The reason for writing responses to the "book" is to arm the competition. If Samizdat does get into the hands of a politician, they now have at least two good dissenting opinions to read on the matter.
If you ignore the book, you leave it as the only "source" of information on IP misappropriation in Free Software.
Yes, but in this case it's so ambiguous as to be witty without having any substance. It's a miniature circular argument.
WTF does "Disneyed" mean in this context anyway? I can think of a number of things that Disney is famous for: merchandising, theme parks, corporate bullshit, animated movies. Am I to assume that we're talking about animated movies then? Disney's not known for *good* animated movies -- they pioneered animation for TV and movies, so they get the credit and the association. But this still doesn't make sense in the submitter's paragraph.
And I'd say you're trying to create FUD about me as a journalist. I have evidence to prove my findings, and you're making anonymous claims with no evidence to suggest that they are true.
Now which one is Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt?
At least use the term correctly if you're going to use it.
Stephen King is not dead, though. The fact that you believe an urban legend makes this and any future conversations between us totally pointless from my frame of reference.
Anyway, JDS 2003 didn't work either. And JDS2 did install on the laptop system, so the media wasn't bad in my opinion. People keep bringing up the bad media issue -- I should never have suggested it, or maybe made it more clear that since it did eventually work on the laptop, it was shown to be good.
How is it useless? If the only reviews I read of JDS2 were "wow its awesome on my P2/333 box d00d" and then I bought it for my systems and it didn't work, then I'd feel that review was a failure.
If you read the review carefully, I didn't blast Sun on anything except licensing, support, and the poor decision that led to the old kernel. The included software, the new utilities and the customized UI I thought were great... but useless to me because my hardware isn't supported.
It's not a very flattering review of the product, but at least it is honest. I shouldn't have to go hunting for a computer that will work with the software. The review reflects my experiences which could very well be your experiences too if you have similar systems.
I used the default partitioning setup and the drive was right out of the static bag never been used. I also tried my Maxtor 80GB drive which had some FAT and EXT3 partions on it already. The 6GB drive in the Terminator had one NTFS partition on it. The Dell notebook had a 10GB drive with three partitions for Debian, which is what I foolishly had to erase to install JDS2.
Changing the partition configuration from the default didn't make any noticeable difference. It still thought there wasn't enough disk space. I honestly think it had something to do with lack of support for the ATA controllers.
Revisions are added to add support for more hardware, usually faster CPUs and different kinds of RAM. Small adjustments are made to the northbridge and southbridge chipsets and sometimes the voltage regulator in an effort to support nonstandard or strangely implemented hardware from other manufacturers.
I don't recall saying anything about a used PC, but you did say something about older "stabler" hardware. You can't buy old hardware new anymore, as far as I know. And the oldest new hardware there is is often more expensive or a few dollars cheaper than something substantially faster and more capable (more modern).
It makes more economic sense to skip JDS2, get superior hardware and use a different OS. Even if it's Solaris.
If you mean "it doesn't malfunction" then that's ridiculous. The mythical malfunctioning of cutting edge hardware is nothing more than urban legend. I've personally tested and reviewed three dozen IA32 motherboards in the past year and a half and have never seen an "instability issue" that wasn't related to either a compatibility problem or an individual defect which had nothing to do with design or implementation.
Or do you mean stabler as in the design has solidified? Again, doesn't make sense.
What really doesn't make sense is the assertion that a machine that has seen tens of thousands of hours of use will be more reliable than one that has seen only a few thousand. With electronic wear and tear, capacitors and ICs tend to become "unstable" over time, resulting in less-than-stable conditions.
Anyway, Sun is excluding a large portion of the market if they can't support newer hardware. When old workstations break, they are not generally replaced by another old workstation. What happens if the replacement can't use the operating environment? Sun did not produce a product with an upgrade path. You're locked into old hardware with JDS.
I was expecting far more from JDS2. If the review seems harsh it's only because Sun totally blew it on this product and I would be remiss in not warning people of its potential dangers.
When I spoke with Sun for the review, they said that a Solaris x86 JDS will be out this summer, and Sun Ray support will follow sometime later this year.
I was there when the reviewer did the install, and I believe everything I write.
I tried different hard drives on different computers. I tried four different configurations, three of which were distinctly different. Sun could have easily updated the kernel in JDS2 but they chose not to.
It's not my fault they shipped a prehistoric kernel. Did you expect me to write a puff piece on an operating environment that doesn't work on all of my test equipment?
-Jem
Re:I have the PDF of the first 92 pages of the boo
on
More From Tanenbaum
·
· Score: 1
Well you can email Ken Brown and he'll send it to you if you're going to write about it for somewhere. I'll likely be selling what I write about it to NewsForge.
If you're not in a position to do that, I'll remind you of the Starfleet regulation that Admiral Kirk used to fool Khan in Star Trek II when estimating the time it would take to repair the engines.
-Jem
I have the PDF of the first 92 pages of the book
on
More From Tanenbaum
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
... you guys would absolutely not believe the stuff this guy says about Free Software philosophy. He takes every single aspect of FOSS and gives it a sinister anti-business anti-America anti-puppy connotation.
I only read the first 20 pages or so, then I skipped to the bibliography. In over fifty listings, the only real books he listed were ESR's and they're available online. Every other reference he listed was someone's personal homepage or a newsgroup posting or something arbitrary like that.
There will be an article, ladies and gentlemen. I just haven't decided if it should be a serious analytical debunking of this troll book or a humor piece that shows its rediculousness.
150k is about three times the normal Slashdot effect (the best Slashdotting I ever got was just over 50k, and the lowest Slashdotting was around 25k -- this is in one day). Tanenbaum's note got picked up by a lot more places than/.
I'll certainly agree that the CGI they use in most movies these days -- especially Star Wars prequels -- looks like crap. It's like watching a video game that you can't play.
Don't forget that Lucas purposefully instructs actors not to emote. He once told John Williams that he thinks of his movies as silent films -- in other words the music is important and the dialogue is not. That accounts for the "Staged" look that Episode I had (I didn't see the second one), with all of the close-ups and the meticulously constructed scenes where everyone is in a certain place, the bland dialogue and the uninspired acting.
Jurassic Park is an excellent example of a CGI-instensive movie with good acting in it. But that was directed by Spielberg. Can't get much better than that for a director. Can you imagine if Lucas had directed it?
Well I'm a small-time actor and I have performed in front of a blue screen before -- I've even played a Jedi knight with a "real" lightsaber for a TV commercial.
You're always given reference points when you're dealing with CGI. The director will substitute real objects for the ones that will be CGId, for instance I used a retractable measuring tape for a lightsaber. During post production they put the fancy laser image over it and it looked just like a lightsaber from the movies.
When you're talking to someone who isn't there in a blue screen scene, there is a photo of them or a stand-in actor who is edited out later. In extreme circumstances the actors will sort of "practice" the scene with absentee actors so that they know where to look and how to act. Jar Jar Binks, for instance, was subbed by the guy who did the voice. They made a pseudo-Jar Jar costume for him and he'd practice the scene with the other actors, then they'd film it without him.
His reputation is not as a filmmaker, but as a producer. He's the world's worst director and his writing was heavily influenced and inspired by the late great Joseph Campbell. Without Campbell's influence, there would have been no Star Wars.
Lucas has never directed a good film. His genius is in special effects and production, but he is a creative black hole -- a total moron when it comes to directing actors and creating a story.
It would be better to wait for 5.3 before trying an SMP comparison. It's not too far off. I just need to get an SMP system for testing... shouldn't be too hard at this point.
I could also test with GNU/Linux. SuSE makes a fine testing platform for 64 vs. 32.
RTFP -- the script redirects to an intermediate page which recommends different browsers and offers a reduced style sheet for IE viewing. You can view the site with IE, but you can't see the transparent menus because IE doesn't properly support alpha-blended PNGs.
Opera is available for MacOS (pre-OS X) last I checked (today).
Why should I code for five different browsers? I'm sick of the brokenness of IE, and even the Mac version of IE leaves out some CSS functionality as I recall from my Google searches before I wrote the script. I'd rather code to standards and exclude or reduce the programs that don't support the standards. If IE had been a major percentage of traffic I would have considered a different solution, but 20% of the traffic was not worth 50% more time coding workarounds and then installing Windows so that I could test it (I'm totally FreeBSD-based). And of that 20% virtually no visitors are using Apple machines, which I have absolutely no way to test browser compatibility with.
If you aren't interested in the book, then the site will be of no use to you anyway. I only posted it here as an example of the code as it is in use.
Opera's stats are deceiving; by default it reports its user agent as MSIE.
I run three websites, and Opera accoutns for anywhere between 2% and 11% of traffic. The Herotale website that I gave as an example of the code in action had 20% of its traffic using MSIE before I enabled that code. Now it's a little less (about 15% MSIE) even though traffic has doubled since I switched the site from Flash to PHP/XHTML/CSS.
Flash sometimes relies on JavaScript to detect the plugin version and redirect to an "install a newer Flash" page. This could be interfering with your Flash killer, as could a Flash graphic created with Swish or some other kind of Flash creation tool that identifies itself differently than the genuine Macromedia program.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason for writing responses to the "book" is to arm the competition. If Samizdat does get into the hands of a politician, they now have at least two good dissenting opinions to read on the matter.
If you ignore the book, you leave it as the only "source" of information on IP misappropriation in Free Software.
-Jem
Yes, but in this case it's so ambiguous as to be witty without having any substance. It's a miniature circular argument.
WTF does "Disneyed" mean in this context anyway? I can think of a number of things that Disney is famous for: merchandising, theme parks, corporate bullshit, animated movies. Am I to assume that we're talking about animated movies then? Disney's not known for *good* animated movies -- they pioneered animation for TV and movies, so they get the credit and the association. But this still doesn't make sense in the submitter's paragraph.
-Jem
And I'd say you're trying to create FUD about me as a journalist. I have evidence to prove my findings, and you're making anonymous claims with no evidence to suggest that they are true.
Now which one is Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt?
At least use the term correctly if you're going to use it.
-Jem
It was being installed on an ATA 80GB drive. RTFA
-Jem
Well whatever.
Stephen King is not dead, though. The fact that you believe an urban legend makes this and any future conversations between us totally pointless from my frame of reference.
-Jem
I never did hear back from support, BTW.
Anyway, JDS 2003 didn't work either. And JDS2 did install on the laptop system, so the media wasn't bad in my opinion. People keep bringing up the bad media issue -- I should never have suggested it, or maybe made it more clear that since it did eventually work on the laptop, it was shown to be good.
-Jem
How is it useless? If the only reviews I read of JDS2 were "wow its awesome on my P2/333 box d00d" and then I bought it for my systems and it didn't work, then I'd feel that review was a failure.
If you read the review carefully, I didn't blast Sun on anything except licensing, support, and the poor decision that led to the old kernel. The included software, the new utilities and the customized UI I thought were great... but useless to me because my hardware isn't supported.
It's not a very flattering review of the product, but at least it is honest. I shouldn't have to go hunting for a computer that will work with the software. The review reflects my experiences which could very well be your experiences too if you have similar systems.
-Jem
I used the default partitioning setup and the drive was right out of the static bag never been used. I also tried my Maxtor 80GB drive which had some FAT and EXT3 partions on it already. The 6GB drive in the Terminator had one NTFS partition on it. The Dell notebook had a 10GB drive with three partitions for Debian, which is what I foolishly had to erase to install JDS2.
Changing the partition configuration from the default didn't make any noticeable difference. It still thought there wasn't enough disk space. I honestly think it had something to do with lack of support for the ATA controllers.
-Jem
A flash BIOS is software, is it not?
Revisions are added to add support for more hardware, usually faster CPUs and different kinds of RAM. Small adjustments are made to the northbridge and southbridge chipsets and sometimes the voltage regulator in an effort to support nonstandard or strangely implemented hardware from other manufacturers.
I don't recall saying anything about a used PC, but you did say something about older "stabler" hardware. You can't buy old hardware new anymore, as far as I know. And the oldest new hardware there is is often more expensive or a few dollars cheaper than something substantially faster and more capable (more modern).
It makes more economic sense to skip JDS2, get superior hardware and use a different OS. Even if it's Solaris.
-Jem
I've been Slashdotted 6 or 7 times in the past year. I suppose that's not enough data for you though.
Actually one of my articles is on the front page right now, but I didn't publish it on my site this time.
-Jem
"...slightly older but much stabler hardware..."
Wait a second. Stabler? What do you mean by that?
If you mean "it doesn't malfunction" then that's ridiculous. The mythical malfunctioning of cutting edge hardware is nothing more than urban legend. I've personally tested and reviewed three dozen IA32 motherboards in the past year and a half and have never seen an "instability issue" that wasn't related to either a compatibility problem or an individual defect which had nothing to do with design or implementation.
Or do you mean stabler as in the design has solidified? Again, doesn't make sense.
What really doesn't make sense is the assertion that a machine that has seen tens of thousands of hours of use will be more reliable than one that has seen only a few thousand. With electronic wear and tear, capacitors and ICs tend to become "unstable" over time, resulting in less-than-stable conditions.
Anyway, Sun is excluding a large portion of the market if they can't support newer hardware. When old workstations break, they are not generally replaced by another old workstation. What happens if the replacement can't use the operating environment? Sun did not produce a product with an upgrade path. You're locked into old hardware with JDS.
I was expecting far more from JDS2. If the review seems harsh it's only because Sun totally blew it on this product and I would be remiss in not warning people of its potential dangers.
-Jem
When I spoke with Sun for the review, they said that a Solaris x86 JDS will be out this summer, and Sun Ray support will follow sometime later this year.
-Jem
I was there when the reviewer did the install, and I believe everything I write.
I tried different hard drives on different computers. I tried four different configurations, three of which were distinctly different. Sun could have easily updated the kernel in JDS2 but they chose not to.
It's not my fault they shipped a prehistoric kernel. Did you expect me to write a puff piece on an operating environment that doesn't work on all of my test equipment?
-Jem
Well you can email Ken Brown and he'll send it to you if you're going to write about it for somewhere. I'll likely be selling what I write about it to NewsForge.
If you're not in a position to do that, I'll remind you of the Starfleet regulation that Admiral Kirk used to fool Khan in Star Trek II when estimating the time it would take to repair the engines.
-Jem
... you guys would absolutely not believe the stuff this guy says about Free Software philosophy. He takes every single aspect of FOSS and gives it a sinister anti-business anti-America anti-puppy connotation.
I only read the first 20 pages or so, then I skipped to the bibliography. In over fifty listings, the only real books he listed were ESR's and they're available online. Every other reference he listed was someone's personal homepage or a newsgroup posting or something arbitrary like that.
There will be an article, ladies and gentlemen. I just haven't decided if it should be a serious analytical debunking of this troll book or a humor piece that shows its rediculousness.
-Jem
150k is about three times the normal Slashdot effect (the best Slashdotting I ever got was just over 50k, and the lowest Slashdotting was around 25k -- this is in one day). Tanenbaum's note got picked up by a lot more places than /.
-Jem
I'll certainly agree that the CGI they use in most movies these days -- especially Star Wars prequels -- looks like crap. It's like watching a video game that you can't play.
Don't forget that Lucas purposefully instructs actors not to emote. He once told John Williams that he thinks of his movies as silent films -- in other words the music is important and the dialogue is not. That accounts for the "Staged" look that Episode I had (I didn't see the second one), with all of the close-ups and the meticulously constructed scenes where everyone is in a certain place, the bland dialogue and the uninspired acting.
Jurassic Park is an excellent example of a CGI-instensive movie with good acting in it. But that was directed by Spielberg. Can't get much better than that for a director. Can you imagine if Lucas had directed it?
-Jem
Well I'm a small-time actor and I have performed in front of a blue screen before -- I've even played a Jedi knight with a "real" lightsaber for a TV commercial.
You're always given reference points when you're dealing with CGI. The director will substitute real objects for the ones that will be CGId, for instance I used a retractable measuring tape for a lightsaber. During post production they put the fancy laser image over it and it looked just like a lightsaber from the movies.
When you're talking to someone who isn't there in a blue screen scene, there is a photo of them or a stand-in actor who is edited out later. In extreme circumstances the actors will sort of "practice" the scene with absentee actors so that they know where to look and how to act. Jar Jar Binks, for instance, was subbed by the guy who did the voice. They made a pseudo-Jar Jar costume for him and he'd practice the scene with the other actors, then they'd film it without him.
You never act in a void.
-Jem
His reputation is not as a filmmaker, but as a producer. He's the world's worst director and his writing was heavily influenced and inspired by the late great Joseph Campbell. Without Campbell's influence, there would have been no Star Wars.
Lucas has never directed a good film. His genius is in special effects and production, but he is a creative black hole -- a total moron when it comes to directing actors and creating a story.
-Jem
It would be better to wait for 5.3 before trying an SMP comparison. It's not too far off. I just need to get an SMP system for testing... shouldn't be too hard at this point.
I could also test with GNU/Linux. SuSE makes a fine testing platform for 64 vs. 32.
-Jem
64-bit vs. 32 bit using FreeBSD
Don't you ever read the BSD section?
-Jem
RTFP -- the script redirects to an intermediate page which recommends different browsers and offers a reduced style sheet for IE viewing. You can view the site with IE, but you can't see the transparent menus because IE doesn't properly support alpha-blended PNGs.
Opera is available for MacOS (pre-OS X) last I checked (today).
Why should I code for five different browsers? I'm sick of the brokenness of IE, and even the Mac version of IE leaves out some CSS functionality as I recall from my Google searches before I wrote the script. I'd rather code to standards and exclude or reduce the programs that don't support the standards. If IE had been a major percentage of traffic I would have considered a different solution, but 20% of the traffic was not worth 50% more time coding workarounds and then installing Windows so that I could test it (I'm totally FreeBSD-based). And of that 20% virtually no visitors are using Apple machines, which I have absolutely no way to test browser compatibility with.
If you aren't interested in the book, then the site will be of no use to you anyway. I only posted it here as an example of the code as it is in use.
-Jem
Opera's stats are deceiving; by default it reports its user agent as MSIE.
I run three websites, and Opera accoutns for anywhere between 2% and 11% of traffic. The Herotale website that I gave as an example of the code in action had 20% of its traffic using MSIE before I enabled that code. Now it's a little less (about 15% MSIE) even though traffic has doubled since I switched the site from Flash to PHP/XHTML/CSS.
-Jem
I didn't know that -- I thought it totally copied the MSIE string. I'll have to change the if statement to add that condition.
-Jem
Flash sometimes relies on JavaScript to detect the plugin version and redirect to an "install a newer Flash" page. This could be interfering with your Flash killer, as could a Flash graphic created with Swish or some other kind of Flash creation tool that identifies itself differently than the genuine Macromedia program.
-Jem