Yes, but FreeMware does not have a 1.0 "product" out either, so why are we talking about it? It's important for most people to have dreams and hopes for the future. If you're talking about a business problem, then yes, you can't count on Transmeta to deliver anything. But, from a personal perspective I think everyone has their pipedreams of a CPU that could dynamically change it's microcode in order to execute "native" instructions for a multitude of CPU architectures. Then we could run Mac software on a "PC" in addition to PC software, and Sparc software, and HP-PA software and anything else. We would no longer be dependant on software vendors to port their software to OS which runs on different hardware.
Well, technically they do support SCSI drives, but they must be "virtual" drives instead of "raw" drives. Fortunately I have one IDE drive that I'm able to run Windows on for work related stuff, and hence can use it as a "raw" drive under VMware. It still seems unbelieveably slow at times though...
If they do sue I can tell you that it won't take more than a few nanoseconds for me to never buy another product from them again. The only case in which I think a suit would be justified was if the FreeMWare team actually disassembled the VMware code and just recompiled it after changing variable names, etc. (and don't get all technical on me. I've disassembled stuff before and know that you don't get "variable names" but you know what I mean). Even if the FreeMWare team ended up using the exact same method for virtualizing the PC I don't think that VMware should sue, as long as they came up with the specifics on their own.
Not "raw" SCSI drives, only IDE. Since VMware requires a somewhat beefy system to run acceptably, it makes sense that people who purchase "beefy" systems would be more likely to have fast SCSI drives instead of IDE.
Yes, you should be able to - as long as it's on an IDE drive and you don't mind rebooting your virtual machine a bunch of times to replace the hardware drivers.
I can tell you you'll have problems trying to take an NT install on a dual CPU system and make it run in VMware, because VMware only "presents" one CPU to NT when it's running under Linux.
For 98' you should be able to boot of the "raw" IDE partition. You will in all likelihood get a bunch of "error" messages about missing hardware or new hardware. Going into safe mode and "deleting" all your hardware, including motherboard "resources" and rebooting should make Windows "rediscover" the new hardware under the VMware environment. This is necessary because VMware "substitutes" virtual hardware for some "real" hardware. For instance, no matter what kind of Ethernet adapter you have VMware presents an AMD PCnet Ethernet Adapter to Windows. All I can say is that it worked for me, but depending on your actual hardware you may have "issues."
What you say is true, but I expected a little more from a commercial product. I purchased VMware quite a while ago (actually right when it went FCS, so I got the special $75 rate). One of the things that I wish it could do but apparently can't is virtualizing the SCSI controllers so that I can boot off a "raw" SCSI partition instead of having to run off my slow IDE drive. I know that there are issues with SCSI controllers because of the way the bus works, but this is a commercial company. I assumed that they would be able to find a way to do this given that they are making money on the product and their R&D efforts can be tied directly to the amount of income they are getting in. One thing they could possibly do is write a device driver for Windows that only allowed requests to/from specific SCSI ID's. You'd then have to commit a whole disk to VMware, but for me that's not a problem. Looks like the freemware people may get there before VMware...
Well, once we have that code-morphing computer from transmeta then we won't have this issue, will we? We'll be able to run code for various architectures "natively" without the slowdown due to emulation of hardware...
And basically that is a bunch of FUD. When it comes to my endorsement of Microsoft I?m talking about the API?s and the SDK?s. and that is defiantly not ?glitzy?.
Are you crazy? Are you a programmer who has actually looked at Microsoft's APIs or are you just spewing forth nonsense to make excuses for your defense of Microsoft? If you're a programmer of any measurable skill level and have examined Microsoft's APIs you will know that they are the biggest example of fudged, inconsistant, and incompatible mess that you've ever seen. Different "versions" of Windows API are incompatible with other "versions" of Windows API. Everyone is going to have to recode for Windows 2000, because there is a fundamental incompatability with earlier code. I can't believe you used their API as the basis for your defense. If you actually believe that Microsoft Windows API is really technically ellegant then you truely are hopeless.
Yes assembly can be very productive, if you?re proficient at it. but that like anything isn?t it? I think you?re picked on a side comment I made about how I don?t agree with Java?s VM implementation. Perhaps I should have worded that more carefully.. you guys have a real talent for picking out poorly worded text?s and throwing them back in my face.
Not much talent is required when we have examples such as this.
>You do need to know what the interfaces are, and if necessary supply the necessary shims so >that the interfaces match.
IMHO that?s a hack. A clean design does not rely on compatibility layers.
Then you'd be surprised by all the "hack[s]" in the Windows APIs.
think I need to put this in my./ bio.. or something as a.sig that gives people a little clear warning. I really enjoy posting here, but it gets more and more frustrating when people get so wrapped up in my grammar and spelling.
I can understand your issue with spelling, but I think there is a better solution. How about picking up a book on grammar and spelling and reading it. This is not meant to be an insult. I think it would help you greatly in many situations if you took it upon yourself to learn proper grammar and spelling.
In summary I think the only real argument to back up your endorsement of Microsoft, primarily their API, fails because it doesn't take a genious to understand that the problems with Windows are due to issues with their API. People complain about stability and performance. Why? Because Microsoft made mistakes, or based decisions on marketing needs rather than technical excellence, in the underlying API that makes the OS as a whole unstable.
The "do it your self" philosophy may be your preference, but my preference is that I don't have to spend time doing things that could be done for me by a machine. Id rather spends my time doing something actually productive, something original. Take tools that other people have used and use them to create something new. This is the philosophy behind "code-reuses" and the main reason we don't all write our software with our own hardware. Drive car's we build from scratch, or write up insults to our fellow man on keyboards made of wood we cute down in our backyard.
This is an argument I have a serious problem with. I don't have a problem with people who need "integrated" tools and don't have time to figure things out for themselves. My time is precious also. However, I have a serious problem with operating systems or application programs which prevent me from coming up with quick elegant solutions on my own. Windows, and the whole Windows philosophy, have this attitude, IMHO.
Take for instance a recent message on the OVForum. A list member asked about probes that could monitor DHCP traffic. Not much info was given as to what was desired to be accomplished, but I assumed that they wanted to monitor DHCP lease assignments so that they could asynchronously notify HP OpenView that an IP address on a DHCP client changed, thereby updating the network maps and keeping the network monitoring platform "in sync" with the network. I suggested a simple script, written in perl, that would take the output of snoop (on a Sparc) and parse the decode so that it could use ovevent to send a SNMP Trap to the management station notifying of the DHCP event. Since I'm a Unix bigot I mentioned several times in the post that if the user was running Windoes NT that (s)he's probably out of luck, since I don't know of a NT program that captures packets and can pipe it's output to a Perl program like I suggested. I got a reply, to me directly and not to the list, that basically said that if the user was runing all NT that they could take advantage of all the 3rd party apps that are available to monitor NT services and so forth. Either I didn't understand the original poster's needs or the person who responded to me didn't see the usefullness of asynchronous notification of IP address changes in a network monitoring platform. Needless to say, NT's "integrated" network capture program does not support "background" execution and piping to another program of the decoded packets, AFAIK. This, IMHO is a "limitation" of the platform and hinders people who have the ability to quickly construct solutions to problems from accomplishing their goals. BTW, that's another thing that the person who responded to me directly stated. That it would take an exhorbinant amount of time to write, test, and maintain the program, taking time away from network management to do "program development." Obviously, the person thought it would take much longer than I anticipate to move this solution into "production." If he knew that there already was a perl script on freshmeat.net that monitored the dhcp.leases file and asynchronously posted updates to bind then they would realize that not many changes, and hence time, would be required to implement this. I pointed out to the person, in a reply message, that in all probability more of my time would be "wasted" in searching for a commerical product that does the same thing, ordering it, waiting for it to be shipped, installing it, testing it, and possibly finding out that it doesn't even do what I need it to that to simply code the simple Perl script.
The point behind the post (since most of you seemed to miss it). is that linux is not all that great of an OS from a usability standpoint. It?s an exercise in pain to get the simplest things working correctly. To accomplish something like a integrated spell checker linux would have some type of integration for applications that would allow this, something I have yet to see (and I?m sure lots of people have something to say about this, but before you reply. Realize that this thread is about FUD. And anything about how lunux apps are ?so well integrated? would be complete bullshit).
Linux is a great OS from a usability standpoint from my perspective. So is Solaris and HP-UX for that matter. In fact, any Unix "like" OS is generations ahead of OS's like Windows because they allow people with the skills the flexability to implement solutions for their clients much easier, and faster, than the alternative.
This is getting offtopic, but I do have a serious concern that integration will never succeed with Open Source software. There are to many people doing things the way they feel is best, even things like command line parameters aren?t consistent. You get a bunch of great programmers out their doing great apps, but none of the work together at all, they isn?t any standard, no consistent way of doing something (and this is in a general ?big picture? sense people).
Instead of a bunch of great programmers doing great things the way they feel best would you rather have a bunch of mediocre programmers doing mediocre things in an integrated way? If so, you're sure to be happy in the Windows world. Besides, you totally fail to recognise the work of many "great programmers" who are working on both the GNOME and KDE environments. Are you saying that these systems are not "integrated" enough for you?
For any two programs to work together they?re needs to be some ground rules. Some type of standard. And if you not willing to have a large powerful company (like Microsoft) come up with them and shove them in your face, you may be stuck with a bunch of people in a standards committee for years debating on it. a good example of this is C++, this took something like a decade to get standardized, and a lot of people have very litigate issues with that they finally settled on (things like locale come to mind). Then you have something like Java, it only took Sun a few years to come up with. and it?s a pretty darn good language, mind you I don?t thing the write once run anywhere crap is a good idea. But the language itself is yummie.
Problem for you is that there are "standards" for "integrated" programs for Linux. They are the GNOME and KDE "standards", if you're talking about GUI programs which seems to be your focus. No, I don't want to have a "large powerful company (like Microsoft)" "shove [standards] in [my] face." You're FUD about standards committies taking "years" is just that, FUD. I don't have the actual dates, but I don't think it took too long to come up with the TCP/IP standards, or the HTTP standard, or any other "real" standard out there. I would much rather have intelligent people debate the merrits of various methods of implementation instead of having one "large powerful company (like Microsoft)" come up with standards that seem to benefit marketing and financial goals rather than the technical merrits. Your use of the C++ standard does not fit in with the topic, nor does Java. Both are programming languanges as opposed to protocols or programming standards that are used in application programs in order to provide "integrated" solutions. Try again.
I know I?ll get in trouble for this, but I totally agree with Ann Rand with what she wrote in the ?Fountain Head?. Howard rook designed beautiful buildings, they we?re beautiful because he and only he designed them, it was his ?vision?. When a committee got involved it became a hogpoge of mixed ideas, some of this from one guy, and a little of this from another guy. And this does not good art make. .
Sad to say that I've never read Ann Rand. May be this goes against some Holy right of passage that you find dear to your heart, but it's beside the point. I'd rather think of information technology as an area of engineering rather than art. It's when you get all those "artsy fartsy" people involved that things go to crap. Not because art is bad, but because the marketing people at corporations, where their sole purpose of being is to make a profit, know how to use art to influence end-customers, whereas engineers only have their intelligent and performance to rely upon.
I think either you're severely misguided or are just a different kind of person than I. If you can't see the "art" and beauty in a technologically perfect solution and instead prefer the speil of marketing driods then you very well may be beyond help.
I grew up on Byte! Jerry's columns were great at the beginning, but then he started to get influenced by the marketing driods, IYAM (if you ask me). Remember the column about building custom circuits? I actually subscribed to Ciruit Cellar for a while, well, as long as it lasted. Byte was my first introduction to the 286 and 386 processors.
I'm having problems tonight. Anyone know if you can plug a Sun keyboard into a peecee motherbroard? I keep hitting enter instead of backspace due to the different layouts of the keyboards. I suppose as long as you don't plug the mouse into the keyboard it would be O.K., no? If anyone had any experiences with using a Sun keyboard on a PC I'd appreciate an email.
No, there are worse possibilities. If you include medical information in the data then there is the possibilitiy of not getting hired for a job, or not getting medical coverage in a job due to some issue that is controversial (such as I believe at Turner you either won't be hired or won't get medical at all if you smoke -- even off work in the privacy of your home. Or, something less "controversial" say you had cancer and have been in remission for the last 25 years, yet they refuse to give you medical insurance for unrelated stuff like having the flu or breaking your arm.). Or, if you made a financial mistake in the past it could be much harder to get your credit rating cleared up than it is now, effecting your ability to have credit cards, purchase a house, buy a car, or just about participate at all in the "new" electronic community.
Yea, I think someone has to re-read the moderator guidelines.
Re:Stop resisting. Turn it around. Mawasite ageyoo
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Like smacking an errant child, this is not the correct way to handle the problem.
There are widly separate views on whether punishing a child is the correct way or not. In fact, there are widly different opinions if either the "psycological approach" (trying to explain to a child why something is wrong at an age when they can't even comprehend half the words you say) or the "best friend" approach (trying to be your childs best friend instead of an authority figure when it comes to correcting abnormal destructive behavior) contributes to the situation we in the USA are facing right now where the severity of crimes committed by young people not yet legal adults had excalated drastically, or possibly a combination of these two "new" methods is to blame. Anyway, your use of the term "smacking an errant child" clearly shows your stance on the topic and gives the impression, at least to me, that you believe you are 100% right with no possibility of a better way in any circumstance. Besides, other than the "fringe" parenting groups who I personally think border on the criminal and sometimes cross it, the vast majority of people who do use "physical" punishment to correct abnormal behavior mean a smack on the but or hand used to get the childs attention and know that you are upset with them for thier actions, not laying the child across your lap and beating them for 5 minutes to cause physical damage.
I do believe gathering data on the personal financing of corporate officers who make the decisions (or hey, what about the corporate lawyers?) would be an effective means of stoping this. I think you fail to get the point entirely. The point is that we will put presure on corporations to stop gathering "personal" information by gathering "personal" information about the corporation ourselves. As I think it would be fair to estimate that most if not all corporations of the size that would be involved in these actions have a few skeletons in their closet they wouldn't necessarily want the "public" to know about, it may be the only way, other than new laws, to stop them.
If you think it's more realistic to believe that we can effectively "lobby" our representatives and have them pass the appropriate laws before we could gather sufficient information about the companies that do this I believe you are living in a fantasy world.
Re:The Death Bells are Tolling for Privacy.
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And I think it's fair to say that a fair number of these people can not afford child support. Think about it. It's more likely for people with low education and morals/ethics to find themselves in a situation where they are expected to pay child support. Either they beat their spouse or cheated on them, or just got up and tried to walk away. Those kind of people do not strike me as the type of person who would be well compensated for the work that they are able to do. I have no evidence either way, and in fact the truth may be exactly opposite, but it makes sense to me that people who are required to pay child support are probably less able to do so than those who do not put themselves in that situation.
Yes, money itself is capital. And it is not consumed when it is spent; it is passed from hand to hand.
The money is capitol thing may not be the best for you to support, as there are definately laws that forbid the "copying" of money by everyone except the government. This is, in effect, what people who believe in intellectual property are doing. Since they are able to make copies of capital with no measurable cost it argues against viewing "intellectual property" as property at all. Nothing else that is considered capital can be duplicated without cost.
That's why I think it would be better, and financially rewarding, to view programmers as "professionals" in the realm of doctors (but not necessarily lawyers). Doctors are paid for what they can do in each individual visit, not for something they did 30 years ago without "producing" anything for the last 25 years. (Note that this is without considering doctors who try to make a profit off of "intellectual property" such as surgical devices, etc. IMO, they are doing more to retard the progress of medicine than anyone by restricting the use of their "property" to those who cough up the dough). Instead, they could be viewed as service "contractors" who are paid very highly if they are "good" and demonstrate the ability to produce consistantly "good" code. This would reduce the number of "professional" programmers as it would get rid of those who do not produce consistantly "good" code. But, they could still contribute or have a lower paying "side-job" if they could program but be unable to support themselves only by programming if they were not "good." Why would this be so terrible? Doctors can't simply take a few courses in a 4 year college and get their degree. It takes a couple extra years of extra study concentrating in a particular field of medicine in order to get a doctors degree. Plus, even after they are done with that they have to do internship where they don't make a whole lot and have to work excruciatingly long hours before they are actually financially independant. What makes you or anyone else believe that programmers should get paid comparable salaries without going through similar training and weeding-out trials?
There will come a time, relatively soon, where all the "standard" applications are written and rewritten and rewritten the last time. Perhaps it will be when open source (preferably GPL) solutions are available for all the standard applications. Then, since there will be no financial incentive to make a new version of your word processor simply because you can, programming will concentrate on custom applications and those doctor-salaried programmers can go from business to business making buko bucks providing real solutions to people.
His fist computer was an Amiga, which explains a lot. Like Apple Mac users, a certain percentage of them believe that computers should all be point-and-click and all users should be able to comprehend and use them without any assistance regardless of the complexity of the task. Not all Amiga or Mac users believe this but some do (hell some "PC" users do, but I believe it's more common for "user friendly" computer users to have this attitude).
The facts are that some computing tasks are fundamentally complex and no one knows everything. By taking these two fundamental truths in combination it's easy to see why businesses have one of two choices. Either they can hire a large number of people with very high levels of technical skill to cover all possible trouble areas or they can hire a few people that specialize in the core competencies and purchase support contracts to cover the remaining areas. A simple investigation into the relative costs of the two resources makes this a no-brainer.
He doesn't seem to comprehend that insurance is a Good Thing in certain circumstances. Business is one where it is practically essential. Part of my work is to monitor peoples networks and assist them if they have problems. Do you think they would be so willing to hire me for support if I did not have support on the equipment we use? If we didn't purchase support contracts we would have to hire people with the skills in areas that we don't utilize much but would be required if we had issues and threaten our ability to support our customers. Do you think our customers want us to be spending all that money on mostly idle resources instead of purchasing relatively cheap support contracts? Hell no.
Besides, he seems to want to ignore the real facts of computer life, such as only "suggested" "security" patches are available to support holding Sun customers. While RedHat does not do this, I would insist on a support contract with them if I used the Official RedHat Linux Boxed Set in my work, just like I would insist on HP support if I were running HP-UX or, gasp!, Microsoft support if I were running Windows NT.
It's not a rumor when you quote exactly what the original person said, which is what Slashdot exactly did. The Register often quotes anonymous sources, and while Slashdot has Anonymous Cowards they don't use them for sources for their articles, to my knowledge. You are ignorant in not understanding or not having the knowledge to understand the difference between what Slashdot did, which is justifiable although apparently controversial, and what The Register does, which is to report on rumors.
That's not an accurate analogy. The Slashdot article said Bruce Parens made comments about suing Corel, it didn't say he actually filed a suit. A more accurate comparison would be if someone posted an article saying "Author estimates new XYZ release this weekend." I think you would have a lot less to complain about given this more applicable comparison, which results in the collapse of much of your "annoyance" argument.
I don't think that debian-legal can be considered a list where "honest technical discussion" is the subject matter. Most/all of the other debian lists, sure, but not debian-legal. Considering what others have posted, that even talk of legal action does have an effect on the market, it is quite arguable that debian-legal should be a closed list (to those who actually have a legal basis for any legal action). Plus, there is another thing that can/should be considered. While debian-legal is currently "open" many people that use the distribution do not subscribe, including me. Those who use the distribution, and even those who do not, without argument have an interest (not necessarily monetary and not necessarily a legal interest, but a community interest) in any suit that may be brought against any entity. Slashdot was doing us a favor by reporting the discussions on debian-legal to make sure that not only Bruce but all of the people with a real legal basis for an action would have input from the "complete" community.
I don't think Slashdot was irresponsible and I don't think that Roblimo is wrong. I think you are over-reacting and not considering all of the implications.
Your stance assumes the person who makes the comment in the supposedly "semi-private" forum of a mailing list/usenet/web discussions/IRC is a complete newbie and clueless. Anyone with any significant amount of time on the Internet, and you know exactly what that means if you've been around for a while, completely understands just how "private" mailing lists are. Anyone who does not understand this can justifiably be termed a "newbie." Since I don't think anyone considers Bruce a newbie your arguments fail to support reality.
Just about the only case where I would consider a mailing list to fall outside of this definition is one that you must be "authorized" to join. There are lists out like this, such as ones to help people through the loss of a significant loved one. I would definately consider quoting a post on one of those closed/secure mailing lists to be a breach of privacy and unethical for a journalist to do. But, any mailing list which is joinable simply be sending an email to a listserv or majordomo or website is by definition "open" and considered a public forum.
So how do they make their money? Support? Come on, don't be silly. Support revenues are dependent on the amount of time the support technicians are used for by the client. In other words, the harder the software is to use and the less reliable it is, the more they make. Yet reliability is reckoned to me a major advantage of GPL (heck, any open-source) code, due to the ease of peer review. So, they have a financial incentive to write worse code.
Oh grow up. You don't really believe this, do you? We just bought a bunch of Suns and guess what? We paid for a support contract on them. Why? Surely not because Sun makes crappy hardware! It's insurance. Insurance for a fluke in the hardware, or if I do something stupid and need assistance in configuring something. Companies don't but commercial software with support contracts because the software is a peice of crap. They buy it for insurance. And, no one makes more money by having their support personnel tied up all the time. The goal is to have more contracts per employee. The only way you can do this is if the actual support is not needed constantly. People who try to rip others off with support contracts charge on an hourly basis, like Microsoft. People who have confidence in their software charge per-incident or on a yearly basis. That's why RedHat has their incident support to get people started and their new Silver, Gold, and Platinum unlimited incident support contracts on annual basis. You don't think that your car insurance company makes more money when more people get into wrecks do you? That's why you have to have a current car inspection in order to get a insurance contract. RedHat's not going to sell support based on a crappy product.
Either you've never designed a support business or don't have the experience working in one to know what you're talking about. Or, you're just spreading FUD about RedHat to support your views on licensing issues. Do you honestly believe that Intel and others would have invested in RedHat had they not performed their due diligence and reviewed their books and business plan? If you believe that I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'll sell ya.
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Yes, but FreeMware does not have a 1.0 "product" out either, so why are we talking about it? It's important for most people to have dreams and hopes for the future. If you're talking about a business problem, then yes, you can't count on Transmeta to deliver anything. But, from a personal perspective I think everyone has their pipedreams of a CPU that could dynamically change it's microcode in order to execute "native" instructions for a multitude of CPU architectures. Then we could run Mac software on a "PC" in addition to PC software, and Sparc software, and HP-PA software and anything else. We would no longer be dependant on software vendors to port their software to OS which runs on different hardware.
Come on, live a little, DREAM.
Well, technically they do support SCSI drives, but they must be "virtual" drives instead of "raw" drives. Fortunately I have one IDE drive that I'm able to run Windows on for work related stuff, and hence can use it as a "raw" drive under VMware. It still seems unbelieveably slow at times though...
If they do sue I can tell you that it won't take more than a few nanoseconds for me to never buy another product from them again. The only case in which I think a suit would be justified was if the FreeMWare team actually disassembled the VMware code and just recompiled it after changing variable names, etc. (and don't get all technical on me. I've disassembled stuff before and know that you don't get "variable names" but you know what I mean). Even if the FreeMWare team ended up using the exact same method for virtualizing the PC I don't think that VMware should sue, as long as they came up with the specifics on their own.
If you have to use Device Manager or Site Manager (Nortel network administration programs) for work then it is necessary).
Not "raw" SCSI drives, only IDE. Since VMware requires a somewhat beefy system to run acceptably, it makes sense that people who purchase "beefy" systems would be more likely to have fast SCSI drives instead of IDE.
You're forgetting Tramsmeta, aren't you?
Yes, you should be able to - as long as it's on an IDE drive and you don't mind rebooting your virtual machine a bunch of times to replace the hardware drivers.
I can tell you you'll have problems trying to take an NT install on a dual CPU system and make it run in VMware, because VMware only "presents" one CPU to NT when it's running under Linux.
For 98' you should be able to boot of the "raw" IDE partition. You will in all likelihood get a bunch of "error" messages about missing hardware or new hardware. Going into safe mode and "deleting" all your hardware, including motherboard "resources" and rebooting should make Windows "rediscover" the new hardware under the VMware environment. This is necessary because VMware "substitutes" virtual hardware for some "real" hardware. For instance, no matter what kind of Ethernet adapter you have VMware presents an AMD PCnet Ethernet Adapter to Windows. All I can say is that it worked for me, but depending on your actual hardware you may have "issues."
What you say is true, but I expected a little more from a commercial product. I purchased VMware quite a while ago (actually right when it went FCS, so I got the special $75 rate). One of the things that I wish it could do but apparently can't is virtualizing the SCSI controllers so that I can boot off a "raw" SCSI partition instead of having to run off my slow IDE drive. I know that there are issues with SCSI controllers because of the way the bus works, but this is a commercial company. I assumed that they would be able to find a way to do this given that they are making money on the product and their R&D efforts can be tied directly to the amount of income they are getting in. One thing they could possibly do is write a device driver for Windows that only allowed requests to/from specific SCSI ID's. You'd then have to commit a whole disk to VMware, but for me that's not a problem. Looks like the freemware people may get there before VMware...
Well, once we have that code-morphing computer from transmeta then we won't have this issue, will we? We'll be able to run code for various architectures "natively" without the slowdown due to emulation of hardware...
And basically that is a bunch of FUD. When it comes to my endorsement of Microsoft I?m talking about the API?s and the SDK?s. and that is
./ bio.. or something as a .sig that gives people a little clear warning. I really enjoy posting here, but it gets more and
defiantly not ?glitzy?.
Are you crazy? Are you a programmer who has actually looked at Microsoft's APIs or are you just spewing forth nonsense to make excuses for your defense of Microsoft? If you're a programmer of any measurable skill level and have examined Microsoft's APIs you will know that they are the biggest example of fudged, inconsistant, and incompatible mess that you've ever seen. Different "versions" of Windows API are incompatible with other "versions" of Windows API. Everyone is going to have to recode for Windows 2000, because there is a fundamental incompatability with earlier code. I can't believe you used their API as the basis for your defense. If you actually believe that Microsoft Windows API is really technically ellegant then you truely are hopeless.
Yes assembly can be very productive, if you?re proficient at it. but that like anything isn?t it? I think you?re picked on a side comment I made about
how I don?t agree with Java?s VM implementation. Perhaps I should have worded that more carefully.. you guys have a real talent for picking out
poorly worded text?s and throwing them back in my face.
Not much talent is required when we have examples such as this.
>You do need to know what the interfaces are, and if necessary supply the necessary shims so
>that the interfaces match.
IMHO that?s a hack. A clean design does not rely on compatibility layers.
Then you'd be surprised by all the "hack[s]" in the Windows APIs.
think I need to put this in my
more frustrating when people get so wrapped up in my grammar and spelling.
I can understand your issue with spelling, but I think there is a better solution. How about picking up a book on grammar and spelling and reading it. This is not meant to be an insult. I think it would help you greatly in many situations if you took it upon yourself to learn proper grammar and spelling.
In summary I think the only real argument to back up your endorsement of Microsoft, primarily their API, fails because it doesn't take a genious to understand that the problems with Windows are due to issues with their API. People complain about stability and performance. Why? Because Microsoft made mistakes, or based decisions on marketing needs rather than technical excellence, in the underlying API that makes the OS as a whole unstable.
The "do it your self" philosophy may be your preference, but my preference is that I don't have to spend time doing things that could be done for me
by a machine. Id rather spends my time doing something actually productive, something original. Take tools that other people have used and use
them to create something new. This is the philosophy behind "code-reuses" and the main reason we don't all write our software with our own
hardware. Drive car's we build from scratch, or write up insults to our fellow man on keyboards made of wood we cute down in our backyard.
This is an argument I have a serious problem with. I don't have a problem with people who need "integrated" tools and don't have time to figure things out for themselves. My time is precious also. However, I have a serious problem with operating systems or application programs which prevent me from coming up with quick elegant solutions on my own. Windows, and the whole Windows philosophy, have this attitude, IMHO.
Take for instance a recent message on the OVForum. A list member asked about probes that could monitor DHCP traffic. Not much info was given as to what was desired to be accomplished, but I assumed that they wanted to monitor DHCP lease assignments so that they could asynchronously notify HP OpenView that an IP address on a DHCP client changed, thereby updating the network maps and keeping the network monitoring platform "in sync" with the network. I suggested a simple script, written in perl, that would take the output of snoop (on a Sparc) and parse the decode so that it could use ovevent to send a SNMP Trap to the management station notifying of the DHCP event. Since I'm a Unix bigot I mentioned several times in the post that if the user was running Windoes NT that (s)he's probably out of luck, since I don't know of a NT program that captures packets and can pipe it's output to a Perl program like I suggested. I got a reply, to me directly and not to the list, that basically said that if the user was runing all NT that they could take advantage of all the 3rd party apps that are available to monitor NT services and so forth. Either I didn't understand the original poster's needs or the person who responded to me didn't see the usefullness of asynchronous notification of IP address changes in a network monitoring platform. Needless to say, NT's "integrated" network capture program does not support "background" execution and piping to another program of the decoded packets, AFAIK. This, IMHO is a "limitation" of the platform and hinders people who have the ability to quickly construct solutions to problems from accomplishing their goals. BTW, that's another thing that the person who responded to me directly stated. That it would take an exhorbinant amount of time to write, test, and maintain the program, taking time away from network management to do "program development." Obviously, the person thought it would take much longer than I anticipate to move this solution into "production." If he knew that there already was a perl script on freshmeat.net that monitored the dhcp.leases file and asynchronously posted updates to bind then they would realize that not many changes, and hence time, would be required to implement this. I pointed out to the person, in a reply message, that in all probability more of my time would be "wasted" in searching for a commerical product that does the same thing, ordering it, waiting for it to be shipped, installing it, testing it, and possibly finding out that it doesn't even do what I need it to that to simply code the simple Perl script.
The point behind the post (since most of you seemed to miss it). is that linux is not all that great of an OS from a usability standpoint. It?s an
exercise in pain to get the simplest things working correctly. To accomplish something like a integrated spell checker linux would have some type of
integration for applications that would allow this, something I have yet to see (and I?m sure lots of people have something to say about this, but
before you reply. Realize that this thread is about FUD. And anything about how lunux apps are ?so well integrated? would be complete bullshit).
Linux is a great OS from a usability standpoint from my perspective. So is Solaris and HP-UX for that matter. In fact, any Unix "like" OS is generations ahead of OS's like Windows because they allow people with the skills the flexability to implement solutions for their clients much easier, and faster, than the alternative.
This is getting offtopic, but I do have a serious concern that integration will never succeed with Open Source software. There are to many people
doing things the way they feel is best, even things like command line parameters aren?t consistent. You get a bunch of great programmers out their
doing great apps, but none of the work together at all, they isn?t any standard, no consistent way of doing something (and this is in a general ?big
picture? sense people).
Instead of a bunch of great programmers doing great things the way they feel best would you rather have a bunch of mediocre programmers doing mediocre things in an integrated way? If so, you're sure to be happy in the Windows world. Besides, you totally fail to recognise the work of many "great programmers" who are working on both the GNOME and KDE environments. Are you saying that these systems are not "integrated" enough for you?
For any two programs to work together they?re needs to be some ground rules. Some type of standard. And if you not willing to have a large powerful
company (like Microsoft) come up with them and shove them in your face, you may be stuck with a bunch of people in a standards committee for
years debating on it. a good example of this is C++, this took something like a decade to get standardized, and a lot of people have very litigate issues
with that they finally settled on (things like locale come to mind). Then you have something like Java, it only took Sun a few years to come up with.
and it?s a pretty darn good language, mind you I don?t thing the write once run anywhere crap is a good idea. But the language itself is yummie.
Problem for you is that there are "standards" for "integrated" programs for Linux. They are the GNOME and KDE "standards", if you're talking about GUI programs which seems to be your focus. No, I don't want to have a "large powerful company (like Microsoft)" "shove [standards] in [my] face." You're FUD about standards committies taking "years" is just that, FUD. I don't have the actual dates, but I don't think it took too long to come up with the TCP/IP standards, or the HTTP standard, or any other "real" standard out there. I would much rather have intelligent people debate the merrits of various methods of implementation instead of having one "large powerful company (like Microsoft)" come up with standards that seem to benefit marketing and financial goals rather than the technical merrits. Your use of the C++ standard does not fit in with the topic, nor does Java. Both are programming languanges as opposed to protocols or programming standards that are used in application programs in order to provide "integrated" solutions. Try again.
I know I?ll get in trouble for this, but I totally agree with Ann Rand with what she wrote in the ?Fountain Head?. Howard rook designed beautiful
buildings, they we?re beautiful because he and only he designed them, it was his ?vision?. When a committee got involved it became a hogpoge of
mixed ideas, some of this from one guy, and a little of this from another guy. And this does not good art make. .
Sad to say that I've never read Ann Rand. May be this goes against some Holy right of passage that you find dear to your heart, but it's beside the point. I'd rather think of information technology as an area of engineering rather than art. It's when you get all those "artsy fartsy" people involved that things go to crap. Not because art is bad, but because the marketing people at corporations, where their sole purpose of being is to make a profit, know how to use art to influence end-customers, whereas engineers only have their intelligent and performance to rely upon.
I think either you're severely misguided or are just a different kind of person than I. If you can't see the "art" and beauty in a technologically perfect solution and instead prefer the speil of marketing driods then you very well may be beyond help.
I grew up on Byte! Jerry's columns were great at the beginning, but then he started to get influenced by the marketing driods, IYAM (if you ask me). Remember the column about building custom circuits? I actually subscribed to Ciruit Cellar for a while, well, as long as it lasted. Byte was my first introduction to the 286 and 386 processors.
I'm having problems tonight. Anyone know if you can plug a Sun keyboard into a peecee motherbroard? I keep hitting enter instead of backspace due to the different layouts of the keyboards. I suppose as long as you don't plug the mouse into the keyboard it would be O.K., no? If anyone had any experiences with using a Sun keyboard on a PC I'd appreciate an email.
Thanks,
fwr
No, there are worse possibilities. If you include medical information in the data then there is the possibilitiy of not getting hired for a job, or not getting medical coverage in a job due to some issue that is controversial (such as I believe at Turner you either won't be hired or won't get medical at all if you smoke -- even off work in the privacy of your home. Or, something less "controversial" say you had cancer and have been in remission for the last 25 years, yet they refuse to give you medical insurance for unrelated stuff like having the flu or breaking your arm.). Or, if you made a financial mistake in the past it could be much harder to get your credit rating cleared up than it is now, effecting your ability to have credit cards, purchase a house, buy a car, or just about participate at all in the "new" electronic community.
Yea, I think someone has to re-read the moderator guidelines.
Like smacking an errant child, this is not the correct way to
handle the problem.
There are widly separate views on whether punishing a child is the correct way or not. In fact, there are widly different opinions if either the "psycological approach" (trying to explain to a child why something is wrong at an age when they can't even comprehend half the words you say) or the "best friend" approach (trying to be your childs best friend instead of an authority figure when it comes to correcting abnormal destructive behavior) contributes to the situation we in the USA are facing right now where the severity of crimes committed by young people not yet legal adults had excalated drastically, or possibly a combination of these two "new" methods is to blame. Anyway, your use of the term "smacking an errant child" clearly shows your stance on the topic and gives the impression, at least to me, that you believe you are 100% right with no possibility of a better way in any circumstance. Besides, other than the "fringe" parenting groups who I personally think border on the criminal and sometimes cross it, the vast majority of people who do use "physical" punishment to correct abnormal behavior mean a smack on the but or hand used to get the childs attention and know that you are upset with them for thier actions, not laying the child across your lap and beating them for 5 minutes to cause physical damage.
I do believe gathering data on the personal financing of corporate officers who make the decisions (or hey, what about the corporate lawyers?) would be an effective means of stoping this. I think you fail to get the point entirely. The point is that we will put presure on corporations to stop gathering "personal" information by gathering "personal" information about the corporation ourselves. As I think it would be fair to estimate that most if not all corporations of the size that would be involved in these actions have a few skeletons in their closet they wouldn't necessarily want the "public" to know about, it may be the only way, other than new laws, to stop them.
If you think it's more realistic to believe that we can effectively "lobby" our representatives and have them pass the appropriate laws before we could gather sufficient information about the companies that do this I believe you are living in a fantasy world.
And I think it's fair to say that a fair number of these people can not afford child support. Think about it. It's more likely for people with low education and morals/ethics to find themselves in a situation where they are expected to pay child support. Either they beat their spouse or cheated on them, or just got up and tried to walk away. Those kind of people do not strike me as the type of person who would be well compensated for the work that they are able to do. I have no evidence either way, and in fact the truth may be exactly opposite, but it makes sense to me that people who are required to pay child support are probably less able to do so than those who do not put themselves in that situation.
Yea, but you can PGP it if you really need to be sure, with a humongous key like 2048 bits or over...
The end does not justify the means.
Yes, money itself is capital. And it is not consumed when it is spent; it is passed from hand to hand.
The money is capitol thing may not be the best for you to support, as there are definately laws that forbid the "copying" of money by everyone except the government. This is, in effect, what people who believe in intellectual property are doing. Since they are able to make copies of capital with no measurable cost it argues against viewing "intellectual property" as property at all. Nothing else that is considered capital can be duplicated without cost.
That's why I think it would be better, and financially rewarding, to view programmers as "professionals" in the realm of doctors (but not necessarily lawyers). Doctors are paid for what they can do in each individual visit, not for something they did 30 years ago without "producing" anything for the last 25 years. (Note that this is without considering doctors who try to make a profit off of "intellectual property" such as surgical devices, etc. IMO, they are doing more to retard the progress of medicine than anyone by restricting the use of their "property" to those who cough up the dough). Instead, they could be viewed as service "contractors" who are paid very highly if they are "good" and demonstrate the ability to produce consistantly "good" code. This would reduce the number of "professional" programmers as it would get rid of those who do not produce consistantly "good" code. But, they could still contribute or have a lower paying "side-job" if they could program but be unable to support themselves only by programming if they were not "good." Why would this be so terrible? Doctors can't simply take a few courses in a 4 year college and get their degree. It takes a couple extra years of extra study concentrating in a particular field of medicine in order to get a doctors degree. Plus, even after they are done with that they have to do internship where they don't make a whole lot and have to work excruciatingly long hours before they are actually financially independant. What makes you or anyone else believe that programmers should get paid comparable salaries without going through similar training and weeding-out trials?
There will come a time, relatively soon, where all the "standard" applications are written and rewritten and rewritten the last time. Perhaps it will be when open source (preferably GPL) solutions are available for all the standard applications. Then, since there will be no financial incentive to make a new version of your word processor simply because you can, programming will concentrate on custom applications and those doctor-salaried programmers can go from business to business making buko bucks providing real solutions to people.
His fist computer was an Amiga, which explains a lot. Like Apple Mac users, a certain percentage of them believe that computers should all be point-and-click and all users should be able to comprehend and use them without any assistance regardless of the complexity of the task. Not all Amiga or Mac users believe this but some do (hell some "PC" users do, but I believe it's more common for "user friendly" computer users to have this attitude).
The facts are that some computing tasks are fundamentally complex and no one knows everything. By taking these two fundamental truths in combination it's easy to see why businesses have one of two choices. Either they can hire a large number of people with very high levels of technical skill to cover all possible trouble areas or they can hire a few people that specialize in the core competencies and purchase support contracts to cover the remaining areas. A simple investigation into the relative costs of the two resources makes this a no-brainer.
He doesn't seem to comprehend that insurance is a Good Thing in certain circumstances. Business is one where it is practically essential. Part of my work is to monitor peoples networks and assist them if they have problems. Do you think they would be so willing to hire me for support if I did not have support on the equipment we use? If we didn't purchase support contracts we would have to hire people with the skills in areas that we don't utilize much but would be required if we had issues and threaten our ability to support our customers. Do you think our customers want us to be spending all that money on mostly idle resources instead of purchasing relatively cheap support contracts? Hell no.
Besides, he seems to want to ignore the real facts of computer life, such as only "suggested" "security" patches are available to support holding Sun customers. While RedHat does not do this, I would insist on a support contract with them if I used the Official RedHat Linux Boxed Set in my work, just like I would insist on HP support if I were running HP-UX or, gasp!, Microsoft support if I were running Windows NT.
It's not a rumor when you quote exactly what the original person said, which is what Slashdot exactly did. The Register often quotes anonymous sources, and while Slashdot has Anonymous Cowards they don't use them for sources for their articles, to my knowledge. You are ignorant in not understanding or not having the knowledge to understand the difference between what Slashdot did, which is justifiable although apparently controversial, and what The Register does, which is to report on rumors.
Ever heard of off-line browsing. It was designed for exactly what your problem presents.
That's not an accurate analogy. The Slashdot article said Bruce Parens made comments about suing Corel, it didn't say he actually filed a suit. A more accurate comparison would be if someone posted an article saying "Author estimates new XYZ release this weekend." I think you would have a lot less to complain about given this more applicable comparison, which results in the collapse of much of your "annoyance" argument.
I don't think that debian-legal can be considered a list where "honest technical discussion" is the subject matter. Most/all of the other debian lists, sure, but not debian-legal. Considering what others have posted, that even talk of legal action does have an effect on the market, it is quite arguable that debian-legal should be a closed list (to those who actually have a legal basis for any legal action). Plus, there is another thing that can/should be considered. While debian-legal is currently "open" many people that use the distribution do not subscribe, including me. Those who use the distribution, and even those who do not, without argument have an interest (not necessarily monetary and not necessarily a legal interest, but a community interest) in any suit that may be brought against any entity. Slashdot was doing us a favor by reporting the discussions on debian-legal to make sure that not only Bruce but all of the people with a real legal basis for an action would have input from the "complete" community.
I don't think Slashdot was irresponsible and I don't think that Roblimo is wrong. I think you are over-reacting and not considering all of the implications.
Your stance assumes the person who makes the comment in the supposedly "semi-private" forum of a mailing list/usenet/web discussions/IRC is a complete newbie and clueless. Anyone with any significant amount of time on the Internet, and you know exactly what that means if you've been around for a while, completely understands just how "private" mailing lists are. Anyone who does not understand this can justifiably be termed a "newbie." Since I don't think anyone considers Bruce a newbie your arguments fail to support reality.
Just about the only case where I would consider a mailing list to fall outside of this definition is one that you must be "authorized" to join. There are lists out like this, such as ones to help people through the loss of a significant loved one. I would definately consider quoting a post on one of those closed/secure mailing lists to be a breach of privacy and unethical for a journalist to do. But, any mailing list which is joinable simply be sending an email to a listserv or majordomo or website is by definition "open" and considered a public forum.
So how do they make their money? Support? Come on, don't be silly. Support revenues are dependent on the amount of time the support
technicians are used for by the client. In other words, the harder the software is to use and the less reliable it is, the more they make. Yet reliability
is reckoned to me a major advantage of GPL (heck, any open-source) code, due to the ease of peer review. So, they have a financial incentive to
write worse code.
Oh grow up. You don't really believe this, do you? We just bought a bunch of Suns and guess what? We paid for a support contract on them. Why? Surely not because Sun makes crappy hardware! It's insurance. Insurance for a fluke in the hardware, or if I do something stupid and need assistance in configuring something. Companies don't but commercial software with support contracts because the software is a peice of crap. They buy it for insurance. And, no one makes more money by having their support personnel tied up all the time. The goal is to have more contracts per employee. The only way you can do this is if the actual support is not needed constantly. People who try to rip others off with support contracts charge on an hourly basis, like Microsoft. People who have confidence in their software charge per-incident or on a yearly basis. That's why RedHat has their incident support to get people started and their new Silver, Gold, and Platinum unlimited incident support contracts on annual basis. You don't think that your car insurance company makes more money when more people get into wrecks do you? That's why you have to have a current car inspection in order to get a insurance contract. RedHat's not going to sell support based on a crappy product.
Either you've never designed a support business or don't have the experience working in one to know what you're talking about. Or, you're just spreading FUD about RedHat to support your views on licensing issues. Do you honestly believe that Intel and others would have invested in RedHat had they not performed their due diligence and reviewed their books and business plan? If you believe that I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'll sell ya.