The biggest cool thing is that they really understand average users. They worry seriously about things like how hard it is for users to change the time, and what users will think of having to do more to change the time than click on their clock.
Also they will be using reiser4 in their next big release.:)
The article is correct in that, did you notice that Stallman was interviewed by that guy writing the book?
Also, the Linux OS resembles Unix rather closely. Of course, when you make something like Posix a government procurement standard, you rather lose your right to complain when people conform. Still, it would be nice if Linux attributed better. We aren't as bad as MS in attributing (ever see MS documents explaining that some idea had its origins outside MS?), but we definitely should improve.
Boris Babayan is a Russian chip architect who has never gotten the funding (tens of millions at least are needed these days) to adequately pursue a whole set of interesting ideas of his. He is the guy behind Elbrus, the interesting Russian CPU that never materializes because the money never happens.
Transmeta seems to be based on hiring one of his students, and implementing some version of Babayan's many ideas. Code morphing, protecting code from going out of bounds in hardware, these ideas are originally Babayan's. Maybe they should hire the master not the student, and then things might actually work. It is always sad when people don't realize the students are often not a good substitute for the original. It would be really nice to see Babayan get a shot at doing something in reality.
Of course, I say this without ever having met said student, and I am biased because I did meet Babayan and was personally impressed by him, so take this all with a grain of salt. Maybe I would be equally impressed by the student. Sure would be nice to see Babayan get a try at it though.
and this makes darpa the only player as far as independent businesses doing science are concerned.
It is a great pity that the NSF is so restricted, it should be changed. I would like to be able to apply for non DoD grants for ReiserFS, and have security not be the only thing I can officially get funded.
Bluecurve was an exercise in plagiarism, which I hope this will not be. Bluecurve was mostly about putting redhat logos everywhere and removing all those K's.
Getting the developers of KDE and Gnome to actually work together, that will be a real accomplishment that deserves praise. I would so like to use sawfish with kde.
If they spent the fine on funding free software...
on
Microsoft and EU Talks End
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
now THAT would cause MS some pain way beyond the sub-billion euro level they are talking about for the fine itself.
Their profits from abusing their monopoly are at least tens of billions. This EU fine is just a speed bump for them, and profit-wise, abusing their monopoly paid off. They continue to serve as an example to other companies of how breaking the anti-trust laws makes you lots of money, and the government won't do anything that will cause you to regret your actions.
The worst the government might do is tell you not to do it again, and make you pay a token fine that sounds like a lot to the folks flipping burgers but isn't substantive compared to your profit from locking out competitors.
All that said, hey, the EU is better than the US at antitrust. Yeah!
Maybe I can consider porting reiser4 to Windows for use in the EU. I'll be watching to see how things unfold.
and it is a great pity that the judiciary was stacked with scofflaw pro-trust judges by Edwin Meese and Mr. Reagan, and this case of tying lost.
I NEVER want the stock car radio from the manufacturer. Yet, having paid for it, I often settle for having it for many years because I don't have that money for buying the better car radio from the independents. Quality of a product is very much a function of how many competitors there are. Companies that specialize in car radios do a better job: they have to, if they sold that crap that came with the car, they wouldn't make it. Car companies only have to produce a better car radio than the other car companies, and not even that if the other company's cars aren't the same. This is far less stimulating of innovation than the independent manufacturer's market.
Whenever a brainless judge says that tying cannot get you more profit than the original monopoly could if you just raised the price on the monopoly product, just point out that the tied market isn't usually fully competitive either (most markets are semi-competitive, very few are fully competitive), and tying does indeed get you the difference between the marginal cost and the market price, which is only 0 in close to non-existent fully competitive markets. It also reduces the effective number of competitors, which also increases the distance between marginal cost and market price.
I think it is 5 different agencies that tap all internet communications.
All ISPs are required to provide them with hardware for monitoring/recording purposes, and it adds significantly to costs.
We need encrypted VOIP and encrypted email built in as the default configurations for Linux.
Don't underestimate how much info they get from monitoring all the communications you don't remember to or don't bother to encrypt.
Oh well, at least Reiser4 will ensure that if they confiscate your hard drive they need to extract the key out of you to do anything with it. We all do what we can....
Distros routinely engage in systematic plagiarism, wiping out information that users might see suggesting that they weren't the ones who created the software.
If distros don't like it that developers have found that the GPL does not protect them, and don't like what they have to do to protect themselves, then they should behave like gentlemen, and not presume to make their names the most prominent feature of software mostly written by others.
This is the inevitable result of RedHat removing KDE's credits. When they did that, people all throughout the developer community started to understand that it could and would be done to them too. There is no other solution than what XFree has done that will solve distro plagiarism. Unfortunately this means that there will be unceasing and ugly tug-of-wars over who gets credited how, and it will go into the licenses, and a few of the licenses of various components will conflict, and it is happening because gentlemen who attribute properly are not the ones in control of the corporations who are moving in on Linux.
Users should support the crediting of developers. If you don't pay us money, then maybe you should make sure we have some other reason like reputation for writing software like academia is very careful to foster.
I would like to thank XFree for taking on a very difficult issue that needs addressing. Notice how threatening the distros find this. They know that if users think of developers as being responsible for the software, then it creates a major shift of power, and distros will have to sponsor more software to create brand reputation.
Maybe part of the reason KDE is better is because they manage to make some money. Taxing proprietary software when they want to take advantage of your labor so that THEY can make money seems pretty reasonable to me. If THEY can make money charging users license fees, why not KDE?
Note that all of Darl's arguments become invalid when dual-licensing or BSD licensing is used. There really IS a desire by some in the free software industry to market leverage proprietary software out of the Linux market. This is unfortunate.
While I myself choose to give the software away for free, I do recognize the legitimate tradeoffs involved in copyright law. There are businesses that simply are not viable without a short-term (I favor 14 years) payment for use of their software. I don't think that the games that I play would be anywhere near as good if the developers were not paid for them --- it is very expensive to produce the fancy animations and graphics I enjoy.
Those of us who are (barely in my case) able to make it with free software businesses should not lock out others who cannot make it without charging. This is why I make all my software available under a non-GPL license for those who are willing to pay for such a license. That way they can make proprietary enhancements of my software, and sell them, and good for them!
I am one of the more technically successful developers in my industry, yet my business has been bouncing from one fiscal scare to another its entire existence. People who think GPL is the only way should try supporting a family and a payroll (the payroll is harder...) on free software for a few years, and they may find their ideology becomes less fervently fixated on the superiority of one way of doing business.
All that said, I still believe that copyright should require full disclosure of the source code, and the allowance of improvements to be made and sold by others, or else it serves no US constitutional purpose of advancing the arts and sciences.
Why don't you let users choose filesystems, and leave it to Linus to screen out filesystems that aren't ready for users to be choosing from? Does market leveraging really pay off for you? Why do you think of Linux filesystems made by others as competing with you --- does that reflect a lack of understanding of free software ideals?
Qt/Embedded and Qtopia are basically a grab by a small company to own the commercial handheld space.
And what in the world is wrong with that? They are giving for free to those who give back, and charging those who charge. Almost any software that is sufficiently successful is going to become a de facto standard and thus a necessity to those who want to enter the market. By charging those who charge they can maybe hope to barely make payroll if they produce best in the world quality work. You begrudge them this. What an ass!
Do you have any concept of how poor almost everyone in this dual-licensing business is compared to what their single proprietary licensing peers are making?
People who can work 40-60 hours a week on software do not three times, but five to seven times more work of a better quality, than those who do 15-20 hours of work a week. Many serious and deep projects simply cannot be done by part-time amateurs. Stallman's approach (seriously) is to not have children so money isn't needed. There is a flaw with that approach, think about it....;-)
In any piece of code there are certain patterns to it. Look for them. Particularly data structures which the code's effectiveness is tightly linked to. Most thieves are lazy, so they will leave some of the code unchanged. Very few persons are both willing to steal code and willing to take the time to fully obfuscate it.
The nice thing about this approach is you can wait until you suspect someone of stealing before you even bother thinking about the issue.
Oh, and in response to someone who asked if GPL violations are common. Yes they are, very common indeed, because free software is easy to get the source code for. Lots of startups, especially ones involved with web caching, steal from GPL'd code long enough to ship a first release.
His workload looks likely to be fsync intensive, and this is probably the main reason for the performance difference between scsi and IDE. Linux drivers handle write barriers better for SCSI than IDE. For most usage patterns, 2 IDE disks are going to outperform one SCSI disk and cost less.
I never buy SCSI.
I don't have any fsync intensive workloads, and the price just does not compute to buy it for me. SCSI is a marketing segmentation mechanism designed to get dumb corporations to spend more money.
Because my lawyer is not nearly so nice as Eben Moglen, and we'll go for the full monetary damages (what is it, $25,000 a copy?) I have no problem whatsoever with bankrupting any company I catch violating my copyright.
"Are you sure it wasn't installing the HD that helped the speed so much?"
was meant to be a quotation not a statement by me....
Re:these are narrow tests, not comprehensive tests
on
Linux File System Shootout
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Think of different benchmarks as being like x-ray vs. infrared photographs. Each of them gives a different insight into the subject of the photo.
In this case, I think that this 200Mhz CPU benchmark is not highly worth optimizing for, but generally more views of a design are interesting.
One of the things reiser4 needs to do is not have a structure per unformatted node for large files, and you can see the need for that if you look at our CPU consumption when writing a large file using dd. We'll probably adjust that aspect of the design sometime in the next two months, and have a structure per extent instead of per unformatted node. If I hadn't been running benchmarks, I never would have understood that misdesign decision of mine so clearly. The nice thing is that the code will get simpler as a result of the change.
Are you sure it wasn't installing the HD that helped the speed so much?
We do well at squid. If you use reiserfs you can have fun experimenting with such things as storing everything in one directory, etc. One of the annoyances about linux VFS though is that it giant locks the whole directory, so don't do that if you have more than one CPU.
which makes the whole thing pretty questionable in my view, especially when you consider that Nikita got completely different results on his more modern hardware (see www.namesys.com/benchmarks.html)
I don't really target 200Mhz CPUs in my performance tuning....;-)
Still, they are interesting in showing areas of performance where something is a bit amiss.
It would be nice if exactly what they did was explained. You know, things like how you can get both the lowest total elapsed time and the worst overall score on one of the runs (because of CPU usage? ), what task was measured by each of the numbers printed, what the different settings on the different runs mean.....
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest cool thing is that they really understand average users. They worry seriously about things like how hard it is for users to change the time, and what users will think of having to do more to change the time than click on their clock.
Also they will be using reiser4 in their next big release.:)
The standards they are rebelling against are structured contrary to the interests of the consumers. Let us thank them for their courage.
I will happily buy evd products as a consumer
Competition is great!.
The article is correct in that, did you notice that Stallman was interviewed by that guy writing the book?
Also, the Linux OS resembles Unix rather closely. Of course, when you make something like Posix a government procurement standard, you rather lose your right to complain when people conform. Still, it would be nice if Linux attributed better. We aren't as bad as MS in attributing (ever see MS documents explaining that some idea had its origins outside MS?), but we definitely should improve.
Boris Babayan is a Russian chip architect who has never gotten the funding (tens of millions at least are needed these days) to adequately pursue a whole set of interesting ideas of his. He is the guy behind Elbrus, the interesting Russian CPU that never materializes because the money never happens.
Transmeta seems to be based on hiring one of his students, and implementing some version of Babayan's many ideas. Code morphing, protecting code from going out of bounds in hardware, these ideas are originally Babayan's. Maybe they should hire the master not the student, and then things might actually work. It is always sad when people don't realize the students are often not a good substitute for the original. It would be really nice to see Babayan get a shot at doing something in reality.
Of course, I say this without ever having met said student, and I am biased because I did meet Babayan and was personally impressed by him, so take this all with a grain of salt. Maybe I would be equally impressed by the student. Sure would be nice to see Babayan get a try at it though.
You can see benchmarks of it at www.namesys.com/benchmarks.html
and this makes darpa the only player as far as independent businesses doing science are concerned.
It is a great pity that the NSF is so restricted, it should be changed. I would like to be able to apply for non DoD grants for ReiserFS, and have security not be the only thing I can officially get funded.
If they didn't test the passwords, maybe the public is smarter than the pollster? ;-)
Bluecurve was an exercise in plagiarism, which I hope this will not be. Bluecurve
was mostly about putting redhat logos everywhere and removing all those K's.
Getting the developers of KDE and Gnome to actually work together, that will be a real accomplishment that deserves praise. I would so like to use sawfish with kde.
now THAT would cause MS some pain way beyond the sub-billion euro level they are talking about for the fine itself.
Their profits from abusing their monopoly are at least tens of billions. This EU fine is just a speed bump for them, and profit-wise, abusing their monopoly paid off. They continue to serve as an example to other companies of how breaking the anti-trust laws makes you lots of money, and the government won't do anything that will cause you to regret your actions.
The worst the government might do is tell you not to do it again, and make you pay a token fine that sounds like a lot to the folks flipping burgers but isn't substantive compared to your profit from locking out competitors.
All that said, hey, the EU is better than the US at antitrust. Yeah!
Maybe I can consider porting reiser4 to Windows for use in the EU. I'll be watching to see how things unfold.
and it is a great pity that the judiciary was stacked with scofflaw pro-trust judges by Edwin Meese and Mr. Reagan, and this case of tying lost.
I NEVER want the stock car radio from the manufacturer. Yet, having paid for it, I often settle for having it for many years because I don't have that money for buying the better car radio from the independents. Quality of a product is very much a function of how many competitors there are. Companies that specialize in car radios do a better job: they have to, if they sold that crap that came with the car, they wouldn't make it. Car companies only have to produce a better car radio than the other car companies, and not even that if the other company's cars aren't the same. This is far less stimulating of innovation than the independent manufacturer's market.
Whenever a brainless judge says that tying cannot get you more profit than the original monopoly could if you just raised the price on the monopoly product, just point out that the tied market isn't usually fully competitive either (most markets are semi-competitive, very few are fully competitive), and tying does indeed get you the difference between the marginal cost and the market price, which is only 0 in close to non-existent fully competitive markets. It also reduces the effective number of competitors, which also increases the distance between marginal cost and market price.
I think it is 5 different agencies that tap all internet communications.
All ISPs are required to provide them with hardware for monitoring/recording purposes, and it adds significantly to costs.
We need encrypted VOIP and encrypted email built in as the default configurations for Linux.
Don't underestimate how much info they get from monitoring all the communications you don't remember to or don't bother to encrypt.
Oh well, at least Reiser4 will ensure that if they confiscate your hard drive they
need to extract the key out of you to do anything with it. We all do what we can....
Distros routinely engage in systematic plagiarism, wiping out information that users might see suggesting that they weren't the ones who created the software.
If distros don't like it that developers have found that the GPL does not protect them, and don't like what they have to do to protect themselves, then they should behave like gentlemen, and not presume to make their names the most prominent feature of software mostly written by others.
This is the inevitable result of RedHat removing KDE's credits. When they did that, people all throughout the developer community started to understand that it could and would be done to them too. There is no other solution than what XFree has done that will solve distro plagiarism. Unfortunately this means that there will be unceasing and ugly tug-of-wars over who gets credited how, and it will go into the licenses, and a few of the licenses of various components will conflict, and it is happening because gentlemen who attribute properly are not the ones in control of the corporations who are moving in on Linux.
Users should support the crediting of developers. If you don't pay us money, then maybe you should make sure we have some other reason like reputation for writing software like academia is very careful to foster.
I would like to thank XFree for taking on a very difficult issue that needs addressing. Notice how threatening the distros find this. They know that if users think of developers as being responsible for the software, then it creates a major shift of power, and distros will have to sponsor more software to create brand reputation.
Maybe part of the reason KDE is better is because they manage to make some money. Taxing proprietary software when they want to take advantage of your labor so that THEY can make money seems pretty reasonable to me. If THEY can make money charging users license fees, why not KDE?
Note that all of Darl's arguments become invalid when dual-licensing or BSD licensing is used. There really IS a desire by some in the free software industry to market leverage proprietary software out of the Linux market. This is unfortunate.
While I myself choose to give the software away for free, I do recognize the legitimate tradeoffs involved in copyright law. There are businesses that simply are not viable without a short-term (I favor 14 years) payment for use of their software. I don't think that the games that I play would be anywhere near as good if the developers were not paid for them --- it is very expensive to produce the fancy animations and graphics I enjoy.
Those of us who are (barely in my case) able to make it with free software businesses should not lock out others who cannot make it without charging. This is why I make all my software available under a non-GPL license for those who are willing to pay for such a license. That way they can make proprietary enhancements of my software, and sell them, and good for them!
I am one of the more technically successful developers in my industry, yet my business has been bouncing from one fiscal scare to another its entire existence. People who think GPL is the only way should try supporting a family and a payroll (the payroll is harder...) on free software for a few years, and they may find their ideology becomes less fervently fixated on the superiority of one way of doing business.
All that said, I still believe that copyright should require full disclosure of the source code, and the allowance of improvements to be made and sold by others, or else it serves no US constitutional purpose of advancing the arts and sciences.
Why don't you let users choose filesystems, and leave it to Linus to screen out filesystems that aren't ready for users to be choosing from? Does market leveraging really pay off for you? Why do you think of Linux filesystems made by others as competing with you --- does that reflect a lack of understanding of free software ideals?
And what in the world is wrong with that? They are giving for free to those who give back, and charging those who charge. Almost any software that is sufficiently successful is going to become a de facto standard and thus a necessity to those who want to enter the market. By charging those who charge they can maybe hope to barely make payroll if they produce best in the world quality work. You begrudge them this. What an ass!
Do you have any concept of how poor almost everyone in this dual-licensing business is compared to what their single proprietary licensing peers are making?
People who can work 40-60 hours a week on software do not three times, but five to seven times more work of a better quality, than those who do 15-20 hours of work a week. Many serious and deep projects simply cannot be done by part-time amateurs. Stallman's approach (seriously) is to not have children so money isn't needed. There is a flaw with that approach, think about it....;-)
In any piece of code there are certain patterns to it. Look for them. Particularly data structures which the code's effectiveness is tightly linked to. Most thieves are lazy, so they will leave some of the code unchanged. Very few persons are both willing to steal code and willing to take the time to fully obfuscate it.
The nice thing about this approach is you can wait until you suspect someone of stealing before you even bother thinking about the issue.
Oh, and in response to someone who asked if GPL violations are common. Yes they are, very common indeed, because free software is easy to get the source code for. Lots of startups, especially ones involved with web caching, steal from GPL'd code long enough to ship a first release.
His workload looks likely to be fsync intensive, and this is probably the main reason for the performance difference between scsi and IDE. Linux drivers handle write barriers better for SCSI than IDE. For most usage patterns, 2 IDE disks are going to outperform one SCSI disk and cost less.
I never buy SCSI.
I don't have any fsync intensive workloads, and the price just does not compute to buy it for me. SCSI is a marketing segmentation mechanism designed to get dumb corporations to spend more money.
Because my lawyer is not nearly so nice as Eben Moglen, and we'll go for the full monetary damages (what is it, $25,000 a copy?) I have no problem whatsoever with bankrupting any company I catch violating my copyright.
Hans Reiser
Architect of ReiserFS
Namesys.com
Apologies, the line:
"Are you sure it wasn't installing the HD that helped the speed so much?"
was meant to be a quotation not a statement by me....
Think of different benchmarks as being like x-ray vs. infrared photographs. Each of them gives a different insight into the subject of the photo.
In this case, I think that this 200Mhz CPU benchmark is not highly worth optimizing for, but generally more views of a design are interesting.
One of the things reiser4 needs to do is not have a structure per unformatted node for large files, and you can see the need for that if you look at our CPU consumption when writing a large file using dd. We'll probably adjust that aspect of the design sometime in the next two months, and have a structure per extent instead of per unformatted node. If I hadn't been running benchmarks, I never would have understood that misdesign decision of mine so clearly. The nice thing is that the code will get simpler as a result of the change.
Are you sure it wasn't installing the HD that helped the speed so much?
We do well at squid. If you use reiserfs you can have fun experimenting with such things as storing everything in one directory, etc. One of the annoyances about linux VFS though is that it giant locks the whole directory, so don't do that if you have more than one CPU.
which makes the whole thing pretty questionable in my view, especially when you consider that Nikita got completely different results on his more modern hardware (see www.namesys.com/benchmarks.html)
I don't really target 200Mhz CPUs in my performance tuning....;-)
Hans
Still, they are interesting in showing areas of performance where something is a bit amiss.
It would be nice if exactly what they did was explained. You know, things like how you can get both the lowest total elapsed time and the worst overall score on one of the runs (because of CPU usage? ), what task was measured by each of the numbers printed, what the different settings on the different runs mean.....
Sigh, time to go read the source code for them.