It could be that in a few years, IBM-Sun-Compaq et al will rely on free software to move their much of their very-non-free hardware. The public defendor hired to defend the License may well walk into court with more than his dick in his hands. (so to speak)
I don't know how much HP has paid to Puffin-and-friends to port the kernel (though I bet equipment makes up a big chunk of the total). A few million dollars, at most.
Now consider all the customers who've spent billions over the years to run their businesses with HP equipment. With the great and growing value of open source, why on earth would you deny them access? How rude!
This is reason IBM whipped up a custom kernel for their mainframe customers. Negligible cost for ever increasing benefits.
disclaimer: I've only worked on IA-32, but I saw an HP server cube once (HP9000 IIRC).
Linus touched on this subject (micro vs. mono) in "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution". His chapter is titled "The Linux Edge".
He believes that the excessive money spent on microkernel research (in the 80s-90s?) was not only a waste, but perhaps downright corrupt:
In fact, [optimizing tricks for microkernels that also would apply to monolithic kernels] made me think that the microkernel approach was essentially a dishonest approach aimed at receiving more dollars for research. I don't necessarily think these researchers were knowingly dishonest. Perhaps they were simply stupid. Or deluded. I mean this in a very real sense. The dishonesty comes from the intense pressure in the research community at that time to pursue the microkernel topic. In a computer science research lab, you were studying microkernels or you weren't studying kernels at all. So everyone was pressured into this dishonesty, even the people designing Windows NT. While the NT team knew the final result wouldn't approach a microkernel, they knew they had to pay lip service to the idea.
Gee, I hope quoting a paragraph from an open source book isn't illegal. Eh, what the hell.
Everyone should notice that there are TWO proposals being floated. Licensing and *micropayments*. Micropayments don't work with anonymous visitors very well, and I think that's a clue about what's really driving the licensing issue. (When I hear "kiddieporn", I reach for my wallet. To protect it, I mean.)
Corporations want to get PAID. You think the New York Times enjoys giving out content for free? Micropayments would allow companies to finely calibrate entrance fees--just enough to make a profit but not so high as to drive everyone away.
The day we lose our anonymity (in this billing sense), is the day websites will be stop being free as in beer. Taxing transactions will probably get lots easier, too.
The russian design uses graphite to replace the huge pool of water that western reactors are bathed in, not the moderating rods. Carbon (or water) slow the neutrons down to make fission more likely. The rods (made of beryllium? in both designs) absorb the neutrons altogether, and stop the reaction.
Because the russian reactors are "dry", a fire in the graphite blocks is a definite possibility. They should have enclosed the reactor in a containment vessel like we do. Cheapskates.
Click on the link; d/l the postscript file (or pdf or whatever). Read what these scientists are saying!
I understood about every 3rd paragraph (which is pretty good for me). The "branes" are "folded" in sheets that are bigger than our observable universe, > 15 billion lightyears. Yet the sheets (or branes) are less than a millimeter apart gravitationally, which is where the dark matter comes from, according to these guys. That means dark matter is just like regular matter, just invisible except for the gravity. So you would have "dark stars" which look like MACHOS, "halos" of dark matter around visible galaxies (which reveal the presence of other-brane galaxies nestling together "through the bulk" of the branes. Oh, my head is spinning!
And now a safety tip: Please don't pour sulfuric acid on your genitals.
I think that putting an entire book online is similar to a book store allowing you to peruse the same book while sitting in an overstuffed chair. Having to read an entire book on the screen is about as inconvenient as making several trips to B&N to slurp up chapters of the latest Stephen King novel (though strangely I find myself doing that sometimes:o). If the book's good, you'll buy it. If it's not, what do we have to talk about?
I can't seem to link to articles in the Guardian, but here's the search results for "stallman." The first article is his current opinion piece (with the Linux==GNU howler), and the third is their interview with same.
I though this remark amusing:
If you took [RMS's] programs away the internet would stop; Linux, a free operating system which might yet seriously damage Microsoft, would never have been born without Stallman.
So he ought to be supernerd, a semi-autistic genius who speaks human as a foreign language. It is none the less astonishing how closely he lives up to these expectations.
p.s. If you use junkbuster's web proxy then you must add www.newsunlimited.co.uk to your scookie.ini file. And if you don't use junkbuster, why the hell not?
This pisses me off. I just previewed my correction, submitted it, and it came through as Anonymous Coward! The script should remember that I typed in my nick and password (as the preview correctly had my nick in its header. But it's a feature, right? p.s. The guy I was thinking of was a Harvard student who worked at a certain MIT lab. Damn fine writing in any case, citizen hey! (Score:5 in my book). -- submitting without previewing --
What we have here is an MIT alumnis who writes compellingly (dare I say elegantly?) on matters of technological ethics. For One Million Dollars, who could this be?
Is it just me? I try and try, but for the life of me, Slashdot's GNU icon looks to me like a drawning of:
A shaft of fecal matter with glasses and red shoes. It holds a blue blanket to its ear and sucks its thumb (ala that other Linus). It seems to be wearing a locomotive engineer's hat on it's stinky little head.
Isn't a gnu some sort of yak? Where are it's horns?
Oh yeah? How will we ever know if surveys like Netcraft's mis-identify OpenBSD as "Solaris"?
www.openbsd.org www.openbsd.org is running Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) on Solaris ... Solaris users include General Motors, General Electric, AT&T, and PepsiCo.
(or is OpenBSD's site really running under another OS? Good Grief!)
The only other problem I've had is that Redhat initscripts require build-specific System.map and module-info files. The stock release doesn't create those, so you have to bodge around it. Maybe this is documented properly somewhere now - if so, I haven't found it yet. Again, a pain only to Redhat users.
Yeah, System.map confused me too before I found the Red Hat kernel upgrade H OWTO.
There are a few add'l steps after "make modules_install" that are specific to RH. But no biggie.
That Thompson piece is thought provoking indeed. Does the FSF keep a master C compiler binary in a vault somewhere and checksum their working copies every so often? Would it be possible to create a very small compiler that would produce very unoptimized object code, but you could use it to 'bootstrap' a clean (unbugged) full-fledged c compiler binary?
Hmm. Then as Ken said, you'd have to worry about the CPU's microcode.
The US has all kinds of leverage over S.Korean and Taiwanese governments, and indirectly over the companies who make most of the world's non-Intel hardware, so:
My solution is to buy all your hardware from the French. They'd be the last to bow to demands from the US gov't.
[Fred Norris using his frenchie "look into my ass" voice] "F*ck yewh! Yewh hambergeh iting, ketchup-on-everyting uncultur-ed meird-faces! Hey, Hyperpower, you kin kiss mah Parisian derriere!"
Slashdot Mirror
Once a barrister, always a barrister. The stain cannot be removed, though G tried harder than anyone. Shame, but there it is.
Oh, I don't know.
It could be that in a few years, IBM-Sun-Compaq et al will rely on free software to move their much of their very-non-free hardware. The public defendor hired to defend the License may well walk into court with more than his dick in his hands. (so to speak)
I don't know how much HP has paid to Puffin-and-friends to port the kernel (though I bet equipment makes up a big chunk of the total). A few million dollars, at most.
Now consider all the customers who've spent billions over the years to run their businesses with HP equipment. With the great and growing value of open source, why on earth would you deny them access? How rude!
This is reason IBM whipped up a custom kernel for their mainframe customers. Negligible cost for ever increasing benefits.
disclaimer: I've only worked on IA-32, but I saw an HP server cube once (HP9000 IIRC).
They call it SledgeHammer. I think this press release indicates that AMD isn't waiting around to be crushed by IA-64.
A 64-bit architecture with NO speed penalty for IA-32 programs, plus a super-fast (like 20x) I/O bus. Booo-yaaah!
He believes that the excessive money spent on microkernel research (in the 80s-90s?) was not only a waste, but perhaps downright corrupt:
Gee, I hope quoting a paragraph from an open source book isn't illegal. Eh, what the hell.
What's with all the dildo laws? It can't be too realistic, you can't have more than 2 in the house, or you can't legally possess dildos AT ALL!
These fake cocks are getting out of control!!!
I'd like to make your first point more explicit.
Everyone should notice that there are TWO proposals being floated. Licensing and *micropayments*. Micropayments don't work with anonymous visitors very well, and I think that's a clue about what's really driving the licensing issue. (When I hear "kiddieporn", I reach for my wallet. To protect it, I mean.)
Corporations want to get PAID. You think the New York Times enjoys giving out content for free? Micropayments would allow companies to finely calibrate entrance fees--just enough to make a profit but not so high as to drive everyone away.
The day we lose our anonymity (in this billing sense), is the day websites will be stop being free as in beer. Taxing transactions will probably get lots easier, too.
The russian design uses graphite to replace the huge pool of water that western reactors are bathed in, not the moderating rods. Carbon (or water) slow the neutrons down to make fission more likely. The rods (made of beryllium? in both designs) absorb the neutrons altogether, and stop the reaction.
Because the russian reactors are "dry", a fire in the graphite blocks is a definite possibility. They should have enclosed the reactor in a containment vessel like we do. Cheapskates.
Click on the link; d/l the postscript file (or pdf or whatever). Read what these scientists are saying!
I understood about every 3rd paragraph (which is pretty good for me). The "branes" are "folded" in sheets that are bigger than our observable universe, > 15 billion lightyears. Yet the sheets (or branes) are less than a millimeter apart gravitationally, which is where the dark matter comes from, according to these guys. That means dark matter is just like regular matter, just invisible except for the gravity. So you would have "dark stars" which look like MACHOS, "halos" of dark matter around visible galaxies (which reveal the presence of other-brane galaxies nestling together "through the bulk" of the branes. Oh, my head is spinning!
And now a safety tip: Please don't pour sulfuric acid on your genitals.
My bad, AC. I should've just quoted the second paragraph. Of course, Linux isn't Linux without GNU, and the Internet isn't the web without Linux.
The linux-kernel developers don't use CVS. Or rather, Linus acts as an "intellegent CVS with taste." not to dis those who have to use "dumb" CVS. ;)
I think that putting an entire book online is similar to a book store allowing you to peruse the same book while sitting in an overstuffed chair. Having to read an entire book on the screen is about as inconvenient as making several trips to B&N to slurp up chapters of the latest Stephen King novel (though strangely I find myself doing that sometimes :o). If the book's good, you'll buy it. If it's not, what do we have to talk about?
I though this remark amusing:
If you took [RMS's] programs away the internet would stop; Linux, a free operating system which might yet seriously damage Microsoft, would never have been born without Stallman.
So he ought to be supernerd, a semi-autistic genius who speaks human as a foreign language. It is none the less astonishing how closely he lives up to these expectations.
p.s. If you use junkbuster's web proxy then you must add www.newsunlimited.co.uk to your scookie.ini file. And if you don't use junkbuster, why the hell not?
This pisses me off. I just previewed my correction, submitted it, and it came through as Anonymous Coward! The script should remember that I typed in my nick and password (as the preview correctly had my nick in its header. But it's a feature, right? p.s. The guy I was thinking of was a Harvard student who worked at a certain MIT lab. Damn fine writing in any case, citizen hey! (Score:5 in my book). -- submitting without previewing --
What we have here is an MIT alumnis who writes compellingly (dare I say elegantly?) on matters of technological ethics. For One Million Dollars, who could this be?
Wait, don't tell me! Hold on minute!
Wait, sir!
Is it just me? I try and try, but for the life of me, Slashdot's GNU icon looks to me like a drawning of:
A shaft of fecal matter with glasses and red shoes. It holds a blue blanket to its ear and sucks its thumb (ala that other Linus). It seems to be wearing a locomotive engineer's hat on it's stinky little head.
Isn't a gnu some sort of yak? Where are it's horns?
Oh yeah? How will we ever know if surveys like Netcraft's mis-identify OpenBSD as "Solaris"?
www.openbsd.org
www.openbsd.org is running Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) on Solaris
...
Solaris users include General Motors, General Electric, AT&T, and PepsiCo.
(or is OpenBSD's site really running under another OS? Good Grief!)
Yeah, System.map confused me too before I found the Red Hat kernel upgrade H OWTO.
There are a few add'l steps after "make modules_install" that are specific to RH. But no biggie.
That Thompson piece is thought provoking indeed. Does the FSF keep a master C compiler binary in a vault somewhere and checksum their working copies every so often? Would it be possible to create a very small compiler that would produce very unoptimized object code, but you could use it to 'bootstrap' a clean (unbugged) full-fledged c compiler binary?
Hmm. Then as Ken said, you'd have to worry about the CPU's microcode.
The US has all kinds of leverage over S.Korean and Taiwanese governments, and indirectly over the companies who make most of the world's non-Intel hardware, so:
My solution is to buy all your hardware from the French. They'd be the last to bow to demands from the US gov't.
[Fred Norris using his frenchie "look into my ass" voice]
"F*ck yewh! Yewh hambergeh iting, ketchup-on-everyting uncultur-ed meird-faces! Hey, Hyperpower, you kin kiss mah Parisian derriere!"
I warned you, didn't I?
I'm just posting for the first time. Checking to see if the formatting is correct.
Have a nice day.
ps: does this LINK work?