Um, Itanium systems have a maximum clock rate that's slower than what this 'leak' puts as the PPC speed. Itanium systems are quite a bit more expensive than the PPC 970 systems likely to come out of Apple.
Oh, you want to compare 32bit P4s to 64bit 970s? Why, because you're really in the market for a 32 bit processor and need to distort everything into a P4=center of the universe worldview. Grow up. Something new is coming. It will likely run rings around Itanium. It *may* run rings around the P4s for stock 32bit applications and will very likely beat it when comparing code that's similarly optimized for the two chips.
Let's see it unveiled and let's see the benchmarks then let the chip wars begin again!
Volunteers come easy in certain subjects. Anybody wanting to break into the field would have an incentive to add to their resume 'textbook publisher' and for the really boring stuff that has no advocacy group (and you'll be surprised how many subjects do have them) you simply pay people from countries with good educational infrastructure but lousy economies and low pay. You can get textbook writers for a few hundred a month a worker for all the hard sciences. Pay by the math problem if you like and set it at a nickel a problem.
I think the issue is introducing texts in a few grades at a time. So if you save $30M per year, per grade and you're doing two grades a year, at the end of 7 years you're saving $390M a year. Startup costs will eat into savings at the beginning and not needing to go on those fancy national textbook review sessions anymore will save a bit more at the end. It may be BS but you can't tell from the phase in period.
Are authors compensations rising unequally? How about editors? Are only textbook printers unions getting high salary increases and are presses that print textbooks more expensive? No.
All these forces are constrained by competition in the real world but in the oligopoly/government world of textbooks it's spend city.
As for people not writing what doesn't interest therm, there are two solutions. First, pay people. Basic mathematics may be boring but you could get very talented teachers in Romania, Poland, or Russia who would do it for very little money.
Second, find the organizations that are interested in such things and let them have a crack at it. Want to talk about politics? Invite political think tanks to the party. Want to talk about science? Find a science advocacy group. There are groups and clubs for just about everything. For photosynthesis, might I suggest starting with 4H? Of course, this brings up the issue of bias.
One of the major things wrong with textbooks today is that there are roving bands of advocates with a gripe ensuring that this or that idea does *not* get into texts. We don't have to get into specifics but let's just admit that these Comstocks come in all ideological stripes these days.
What happens now is one side wins, the other side loses, and some information is included or excised at the California, Texas, or other big state level and that's it. Nobody in the country has a big enough market to merit special textbooks so you get a sort of lowest common denominator blandness that stands out as the defining feature of texts.
With open textbooks, the losers in these fights can put out mods so that individual schools can splice in the concepts they want or individual parents can insist on extra reading from their tykes to work around the local thought police but still pass their exams.
So every time you hand an afghan tribesman a stinger missile, you need to hand over the source code for the guidance system? I think not. Military stuff gets around a lot further than you might think and it's not always appropriate to distribute source with binaries. In the case of the tribesman, he might not understand the assembly code but he certainly would understand the $50k he'll get from the nice PRC agent for the source which ends up improving PRC or NK or whoever's missile systems.
The article says something a bit different that there is a list of acceptable default licenses and managers are free to pick one of them without fuss. This group wants to remove the choice of the GPL without a lot of bureaucratic red tape added.
Probably better put than he realizes. Take a look at Federalist #10. The US was put together in such a way that there are never durable majorities. You may be in a majority on one question but you are almost certainly simultaneously a minority in some other question. We like it that way. It tends to keep the persecution of minorities down.
Well... If you payed enough in taxes to buy two of them a year, they might just let you do it. Think about Arnold Schwarzenegger getting a military Humvee before there was a civilian version for example.
There's taxpayers and then there's the guys who write the really big checks for taxes.
I certainly wouldn't want military guidance systems released but I wouldn't mind at all if every country in the world used the same stuff to tabulate economic growth and calculated it the same way. That would be a tremendous international benefit and would allow for honest international comparison of systems.
Because some of what government does should be kept secret does not imply that all of what government does should be kept secret.
But what's absolutely foolish is that they seem to be saying that BSD style licenses are bad too and are only exceeded in their wicked ways by GPL licenses. What particular reason is there to avoid a BSD license which doesn't require more than a copyright notice at worst? Well, other than it'll reduce profits at the commercial software shops.
I'd rather improve driver license categories so that we can get much more detail about how good a particular driver is. That doesn't actually require technology research just a little legislation.
What was transplanted into what *is* a distinct fight within Apple right now but each distinct body part (BSD, Java, Mac UI, NeXT UI, Applescript, etc) seems to be melding into a new, cohesive whole.
An example, on Mac OS X hints I saw how to create a software airport bridge that turns on at logon. The fellow was a unix hacker and got stock libraries, recompiled them and tweaked until he was happy. I look at that and say, hmmm, why not just run a login applescript to do the same thing (even if the app is not normally scriptable, UI scripting is out and you can script just about anything now).
I suspect that a lot of the features that were marked missing in 10.0 are no longer missing at 10.2. I expect the list to grow shorter as time goes on and 10.3 etc are released. At the same time I expect that UI advances like the services menu will improve and provide an overall *better* experience than classic MACOS. So where are we? I agree that we're overall better but even the down side isn't as gloomy as you paint. Apple has to wow with new product as it backfills bringing over old classic OS features it couldn't get to in time for 10.0. This slows the process down but it's a temporary price for an astounding OS transition.
Actually there is something called objective C++ which you might not be aware of which should allow you to take advantage of all sorts of Mac OS X goodies in otherwise C++ files.
I think that QT is not the wrong answer but rather the right answer to a question you aren't considering. There's likely to be a market for it for people who want Mac programs and QT software to reside on the same machine. Not having to have the overhead of X11 is a real plus and should be viewed that way.
I usually work more on the administrative side but I do code in RealBasic, a cross platform competitor to VB (let them know you'd be interested in a Linux port, they're thinking about it). They do exactly that, having explicit quit, preferences, and regular menuitems which change locations depending on which MacOS is being run.
Do you have a Mac/QT license? Have you looked at it to determine what it can and can't provide? I'd give the Trolltech people a little credit and give their product a whirl before you knock it as hopelessly inadequate. And if you're right, they're likely to hear from mac programmers soon enough so they can correct their errors.
MacGIMP was in development before this announcement.
The mac community is the art critic of the computer world. It's not that something is not written and so you supply the service. It doesn't work that way. The OSS community is about having an itch and then scratching it. The mac community is about scratching it *in the right way* so that it's done quickly, efficiently, and with the minimum possibility of infection. It doesn't change your feature set so much as change every implementation of the feature set to match human interface guidelines and to elevate HIG to the equivalent importance to functioning code.
My theory rests on the idea that SCO has more balls than brains but that seems to be the truth of the entire SCO lawsuit so why not take that thread to the next level?
Yes, a distressed company with 1-2 months cash left in the bank and hovering around breakeven, could *theoretically* go to IBM but by the time they got a cash infusion they likely would already be in dissolution. Obviously, there would be psychological profiling done of the key players in that company and picking the right one to go after would be key.
For every *normal* operation using AIX after that point, they'd have to make a cost/benefit analysis of getting the license v. being annoyed by SCO in the same manner. Part of that due diligence would be calling SCO up to find out how much a license would cost. SCO PR would immediately spin that to a massive increase in license negotiations and that, in itself, would make their position look more credible.
It's not a scenario without risks, obviously. The benefits to SCO are pretty obvious too though so the question still remains, what would you do?
It's good for the projects. Free software gets introduced to an entirely new clientle, the kind of end user that is exactly what the OSS movement needs, one that is uber picky about UI, is very loud about it, and will nag and complain until the UI is fixed.
*That's* what's been missing from Open Source and it's arriving not a moment too soon.
They would not need a court order against anyone using AIX. The order wouldn't even target IBM as a defendent. It would merely state that it's a search warrant for unlicensed software (something the BSA does all the time without injunction or much of a bond as far as I know) and AIX without a SCO UNIX license would be considered unlicensed.
They would likely look for a distressed company with few cash reserves that couldn't afford the red tape to overturn this and just cave in on buying a license. Once precedent is set, the FUD starts to work better and they take their check and try it again. Repeat at will. At a certain point, they no longer have to execute warrants as people seek licenses without them.
Ok, let's say you're an IT manager at an aix shop that uses it for 24x7 mission critical applications. Sheriff deputies knock on the door with a warrant to search for unauthorized copies of AIX and have a SCO rep in tow that tells you that you can either buy a license, wipe the OS off your hardware, or let the deputies impound your equipment.
What do you do?
That scenario is the next logical step for SCO in their FUD campaign.
It wasn't a 'greatest president' poll but an actual voter preference poll. Go google it yourself if you care. Anybody talking about buttboys isn't worth spending my time on research to look up the link.
While the UK is running as the same political entity for longer than the US, France isn't, Germany isn't, Italy, Spain, and a whole host of other 1st world countries are not the same political entity. Political entities are not the same as nations, which endure far longer than political entities.
In 1783, the US thanked the Bourbon crown for its support. In 1789 we watched in horror as blood ran in the streets of Paris. France is now on its 5th Republic, all post-dating the creation of the US.
In case you didn't notice, France was hyperventilating about US 'hyperpower' during the Clinton administration and working diligently to block us at every turn. It was only under the current administration that we took effective measures to counteract their ankle biting.
The Vilnius 10 letter and France's expressed pique after that letter clearly showed that for a large part of Europe, the bullying they're worried about is France and Germany's. Take a look at the name calling that Poland is enduring right now. It's disgraceful and far nastier than the unofficial gibes at 'cheese eating surrender monkeys'. We've never had cabinet officers talking that way but the Poles have been shabbily treated in both the popular EU press and by high officials in Germany and France.
We might agree on computers but certainly not on politics. Then again, Rush Limbaugh enthusiastically uses Macs and Al Gore's on the board at Apple. Who says Macs are an undifferentiated cult?
Slashdot Mirror
You're correct, as far as it goes but I think the parent was talking about Itaniums which are comparable to the 970 in that both are 64bit chips.
Um, Itanium systems have a maximum clock rate that's slower than what this 'leak' puts as the PPC speed. Itanium systems are quite a bit more expensive than the PPC 970 systems likely to come out of Apple.
Oh, you want to compare 32bit P4s to 64bit 970s? Why, because you're really in the market for a 32 bit processor and need to distort everything into a P4=center of the universe worldview. Grow up. Something new is coming. It will likely run rings around Itanium. It *may* run rings around the P4s for stock 32bit applications and will very likely beat it when comparing code that's similarly optimized for the two chips.
Let's see it unveiled and let's see the benchmarks then let the chip wars begin again!
Volunteers come easy in certain subjects. Anybody wanting to break into the field would have an incentive to add to their resume 'textbook publisher' and for the really boring stuff that has no advocacy group (and you'll be surprised how many subjects do have them) you simply pay people from countries with good educational infrastructure but lousy economies and low pay. You can get textbook writers for a few hundred a month a worker for all the hard sciences. Pay by the math problem if you like and set it at a nickel a problem.
I think the issue is introducing texts in a few grades at a time. So if you save $30M per year, per grade and you're doing two grades a year, at the end of 7 years you're saving $390M a year. Startup costs will eat into savings at the beginning and not needing to go on those fancy national textbook review sessions anymore will save a bit more at the end. It may be BS but you can't tell from the phase in period.
Are authors compensations rising unequally? How about editors? Are only textbook printers unions getting high salary increases and are presses that print textbooks more expensive? No.
All these forces are constrained by competition in the real world but in the oligopoly/government world of textbooks it's spend city.
As for people not writing what doesn't interest therm, there are two solutions. First, pay people. Basic mathematics may be boring but you could get very talented teachers in Romania, Poland, or Russia who would do it for very little money.
Second, find the organizations that are interested in such things and let them have a crack at it. Want to talk about politics? Invite political think tanks to the party. Want to talk about science? Find a science advocacy group. There are groups and clubs for just about everything. For photosynthesis, might I suggest starting with 4H? Of course, this brings up the issue of bias.
One of the major things wrong with textbooks today is that there are roving bands of advocates with a gripe ensuring that this or that idea does *not* get into texts. We don't have to get into specifics but let's just admit that these Comstocks come in all ideological stripes these days.
What happens now is one side wins, the other side loses, and some information is included or excised at the California, Texas, or other big state level and that's it. Nobody in the country has a big enough market to merit special textbooks so you get a sort of lowest common denominator blandness that stands out as the defining feature of texts.
With open textbooks, the losers in these fights can put out mods so that individual schools can splice in the concepts they want or individual parents can insist on extra reading from their tykes to work around the local thought police but still pass their exams.
So every time you hand an afghan tribesman a stinger missile, you need to hand over the source code for the guidance system? I think not. Military stuff gets around a lot further than you might think and it's not always appropriate to distribute source with binaries. In the case of the tribesman, he might not understand the assembly code but he certainly would understand the $50k he'll get from the nice PRC agent for the source which ends up improving PRC or NK or whoever's missile systems.
The article says something a bit different that there is a list of acceptable default licenses and managers are free to pick one of them without fuss. This group wants to remove the choice of the GPL without a lot of bureaucratic red tape added.
Probably better put than he realizes. Take a look at Federalist #10. The US was put together in such a way that there are never durable majorities. You may be in a majority on one question but you are almost certainly simultaneously a minority in some other question. We like it that way. It tends to keep the persecution of minorities down.
Not if Blair has his way, they'll be euros B)
Well... If you payed enough in taxes to buy two of them a year, they might just let you do it. Think about Arnold Schwarzenegger getting a military Humvee before there was a civilian version for example.
There's taxpayers and then there's the guys who write the really big checks for taxes.
I certainly wouldn't want military guidance systems released but I wouldn't mind at all if every country in the world used the same stuff to tabulate economic growth and calculated it the same way. That would be a tremendous international benefit and would allow for honest international comparison of systems.
Because some of what government does should be kept secret does not imply that all of what government does should be kept secret.
But what's absolutely foolish is that they seem to be saying that BSD style licenses are bad too and are only exceeded in their wicked ways by GPL licenses. What particular reason is there to avoid a BSD license which doesn't require more than a copyright notice at worst? Well, other than it'll reduce profits at the commercial software shops.
Um, the assumption of the scenario is that they essentially start with the court order.
I'd rather improve driver license categories so that we can get much more detail about how good a particular driver is. That doesn't actually require technology research just a little legislation.
I can really see this go to pieces in most major US cities during rush hour. Is *anybody* 300 ft away from the car in front of them then?
What was transplanted into what *is* a distinct fight within Apple right now but each distinct body part (BSD, Java, Mac UI, NeXT UI, Applescript, etc) seems to be melding into a new, cohesive whole.
An example, on Mac OS X hints I saw how to create a software airport bridge that turns on at logon. The fellow was a unix hacker and got stock libraries, recompiled them and tweaked until he was happy. I look at that and say, hmmm, why not just run a login applescript to do the same thing (even if the app is not normally scriptable, UI scripting is out and you can script just about anything now).
I suspect that a lot of the features that were marked missing in 10.0 are no longer missing at 10.2. I expect the list to grow shorter as time goes on and 10.3 etc are released. At the same time I expect that UI advances like the services menu will improve and provide an overall *better* experience than classic MACOS. So where are we? I agree that we're overall better but even the down side isn't as gloomy as you paint. Apple has to wow with new product as it backfills bringing over old classic OS features it couldn't get to in time for 10.0. This slows the process down but it's a temporary price for an astounding OS transition.
Actually there is something called objective C++ which you might not be aware of which should allow you to take advantage of all sorts of Mac OS X goodies in otherwise C++ files.
I think that QT is not the wrong answer but rather the right answer to a question you aren't considering. There's likely to be a market for it for people who want Mac programs and QT software to reside on the same machine. Not having to have the overhead of X11 is a real plus and should be viewed that way.
I usually work more on the administrative side but I do code in RealBasic, a cross platform competitor to VB (let them know you'd be interested in a Linux port, they're thinking about it). They do exactly that, having explicit quit, preferences, and regular menuitems which change locations depending on which MacOS is being run.
Do you have a Mac/QT license? Have you looked at it to determine what it can and can't provide? I'd give the Trolltech people a little credit and give their product a whirl before you knock it as hopelessly inadequate. And if you're right, they're likely to hear from mac programmers soon enough so they can correct their errors.
MacGIMP was in development before this announcement.
The mac community is the art critic of the computer world. It's not that something is not written and so you supply the service. It doesn't work that way. The OSS community is about having an itch and then scratching it. The mac community is about scratching it *in the right way* so that it's done quickly, efficiently, and with the minimum possibility of infection. It doesn't change your feature set so much as change every implementation of the feature set to match human interface guidelines and to elevate HIG to the equivalent importance to functioning code.
My theory rests on the idea that SCO has more balls than brains but that seems to be the truth of the entire SCO lawsuit so why not take that thread to the next level?
Yes, a distressed company with 1-2 months cash left in the bank and hovering around breakeven, could *theoretically* go to IBM but by the time they got a cash infusion they likely would already be in dissolution. Obviously, there would be psychological profiling done of the key players in that company and picking the right one to go after would be key.
For every *normal* operation using AIX after that point, they'd have to make a cost/benefit analysis of getting the license v. being annoyed by SCO in the same manner. Part of that due diligence would be calling SCO up to find out how much a license would cost. SCO PR would immediately spin that to a massive increase in license negotiations and that, in itself, would make their position look more credible.
It's not a scenario without risks, obviously. The benefits to SCO are pretty obvious too though so the question still remains, what would you do?
It's good for the projects. Free software gets introduced to an entirely new clientle, the kind of end user that is exactly what the OSS movement needs, one that is uber picky about UI, is very loud about it, and will nag and complain until the UI is fixed.
*That's* what's been missing from Open Source and it's arriving not a moment too soon.
They would not need a court order against anyone using AIX. The order wouldn't even target IBM as a defendent. It would merely state that it's a search warrant for unlicensed software (something the BSA does all the time without injunction or much of a bond as far as I know) and AIX without a SCO UNIX license would be considered unlicensed.
They would likely look for a distressed company with few cash reserves that couldn't afford the red tape to overturn this and just cave in on buying a license. Once precedent is set, the FUD starts to work better and they take their check and try it again. Repeat at will. At a certain point, they no longer have to execute warrants as people seek licenses without them.
Ok, let's say you're an IT manager at an aix shop that uses it for 24x7 mission critical applications. Sheriff deputies knock on the door with a warrant to search for unauthorized copies of AIX and have a SCO rep in tow that tells you that you can either buy a license, wipe the OS off your hardware, or let the deputies impound your equipment.
What do you do?
That scenario is the next logical step for SCO in their FUD campaign.
It wasn't a 'greatest president' poll but an actual voter preference poll. Go google it yourself if you care. Anybody talking about buttboys isn't worth spending my time on research to look up the link.
While the UK is running as the same political entity for longer than the US, France isn't, Germany isn't, Italy, Spain, and a whole host of other 1st world countries are not the same political entity. Political entities are not the same as nations, which endure far longer than political entities.
In 1783, the US thanked the Bourbon crown for its support. In 1789 we watched in horror as blood ran in the streets of Paris. France is now on its 5th Republic, all post-dating the creation of the US.
In case you didn't notice, France was hyperventilating about US 'hyperpower' during the Clinton administration and working diligently to block us at every turn. It was only under the current administration that we took effective measures to counteract their ankle biting.
The Vilnius 10 letter and France's expressed pique after that letter clearly showed that for a large part of Europe, the bullying they're worried about is France and Germany's. Take a look at the name calling that Poland is enduring right now. It's disgraceful and far nastier than the unofficial gibes at 'cheese eating surrender monkeys'. We've never had cabinet officers talking that way but the Poles have been shabbily treated in both the popular EU press and by high officials in Germany and France.
We might agree on computers but certainly not on politics. Then again, Rush Limbaugh enthusiastically uses Macs and Al Gore's on the board at Apple. Who says Macs are an undifferentiated cult?
Peace.