What if Longhorn were released as an OSS product? How would we react to that? Sun's SDK source code is available under some conditions. Even Windows source code is readily available to contract partners (and parts of it was leaked recently), so it is not secret anymore. It could very well happen, that Microsoft decides to OSS Longhorn even before hell freezes over, rather than shortly after. What would happen in this case?
I'd like to confirm this. I have a SCSI PlexWriter 12/10/32S, burnt 3000+ CDRs with it and it never failed me once. I just bought a Plextor DVD burner a few days ago, hoping it will be just as good. Don't know about their media though...
What about people working overseas? Some foreigners may not even get visa to be physically present in their companies' HQs. Working at home for them is not only a convenience, it's crucial.
The more laptops out there, the more important are power saving CPUs. Pentium-M's are a good step in the right direction after the P4 90nm debacle.
Even in the server market, cutting on power consumption is getting more and more important. If you have a park of 1000+ machines in a data center, power consumption matters.
In our current times, it can be pretty useful for some entities to know exactly the patch level of each individual user's machine(s). It makes the job of law enforcement and other agencies much easier...
10 patents a day is not that much for the USPTO... if they only had competent patent examiners. Hmmm, is Microsoft DDoSing the USPTO in order to slip in patents based on prior art?
And if you think Java shouldn't be open source at all, well.. you're just an idiot. It's going to happen whether Sun wants it to or not.
Everyone can download SUNs Java implementation source code, if they submit to their license agreement. If you want to compile Sun's JDK on FreeBSD, that's the only way.
So the source is not exactly "open", but it's certainly not secret!
Oh, and the BSD license is not a less freedom-guaranteeing license. The opposite is true; esp. for developers. But that's another story.
Microsoft (MSFT) is considering to GPL the source code to it's Windows(TM)(R) operating system.
Analysts suggest that the reason behind this revolutionary move is that Microsoft needs to use the very sophisticated Linux device drivers in order to support more customers. "Moving to the GPL is a very courageous move" because it will expose Microsoft to the fury of the litigation happy SCO, which claims that Microsoft licensed confidential Unix code from them and used it in the Windows(TM)(R) OS.
Looks like they need a new acronym. SIU? (Solaris Is Unix). So everything will start with an 's', not with a 'g': scc, slibc, snumeric, the simp, slade, and the best of all: SNOME!
Sun is going to need drivers to interoperate with x86 hardware and common peripherals
That's an interesting point. So far, hardware manufacturers were reluctant to provide specs to Linux developers, but they happily handed over a lot of data under NDAs. Theoretically, Solaris (SPARC and x86) should have had an advantage over Linux here, because SUN would have been able to get much more technical informations on commodity hardware than the average Linux kernel hacker.
Contrast this with the reality? Solaris 9's hardware compatibility list on x86 is pitiful, compared to Linux. As long as you don't care for this market, things won't change that much. Support for new (x86-based) hardware was poor in every Solaris version, up until, and including Solaris 10beta.
So you may be right after all. Maybe is SUN trying to harness Linux' device driver code, and doing this is only possible if they GPLed their kernel (which won't be a bad move after all!).
Unfortunately, they'll lose a lof of their NDA-bility should they later wish to support more hardware peripherals under Open/Free/Solaris than Linux.
Thus we'd be given a nearly useless, incomplete operating system.
Hmmm... wasn't BSD 4.4Lite useless too, because it was incomplete? Yet it mutated into FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin nonetheless. Even an incomplete Solaris source code base would be great!
There's more to portability than just between Linux distros. Porting good software to, say, the BSDs, is not a problem. Porting bad software is always a headache, no matter where or what. Even within the same distribution, things break every now and then when new library versions are installed etc...
rush to make sure all important open source software runs flawlessly on Solaris
Yessss, absolutely! It would benefit every software package's portability and quality at the same time! The more platforms are supported, the better!
What's worse than a great application, riddled with Linux idiosyncracies (/proc usage etc...)? Up until now, only the BSDs have been paying attention that 3rd party application developers stick to standards as far as possible. Having more (Open/Free/...) Solaris-aware users and developers would be great!
Good point. But who knows which version of Solaris they will GPL? Perhaps they're in the midst of a complete rewrite, somewhat like the BSD 4.4Lite story a while ago?
It would be great if Sun GPLed Solaris; whatever version!
Scott Richter and other high profile spammers are conducting a sustained full-scale DDoS attack against the NSA's ability to monitor E-Mail traffic.
One of NSA's main sources of informations in the war against terror is traffic analysis. Terrorists are using strong cryptography nowadays, so it is difficult (even for the NSA) to decrypt. However, traffic analysis exposes pattern of communications that can be extremely useful in tracking down terrorist networks. If A sends a message to B, it would normally mean, that both parties have a common relationship which should be investigated.
With the constant flow of spam, traffic analysis is effectively thwarted. One can hide in the unending stream of spams, simulating an infected Windows PC drone. It is always possible to deny having sent a message: "Hey, how could I know that my PC was infected by that damn worm again?"
Spam is an excellent vehicle for steganography too. With all this random nonsense designed to circumvent spam filters, hiding an encrypted message there is a piece of cake.
Lobbying Ashcroft or Congress to outlaw spam is difficult. The DMA proved to be much stronger this time.
Write to your representative, and point out that CAN SPAM provides terrorists with an effective method to escape detection and surveilliance. Point out that CAN SPAM, as it
is written today, harms the National Security in unintended ways.
With all this terror hysteria in Washington DC, you could even make an impression!
Same here. I've migrated over 700 machines for one of my clients from RHL9 to FreeBSD. It was dead easy, because they used standard apps that had nothing Linux/RH specific.
Actually, using FreeBSD was the best IT decision they've ever made. Thanks CVSUP, maintenance is now a dream, and the community support in mailing lists is outstanding!
99% of the stuff I use that's open-source is in most cases as good as and in many cases better than its proprietary counterpart
Agreed. The only reason to use proprietary software is when you have no free/open alternative. I'm longing for the day when I could drop Maple and Mathematica for an open, portable version that will run on all BSDs, Linux et. al...
As far as the Gimp is concerned, I'm happy with it. It's certainly not perfect, but it is just a matter of time before the developer community makes improvements. At least, we are not at the mercy of a commercial vendor. If we want something better, we can bitch about it on/. (and elsewhere), or we can get down to morph the existing code into something we prefer.
Upgrading the base system is great and it works most of the time. I'd only wish cvsup/cvs were able to fetch a consistant source tree, but as long as CVS doesn't provide some kind of ACID semantics, it would be very hard to do so. There's always the risk of updating/usr/src in the midst of a commit.
The ports are actually more painful to upgrade than FreeBSD proper. portupgrade does a great job at this, but it's not a panacea. First of all, portsdb -uU takes a hell of a time to generate a new INDEX.db, then you still have to fix some stale dependencies etc... This is the same problem as with Linux distros, and there is no easy solution to this.
I have to deal with 30% or more that covers stuff I know.
When reading the book for a second time, you have to deal with 80% or more that covers stuff you knew...
Imagine a book with 100% new content. You wouldn't even be able to read it, less alone understand it. As far as you're concerned, it could be written in a foreign language unknown to you, it wouldn't make any difference at all.
Every book must rely on common knowledge between author and readers, or else no communication would be possible.
Now, you're right. Books are much more verbose than, say, scientific papers. But even papers repeat stuff in order to build on top of it.
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and 50 years from now when someone actually develops a hovercraft car...they *must* pay royalties to you
Make that 20 years. Patents don't last longer, at least for now.
What if Longhorn were released as an OSS product? How would we react to that? Sun's SDK source code is available under some conditions. Even Windows source code is readily available to contract partners (and parts of it was leaked recently), so it is not secret anymore. It could very well happen, that Microsoft decides to OSS Longhorn even before hell freezes over, rather than shortly after. What would happen in this case?
Just play beepbeepwhirr.mp3 on it...
I'd like to confirm this. I have a SCSI PlexWriter 12/10/32S, burnt 3000+ CDRs with it and it never failed me once. I just bought a Plextor DVD burner a few days ago, hoping it will be just as good. Don't know about their media though...
What about people working overseas? Some foreigners may not even get visa to be physically present in their companies' HQs. Working at home for them is not only a convenience, it's crucial.
The more laptops out there, the more important are power saving CPUs. Pentium-M's are a good step in the right direction after the P4 90nm debacle.
Even in the server market, cutting on power consumption is getting more and more important. If you have a park of 1000+ machines in a data center, power consumption matters.
Support for Windows should be user agnostic.
In our current times, it can be pretty useful for some entities to know exactly the patch level of each individual user's machine(s). It makes the job of law enforcement and other agencies much easier...
So, when do we start "conserving bandwidth" in the US?
Kyoto II mandates the conservation of global bandwidth, but the US didn't want to play nice...
Taiwan: ASUS, ABIT, MSI, Soyo, Shuttle, and probably lots more I don't know about.
Perhaps non-DRM crippled generic hardware in the not so far future? Yes, Taiwan's our hope!
10 patents a day is not that much for the USPTO... if they only had competent patent examiners. Hmmm, is Microsoft DDoSing the USPTO in order to slip in patents based on prior art?
And if you think Java shouldn't be open source at all, well.. you're just an idiot. It's going to happen whether Sun wants it to or not.
Everyone can download SUNs Java implementation source code, if they submit to their license agreement. If you want to compile Sun's JDK on FreeBSD, that's the only way.
So the source is not exactly "open", but it's certainly not secret!
Oh, and the BSD license is not a less freedom-guaranteeing license. The opposite is true; esp. for developers. But that's another story.
Microsoft (MSFT) is considering to GPL the source code to it's Windows(TM)(R) operating system.
Analysts suggest that the reason behind this revolutionary move is that Microsoft needs to use the very sophisticated Linux device drivers in order to support more customers. "Moving to the GPL is a very courageous move" because it will expose Microsoft to the fury of the litigation happy SCO, which claims that Microsoft licensed confidential Unix code from them and used it in the Windows(TM)(R) OS.
Looks like they need a new acronym. SIU? (Solaris Is Unix). So everything will start with an 's', not with a 'g': scc, slibc, snumeric, the simp, slade, and the best of all: SNOME!
Sun is going to need drivers to interoperate with x86 hardware and common peripherals
That's an interesting point. So far, hardware manufacturers were reluctant to provide specs to Linux developers, but they happily handed over a lot of data under NDAs. Theoretically, Solaris (SPARC and x86) should have had an advantage over Linux here, because SUN would have been able to get much more technical informations on commodity hardware than the average Linux kernel hacker.
Contrast this with the reality? Solaris 9's hardware compatibility list on x86 is pitiful, compared to Linux. As long as you don't care for this market, things won't change that much. Support for new (x86-based) hardware was poor in every Solaris version, up until, and including Solaris 10beta.
So you may be right after all. Maybe is SUN trying to harness Linux' device driver code, and doing this is only possible if they GPLed their kernel (which won't be a bad move after all!).
Unfortunately, they'll lose a lof of their NDA-bility should they later wish to support more hardware peripherals under Open/Free/Solaris than Linux.
Thus we'd be given a nearly useless, incomplete operating system.
Hmmm... wasn't BSD 4.4Lite useless too, because it was incomplete? Yet it mutated into FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin nonetheless. Even an incomplete Solaris source code base would be great!
There's more to portability than just between Linux distros. Porting good software to, say, the BSDs, is not a problem. Porting bad software is always a headache, no matter where or what. Even within the same distribution, things break every now and then when new library versions are installed etc...
rush to make sure all important open source software runs flawlessly on Solaris
Yessss, absolutely! It would benefit every software package's portability and quality at the same time! The more platforms are supported, the better!
What's worse than a great application, riddled with Linux idiosyncracies (/proc usage etc...)? Up until now, only the BSDs have been paying attention that 3rd party application developers stick to standards as far as possible. Having more (Open/Free/...) Solaris-aware users and developers would be great!
Good point. But who knows which version of Solaris they will GPL? Perhaps they're in the midst of a complete rewrite, somewhat like the BSD 4.4Lite story a while ago?
It would be great if Sun GPLed Solaris; whatever version!
Scott Richter and other high profile spammers are conducting a sustained full-scale DDoS attack against the NSA's ability to monitor E-Mail traffic.
One of NSA's main sources of informations in the war against terror is traffic analysis. Terrorists are using strong cryptography nowadays, so it is difficult (even for the NSA) to decrypt. However, traffic analysis exposes pattern of communications that can be extremely useful in tracking down terrorist networks. If A sends a message to B, it would normally mean, that both parties have a common relationship which should be investigated.
With the constant flow of spam, traffic analysis is effectively thwarted. One can hide in the unending stream of spams, simulating an infected Windows PC drone. It is always possible to deny having sent a message: "Hey, how could I know that my PC was infected by that damn worm again?"
Spam is an excellent vehicle for steganography too. With all this random nonsense designed to circumvent spam filters, hiding an encrypted message there is a piece of cake.
Lobbying Ashcroft or Congress to outlaw spam is difficult. The DMA proved to be much stronger this time.
Write to your representative, and point out that CAN SPAM provides terrorists with an effective method to escape detection and surveilliance. Point out that CAN SPAM, as it is written today, harms the National Security in unintended ways.
With all this terror hysteria in Washington DC, you could even make an impression!
Same here. I've migrated over 700 machines for one of my clients from RHL9 to FreeBSD. It was dead easy, because they used standard apps that had nothing Linux/RH specific.
Actually, using FreeBSD was the best IT decision they've ever made. Thanks CVSUP, maintenance is now a dream, and the community support in mailing lists is outstanding!
99% of the stuff I use that's open-source is in most cases as good as and in many cases better than its proprietary counterpart
Agreed. The only reason to use proprietary software is when you have no free/open alternative. I'm longing for the day when I could drop Maple and Mathematica for an open, portable version that will run on all BSDs, Linux et. al...
As far as the Gimp is concerned, I'm happy with it. It's certainly not perfect, but it is just a matter of time before the developer community makes improvements. At least, we are not at the mercy of a commercial vendor. If we want something better, we can bitch about it on /. (and elsewhere), or we can get down to morph the existing code into something we prefer.
So, an Eden Epia + 12VDC power board + Flash Drive = no moving parts at all. And it's more flexible and cheaper than a Cisco router!
It is also the ultimate silent multipurpose computer! Doing maintenance work in a machine room full of these would be a dream!
Upgrading the base system is great and it works most of the time. I'd only wish cvsup/cvs were able to fetch a consistant source tree, but as long as CVS doesn't provide some kind of ACID semantics, it would be very hard to do so. There's always the risk of updating /usr/src in the midst of a commit.
The ports are actually more painful to upgrade than FreeBSD proper. portupgrade does a great job at this, but it's not a panacea. First of all, portsdb -uU takes a hell of a time to generate a new INDEX.db, then you still have to fix some stale dependencies etc... This is the same problem as with Linux distros, and there is no easy solution to this.
I have to deal with 30% or more that covers stuff I know.
When reading the book for a second time, you have to deal with 80% or more that covers stuff you knew...
Imagine a book with 100% new content. You wouldn't even be able to read it, less alone understand it. As far as you're concerned, it could be written in a foreign language unknown to you, it wouldn't make any difference at all.
Every book must rely on common knowledge between author and readers, or else no communication would be possible.
Now, you're right. Books are much more verbose than, say, scientific papers. But even papers repeat stuff in order to build on top of it.
If AHBL were used more widely, it would probably have a significant effect. It takes a lot to draw the attention of lawmakers...