I am amazed because I thought it would never happen, there being so many obstacles in the way, unlike software. I was wondering the other day if we would ever hear anything about this, and suddenly here it is.
Yes, true for Apache. I doubt that many major OSS projects except Apache have forked, or if they have, it has been to fulfil specific needs. For example, you might want a real-time kernel, but not want the bloat in the main tree. A perfectly reasonable thing to do, and it only affects those who specifically need the forked variant. The more generally useful parts of it will trickle back into the main tree, just like Apache.
I don't know of many major forks, some have re-merged, in others the fork may have fulfilled its need and been frozen, most simply die. It is a natural and healthy process, it allows people to develop their programming skills doing what they want, if it turns out to be what others also want, the fork will succeed. It allows people to focus on what they perceive as important problems without distraction from the main tree, again potentialy useful.
I see no evidence that forking has had any significant negative impact, and it seems to me that there is a lot more consistency and less in-fighting in OSS than in the typical workplace. People really do not want to lose the respect of their peers.
I wonder if this guy has actually looked at the source tree of a few projects, to see what really happens, or if it is just a case of singing from the same hymn-sheet as the Puppet-Master and Convicted Monopolist? He perhaps ought to have a look at the well-documented story behind DirectX before any mud-slinging at free and open source people and projects.
If Linus ever gets fed up with the kernel, or software in general, he certainly has the potential to easily become a very good lawyer. It looks as if he has done some study in that field already. Of course, I would prefer him, and the team, to stick to writing useful software, it really does benefit society.
It makes me wonder if the reason why the US legal system is so needlessly complex, and requires so many lawyers, is perhaps because it creates employment for those with sufficient aggression to be very disruptive to society if they are not in highly paid employment, while not sufficiently intelligent to do something creative, like writing software, or be doctors, teachers, inventors, poets...... Complex financial rules exist so that accountants can be employed for the same reason. A negligible proportion of accountants are in any way creative.
I even wonder if such as McBride, Gates and Ballmer are driven by the fact that in reality they do not have creative potential either, whereas people like Linus certainly do.
It is a bit like the classical UK management structure, the manager is fairly useless and highly paid, his main ability is to use and abuse engineers or other professionals beneath him, take credit for their work, pass the blame for his failures onto them, etc. The no-hopers who by sheer greed, rip-offs, and a certain amount of well-documented dishonesty in getting the Convicted Monopoly established in the beginning, have made it to the top, but command no respect whatsoever technically, naturally get very nervous when people with obvious competence appear, and will do anything to keep them down. The company owned by two very rich incompetent wasters has funded the company run by another modeately rich incompetent waster to attempt to get rid of various pieces of technical excellence for which they can take no credit whatsoever. Simple as that, greed, pride, jealousy (not necessarily in that order).
If the MAC was rising big time (which it may one day), the no-hopers would be going after Apple, and Jobs, who is clearly more astute technically than all of them put together, as they went for Netscape and others.
If I am correct, there will be moves against OpenOffice/Star Office, maybe KDE or Gnome.... The nasty piece of work behind all this will not give up, even when his puppet McBride is in jail. He will simply get someone else or some other method of going for the next target, and when McBride fails, the puppet-master will simply get another, and resume his attack on *nix. It is not just Linux he wants to destroy, in fact Unix will go first, at least the SCO variety, and Bill will have achieved one of his ambitions.
The hatred for *nix is the same mix of jealousy etc. When MessyDOS came out (actually only PC-DOS, there were only IBMs at the time), I was actually using a derivative of Unix V7, which could easily do things that no Windoze system can do today, and no MessyDOS system could either. That is why he hates Unix. IIRC the unix kernel was 52k (total ram 256k), a multi-user multi-tasking system with file and password protection had a kernel about the same size as MessyDOS, and what is more, it had true pipes, not faking it by using files. He is an under-achiever technically, he resents anything and everything that has done better. It is all an extension of his well-documented childish tantrums that he allegedly still suffers from. That is why Xenix was crippled, so it would not show up his personal failure so badly.
I would expect that it would ultimately take on a cellular architecture, with maybe only 5 to 10 prospective users within range of the base station. The population density is very low in the outback, but this technology would be much cheaper than cabling 10 well spread-out properties (say 200 miles of cable for a star topology!).
It would be better to use satellite, cable or microwave to feed all but the smallest towns.
I wonder what the ultimate limit on baud rate would be, for example an analogue telephone line of 3KHz bandwidth manages about 52KB (NEVER 56!) on a V90 modem. That would equate to about 200MB on a 7MHz channel, enought to support a few users! It may be early days yet for this technology, with much better to come.
Nevertheless, an excellent achievement. It probably means that Mudamuckla and Bobo Creek will get broadband before I do. I live in an NTL cable area in London, have only waited for 3 years now, for them to upgrade the link from the street cabinet to wherever the internet connection is. Meanwhile, I am paying for digital TV that I don't really want, and a set-top box (actually a set-bottom box if we want to be pedantic, I have never yet seen one on top) with an RJ45 on the back which currently does nothing.
There are some differences between Star Office and OOo, for a start you get Adabas with Star (not that I have actually used it...), and IIRC there are more file conversions, I think WordPerfect was one, also lots more templates (but there are free ones for download anyway).
I actually bought Star a while ago, IIRC the licence allowed use on 5 PCs, so it really works out at less than people think. I doubt that many people would begrudge the cost, a fair bit less than Works IIRC, and it saves a lot of download time.
I do have Star on 2 PCs, but have OOo on four, mostly dual boot with Win 2000/XP and Linux including the 2 with Star, and the one with Win2000, as OOo or Star is an ESSENTIAL tool to rescue corrupt Word 2000 files! Works on Excel as well, but I have not got that at home or for my business, I have always had Quattro Pro and anyway Star or OOo are every bit as good as Excel, and a lot less buggy.
Having made these observations, I think this is a good move, although they may be disappointed to find that a number of businesses actually use OOo rather than Star. Either way, I wish them well, and see yet another place where the Convicted Monopolist's empire is starting to crumble.
You are quite correct, and it applies to many other types of device also. Canon, for instance, only disclose programming info if you are a corporate and sign a NDA. Did all that ages ago, because I wanted a driver for ny printer and scanner, never had time to do the programming......(usual story). But, if I had done it, I would only be able to release it as a binary, or at least part of it, which IMHO is better than nothing, but not ideal.
But, as you rightly observe, what was the point of them doing that? Dismantling the scanner carefully showed exactly what chip was in it, IIRC it was a National something or other, so I got chip data freely, in tha way that most semiconductor manufcaturers have always provided it. The printer could have been reverse engineered using a little bit of code to monitor the parallel port or USB while printing under a Bill OS. (I never got round to looking inside the printer.)
So, all they have done with their secrecy is to put a minor delay in the way of someone who really needs to find out how it works. A competitor needs at least hundreds of millions to create a new family of ink jets, probably a few millions for a scanner, (tooling charges for the plastic bits alone are horrendous, without software or any custom silicon). so why bother hacking into a competitor's drivers, if you have the budget there are better ways of spending it.
It is only people with a legitimate need to use a device under a non-Gates OS who are impeded by this obsessive secrecy, there are not thousands of hackers sitting up late at home building reverse-engineereed inkjets or scanners. The only thing such manufacturers do is lose the 5 or 10% of business (an increasing proportion!) that they might have got from people who need or want to use Linux, *BSD, or whatever. They do not protect themselves in any way from serious reverse enginering, it is just not possible.
Nvidia is a fairly minor annoyance IMHO, the graphics cards are VERY popular and need support, and what the have done works, on the 3 diverse machines with Nvidia cards at muy disposal. Sadly it does not integrate well into SuSE's Yast configuration system, you always have to edit XF86Config by hand, for which I blame SuSE as Nvidia say the drivers may be distributed, but SuSE doesn't distribute them as part of an integrated package.
The hardware manufacturers could save themselves and us a lot of trouble by publishing proper driver specs in a form that could be easily compiled for any reasonable OS and CPU. That means some kind of definition of registers and how to fiddle them, as you say. It used to be that way, years ago a graphics card or a printer had a proper manual.
A side issue is that if they do disclose details, it is actually much easier to prove copyright viotations as far as the hardware is concerned, and it also prevents a competitor taking out a patent on something they have done, by demonstrating prior art. There is every advantage for a full disclosure of how hardware works, it gives nothing away to the competition that they can't get anyway, although I think some of the operations involved in 3D graphics, or for that matter dithering algorithms on a printer, may be a bit more complex than your description might suggest.
That is how it is supposed to work, and until Maggie Thatcher, both main political parties wished it to continue to be so. However I can speak from direct personal experience when I say that now it does not, if you do suddenly need major surgery for cancer, it will only happen if you happen to have insurance, otherwise you are left lying on a trolley for 24 hours, and in a ward for 3 days, without a single attempt at diagnosis. If you then suddenly remember that your employer has provided you with insurance, it all changes and 12000 worth of surgery etc happens very quickly indeed. As I said, I speak from direct personal experience.
If using Linux helps to improve the sysetm in some way, I am all for it. It was clear while lying in hospital that the problems were not made by the medical staff, rather by the management, and in part they had failed to provide efficient systems for making appointments, and other basic essentials. A well thought out system may reduce the incidence of incidents such as I experienced, by ensuring that the correct department does actually send someone to do some tests.
Althought the NHS was introduced by a socialist government, the need had been obvious for a long time, and it would probably have happened under any government when the time was right. Unfortunately the present so-called socialist government is intent on surpassing the damage Maggie Thatcher did. Socialism does not work, never has, and never will. Blair is trying to go the US way, by stealth. Many will die as a result, as they do daily in the US. Many third world countries can do better in making basic health care available freely. The US is a seriously backward and disfunctional society, we do not want their health care methods in the UK.
It is encouraging that a company with a culture of competence, like Sun, is involved in this. It could equally well have been IBM or various others, who can and will deliver high-quality systems. The good thing is that the software company with the very worst track record of gross incompetence is not involved. We do not want the NHS turning into a Bill monopoly. Some businesses seem to exist for the sole benefit of the IT department, and their software supplier. The NHS belongs to the entire population of the UK, any software they invest in should be for the benefit of us. Use of Linux is a good thing because the saving in licence fees will be truly enormous, and as the programming interface is much more manageable than the grossly excessive number of APIs in Windoze, it follows that development of good quality software is quicker and cheaper under Linux than under Windoze. This is a win-win situation. I have yet to hear of anyone who found development more difficult under Linux than Win, unless of course their idea of development was writing bug-ridden Visual Basic applications, or AciveX......
My GP is one of the best (I have experienced the opposite) and the entire practice is very up to date, computers linked to the local hospital etc, yet one day recently none of it would work, results of my blood test could not be checked, and the receptionist was reduced to making appointments by pen and paper. The server, running some hugely expensive program under NT, had crashed....... It was down all day. Enough said, I think.
One reason they, the press in general, need to keep giving definitions of things is that they themselves are often (but not always) ignorant and ill-informed, hence a lot of the rubbish that they write. If they see a word like Linux, they actually don't know what it is, so they look it up in a dictionary, which is probably on a computer somewhere and kept fairly up to date.
Good journalists are about as rare as good M$ programmers, the results show in both cases....
Well, at least it will hit Bill where it hurts most, in the bank balance! But if that is what they really do, it says a lot about how ill informed senior management are......
You may be right. There is a strange situation here, because AFAIK SCO can read/write FAT partitions, same as almost every other OS, and Win 9x (NOT AN OS!) can. So M$, who have funded SCO to mount an attack on Linux which they themselves can't do for fear of more monopoly allegations, will now have to sue SCO.
This is nonsense anyway, look what happened with the GIF format, when the patent owner tried to enforce it many years too late. Along came.png for law-abiding people, everyone else ignored it, till it expired. If M$ try to enforce this one, I believe they will be in contempt of court, because it will be enforcing a monopoly and preventing interoperability, contrary to the requirements of the last judgment.
Basically the Convicted Monopolist Scumbag is just trying to find loopholes where he can stick his vile little tongue out at the court. He thinks he has found one here, but I think it will end badly for him.
I don't know if CF Cards, for example, are capable of supporting other file systems, due to the design of the embedded controller chip, so if he gets away with it there will be a lot of unhappy people.
I predict a return to court for M$ very shortly.
Meanwhile, I think the free software movement ought to devise a file system optimised for small systems. A properly coordinated approach would be best, not just one person staying up late one night, coding a new Linux driver. It needs to be released for Windoze, Linux, *BSD, MAC etc all at once for maximum impact, and if it is done quickly, to show how responsive the open source movement can be, so much the better. If it is retro-fittable by updating the flash in digital cameras, PDAs, etc, even better. Support, or at least non-obstruction, ought to be expected from hardware manufacturers, as it will save them money.
M$ will end up isolating themselves from the democratic world. Bill can't put say a Reiser, or ext3, driver in Windoze, due to the GPL, but third parties can sell one, or even give it away. If people have to get a non-M$ driver to read their files, it will be embarassing for Bill.....
This sort of thing shows ever more clearly why anything that is even remotely involved in data exchange between architectures needs to be GPL code, or published in full by its designer so it can't be patented (don't know if that works in the US, it seems that a lot of long-established things do get patented there, not by their inventor either) so that the world can not be held to ransom yet again.
I would like to see Bill try this one in Europe. FAT has been in use for 20 years, or very close to it.
It also seems that anyone who wants to format a FAT drive only need do it in a country whose legislation, or the enforcement thereof, does not recognise the patents. I doubt that Bill would find a sympathetic court in France for example, to say nothing of India or China. If there is a workaround like that, his efforts will be in vain anyway.
I would recommend them, although they sometimes do stupid things, such as not giving the option of having Linux pre-installed. That depends on which country you live in, may not be a problem in some.
My Inspiron 8100 was the best laptop I could find, anywhere, at the time, and I have no regrets whatsoever about buying it. Spares are available if it breaks (only the backlight inverter in several years), (dis)assembly instructions are freely available on the web, certain bits such as the graphics card can be changed (rare on a laptop AFAIK), and of course it was one of the first with a 1600*1200 screen.
I run Win2000 and SuSE on mine, both reliably. If I had the money, and was needing an upgrade, it would be a Dell again. I build my destktop machines myself of course (doesn't everyone?) so Dell is of no interest to me in that area.
Yes, I agree. Even forgetting the detail of which base is used, although Debian is a good choice due to their superior package management system, there is a desperate need for something like this. The commercial distros have not entirely succeeded in their aim, there are lots of very buggy, supposedly automatic configuration utilities for example. But, it will need a lot of input from a lot of people to get it optimised and really fit for its intended purpose.
I don't see at this point in time how it is possible to avoid having both Gnome and KDE available, it would be best if they converged, but that may be difficult!
I hope it is done to a very high standard, if so it may well embarass a certain mediocre, backward software company in Redmond (no I don't mean Lindows!).
First there needs to be a plan, to mobilise resources, get people working on the necessary things. That might come as a culture shock to many open source programmers who simply do what they want, but this really needs a properly coordinated effort.
His puppet Blair is doing exactly the same in the UK. He is putting university tuition fees up, to get more students!
Socialism always has been an advanced form of hypocrisy, of course. Blair knows exactly what he is doing, and why, but I think Bush is just to stupid to realise.
If you want to know who is behind this, look up Illuminati, Bildeberg, Trilateral Commission, or the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (and please don't confuse the latter with Jews, they are almost all not, and the issue, which is not racist, has been greatly mis-represented to encourage anti-semitism and anti-anti-semitism, which is what "they" want).
Your point is absolutely correct. However we are in an era of backwards progress at the moment (no supersonic airliner for example), mainly due to the escalating cost of everything, because software gets where it is not really needed.
The Apollo moon missions were possible because they had minimal software, almost no safety precautions, and in many ways fell far short of what would be done, and possibly legally required today.
Kennedy said that the US would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, well IIRC they were actually a year or so early, sadly Kennedy did not see it. If Bush said that today, it would be 2 decades, not 1, and there would be a terrible disaster due to the use of M$ products somewhere.
If people would resist the tendency to do everything digitally, whether it needs to be done at all or not, they could radically increase the viability of programs such as this.
Even the ancient Space Shuttle suffers from feature bloat, how many temperature sensors was it that failed in the recent disaster? None of them was of the slightest use in maintaining safety, they were only there because someone thought it might be a good idea to monitor that which could not be worked around if it failed. Pointless. Nothing to do with the actual cause of the tragedy of course.
There is an urgent need to return to simple, reliable systems, with of course a necessary degree of redundancy built in. It is amazing what can actually be done with hydraulics, analogue electronics etc, and in many cases you can get better control, by avoiding the sampling delay.
If we can restore the notion of elegant simplicity, a return to the moon may well be possible, and even useful. Otherwise, it will never happen. But I hope it does!
I wonder about the feasibility of manufacturuing raw materials on the moon, that would be a very interesting challenge, with useful spin-offs. Oxygen would be the first requirement, followed by water, then some kind of metal.....
Or both, because the US legal system will deal with McBride, but it will take far too long to do it, and the kernel will likely be on about version 9.9, and of course completely clean (as I think it is now) before there is a verdict.
Like M$, the ruling will be too late to be of any use to anyone. SCO will have lost all of their business, and probably their one friend, the Convicted Monopolist of Redmond, long before then. SCO will be outlawed in most of Europe. The investors (who in this case deserve exactly what they will get for being totally stupid) wil be mounting class actions, Slashdot will no longer report the case because people have started to die of boredom, Windoze 2020 will have a major root exploit, will need 64GB of RAM, and will be rejected by the masses, Redmond wil have degenerated into a ghetto for unemployable hackers, the latest 256 bit Athlon will need helium cooling, Intel will still be trying to sell 128 bit processors that don't run Windoze, FreeBSD will be competing fiercely with Linux for No. 1 position on the desktop, following the merger of Boeing and Airbus, and much product rationalisation, Concorde MK 2 will be in flight trials, a new variety of GM pig will really be able to fly............
None of that will necessarily happen of course, but the fact is that whatever happens in court will no longer be of importance to anyone except McBride, who will be trying to save face to the very end, when he will be declared bankrupt. The rest of the world will simply move on and forget this momentary aberration, as they will have forgotten the insignificant little man who occupied the White House without being elected.
Remember the monorail crash in Germany a few years ago. That also wrapped around its track. http://danger-ahead.railfan.net/features/schwebeba hnungluck/home.html
That happened at a very much lower speed. It is impossible to physically construct a train which will remain attached to the track in a high speed derailment. Even if something did not break, the resulting huge deceleration would kill the passemgers anyway.
Safety is only obtained by rigorous track maintenance and inspection. In Japan they have the earthquake hazard, nothing they can do about that. If the track buckles, at that sort of speed, disaster is inevitable.
One good thing is that this particularly fine piece of engineering is not maintained by either Balfour-Beatty or Jarvis, who between them are responsible for quite a few disasters and near-disasters in the UK. Basic things like not putting a piece of track back, and not telling the signaller it was not there (Twice!)
The Japanese are more meticulous than most when it comes to carrying out regular inspections, even so this is fairly risky.
For an individual hacker working on a very tight budget, buffer overflows are understandable, but for those with many billions in the bank, who are too mean to spend the modest amount of money required for tools to check for these and other errors, there is no excuse whatsoever. There never was, and there never will be. I don't know why the world buys the trash that Bill and his gang turn out.
In a proper OS, a user-mode program having a buffer overflow or similar error should only bring down that one process, not even all the processes belonging to that user. Generally, that has been the case with *nix for 30 years or so, and is often but not always true for Win 2K.
Why, on hardware that has memory management and protection, multiple privilege levels, etc, should a buffer overflow in some installed program ever affect the kernel, or be able to influence anything outside the memory allocated to that process?
Bill has been retarding progress for at least 20 years now, it is time it ended. Sadly, he is incapable of realising that neither he, nor his minions, have the slightest degree of competence in designing bug-free code. when he succeeds in locking us out of our own PCs, the bugs and security holes will remain. He will have achieved his dream of a totalitarian monopoly, but to keep things running, laws will have to be passed very swiftly to outlaw his software, if indeed any legislature will still be functional when it all goes wrong.
It is quite amazing that any sane person will even think about entrusting control of his data to an ignorant, incompetent megalomaniac with a proven track record of failure (technically), who is also a Convicted Monoplist.
I have wasted 3 hours today fixing work that his trash word processor mutilated, yet most of the ignorant, ill-informed press rave about the wonders of his vile Office suite, and how it thrashes the competition. The sad fact is that it doesn't, yet the mugs believe it. In either Word Perfect or OpenOffice the problems would not have arisen, and even if they had, there are ways to retreive the formatting, but that scumbag in Redmond has turned out about 6 generations of vileness with the same fundamental errors.
Nothing Microsoft do has the slightest credibility. They should be sued out of existence for wasting people's precious time. After Passport and all their other total failures in the area of security, they should not be allowed to sell software. In any other industry they would have been outlawed long ago.
Note to Bill: Under the UK Sale of Goods act, every single one of your products which I have purchased has not been or merchantable quality,or fit for the purpose for which it was intended. You are legally required to repair or replace these if such defects are found, for a period of 7 years from the date of purchase. Where are my refunds for Win 95, 98, ME, XP, Word 2000 and Works? Every single one of these packages is unfit for use.
Why are Norwegians subject to highly improper US law?
Why should anyone else be? DeCSS has no legal basis anywhere else, surely?
If that is so, then surely citizens of Norway or anywhere else can be subject to any other US laws, which must work both ways. It would mean that owning a hand gun was legal in the UK for example.
This whole thing must be nonsense. I wonder what they will do when the US eventually, after lawyers have made billions, gets rid of the stupid law.
If this is allowed, it means that there is only one sovereign nation on earth, sadly without a legally elected, or mentally competent, head of government at present, therefore anarchy exists everywhere.
Would the same thing not work, if you run OS-X on the main Apple, and simply use the roaming part as an X terminal, using some protocol like VNC? The roaming part needs no Apple architecture at all, it only needs a processor sufficient to handle a network card (wireless), touch screen and LCD. An X server (or is that the client?) running under BSD on the Apple (might be there already, I don't know anything about MACs) would generate the graphics and handle input.
The same remote screen would work with either a MAC, Linux, or anything which can properly support VNC, as its OS. (Win is not much good, because the GDI calls can't be intercepted in such a way as to force screen updates in a timely manner, so I am told. Viewing a Windoze screen remotely using VNC is disappointing, it works well between Linux boxes.) Hopefully someone will go and do it soon, and tell us about it.
Why no handwriting recognition under Linux? Must be possible!
With today's technology the remote unit might be best with an ARM processor, not PC or MAC architecture, which of course would be supported by a cut-down Linux kernel in ROM.
Slashdot Mirror
So did Acorn with the BBC Micro. And who are Acorn, do I hear you say? The forerunners of ARM, of course.
Documented hardware has been of enormous benefit historically, sadly it is not so common now.
A very fine achievement.
Forking in religion may be acceptable to man, but not to God, who sets the rules. Truth is Truth, and is invariant. Try www.trf.org.au
I don't know of many major forks, some have re-merged, in others the fork may have fulfilled its need and been frozen, most simply die. It is a natural and healthy process, it allows people to develop their programming skills doing what they want, if it turns out to be what others also want, the fork will succeed. It allows people to focus on what they perceive as important problems without distraction from the main tree, again potentialy useful.
I see no evidence that forking has had any significant negative impact, and it seems to me that there is a lot more consistency and less in-fighting in OSS than in the typical workplace. People really do not want to lose the respect of their peers.
I wonder if this guy has actually looked at the source tree of a few projects, to see what really happens, or if it is just a case of singing from the same hymn-sheet as the Puppet-Master and Convicted Monopolist? He perhaps ought to have a look at the well-documented story behind DirectX before any mud-slinging at free and open source people and projects.
It makes me wonder if the reason why the US legal system is so needlessly complex, and requires so many lawyers, is perhaps because it creates employment for those with sufficient aggression to be very disruptive to society if they are not in highly paid employment, while not sufficiently intelligent to do something creative, like writing software, or be doctors, teachers, inventors, poets...... Complex financial rules exist so that accountants can be employed for the same reason. A negligible proportion of accountants are in any way creative.
I even wonder if such as McBride, Gates and Ballmer are driven by the fact that in reality they do not have creative potential either, whereas people like Linus certainly do.
It is a bit like the classical UK management structure, the manager is fairly useless and highly paid, his main ability is to use and abuse engineers or other professionals beneath him, take credit for their work, pass the blame for his failures onto them, etc. The no-hopers who by sheer greed, rip-offs, and a certain amount of well-documented dishonesty in getting the Convicted Monopoly established in the beginning, have made it to the top, but command no respect whatsoever technically, naturally get very nervous when people with obvious competence appear, and will do anything to keep them down. The company owned by two very rich incompetent wasters has funded the company run by another modeately rich incompetent waster to attempt to get rid of various pieces of technical excellence for which they can take no credit whatsoever. Simple as that, greed, pride, jealousy (not necessarily in that order).
If the MAC was rising big time (which it may one day), the no-hopers would be going after Apple, and Jobs, who is clearly more astute technically than all of them put together, as they went for Netscape and others.
If I am correct, there will be moves against OpenOffice/Star Office, maybe KDE or Gnome.... The nasty piece of work behind all this will not give up, even when his puppet McBride is in jail. He will simply get someone else or some other method of going for the next target, and when McBride fails, the puppet-master will simply get another, and resume his attack on *nix. It is not just Linux he wants to destroy, in fact Unix will go first, at least the SCO variety, and Bill will have achieved one of his ambitions.
The hatred for *nix is the same mix of jealousy etc. When MessyDOS came out (actually only PC-DOS, there were only IBMs at the time), I was actually using a derivative of Unix V7, which could easily do things that no Windoze system can do today, and no MessyDOS system could either. That is why he hates Unix. IIRC the unix kernel was 52k (total ram 256k), a multi-user multi-tasking system with file and password protection had a kernel about the same size as MessyDOS, and what is more, it had true pipes, not faking it by using files. He is an under-achiever technically, he resents anything and everything that has done better. It is all an extension of his well-documented childish tantrums that he allegedly still suffers from. That is why Xenix was crippled, so it would not show up his personal failure so badly.
It would be better to use satellite, cable or microwave to feed all but the smallest towns.
I wonder what the ultimate limit on baud rate would be, for example an analogue telephone line of 3KHz bandwidth manages about 52KB (NEVER 56!) on a V90 modem. That would equate to about 200MB on a 7MHz channel, enought to support a few users! It may be early days yet for this technology, with much better to come.
Nevertheless, an excellent achievement. It probably means that Mudamuckla and Bobo Creek will get broadband before I do. I live in an NTL cable area in London, have only waited for 3 years now, for them to upgrade the link from the street cabinet to wherever the internet connection is. Meanwhile, I am paying for digital TV that I don't really want, and a set-top box (actually a set-bottom box if we want to be pedantic, I have never yet seen one on top) with an RJ45 on the back which currently does nothing.
I actually bought Star a while ago, IIRC the licence allowed use on 5 PCs, so it really works out at less than people think. I doubt that many people would begrudge the cost, a fair bit less than Works IIRC, and it saves a lot of download time.
I do have Star on 2 PCs, but have OOo on four, mostly dual boot with Win 2000/XP and Linux including the 2 with Star, and the one with Win2000, as OOo or Star is an ESSENTIAL tool to rescue corrupt Word 2000 files! Works on Excel as well, but I have not got that at home or for my business, I have always had Quattro Pro and anyway Star or OOo are every bit as good as Excel, and a lot less buggy.
Having made these observations, I think this is a good move, although they may be disappointed to find that a number of businesses actually use OOo rather than Star. Either way, I wish them well, and see yet another place where the Convicted Monopolist's empire is starting to crumble.
But, as you rightly observe, what was the point of them doing that? Dismantling the scanner carefully showed exactly what chip was in it, IIRC it was a National something or other, so I got chip data freely, in tha way that most semiconductor manufcaturers have always provided it. The printer could have been reverse engineered using a little bit of code to monitor the parallel port or USB while printing under a Bill OS. (I never got round to looking inside the printer.)
So, all they have done with their secrecy is to put a minor delay in the way of someone who really needs to find out how it works. A competitor needs at least hundreds of millions to create a new family of ink jets, probably a few millions for a scanner, (tooling charges for the plastic bits alone are horrendous, without software or any custom silicon). so why bother hacking into a competitor's drivers, if you have the budget there are better ways of spending it.
It is only people with a legitimate need to use a device under a non-Gates OS who are impeded by this obsessive secrecy, there are not thousands of hackers sitting up late at home building reverse-engineereed inkjets or scanners. The only thing such manufacturers do is lose the 5 or 10% of business (an increasing proportion!) that they might have got from people who need or want to use Linux, *BSD, or whatever. They do not protect themselves in any way from serious reverse enginering, it is just not possible.
Nvidia is a fairly minor annoyance IMHO, the graphics cards are VERY popular and need support, and what the have done works, on the 3 diverse machines with Nvidia cards at muy disposal. Sadly it does not integrate well into SuSE's Yast configuration system, you always have to edit XF86Config by hand, for which I blame SuSE as Nvidia say the drivers may be distributed, but SuSE doesn't distribute them as part of an integrated package.
The hardware manufacturers could save themselves and us a lot of trouble by publishing proper driver specs in a form that could be easily compiled for any reasonable OS and CPU. That means some kind of definition of registers and how to fiddle them, as you say. It used to be that way, years ago a graphics card or a printer had a proper manual.
A side issue is that if they do disclose details, it is actually much easier to prove copyright viotations as far as the hardware is concerned, and it also prevents a competitor taking out a patent on something they have done, by demonstrating prior art. There is every advantage for a full disclosure of how hardware works, it gives nothing away to the competition that they can't get anyway, although I think some of the operations involved in 3D graphics, or for that matter dithering algorithms on a printer, may be a bit more complex than your description might suggest.
I don't think extradition treaties cover patent infringement, and if you get away with it somewhere else, it all helps to undermine the stupid law.
If using Linux helps to improve the sysetm in some way, I am all for it. It was clear while lying in hospital that the problems were not made by the medical staff, rather by the management, and in part they had failed to provide efficient systems for making appointments, and other basic essentials. A well thought out system may reduce the incidence of incidents such as I experienced, by ensuring that the correct department does actually send someone to do some tests.
Althought the NHS was introduced by a socialist government, the need had been obvious for a long time, and it would probably have happened under any government when the time was right. Unfortunately the present so-called socialist government is intent on surpassing the damage Maggie Thatcher did. Socialism does not work, never has, and never will. Blair is trying to go the US way, by stealth. Many will die as a result, as they do daily in the US. Many third world countries can do better in making basic health care available freely. The US is a seriously backward and disfunctional society, we do not want their health care methods in the UK.
It is encouraging that a company with a culture of competence, like Sun, is involved in this. It could equally well have been IBM or various others, who can and will deliver high-quality systems. The good thing is that the software company with the very worst track record of gross incompetence is not involved. We do not want the NHS turning into a Bill monopoly. Some businesses seem to exist for the sole benefit of the IT department, and their software supplier. The NHS belongs to the entire population of the UK, any software they invest in should be for the benefit of us. Use of Linux is a good thing because the saving in licence fees will be truly enormous, and as the programming interface is much more manageable than the grossly excessive number of APIs in Windoze, it follows that development of good quality software is quicker and cheaper under Linux than under Windoze. This is a win-win situation. I have yet to hear of anyone who found development more difficult under Linux than Win, unless of course their idea of development was writing bug-ridden Visual Basic applications, or AciveX......
My GP is one of the best (I have experienced the opposite) and the entire practice is very up to date, computers linked to the local hospital etc, yet one day recently none of it would work, results of my blood test could not be checked, and the receptionist was reduced to making appointments by pen and paper. The server, running some hugely expensive program under NT, had crashed....... It was down all day. Enough said, I think.
Good journalists are about as rare as good M$ programmers, the results show in both cases....
Well, at least it will hit Bill where it hurts most, in the bank balance! But if that is what they really do, it says a lot about how ill informed senior management are ......
The NT family are of course different entirely at OS level.
This is nonsense anyway, look what happened with the GIF format, when the patent owner tried to enforce it many years too late. Along came .png for law-abiding people, everyone else ignored it, till it expired. If M$ try to enforce this one, I believe they will be in contempt of court, because it will be enforcing a monopoly and preventing interoperability, contrary to the requirements of the last judgment.
Basically the Convicted Monopolist Scumbag is just trying to find loopholes where he can stick his vile little tongue out at the court. He thinks he has found one here, but I think it will end badly for him.
I don't know if CF Cards, for example, are capable of supporting other file systems, due to the design of the embedded controller chip, so if he gets away with it there will be a lot of unhappy people.
I predict a return to court for M$ very shortly.
Meanwhile, I think the free software movement ought to devise a file system optimised for small systems. A properly coordinated approach would be best, not just one person staying up late one night, coding a new Linux driver. It needs to be released for Windoze, Linux, *BSD, MAC etc all at once for maximum impact, and if it is done quickly, to show how responsive the open source movement can be, so much the better. If it is retro-fittable by updating the flash in digital cameras, PDAs, etc, even better. Support, or at least non-obstruction, ought to be expected from hardware manufacturers, as it will save them money.
M$ will end up isolating themselves from the democratic world. Bill can't put say a Reiser, or ext3, driver in Windoze, due to the GPL, but third parties can sell one, or even give it away. If people have to get a non-M$ driver to read their files, it will be embarassing for Bill..... This sort of thing shows ever more clearly why anything that is even remotely involved in data exchange between architectures needs to be GPL code, or published in full by its designer so it can't be patented (don't know if that works in the US, it seems that a lot of long-established things do get patented there, not by their inventor either) so that the world can not be held to ransom yet again.
I would like to see Bill try this one in Europe. FAT has been in use for 20 years, or very close to it.
It also seems that anyone who wants to format a FAT drive only need do it in a country whose legislation, or the enforcement thereof, does not recognise the patents. I doubt that Bill would find a sympathetic court in France for example, to say nothing of India or China. If there is a workaround like that, his efforts will be in vain anyway.
That might explain a few starnge crashes.....
My Inspiron 8100 was the best laptop I could find, anywhere, at the time, and I have no regrets whatsoever about buying it. Spares are available if it breaks (only the backlight inverter in several years), (dis)assembly instructions are freely available on the web, certain bits such as the graphics card can be changed (rare on a laptop AFAIK), and of course it was one of the first with a 1600*1200 screen.
I run Win2000 and SuSE on mine, both reliably. If I had the money, and was needing an upgrade, it would be a Dell again. I build my destktop machines myself of course (doesn't everyone?) so Dell is of no interest to me in that area.
I don't see at this point in time how it is possible to avoid having both Gnome and KDE available, it would be best if they converged, but that may be difficult!
I hope it is done to a very high standard, if so it may well embarass a certain mediocre, backward software company in Redmond (no I don't mean Lindows!).
First there needs to be a plan, to mobilise resources, get people working on the necessary things. That might come as a culture shock to many open source programmers who simply do what they want, but this really needs a properly coordinated effort.
I think it will be a success.
Socialism always has been an advanced form of hypocrisy, of course. Blair knows exactly what he is doing, and why, but I think Bush is just to stupid to realise.
If you want to know who is behind this, look up Illuminati, Bildeberg, Trilateral Commission, or the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (and please don't confuse the latter with Jews, they are almost all not, and the issue, which is not racist, has been greatly mis-represented to encourage anti-semitism and anti-anti-semitism, which is what "they" want).
The Apollo moon missions were possible because they had minimal software, almost no safety precautions, and in many ways fell far short of what would be done, and possibly legally required today.
Kennedy said that the US would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, well IIRC they were actually a year or so early, sadly Kennedy did not see it. If Bush said that today, it would be 2 decades, not 1, and there would be a terrible disaster due to the use of M$ products somewhere.
If people would resist the tendency to do everything digitally, whether it needs to be done at all or not, they could radically increase the viability of programs such as this.
Even the ancient Space Shuttle suffers from feature bloat, how many temperature sensors was it that failed in the recent disaster? None of them was of the slightest use in maintaining safety, they were only there because someone thought it might be a good idea to monitor that which could not be worked around if it failed. Pointless. Nothing to do with the actual cause of the tragedy of course.
There is an urgent need to return to simple, reliable systems, with of course a necessary degree of redundancy built in. It is amazing what can actually be done with hydraulics, analogue electronics etc, and in many cases you can get better control, by avoiding the sampling delay.
If we can restore the notion of elegant simplicity, a return to the moon may well be possible, and even useful. Otherwise, it will never happen. But I hope it does!
I wonder about the feasibility of manufacturuing raw materials on the moon, that would be a very interesting challenge, with useful spin-offs. Oxygen would be the first requirement, followed by water, then some kind of metal.....
Like M$, the ruling will be too late to be of any use to anyone. SCO will have lost all of their business, and probably their one friend, the Convicted Monopolist of Redmond, long before then. SCO will be outlawed in most of Europe. The investors (who in this case deserve exactly what they will get for being totally stupid) wil be mounting class actions, Slashdot will no longer report the case because people have started to die of boredom, Windoze 2020 will have a major root exploit, will need 64GB of RAM, and will be rejected by the masses, Redmond wil have degenerated into a ghetto for unemployable hackers, the latest 256 bit Athlon will need helium cooling, Intel will still be trying to sell 128 bit processors that don't run Windoze, FreeBSD will be competing fiercely with Linux for No. 1 position on the desktop, following the merger of Boeing and Airbus, and much product rationalisation, Concorde MK 2 will be in flight trials, a new variety of GM pig will really be able to fly............
None of that will necessarily happen of course, but the fact is that whatever happens in court will no longer be of importance to anyone except McBride, who will be trying to save face to the very end, when he will be declared bankrupt. The rest of the world will simply move on and forget this momentary aberration, as they will have forgotten the insignificant little man who occupied the White House without being elected.
Safety is only obtained by rigorous track maintenance and inspection. In Japan they have the earthquake hazard, nothing they can do about that. If the track buckles, at that sort of speed, disaster is inevitable.
One good thing is that this particularly fine piece of engineering is not maintained by either Balfour-Beatty or Jarvis, who between them are responsible for quite a few disasters and near-disasters in the UK. Basic things like not putting a piece of track back, and not telling the signaller it was not there (Twice!)
The Japanese are more meticulous than most when it comes to carrying out regular inspections, even so this is fairly risky.
In a proper OS, a user-mode program having a buffer overflow or similar error should only bring down that one process, not even all the processes belonging to that user. Generally, that has been the case with *nix for 30 years or so, and is often but not always true for Win 2K.
Why, on hardware that has memory management and protection, multiple privilege levels, etc, should a buffer overflow in some installed program ever affect the kernel, or be able to influence anything outside the memory allocated to that process?
Bill has been retarding progress for at least 20 years now, it is time it ended. Sadly, he is incapable of realising that neither he, nor his minions, have the slightest degree of competence in designing bug-free code. when he succeeds in locking us out of our own PCs, the bugs and security holes will remain. He will have achieved his dream of a totalitarian monopoly, but to keep things running, laws will have to be passed very swiftly to outlaw his software, if indeed any legislature will still be functional when it all goes wrong.
It is quite amazing that any sane person will even think about entrusting control of his data to an ignorant, incompetent megalomaniac with a proven track record of failure (technically), who is also a Convicted Monoplist.
I have wasted 3 hours today fixing work that his trash word processor mutilated, yet most of the ignorant, ill-informed press rave about the wonders of his vile Office suite, and how it thrashes the competition. The sad fact is that it doesn't, yet the mugs believe it. In either Word Perfect or OpenOffice the problems would not have arisen, and even if they had, there are ways to retreive the formatting, but that scumbag in Redmond has turned out about 6 generations of vileness with the same fundamental errors.
Nothing Microsoft do has the slightest credibility. They should be sued out of existence for wasting people's precious time. After Passport and all their other total failures in the area of security, they should not be allowed to sell software. In any other industry they would have been outlawed long ago.
Note to Bill: Under the UK Sale of Goods act, every single one of your products which I have purchased has not been or merchantable quality,or fit for the purpose for which it was intended. You are legally required to repair or replace these if such defects are found, for a period of 7 years from the date of purchase. Where are my refunds for Win 95, 98, ME, XP, Word 2000 and Works? Every single one of these packages is unfit for use.
It would also mean that its removal from the kernel was already under way.
Why should anyone else be? DeCSS has no legal basis anywhere else, surely?
If that is so, then surely citizens of Norway or anywhere else can be subject to any other US laws, which must work both ways. It would mean that owning a hand gun was legal in the UK for example.
This whole thing must be nonsense. I wonder what they will do when the US eventually, after lawyers have made billions, gets rid of the stupid law.
If this is allowed, it means that there is only one sovereign nation on earth, sadly without a legally elected, or mentally competent, head of government at present, therefore anarchy exists everywhere.
The same remote screen would work with either a MAC, Linux, or anything which can properly support VNC, as its OS. (Win is not much good, because the GDI calls can't be intercepted in such a way as to force screen updates in a timely manner, so I am told. Viewing a Windoze screen remotely using VNC is disappointing, it works well between Linux boxes.) Hopefully someone will go and do it soon, and tell us about it.
Why no handwriting recognition under Linux? Must be possible!
With today's technology the remote unit might be best with an ARM processor, not PC or MAC architecture, which of course would be supported by a cut-down Linux kernel in ROM.