In quick summary, SCO did not provide line number, VERSION and FILE information for many of it's claims. Some of their claims they did not even find source code for (roughly 2/3rds of claims). IBM warned them very early on that if they didn't receive these specifics, they would seek court intervention.
SCO also claimed that "methods and concepts" do not need source code to back them up. However, the Judge decided that this was incorrect and that methods and concepts could, in the most basic of terms, be boiled down to source code. Even the SCO technical witnesses attested to this, and furthermore SCO repeatedly requested the SAME LEVEL of specificity from IBM when requestiong source codef regarding AIX, LINUX and other products throughout the trial.
Basically the Judge finds it unacceptable that even though SCO has had since 2003 to substantiate it's claim with LINE, FILE and VERSION numbers for each claim, it has failed to do so.
For Euro 1000, this thing should have some sort of antipersonnel weapon built in. When the price comes down, this might be practical as a daily computer -- I know that with wireless Internet on one at a $500 price point I'd spend a lot more time out of the office.
I doubt it. From the description, anything you can do on this new toy, you can do (probably easier) on a PDA-Phone. No one REALLY works on PDA-phones either. You work on a LAPTOP where you can type at a reasonable speed.
Granted, my Treo can be a lifesaver, with it's email/ssh etc. on the road, but I'd never want to spend an extended period of time typing on it. This device looks even worse!
And my question is this, why would you use this when you can have a PDA-phone which does ALL the same stuff AND has a phone. Even if this HAD a phone, who would use it? You certainly don't want everyone hearing all your conversations!
It just pisses me off how Novell might be very successful in this, and if they are, it has no benefit for Linux (as in, you know, the free/open source side), and quite possibly a negative effect. All this does is benefit Novell, and once companies write up their drivers, where are the rest of us that use real Linux left? In the dust, and possibly moreso, because now the companies can say with a smile on their faces that they support Linux, and may not ever bother to turn back and support the rest of us. Thanks Novell, for giving the world a stabler Windows.
First off, Novell's distribution of Linux is "real Linux." I'm not sure how you think Debian or Ubuntu or whatever is "real Linux" but somehow SuSE, which runs the same kernel, programs, etc., is not. It's foolishness.
Secondarily, if you're trying to crucify Novell for attempting to make it easier for ISV's to integrate with their software offering, I have no idea how you plan to defend that. The problem with Linux acceptance is EXACTLY the problem of standardization. And since there seems to be no standards in motion for how ISV's should write and deploy Linux device drivers, they started their own.
What's the alternative to this? From past experience I think we can agree it's either (a) Hope that someone, somewhere comes up with a standard for "all Linux device driver development and deployment" and then hope that EVERY major Linux vendor and packager adopts this standard implementation and process. This is EXTREMELY unlikely and would take ages AND will still leave out some of the thousands of "distributions" on distrowatch and other places. Boo hoo, it's not fair! (b) Continue as we have been where device drivers are implemented in a myriad of different ways by different ISV's and have little to no support from the vendors themselves and NO support from the distribution creator.
Both of these options suck.
At least the Novell initiative here makes some promises and puts some manpower on these issues. Even the promise of Novell WORKING WITH VENDORS at all is such a welcome change from, for example, the crap shoot that is installing ISV device drivers with a Debian-like Linux system. I'm not saying it doesn't work sometimes or that Debian is a bad distro... but try to get support from ISV's for device drivers they wrote on, say, Ubuntu and let me know how that goes.
How about a package manager that downloads the code, lets you inspect, customize, or debug it, then compiles it and adds it to your modules list once you approve it?
What planet do you live on?
Not only do most (and here I would wager "most" is 99%) desktop users NOT WANT to "inspect, customize or debug" a freaking KERNEL MODULE, why can't you just do that yourself? Why would you need a freaking package manager if you're going to be compiling the damn thing yourself, let alone tinkering with it?
While people may be bashing Novell for hyping up "non-breakthrough" things like this, you all miss the point. Standardizing how vendors do things with regards to Linux is a GOOD thing. Even if this was just an AGREEMENT between SUSE and some vendors and they got it widely accepted with their "hype" and marketing, that would be GREAT. Novell is starting the ball rolling on getting some real vendor partnerships going and attempting to start making it easier for development and installation of device drivers on their version of Linux. I applaud this and so should you.
I'm glad you are so confident. I am not. The models (the so-called 'guesses') have been developed and refined over decades, and based on data that goes back for millenia. Almost all scientific work is based on this sort of 'guess'.
Not quite. Scientific work often has controlled studies based on things you can observe over time. In fact, MOST of reliable science is done that way.
The difficulty lies in the fact that there's no REAL way to test changes in the Earth's climate over time and what might influence it beyond computer simulations that have, time and time again, come up wrong. Years ago, I recall a certain senator backing down on earlier greenhouse temperature predictions after his own, based on expert advice by scientists, was proven incorrect.
We've heard this before.
I don't necessarily agree. I think iTunes shows that people are willing to pay (for a reasonable price), but that they want the convenience of electronic distribution.
Sure but again, what does this have to do with P2P? That's entirely my point. P2P is popular because it's free stuff, iTunes is popular because it's a convenient way to get legal stuff. iTunes is not P2P because there's no point.
The execs think "peer to peer" is a buzzword they need on their products but people, NORMAL people, aren't interested in the "peer to peer" part of P2P they're interested in the "free stuff I don't have to pay for" part of P2P.
I applaud efforts to make media online easily for all who want it, that's how people want to get content. But P2P in this case isn't doing anything but showing up in headlines and making executives think they're creating "hip" products.
Often times it's only required to rewrite the most crucial bits of an app. This is fairly straightforward in Python.
Re:I love Python, but...
on
Guido Goes Google
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I really do think it has been hampered by having a less rigorously standardized basic class library than Java or.NET. It would be great to see Python get some better documentation tools as well so that it'd be easy to generate documentation on par with the Java and.NET documentation.
Actually Python's interactive interpreter and class/method documentation strings work very well. Most times it's much nicer to simply be able to DO stuff and look up help at the same time rather than go sifting through some huge morass of automated docs.
Also, the next time you can do something in Java or.NET that you can't do in Python, let me know.
Re:His name is Guido?
on
Guido Goes Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Umm...
First of all Python has been part of Google since the beginning. There's even a quote about it on the Python.org homepage.
Secondarily, Python is still much slower than C, and it's used internally or for prototyping, from what I've heard, at Google. Once an external project is prototyped and "proof of concept"ed they move to a faster language.
Python is about speed of development, not necessarily execution and they would NEVER use Zope for Google, it's dog slow.
SuSE Linux.... now with open source. Am I alone in seeing the irony here. Somehow it seems that Novel is teaching SuSE how community and Open Source work. Though in the long run it is nice to see the return. Novel opened Yast, and now they are pushing SuSE back towards its roots. Kinda nice in a way.
It's simply a matter of interest. SuSE, while it was independent, was interested in selling boxed copies of SuSE as it's highest priority. That meant keeping close to it's chest some of it's best technology, like YaST.
Novell, on the other hand, is interested in SuSE as a cheap alternative to windows on which to sell it's networking products. Therefore, the more adoption, the better. Hence, more opening of source etc.
I am, personally, leery of this move though, I think SuSE does a better job of packaging a distro than the majority of the Linux community that would get involved. So far, Fedora has not impressed me a whit, and I hope SuSE doesn't suffer similar fate.
Lucas made some decent action flicks but then he reaslized that he made more money on toys than movies, so he decided "gee, why don't I substitute a three hour toy and video game commercial for my next movie". Never did he realize that people don't enjoy paying $10 to see a commercial.
I sure have doubts over the patent issue. No, I take that back. I'm confident that mono has patent problems. There is nothing to doubt.
Now, why would I want to rely on software that will get stopped in court? Why would I want to buy from a Linux vendor that might get shut down (bankrupted, etc.) via court action?
Well, then, Mr. Lawyer, don't use it if you're confident (sans proof/research of course) that it has patent issues, don't use it!
But tell me, what did you REALLY add to the conversation?
I had no expectation that a used copy of the game would be such a problem. After all, even all of Blizzard's previous games (Warcraft 2, Starcraft, BroodWar) had keys that could be used and passed on while maintaining the reasonable restriction that only one instance of the key could be used at any one time. (I have never bought or played Warcraft 3, so I do not know about it.) In fact, I bought my copy of Starcraft used and never had any trouble with it.
First off, to assume a MMORPG would have the same mechanisms involved as far as keys and such go is silly. They are NOT the same.
This person has obviously not played an MMORPG before. If I have a key, create an account and then, say, DEACTIVATE THE ACCOUNT... how could you expect to buy that box and use the same account KEY to create a new account? It's never worked that way in MMO's, and there's a reason for it. They keys are individual identifiers and they cannot be re-used. Sorry you're stupid and bought a used copy. Blizzard rocks and WoW is the best MMO I've played to date ( which is saying something, I've done most MMO's since EQ at least for a beta ).
Shame their commercial license is so incredibly overpriced... believe I'll learn wxWindows instead.
For personal use? Sure. For a business? The productivity and cross platform reliability make the licencing fee minimal. Developers who do the kind of programming that benefits from Qt pay their developers 45-65k a year. 1k or so for a Qt licence is a pittance for the added productivity over wxWidgets or GTK+ or somesuch. Possibly C# with GTK# might be as productive, but it's STILL not as fast as C++ with Qt.
You mention SVG, but then you fail to see the benefit of reducing the size of, say, a large SVG file in a standards compliant way so that it can be transferred and take up less bandwidth. A good binary standard will DEFINITELY be smaller than the verbosity that is XML. Sure you can compress it, but when you compress a whole bunch of unneeded crap, you still have a whole bunch of unneeded crap... just compressed. If this standard reduces the amount of space it takes to write:
<someLongTagWithANameLikeThis>1</someLongTagWithAN ameLikeThis>
... that will help a lot. People have been clamoring for a STANDARDIZED recommendation for XML for a LONG time.
Ok, not to "demonize" Bill but what ELSE would you do with 50 BILLION DOLLARS? Lets think about it. Even if you gave away 48 BILLION, you'd still have 2 BILLION DOLLARS in fortune, which is more than enough for an entire generation to live on comfortably and more money than 99.999...% of the world will ever have.
The FOUNDATION can't even spend it fast enough, how could he do anything else?? We're talking BILLIONS of dollars in PERSONAL FORTUNE, and he's given away maybe half. Wow. I'm super impressed.
For the professional programmer, it's tough to tell ANYTHING from this article.
These trivial example type articles aren't anywhere close to the real domain of much of business software/webapps. Everything in this example is from one simple table with little/no error checking or formatting. Once you start getting into the nitty gritty of things where an entity uses multiple tables and has dynamic and/or very strict error/format checking... will this type of framework actually help you at all?
Perhaps this makes sense to the casual user. Perhaps not. I certainly am too much of a geek to pretend that I know what the casual user wants/needs.
Certainly the GNOME storage idea is much like that of Google.. I'd rather type something in Google than look for a bookmark much of the time. But if I can't really remember the name, that's when things like bookmarks and hierarchical structures become usefull. Indeed most of the time, looking at the site favicon in my bookmarks dropdown is what triggers my memory most... that and the categorizing. So I guess, imho, spacial is not a complete replacement for hierarchical, but hierarchical can be a complete replacement for spacial.
Also, for people that manipulate files and collections of files a LOT - possibly from multiple locations on the disk - I'm not sure that spacial makes much sense. My mom and family sure don't like it. (At least their experience from Mac OSX... and lets not pretend GNOME's system is that much different. KDE rips Windows quite often but the same can be said of OSX and GNOME). I guess it depends on your perspective...
but right now, the KDE file dialog works, but the GNOME storage stuff is not distributed. =P
One of the things I keep hoping GNOME will get better at is file handling. Konqueror is a great tool for splitting windows, drag'n'drop between ftp sites/websites/etc, and the FILE DIALOG in KDE is pretty decent too...
Why can't the GNOME one get better? The 2.4 and pre series was a JOKE and this new one, even with all it's vaunted HIG stuff, is still horrible imho. Why can't I see thumbs? Previews? A decent file tree? Bleh.
Slashdot Mirror
In quick summary, SCO did not provide line number, VERSION and FILE information for many of it's claims. Some of their claims they did not even find source code for (roughly 2/3rds of claims). IBM warned them very early on that if they didn't receive these specifics, they would seek court intervention.
SCO also claimed that "methods and concepts" do not need source code to back them up. However, the Judge decided that this was incorrect and that methods and concepts could, in the most basic of terms, be boiled down to source code. Even the SCO technical witnesses attested to this, and furthermore SCO repeatedly requested the SAME LEVEL of specificity from IBM when requestiong source codef regarding AIX, LINUX and other products throughout the trial.
Basically the Judge finds it unacceptable that even though SCO has had since 2003 to substantiate it's claim with LINE, FILE and VERSION numbers for each claim, it has failed to do so.
This case was lost in the public court of opinion long ago, I'm kind of surprised it's even still going on. Apparently the judge is of the same mind.
For Euro 1000, this thing should have some sort of antipersonnel weapon built in. When the price comes down, this might be practical as a daily computer -- I know that with wireless Internet on one at a $500 price point I'd spend a lot more time out of the office.
I doubt it. From the description, anything you can do on this new toy, you can do (probably easier) on a PDA-Phone. No one REALLY works on PDA-phones either. You work on a LAPTOP where you can type at a reasonable speed.
Granted, my Treo can be a lifesaver, with it's email/ssh etc. on the road, but I'd never want to spend an extended period of time typing on it. This device looks even worse!
And my question is this, why would you use this when you can have a PDA-phone which does ALL the same stuff AND has a phone. Even if this HAD a phone, who would use it? You certainly don't want everyone hearing all your conversations!
Looks impractical for most people.
It just pisses me off how Novell might be very successful in this, and if they are, it has no benefit for Linux (as in, you know, the free/open source side), and quite possibly a negative effect. All this does is benefit Novell, and once companies write up their drivers, where are the rest of us that use real Linux left? In the dust, and possibly moreso, because now the companies can say with a smile on their faces that they support Linux, and may not ever bother to turn back and support the rest of us. Thanks Novell, for giving the world a stabler Windows.
First off, Novell's distribution of Linux is "real Linux." I'm not sure how you think Debian or Ubuntu or whatever is "real Linux" but somehow SuSE, which runs the same kernel, programs, etc., is not. It's foolishness.
Secondarily, if you're trying to crucify Novell for attempting to make it easier for ISV's to integrate with their software offering, I have no idea how you plan to defend that. The problem with Linux acceptance is EXACTLY the problem of standardization. And since there seems to be no standards in motion for how ISV's should write and deploy Linux device drivers, they started their own.
What's the alternative to this? From past experience I think we can agree it's either (a) Hope that someone, somewhere comes up with a standard for "all Linux device driver development and deployment" and then hope that EVERY major Linux vendor and packager adopts this standard implementation and process. This is EXTREMELY unlikely and would take ages AND will still leave out some of the thousands of "distributions" on distrowatch and other places. Boo hoo, it's not fair! (b) Continue as we have been where device drivers are implemented in a myriad of different ways by different ISV's and have little to no support from the vendors themselves and NO support from the distribution creator.
Both of these options suck.
At least the Novell initiative here makes some promises and puts some manpower on these issues. Even the promise of Novell WORKING WITH VENDORS at all is such a welcome change from, for example, the crap shoot that is installing ISV device drivers with a Debian-like Linux system. I'm not saying it doesn't work sometimes or that Debian is a bad distro... but try to get support from ISV's for device drivers they wrote on, say, Ubuntu and let me know how that goes.
How about a package manager that downloads the code, lets you inspect, customize, or debug it, then compiles it and adds it to your modules list once you approve it?
What planet do you live on?
Not only do most (and here I would wager "most" is 99%) desktop users NOT WANT to "inspect, customize or debug" a freaking KERNEL MODULE, why can't you just do that yourself? Why would you need a freaking package manager if you're going to be compiling the damn thing yourself, let alone tinkering with it?
While people may be bashing Novell for hyping up "non-breakthrough" things like this, you all miss the point. Standardizing how vendors do things with regards to Linux is a GOOD thing. Even if this was just an AGREEMENT between SUSE and some vendors and they got it widely accepted with their "hype" and marketing, that would be GREAT. Novell is starting the ball rolling on getting some real vendor partnerships going and attempting to start making it easier for development and installation of device drivers on their version of Linux. I applaud this and so should you.
I'm glad you are so confident. I am not. The models (the so-called 'guesses') have been developed and refined over decades, and based on data that goes back for millenia. Almost all scientific work is based on this sort of 'guess'.
Not quite. Scientific work often has controlled studies based on things you can observe over time. In fact, MOST of reliable science is done that way. The difficulty lies in the fact that there's no REAL way to test changes in the Earth's climate over time and what might influence it beyond computer simulations that have, time and time again, come up wrong. Years ago, I recall a certain senator backing down on earlier greenhouse temperature predictions after his own, based on expert advice by scientists, was proven incorrect. We've heard this before.
I don't necessarily agree. I think iTunes shows that people are willing to pay (for a reasonable price), but that they want the convenience of electronic distribution.
Sure but again, what does this have to do with P2P? That's entirely my point. P2P is popular because it's free stuff, iTunes is popular because it's a convenient way to get legal stuff. iTunes is not P2P because there's no point.
Correct.
The execs think "peer to peer" is a buzzword they need on their products but people, NORMAL people, aren't interested in the "peer to peer" part of P2P they're interested in the "free stuff I don't have to pay for" part of P2P.
I applaud efforts to make media online easily for all who want it, that's how people want to get content. But P2P in this case isn't doing anything but showing up in headlines and making executives think they're creating "hip" products.
absolutely.
Often times it's only required to rewrite the most crucial bits of an app. This is fairly straightforward in Python.
I really do think it has been hampered by having a less rigorously standardized basic class library than Java or .NET. It would be great to see Python get some better documentation tools as well so that it'd be easy to generate documentation on par with the Java and .NET documentation.
.NET that you can't do in Python, let me know.
Actually Python's interactive interpreter and class/method documentation strings work very well. Most times it's much nicer to simply be able to DO stuff and look up help at the same time rather than go sifting through some huge morass of automated docs.
Also, the next time you can do something in Java or
Umm... First of all Python has been part of Google since the beginning. There's even a quote about it on the Python.org homepage. Secondarily, Python is still much slower than C, and it's used internally or for prototyping, from what I've heard, at Google. Once an external project is prototyped and "proof of concept"ed they move to a faster language. Python is about speed of development, not necessarily execution and they would NEVER use Zope for Google, it's dog slow.
SuSE Linux .... now with open source. Am I alone in seeing the irony here. Somehow it seems that Novel is teaching SuSE how community and Open Source work. Though in the long run it is nice to see the return. Novel opened Yast, and now they are pushing SuSE back towards its roots. Kinda nice in a way.
It's simply a matter of interest. SuSE, while it was independent, was interested in selling boxed copies of SuSE as it's highest priority. That meant keeping close to it's chest some of it's best technology, like YaST.
Novell, on the other hand, is interested in SuSE as a cheap alternative to windows on which to sell it's networking products. Therefore, the more adoption, the better. Hence, more opening of source etc.
I am, personally, leery of this move though, I think SuSE does a better job of packaging a distro than the majority of the Linux community that would get involved. So far, Fedora has not impressed me a whit, and I hope SuSE doesn't suffer similar fate.
Lucas made some decent action flicks but then he reaslized that he made more money on toys than movies, so he decided "gee, why don't I substitute a three hour toy and video game commercial for my next movie". Never did he realize that people don't enjoy paying $10 to see a commercial.
A-fucking-men
I sure have doubts over the patent issue. No, I take that back. I'm confident that mono has patent problems. There is nothing to doubt.
Now, why would I want to rely on software that will get stopped in court? Why would I want to buy from a Linux vendor that might get shut down (bankrupted, etc.) via court action?
Well, then, Mr. Lawyer, don't use it if you're confident (sans proof/research of course) that it has patent issues, don't use it!
But tell me, what did you REALLY add to the conversation?
"...GNOME is hellbent on cloning Windows internals while 'innovating' the look & feel (ignoring the whole spatial nautilus fiasco)..."
If by "innovating" you mean "ripping off OSX", then I agree...
I had no expectation that a used copy of the game would be such a problem. After all, even all of Blizzard's previous games (Warcraft 2, Starcraft, BroodWar) had keys that could be used and passed on while maintaining the reasonable restriction that only one instance of the key could be used at any one time. (I have never bought or played Warcraft 3, so I do not know about it.) In fact, I bought my copy of Starcraft used and never had any trouble with it.
First off, to assume a MMORPG would have the same mechanisms involved as far as keys and such go is silly. They are NOT the same.
This person has obviously not played an MMORPG before. If I have a key, create an account and then, say, DEACTIVATE THE ACCOUNT... how could you expect to buy that box and use the same account KEY to create a new account? It's never worked that way in MMO's, and there's a reason for it. They keys are individual identifiers and they cannot be re-used. Sorry you're stupid and bought a used copy. Blizzard rocks and WoW is the best MMO I've played to date ( which is saying something, I've done most MMO's since EQ at least for a beta ).
Rarely does every developer need to develop on 3 platforms simultaneously.
Shame their commercial license is so incredibly overpriced... believe I'll learn wxWindows instead.
For personal use? Sure. For a business? The productivity and cross platform reliability make the licencing fee minimal. Developers who do the kind of programming that benefits from Qt pay their developers 45-65k a year. 1k or so for a Qt licence is a pittance for the added productivity over wxWidgets or GTK+ or somesuch. Possibly C# with GTK# might be as productive, but it's STILL not as fast as C++ with Qt.
Really? You can't see the benefit?
N ameLikeThis>
... that will help a lot. People have been clamoring for a STANDARDIZED recommendation for XML for a LONG time.
You mention SVG, but then you fail to see the benefit of reducing the size of, say, a large SVG file in a standards compliant way so that it can be transferred and take up less bandwidth. A good binary standard will DEFINITELY be smaller than the verbosity that is XML. Sure you can compress it, but when you compress a whole bunch of unneeded crap, you still have a whole bunch of unneeded crap... just compressed. If this standard reduces the amount of space it takes to write:
<someLongTagWithANameLikeThis>1</someLongTagWithA
Ok, not to "demonize" Bill but what ELSE would you do with 50 BILLION DOLLARS? Lets think about it. Even if you gave away 48 BILLION, you'd still have 2 BILLION DOLLARS in fortune, which is more than enough for an entire generation to live on comfortably and more money than 99.999...% of the world will ever have.
The FOUNDATION can't even spend it fast enough, how could he do anything else?? We're talking BILLIONS of dollars in PERSONAL FORTUNE, and he's given away maybe half. Wow. I'm super impressed.
For the professional programmer, it's tough to tell ANYTHING from this article.
These trivial example type articles aren't anywhere close to the real domain of much of business software/webapps. Everything in this example is from one simple table with little/no error checking or formatting. Once you start getting into the nitty gritty of things where an entity uses multiple tables and has dynamic and/or very strict error/format checking... will this type of framework actually help you at all?
Can't tell from this article, unfortunately.
lolol mod parent up please
I haven't used it yet,
... post over.
Perhaps this makes sense to the casual user. Perhaps not. I certainly am too much of a geek to pretend that I know what the casual user wants/needs.
Certainly the GNOME storage idea is much like that of Google.. I'd rather type something in Google than look for a bookmark much of the time. But if I can't really remember the name, that's when things like bookmarks and hierarchical structures become usefull. Indeed most of the time, looking at the site favicon in my bookmarks dropdown is what triggers my memory most... that and the categorizing. So I guess, imho, spacial is not a complete replacement for hierarchical, but hierarchical can be a complete replacement for spacial.
Also, for people that manipulate files and collections of files a LOT - possibly from multiple locations on the disk - I'm not sure that spacial makes much sense. My mom and family sure don't like it. (At least their experience from Mac OSX... and lets not pretend GNOME's system is that much different. KDE rips Windows quite often but the same can be said of OSX and GNOME). I guess it depends on your perspective... but right now, the KDE file dialog works, but the GNOME storage stuff is not distributed. =P
One of the things I keep hoping GNOME will get better at is file handling. Konqueror is a great tool for splitting windows, drag'n'drop between ftp sites/websites/etc, and the FILE DIALOG in KDE is pretty decent too...
Why can't the GNOME one get better? The 2.4 and pre series was a JOKE and this new one, even with all it's vaunted HIG stuff, is still horrible imho. Why can't I see thumbs? Previews? A decent file tree? Bleh.