Agreed. A lot of cops do very real protection of innocent people, and take pride in it. The rules about illegal search and seizure, and cruel and unusual punishment, help keep those guardians of the public from themselves becoming dangerous in their quest. I'm glad to see a cop helping at an accident, patrolling a dangerous street, or writing a ticket for some idiot who blocks a fire hydrant.
OK, we're going to keep naughty bits cool, I have some suggestions of where to put the fans and how to attach them for maximum, ummm, cooling effect. That's right, cooling! That's what that very popular device is for! Every VP should get one as part of their bonus package!
Neither would a lot of viruses, corporate theft and violations of NDA agreements from "partners" who've been robbed. Give the man credit for being a leader in his field, very few companies are more dangerous to reveal your new designs to as a "partner" in innovation.
NVidia is caught up in the pursuit of EXCITING NEW FEATURES! NEVER SEEN BEFORE! NEVER TESTED BEFORE! FAILS ON DAYS ENDING STARTING WITH T IF THE DAY OF THE MONTH IS ODD!
The result is that their new hardware is not usable in production, but their slightly older hardware that's had the bugs worked out and firmware patches published is quite usable.
Easier, yes. Cost-effective? If a cheesy manufacturer can short-circuit the bug-reporting and blame problems on Microsoft or other components, they will, in order to avoid costly tech support calls and refunds and providing timely bugfixes. Lots of manufacturers have been caught playing this sort of game, making their slightly cheaper components very expensive in user time getting the right update and fixed drivers: it's especially fun with bleeding edge or newly discounted, low-bid hardware.
It's also why Mac's cost more but are rock solid: Apple actually spends a lot of time and effort with the vendors making sure things follow the specifications and play nicely with others before they put a "Mac compatible" logo on it.
Do you need to pay the extra $10 bucks for a quality SATA card, such as an Adaptec or a 3Ware? You bet. Even Belkin's low end offereings work more reliably than Via cards.
DEC settling doesn't mean that it was legal, anymore than paying for someone's fender and their medical bills makes it legal to smash into their car. The idea that settling means it wasn't theft is very strange, indeed. And no, I meant the Pentium IV for lots of technical theft by Intel There are allegations of theft for previous technologies such as the Pentium II, due toe DEC's previous policies of being relatively open about its designs in non-disclosure agreeement based meetings.
I'm cherry picking examples that are some of the most famous and egregious, leading most directly to DEC's demise.
And stop pretending this has anything to do with misuse by open-source developers. That's serious FUD: The GPL and many other open source copyrights are carefully written to avoid this sort of abuse and others. If you violate that agreement, as a developer, you can and will have your code ripped out screaming by the roots when the FSF or other open source bodies notice it, and people like the Samba developers and Linux kernel developers have repeatedly shown exactly what lengths they go to to avoid that kind of problem.
There is plenty wrong with intellectual property law, but ignoring such blatant violations of it doesn't help anyone but the thieves. Ignoring it is like ignoring SUV's with urgently business wrangling young professionals, parking in the handicapped spots because it's the only pair of empty spaces in the lot. It's illegal, and it interferes with the rest of us.
It's not just the knowledge, much of which was trade secrets illegal to use elsewhere. It's copyrighted code. You really need to look at the lawsuits, David Cutler and his merry band of pirates stole not just general concepts but wholesale chunks of code. For example, take a good look at the memory management code, if you can get appropriate developer licenses and access to old VMS source code. They signed contracts that forbade exactly this: they took the money and Microsoft and ignored the contracts.
DEC settled for what turned out to be a pittance their policy was to avoid painful and possibly expensive lawsuits, and they thought they could milk the cow of the NT marketplace by selling Alphas that ran NT. This coupled with the theft of Alpha technologies for the Pentium IV chips by Intel, basically destroyed DEC's highly coupled cash cows by removing much of their competitive advantage and selling cheaper, flakier versions of the technologies for far less money because they could steal them wholesale, rather than having to develop them from scratch.
Talk to old DEC employees of the period: ones who know enough about the details curse the days that DEC settled out of court with both Microsoft and Intel, rather than flensing them to the fiscal bone for their wholesale theft. After that sort of disaster, and that sort of wholesale theft of your work by crooks who get rich stealing it, you're not inclined to stick around and make more good products: a lot of folks left for that kind of reason, and the loss of talented engineers was very detrimental to the company.
And don't pretend that OSS written on spare time has the same issues: that's a nasty strawman, used to justify taking somebody's money and then violating the contract. Actually read your NDA contract, and if you can't live with it, leave before you start stealing. David Cutler took a lot of salary and benefits during his DEC tenure, and if you're not going to follow your contract, you shouldn't sign it and take the money. The courts, and the creators of software licenses, seem to agree with this.
All files should be lower case, "LANG=C" compatible ASCII text with no spaces or command-line altering punctuation such as brackets, parenthes, ampersands, etc.. Case sensitivity is simply a smaller case of the difficulty of supporting all sorts of weird fonts and abuses of file names, which has been wildly exacerbated both by the development of unicode and by the extremely poor, inconsistent, and incomplete implementations of it.
By being paid by DEC for it and signing a non-compete agreement. He also hired away much of his merry old crew, who participated in the non-compete, trade secret, and copyright violations: DEC settled out of court for way, way too little money and the promise that NT would always run on Alphas.
Of course it ran on Alphas! VMS was written for Alphas!
And "preferred partner" discounts for their desktop software licenses, and the vendors of hardware will be pushed to pay for MS licenses for their cluster systems or lose their discounts for desktops. Microsoft has been caught at that illegal monopolistic behavior, and barely gotten their wrist slapped. It's unfortunately no longer a surprise no interesting, it's just standard criminal behavior for them.
More interesting is whether Vista will be capable of cluster computing: AS the legacies of DOS have fallen out of Microsoft support, and its core more moved towards the NT built by David Cutler with his stolen work from DEC's VMS, it's actually become more of a seriously powerful OS and could conceivably be up to the task.
But they're not a good market: while there are lots of them, the money to rip off is in the US economy, not the Chinese. So the spam is still targeted mainly at US victims.
Emacs is certainly not a copy of a UNIX tool: gcc, while in many ways matching other compiler's results, was written quite independently and continues to be one of the core components of Linux and all of the BSD-based operating systems. Other tools, such as GNU versions of "make", "compress", "bash" and "ghostscript" all are fundamental to many, many other tools in commoon use have properly displaced the proprietary versions of those tools for many operating systems.
Don't underestimate GNU and the FSF: they still do quite a lot of development work, even if it's merely by organizng other scattered developers around the world to finish a project and get something working.
That's especially funny considering that Mr. Stallman is one of the few Americans who actually bathes less than the French. There's a fairly typical photo of Richard on the cover of "FREE AS IN FREEDOM", and that cover is online at http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/
I've strongly suggested Xbox based Linux clusters: besides the fun of making Microsoft lose money on every console purchased, then not buying any games for 200 machines. Unfortunately, the heat and poor venting of those power supplies is a problem: I wouldn't want to run more than a few in a small space, but it could also make for a fun cluster computing demo. Dual-boot one of them for games to draw people to your booth at a trade show, and you can have a bit of fun irritating Microsoft while doing actual cluster computing.
Or upgrade something else you need a lot of for another project, and use the old 32-bit or 64-bit hardware with Linux as a free software testbed before pursuing a big hardware purchase. That gives you some experience with the tools before spending huge amounts of software and hardware money up front. And you can upgrade when you need to, since you've already got the cooling and power in place for the old hardware.
There are exceptions: some folks do wind up digging up racks of old servers, at rock bottom prices or even for free, as their data centers or deployed installations decommission them. You can inherit quite a lot of slightly outdated hardware this way: if you can justify the electrical expense of running them, they're quite convenient for massive, lengthy computing jobs.
A lot of cluster managers also mistake "really expensive, physically robust servers for "will always be working". The complexities of such setups and the general frequency of failure of "high availability" software itself means that the much vaunted 99.99% uptime of such systems is usually based on serious cooking of the numbers, not any metric actually used in the field. After the crops of failures of things like the old IBM deskstar drives, the run of bad tantalum capacitors in Dell motherboards, and other failures that strike entire classes of brand new hardware, it's often better to use older, cheaper, burned in hardware that's had the BIOS updates and the kinks worked out, and save the extra money for the next round of upgrades in six months or a year.
Please don't call Linux "UNIX". It's really not, in a number of important software ways but especially in legally binding trademark ways.
But my experience with Solaris, for many years, is that to make it usable you have to basically replace a lot of core tools with the much more powerful and better built ones from the FSF, many of which are core to Linux OS deployments. Emacs, sendmail, more, make, bash, gcc, and tar, all are much better deployed from recent FSF releases or maybe www.sunfreeware.com rebundlings, rather than using the utilities built into Solaris.
And that unspeakable piece of buggy and undocumented cruft known as dpkg should have died years ago: RPM is a very solid way to replace it, which makes SuSE and RedHat good choices for company wide deployments.
No, the Mac users are targets of the Windows advertisers, to convince them that the Mac market is too small and that the products they need are easily available under Windows. When it comes to CAD software and games, the Windows advertisers are also corretc.
SuSE goes through similar fun and games with their access to NVidia drivers and some Microsoft fonts. The resulting mess in their installer, with packages that installed via shell script and others installed via RPM, means that the non-RPM packages are poorly managed and are nightmarish to automatically update at OS installation time.
So I went and took a look at the source. If Sun is successfully compiling from that mass of broken Makefiles and poorly written shell madness, they're braver and considerably luckier than I am. I have to assume that there are compilation tricks they're simply not including in that source bundle, based on failure to compile on 3 different OS's in a row.
Note especially that the RPM and similar packages are not compiled from source: they're typically installation wrappers around the Sun-published binaries, I assume because actually compiling it from the published source is so very painful and difficult. Has anyone actually compiled the SDK from the source code on a Linux system, other than Sun? I'd love to see your configuration and especially what compiler you got it to work with.
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Agreed. A lot of cops do very real protection of innocent people, and take pride in it. The rules about illegal search and seizure, and cruel and unusual punishment, help keep those guardians of the public from themselves becoming dangerous in their quest. I'm glad to see a cop helping at an accident, patrolling a dangerous street, or writing a ticket for some idiot who blocks a fire hydrant.
Acting in the fine tradition of J. Edgar Hoover, yes.
OK, we're going to keep naughty bits cool, I have some suggestions of where to put the fans and how to attach them for maximum, ummm, cooling effect. That's right, cooling! That's what that very popular device is for! Every VP should get one as part of their bonus package!
So when did you leave Oracle?
Neither would a lot of viruses, corporate theft and violations of NDA agreements from "partners" who've been robbed. Give the man credit for being a leader in his field, very few companies are more dangerous to reveal your new designs to as a "partner" in innovation.
NVidia is caught up in the pursuit of EXCITING NEW FEATURES! NEVER SEEN BEFORE! NEVER TESTED BEFORE! FAILS ON DAYS ENDING STARTING WITH T IF THE DAY OF THE MONTH IS ODD!
The result is that their new hardware is not usable in production, but their slightly older hardware that's had the bugs worked out and firmware patches published is quite usable.
Easier, yes. Cost-effective? If a cheesy manufacturer can short-circuit the bug-reporting and blame problems on Microsoft or other components, they will, in order to avoid costly tech support calls and refunds and providing timely bugfixes. Lots of manufacturers have been caught playing this sort of game, making their slightly cheaper components very expensive in user time getting the right update and fixed drivers: it's especially fun with bleeding edge or newly discounted, low-bid hardware.
It's also why Mac's cost more but are rock solid: Apple actually spends a lot of time and effort with the vendors making sure things follow the specifications and play nicely with others before they put a "Mac compatible" logo on it.
Do you need to pay the extra $10 bucks for a quality SATA card, such as an Adaptec or a 3Ware? You bet. Even Belkin's low end offereings work more reliably than Via cards.
DEC settling doesn't mean that it was legal, anymore than paying for someone's fender and their medical bills makes it legal to smash into their car. The idea that settling means it wasn't theft is very strange, indeed. And no, I meant the Pentium IV for lots of technical theft by Intel There are allegations of theft for previous technologies such as the Pentium II, due toe DEC's previous policies of being relatively open about its designs in non-disclosure agreeement based meetings.
I'm cherry picking examples that are some of the most famous and egregious, leading most directly to DEC's demise.
And stop pretending this has anything to do with misuse by open-source developers. That's serious FUD: The GPL and many other open source copyrights are carefully written to avoid this sort of abuse and others. If you violate that agreement, as a developer, you can and will have your code ripped out screaming by the roots when the FSF or other open source bodies notice it, and people like the Samba developers and Linux kernel developers have repeatedly shown exactly what lengths they go to to avoid that kind of problem.
There is plenty wrong with intellectual property law, but ignoring such blatant violations of it doesn't help anyone but the thieves. Ignoring it is like ignoring SUV's with urgently business wrangling young professionals, parking in the handicapped spots because it's the only pair of empty spaces in the lot. It's illegal, and it interferes with the rest of us.
It's not just the knowledge, much of which was trade secrets illegal to use elsewhere. It's copyrighted code. You really need to look at the lawsuits, David Cutler and his merry band of pirates stole not just general concepts but wholesale chunks of code. For example, take a good look at the memory management code, if you can get appropriate developer licenses and access to old VMS source code. They signed contracts that forbade exactly this: they took the money and Microsoft and ignored the contracts.
DEC settled for what turned out to be a pittance their policy was to avoid painful and possibly expensive lawsuits, and they thought they could milk the cow of the NT marketplace by selling Alphas that ran NT. This coupled with the theft of Alpha technologies for the Pentium IV chips by Intel, basically destroyed DEC's highly coupled cash cows by removing much of their competitive advantage and selling cheaper, flakier versions of the technologies for far less money because they could steal them wholesale, rather than having to develop them from scratch.
Talk to old DEC employees of the period: ones who know enough about the details curse the days that DEC settled out of court with both Microsoft and Intel, rather than flensing them to the fiscal bone for their wholesale theft. After that sort of disaster, and that sort of wholesale theft of your work by crooks who get rich stealing it, you're not inclined to stick around and make more good products: a lot of folks left for that kind of reason, and the loss of talented engineers was very detrimental to the company.
And don't pretend that OSS written on spare time has the same issues: that's a nasty strawman, used to justify taking somebody's money and then violating the contract. Actually read your NDA contract, and if you can't live with it, leave before you start stealing. David Cutler took a lot of salary and benefits during his DEC tenure, and if you're not going to follow your contract, you shouldn't sign it and take the money. The courts, and the creators of software licenses, seem to agree with this.
All files should be lower case, "LANG=C" compatible ASCII text with no spaces or command-line altering punctuation such as brackets, parenthes, ampersands, etc.. Case sensitivity is simply a smaller case of the difficulty of supporting all sorts of weird fonts and abuses of file names, which has been wildly exacerbated both by the development of unicode and by the extremely poor, inconsistent, and incomplete implementations of it.
By being paid by DEC for it and signing a non-compete agreement. He also hired away much of his merry old crew, who participated in the non-compete, trade secret, and copyright violations: DEC settled out of court for way, way too little money and the promise that NT would always run on Alphas.
Of course it ran on Alphas! VMS was written for Alphas!
And "preferred partner" discounts for their desktop software licenses, and the vendors of hardware will be pushed to pay for MS licenses for their cluster systems or lose their discounts for desktops. Microsoft has been caught at that illegal monopolistic behavior, and barely gotten their wrist slapped. It's unfortunately no longer a surprise no interesting, it's just standard criminal behavior for them.
More interesting is whether Vista will be capable of cluster computing: AS the legacies of DOS have fallen out of Microsoft support, and its core more moved towards the NT built by David Cutler with his stolen work from DEC's VMS, it's actually become more of a seriously powerful OS and could conceivably be up to the task.
But they're not a good market: while there are lots of them, the money to rip off is in the US economy, not the Chinese. So the spam is still targeted mainly at US victims.
Emacs is certainly not a copy of a UNIX tool: gcc, while in many ways matching other compiler's results, was written quite independently and continues to be one of the core components of Linux and all of the BSD-based operating systems. Other tools, such as GNU versions of "make", "compress", "bash" and "ghostscript" all are fundamental to many, many other tools in commoon use have properly displaced the proprietary versions of those tools for many operating systems.
Don't underestimate GNU and the FSF: they still do quite a lot of development work, even if it's merely by organizng other scattered developers around the world to finish a project and get something working.
That's especially funny considering that Mr. Stallman is one of the few Americans who actually bathes less than the French. There's a fairly typical photo of Richard on the cover of "FREE AS IN FREEDOM", and that cover is online at http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/
What would they give for shutting down China? The pirated Windows there seem to be far more common than legitimate copies, at least on my last visit.
I've strongly suggested Xbox based Linux clusters: besides the fun of making Microsoft lose money on every console purchased, then not buying any games for 200 machines. Unfortunately, the heat and poor venting of those power supplies is a problem: I wouldn't want to run more than a few in a small space, but it could also make for a fun cluster computing demo. Dual-boot one of them for games to draw people to your booth at a trade show, and you can have a bit of fun irritating Microsoft while doing actual cluster computing.
Or upgrade something else you need a lot of for another project, and use the old 32-bit or 64-bit hardware with Linux as a free software testbed before pursuing a big hardware purchase. That gives you some experience with the tools before spending huge amounts of software and hardware money up front. And you can upgrade when you need to, since you've already got the cooling and power in place for the old hardware.
There are exceptions: some folks do wind up digging up racks of old servers, at rock bottom prices or even for free, as their data centers or deployed installations decommission them. You can inherit quite a lot of slightly outdated hardware this way: if you can justify the electrical expense of running them, they're quite convenient for massive, lengthy computing jobs.
A lot of cluster managers also mistake "really expensive, physically robust servers for "will always be working". The complexities of such setups and the general frequency of failure of "high availability" software itself means that the much vaunted 99.99% uptime of such systems is usually based on serious cooking of the numbers, not any metric actually used in the field. After the crops of failures of things like the old IBM deskstar drives, the run of bad tantalum capacitors in Dell motherboards, and other failures that strike entire classes of brand new hardware, it's often better to use older, cheaper, burned in hardware that's had the BIOS updates and the kinks worked out, and save the extra money for the next round of upgrades in six months or a year.
Please don't call Linux "UNIX". It's really not, in a number of important software ways but especially in legally binding trademark ways.
But my experience with Solaris, for many years, is that to make it usable you have to basically replace a lot of core tools with the much more powerful and better built ones from the FSF, many of which are core to Linux OS deployments. Emacs, sendmail, more, make, bash, gcc, and tar, all are much better deployed from recent FSF releases or maybe www.sunfreeware.com rebundlings, rather than using the utilities built into Solaris.
And that unspeakable piece of buggy and undocumented cruft known as dpkg should have died years ago: RPM is a very solid way to replace it, which makes SuSE and RedHat good choices for company wide deployments.
No, the Mac users are targets of the Windows advertisers, to convince them that the Mac market is too small and that the products they need are easily available under Windows. When it comes to CAD software and games, the Windows advertisers are also corretc.
So how long has your school been using Mac's?
SuSE goes through similar fun and games with their access to NVidia drivers and some Microsoft fonts. The resulting mess in their installer, with packages that installed via shell script and others installed via RPM, means that the non-RPM packages are poorly managed and are nightmarish to automatically update at OS installation time.
So I went and took a look at the source. If Sun is successfully compiling from that mass of broken Makefiles and poorly written shell madness, they're braver and considerably luckier than I am. I have to assume that there are compilation tricks they're simply not including in that source bundle, based on failure to compile on 3 different OS's in a row.
Note especially that the RPM and similar packages are not compiled from source: they're typically installation wrappers around the Sun-published binaries, I assume because actually compiling it from the published source is so very painful and difficult. Has anyone actually compiled the SDK from the source code on a Linux system, other than Sun? I'd love to see your configuration and especially what compiler you got it to work with.