If we were to hit them full-on with a lawsuit the results would be companies would simply not touch Linux with a 10-foot pole for fear of another suit.
Hardware companies have no business touching Linux anyway. Open the specs and let the Linux community develop the drivers. There is no way that can get them in legal trouble.
Allowing non-GPL kernel modules in the first place was a mistake. Fortunately it is very hard to develop a kernel module without using GPL'd code.
Ericsson brings functionality at the cost of reliability. I have had 3 different so far, the two last being the GS18 and the SH888. Ericsson actually replaced the GS18's in my company with SH888's because they couldn't fix the GS18's.
Even the SH888's have software that feels like a late beta at best. The user interface is terrible. They turn themselves off constantly, whether because of software or hardware I don't know. Every time we get a phone repaired it fails less often for the next month or so, and then it's back to the daily crashes.
Just to top it off they have zero coverage in places where a Nokia 7110 reports "half" coverage and goes through flawlessly.
IBM's new drive doesn't let the heads ever touch the surface (if it's working properly). [..] This
is new, and should be posted under the 'why didn't they think of that earlier' topic.
They did think of it earlier. Notebook hard drives have done it for a while, but it's new on the desktop.
DAT used to be wonderful -- most 2GB drives work great. The newer high density drives are unreliable in my experience.
Backup "as we know it" on removable media is probably going away in the next 5-10 years. Retention of tapes, or copying old media to new ones is not practical. It is better to simply archive to hard drives, and their prices are falling much faster than tape prices.
National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei. Perhaps better known as the Nazis. And I do apologize if I spelled it wrong, my German isn't that great.
Both SCSI and IDE drives these days hide defects. There is no technical reason why IDE drives are less reliable than SCSI drives. However, SCSI has lost the workstation market completely, so now only servers use SCSI. The data on server disks is generally more expensive to replace, and downtime there is more troublesome, so people are prepared to pay for quality. Some manufacturers have made two versions of mechanically identical drives, one IDE and one SCSI. Quantum Fireball is an example. That practice seems to be ending now that there is no such thing as a low end SCSI drive.
Anyway, there sure is not two heads on each platter as suggested by another poster. At one time Seagate made Barracuda drives that were able to read data off two platters in parallel. They dropped it in the later Barracudas when the increase in data density made it possible to make faster drives without this feature.
Another issue is that IDE drives are usually optimized to withstand getting started and stopped again and again by powersaving, whereas SCSI drives are optimized to run continuously for years.
If the planets were further from their suns, they would be undetectable to us. Only a very massive planet in a very small orbit makes a star wobble enough to let us detect it.
One can only hope that the fact that there are so many planets of the kind we can detect means that there are also many planets of the kind we cannot detect, such as Earthlike planets. Then again, one can also hope for the opposite.
Analog mobile phones have traditionally transmitted a signal containing less information over a wider channel at a lower frequency. The two first parts make reception resist errors better, and the last helps long distance reception.
There is no reason you could not make a digital phone system with the same properties, you just need to get a wide band at a low frequency. Even then the system probably would not support many users.
Patents were not invented in order to reward the inventor, or in order to make
They were created so that inventors would not keep their inventions secret, but instead have a way to share the inventions with others without losing the potential income from the invention. It is highly ironic that patents are now causing people to not share.
The balkanization of FUD is causing numerous problems, most importantly several not quite compatible variants of FUD. I have seen FUD from one company saying that since Linux is free it is worthless, and FUD from a different company saying that Linux is in fact more expensive to deploy than, say, Windows.
I think it is important that all producers of FUD work together so that needless incompatibilities can be avoided. It is of course important for vendors to be able to differentiate their FUD in the market, but this needs not cause incompatibility. I applaud the efforts that Microsoft does to provide basic FUD to VAR's such as ZD and NY Times, who are then able to add their spin, creating different but compatible FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardware companies have no business touching Linux anyway. Open the specs and let the Linux community develop the drivers. There is no way that can get them in legal trouble.
Allowing non-GPL kernel modules in the first place was a mistake. Fortunately it is very hard to develop a kernel module without using GPL'd code.
EEben YAYleh.
The H is silent.
Benny
Ericsson brings functionality at the cost of reliability. I have had 3 different so far, the two last being the GS18 and the SH888. Ericsson actually replaced the GS18's in my company with SH888's because they couldn't fix the GS18's.
Even the SH888's have software that feels like a late beta at best. The user interface is terrible. They turn themselves off constantly, whether because of software or hardware I don't know. Every time we get a phone repaired it fails less often for the next month or so, and then it's back to the daily crashes.
Just to top it off they have zero coverage in places where a Nokia 7110 reports "half" coverage and goes through flawlessly.
Never again Ericsson.
DAT used to be wonderful -- most 2GB drives work great. The newer high density drives are unreliable in my experience.
Backup "as we know it" on removable media is probably going away in the next 5-10 years. Retention of tapes, or copying old media to new ones is not practical. It is better to simply archive to hard drives, and their prices are falling much faster than tape prices.
Benny
National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei. Perhaps better known as the Nazis. And I do apologize if I spelled it wrong, my German isn't that great.
Benny
6009
Both SCSI and IDE drives these days hide defects. There is no technical reason why IDE drives are less reliable than SCSI drives. However, SCSI has lost the workstation market completely, so now only servers use SCSI. The data on server disks is generally more expensive to replace, and downtime there is more troublesome, so people are prepared to pay for quality. Some manufacturers have made two versions of mechanically identical drives, one IDE and one SCSI. Quantum Fireball is an example. That practice seems to be ending now that there is no such thing as a low end SCSI drive.
Anyway, there sure is not two heads on each platter as suggested by another poster. At one time Seagate made Barracuda drives that were able to read data off two platters in parallel. They dropped it in the later Barracudas when the increase in data density made it possible to make faster drives without this feature.
Another issue is that IDE drives are usually optimized to withstand getting started and stopped again and again by powersaving, whereas SCSI drives are optimized to run continuously for years.
Benny
If the planets were further from their suns, they would be undetectable to us. Only a very massive planet in a very small orbit makes a star wobble enough to let us detect it.
One can only hope that the fact that there are so many planets of the kind we can detect means that there are also many planets of the kind we cannot detect, such as Earthlike planets. Then again, one can also hope for the opposite.
Benny
Analog mobile phones have traditionally transmitted a signal containing less information over a wider channel at a lower frequency. The two first parts make reception resist errors better, and the last helps long distance reception.
There is no reason you could not make a digital phone system with the same properties, you just need to get a wide band at a low frequency. Even then the system probably would not support many users.
Patents were not invented in order to reward the inventor, or in order to make
They were created so that inventors would not keep their inventions secret, but instead have a way to share the inventions with others without losing the potential income from the invention. It is highly ironic that patents are now causing people to not share.
Benny
I'm concerned.
The balkanization of FUD is causing numerous problems, most importantly several not quite compatible variants of FUD. I have seen FUD from one company saying that since Linux is free it is worthless, and FUD from a different company saying that Linux is in fact more expensive to deploy than, say, Windows.
I think it is important that all producers of FUD work together so that needless incompatibilities can be avoided. It is of course important for vendors to be able to differentiate their FUD in the market, but this needs not cause incompatibility. I applaud the efforts that Microsoft does to provide basic FUD to VAR's such as ZD and NY Times, who are then able to add their spin, creating different but compatible FUD.
Benny
The "refrigerator hard drive" mentioned consists of many spindles in one case. Calling that a hard drive is a stretch.
Benny
It seems that with John Katz, Slashdot has its very own Jerry Pournelle.
And any dictator wants to avoid that. If anything, Iraq's internet infrastructure should be encouraged to grow.
Perhaps the bombers should be dropping computers and networking equipment instead?