they study crypto a lot and have a vested interest in it
From this it should follow that we listen to them, not that we dismiss what they say!
I'm glad that the construction engineers who design the bridges we ride over "study [bridges] a lot", and aviation engineers who designed the plane I am about to ride on "study [planes] a lot" and you bet they "have a vested interest" in safety.
Praise the experts who "study a lot", for without them, we'd all be dead.:-)
Yes, I agree that the economics of commodity web hosting push things in the direction you describe.
But waste is certainly rampant in internal installations. I have done some work recently with a company that configures Dell servers as part of their total product installation, and they use five or seven boxes where one (or 2 for failover) would be plenty. Not a thought given to consolidation of services. Plus the additional irony that, in a market where availability is a high requirement, they chose the flakiest O/S on the market.
Actually I am guilty of it myself, because I prefer to colocate and administer an overpowered dedicated box than buy a managed service...
Not to overlook the fact that the Lisa actually had slots (!) and complete, documented environments for application developers?
The Lisa's failure had less to do with being "closed" -- I cannot see any respect in which it is more "closed" than the first Macs; it was certainly more powerful -- than with being overpriced, largely an artefact of over-engineering and Jobs' ambitions for it (yes, it was supposed to revolutionise the PC world -- and did, just not in the way it was hoped). The NeXT recapitulated some of this hubris, less spectacularly. Both are technical masterpieces.
The Mac was developed by a different team with very different priorities. The "openly" comprehensive 1983 draft of "Inside Macintosh" is indicative of Apple's encouraging attitude to developers with that product line.
This closed/open business is a red herring. The Mac Mini, by all accounts a good seller, is no more "open" than any of those machines.
Most server hardware is massively overspecified. 90% of websites could run on a 486 and nobody would notice a difference - assuming, of course, that you are running a sane, frugal (UNIX family) O/S.
Make enormous energy savings simply by consolidating services...
Stop buying new servers and extend the lifetime of older ones. (Account for the energy costs of manufacture as well as running costs.)
Your average linux user can usually get just about any distro to 95%. You just never get that last thing (or two) working
Yes, that is often the way it goes, so I guess it's nice to see one manufacturer stepping up to the plate. I confess it took me two or three hours to get X11 (x.org) working at full 1280x800 resolution on the Inspiron 6000. I've sometimes spent days on 3rd party wireless devices. That sounds bad compared to Windoze, until you remember that if you have a problem with a 'doze driver, you have no recourse but to wait for an upgrade. You're only ahead if it works "out of the box".
Until the Linux market grows to a respectable size, and challenges M$' cursed monopoly, manufacturers are going to have little motivation to help solve the problem. (Market share will ensure support.) Maybe HP's initiative is a glimmer of hope...
But in the end it's only a half measure. For instance, there is no recourse if you find a bug in the driver, or you need a new feature, etc. We still need to lobby manufacturers for open source drivers or at least open documentation...
Had Apple not decided to turn their backs on the great original idea of embracing third party development when they went the route of Mac/Lisa
You could not be more wrong if you meant 3rd party application software development. Despite some patchiness in the 90s, which other greybeards can recount, Apple has generally been very pro-developer, and remains so today.
You also exaggerate about closing the hardware of the Macintosh. In fact, all they really did was close the case and leave out slots (like the Mac Mini). Slots came back within 3 years of the Mac's introduction, but even the so-called "closed" Macs had a full range of upgrades and peripherals. The fact is, slots did not make sense for those first models - yet every port on the original Mac was used to augment functionality and despite the limited space there were also many upgrades - RAM, CPU, coprocessors, video cards for external screens, disks - available inside the case.
Supporting third party developers has been a fundamental credo of Apple from its very foundation; they know their survival depends on it.
If requested, HP will provide a CD-ROM with a customized and Debian-based Ubuntu Linux free of charge....
According to HP in Europe, the Ubuntu Linux project is currently limited to EMEA - a region that tends to be more receptive to Linux than for example the US - and aims to demonstrate that a Linux desktop can be easily transferred to a notebook....
Is that such a novelty? I was able to get Gentoo and 2.6 kernel running on a Dell Inspiron 6000 without too much trouble (excluding the Dell wireless LAN however).
The company was not able to say, if the program will be extended to the US in the future.
If HP contributes their drivers to the mainline, that will be a moot point, won't it. Unfortunately the FA doesn't make clear if that is going to happen.
Once you have a checksum for linux-2.6.0.tar.bz2, why calculate it again?
What's different about rsync is that it does not ordinarily use a single file checksum (and therefore copy whole files if changed). Instead, to save bandwidth, it uses a more sophisticated system to ensure that only changed parts of a file are transmitted - and it detects changed parts by comparing (many) checksums, I believe. The report sums it up like this:
The algorithm identifies parts of the source file which are identical to some part of the destination file, and only sends those parts which cannot be matched in this way. Effectively, the algorithm computes a set of differences without having both files on the same machine.
(Disclaimer, I have only skimmed the rsync report and that was some time ago, but I am a longtime and happy rsync user.)
they have violated the terms of the license, and are therefore in violation of the law
I think you are quite right. I don't use Windoze enough to be aware whether they're in compliance or not. Breaking the law would be wholly consistent and expected behaviour from our favourite monopolist.
maybe you could ask the guys who wrote the BSD stack
You highlight the beauty of copyright: The author gets to choose the license, so the BSD authors are presumably quite content.
If they hadn't wanted that to happen, they would have chosen the GPL or a license that forbids such use. (And if the GPL didn't exist, they would be forced to invent it.)
This is exactly what you do when you are a (convicted) monopoly with $40 billion in the bank. Why is anyone surprised? Something tells me they're not out to bat for our team (the human race).
MS is basically flicking off the EU while saying "we did what you asked".
Actually, I believe it's a "low cost" version which is meant to entice "developing" countries to choose some version of Windoze instead of Linux. Yeah! That will work: Bring out a version that's EVEN MORE CRIPPLED than the expensive version, and hope the poor saps don't notice the free, reliable & fully-featured operating systems legally downloadable everywhere.
Does M$ think the rest of the world is that stupid?
This never looks good to customers and is bad advertising in large traffic areas.
Except that the vast majority of the M$-using public, in some variant of Stockholm Syndrome, have come to expect such failure as normal and everyday. It just works, indeed. M$ marketing department putting the Big Lie principle to work.
The cost of habituating society to mediocrity on such a scale is incalculable... The irony is that the jets that fly in and out of the airports are built to an entirely different engineering standard, and the computing industry in general had better wake up before it's too late.
On the other hand, maybe I would be happier if I just had the same low expectations.
The total lack of usability progress in the vast majority of OSS projects... These bounties for me are missing the point
Isn't the idea of a bounty perfectly consistent with the points you make or imply:
1. The UI needs improvement.
2. I {can't be bothered}/{don't know how} to improve it myself.
One obvious response: Offer an incentive to make the necessary improvements: A bounty! Seems like you're describing the premise and failing to see a fitting solution.
You also omit mention of the massive negatives associated with taking on a program like Photoshop, or any proprietary package. (Having used Adobe products for 20 years in commercial graphic arts, I am pretty intimate with the downside...)
One obvious and real advantage of open source packages, with or without bounties: You can make bug reports, even if you're not interested in actually fixing a problem yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Why did I immediately think he meant toilet bowls? -- and that it had already happened?
From this it should follow that we listen to them, not that we dismiss what they say!
I'm glad that the construction engineers who design the bridges we ride over "study [bridges] a lot", and aviation engineers who designed the plane I am about to ride on "study [planes] a lot" and you bet they "have a vested interest" in safety.
Praise the experts who "study a lot", for without them, we'd all be dead. :-)
But waste is certainly rampant in internal installations. I have done some work recently with a company that configures Dell servers as part of their total product installation, and they use five or seven boxes where one (or 2 for failover) would be plenty. Not a thought given to consolidation of services. Plus the additional irony that, in a market where availability is a high requirement, they chose the flakiest O/S on the market.
Actually I am guilty of it myself, because I prefer to colocate and administer an overpowered dedicated box than buy a managed service...
The Lisa's failure had less to do with being "closed" -- I cannot see any respect in which it is more "closed" than the first Macs; it was certainly more powerful -- than with being overpriced, largely an artefact of over-engineering and Jobs' ambitions for it (yes, it was supposed to revolutionise the PC world -- and did, just not in the way it was hoped). The NeXT recapitulated some of this hubris, less spectacularly. Both are technical masterpieces.
The Mac was developed by a different team with very different priorities. The "openly" comprehensive 1983 draft of "Inside Macintosh" is indicative of Apple's encouraging attitude to developers with that product line.
This closed/open business is a red herring. The Mac Mini, by all accounts a good seller, is no more "open" than any of those machines.
Anyone? Bueller?
Anyone know what the meeting was actually about, then, since everyone seems agreed that an acquisition is pretty obviously unthinkable?
Make enormous energy savings simply by consolidating services...
Stop buying new servers and extend the lifetime of older ones. (Account for the energy costs of manufacture as well as running costs.)
Until the Linux market grows to a respectable size, and challenges M$' cursed monopoly, manufacturers are going to have little motivation to help solve the problem. (Market share will ensure support.) Maybe HP's initiative is a glimmer of hope...
But in the end it's only a half measure. For instance, there is no recourse if you find a bug in the driver, or you need a new feature, etc. We still need to lobby manufacturers for open source drivers or at least open documentation...
You also exaggerate about closing the hardware of the Macintosh. In fact, all they really did was close the case and leave out slots (like the Mac Mini). Slots came back within 3 years of the Mac's introduction, but even the so-called "closed" Macs had a full range of upgrades and peripherals. The fact is, slots did not make sense for those first models - yet every port on the original Mac was used to augment functionality and despite the limited space there were also many upgrades - RAM, CPU, coprocessors, video cards for external screens, disks - available inside the case.
Supporting third party developers has been a fundamental credo of Apple from its very foundation; they know their survival depends on it.
What's different about rsync is that it does not ordinarily use a single file checksum (and therefore copy whole files if changed). Instead, to save bandwidth, it uses a more sophisticated system to ensure that only changed parts of a file are transmitted - and it detects changed parts by comparing (many) checksums, I believe. The report sums it up like this:
(Disclaimer, I have only skimmed the rsync report and that was some time ago, but I am a longtime and happy rsync user.)
they can't say that TigerDirect failed to protect their TM.
I think you are quite right. I don't use Windoze enough to be aware whether they're in compliance or not. Breaking the law would be wholly consistent and expected behaviour from our favourite monopolist.
You highlight the beauty of copyright: The author gets to choose the license, so the BSD authors are presumably quite content.
If they hadn't wanted that to happen, they would have chosen the GPL or a license that forbids such use. (And if the GPL didn't exist, they would be forced to invent it.)
I'll do it for double those prices!
"JAP makes it possible to surf the internet anonymously and unobservably."
Canada's only a short hop north guys! They'll take almost anyone :-)
Your handle is snorklewacker, for the love of Gatsby. Why should we listen to YOU?
This is exactly what you do when you are a (convicted) monopoly with $40 billion in the bank. Why is anyone surprised? Something tells me they're not out to bat for our team (the human race).
Does M$ think the rest of the world is that stupid?
Except that the vast majority of the M$-using public, in some variant of Stockholm Syndrome, have come to expect such failure as normal and everyday. It just works, indeed. M$ marketing department putting the Big Lie principle to work.
The cost of habituating society to mediocrity on such a scale is incalculable... The irony is that the jets that fly in and out of the airports are built to an entirely different engineering standard, and the computing industry in general had better wake up before it's too late.
On the other hand, maybe I would be happier if I just had the same low expectations.
"hey man, it won't boot"
"fine, hand me the linux cd"
Isn't the idea of a bounty perfectly consistent with the points you make or imply:
1. The UI needs improvement.
2. I {can't be bothered}/{don't know how} to improve it myself.
One obvious response: Offer an incentive to make the necessary improvements: A bounty! Seems like you're describing the premise and failing to see a fitting solution.
You also omit mention of the massive negatives associated with taking on a program like Photoshop, or any proprietary package. (Having used Adobe products for 20 years in commercial graphic arts, I am pretty intimate with the downside...)
One obvious and real advantage of open source packages, with or without bounties: You can make bug reports, even if you're not interested in actually fixing a problem yourself.