RedHat have promised to keep supporting for 5 years after release. After that, it's when the whim strikes them. I think this is pretty good compared with other folk.
Offtopic, but.... the moderation system is so that the most interesting posts float to the top, not the most "correct". This post asks a valid question, and is therefore "Interesting". Uninformed != low score. (you're right, it's perhaps not "Insightful").
Also, most places have a rule where once you've bought 20% (or some similar figure) of the company, you have to attempt a full takeover bid. Ending up with 51% of a company in shares is a hard thing to do.
One of the things that upsets me about NAT is that it is making the most complicated technologies the standard one that everybody has in their home.
If you read your average TCP/IP textbook, how to set up a network with static IP addresses is finished by chapter 5. You don't get to NAT until chapter 30.
When you think about what NAT has to do, it's pretty complicated. Yet the most complicated technology is used by the most naive users on DSL. 10 years ago, you'd have to spend big money for anything that could do NAT- imagine what Cisco would have charged you! But now it comes in a box costing £200.
Maybe this is just a bad geek attitude, but home NAT routers are bit like handing out super-deadly chainsaws to DIY enthusiasts. I think home users should be encouraged to stick to hacksaws for now, and we should try and make an internet where all of the stuff is in the home is understandable by non-networking super-nerds.
I don't see why not. NAT is great for lots of machines that need to make outgoing connections, but if you want to turn your light bulb on and off remotely, this is a pain through NAT.
I don't see why I can't turn my heating on and off remotely through a webserver in the boiler, and see what's left in the fridge through my mobile phone etc.
This reminds me of a quote:
I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20 years ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors would eventually be in the millions, someone else said, "Where are they all going to go? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob!"
Years later, I went back to the same hotel. I noticed the room keys had been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors.
...at least to UK citizens. Remebember the BBC is already paid for by the license fee (a tax by any other name), so all of the programs made by the BBC _already belong to us_. It makes me a bit sad that the shops are full of DVDs of BBC shows retailing for £20 a go, when license payers have already paid for this show's creation.
1) This man is comparing the ease of working _lots_ of different OSs vs one OS- compiling programs etc. This isn't very fair- all UNIXes are not one big UNIX. You could create programs that can work on just Linux (or Solaris, or BSD or...) just as easily as Windows. The difficulty of portability comes when you want to port between more than one OS (duh). Show me a program that compiles easily on Windows and something else, and you might have a point.
2) The reason we have different OSs is because they are _different_. Otherwise there's no point. With the dawn of Linux etc., you can run one OS (even one distro) on many different architectures. So other OS have to do something different, by definition, to justify their existence.
3) All immature industries have many small companies, and as time goes by, they consolidate. We are beginning to see this with Linux distributions. I predict in 2 years there will be less distributions than there are now.
Software still needs to be paid for- programmers gotta eat. In fact the amount of open source that is written for money is quite significant- much of the kernel and mozilla/firefox/thunderbird etc. IBM have put much development into the kernel- hence nearly getting sued by SCO.
Most of the money worldwide in computing is in hiring people to solve your problem, not buying a lot of software- this is what IBM's huge consultancy arm does. These people are best served by great software being available for low prices, so IBM has a vested interest in free software being good.
The thing to remember about IBM is that the are the do-everything company. Where Sun, or Microsoft, or Apple etc. try and sell you one vision of the future, IBM invest in everything, and let you decide what you want.
Want to run Linux sir? No problem! Or Windows? No problem too. Proprietary UNIX? We've got it. Have we got some bizarre other operating systems? Have we ever!
We'll sell you an Intel server, a RISC based unix server, an AMD server, any bizarre server you like. Stuck in the 80s and can't decide whether you want fat clients or thin clients and a mainframe? No problem, we've got mainframes, we've got PCs (until recently, of course).
My point is that IBM may be investing $100m in Linux, but chances are, they are also investing $100m in everything else too. That's the IBM way- because they never stick all of their chips on one technology, they never win big (like Wintel has done), but they never lose their shirts either (like Sun looks like doing, and HP looks like doing with Itanic)
I think the problem in this case is that they wanted to use what they describe as "standard" Javascript (rather than standard CSS or standard HTML).
Trouble is, there isn't such a thing as standard javascript in the same way as there is with standard HTML, standard CSS. There is a javascript language standard, and the W3C has a few things to do with how languages in general should see HTML pages (the HTML DOM), but the actual mechanics of how the langugage and browser fit together has been developed between IE and Netscape as a matter of convention not standards- it's evolved over time.
The W3C is trying to resolve this with things like XML Events, which should reduce the amount of javascript code necessary to run interactive websites.
Alas, the BBC really does show "lawn-bowling match among seniors" as top-flight sports coverage, because they can no longer afford the rights to anything decent.
It seems to me that the whole open source vs free software thing is a sliding scale- kind of like the left/right axis in politics. On the far "left" is people like RMS- people who think the whole point is that the software is free and open. On the far "right" are people who only belive that open source is only better because it works better- that if private software worked better we should all do that. I think most FOSS enthusiasts lie somewhere on this line.
I think the problem is that RMS is of the opinion that anyone who isn't sitting on the farmost left tip of the line doesn't count and is morally repugnant. Most people even on slashdot will share a mix of some open source and some free software views, and I think that's important. You've got to be flexible and work with other people who may have different views in life. Personally I'm about 25% along from the left- I'm sad when a BSD-licensed program is taken, a little extra is added, and a proprietry software product produced (e.g. Posidon UML editor). On the other hand, I couldn't say hand-on-heart that I'd still be interested if my Linux computer didn't work very well.
Benchmarks are usually pretty unreliable and fudgeable anyway, but I think these TCO studies are the pits. I certainly don't believe them when Microsoft pays for studies to tell me that they are the best, so I don't see why I should pay any attention when an open source company (gasp) endorses open source solutions. Like all benchmarks, how good something is depends on circumstances individual to your situation, and TCO statistics surely must be more sensitive to individual circumstances than most.
Note for slashdot bias fans: "Linux wins again" is actually in the story in the link, rather than a bit of spin on the part of everyone's favourite news site:)
I think you should have included the words "Half Life 2" somewhere in it. That way we could all work out what you were on about with out reading the comments. The posting as written relied on you knowing who Valve were. Although this is news for nerds, you have to be a particular type of nerd to understand this posting as it is!
that desktop searching will be added to Firefox, just that they are considering making Firefox work with other people's desktop searching software (such as Google's).
I hate to break this to you, but all they seem to be talking about is running a load of proprietary rubbish that they've already got on Linux rather than Solaris, Windows etc.. I don't see "consolidating on (proprietary) Novell stuff" on Linux (as opposed to "using more open standards and open software") to be a great step forwards really.
Like SVG for graphics, I think XForms is not only a useful concept if the browser supports it. I like the idea that I can currently create SVG on the server, render it on the server and send it to the browser as a PNG. I believe that there are currently products and projects available that if you have a set of XForms, allow you to turn them into a standard CGI-like application- all of the work of transforming into HTML etc. is done on the server.
I hope (cross-fingers) that in the future that I can send the original SVG/XForms/whatever to browsers that support it, and render on the server for everything else.
It's also good writing things using standards compliant products. I've currently just moved a website that relied on XSLT a lot from one software toolkit to another. This wouldn't be possible if I'd used a non-standard technology (in the sense that it worked with one toolkit only).
Does anyone else think all of this patent-busting might be counter productive? The real goal is surely that no one can own patents on this rubbish (software, websites etc.)- prior art or no prior art.
If these rather ridiculous patents are thrown out, doesn't that strengthen the argument of those who say- "Software patents do work! Here are some bad patents and, look, they were thrown out! The system heals itself. Lets have lots more patents"
Slashdot Mirror
RedHat have promised to keep supporting for 5 years after release. After that, it's when the whim strikes them. I think this is pretty good compared with other folk.
Offtopic, but.... the moderation system is so that the most interesting posts float to the top, not the most "correct". This post asks a valid question, and is therefore "Interesting". Uninformed != low score. (you're right, it's perhaps not "Insightful").
Also, most places have a rule where once you've bought 20% (or some similar figure) of the company, you have to attempt a full takeover bid. Ending up with 51% of a company in shares is a hard thing to do.
If you read your average TCP/IP textbook, how to set up a network with static IP addresses is finished by chapter 5. You don't get to NAT until chapter 30.
When you think about what NAT has to do, it's pretty complicated. Yet the most complicated technology is used by the most naive users on DSL. 10 years ago, you'd have to spend big money for anything that could do NAT- imagine what Cisco would have charged you! But now it comes in a box costing £200.
Maybe this is just a bad geek attitude, but home NAT routers are bit like handing out super-deadly chainsaws to DIY enthusiasts. I think home users should be encouraged to stick to hacksaws for now, and we should try and make an internet where all of the stuff is in the home is understandable by non-networking super-nerds.
I don't see why I can't turn my heating on and off remotely through a webserver in the boiler, and see what's left in the fridge through my mobile phone etc.
This reminds me of a quote:
I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20 years ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors would eventually be in the millions, someone else said, "Where are they all going to go? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob!"
Years later, I went back to the same hotel. I noticed the room keys had been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors.
There was a computer in every doorknob.
-- Danny Hillis
I meant "a service like this for all of their programs". Sorry.
...at least to UK citizens. Remebember the BBC is already paid for by the license fee (a tax by any other name), so all of the programs made by the BBC _already belong to us_. It makes me a bit sad that the shops are full of DVDs of BBC shows retailing for £20 a go, when license payers have already paid for this show's creation.
Posidon UML Editor
WU-BLAST
Netscape (?)
StarOffice (??)
And the star prize winner is....
Mac OS X!1) This man is comparing the ease of working _lots_ of different OSs vs one OS- compiling programs etc. This isn't very fair- all UNIXes are not one big UNIX. You could create programs that can work on just Linux (or Solaris, or BSD or ...) just as easily as Windows. The difficulty of portability comes when you want to port between more than one OS (duh). Show me a program that compiles easily on Windows and something else, and you might have a point.
2) The reason we have different OSs is because they are _different_. Otherwise there's no point. With the dawn of Linux etc., you can run one OS (even one distro) on many different architectures. So other OS have to do something different, by definition, to justify their existence.
3) All immature industries have many small companies, and as time goes by, they consolidate. We are beginning to see this with Linux distributions. I predict in 2 years there will be less distributions than there are now.
According to the WHATWG specification, their work isn't intendeded to replace XForms. So I think this entire ZDNet article is a troll.
Software still needs to be paid for- programmers gotta eat. In fact the amount of open source that is written for money is quite significant- much of the kernel and mozilla/firefox/thunderbird etc. IBM have put much development into the kernel- hence nearly getting sued by SCO. Most of the money worldwide in computing is in hiring people to solve your problem, not buying a lot of software- this is what IBM's huge consultancy arm does. These people are best served by great software being available for low prices, so IBM has a vested interest in free software being good.
The thing to remember about IBM is that the are the do-everything company. Where Sun, or Microsoft, or Apple etc. try and sell you one vision of the future, IBM invest in everything, and let you decide what you want.
Want to run Linux sir? No problem! Or Windows? No problem too. Proprietary UNIX? We've got it. Have we got some bizarre other operating systems? Have we ever!
We'll sell you an Intel server, a RISC based unix server, an AMD server, any bizarre server you like. Stuck in the 80s and can't decide whether you want fat clients or thin clients and a mainframe? No problem, we've got mainframes, we've got PCs (until recently, of course).
My point is that IBM may be investing $100m in Linux, but chances are, they are also investing $100m in everything else too. That's the IBM way- because they never stick all of their chips on one technology, they never win big (like Wintel has done), but they never lose their shirts either (like Sun looks like doing, and HP looks like doing with Itanic)
I think the problem in this case is that they wanted to use what they describe as "standard" Javascript (rather than standard CSS or standard HTML).
Trouble is, there isn't such a thing as standard javascript in the same way as there is with standard HTML, standard CSS. There is a javascript language standard, and the W3C has a few things to do with how languages in general should see HTML pages (the HTML DOM), but the actual mechanics of how the langugage and browser fit together has been developed between IE and Netscape as a matter of convention not standards- it's evolved over time.
The W3C is trying to resolve this with things like XML Events, which should reduce the amount of javascript code necessary to run interactive websites.
To be honest, I don't think it matters who "owns" it. Just because you own something, doesn't mean you can control absolutely what happens to it.
Alas, the BBC really does show "lawn-bowling match among seniors" as top-flight sports coverage, because they can no longer afford the rights to anything decent.
This was in the Economist two weeks ago, and in other IT sources (e.g. the Register) a week ago. This is "Olds for Nerds".
I think the problem is that RMS is of the opinion that anyone who isn't sitting on the farmost left tip of the line doesn't count and is morally repugnant. Most people even on slashdot will share a mix of some open source and some free software views, and I think that's important. You've got to be flexible and work with other people who may have different views in life. Personally I'm about 25% along from the left- I'm sad when a BSD-licensed program is taken, a little extra is added, and a proprietry software product produced (e.g. Posidon UML editor). On the other hand, I couldn't say hand-on-heart that I'd still be interested if my Linux computer didn't work very well.
Note for slashdot bias fans: "Linux wins again" is actually in the story in the link, rather than a bit of spin on the part of everyone's favourite news site :)
I think you should have included the words "Half Life 2" somewhere in it. That way we could all work out what you were on about with out reading the comments. The posting as written relied on you knowing who Valve were. Although this is news for nerds, you have to be a particular type of nerd to understand this posting as it is!
that desktop searching will be added to Firefox, just that they are considering making Firefox work with other people's desktop searching software (such as Google's).
I hate to break this to you, but all they seem to be talking about is running a load of proprietary rubbish that they've already got on Linux rather than Solaris, Windows etc.. I don't see "consolidating on (proprietary) Novell stuff" on Linux (as opposed to "using more open standards and open software") to be a great step forwards really.
I now use AxKit . And there is caching, so the transform only happens once - the web sees the same transform unless the source document has changed.
Like SVG for graphics, I think XForms is not only a useful concept if the browser supports it. I like the idea that I can currently create SVG on the server, render it on the server and send it to the browser as a PNG. I believe that there are currently products and projects available that if you have a set of XForms, allow you to turn them into a standard CGI-like application- all of the work of transforming into HTML etc. is done on the server.
I hope (cross-fingers) that in the future that I can send the original SVG/XForms/whatever to browsers that support it, and render on the server for everything else.
It's also good writing things using standards compliant products. I've currently just moved a website that relied on XSLT a lot from one software toolkit to another. This wouldn't be possible if I'd used a non-standard technology (in the sense that it worked with one toolkit only).
Does anyone else think all of this patent-busting might be counter productive? The real goal is surely that no one can own patents on this rubbish (software, websites etc.)- prior art or no prior art. If these rather ridiculous patents are thrown out, doesn't that strengthen the argument of those who say- "Software patents do work! Here are some bad patents and, look, they were thrown out! The system heals itself. Lets have lots more patents"