One poster likes VisualAge, another thinks it sucks.
One poster likes Visual Cafe, another thinks it sucks.
Some folks think emacs is a great IDE, some think these folks are on GnuCrack.
The point is, the more IDEs we have for Linux, the more of these people can work on Linux, and the better off Linux is.
Diversity of uses and users is Linux's strengh; diversity of apps is what we need to get even stronger. Even if you think that newest FooBar Visual Widget Toolkit +- sucks, it's making Linux that much more appealing to people who don't think that it sucks, and we all get a bit stronger.
Freedom of choice. It's that good thing, remember? --G
(1) isn't the bad guys, and (2) probably will decide to ignore wiretapping concerns in protocol definitions
The question the IETF is debating the answer to is, roughly, "should wiretapping laws (of varoius countries) be considered a factor in protocol designs." It's a good and important question to ask and folks shouldn't demonize them for asking it.
That having been said, the answer will probably -- quite sensibly -- be "no." --G
Since many of the Itsy folk were doing USB on BSD on ARM, I wouldn't be surprised if this were the same -- the Itsy could easily have been made small enough, it was already low-power, and then with a daughtercard tacked on it could do this sort of thing trivially (and fairly inexpensively).
So I'd guess that it's some species or variant of BSD.
Nobody doing embedded control work is anything but openly contemptuous of Wince; I doubt the folks at these (ex-DIGITAL) research labs would even think hard about that direction. --G
Cygnus has been in trouble recently -- the outcome oftheir "name the company" contest suggests that they weren't financially strong enough to IPO. Getting acquired makes good sense there.
RedHat, by contrast, has the advantage of a delusionally high market cap that is buying power today but could be gone the moment the market comes to its senses. Making an acquisition makes good sense.
What it does signal is an agressive position for RedHat -- Cygnus isn't a Linux company, their expertise is more general Un*x and IDE/compatibility stuff. That jives with RedHat trying to push Linux as the Un*x of the future -- they need to build or buy more expertise in that direction.
In my view -- this would be good for RedHat, good for Cyngus, good for Linux, and probably seriously bad news for all the other Unices (eunuchs?) on the block. --G
Um, not to pick offtopic nits, but I think you've got it backwards:
"Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven unto men [Mt 12:31]."
Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the _only_ sin that God does not forgive.
Blasphemy against God is forgiven. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is not.
Um, not to pick offtopic nits, but I think you've got it backwards:
"Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven unto men [Mt 12:31]."
Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the _only_ sin that God does not forgive. --G [apostate, damned, and proud]
Three years ago everything had to be e-this or e-that. eCommerce, eZines, eBusiness.
Today, everything is i. iMac, iToaster, iBook, iPlanet.
I predict that in three years everything will be o. Well have oData and oMarkets and oTaxes.
Just as in the previous cases, very few people will actually remember what the prepended vowel is supposed to mean. But they'll buy the product anyway.
Mmm, feel them flames of competition. Mmm, barbeque!
Serious multigigabuck competition will do fun things for the face of the Linux world. Heck, it'll do fun things for the face of the whole bloody world.
Lotta things gonna change, lotta people going to be called the {microsoft | Stalin | nazis | RIAA} of {Linux | Open Source | Free Software | Unixen | hackers} first, but we'll get there soon.
Capitalism is coming to Linux? Hell, Linux is coming to Capitalism! --G
Thanks a bunch for all the info (The geek/Linux community at its best -- you can always get two nigh-irreconcileable disagreeing opinions -- wouldn't have it any other way:) ). I'll check this against prices and start some 3d cookin'. --G
I've been planning for awhile to get a new video card, as my old one is getting on in years. What are the decent 3d cards these days that Linux supports and that have a reasonably friendly/open set of drivers?
I keep reading these stories about how this or that company is behaving obnoxiously, this or that company is suing this or that other company over some obscure chunk of IP, this or that set of drivers exists but is binary-only. Could someone summarize the state of the market?
With profuse apologies for my state of ignorance, --G
As Linux has already demonstrated, CLI and GUI are both necessary. You wouldn't want to GIMP from a command line and you wouldn't want to do anything involving redirects and pipes through a GUI.
What we need is a migration from textfile-only configuration files to textfile-or-gui-generated configuration files. Mom (or even a one-time techie user) can toss together a configuration for Foowm from a graphical utility, whereas Joe Superhacker can edit the raw bits by hand with SQUID if he wants to.
In the end, GUI vs. CLI is a question of what makes sense, and programmers have as much of a feel for usability in this regard as anyone else because an interface should appeal to the lazy (give me the features I want easy and nearby at the toplevel, complex thigs buried further down, and even a geek needs help sometimes).
Where this breaks down is in configuration, and that's where unixen all lose -- my wm should have a graphical configuration utility in addition to its.foowmrc or whatever file. Those graphical config utilities are what we need to be aiming at today. They don't have to be as universal or expressive as the textfiles, but they have to be there.
The time-to-market argument certainly fails for novel wacky stuff in the drivers. But as ESR notes, if you do have clever proprietary novel wacky stuff it belongs in the ROMs on the board. If you've got clever wacky stuff that can only live at the driver level, release interface specs and let other folks write less clever drivers anyway.
The more basic argument he is making is: Hardware vendors don't want to be in the software business, particular in the boring part of it that's about porting drivers to x, y, z, and w random architecture. If they open the specs and other people can do the porting work for them. There's no reason that has to touch on any wacky proprietary innovation of theirs.
Fundamentally, having proprietary stuff at the interface level is silly. More to the point, it doesn't much happen. That, I think, is the basic argument here.
That defensive do-this-or-you're-a-moron tone isn't going to make any friends in the corporate world. Is ESR beginning to lose his temper a bit? Understandable given the total idocy level out there, but that appendix could use a bit of calming down.
One comment for the author: You have some credentials, but you make the reader infer them, and even that's hard until you talk about your own experience three quarters of the way down. How about front-loading your credentials on this, so that some corporate type knows who you are and why your opinion might be well-informed?
I wonder if these folks even realize the implications... forget embedded (win32 is a bad idea for the embedded market anyway), think emulation -- win32 drivers and applications running with no overhead under any OS you like.
If this is legal (and you can bet MS will be trying hard to prevent it from being) then we may just have hit the point where even OS-specific software and drivers aren't OS-specific any more.
Of course the obvious MS response is to immediately make some incompatible API changes that break this new micro-OS, and patent them so far up their asses that a programmer couldn't extract them without reaching down their mouths with a plumber's snake. We'll have to see how the legal side of this evolves.
Free software is still capitalistic
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
(and that ain't a bad thing)
The basic notion of capitalism is, you can't make money without some sort of exchange with someone, and that person probably got something they wanted out of it too, which means the more money gets made, the better things get.
Now intellectual property, copyrights, patents, and the whole world of proprietary stuff, that's a way to make a buck but we need to remember that it's only one way. It's about angling for a bigger slice of the pie.
Free software is about aiming for a bigger pie, which is fine capitalism, too. Capitalism doesn't have to be about competition; cooperation is just as good a way to make a buck and you're more likely to like what you see in the mirror in the morning, too.
The only time it stops being capitalism is when people start dragging the lawyers in. And the record shows, that's much more likely to be the corps and the purveyors of closed source. From that point of view, free software is better capitalism than most of the capitalists anyway. There's more to capitalism than "whoever dies with the most toys, wins."
My experience has been that if you're dealing with an HR person, you've _already_ lost the battle. They'll always be more interested in buzzwords than in skills, because they're hiring for things they don't understand.
Unless you're talking to someone in engineering or smarter, the person you're talking to isn't in the market for a real geek. --G
Most of the history of large computer systems since UNIX has been of the form, "Company x needs to do something like UNIX. Company x tries to build something like UNIX that is not UNIX. Comapny x fails dramatically." That Linux is a copy of UNIX that works makes it a solid and useful piece of work.
AN operating system should provide, basically, memory management, device addressing, process scheduling, and pipes. The rest is garnish. UNIX gave us good working models for all of those, and Linux has properly followed that lead.
This puts it miles ahead of Microsoft, which has yet to do a reasonable job of any of the criteria mentioned above. You can do a lot worse than making a working, free copy of UNIX. --G
Well, Rob, you'll need a new icon for the new Holy Trinity here. Who knows, in five years maybe they'll be the new MSFT. The market seems to need a 500-pound gorilla, and once Redmond is out of the picture someone else will take its place. Sounds like these folks want to be that.
This year, they're the good guys. Next year maybe they'll be the bad guys. Ah well, if we didn't want excitement and constant change, we wouldn't be working in technology, eh?
Seems to me the ruling isn't about anonymity at all -- that defamation isn't a free speech right is nothing new. That any records that exist can be subpoena'd can be nothing new. The solution -- don't retain subpoena'able records -- isn't anything new either.
It's not quite there (no Java 1.1 support) but this is a huge step in the right direction. Once again I feel vindicated in forgetting all the C++ I ever learned.
I just hope that this doesn't lead to java forking. It's already started (CommAPI for instance) and architecture-dependent java variants could really screw up the big opportunity for architecture-independent programming.
Slashdot Mirror
One poster likes VisualAge, another thinks it sucks.
One poster likes Visual Cafe, another thinks it sucks.
Some folks think emacs is a great IDE, some think these folks are on GnuCrack.
The point is, the more IDEs we have for Linux, the more of these people can work on Linux, and the better off Linux is.
Diversity of uses and users is Linux's strengh; diversity of apps is what we need to get even stronger. Even if you think that newest FooBar Visual Widget Toolkit +- sucks, it's making Linux that much more appealing to people who don't think that it sucks, and we all get a bit stronger.
Freedom of choice. It's that good thing, remember?
--G
Graphic ideas for a new "Intellectual Property" Slashdot section:
A brain with a padlock on/through it.
One of those zombies from Night of the Living Dead.
A rubber-stamp and a pair of handcuffs.
--G
The IETF, contrary to many posts here,
(1) isn't the bad guys, and
(2) probably will decide to ignore wiretapping concerns in protocol definitions
The question the IETF is debating the answer to is, roughly, "should wiretapping laws (of varoius countries) be considered a factor in protocol designs." It's a good and important question to ask and folks shouldn't demonize them for asking it.
That having been said, the answer will probably -- quite sensibly -- be "no."
--G
Since many of the Itsy folk were doing USB on BSD on ARM, I wouldn't be surprised if this were the same -- the Itsy could easily have been made small enough, it was already low-power, and then with a daughtercard tacked on it could do this sort of thing trivially (and fairly inexpensively).
So I'd guess that it's some species or variant of BSD.
Nobody doing embedded control work is anything but openly contemptuous of Wince; I doubt the folks at these (ex-DIGITAL) research labs would even think hard about that direction.
--G
Cygnus has been in trouble recently -- the outcome oftheir "name the company" contest suggests that they weren't financially strong enough to IPO. Getting acquired makes good sense there.
RedHat, by contrast, has the advantage of a delusionally high market cap that is buying power today but could be gone the moment the market comes to its senses. Making an acquisition makes good sense.
What it does signal is an agressive position for RedHat -- Cygnus isn't a Linux company, their expertise is more general Un*x and IDE/compatibility stuff. That jives with RedHat trying to push Linux as the Un*x of the future -- they need to build or buy more expertise in that direction.
In my view -- this would be good for RedHat, good for Cyngus, good for Linux, and probably seriously bad news for all the other Unices (eunuchs?) on the block.
--G
Blasphemy against God is forgiven.
Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is not.
Um, not to pick offtopic nits, but I think you've got it backwards:
"Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven unto men [Mt 12:31]."
Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the _only_ sin that God does not forgive.
--G [apostate, damned, and proud]
Blasphemy against God is forgiven.
Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is not.
Um, not to pick offtopic nits, but I think you've got it backwards:
"Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven unto men [Mt 12:31]."
Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the _only_ sin that God does not forgive.
--G [apostate, damned, and proud]
Great -- biology has finally manged to successfully compile and statically link from source.
Now when can I get an egcs module to handle dna sequences?
--G
Three years ago everything had to be e-this or e-that. eCommerce, eZines, eBusiness.
Today, everything is i. iMac, iToaster, iBook, iPlanet.
I predict that in three years everything will be o. Well have oData and oMarkets and oTaxes.
Just as in the previous cases, very few people will actually remember what the prepended vowel is supposed to mean. But they'll buy the product anyway.
-- The oG (tm)
Mmm, feel them flames of competition. Mmm, barbeque!
Serious multigigabuck competition will do fun things for the face of the Linux world. Heck, it'll do fun things for the face of the whole bloody world.
Lotta things gonna change, lotta people going to be called the {microsoft | Stalin | nazis | RIAA} of {Linux | Open Source | Free Software | Unixen | hackers} first, but we'll get there soon.
Capitalism is coming to Linux? Hell, Linux is coming to Capitalism!
--G
Thanks a bunch for all the info (The geek/Linux community at its best -- you can always get two nigh-irreconcileable disagreeing opinions -- wouldn't have it any other way :) ). I'll check this against prices and start some 3d cookin'.
--G
I've been planning for awhile to get a new video card, as my old one is getting on in years. What are the decent 3d cards these days that Linux supports and that have a reasonably friendly/open set of drivers?
I keep reading these stories about how this or that company is behaving obnoxiously, this or that company is suing this or that other company over some obscure chunk of IP, this or that set of drivers exists but is binary-only. Could someone summarize the state of the market?
With profuse apologies for my state of ignorance,
--G
As Linux has already demonstrated, CLI and GUI are both necessary. You wouldn't want to GIMP from a command line and you wouldn't want to do anything involving redirects and pipes through a GUI.
.foowmrc or whatever file. Those graphical config utilities are what we need to be aiming at today. They don't have to be as universal or expressive as the textfiles, but they have to be there.
What we need is a migration from textfile-only configuration files to textfile-or-gui-generated configuration files. Mom (or even a one-time techie user) can toss together a configuration for Foowm from a graphical utility, whereas Joe Superhacker can edit the raw bits by hand with SQUID if he wants to.
In the end, GUI vs. CLI is a question of what makes sense, and programmers have as much of a feel for usability in this regard as anyone else because an interface should appeal to the lazy (give me the features I want easy and nearby at the toplevel, complex thigs buried further down, and even a geek needs help sometimes).
Where this breaks down is in configuration, and that's where unixen all lose -- my wm should have a graphical configuration utility in addition to its
The time-to-market argument certainly fails for novel wacky stuff in the drivers. But as ESR notes, if you do have clever proprietary novel wacky stuff it belongs in the ROMs on the board. If you've got clever wacky stuff that can only live at the driver level, release interface specs and let other folks write less clever drivers anyway.
The more basic argument he is making is: Hardware vendors don't want to be in the software business, particular in the boring part of it that's about porting drivers to x, y, z, and w random architecture. If they open the specs and other people can do the porting work for them. There's no reason that has to touch on any wacky proprietary innovation of theirs.
Fundamentally, having proprietary stuff at the interface level is silly. More to the point, it doesn't much happen. That, I think, is the basic argument here.
That defensive do-this-or-you're-a-moron tone isn't going to make any friends in the corporate world. Is ESR beginning to lose his temper a bit? Understandable given the total idocy level out there, but that appendix could use a bit of calming down.
One comment for the author: You have some credentials, but you make the reader infer them, and even that's hard until you talk about your own experience three quarters of the way down. How about front-loading your credentials on this, so that some corporate type knows who you are and why your opinion might be well-informed?
Just a suggestion.
I wonder if these folks even realize the implications... forget embedded (win32 is a bad idea for the embedded market anyway), think emulation -- win32 drivers and applications running with no overhead under any OS you like.
If this is legal (and you can bet MS will be trying hard to prevent it from being) then we may just have hit the point where even OS-specific software and drivers aren't OS-specific any more.
Of course the obvious MS response is to immediately make some incompatible API changes that break this new micro-OS, and patent them so far up their asses that a programmer couldn't extract them without reaching down their mouths with a plumber's snake. We'll have to see how the legal side of this evolves.
(and that ain't a bad thing)
The basic notion of capitalism is, you can't make money without some sort of exchange with someone, and that person probably got something they wanted out of it too, which means the more money gets made, the better things get.
Now intellectual property, copyrights, patents, and the whole world of proprietary stuff, that's a way to make a buck but we need to remember that it's only one way. It's about angling for a bigger slice of the pie.
Free software is about aiming for a bigger pie, which is fine capitalism, too. Capitalism doesn't have to be about competition; cooperation is just as good a way to make a buck and you're more likely to like what you see in the mirror in the morning, too.
The only time it stops being capitalism is when people start dragging the lawyers in. And the record shows, that's much more likely to be the corps and the purveyors of closed source. From that point of view, free software is better capitalism than most of the capitalists anyway. There's more to capitalism than "whoever dies with the most toys, wins."
My experience has been that if you're dealing with an HR person, you've _already_ lost the battle. They'll always be more interested in buzzwords than in skills, because they're hiring for things they don't understand.
Unless you're talking to someone in engineering or smarter, the person you're talking to isn't in the market for a real geek.
--G
Most of the history of large computer systems since UNIX has been of the form, "Company x needs to do something like UNIX. Company x tries to build something like UNIX that is not UNIX. Comapny x fails dramatically." That Linux is a copy of UNIX that works makes it a solid and useful piece of work.
AN operating system should provide, basically, memory management, device addressing, process scheduling, and pipes. The rest is garnish. UNIX gave us good working models for all of those, and Linux has properly followed that lead.
This puts it miles ahead of Microsoft, which has yet to do a reasonable job of any of the criteria mentioned above. You can do a lot worse than making a working, free copy of UNIX.
--G
Well, Rob, you'll need a new icon for the new Holy Trinity here. Who knows, in five years maybe they'll be the new MSFT. The market seems to need a 500-pound gorilla, and once Redmond is out of the picture someone else will take its place. Sounds like these folks want to be that.
This year, they're the good guys. Next year maybe they'll be the bad guys. Ah well, if we didn't want excitement and constant change, we wouldn't be working in technology, eh?
Seems to me the ruling isn't about anonymity at all -- that defamation isn't a free speech right is nothing new. That any records that exist can be subpoena'd can be nothing new. The solution -- don't retain subpoena'able records -- isn't anything new either.
It's not quite there (no Java 1.1 support) but this is a huge step in the right direction. Once again I feel vindicated in forgetting all the C++ I ever learned.
I just hope that this doesn't lead to java forking. It's already started (CommAPI for instance) and architecture-dependent java variants could really screw up the big opportunity for architecture-independent programming.
Kudos to Cygnus!