I'm sure they've looked at other code bases, but I doubt they are actively following every change. Software, especially Open Source software, is constantly evolving. If you think one OS is better than another OS at a particular function, just because they were better a year or so ago, then you may be missing something. If OpenBSD is doing something better than Windows, that Windows NEEDS to do well, then it's time for MS developers to take another look.
Both Mundie and the reporter are writing to the same audience. Mundie's not explaining the issues is probably a combination of it being less confusing for his audience, as well as all Open Source being a competitor to some extent.
What bothers me about the WSJ article is that there really isn't much to the article. Other than reporting that someone at Microsoft saying there was no Open Source used at Hotmail, which he should have known to be untrue, and easily proven untrue. A fact which was corrected a few days later by someone at Hotmail with a clue. Spokesmen for Hotmail get no benefit from lying about this, someone was just clueless about this issue. The rest of the article is really just sensational. There aren't enough facts in the article to make it useful for anyone who is trying to learn something. The article isn't really trying to inform people. It's just a sensational article about a controversial subject. That makes WSJ a business tabloid, which is dissapointing. I guess I should be used to being disappointed by the mainstream press. I'm really disappointed by Slashdot's increasing tendency to link these articles without technical comments added. It seems to me like Slashdot's becomming a technical tabloid where you get to comment on the sensational articles. It's not there yet, but it seems to be leaning in that direction more and more.
As long as you write your own damn code you aren't 'forced' into using any license.
With GPL this is not true. If you link to GPLed code your code is forced to be GPL. This may not be such a big deal with applications, but it can be a real pain when writing drivers. Linux doesn't have a binary driver interface. This is one of the reasons that you don't see Linux drivers for a lot of hardware that's out there, or that you see open source drivers that are missing large portions of the functionality that is available in the binary Windows drivers. A lot of companies aren't willing to give away to many secrets about technology they spent millions to develop, and the design of Linux combined with the GPL makes it difficult for them to hide that information. You can still do it, but it's more difficult. Your driver breaks as the kernel goes through minor revisions. Kernel patches for other packages can easily be incompatible with your driver. Supporting different distributions is even a challenge, so you end up supporting just Red Hat to keep support costs managable. Supporting Linux drivers is a considerable challenge, and in the end how much more hardware are you going to sell because you have a Linux driver.
You want more Linux drivers, give us driver developers a binary driver interface. There is a price you will pay for them. You will end up with more closed source drivers, which is a serious issue for many Linux developers and users. Not only is there the philosophical issue of closed sourse software, there is the real issue of bugs in drivers can easily crash the kernel. A good binary interface will encourage programming styles which produce fewer bugs, but the simple fact remains that crappy drivers crash kernels, and if the source is closed, the only choice you really have is to not use it if it doesn't work well. Some companies aren't going to write open source drivers, or provide enough information for other to write them. It's up to the kernel developers to decide how willing they are to support binary driver developers. I heard that Linus is against a binary driver interface, though I have that information second hand, so I can't point you to a quote. If this is truely the case I don't expect a large increase in the number of device drivers available in the near future. Linux is a constantly evolving OS, so maybe the right time for a binary driver interface will come.
The article is dumbed down too much to avoid explaining the different licenses. Microsoft also does this in their announcements. Most of Microsoft's arguments against Open Source are against GPLed software. The WSJ doesn't even mention GPL. That's either because they don't know how to explain it in a few paragraphs, or even more likely they don't understand the issues with the different licenses.
Microsoft telling reporters that Hotmail doesn't use any Open Source software is a different issue. Either the Microsoft employee that stated that was horribly informed and should have known to keep his mouth shut, or the quote was taken out of context. Through Hotmail, Microsoft has learned that there are some things that FreeBSD is better at. I'm willing to bet that these issuses are getting a lot of attention by the Win2000/XP development teams. I'm sure that it's a goal of Microsoft's to be able to switch those systems over to Windows in the future. At least they're smart enough to run FreeBSD untill they have a "Microsoft" solution. If they're smart, part of the solution will be to look at the FreeBSD code and learn what they can from it, and since the BSD license allows it even use BSD code to solve the problem if that works for them.
You should apply, you already know the basics of how to spin the truth.
I have worked with a lot of different OS's. I can see that most of them have applications where they excel, and yes I know how to point out the strengths of the OS which best serves my purposes. You are justified in calling that spin. However, in my previous post I wasn't advocating either Windows or Linux as the perfect OS for every occasion. We typically support around 6 OSs with our drivers, and work hard to make our software as cross platform as possible. If you're telling me that advocating choice is spinning the facts, then I may as well accuse you of zealotry. Sorry you had a bad experience working at Microsoft. Sorry that the inherrant instabilities in some of Microsoft's design choices don't make it appropriate to you. Don't use their software. For some people it's still a good choice.
Just because someone has an opinion other than what the "slashdot community" holds to be true, doesn't mean they are trolling. They stated their opinion, gave a number of reasons why they hold that opinion, and didn't make any personal attacks on the person they are replying to. Doesn't sound like a troll/flame to me. It's just a differing opinion, which keeps the discussion interesting. If everyone on Slashdot agreed on everything this site would be boring.
Actually my Win2000 box I'm using right now has been up for months, and the Linux box I have in my office crashes several times a day.
Of course there's a good reason for this. I'm testing the device drivers we write on the Linux box, while the Win2000 machine is running nice stable drivers.
Either system is only as stable as the drivers you have running on it. There's a lot of hardware, available with device drivers for Windows. If you consider the number of people using Windows, and the number of hardware vendors that don't thoroughly test their drivers, it's not surprising that you end up with a lot of people complaining loudly about the stability of Windows. Linux does seem to do a better job of seperating the different parts of the OS/distribution, so that one part crashing doesn't make the system unusable, such as when IE crashes on Windows. However, most of the people using windows aren't using a lot of different applications at once, so the difference between crashing the OS and crashing a particular appliction isn't that great for them.
My oppinion is use whatever works best for you. I'll write drivers for whatever OS marketing tells me we need to develop. Though a binary driver interface for Linux would really make my job a lot easier when it comes to supporting Linux. It really sucks when APIs change with ever point release.
This could kind of be considered a different issue, but it brings up a good point. Does a country, such as the United States have the right to pass laws about what there citizens do outside the country. The activity Jay Cohen was convicted of may have occurred outside of the United States, but the US may consider itself to still have jurisdiction over it's citizen's actions. IAMNAL, and I don't know the details of the case, so I don't know if that was the issue with this case.
Yahoo is incorporated in the United States. Corporations as well as individuals need to abide by foreign laws when the take action in foreign countries, however I think that this specific French court has gone too far on this occasion.
Hate speech is illegal in many countries. Is the next step to have phone companies digitally monitor phone conversations for hate speech and disconnect the call automatically. Europe seems to be very protective of it's population's privacy, but is it really an invasion of someones privacy to have a computer monitor the lines, and do the disconnecting, if no human being ever listens in on the conversation, and records of who was disconnected aren't kept. It would save possibly thousands or millions of people from being subjected to hateful language .
Confidential information makes it's way onto unclassified computers in the military. The people dealing with the information are human, and some information almost inevitably ends up on the computers that they use on a daily basis. Those computers are not intended to have classified information on them, but as people write reports, and prepare presentations, small amounts of information leaks into what they produce. Each report or presentation doesn't hold enough information to be a problem, but taken as a whole, a lot of information can be gathered.
I did computer support at an Air Force base a number of years ago. The only time I heard of information not being properly destroyed was when a hard drive failed that had personel info on it failed, and the computer tech threw it in the trash when he replaced it. The tech had been around a long time, so he managed to not lose his job over the issue, but he should have known better.
The Air Force policy where I was at was that a computer's life span was 5 years, and they rarely bought state of the art computers in the first place. After a few years, the departments with the budgets to buy new computers would buy them, and the still usable used computers would be passed to a department why didn't have money to upgrade their 5+ year old equipment. Often those 5+ year old computers would be passed down to contractors and others without the budget or political clout to acquire new or even slightly used equipment. Old computers were also scavenged to keep other old computers running. By the time the Air Force was done with those computers, there was very little value left in them, even for educational use. An average computer tech contractor costs the government somewhere in the range of $40 an hour. If it really worth spending the time to make sure the computer's drive is wiped. In many cases the computers don't even work, so wiping the hard drive means putting it in another computer to do so. In the end the schools get tons of junk which they have to pay to dispose of, and the government gets to be politically correct.
Just chuck the hard drives in the incinerator and throw the computers away. Don't waste the time and effort trying to figure out if there might possibly be sensitive (classified or otherwise) information on the hard drive, destroy it. At the point the government is willing to give them to schools, they aren't worth anything anyway. If the government wants to spend money on getting rid of old computers, spend it recycling the old parts, so we don't just put them in landfills. Giving them to schools may be politically correct, but mostly it just means that the school wastes it's resources trying to find out if the computer is usefull, then just chucks it in a different landfill.
If you're just loading 1 pc for your personal use, figuring out how to set up an install script is a waste of your time. By the time you're done figuring it out, you could have already installed the OS. I've installed Win2000. It wasn't hard, or complicated for me. However, there's no excuse for me to have to sit there and watch it install. The installer already works with scripts, so why can't the installer ask me all the questions at the beginning. I should be able to insert the CD, answer the questions, and walk away. Win2000 is relatively simple to install compared to many OSs, but there's still room for improvement. OS X has quite an advantage in this area, because Apple controls the hardware design, and there is a much more limited set of hardware that Apple supports. But Microsoft would do well to learn from Apple that they can make installation easier for their customers.
1) the religious whackos (who don't want us to see God on our own time);
I'll just leave this one alone. The way the statment is made it's just a troll.
2) The corporations (it was business owners in southern california that originally outlawed marijuana; primarly because Mexican labor was "difficult to control" while high.
It's hard to get good work out of people when they're high. It seems to me that it does depend some on the type of work, and the type of drug. Basically, if poeple come to work messed up, productivity and safety are likly going to suffer. Personally, I think companies should be able to fire the people who aren't doing their jobs. What the employees do on their own time is their own business, but if you come to work messed up, and it effects you doing your job, then they should take care of the problem with THAT person.
3) the police state, which expends massive amounts of money in and out of the USA attempting to stop illicit drugs, then bills the taxpayer accordingly;
Police want to stop drug use because they feel it would reduce crime, and there's probably a lot of truth to this. Drug users (and people who just want the government out of their personal lives) say if drugs weren't illegal then people wouldn't be breaking so many laws to get them. There seems to be a lot of truth to this as well, but in places where gambling is illegal there's still a lot of people who commit crimes to feed their addictions. It's a complicated problem with no easy answer.
4) the countries producing illegal drugs, since the black market allows them to create a bindle of powder for $0.25 and sell it to the end user for $100, but only if it's kept illegal.
There are people in those countries that make a lot of money off of illegal drugs, but that money doesn't seem to help the people of those countries much. The money just seems to corrupt the governments and the people of that country get screwed.
Corporations are legally bound to put shareholder profits ahead of quality or value to the end user/buyer, which is devastating to the free market.
In a free market, corporations which consistently put out products which are a poor value to consumers will go out of business. Truely dominant monopolies can put out poor products and get away with it. Cartels can put out poor products and get away with it. But those are cases where the market is no longer free. Even Microsoft has to put out a product that does a decent job of meeting most people's needs. If they don't then competition will tear down the "barriers to entry" in the OS market.
Corporations are entities created by the state to concentrate control of wealth into the hands of a few.
I don't understand why you think this to be true. Most of these large corporations are publicly held. That means anyone can invest in them, and share in the wealth if they do well. Sole proprietorships and partnerships limit wealth to those few who can personally raise enough capital to start and maintain a business. The exhistence of corporations allows a large number of people to pool their resources and share in the benefits. If also allows employees with stock benefits a chance to achieve considerable levels of wealth if the company they work for does well.
This makes it much more possible for a person who starts life with little to aquire wealth. It requires hard work and motivation to get the education and learn the proper skills. It also is harder for poor people to get a good education, and to learn those skills, but there are a lot of people who do it. It used to be considered the "American Dream".
PS2 $200
External Hard Drive ~$250
External Floppy Drive ~$50
Mouse & Keyboard ~$35
You get the picture.
And those great graphics you talk about are designed for a TV. It'll make a nice DVD player, but I'd hate to write software using a TV as a display. I've heard rumors of LCD displays comming out, but at what resolution, and what cost?
If you can put a network card in it it might make a nice firewall computer, but Linksys already makes those cheap.
Linux on PS2 is interesting from a hobby aspect, and it shows how portable the Kernel is, but it doesn't appear very "usefull" to me.
They are on the unsupported, but should work list. I take that to mean that they don't have those machines sitting around, so they have no way to support you if you have problems.
We have the same problem where I work. We write drivers to be as portable as possible, but don't promise they will work on all hardware on all the OSs we support. On some OSs we provide source code for the files that are system specific, object files for the rest, and a porting guide. They can port it themselves, but don't expect much support for your hardware if it doesn't work.
There are other drivers where we just provide all the source, it depends on the product, and legal issues with whatever IP is involved.
People have a right to privacy, and governments should respect and protect that right. People should also have the right to choose to allow some of their private information to be used if they want to do so. In order to properly protect people's privacy, no company should be able to give out persoan information without explicit permission to do so. This means that the default has to be that they don't give out personal information, and the customer/user needs to specifically select to have their information provided to others.
Re:AOL is totally cool (some corrections)
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AOL And The GPL
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b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution,...
I guess it depends on if you consider a link to Transmeta's web page to be a written offer. This is an internet terminal, and purchasing it requires that you have AOL's service. The only thing you're missing is a hard copy, and most GPL programs don't have that.
... a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
I think that the internet is safely considered a "medium customarily used for software interchange."
The offer to provide the source is there. If allowing other people to provide the source, then anyone who uses 3rd party web/ftp servers to make source available is in violation too. It seem to me like observer.net is doing a great job of trolling.
Re:Maybe we need a standard GPL-violation Form Let
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AOL And The GPL
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Furthermore, according to the article they didn't indicate any intention to correct this situation when the reporters called up to ask about it.
Consider the source. Do you really think that observers.net contacted anyone at either company that understands what a License is? It's more likely they asked the salesman at the Gateway Country Store, and talked to some clueless, overworked phone support person at AOL. Observer.net doesn't strike me as the most objective source of information, and depending on how you ask the questions, you can pretty easily get the answers they got from techsupport, even if there were GPL notices all through the manuals.
But in a civil suit, accident is not a defense -- it just keeps you from maybe paying triple damages for malice.
IANAL, but pay damages there have to be damages. The software is free. AOL has not prevented anyone from getting the source, you can get it from Transmeta. Sueing AOL will likely get them forced to include a copy of the GPL, and make the provide access to the source, probably through Transmeta. A little diplomacy will likely achieve the same results, and save lawyer fees and court costs.
This deal between AOL and Sony looks like it will help both of them expand thier markets. However, I didn't see anything that said this is an exclusive agreement. If the XBox takes off, AOL will likely want to have AOL on the XBox as well.
The worst thing would be for AOL, the largest internet provider, and Sony, the largest game console company, teaming up to keep competitors out of the market.
One of the benefits of open source is that it allows the world to review the code. You need to have code reviews so that one person by intent or mistake can't royally screw things up.
Call me nieve, but I don't think that Microsoft is stupid enough to purposely put in a back door. Even if "security experts" outside the company never find it, secrets like backdoors have a way of comming out. This is likely the act of mone or two very foolish MS employees who if they still worked there when this came out, got fired over it.
Code reviews are especially improtant with closed source, but all projects need them. We got behind schedule on the last project I was in charge of, and I put off the code reviews to try and get the software done. It was a BIG MISTAKE on my part. Now some of those people have left the company, and I'm left supporting poorly designed, hastily written code. What's worse is the one person who left had great confidence in himself, so he tested very little of his code. Needles to say, the product ended up being later and of lower quality because the time wasn't spent doing it right the first time.
Motorola Computer Group does make PPC ATX system boards. I don't think there's a version of Mac OS that runs on them, but you can run Linux on them, though it's not fun to set up.
Mac OS not running on these systems isn't Motorola's fault. Apple doesn't chose to support these boards, other vendors do support them. Apple sells computers, not OSs, so they aren't interested in supporting their OS on other platforms.
The ATX boards are Motorola's MATX series. They also have CPCI and VME boards.
PPC systems will NEVER be cheap beacuse Apple wants them to be expensive, and if you want to run Linux, you already have how many cheap x86 hardware options?
Apple may use the most PPC chips, but they don't control their manufacture or distribution.
I see the real barrier to cheap PPC systems is good third party motherboards. How do you convince Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, and the rest that they can make money making PPC motherboards. It costs a lot of money to design a motherboard, make the test fixtures, and the margins aren't very good. If you want cheap parts you need to have volume. The first step in convincing manufacturers that volume could exist is to show them that there's a demand for current PPC hardware. This means showing that people run Linux on PowerMacs, or that OSX could run on third party hardware. That might convince them that if they can produce cheaper components, that volumes would increase. However, simply saying that price alone is the reason for relatively small PPC demand won't go far.
Linux in general has come a long way toward becomming more user friendly, however it still has a ways to go before it's adopted by the average consumer. In my experience, PPC versions of Linux still lag behind X86 versions by quite a bit. If Linux on the PPC is the justification for mass production of PPC PCs, then there;s a lot of work to be done on PPC Linux.
. Using a layered model, where each piece of the picture is an independant piece, gave us things like the Window Manager in X, and the filesystem drop-in replacements, and the standard file i/o device drivers, and so on.
I'm sure there examples where Windows isn't as layered, as some UNIXs in certain areas, but NT uses a layered approach in most areas. You can drop in a new file system in NT. The device driver interface is devinately layered, and is more versitile than most UNIXs I've worked with, although adding plug and play stuff make it considerably more confusing in Win2000. You bring up some good ideas in your post, but I don't think issue number 2 is that sound.
Re:The fundamental precept that MS seeks to obfusc
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It is no more viral than the commercial license which seeks to 'infect' your pocketbook. Over, and over, and over again.
Most comercial licenses aren't viral. You get what you pay for. Unless you pay for the rights to reuse the code you don't get those rights. GPL's viral aspect is that if you add on to GPLed code, you have to release the derived work under GPL. Seems fair enough. Where it can be a royal pain is with device drivers under Linux. IF a device driver is a kernel loadable module, then it doesn't have to be GPLed, otherwise it does. The problem is that Linux doesn't have a binary driver interface. You are very limited in the kinds of drivers you can write as loadable modules. In the end, if you want to release a binary driver you'll likely end up writing your own little binary interface to the kernel which you'll have to release under GPL. Oh, and expect it to get broken on a regular basis as the kernel goes through even minor revisions.
Linux developers have ever right to make it hard to write binary drivers. If I don't like it, I can even fork the code an make my own "Linux" that has a binary driver interface. Just don't try and tell me that GPL is no more viral than commercial software.
Commercial, broadcast television works because it's a highly regulated market, and is highly protected by IP laws. With cable and satalite TV you actually have to pay for the shows you get in additions to the ad revenue they bring in.
Re:Code forking bad; MS's lying propoganda is wors
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Microsoft is also being a huge hypocrite whenever they talk about code forking. Hello? Windows 95/98/ME vs. NT/2000? Oh, and there's Windows XP/2002 now -- a professional vs. consumers product fork in grand NT tradition.
The isn't a code fork. A code fork happens when two groups take the same source code and branch off in different directions, which often leads to incompatibilities between the branches. Windows NT was not a fork off of the consumer Windows code. It was a seperatly developed kernel which had a common look and feel as well as a level of binary compatibility. Microsoft is trying to do the opposite of a code fork by bringing these two product together into one OS (Windows XP). Windows XP is available in different packaging (Consumer, Professional, Server...). I wouldn't really call these code forks either, because it's more of a case where some versions are optimized differently or, have features disabled, rather than truly different code paths.
Code forks may very well result in better software in some cases. But in the short run they often make life confusing and difficult for both users and developers.
It's also hard to see where truely forking the code fits into a profitable business model for a software company. Which is what the speach was about.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure they've looked at other code bases, but I doubt they are actively following every change. Software, especially Open Source software, is constantly evolving. If you think one OS is better than another OS at a particular function, just because they were better a year or so ago, then you may be missing something. If OpenBSD is doing something better than Windows, that Windows NEEDS to do well, then it's time for MS developers to take another look.
Both Mundie and the reporter are writing to the same audience. Mundie's not explaining the issues is probably a combination of it being less confusing for his audience, as well as all Open Source being a competitor to some extent.
What bothers me about the WSJ article is that there really isn't much to the article. Other than reporting that someone at Microsoft saying there was no Open Source used at Hotmail, which he should have known to be untrue, and easily proven untrue. A fact which was corrected a few days later by someone at Hotmail with a clue. Spokesmen for Hotmail get no benefit from lying about this, someone was just clueless about this issue. The rest of the article is really just sensational. There aren't enough facts in the article to make it useful for anyone who is trying to learn something. The article isn't really trying to inform people. It's just a sensational article about a controversial subject. That makes WSJ a business tabloid, which is dissapointing. I guess I should be used to being disappointed by the mainstream press. I'm really disappointed by Slashdot's increasing tendency to link these articles without technical comments added. It seems to me like Slashdot's becomming a technical tabloid where you get to comment on the sensational articles. It's not there yet, but it seems to be leaning in that direction more and more.
As long as you write your own damn code you aren't 'forced' into using any license.
With GPL this is not true. If you link to GPLed code your code is forced to be GPL. This may not be such a big deal with applications, but it can be a real pain when writing drivers. Linux doesn't have a binary driver interface. This is one of the reasons that you don't see Linux drivers for a lot of hardware that's out there, or that you see open source drivers that are missing large portions of the functionality that is available in the binary Windows drivers. A lot of companies aren't willing to give away to many secrets about technology they spent millions to develop, and the design of Linux combined with the GPL makes it difficult for them to hide that information. You can still do it, but it's more difficult. Your driver breaks as the kernel goes through minor revisions. Kernel patches for other packages can easily be incompatible with your driver. Supporting different distributions is even a challenge, so you end up supporting just Red Hat to keep support costs managable. Supporting Linux drivers is a considerable challenge, and in the end how much more hardware are you going to sell because you have a Linux driver.
You want more Linux drivers, give us driver developers a binary driver interface. There is a price you will pay for them. You will end up with more closed source drivers, which is a serious issue for many Linux developers and users. Not only is there the philosophical issue of closed sourse software, there is the real issue of bugs in drivers can easily crash the kernel. A good binary interface will encourage programming styles which produce fewer bugs, but the simple fact remains that crappy drivers crash kernels, and if the source is closed, the only choice you really have is to not use it if it doesn't work well. Some companies aren't going to write open source drivers, or provide enough information for other to write them. It's up to the kernel developers to decide how willing they are to support binary driver developers. I heard that Linus is against a binary driver interface, though I have that information second hand, so I can't point you to a quote. If this is truely the case I don't expect a large increase in the number of device drivers available in the near future. Linux is a constantly evolving OS, so maybe the right time for a binary driver interface will come.
The article is dumbed down too much to avoid explaining the different licenses. Microsoft also does this in their announcements. Most of Microsoft's arguments against Open Source are against GPLed software. The WSJ doesn't even mention GPL. That's either because they don't know how to explain it in a few paragraphs, or even more likely they don't understand the issues with the different licenses.
Microsoft telling reporters that Hotmail doesn't use any Open Source software is a different issue. Either the Microsoft employee that stated that was horribly informed and should have known to keep his mouth shut, or the quote was taken out of context. Through Hotmail, Microsoft has learned that there are some things that FreeBSD is better at. I'm willing to bet that these issuses are getting a lot of attention by the Win2000/XP development teams. I'm sure that it's a goal of Microsoft's to be able to switch those systems over to Windows in the future. At least they're smart enough to run FreeBSD untill they have a "Microsoft" solution. If they're smart, part of the solution will be to look at the FreeBSD code and learn what they can from it, and since the BSD license allows it even use BSD code to solve the problem if that works for them.
You should apply, you already know the basics of how to spin the truth.
I have worked with a lot of different OS's. I can see that most of them have applications where they excel, and yes I know how to point out the strengths of the OS which best serves my purposes. You are justified in calling that spin. However, in my previous post I wasn't advocating either Windows or Linux as the perfect OS for every occasion. We typically support around 6 OSs with our drivers, and work hard to make our software as cross platform as possible. If you're telling me that advocating choice is spinning the facts, then I may as well accuse you of zealotry. Sorry you had a bad experience working at Microsoft. Sorry that the inherrant instabilities in some of Microsoft's design choices don't make it appropriate to you. Don't use their software. For some people it's still a good choice.
Just because someone has an opinion other than what the "slashdot community" holds to be true, doesn't mean they are trolling. They stated their opinion, gave a number of reasons why they hold that opinion, and didn't make any personal attacks on the person they are replying to. Doesn't sound like a troll/flame to me. It's just a differing opinion, which keeps the discussion interesting. If everyone on Slashdot agreed on everything this site would be boring.
Actually my Win2000 box I'm using right now has been up for months, and the Linux box I have in my office crashes several times a day.
Of course there's a good reason for this. I'm testing the device drivers we write on the Linux box, while the Win2000 machine is running nice stable drivers.
Either system is only as stable as the drivers you have running on it. There's a lot of hardware, available with device drivers for Windows. If you consider the number of people using Windows, and the number of hardware vendors that don't thoroughly test their drivers, it's not surprising that you end up with a lot of people complaining loudly about the stability of Windows. Linux does seem to do a better job of seperating the different parts of the OS/distribution, so that one part crashing doesn't make the system unusable, such as when IE crashes on Windows. However, most of the people using windows aren't using a lot of different applications at once, so the difference between crashing the OS and crashing a particular appliction isn't that great for them.
My oppinion is use whatever works best for you. I'll write drivers for whatever OS marketing tells me we need to develop. Though a binary driver interface for Linux would really make my job a lot easier when it comes to supporting Linux. It really sucks when APIs change with ever point release.
This could kind of be considered a different issue, but it brings up a good point. Does a country, such as the United States have the right to pass laws about what there citizens do outside the country. The activity Jay Cohen was convicted of may have occurred outside of the United States, but the US may consider itself to still have jurisdiction over it's citizen's actions. IAMNAL, and I don't know the details of the case, so I don't know if that was the issue with this case.
Yahoo is incorporated in the United States. Corporations as well as individuals need to abide by foreign laws when the take action in foreign countries, however I think that this specific French court has gone too far on this occasion.
Hate speech is illegal in many countries. Is the next step to have phone companies digitally monitor phone conversations for hate speech and disconnect the call automatically. Europe seems to be very protective of it's population's privacy, but is it really an invasion of someones privacy to have a computer monitor the lines, and do the disconnecting, if no human being ever listens in on the conversation, and records of who was disconnected aren't kept. It would save possibly thousands or millions of people from being subjected to hateful language .
Confidential information makes it's way onto unclassified computers in the military. The people dealing with the information are human, and some information almost inevitably ends up on the computers that they use on a daily basis. Those computers are not intended to have classified information on them, but as people write reports, and prepare presentations, small amounts of information leaks into what they produce. Each report or presentation doesn't hold enough information to be a problem, but taken as a whole, a lot of information can be gathered.
I did computer support at an Air Force base a number of years ago. The only time I heard of information not being properly destroyed was when a hard drive failed that had personel info on it failed, and the computer tech threw it in the trash when he replaced it. The tech had been around a long time, so he managed to not lose his job over the issue, but he should have known better.
The Air Force policy where I was at was that a computer's life span was 5 years, and they rarely bought state of the art computers in the first place. After a few years, the departments with the budgets to buy new computers would buy them, and the still usable used computers would be passed to a department why didn't have money to upgrade their 5+ year old equipment. Often those 5+ year old computers would be passed down to contractors and others without the budget or political clout to acquire new or even slightly used equipment. Old computers were also scavenged to keep other old computers running. By the time the Air Force was done with those computers, there was very little value left in them, even for educational use. An average computer tech contractor costs the government somewhere in the range of $40 an hour. If it really worth spending the time to make sure the computer's drive is wiped. In many cases the computers don't even work, so wiping the hard drive means putting it in another computer to do so. In the end the schools get tons of junk which they have to pay to dispose of, and the government gets to be politically correct.
Just chuck the hard drives in the incinerator and throw the computers away. Don't waste the time and effort trying to figure out if there might possibly be sensitive (classified or otherwise) information on the hard drive, destroy it. At the point the government is willing to give them to schools, they aren't worth anything anyway. If the government wants to spend money on getting rid of old computers, spend it recycling the old parts, so we don't just put them in landfills. Giving them to schools may be politically correct, but mostly it just means that the school wastes it's resources trying to find out if the computer is usefull, then just chucks it in a different landfill.
If you're just loading 1 pc for your personal use, figuring out how to set up an install script is a waste of your time. By the time you're done figuring it out, you could have already installed the OS. I've installed Win2000. It wasn't hard, or complicated for me. However, there's no excuse for me to have to sit there and watch it install. The installer already works with scripts, so why can't the installer ask me all the questions at the beginning. I should be able to insert the CD, answer the questions, and walk away. Win2000 is relatively simple to install compared to many OSs, but there's still room for improvement. OS X has quite an advantage in this area, because Apple controls the hardware design, and there is a much more limited set of hardware that Apple supports. But Microsoft would do well to learn from Apple that they can make installation easier for their customers.
1) the religious whackos (who don't want us to see God on our own time);
I'll just leave this one alone. The way the statment is made it's just a troll.
2) The corporations (it was business owners in southern california that originally outlawed marijuana; primarly because Mexican labor was "difficult to control" while high.
It's hard to get good work out of people when they're high. It seems to me that it does depend some on the type of work, and the type of drug. Basically, if poeple come to work messed up, productivity and safety are likly going to suffer. Personally, I think companies should be able to fire the people who aren't doing their jobs. What the employees do on their own time is their own business, but if you come to work messed up, and it effects you doing your job, then they should take care of the problem with THAT person.
3) the police state, which expends massive amounts of money in and out of the USA attempting to stop illicit drugs, then bills the taxpayer accordingly;
Police want to stop drug use because they feel it would reduce crime, and there's probably a lot of truth to this. Drug users (and people who just want the government out of their personal lives) say if drugs weren't illegal then people wouldn't be breaking so many laws to get them. There seems to be a lot of truth to this as well, but in places where gambling is illegal there's still a lot of people who commit crimes to feed their addictions. It's a complicated problem with no easy answer.
4) the countries producing illegal drugs, since the black market allows them to create a bindle of powder for $0.25 and sell it to the end user for $100, but only if it's kept illegal.
There are people in those countries that make a lot of money off of illegal drugs, but that money doesn't seem to help the people of those countries much. The money just seems to corrupt the governments and the people of that country get screwed.
Corporations are legally bound to put shareholder profits ahead of quality or value to the end user/buyer, which is devastating to the free market.
In a free market, corporations which consistently put out products which are a poor value to consumers will go out of business. Truely dominant monopolies can put out poor products and get away with it. Cartels can put out poor products and get away with it. But those are cases where the market is no longer free. Even Microsoft has to put out a product that does a decent job of meeting most people's needs. If they don't then competition will tear down the "barriers to entry" in the OS market.
Corporations are entities created by the state to concentrate control of wealth into the hands of a few.
I don't understand why you think this to be true. Most of these large corporations are publicly held. That means anyone can invest in them, and share in the wealth if they do well. Sole proprietorships and partnerships limit wealth to those few who can personally raise enough capital to start and maintain a business. The exhistence of corporations allows a large number of people to pool their resources and share in the benefits. If also allows employees with stock benefits a chance to achieve considerable levels of wealth if the company they work for does well.
This makes it much more possible for a person who starts life with little to aquire wealth. It requires hard work and motivation to get the education and learn the proper skills. It also is harder for poor people to get a good education, and to learn those skills, but there are a lot of people who do it. It used to be considered the "American Dream".
PS2 $200
External Hard Drive ~$250
External Floppy Drive ~$50
Mouse & Keyboard ~$35
You get the picture.
And those great graphics you talk about are designed for a TV. It'll make a nice DVD player, but I'd hate to write software using a TV as a display. I've heard rumors of LCD displays comming out, but at what resolution, and what cost?
If you can put a network card in it it might make a nice firewall computer, but Linksys already makes those cheap.
Linux on PS2 is interesting from a hobby aspect, and it shows how portable the Kernel is, but it doesn't appear very "usefull" to me.
They are on the unsupported, but should work list. I take that to mean that they don't have those machines sitting around, so they have no way to support you if you have problems.
We have the same problem where I work. We write drivers to be as portable as possible, but don't promise they will work on all hardware on all the OSs we support. On some OSs we provide source code for the files that are system specific, object files for the rest, and a porting guide. They can port it themselves, but don't expect much support for your hardware if it doesn't work.
There are other drivers where we just provide all the source, it depends on the product, and legal issues with whatever IP is involved.
People have a right to privacy, and governments should respect and protect that right. People should also have the right to choose to allow some of their private information to be used if they want to do so. In order to properly protect people's privacy, no company should be able to give out persoan information without explicit permission to do so. This means that the default has to be that they don't give out personal information, and the customer/user needs to specifically select to have their information provided to others.
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, ...
... a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
I guess it depends on if you consider a link to Transmeta's web page to be a written offer. This is an internet terminal, and purchasing it requires that you have AOL's service. The only thing you're missing is a hard copy, and most GPL programs don't have that.
I think that the internet is safely considered a "medium customarily used for software interchange."
The offer to provide the source is there. If allowing other people to provide the source, then anyone who uses 3rd party web/ftp servers to make source available is in violation too. It seem to me like observer.net is doing a great job of trolling.
Furthermore, according to the article they didn't indicate any intention to correct this situation when the reporters called up to ask about it.
Consider the source. Do you really think that observers.net contacted anyone at either company that understands what a License is? It's more likely they asked the salesman at the Gateway Country Store, and talked to some clueless, overworked phone support person at AOL. Observer.net doesn't strike me as the most objective source of information, and depending on how you ask the questions, you can pretty easily get the answers they got from techsupport, even if there were GPL notices all through the manuals.
But in a civil suit, accident is not a defense -- it just keeps you from maybe paying triple damages for malice.
IANAL, but pay damages there have to be damages. The software is free. AOL has not prevented anyone from getting the source, you can get it from Transmeta. Sueing AOL will likely get them forced to include a copy of the GPL, and make the provide access to the source, probably through Transmeta. A little diplomacy will likely achieve the same results, and save lawyer fees and court costs.
This deal between AOL and Sony looks like it will help both of them expand thier markets. However, I didn't see anything that said this is an exclusive agreement. If the XBox takes off, AOL will likely want to have AOL on the XBox as well.
The worst thing would be for AOL, the largest internet provider, and Sony, the largest game console company, teaming up to keep competitors out of the market.
One of the benefits of open source is that it allows the world to review the code. You need to have code reviews so that one person by intent or mistake can't royally screw things up.
Call me nieve, but I don't think that Microsoft is stupid enough to purposely put in a back door. Even if "security experts" outside the company never find it, secrets like backdoors have a way of comming out. This is likely the act of mone or two very foolish MS employees who if they still worked there when this came out, got fired over it.
Code reviews are especially improtant with closed source, but all projects need them. We got behind schedule on the last project I was in charge of, and I put off the code reviews to try and get the software done. It was a BIG MISTAKE on my part. Now some of those people have left the company, and I'm left supporting poorly designed, hastily written code. What's worse is the one person who left had great confidence in himself, so he tested very little of his code. Needles to say, the product ended up being later and of lower quality because the time wasn't spent doing it right the first time.
Motorola Computer Group does make PPC ATX system boards. I don't think there's a version of Mac OS that runs on them, but you can run Linux on them, though it's not fun to set up.
Mac OS not running on these systems isn't Motorola's fault. Apple doesn't chose to support these boards, other vendors do support them. Apple sells computers, not OSs, so they aren't interested in supporting their OS on other platforms.
The ATX boards are Motorola's MATX series. They also have CPCI and VME boards.
www.mcg.mot.com
PPC systems will NEVER be cheap beacuse Apple wants them to be expensive, and if you want to run Linux, you already have how many cheap x86 hardware options?
Apple may use the most PPC chips, but they don't control their manufacture or distribution.
I see the real barrier to cheap PPC systems is good third party motherboards. How do you convince Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, and the rest that they can make money making PPC motherboards. It costs a lot of money to design a motherboard, make the test fixtures, and the margins aren't very good. If you want cheap parts you need to have volume. The first step in convincing manufacturers that volume could exist is to show them that there's a demand for current PPC hardware. This means showing that people run Linux on PowerMacs, or that OSX could run on third party hardware. That might convince them that if they can produce cheaper components, that volumes would increase. However, simply saying that price alone is the reason for relatively small PPC demand won't go far.
Linux in general has come a long way toward becomming more user friendly, however it still has a ways to go before it's adopted by the average consumer. In my experience, PPC versions of Linux still lag behind X86 versions by quite a bit. If Linux on the PPC is the justification for mass production of PPC PCs, then there;s a lot of work to be done on PPC Linux.
. Using a layered model, where each piece of the picture is an independant piece, gave us things like the Window Manager in X, and the filesystem drop-in replacements, and the standard file i/o device drivers, and so on.
I'm sure there examples where Windows isn't as layered, as some UNIXs in certain areas, but NT uses a layered approach in most areas. You can drop in a new file system in NT. The device driver interface is devinately layered, and is more versitile than most UNIXs I've worked with, although adding plug and play stuff make it considerably more confusing in Win2000. You bring up some good ideas in your post, but I don't think issue number 2 is that sound.
It is no more viral than the commercial license which seeks to 'infect' your pocketbook. Over, and over, and over again.
Most comercial licenses aren't viral. You get what you pay for. Unless you pay for the rights to reuse the code you don't get those rights. GPL's viral aspect is that if you add on to GPLed code, you have to release the derived work under GPL. Seems fair enough. Where it can be a royal pain is with device drivers under Linux. IF a device driver is a kernel loadable module, then it doesn't have to be GPLed, otherwise it does. The problem is that Linux doesn't have a binary driver interface. You are very limited in the kinds of drivers you can write as loadable modules. In the end, if you want to release a binary driver you'll likely end up writing your own little binary interface to the kernel which you'll have to release under GPL. Oh, and expect it to get broken on a regular basis as the kernel goes through even minor revisions.
Linux developers have ever right to make it hard to write binary drivers. If I don't like it, I can even fork the code an make my own "Linux" that has a binary driver interface. Just don't try and tell me that GPL is no more viral than commercial software.
Commercial, broadcast television works because it's a highly regulated market, and is highly protected by IP laws. With cable and satalite TV you actually have to pay for the shows you get in additions to the ad revenue they bring in.
Microsoft is also being a huge hypocrite whenever they talk about code forking. Hello? Windows 95/98/ME vs. NT/2000? Oh, and there's Windows XP/2002 now -- a professional vs. consumers product fork in grand NT tradition.
...). I wouldn't really call these code forks either, because it's more of a case where some versions are optimized differently or, have features disabled, rather than truly different code paths.
The isn't a code fork. A code fork happens when two groups take the same source code and branch off in different directions, which often leads to incompatibilities between the branches. Windows NT was not a fork off of the consumer Windows code. It was a seperatly developed kernel which had a common look and feel as well as a level of binary compatibility. Microsoft is trying to do the opposite of a code fork by bringing these two product together into one OS (Windows XP). Windows XP is available in different packaging (Consumer, Professional, Server
Code forks may very well result in better software in some cases. But in the short run they often make life confusing and difficult for both users and developers.
It's also hard to see where truely forking the code fits into a profitable business model for a software company. Which is what the speach was about.