If you hook a user on Roxen or Pike, you can then point out that they can have it without the (check one or more) [_] expense [_] instability [_] insecurity [_] licence issues [_] embarrassment [_] opacity of running it under Windows. Odd it is that something named Windows opaque should be.
With a satellite dish the size of your sails, and power from a generator that weighs an order of magnitude or so more than your entire boat, lead keel and all.
hat would be something to do on the bus, or a new way to crash your car. I wonder if microsoft will write there own products if wap takes off.
"Where do you want to go today? That wall over there? Consider it done!" (-:
Given how enthusiastic they are to crash your computer, I can't see how MS could resist an opportunity to crash your car as well. It would kind of get back at Lee Iacocca for his nasty rebuttal to Bill's "if cars were like computers" speech if MS could get cars up to crashing twice a day... and the market for SensiPeril Blue windscreens would soar... General Pedestrian Fault? (-:
The limiting factors for WAP devices by and large aren't processor power, so Moore's law doesn't apply. The two major factors are screen size and network speed.
Network speed shouldn't be much of a limiting factor for games like Backgammon. Given that mobile delivery of audio and video is planned for a few years hence, the bandwidth for playing Quake doesn't look so impossible.
As to screen size, colour is almost here and flexible semiconductors as well, so having a 6x4-inch (15x10cm) unrollable screen (2x4 (5x10) rolled up) in your 'phone is a realistic expectation.
Quake in 320x200 at first. Maybe later we clip the phone to the dashboard or bus seat and project a HUD onto the glass. With an aync ARM CPU and async ARMified version of the Voodoo 5000, you should get 10, maybe 15 minutes before the battery dies. (-:
This means you can use Perl as your scripting language with any application on Windows that supports ActiveX scripting, such as Internet Explorer, Active Server Pages files, and the Windows Scripting Host.
Woooooohoo! Party! Party! Let's have a party! Does anyone have a link to a valid ActiveX key and/or non-Windows signer? (-:
We can make an ILOVEYOU removal service, which sends itself around a bit to make sure all of those nasty ILOVEYOU virii really were erased. (-: I think a thousand-entry hashed sent-one-here list and a twenty-hop age limit would be enough. Being PERL, it would be difficult to figure out where the code ended and the has table began.
> The way I see it... the free beer only tides > us over until the free speech comes to the > rescue.
Yup. That's how it's often been so far.
I hope that Sun, for example, elects to properly OpenSource the StarOffice suite when it hits the wall as far as direct political usefulness goes (if not before) since I'd value the opportunity to put that on a diet and install a squillion copies.
In this vein, Open Sourcing faces a dilemma for a commerce-oriented company like Sun. If they stick a rider on, requiring derivatives of their software to continuously display an unadulterated "derived from Sun software" logo (something I would be more than happy to suffer), they then face an image issue
would Sun's image suffer if the derivation was done by a schmuck who manages to thoroughly passion-finger the package?
How about if a derivative is in some way perceptually better than Sun's "official" version but made a sacrifice to do that which Sun are unwilling to integrate back into the "official" version?
Would it be any better if the conditions included clear display of a specific disclaimer when the derived-from-Sun bitmap were clicked or hovered over?
I have another suggestion for Sun in particular, to do right now: consider semi-open-sourcing StarOffice on a may-not-sell-or-distribute basis (ie private use only for derivatives) but with a fixed time-bomb that automatically GPLs it (maybe at the end of 2002, but give a definite date) (even with a must-display-this-logo rider).
This would work for Sun because:
The open sourcing would allow people to submit useful bug reports, and so quickly improve the software
Open sourcing would allow people to write and submit documentation and help for it, which is sadly lacking right now
The fixed GPL timebomb would encourage many people to participate who would not participate in a SCLed product
A GPLish licence rather than BSDish licence would limit competitors' activity in that any improvement that a competitor made would immediately be available to Sun, and it would prevent (for obvious e.g.) MS from pinching slabs of Sun technology for Office since the instant they did this, Office would become Open Source! (Would using StarOffice as bait for exactly this purpose be a king-hit political choice in their rivalry against MS?)
If the pre-timebomb licence conditions allowed Sun to fork a non-GPLish version of StarOffice up to the deadline, Sun could still use the improvements in a future private version of StarOffice: both they and OSS community win.
> [MS] like to think of themselves as the > bully and think that everyone will just > fold over.
No, MS like to think of themselves as righteously indignant because their bought-and-paid-for property has been "stolen".
I suspect that the majority of MS herdsmen, particularly the lawyers, are in such culture shock about MS truly giving anything away, however backhandedly, that the idea doesn't actually take root in their consciousness. Also, they don't seem to understand "public." They seem to think that it means something like "available to be snatched away and defended" rather than "accessible to all".
Not until you press them, and ask pointy questions that force them to begin thinking (ooh, that smarts), do they have to actually assimilate enough reality to come to a knowledge of the truth. This of course shows them what dodos they really look like to everyone else, which is embarrassing and makes them highly defensive.
If they learn quickly, the individuals involved will most carefully avoid such issues in future, else if they also have enough basic honesty, they will then choose the truly righteous side (even though it will most likely cost them their job). If they're a bit thick, they'll accuse Bob Young of attacking them, froth at the mouth, and generally set themselves up for another pie in the face.
It's quite simple: the program is GPLed. Once GPLed, always GPLed - the "viral" nature of GPL. Whether you're the "owner" or not is irrelevant, and of course if others have contributed, you're not the only owner any more. Problem solved.
BTW, if you want me to contribute something, even if only to solve your dilemma, email me with a URL. (-:
If your workplace wants you to improve the program, that's not a problem. Simply contribute the improvements back to the package, just like the nice licence says. While you're there, add comments to the new/improved section saying "Improvements to this section sponsored by XYZ Corp. If you're in the market for late alphabetical services, visit http://www.xyz.com/ or call 555-6789-0123". I'd call that fair.
If they want to sell the improved package, also not a problem as long as the source is also freely available (and since you contributed the changes back, that's done already).
Kick the wrong ass, and it'll turn around and bite you (a.g. Baalam's donkey).
Hosting copyrighted material is ILLEGAL, you must ditch posts that actually contain it, regardless of free-speech issues. Fight the copyright issue using legal means, and if you win then by all means replace the postings. Getting yourself totally shut down (martyred) is the ultimate loss of speech freedom.
Linking is a different matter; MS should be contacting the linked-to sites.
Yes, posters own their posted material. Or do they? Since material posted by SlashDot users appeared in a certain book, you may have shown that they don't. Hoist by your own petard.
Also, Anonymous Coward is by definition "nobody." Since nobody made the posting, nobody owns the contents - the ownership must devolve back onto SlashDot.
It would be out of character for the SlashDot team to do anything for purely commercial reasons, but I bet you need your new server to deal with the hits that this controversy is generating.
SlashDot may have already given themselves hell. Hell-mouth, in fact.
Publishing the comments of SlashDot readers sans their permission (the Hellmouth book) may just have dug/.'s grave. Now/. can't really argue that they're more or less free to do what they like with user comments.
OTOH, Microsoft only has the right to demand removal of actual copyright material. Links are a different matter. Hint: Australians are allowed to reverse-engineer things; perhaps there should be a SlashDot department somewhere out of reach of Microsoft lawyers?
My Sony DSC-F505 whizz-bang USB digital camera works just fine under 2.3.99pre6, thank you.
localised Linux-distributions
And which rock are you hiding under? You have choices of Chinese, Korean, Russian etc-ad-nauseum localised distributions, and all of the majors (Mandrake, Debian, e-a-n) speak more languages than you've got extremities to count them on.
I must admit that RedHat has deleted the RedNeck installer option (I want that back, along with jive, cow and a few others).
Lets put it this way, it takes 10+ years and 000s of developers to build an Air Traffic Control System, do you think this would work well in the bazzare enviroment?
That's "bizarre" environment, as in "the catheter and the bizarre behaviour". (-:
Well, it seems to work fine for simulators, so stand aside and let's have a go at the real thing!
If IT businesses shift to providing services, will the suits, which historically make software releases buggy, bloated, and premature, be taken out of the decision process?
One said, If IT businesses shift to making money by being seen as the most effective service channel, they then have a vested interest in having service people who understand the code, the problems and the people.
One said, Unlike the current situation, where you're either a monopoly or can blame your failure on one.
One said, And it will dawn on one or another bright cookie that having support people contribute changes on the spot, and idle people working to make the supported code better as a kind of pre-emptive support, makes good press.
One said, Unlike now, where the same bug might be reported a thousand times before it graduates to the top of the list.
One said, And starting new and innovative projects would provide more support fodder.
One said, If I were a suit, and lazy or efficient, I would just let my people run riot. It's almost too obvious as a solution!
One said, You spoke in the first person.
One said, Damn, and vanished in a puff of smoke. Octarine sparks coalesced into another One.
Larger maximum record size. I believe 8192 bytes is the biggest record you can do with PostGreSQL at the moment.
One website I authored in PHP/MySQL (for political reasons, else it would have been PostGreSQL) has records consisting primarily of a VARCHAR(255) because while the records could be immense under MySQL, individual fields could not. And naturally, everyone's BLOB handling is at least a little bit different.
"We?" I didn't see your name on the developer list! (-:
In a few more releases, "we" can probably call it GreasedPiglet and explain that it goes fast and SQueaLs. Not very corporate, but very catchy. I look forward to host names like "charlotte" and "babe". (-:
Honestly, you would probably be better of with Access if you have an application with five users.
Music to my ears. In particular, the music of the M*A*S*H theme: suicide is painless^H^H^H^Hful.
Access is a a nightmare for anything reliable or complex. As far as databases go, it rates "Pretty toy, but odd that it should have razors sticking out here and there." It's not a "much smaller craft", it's a much smaller death-trap.
According to the developers, it is the first release where they have someone on the team that understands every section of code. Let me tell you, that scared me away.
Given that these programmers didn't start PostGreSQL, but have picked up someone else's orphan and are running with it, and given the substantial bugfixes in 6.5 and substantial improvements in 7.0, I'd say that was pretty good progress.
Now let's ask some other questions to really put it into context:
Does any one person truly understand every aspect of Oracle? (-: And what happens when that person walks into the path of a bus or does a David Helfgott?:-)
How about MS-SQL? Windows 98? Word? Have you ever used one of those? For anything important?
How about jet airliners? I seem to remember something about faulty PlayStation wiring bringing one down... do you refuse to fly because of it?
The difference between PostGreSQL and many of the others is that because the pgsql people have no polished corporate facade to fit into, they can be honest about things that the others can't.
postgresql is process-per-user - the engine isn't multithreaded. this is a scalability issue for apps that produce a large number of connections.
Given that Linux process switching is faster than Solaris thread switching, I can't see this being a terrible problem for Linux (and you can bet your butt Linux isn't the only fast-switching OS in the world).
Apache on Linux kicks butt at high loads with thread-per-user (at least, it does since it got wake-one to play with).
PostGreSQL on NT, however, would run like a dyslexic centipede, given the truly staggering per-process overheads there. What a shame.
Actually, it seems to me that threading under NT is a kind of a conceptual bandaid to slow the bleeding of their whole-process issues.
I would like to see options for analysing a page, starting with a link dump mode like Lynx, and dear old IBM WebExplorer's links menu, so for the case of the missing Submit button, I could find out what's going on. This would not be useful without there also being a domain-equivalence table (e.g. hotmail.com == passport.com == freebsd.org and similar; maybe some regexps would be handy, since most modern machines wouldn't notice the extra overhead).
A similar mapping to geld the scripting on specific pages or sites, and/or to disable for all but re-enable for specific would also be good.
Putting these in a separate config section, disabled by default and emblazoned with suitable warnings (perhaps even rcfile-style completely eliminable for tur[n]key intallations) would help to ally the fears of the "it causes problems" panic merchants. Mozilla, if it is to succeed, will want to be more like Lego than any other browser, that is, more possibilities available but not forced on you.
The idea of banner ads going away is difficult to envision. Advertisers are finding more ways to assault your eyeballs, not less. For example, if *.doubleclick.com becomes widely blocked, an advertising site (www.randomwebsite.com) need only add an A-record to their DNS (for something like dc.randomwebsite.com) that resolves to an IP owned by doubleclick.com. If doubleclick then diversifies their IP address holdings, this will become increasingly difficult to block.
Although doubleclick seem to me to be slowly improving the quality of their ads, I do find them extremely tiresome and would treasure an easy way to replace them with a fast blank box.
Slashdot Mirror
If you hook a user on Roxen or Pike, you can then point out that they can have it without the (check one or more) [_] expense [_] instability [_] insecurity [_] licence issues [_] embarrassment [_] opacity of running it under Windows. Odd it is that something named Windows opaque should be.
You should ask them how they do it.
With a satellite dish the size of your sails, and power from a generator that weighs an order of magnitude or so more than your entire boat, lead keel and all.
hat would be something to do on the bus, or a
new way to crash your car. I wonder if microsoft will write there own products if wap takes off.
"Where do you want to go today? That wall over there? Consider it done!" (-:
Given how enthusiastic they are to crash your computer, I can't see how MS could resist an opportunity to crash your car as well. It would kind of get back at Lee Iacocca for his nasty rebuttal to Bill's "if cars were like computers" speech if MS could get cars up to crashing twice a day... and the market for SensiPeril Blue windscreens would soar... General Pedestrian Fault? (-:
The limiting factors for WAP devices by and large aren't processor power, so Moore's law doesn't apply. The two major factors are screen size and network speed.
Network speed shouldn't be much of a limiting factor for games like Backgammon. Given that mobile delivery of audio and video is planned for a few years hence, the bandwidth for playing Quake doesn't look so impossible.
As to screen size, colour is almost here and flexible semiconductors as well, so having a 6x4-inch (15x10cm) unrollable screen (2x4 (5x10) rolled up) in your 'phone is a realistic expectation.
Quake in 320x200 at first. Maybe later we clip the phone to the dashboard or bus seat and project a HUD onto the glass. With an aync ARM CPU and async ARMified version of the Voodoo 5000, you should get 10, maybe 15 minutes before the battery dies. (-:
This means you can use Perl as your scripting language with any application on Windows that supports ActiveX scripting, such as Internet Explorer, Active Server Pages files, and the Windows Scripting Host.
Woooooohoo! Party! Party! Let's have a party! Does anyone have a link to a valid ActiveX key and/or non-Windows signer? (-:
We can make an ILOVEYOU removal service, which sends itself around a bit to make sure all of those nasty ILOVEYOU virii really were erased. (-: I think a thousand-entry hashed sent-one-here list and a twenty-hop age limit would be enough. Being PERL, it would be difficult to figure out where the code ended and the has table began.
At least you could only delete things writeable by the luser who _did_ open such an attachment. Rather than a "sand tray", we need a Faraday cage.
> us over until the free speech comes to the
> rescue.
Yup. That's how it's often been so far.
I hope that Sun, for example, elects to properly OpenSource the StarOffice suite when it hits the wall as far as direct political usefulness goes (if not before) since I'd value the opportunity to put that on a diet and install a squillion copies.
In this vein, Open Sourcing faces a dilemma for a commerce-oriented company like Sun. If they stick a rider on, requiring derivatives of their software to continuously display an unadulterated "derived from Sun software" logo (something I would be more than happy to suffer), they then face an image issue
I have another suggestion for Sun in particular, to do right now: consider semi-open-sourcing StarOffice on a may-not-sell-or-distribute basis (ie private use only for derivatives) but with a fixed time-bomb that automatically GPLs it (maybe at the end of 2002, but give a definite date) (even with a must-display-this-logo rider).
This would work for Sun because:
How say you?
> [MS] like to think of themselves as the
> bully and think that everyone will just
> fold over.
No, MS like to think of themselves as righteously indignant because their bought-and-paid-for property has been "stolen".
I suspect that the majority of MS herdsmen, particularly the lawyers, are in such culture shock about MS truly giving anything away, however backhandedly, that the idea doesn't actually take root in their consciousness. Also, they don't seem to understand "public." They seem to think that it means something like "available to be snatched away and defended" rather than "accessible to all".
Not until you press them, and ask pointy questions that force them to begin thinking (ooh, that smarts), do they have to actually assimilate enough reality to come to a knowledge of the truth. This of course shows them what dodos they really look like to everyone else, which is embarrassing and makes them highly defensive.
If they learn quickly, the individuals involved will most carefully avoid such issues in future, else if they also have enough basic honesty, they will then choose the truly righteous side (even though it will most likely cost them their job). If they're a bit thick, they'll accuse Bob Young of attacking them, froth at the mouth, and generally set themselves up for another pie in the face.
Here's my Microsoft Parody, where's yours?
Here.
Especially if the poll code can keep separate tallies for registered users and ACs.
* Publish it now, screw the credit
* Publish it soon, credit where possible (email candidates, timeout in 14 days)
* Publish it later, take excruciating care with credit
* I just like voting
* Don't publish it
> POSIX actually requires Motif.
Well, then: another one bites the dust. Are there any standards that Linux _doesn't_ own?
It's quite simple: the program is GPLed. Once GPLed, always GPLed - the "viral" nature of GPL. Whether you're the "owner" or not is irrelevant, and of course if others have contributed, you're not the only owner any more. Problem solved.
BTW, if you want me to contribute something, even if only to solve your dilemma, email me with a URL. (-:
If your workplace wants you to improve the program, that's not a problem. Simply contribute the improvements back to the package, just like the nice licence says. While you're there, add comments to the new/improved section saying "Improvements to this section sponsored by XYZ Corp. If you're in the market for late alphabetical services, visit http://www.xyz.com/ or call 555-6789-0123". I'd call that fair.
If they want to sell the improved package, also not a problem as long as the source is also freely available (and since you contributed the changes back, that's done already).
Easy, isn't it? (-:
Kick the wrong ass, and it'll turn around and bite you (a.g. Baalam's donkey).
Hosting copyrighted material is ILLEGAL, you must ditch posts that actually contain it, regardless of free-speech issues. Fight the copyright issue using legal means, and if you win then by all means replace the postings. Getting yourself totally shut down (martyred) is the ultimate loss of speech freedom.
Linking is a different matter; MS should be contacting the linked-to sites.
Yes, posters own their posted material. Or do they? Since material posted by SlashDot users appeared in a certain book, you may have shown that they don't. Hoist by your own petard.
Also, Anonymous Coward is by definition "nobody." Since nobody made the posting, nobody owns the contents - the ownership must devolve back onto SlashDot.
It would be out of character for the SlashDot team to do anything for purely commercial reasons, but I bet you need your new server to deal with the hits that this controversy is generating.
SlashDot may have already given themselves hell. Hell-mouth, in fact.
/.'s grave. Now /. can't really argue that they're more or less free to do what they like with user comments.
Publishing the comments of SlashDot readers sans their permission (the Hellmouth book) may just have dug
OTOH, Microsoft only has the right to demand removal of actual copyright material. Links are a different matter. Hint: Australians are allowed to reverse-engineer things; perhaps there should be a SlashDot department somewhere out of reach of Microsoft lawyers?
I'm still waiting for USB support,
My Sony DSC-F505 whizz-bang USB digital camera works just fine under 2.3.99pre6, thank you.
localised Linux-distributions
And which rock are you hiding under? You have choices of Chinese, Korean, Russian etc-ad-nauseum localised distributions, and all of the majors (Mandrake, Debian, e-a-n) speak more languages than you've got extremities to count them on.
I must admit that RedHat has deleted the RedNeck installer option (I want that back, along with jive, cow and a few others).
Lets put it this way, it takes 10+ years and 000s of developers to build an Air Traffic Control
System, do you think this would work well in the bazzare enviroment?
That's "bizarre" environment, as in "the catheter and the bizarre behaviour". (-:
Well, it seems to work fine for simulators, so stand aside and let's have a go at the real thing!
If IT businesses shift to providing services, will the suits, which historically make software releases buggy, bloated, and premature, be taken out of the decision process?
One said, If IT businesses shift to making money by being seen as the most effective service channel, they then have a vested interest in having service people who understand the code, the problems and the people.
One said, Unlike the current situation, where you're either a monopoly or can blame your failure on one.
One said, And it will dawn on one or another bright cookie that having support people contribute changes on the spot, and idle people working to make the supported code better as a kind of pre-emptive support, makes good press.
One said, Unlike now, where the same bug might be reported a thousand times before it graduates to the top of the list.
One said, And starting new and innovative projects would provide more support fodder.
One said, If I were a suit, and lazy or efficient, I would just let my people run riot. It's almost too obvious as a solution!
One said, You spoke in the first person.
One said, Damn, and vanished in a puff of smoke. Octarine sparks coalesced into another One.
Larger maximum record size. I believe 8192 bytes is the biggest record you can do with PostGreSQL at the moment.
One website I authored in PHP/MySQL (for political reasons, else it would have been PostGreSQL) has records consisting primarily of a VARCHAR(255) because while the records could be immense under MySQL, individual fields could not. And naturally, everyone's BLOB handling is at least a little bit different.
We can call it something nice and corporate like:
"We?" I didn't see your name on the developer list! (-:
In a few more releases, "we" can probably call it GreasedPiglet and explain that it goes fast and SQueaLs. Not very corporate, but very catchy. I look forward to host names like "charlotte" and "babe". (-:
Honestly, you would probably be better of with Access if you have an application with five users.
Music to my ears. In particular, the music of the M*A*S*H theme: suicide is painless^H^H^H^Hful.
Access is a a nightmare for anything reliable or complex. As far as databases go, it rates "Pretty toy, but odd that it should have razors sticking out here and there." It's not a "much smaller craft", it's a much smaller death-trap.
I'd rather use text files, thanks.
Given that these programmers didn't start PostGreSQL, but have picked up someone else's orphan and are running with it, and given the substantial bugfixes in 6.5 and substantial improvements in 7.0, I'd say that was pretty good progress.
Now let's ask some other questions to really put it into context:
The difference between PostGreSQL and many of the others is that because the pgsql people have no polished corporate facade to fit into, they can be honest about things that the others can't.
postgresql is process-per-user - the engine isn't multithreaded. this is a scalability issue for apps that produce a large number of connections.
Given that Linux process switching is faster than Solaris thread switching, I can't see this being a terrible problem for Linux (and you can bet your butt Linux isn't the only fast-switching OS in the world).
Apache on Linux kicks butt at high loads with thread-per-user (at least, it does since it got wake-one to play with).
PostGreSQL on NT, however, would run like a dyslexic centipede, given the truly staggering per-process overheads there. What a shame.
Actually, it seems to me that threading under NT is a kind of a conceptual bandaid to slow the bleeding of their whole-process issues.
I would like to see options for analysing a page, starting with a link dump mode like Lynx, and dear old IBM WebExplorer's links menu, so for the case of the missing Submit button, I could find out what's going on. This would not be useful without there also being a domain-equivalence table (e.g. hotmail.com == passport.com == freebsd.org and similar; maybe some regexps would be handy, since most modern machines wouldn't notice the extra overhead).
A similar mapping to geld the scripting on specific pages or sites, and/or to disable for all but re-enable for specific would also be good.
Putting these in a separate config section, disabled by default and emblazoned with suitable warnings (perhaps even rcfile-style completely eliminable for tur[n]key intallations) would help to ally the fears of the "it causes problems" panic merchants. Mozilla, if it is to succeed, will want to be more like Lego than any other browser, that is, more possibilities available but not forced on you.
The idea of banner ads going away is difficult to envision. Advertisers are finding more ways to assault your eyeballs, not less. For example, if *.doubleclick.com becomes widely blocked, an advertising site (www.randomwebsite.com) need only add an A-record to their DNS (for something like dc.randomwebsite.com) that resolves to an IP owned by doubleclick.com. If doubleclick then diversifies their IP address holdings, this will become increasingly difficult to block.
Although doubleclick seem to me to be slowly improving the quality of their ads, I do find them extremely tiresome and would treasure an easy way to replace them with a fast blank box.
I thought it would be a fun time to mention that the Motorola PowerPC 7500 (aka G4) chip uses 5 watts under typical use and 8 watts max.
/ME thought that it would be a fun time to mention that a nice fast ARM would suck a fraction of a watt...
And
Actually, PowerPC is quite nice compared to these cumbersome Intelish 4004-derived mutants.