In no sense of the word did they 'take an open source product' and kinda create their own fork. Unless you can tell me where to download NeXT's Source Code.
NeXT is a fork of Mach, BSD UNIX, and GNU (including the GNU compiler).
Note that the remaining technology also didn't come from Apple or NeXT: Objective-C came from Stepstone, Postscript came from Adobe, and the NeXTStep library design came from Xerox.
And of course PalmOS-over-Linux is not even close to being here, much less it were so in the days when Zodiacs were being developed.
Merely putting Linux on the Zodiac wouldn't have made their stupid business model work either. Their mistake was to design a device that was a cross between a PDA and a gaming machine. Nothing was going to save them from that.
The reason Linux might have helped them is because it would have opened up other applications for the hardware. As it was, the use of PalmOS locked them into a developer community that was incapable of delivering any kinds of applications that could have carried the device.
but users were very happy with the Zodiac as a PDA. Fast, tons of memory.
And I'm "happy with" my Palm as well, even though I think the Palm OS 5 internal architecture sucks. But that's not sufficient to win in the market, and it is certainly not sufficient for claiming to be innovative. Tapwave's business proposition was bogus, and they were not innovative.
I don't have one myself as I need a built-in keyboard (I have a Clie NX 70),
See, and that illustrates the problem. You like your Palm, I like my Palm, but neither of us bought a Tapwave device.
Your post makes me remember why many people hate Linux. It's because of the attitude like yours.
That you worry about attitudes like mine in and of itself shows that you shouldn't be designing products.
I mean - don't tell me you seriously believe that going with PalmOS instead of Linux for a PDA was a bloody _wrong_ choice?
Yes.
Linux is not the answer to everything. I'd hate to be in IT world where it's "Linux vs Windows" as much as I'd hate to be in "Only Windows". Palm and Apple still give me (faint) hope though.
Oh, I fully agree that Linux has lots of problems, and that a Linux vs. Windows world would be bad.
But you are full of shit if Palm or Apple "give you hope"; Palm OS and OS X are obsolete and have no compelling advantages over other offerings in the market. Until companies like Palm and Apple come up with something that is actually better than Linux (or BSD, for that matter), they should at least use Linux.
Palm at least has realized their mistake and is switching to an all Linux lineup.
In order to get something better than Palm OS or OS X, we'll have to wait for companies to get off their lazy butts and actually start innovating. Unfortunately, no company working on operating systems has done that, least of all Palm or Apple.
During the ensuing discussion somebody pointed out that the number of technical PhDs earned every year was like a hundred times the MSR hiring rate.
Maybe a few percent of those PhDs are actually good enough to do something truly new and innovative during their lives, and MSR manages to hire a big fraction of those. Yes, it really is a problem.
There are more than, say 500 good engineers in the US
Yes, but we aren't talking about "good engineers". There are tens of thousands of good engineers in the US. But there are probably no more than 500 top notch innovators in the US, and Google and Yahoo have hired a substantial fraction of those.
Sure, not many VPs of big dot-coms are easy to hire but would a startup be able to afford the salaries/perks they demand?
The people we are talking about are not "VPs", they are the technical brains of companies. While they certainly won't turn down money if it's offered to them, it's not what motivates them. What does motivate them is the ability to get innovations out the door. And the problem with startups is not the salary or financial uncertainty, it's the risk that they work for several years and then see their product die because some VC screwed up the business side.
These people are just as likely to come up with the Next Big Thing (tm) as the MIT PhD's are
Companies like graduates from certain schools because those people are not just trained to be good programmers, but to think beyond what they were taught. You don't have to have attended such a school in order to have those skills, but if you didn't, you'll have to establish to your potential employer that you know what it takes some other way.
And my impression is that you don't actually know what it takes. You imply that being a "talented engineer" is enough. You're right that there are plenty of talented engineers and coders, and it is not enough.
Just as interesting (but nowhere near as well supported) is the possibility that the solar system is actually a binary star system, with the second star a dim brown dwarf at around one light year distance. The idea is that its long period orbit would periodically take it through regions with large numbers of objects, whose orbits would be perturbed by the passing star, and would lead to periodic bombardment of the inner solar system.
It's incrementalism that killed Tapwave. Instead of going out and creating a future-proof gaming platform, they took PalmOS and stuck on a third party gaming library. How much more "incremental" can you get? PalmOS 5 was an obsolete platform before they even started. And Tapwave followed a long chain of obsolete thinking about proprietary APIs, starting at Apple, then Palm, and finally Tapwave.
What would an innovative gaming platform have looked like? Something with an open source OS (maybe Linux, maybe something entirely new) and an open source gaming library. Something that would have made it radically easier to develop games for it. Something with a new class of games on it, with social networking applications, with new controllers and hardware.
Tapwave was "punished" because they were incrementalists; failure was pretty much inevitable for them. If they had actually been innovative, it would still have been risky, but at least they might have had a chance.
This was completely predictable: a PalmOS machine with a proprietary gaming library was a really stupid idea. It made them dependent on PalmOS, tied them to an outdated software architecture, and meant that they still had to do lots of custom software development.
I think even if they had started off with Linux on those devices, they would have failed: wrong market, wrong timing. But they would have had a slightly better chance than with what they actually did.
It's good when people fix problems in their web apps. But, realistically, a lot of companies aren't going to bother; touching large amounts of old code is a dangerous and costly proposition.
I think the solution is a different one. Greasemonkey has already been used for the purpose of fixing IE-only problems, and it's relatively easy to write new scripts that patch up problems in IE-based web apps. I think that's the path towards helping making Firefox an even better replacement for IE.
Of course, Greasemonkey itself isn't mature and has problems. The recently discovered security problems are serious but fixable.
More important is that Greasemonkey scripts may be too much trouble to install right now for deployment. Greasemonkey would be greatly enhanced if it could be set up to access script repositories through http and/or WebDAV. That way, intranet administrators could point their users' Firefox browsers at a secure, internal Greasemonkey script repository and add fixes as they encounter them.
You should be able to implement data islands without touching the original code as a Greasemonkey script (even with the less powerful version in use right now).
You don't have to do complex calculations--just look at Microsoft's profits. Since Microsoft's products are no more technologically advanced than many alternative offerings, in an efficient market, competition would drive prices down and those profits would quickly go away.
Why, they couldn't possibly have ulterior motives!
Of course, they do! Their ulterior motive is that they'd like to see Microsoft's monopolistic practices end so that they can compete on technology and price. It's an ulterior motive everybody should heartily applaud.
I do find it hilarious that the Chinese are probably going to get away with this and there's hardly a damn thing U.S. powers can do. [...] risk upsetting trade relations over MIPS.
This has nothing to do with trade relations. Even if the technology was patented in the US, those patents simply are not valid in China. There is nothing unusual about that: foreign patents aren't valid in the US either.
More generally, patents, copyrights, etc. are laws and agreements that are negotiated between nations; there is no legal or ethical basis on which to even suggest that other nations should implement them. If China doesn't want patents, that's their good right.
Keep in mind that the US during its early history flagrantly and deliberately violated intellectual property of the European nations.
Actually, AMD licenses an enormous amount of IP from Intel
You're right, I made a mistake: AMD did license even the instruction set from the start. It was the C3 processor and some other x86 clones that were created without a license. Note that any patents related to the 386 instruction set and architecture are around their expiration date.
This cross-licensing is what benefits us, and makes sure that Intel gets what Intel deserves and AMD gets AMD deserves.
No, the patent cross-licensing does not benefit us; it creates artificial and harmful barriers to entry, without creating much of an incentive for Intel or AMD to conduct more R&D than they would otherwise.
I keep my fingers crossed that the Chinese are getting away with this; I think this is a good thing. Incidentally, given that MIPS started in the early 1980's, chances are that any patents on the instruction set and general architecture have expired. Furthermore, China is under no obligation to enforce US patents within China anyway; as long as they don't ship it to the US, they can produce whatever they like.
The CPU is 95% MIPS compatible using an unauthorized and unlicensed variation of the MIPS architecture,
The AMD chips are 100% Pentium compatible, using an unauthorized and unlicensed variation of the Pentium architecture, and we all benefit from that. As long as they don't violate specific patents or copy parts of the circuitry, it's also legal.
If MIPS Technologies actually claim intellectual property in the MIPS instruction set or general aspects of the MIPS architecture, then we have a real problem, but that problem is with MIPS Technologies. Instruction sets and straightforward high-level architectural choices should not be patentable.
The hardware was pretty decent at the time. The new disk-based Zaurus handhelds are great (if heavy). The functionality is also nice, as are the open file formats and the Linux underpinnings.
But the problem with all of them is that the user interface on the Zaurus sucks badly. Like PocketPC, it tries to adapt desktop metaphors to handhelds, and that just doesn't work well.
As far as I'm concerned, the only PDAs with acceptable UIs at this point are Palm and Symbian. And since Palm will soon be Linux-based, I won't have to choose anymore between a good UI and a good operating system. For now, I choose a usable UI, which means I continue to use my Zire.
24x24x24 milimeters (about the size of the tip of your finger
If the tip of your finger is about 1"x1"x1", you either have elephantitis or are about 12' tall. Are your other appendages of such unusual size as well? If so, poor you.
Can SuSE set up my wireless card with ndiswrapper without a CLI?
No, but neither can Windows.
The point is that you need to compare apples to apples. Windows and Macintosh only work on supported hardware, so if you are going to make any comparisons, you need to compare those systems to Linux on supported hardware.
And on supported hardware, Linux GUI admin tools are excellent--easier to use, more consistent, and more comprehensive than Windows or Macintosh.
This sort of thing is stupidity, not an attack. Unfortunately, it's stupidity that happens again and again.
As a rule of thumb, never set the return address for a mailing list or a group mailing to the group.
As a rule of thumb, never put more than a handful of people in the To/Cc lines of an Email.
Stick to those two rules, and you'll be doing OK. Break them only if you have a really, really good reason.
Re:Uh Oh.
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If they came with a full set of graphical administration tools then it wouldn't be necessary to go to a command line at all.
Systems like SuSE do come with a full set of graphical adminstration tools; it isn't necessary to go to the command line to administer them, ever.
And something like Webmin runs on any UNIX system and gives you a far more comprehensive and consistent administration interface to a larger set of subsystems than Windows tools.
Of course, many end-users find command line administration actually easier.
Slashdot Mirror
In no sense of the word did they 'take an open source product' and kinda create their own fork. Unless you can tell me where to download NeXT's Source Code.
NeXT is a fork of Mach, BSD UNIX, and GNU (including the GNU compiler).
Note that the remaining technology also didn't come from Apple or NeXT: Objective-C came from Stepstone, Postscript came from Adobe, and the NeXTStep library design came from Xerox.
And of course PalmOS-over-Linux is not even close to being here, much less it were so in the days when Zodiacs were being developed.
Merely putting Linux on the Zodiac wouldn't have made their stupid business model work either. Their mistake was to design a device that was a cross between a PDA and a gaming machine. Nothing was going to save them from that.
The reason Linux might have helped them is because it would have opened up other applications for the hardware. As it was, the use of PalmOS locked them into a developer community that was incapable of delivering any kinds of applications that could have carried the device.
but users were very happy with the Zodiac as a PDA. Fast, tons of memory.
And I'm "happy with" my Palm as well, even though I think the Palm OS 5 internal architecture sucks. But that's not sufficient to win in the market, and it is certainly not sufficient for claiming to be innovative. Tapwave's business proposition was bogus, and they were not innovative.
I don't have one myself as I need a built-in keyboard (I have a Clie NX 70),
See, and that illustrates the problem. You like your Palm, I like my Palm, but neither of us bought a Tapwave device.
Your post makes me remember why many people hate Linux. It's because of the attitude like yours.
That you worry about attitudes like mine in and of itself shows that you shouldn't be designing products.
I mean - don't tell me you seriously believe that going with PalmOS instead of Linux for a PDA was a bloody _wrong_ choice?
Yes.
Linux is not the answer to everything. I'd hate to be in IT world where it's "Linux vs Windows" as much as I'd hate to be in "Only Windows". Palm and Apple still give me (faint) hope though.
Oh, I fully agree that Linux has lots of problems, and that a Linux vs. Windows world would be bad.
But you are full of shit if Palm or Apple "give you hope"; Palm OS and OS X are obsolete and have no compelling advantages over other offerings in the market. Until companies like Palm and Apple come up with something that is actually better than Linux (or BSD, for that matter), they should at least use Linux.
Palm at least has realized their mistake and is switching to an all Linux lineup.
In order to get something better than Palm OS or OS X, we'll have to wait for companies to get off their lazy butts and actually start innovating. Unfortunately, no company working on operating systems has done that, least of all Palm or Apple.
During the ensuing discussion somebody pointed out that the number of technical PhDs earned every year was like a hundred times the MSR hiring rate.
Maybe a few percent of those PhDs are actually good enough to do something truly new and innovative during their lives, and MSR manages to hire a big fraction of those. Yes, it really is a problem.
There are more than, say 500 good engineers in the US
Yes, but we aren't talking about "good engineers". There are tens of thousands of good engineers in the US. But there are probably no more than 500 top notch innovators in the US, and Google and Yahoo have hired a substantial fraction of those.
Sure, not many VPs of big dot-coms are easy to hire but would a startup be able to afford the salaries/perks they demand?
The people we are talking about are not "VPs", they are the technical brains of companies. While they certainly won't turn down money if it's offered to them, it's not what motivates them. What does motivate them is the ability to get innovations out the door. And the problem with startups is not the salary or financial uncertainty, it's the risk that they work for several years and then see their product die because some VC screwed up the business side.
These people are just as likely to come up with the Next Big Thing (tm) as the MIT PhD's are
Companies like graduates from certain schools because those people are not just trained to be good programmers, but to think beyond what they were taught. You don't have to have attended such a school in order to have those skills, but if you didn't, you'll have to establish to your potential employer that you know what it takes some other way.
And my impression is that you don't actually know what it takes. You imply that being a "talented engineer" is enough. You're right that there are plenty of talented engineers and coders, and it is not enough.
Just as interesting (but nowhere near as well supported) is the possibility that the solar system is actually a binary star system, with the second star a dim brown dwarf at around one light year distance. The idea is that its long period orbit would periodically take it through regions with large numbers of objects, whose orbits would be perturbed by the passing star, and would lead to periodic bombardment of the inner solar system.
It's incrementalism that killed Tapwave. Instead of going out and creating a future-proof gaming platform, they took PalmOS and stuck on a third party gaming library. How much more "incremental" can you get? PalmOS 5 was an obsolete platform before they even started. And Tapwave followed a long chain of obsolete thinking about proprietary APIs, starting at Apple, then Palm, and finally Tapwave.
What would an innovative gaming platform have looked like? Something with an open source OS (maybe Linux, maybe something entirely new) and an open source gaming library. Something that would have made it radically easier to develop games for it. Something with a new class of games on it, with social networking applications, with new controllers and hardware.
Tapwave was "punished" because they were incrementalists; failure was pretty much inevitable for them. If they had actually been innovative, it would still have been risky, but at least they might have had a chance.
This was completely predictable: a PalmOS machine with a proprietary gaming library was a really stupid idea. It made them dependent on PalmOS, tied them to an outdated software architecture, and meant that they still had to do lots of custom software development.
I think even if they had started off with Linux on those devices, they would have failed: wrong market, wrong timing. But they would have had a slightly better chance than with what they actually did.
No, standard mischief won't. But non-standard mischief, like not buying one of those printers, does and works very well.
Print a test page at the store and have a look; the dots are easy to see once you know they're there.
It's good when people fix problems in their web apps. But, realistically, a lot of companies aren't going to bother; touching large amounts of old code is a dangerous and costly proposition.
I think the solution is a different one. Greasemonkey has already been used for the purpose of fixing IE-only problems, and it's relatively easy to write new scripts that patch up problems in IE-based web apps. I think that's the path towards helping making Firefox an even better replacement for IE.
Of course, Greasemonkey itself isn't mature and has problems. The recently discovered security problems are serious but fixable.
More important is that Greasemonkey scripts may be too much trouble to install right now for deployment. Greasemonkey would be greatly enhanced if it could be set up to access script repositories through http and/or WebDAV. That way, intranet administrators could point their users' Firefox browsers at a secure, internal Greasemonkey script repository and add fixes as they encounter them.
You should be able to implement data islands without touching the original code as a Greasemonkey script (even with the less powerful version in use right now).
Why in the world would you fly into space with an organization that talks about "the dark side of the moon"?
You don't have to do complex calculations--just look at Microsoft's profits. Since Microsoft's products are no more technologically advanced than many alternative offerings, in an efficient market, competition would drive prices down and those profits would quickly go away.
Why, they couldn't possibly have ulterior motives!
Of course, they do! Their ulterior motive is that they'd like to see Microsoft's monopolistic practices end so that they can compete on technology and price. It's an ulterior motive everybody should heartily applaud.
I do find it hilarious that the Chinese are probably going to get away with this and there's hardly a damn thing U.S. powers can do. [...] risk upsetting trade relations over MIPS.
This has nothing to do with trade relations. Even if the technology was patented in the US, those patents simply are not valid in China. There is nothing unusual about that: foreign patents aren't valid in the US either.
More generally, patents, copyrights, etc. are laws and agreements that are negotiated between nations; there is no legal or ethical basis on which to even suggest that other nations should implement them. If China doesn't want patents, that's their good right.
Keep in mind that the US during its early history flagrantly and deliberately violated intellectual property of the European nations.
Actually, AMD licenses an enormous amount of IP from Intel
You're right, I made a mistake: AMD did license even the instruction set from the start. It was the C3 processor and some other x86 clones that were created without a license. Note that any patents related to the 386 instruction set and architecture are around their expiration date.
This cross-licensing is what benefits us, and makes sure that Intel gets what Intel deserves and AMD gets AMD deserves.
No, the patent cross-licensing does not benefit us; it creates artificial and harmful barriers to entry, without creating much of an incentive for Intel or AMD to conduct more R&D than they would otherwise.
I keep my fingers crossed that the Chinese are getting away with this; I think this is a good thing. Incidentally, given that MIPS started in the early 1980's, chances are that any patents on the instruction set and general architecture have expired. Furthermore, China is under no obligation to enforce US patents within China anyway; as long as they don't ship it to the US, they can produce whatever they like.
It's a pretty goddamned good deal.
No, it's not. Not even at half price.
The CPU is 95% MIPS compatible using an unauthorized and unlicensed variation of the MIPS architecture,
The AMD chips are 100% Pentium compatible, using an unauthorized and unlicensed variation of the Pentium architecture, and we all benefit from that. As long as they don't violate specific patents or copy parts of the circuitry, it's also legal.
If MIPS Technologies actually claim intellectual property in the MIPS instruction set or general aspects of the MIPS architecture, then we have a real problem, but that problem is with MIPS Technologies. Instruction sets and straightforward high-level architectural choices should not be patentable.
The hardware was pretty decent at the time. The new disk-based Zaurus handhelds are great (if heavy). The functionality is also nice, as are the open file formats and the Linux underpinnings.
But the problem with all of them is that the user interface on the Zaurus sucks badly. Like PocketPC, it tries to adapt desktop metaphors to handhelds, and that just doesn't work well.
As far as I'm concerned, the only PDAs with acceptable UIs at this point are Palm and Symbian. And since Palm will soon be Linux-based, I won't have to choose anymore between a good UI and a good operating system. For now, I choose a usable UI, which means I continue to use my Zire.
24x24x24 milimeters (about the size of the tip of your finger
If the tip of your finger is about 1"x1"x1", you either have elephantitis or are about 12' tall. Are your other appendages of such unusual size as well? If so, poor you.
Can SuSE set up my wireless card with ndiswrapper without a CLI?
No, but neither can Windows.
The point is that you need to compare apples to apples. Windows and Macintosh only work on supported hardware, so if you are going to make any comparisons, you need to compare those systems to Linux on supported hardware.
And on supported hardware, Linux GUI admin tools are excellent--easier to use, more consistent, and more comprehensive than Windows or Macintosh.
This sort of thing is stupidity, not an attack. Unfortunately, it's stupidity that happens again and again.
As a rule of thumb, never set the return address for a mailing list or a group mailing to the group.
As a rule of thumb, never put more than a handful of people in the To/Cc lines of an Email.
Stick to those two rules, and you'll be doing OK. Break them only if you have a really, really good reason.
If they came with a full set of graphical administration tools then it wouldn't be necessary to go to a command line at all.
Systems like SuSE do come with a full set of graphical adminstration tools; it isn't necessary to go to the command line to administer them, ever.
And something like Webmin runs on any UNIX system and gives you a far more comprehensive and consistent administration interface to a larger set of subsystems than Windows tools.
Of course, many end-users find command line administration actually easier.