I am an engineer who works for a company that makes base station-side software and hardware for this product. We are a supplier to Nortel, who is the general contractor for the San Diego deployment. Since I personally wrote a lot of the code that makes this stuff work, I can speak somewhat authoritatively on this technology.
First of all, EV-DO does scale. There are 5 million subscribers in Korea alone, shared between SK telecom and KT freetel. The technology has also been rolled out in a big way in Japan by KDDI recently.
It is true that the current Verizon deployment uses only PCMCIA cards. But phones are on the way later this year. There are dozens of EV-DO enabled phones and handheld devices available. Check out this page. EV-DO is data only, but nothing says that end-user devices cannot be EV-DO + 1x-RTT.
The article says that this is not "always on". That is misleading. EV-DO has the concept of "sessions" and "connections". Sessions are always on, and connections are on an as-needed basis. Connections are set-up when the user needs to send/receive data and torn down when he is done. This happens automatically, the user does not have to do anything special when he needs to do something. (For e.g., just click on a link on slashdot and a new connection is set up, data is uploaded and subsequently downloaded from the website, and the connection is torn down. All this happens automatically, the technology takes care of everything).
This is not a LAN technology. It is not a replacement for WiFi. This is a CDMA-based, cellular-WAN technology. It automatically provides all the security of a CDMA-based network. Not that this is perfect, but it is much better than WiFi in that w.r.t. security.
Transgressions? After the case was heard, Jackson publicly said that he would be opposed to breaking up MS. It is only after MS repeatedly flouted his rulings, continued to:
1) Deny events that were factually in the record.
2) Claim "no wrongdoing" and refused to take responsibility for their actions.
3) Claimed that any punishment that Jackson ruled out would be too much for any crime that they had committed.
4) Claimed that they were going to appeal whatever wristslap jackson imposed on them
that jackson changed his mind about the punishment they deserved. IMHO, he was too reserved. I would have dressed BillG and Ballmer in drag and thrown them into a cell full of rapists doing life.
Because the appeals court is full of MS fans and shills. A couple of judges reportedly have several million dollars of MS stock. Of course, they don't think that this makes them biased, so they don't recuse themselves. The appeals court has almost never ruled against Microsoft in the last dozen or so years when MS lost in a lower court. It is a foregone conclusion that the appeals court will reverse jackson and rule in favor of MS. It is also a foregone conclusion that none of their kids will "ever be hungry again". Asking for the Supreme court to hear the case directly is the closest the govt can come to stating this. If they say this in plain english, they run the risk of being in contempt of court.
Because, it might be technically illegal to link your code with a GPLd library, or to cut and paste from a GPLd application, if your license is not GPL-compatible.
The GPL is a legal contract. If the FSF does not enforce it, they legally lose the right to enforce it in the future, as they did not exercise "due diligence" in its enforcement. The GPL (and other freeware licenses too) could lose whatever little legal protections they have.
That is why RMS is so insistent on licensing issues.
Of course, if all you care about is to make sure that your source is available to the users and don't care about licensing issues, you could always put your code in the public domain, or BSD it. That way, you don't have to bother with RMS or the FSF.
Of course, you might not be very happy when some company adds some features to your code and starts selling it for $5000.00 per license, while not even acknowledging your existence.
You must have just come in late. "OSS", as you call it, has always been the "laughing stock" of the OS "market". From before it started being called OSS. Unfortunately for the OS "market", OSS is now kicking its collective butt.
The opinions of the OS market are the last things that we need to care about. The OS market goes where it can make a buck.
I for one am sincerely glad that Stallman has the balls to stand up and say what must be said, even if that means losing "popularity" with the OS market and its cheerleaders.
Oh, great RMS basher, do enlighten us and tell us what YOU have done for Free Software that makes you such a valid critic. While you are about it, why don't you also enlighten us with examples of how "RMS backstabbed, grown arrogant etc".
RMS is one of the most perfectly logical people that I have had the pleasure to read. All of his writings or sayings (not stuff that corporate shills make up and get attributed to him, mind you) are completely consistant with his basic axioms. He is unyeilding on matters of principle, but I have never seen self-aggrandizing from him. (Go ahead, post a link to the contrary). Compared to some guys in the BSD camp or Tom Christensen the Perl guy, RMS is a model of restraint.
Now, when I read your stuff, all I can visualize is a carpetbagger who wants to have the freedom to dip into the GPL till and make off with what he can grab, without feeling legally constrained to give anything back. I'm sorry, but the GPL was designed to thwart guys like you. It is the most popular free software license, so it appears that many authors feel that way. I notice that, for all their protestations, the KDE team did not release their software under the X11 or artistic licenses to get RMS off their back. They could easily have done so since, according to their claims, all the code in KDE (with the exception of some in kmidi and kghostview) is new.
Hari.
They didn't get this far obeying corporate lackeys
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
Dude,
If everyone had adopted the "pragmatic" attitude as you suggested, linux would never have been written.
I mean, it would be impossible to write an OS without corporate backing, right? Linus should have adopted the practical approach and gone to work for Microsoft.
But of course, you know that. You don't give a rats ass about Linux, open source or "the community". You want to go in, rake whatever cash you can out of the mix and get out. And if it can help you MS stock go up a bit, so much the better. Your reference to "Pseudo-communistic leader" gave the game away.
Neither Linus nor Stallman needs advice from the likes of you. In fact, you are exactly the sort that the GPL was written to thwart.
All right, O insightful one, let us assume for the sake of argument that you are 100% correct and that gnome is "controlled by" one company and the installer by another. As long as the source for both pieces are released under the GPL, what is the problem?
They are based on John Le Carre's books, and are somewhat Cerebral, but for those who like that sort of thing, they are the best in the genre. Alec guinness has done an amazing job playing George Smiley.
Another film that moved me powerfully, was "The bridge on the river Kwai". Guinness is scarily good in that one as well.
Programming is an intensely mind-consuming activity that can leave you mentally exhausted. You need to give your mind a chance to clear off the cobwebs and stay fresh.
Suggestions:
1) Develop some hobbies or other interests that have nothing to do with computers or books or other mental activity. Preferably, some physical sport that causes you to sweat a little, or something like carpentry . Spend at least 30 minutes a day on such activity. A healthy mind requires a sound body to stay healthy.
2) Hang out with some non-programmers of the opposite sex once in a while. Tell them about what you are doing (in a non-boasting way). Never underestimate the effect of the power of "wanting to show off" on your creativity.
Opera on Linux is deader than a dodo. As far as I can see, there has been no development on it since "Technology Preview 2" came out early this year. Remember the noise that they were making last year? The guy who ran the project wanted to release the first beta by Christmas so that he could "get a bonus". Well, the beta was a joke, so they retroactively renamed it "Technology Preview 1".
Mozilla is way overdue. But the sad fact is, there is no other viable browser being developed right now for Linux. Konqueror is cool in what it does, but not for regular use as the main browser.
I'm not an American, or even a gun advocate. But this particular argument struck me as extremely flawed.
A very famous American whose name escapes me for the moment once said: "Those who trade freedom for security neither deserve, nor will have, either freedom or security".
What you are advocating is basically this: surrender your freedoms to the government so that government may better protect you. History has shown that that particular line of reasoning has disastrous consequences in the long term.
And anyway, how do you explain the lack of crime in Switzerland, where almost everyone has a gun?
I've been using linux for 4 years and unix for far longer. Xemacs, latex and octave are among my most used tools. And they will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
Yet, I WANT to see more, many more, commercial applications for linux.
This does not mean that I will abandon good free applications for commercial ones at the drop of a hat. However, if a good free application is not available for linux, I will gladly pay for the ability to use a commercial app.
And this will help linux. It will become easier for new people to use it, because linux will become a "full service" store wherein people can easily accomplish ALL their tasks.
As an example of how lack of commercial applications and support is hurting linux, let me share a story. The company I work for is building up a software development group of about 35 people. We are a small company doing embedded programming and are somewhat budget conscious. The software director (who is a sincere and open-minded guy) performed a comprehensive study of the pros/cons of standardizing on linux/KDE on the desktop for the developers. (As opposed to NT). Ultimately, linux lost. Why? Because none of the vendors of the toolchains that we plan to use support linux, or have any plans to support linux. (By toolchain, I don't mean gcc+kdevelop, we need sophisticated embedded development tools).
The guy was prepared to standardize on staroffice, though the absense of a visio-equivalent hurt. He was prepared to go through the extra overhead of setting up the enviroment and providing training to people unfamiliar with unix. But even this unbiased, openminded and willing-to-learn guy ultimately ended up going to NT. And, I, despite being a hardcore linux fan who would have loved to see it deployed here on a large scale, cannot fault his logic.
That is a total of 35 desktops lost to NT. This story is repeating all over the world right now.
Having said that, I completely agree with all your points. I need to add one... the ability to click on a link and have the result come up in an already existing window. This would be an absolute boon while reading complex pages with many links, so that I don't have to wait for ever for the "back" button to work.
Care to cite these studies? Are they recent? Do they compare recent linux and BSD kernels? In my experience, neither linux nor BSD has any advantage over the other as workstations or as mid-range servers. I cannot comment on very high load applications.
Hari.
By the same argument, free all murderers.
on
Microsoft Quickies
·
· Score: 1
Does anybody really think jailing or hanging murderers will bring back their victims? Does punishing rapists "unrape" their victims? Of course not. So why should a criminal MS be let off because their actions are not easily reversible?
Hari.
Furthermore, Adobe is a bigtime MS shill.
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 1
I am surprised that there is not more dislike of Adobe among Free Software users. Adobe is, was and always has been a big-time MS shill. They make their products by and large only for Windows. The unix versions of their products are crippleware. They have a "we have acrobat reader for linux, you miserable heathen, you should worship us for that" attitude that I absolutely hate. They bend over to take it whenever MS orders them to and are always on call to dutifully parrot Chairman Bills latest nuggets of wisdom. Now that is one company I would like to see in Bankruptcy court.
If it wasn't for the efforts of Peter Deutch and friends at Aladdin, linux and unix users would be almost completely locked out of Postscript and PDF.
As a unix user who has had the misfortune to work on the CDE implementations on HPUX and Solaris for the past few years, and on HP VUE before it became CDE, I feel comfortable in my knowledge that CDE is a gigantic piece of crap. If only some proprietary app developers would ensure that their apps would run on ICCCM-certified window managers, instead of coding for the vagaries of MWM, I would have chucked it long ago.
The configuration subsystem is full of bugs. Ditto session-management. How many times have I set the session up to do exactly what I want, did "make current session the home session in the dialog box, only to have it completely forget this the next time I booted up! The printer queue is a travesty. The popup menus are non-inutitive and buggy. Adding a non-CDE app to the menu is an exercise in frustration.
I used slackware from 1996 to late 1999. I'm embarassed to say that I swiched to Linux Mandrake since I got tired of doing things by hand all the time, especially with the difficulty of keeping track of packages that I installed by ./configure; make; make install.
First question: do you think there is an easy way to integrate the above process with a package handling mechanism, so that I could use make install to install the package and pkgtool to uninstall it? Is any work being done on it?
Slashdot Mirror
I am an engineer who works for a company that makes base station-side software and hardware for this product. We are a supplier to Nortel, who is the general contractor for the San Diego deployment. Since I personally wrote a lot of the code that makes this stuff work, I can speak somewhat authoritatively on this technology.
First of all, EV-DO does scale. There are 5 million subscribers in Korea alone, shared between SK telecom and KT freetel. The technology has also been rolled out in a big way in Japan by KDDI recently.
It is true that the current Verizon deployment uses only PCMCIA cards. But phones are on the way later this year. There are dozens of EV-DO enabled phones and handheld devices available. Check out this page. EV-DO is data only, but nothing says that end-user devices cannot be EV-DO + 1x-RTT.
The article says that this is not "always on". That is misleading. EV-DO has the concept of "sessions" and "connections". Sessions are always on, and connections are on an as-needed basis. Connections are set-up when the user needs to send/receive data and torn down when he is done. This happens automatically, the user does not have to do anything special when he needs to do something. (For e.g., just click on a link on slashdot and a new connection is set up, data is uploaded and subsequently downloaded from the website, and the connection is torn down. All this happens automatically, the technology takes care of everything).
This is not a LAN technology. It is not a replacement for WiFi. This is a CDMA-based, cellular-WAN technology. It automatically provides all the security of a CDMA-based network. Not that this is perfect, but it is much better than WiFi in that w.r.t. security.
Hari.
Transgressions? After the case was heard, Jackson publicly said that he would be opposed to breaking up MS. It is only after MS repeatedly flouted his rulings, continued to:
1) Deny events that were factually in the record.
2) Claim "no wrongdoing" and refused to take responsibility for their actions.
3) Claimed that any punishment that Jackson ruled out would be too much for any crime that they had committed.
4) Claimed that they were going to appeal whatever wristslap jackson imposed on them
that jackson changed his mind about the punishment they deserved. IMHO, he was too reserved. I would have dressed BillG and Ballmer in drag and thrown them into a cell full of rapists doing life.
Hari.
Because the appeals court is full of MS fans and shills. A couple of judges reportedly have several million dollars of MS stock. Of course, they don't think that this makes them biased, so they don't recuse themselves. The appeals court has almost never ruled against Microsoft in the last dozen or so years when MS lost in a lower court. It is a foregone conclusion that the appeals court will reverse jackson and rule in favor of MS. It is also a foregone conclusion that none of their kids will "ever be hungry again". Asking for the Supreme court to hear the case directly is the closest the govt can come to stating this. If they say this in plain english, they run the risk of being in contempt of court.
Guys,
This is rather short notice. How about some
earlier announcements next time?
Hari.
Debian has dedicated "potato" to Espy. They never said that they will change the name of the release.
Hari.
Because, it might be technically illegal to link your code with a GPLd library, or to cut and paste from a GPLd application, if your license is not GPL-compatible.
The GPL is a legal contract. If the FSF does not enforce it, they legally lose the right to enforce it in the future, as they did not exercise "due diligence" in its enforcement. The GPL (and other freeware licenses too) could lose whatever little legal protections they have.
That is why RMS is so insistent on licensing issues.
Of course, if all you care about is to make sure that your source is available to the users and don't care about licensing issues, you could always put your code in the public domain, or BSD it. That way, you don't have to bother with RMS or the FSF.
Of course, you might not be very happy when some company adds some features to your code and starts selling it for $5000.00 per license, while not even acknowledging your existence.
Hari.
You must have just come in late. "OSS", as you call it, has always been the "laughing stock" of the OS "market". From before it started being called OSS. Unfortunately for the OS "market", OSS is now kicking its collective butt.
The opinions of the OS market are the last things that we need to care about. The OS market goes where it can make a buck.
I for one am sincerely glad that Stallman has the balls to stand up and say what must be said, even if that means losing "popularity" with the OS market and its cheerleaders.
Hari.
The GPL was designed to prevent exactly this.
You want to grab about a billion dollars worth
of codebase, use it in your product, and give
nothing back eh? Nice.
I guess you are able to cut and paste from MS' code when you write for MS Windows, huh?
Hari.
Oh, great RMS basher, do enlighten us and tell us what YOU have done for Free Software that makes you such a valid critic. While you are about it, why don't you also enlighten us with examples of how "RMS backstabbed, grown arrogant etc".
RMS is one of the most perfectly logical people that I have had the pleasure to read. All of his writings or sayings (not stuff that corporate shills make up and get attributed to him, mind you) are completely consistant with his basic axioms. He is unyeilding on matters of principle, but I have never seen self-aggrandizing from him. (Go ahead, post a link to the contrary). Compared to some guys in the BSD camp or Tom Christensen the Perl guy, RMS is a model of restraint.
Now, when I read your stuff, all I can visualize is a carpetbagger who wants to have the freedom to dip into the GPL till and make off with what he can grab, without feeling legally constrained to give anything back. I'm sorry, but the GPL was designed to thwart guys like you. It is the most popular free software license, so it appears that many authors feel that way. I notice that, for all their protestations, the KDE team did not release their software under the X11 or artistic licenses to get RMS off their back. They could easily have done so since, according to their claims, all the code in KDE (with the exception of some in kmidi and kghostview) is new.
Hari.
Dude,
If everyone had adopted the "pragmatic" attitude as you suggested, linux would never have been written.
I mean, it would be impossible to write an OS without corporate backing, right? Linus should have adopted the practical approach and gone to work for Microsoft.
But of course, you know that. You don't give a rats ass about Linux, open source or "the community". You want to go in, rake whatever cash you can out of the mix and get out. And if it can help you MS stock go up a bit, so much the better. Your reference to "Pseudo-communistic leader" gave the game away.
Neither Linus nor Stallman needs advice from the likes of you. In fact, you are exactly the sort that the GPL was written to thwart.
Hari.
All right, O insightful one, let us assume for the sake of argument that you are 100% correct and that gnome is "controlled by" one company and the installer by another. As long as the source for both pieces are released under the GPL, what is the problem?
Hari.
This is a sad day... a genuinely good and talented man has passed away.
For those of you who have reasonable attention spans... try the following 2 BBC miniseries if you can get your hands on them.
"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy."
"Smiley's People".
They are based on John Le Carre's books, and are somewhat Cerebral, but for those who like that sort of thing, they are the best in the genre. Alec guinness has done an amazing job playing George Smiley.
Another film that moved me powerfully, was "The bridge on the river Kwai". Guinness is scarily good in that one as well.
Hari.
Programming is an intensely mind-consuming activity that can leave you mentally exhausted. You need to give your mind a chance to clear off the cobwebs and stay fresh.
Suggestions:
1) Develop some hobbies or other interests that have nothing to do with computers or books or other mental activity. Preferably, some physical sport that causes you to sweat a little, or something like carpentry . Spend at least 30 minutes a day on such activity. A healthy mind requires a sound body to stay healthy.
2) Hang out with some non-programmers of the opposite sex once in a while. Tell them about what you are doing (in a non-boasting way). Never underestimate the effect of the power of "wanting to show off" on your creativity.
Hari.
Dude,
Opera on Linux is deader than a dodo. As far as I can see, there has been no development on it since "Technology Preview 2" came out early this year. Remember the noise that they were making last year? The guy who ran the project wanted to release the first beta by Christmas so that he could "get a bonus". Well, the beta was a joke, so they retroactively renamed it "Technology Preview 1".
Mozilla is way overdue. But the sad fact is, there is no other viable browser being developed right now for Linux. Konqueror is cool in what it does, but not for regular use as the main browser.
Hari.
I'm not an American, or even a gun advocate. But this particular argument struck me as extremely flawed.
A very famous American whose name escapes me for the moment once said: "Those who trade freedom for security neither deserve, nor will have, either freedom or security".
What you are advocating is basically this: surrender your freedoms to the government so that government may better protect you. History has shown that that particular line of reasoning has disastrous consequences in the long term.
And anyway, how do you explain the lack of crime in Switzerland, where almost everyone has a gun?
Hari.
Dude,
I've been using linux for 4 years and unix for far longer. Xemacs, latex and octave are among my most used tools. And they will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
Yet, I WANT to see more, many more, commercial applications for linux.
This does not mean that I will abandon good free applications for commercial ones at the drop of a hat. However, if a good free application is not available for linux, I will gladly pay for the ability to use a commercial app.
And this will help linux. It will become easier for new people to use it, because linux will become a "full service" store wherein people can easily accomplish ALL their tasks.
As an example of how lack of commercial applications and support is hurting linux, let me share a story. The company I work for is building up a software development group of about 35 people. We are a small company doing embedded programming and are somewhat budget conscious. The software director (who is a sincere and open-minded guy) performed a comprehensive study of the pros/cons of standardizing on linux/KDE on the desktop for the developers. (As opposed to NT). Ultimately, linux lost. Why? Because none of the vendors of the toolchains that we plan to use support linux, or have any plans to support linux. (By toolchain, I don't mean gcc+kdevelop, we need sophisticated embedded development tools).
The guy was prepared to standardize on staroffice, though the absense of a visio-equivalent hurt. He was prepared to go through the extra overhead of setting up the enviroment and providing training to people unfamiliar with unix. But even this unbiased, openminded and willing-to-learn guy ultimately ended up going to NT. And, I, despite being a hardcore linux fan who would have loved to see it deployed here on a large scale, cannot fault his logic.
That is a total of 35 desktops lost to NT. This story is repeating all over the world right now.
Hari.
Don't hold back. Tell us how you REALLY feel. :)
Having said that, I completely agree with all
your points. I need to add one... the ability
to click on a link and have the result come up
in an already existing window. This would be an
absolute boon while reading complex pages with
many links, so that I don't have to wait for ever
for the "back" button to work.
Hari.
Care to cite these studies? Are they recent? Do they compare recent linux and BSD kernels? In my experience, neither linux nor BSD has any advantage over the other as workstations or as mid-range servers. I cannot comment on very high load applications.
Hari.
Does anybody really think jailing or hanging murderers will bring back their victims? Does punishing rapists "unrape" their victims? Of course not. So why should a criminal MS be let off because their actions are not easily reversible?
Hari.
I am surprised that there is not more dislike of Adobe among Free Software users. Adobe is, was and always has been a big-time MS shill. They make their products by and large only for Windows. The unix versions of their products are crippleware. They have a "we have acrobat reader for linux, you miserable heathen, you should worship us for that" attitude that I absolutely hate. They bend over to take it whenever MS orders them to and are always on call to dutifully parrot Chairman Bills latest nuggets of wisdom. Now that is one company I would like to see in Bankruptcy court.
If it wasn't for the efforts of Peter Deutch and friends at Aladdin, linux and unix users would be almost completely locked out of Postscript and PDF.
Hari.
Read too many Asterix comics lately?
Hari.
As a unix user who has had the misfortune
to work on the CDE implementations on HPUX
and Solaris for the past few years, and on
HP VUE before it became CDE, I feel comfortable
in my knowledge that CDE is a gigantic piece
of crap. If only some proprietary app developers
would ensure that their apps would run on
ICCCM-certified window managers, instead of coding
for the vagaries of MWM, I would have chucked
it long ago.
The configuration subsystem is full of bugs.
Ditto session-management. How many times have I set
the session up to do exactly what I want,
did "make current session the home
session in the dialog box, only to have it
completely forget this the next time I booted up!
The printer queue is a travesty. The popup menus
are non-inutitive and buggy. Adding a non-CDE
app to the menu is an exercise in frustration.
And I have just begun to scratch the surface.
Hari.
I thought this was exactly what
Direct Rendering (included in Xfree4.0)
does.
Hari.
Hi, Partick,
I understand that you have chosen
not to participate in the LSB. The reasons
mentioned were:
a) That you prefer the old "unix" way of
doing things.
b) You feel that these ways should be
THE standard.
There must be good technical and marketing
reasons behind your preferences. Could you please
elaborate on both? Thanks.
Hari.
Hi Patrick,
I used slackware from 1996 to late 1999.
I'm embarassed to say that I swiched to
Linux Mandrake since I got tired of doing
things by hand all the time, especially with
the difficulty of keeping track of packages
that I installed by
./configure; make; make install.
First question: do you think there is an
easy way to integrate the above process with
a package handling mechanism, so that I could
use make install to install the package
and pkgtool to uninstall it? Is any work
being done on it?
Thanks,
Hari.