The Smalltalk 76 system, running on a Xerox Alto in 1976, did indeed have overlapping windows. This was a research system created at PARC. The Star was a commercial system, inspired by the Alto and Smalltalk, and was created by a different group of people at Xerox.
Apple copied far less from Xerox Parc than people suppose. Essentially what they copied was the general idea of the GUI: overlapping windows on a bitmap display. (Windows, hypertext, and the mouse were all invented much earlier, by Doug Englebart at Stanford.) More interesting is what Apple invented. Many of the fine details of how modern GUIs work were invented by Apple, not by Xerox. For example, Apple invented the modern interface for editing text using a mouse: eg, drag to select text, type to replace the selected text. Apple didn't invent the scroll bar, but the modern 5 part scroll bar is pure Apple: the Xerox scroll bar was very different, and much more primitive. To use a musical analogy, Xerox invented a new genre (the GUI), but Apple invented an original composition within that genre (the Mac look and feel). Nowadays, everyone uses the Mac look and feel: no one remembers its klunky predecessors, or is aware that GUIs ever worked any other way!
Now look at what the Aqua theme copies from Apple. To use a musical analogy, this is a different performance of the same musical work. If Aqua were music, then Apple would be owed royalties for the Aqua theme, fair and square.
The University of Waterloo's operating systems course requires you to implement a message passing microkernel. There are a number of "spin off" companies, started by Waterloo grads and/or profs, who have commercialized this microkernel design. One is QNX, another is CacheFlow, and I'm sure other slashdotters can add more to this list.
I couldn't find any links about cars that drive themselves (computer driven cars) there. But then I can't find anything about them on other search engines either. You'd think something that nifty would be on the web somewhere, hrm?;)
Type computer driven cars into
google
and you get lots of relevant hits.
Everyone should be using encryption for as much as they possibly can.
When everyone uses encryption routinely,
the FBI will initiate the Carnivore 2 project.
This will require computer manufacturers to
install a remotely controlled keyboard bug in
every new computer.
Naturally, the FBI will promise to obtain a court
order before enabling the bug for any given
computer.
It's not that simple. To quote from trolltech.com,
The open source version of Qt/Embedded will enable developers of free software to use Trolltech's embedded GUI application framework and windowing system under the terms of the GPL. Commercial customers will benefit from professional support and services and will not be restricted by the GPL licensing conditions.
These guys have a commercial licence for Qt/Embedded, it says so on their web site.
So they are not restricted by the GPL licencing
conditions, and I bet that means they don't distribute the source, which might be customized for their hardware.
Try to figure out the facts before opening your mouth.
I looked at the web site in detail, and watched the movie. Very cool hardware and software.
Currently, it's only available as a circuit board and CD for $3500. They aren't manufacturing it yet.
There does not appear to be an X server. They have licenced QT embedded, which writes directly to the display, and is closed source, and Opera, also closed source. They can run QT apps but not X apps. Since the graphics and GUI subsystems are closed source, you could compare this system with Mac OS X: open source kernel, closed source GUI. That doesn't mean I wouldn't buy this puppy for the right price, but it does mean you shouldn't leap to unwarranted conclusions about what "Linux" means in the context of a product announcement like this.
Look. I really don't appreciate your calling my post nonsense.
Well, you're right, that was heavy handed of me, and I apologise.
I originally thought your post was flamebait, so I posted a flame in response. But now that I have read your reply, I understand your point better, and I agree with you about the subjective issues when choosing an OS.
Let me tell you what makes linux infinitely better than BSD.
GPL!
Case in point, BSD will gain absolutely nothing from the popularity of OSX.
The GPL has nothing to do with this.
Apple could easily have built MacOS X on top of MkLinux, which they financed the development of.
The GPL on the MkLinux kernel would not have made any difference. It would not have made any difference to what parts of MacOS X were released as Open Source, since Apple has voluntarily released Darwin as open source anyways, despite its BSD licence. And the GPL on the MkLinux kernel would not have prevented Apple from closing the source of the MacOS X GUI.
We can only conclude that Apple picked FreeBSD over MkLinux because of its technical superiority, not because of the GPL.
This post is mostly nonsense. Apache has the same BSD style licence regardless of whether it is part of a BSD or a Linux distribution. Gcc is GPLed, regardless of whether it is part of a BSD or Linux distribution. You get a mix of licences regardless of what free or open source Unix variant you use.
The GPL does not give more rights to you, the consumer than the BSD licence; it gives fewer. Stallman argues that he has to restrict your rights as a consumer to do whatever you like with GPLed source so that he can prevent evil corporations from doing whatever they like with the same source.
So if you think that by running Linux, you are protecting your rights by avoiding impure, BSD licenced code, you are doubly deluded, because Linux distributions are full of BSD licenced code, and because you have more rights over that code than you do over GPLed code.
Not that this distinction matters. From a consumer point of view, the only choice that makes any real difference is between free/open source software products, and closed source software products. For example, it's true that Windows 2000 contains small amounts of BSD licenced source, which Microsoft does not redistribute. This is a good justification for boycotting Microsoft Windows. It is not a good justification for boycotting FreeBSD and choosing Linux instead. The FreeBSD team are not the bad guys here, and your Linux distribution may in fact contain some of the very same BSD code that is contained in Windows.
I currently run RedHat 6.1, FreeBSD 4.2, MacOS 9 and Windows 2000+Interix on the 4 main machines of my home network. I use all of these systems daily. Linux has more Unix apps, and especially more apps in binary form, than FreeBSD. FreeBSD was easier to install, and is technically the best Unix in most ways. (I used to run OpenBSD, which has better security, but the development environment sucks--gdb is screwy, no/proc.) MacOS 9 has the best GUI. Windows has the 2nd best GUI (Gnome sucks and KDE 2.0, while an improvement over Gnome, still doesn't match the Mac or Windows).
I've played with MacOS X, and I'm very impressed. Here is a GUI that looks and feels amazing, and the underlying technology (Quartz) is a decade ahead of X11.
I plan to get a MacOS X machine running after the official release. That means I'll have 2 BSD machines to the one Linux machine.
But most of the Mac users I know are going to be rather slow to upgrade to Mac OS X. It's going to be several years before Mac OS X is running on the majority of the Mac installed base. And I doubt that your average Linux kiddie is going to fork out for an iMac or a Cube and then manually port his 200 favourite Linux utilities to MacOS X. So BSD isn't going to leapfrog Linux any time next year because of Mac OS X.
There is no dividing line between what is and is not allowable. You can't use simplistic categories to determine what sort of speech should be permitted and what sort of speech should be a criminal offence without hurting innocent people, stifling socially beneficial debate and innovation, and hurting society. And yes, I support websites with bomb making plans.
When I was a 14 year old, I made bombs in the basement. My parents had no problem with this, and neither did the parents of the friends that dropped in to help me. You see, I wasn't engaged in terrorist activities, I was making fireworks. And I wasn't doing anything terribly risky: I learned quite a bit about the safety aspects of what I was doing, and knew what not to attempt.
If I was still pursuing pyrotechnics as a hobby today, then I would certainly be surfing all of the sites with bomb making plans, both to find ideas for new things to try, and to find out what sorts of things to avoid.
So, what if it was illegal to host a web site with "bomb making plans"? Then I suppose that the police would be empowered to shut down sites with information about the art and science of pyrotechnics. People who design and manufacture fireworks, either professionally or as a hobby, would not be permitted to share information with one another over the public internet, and if they did, they might end up in jail. Rocket scientists, and people who design and manufacture explosives for industrial applications, might be similarly affected. And for me, that would be an unacceptable limitation of free speech.
US spelling is Millennium, but the Brits use the word with an 'l' or 'n' dropped.
They do not. The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for "millennium", but not for "millenium". The etymology says that this word derives from the Latin word "millennium". Chambers English Dictionary (an English dictionary) and Websters New Twentieth Century (an American dictionary) agree. So there is only one accepted spelling, and that is "millennium", regardless of whether you are writing in English, American or Latin.
And "British" is spelled with only one "t".
If you're going to make pedantic posts picking nits in other people's spelling, at least consult a dictionary first.
You can't slap a copyright on a public domain work as is, but as soon as you modify it somehow, you have copyright to the modified work, and then you can GPL it. You can, e.g., simply add a GPL copyright notice in every file, and then license the work under the GPL. So it is certainly possible to take public domain source and put it under the GPL without even changing the actual code.
Not true. This is a widespread misconception. This is no more or less legal than taking a GPLed source file, deleting the original copyright notice and inserting a BSD copyright notice.
103 (b) The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material.
In other words, if you add a copyright and GPL notice to the top of a public domain source file, without making any other changes, then the copyright and the GPL licence only applies to the copyright and the GPL notice, not to the rest of the file. The copyright and GPL notice do not place any restrictions on the original public domain source code ("does not imply any exclusive right in the pre-existing material").
But wait, there's more. Consider this:
506 (c) Fraudulent Copyright Notice.--Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500.
If you take a public domain source file that I wrote, and insert a "Copyright 1999 Patrik Nordebo" notice (plus a GPL notice), then you are committing a criminal offence.
If its public domain, couldn't they just GPL it? If I take a copy of the King James version of the Bible (which is in the public domain) and slap a copyright notice on it, the copyright isn't valid: only the author of a work can copyright the work. If someone simply slaps a copyright notice and a GPL onto my public domain source file, it isn't valid.
If someone makes improvements to an open source software project, there are strong social pressures to contribute the changes back to the project maintainer, rather than creating a fork. For example, Softway Systems (a for-profit company) has contributed all of their changes to the pdksh back to the project maintainers. Since pdksh is public domain, Softway released their changes to the public domain. In short, people do contribute to public domain software projects, and forking is not inevitable.
If I was paranoid, and wanted to prevent people from forking my open source code, I wouldn't choose GPL over public domain for that reason, because GPLed code is just as easy to fork as pd code. I would instead choose a fork-proof licence like the QPL.
The real benefit of the GPL is that it has restrictions that prevent bad people from doing bad things with your code (ie, making the code unfree). The real benefit of the public domain is that it is compatible with every software project. That means more people using the software, and more people contributing useful changes back to the project maintainer. Notice the difference in emphasis here.
I hope you don't mean that *only* GPLed code would be allowed in the repository. A repository of reusable C and C++ components would be of much greater benefit to the Open Source community if other Open Source licences were permitted, as well as public domain source code. That's because the GPL is incompatible with most other Open Source licences (eg, original BSD, MPL, QPL), and there are quite a few Open Source projects that don't use the GPL. My personal preference for reusable C/C++ components is the public domain, because that is compatible with *all* Open Source projects. I'm hoping to publish some reuseable C++ components next year, and I'll make them public domain for this reason. Will I be permitted to contribute to this proposed repository?
Instead of criticizing Hollywood for its portrayal of user interfaces that are "too cinematic", why not accept this as a technical challenge? I spend most of my time interacting with Linux using an embarrassingly low tech interface: an xterm which is little more than a virtual vt100, complete with monochrome fixed width text. And why have graphical user interfaces made virtually no progress since the Macintosh was introduced 15 years ago? This seems backwards to me, given that most Linux boxes now come with high performance 3D rendering hardware. Why not build a visual shell and programming environment based on the Quake engine instead? That would be a more interesting technical direction for Linux to take than the current attempts to build a bad clone of M$ Windows.
microtechnology != nanotechnology
on
Smart Dust
·
· Score: 2
MEMS is not nanotech, it's microtech. (The "M" in MEMS means Micro.) Nanotech is machinery built at the nanometre scale (at the scale of individual atoms), while microtech is at the micron scale. Microtech was already around at the time that Eric Drexler coined the word "nanotechnology". I seem to recall that state of the art microtech at that time was tiny electric motors and accelerometers built using silicon lithography. Drexler wanted a new word to distinguish his revolutionary ideas from technology like MEMS.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a paper describing Smalltalk 76, and here is what Jobs and Hertzfeld likely saw .
Now look at what the Aqua theme copies from Apple. To use a musical analogy, this is a different performance of the same musical work. If Aqua were music, then Apple would be owed royalties for the Aqua theme, fair and square.
The University of Waterloo's operating systems course requires you to implement a message passing microkernel. There are a number of "spin off" companies, started by Waterloo grads and/or profs, who have commercialized this microkernel design. One is QNX, another is CacheFlow, and I'm sure other slashdotters can add more to this list.
Type computer driven cars into google and you get lots of relevant hits.
When everyone uses encryption routinely, the FBI will initiate the Carnivore 2 project. This will require computer manufacturers to install a remotely controlled keyboard bug in every new computer. Naturally, the FBI will promise to obtain a court order before enabling the bug for any given computer.
It's not that simple. To quote from trolltech.com, The open source version of Qt/Embedded will enable developers of free software to use Trolltech's embedded GUI application framework and windowing system under the terms of the GPL. Commercial customers will benefit from professional support and services and will not be restricted by the GPL licensing conditions.
These guys have a commercial licence for Qt/Embedded, it says so on their web site. So they are not restricted by the GPL licencing conditions, and I bet that means they don't distribute the source, which might be customized for their hardware.
Try to figure out the facts before opening your mouth.
Same to you, flame breath.
Currently, it's only available as a circuit board and CD for $3500. They aren't manufacturing it yet.
There does not appear to be an X server. They have licenced QT embedded, which writes directly to the display, and is closed source, and Opera, also closed source. They can run QT apps but not X apps. Since the graphics and GUI subsystems are closed source, you could compare this system with Mac OS X: open source kernel, closed source GUI. That doesn't mean I wouldn't buy this puppy for the right price, but it does mean you shouldn't leap to unwarranted conclusions about what "Linux" means in the context of a product announcement like this.
Well, you're right, that was heavy handed of me, and I apologise. I originally thought your post was flamebait, so I posted a flame in response. But now that I have read your reply, I understand your point better, and I agree with you about the subjective issues when choosing an OS.
The GPL has nothing to do with this. Apple could easily have built MacOS X on top of MkLinux, which they financed the development of. The GPL on the MkLinux kernel would not have made any difference. It would not have made any difference to what parts of MacOS X were released as Open Source, since Apple has voluntarily released Darwin as open source anyways, despite its BSD licence. And the GPL on the MkLinux kernel would not have prevented Apple from closing the source of the MacOS X GUI.
We can only conclude that Apple picked FreeBSD over MkLinux because of its technical superiority, not because of the GPL.
The GPL does not give more rights to you, the consumer than the BSD licence; it gives fewer. Stallman argues that he has to restrict your rights as a consumer to do whatever you like with GPLed source so that he can prevent evil corporations from doing whatever they like with the same source.
So if you think that by running Linux, you are protecting your rights by avoiding impure, BSD licenced code, you are doubly deluded, because Linux distributions are full of BSD licenced code, and because you have more rights over that code than you do over GPLed code.
Not that this distinction matters. From a consumer point of view, the only choice that makes any real difference is between free/open source software products, and closed source software products. For example, it's true that Windows 2000 contains small amounts of BSD licenced source, which Microsoft does not redistribute. This is a good justification for boycotting Microsoft Windows. It is not a good justification for boycotting FreeBSD and choosing Linux instead. The FreeBSD team are not the bad guys here, and your Linux distribution may in fact contain some of the very same BSD code that is contained in Windows.
I've played with MacOS X, and I'm very impressed. Here is a GUI that looks and feels amazing, and the underlying technology (Quartz) is a decade ahead of X11.
I plan to get a MacOS X machine running after the official release. That means I'll have 2 BSD machines to the one Linux machine.
But most of the Mac users I know are going to be rather slow to upgrade to Mac OS X. It's going to be several years before Mac OS X is running on the majority of the Mac installed base. And I doubt that your average Linux kiddie is going to fork out for an iMac or a Cube and then manually port his 200 favourite Linux utilities to MacOS X. So BSD isn't going to leapfrog Linux any time next year because of Mac OS X.
There is no dividing line between what is and is not allowable. You can't use simplistic categories to determine what sort of speech should be permitted and what sort of speech should be a criminal offence without hurting innocent people, stifling socially beneficial debate and innovation, and hurting society. And yes, I support websites with bomb making plans.
When I was a 14 year old, I made bombs in the basement. My parents had no problem with this, and neither did the parents of the friends that dropped in to help me. You see, I wasn't engaged in terrorist activities, I was making fireworks. And I wasn't doing anything terribly risky: I learned quite a bit about the safety aspects of what I was doing, and knew what not to attempt.
If I was still pursuing pyrotechnics as a hobby today, then I would certainly be surfing all of the sites with bomb making plans, both to find ideas for new things to try, and to find out what sorts of things to avoid.
So, what if it was illegal to host a web site with "bomb making plans"? Then I suppose that the police would be empowered to shut down sites with information about the art and science of pyrotechnics. People who design and manufacture fireworks, either professionally or as a hobby, would not be permitted to share information with one another over the public internet, and if they did, they might end up in jail. Rocket scientists, and people who design and manufacture explosives for industrial applications, might be similarly affected. And for me, that would be an unacceptable limitation of free speech.
They do not. The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for "millennium", but not for "millenium". The etymology says that this word derives from the Latin word "millennium". Chambers English Dictionary (an English dictionary) and Websters New Twentieth Century (an American dictionary) agree. So there is only one accepted spelling, and that is "millennium", regardless of whether you are writing in English, American or Latin.
And "British" is spelled with only one "t".
If you're going to make pedantic posts picking nits in other people's spelling, at least consult a dictionary first.
Not true. This is a widespread misconception. This is no more or less legal than taking a GPLed source file, deleting the original copyright notice and inserting a BSD copyright notice.
Here's a quote from US copyright law:
In other words, if you add a copyright and GPL notice to the top of a public domain source file, without making any other changes, then the copyright and the GPL licence only applies to the copyright and the GPL notice, not to the rest of the file. The copyright and GPL notice do not place any restrictions on the original public domain source code ("does not imply any exclusive right in the pre-existing material").But wait, there's more. Consider this:
If you take a public domain source file that I wrote, and insert a "Copyright 1999 Patrik Nordebo" notice (plus a GPL notice), then you are committing a criminal offence.If I take a copy of the King James version of the Bible (which is in the public domain) and slap a copyright notice on it, the copyright isn't valid: only the author of a work can copyright the work. If someone simply slaps a copyright notice and a GPL onto my public domain source file, it isn't valid.
If someone makes improvements to an open source software project, there are strong social pressures to contribute the changes back to the project maintainer, rather than creating a fork. For example, Softway Systems (a for-profit company) has contributed all of their changes to the pdksh back to the project maintainers. Since pdksh is public domain, Softway released their changes to the public domain. In short, people do contribute to public domain software projects, and forking is not inevitable.
If I was paranoid, and wanted to prevent people from forking my open source code, I wouldn't choose GPL over public domain for that reason, because GPLed code is just as easy to fork as pd code. I would instead choose a fork-proof licence like the QPL.
The real benefit of the GPL is that it has restrictions that prevent bad people from doing bad things with your code (ie, making the code unfree). The real benefit of the public domain is that it is compatible with every software project. That means more people using the software, and more people contributing useful changes back to the project maintainer. Notice the difference in emphasis here.
I hope you don't mean that *only* GPLed code would be allowed in the repository. A repository of reusable C and C++ components would be of much greater benefit to the Open Source community if other Open Source licences were permitted, as well as public domain source code. That's because the GPL is incompatible with most other Open Source licences (eg, original BSD, MPL, QPL), and there are quite a few Open Source projects that don't use the GPL. My personal preference for reusable C/C++ components is the public domain, because that is compatible with *all* Open Source projects. I'm hoping to publish some reuseable C++ components next year, and I'll make them public domain for this reason. Will I be permitted to contribute to this proposed repository?
I'm not sure what a good 3D visual programming environment would look like, but Jaron Lanier makes some interesting claims about the Body Electric 3D visual programming environment .
MEMS is not nanotech, it's microtech. (The "M" in MEMS means Micro.) Nanotech is machinery built at the nanometre scale (at the scale of individual atoms), while microtech is at the micron scale. Microtech was already around at the time that Eric Drexler coined the word "nanotechnology". I seem to recall that state of the art microtech at that time was tiny electric motors and accelerometers built using silicon lithography. Drexler wanted a new word to distinguish his revolutionary ideas from technology like MEMS.