I suppose I should reserve judgement until I actually see one, but I think they're going to ruin AIBO by making it too gimmicky.
I've had a dog and he didn't need any coloured LEDs to let me know when he was happy, sad, or upset. An AIBO that looks sad by skulking around and not wagging it's tail is likely to get my sympathy, but an AIBO that flashes red lights at me would just be annoying. I wouldn't like a person who shouted "I'm happy now!" or "I'm sad now!" constantly, a robot that was that blatent would have me reaching for the power button ASAP.
Rather than add silly/gimicky features I'd rather they concentrated on things that would make AIBO more useful. Maybe a "call the police" or "call an ambulance" feature. A built-in GPS would be cool too: "AIBO, take me to the nearest pub."
1. The recent builds are MUCH better than just a few weeks ago, much less M14. It really is starting to shape up nicely.
2. I beleive the MPL allows Netscape (and only Netscape) to release the code under their own licence. If there own licence happens to be the GPL then that's their right.
I wouldn't have expected a Linux game to even break even. Linux is doing amazingly well in the Internet server market, but I didn't think the Linux desktop market really existed yet.
If it's true that the port paid for itself then game manufacturers can now afford to support Linux without losing their shirts. Seeing more games available will encourage users to switch to Linux. Seeing more users will encourage more game producers. Once the positive feedback loop is established things will snowball.
Getting to that break-even point is the hard part. If we've really reached it then this is a significant event.
The reviewer mentioned Postgres triggers, but didn't make it clear that triggers use a more general feature called stored procedures.
By coding lots of low-level functions as stored procedures that are stored _inside_ the database I can drastically reduce the number of database calls my application has to make.
The benchmarks he used can't show this (because he said himself that he doesn't use these features) but proper use of stored procedures should improve performance drastically while simplifying application code.
My experience in rural India is limited, but in the areas I visited I'd have to say that sanitation was a problem. Nutrition seemed OK, the power outages were a minor inconvenience (people just learned to live without for a few hours - wood stoves helped), but there were a lot of open sewers containing human waste.
I imagine some buried sewage pipes would go a long way to improving the health of the general population.
You're spoiled by the relatively reliable power available in the West. I'm sure the people in rural India would love to have more reliable power, but they're used to not having it. Rotating blackouts (because of lack of capacity) are a way of life.
The internet could bring with it educational opportunities that would be impossible otherwise. This is far more important in the long term than a few hours a day of extra power.
Plus, solving the energy problem would be very expensive. Power stations cost millions of dollars. That money would be better spent on sanitation systems. Internet access provided by existing cabling could be quite cheap.
The zoned memory management in 2.3 is a starting point for NUMA. It allows you to break the address space into segments which are treated differently (ie. Non-Uniformly).
SGI and IBM will have to cooperate, although maybe not officially. They'll each have teams adding features to the kernel and they'll talk to each other the same way all the other developers do. There's just no other way to do it.
He's latched on to some features that Motif has that haven't been fully realized in Qt or GTK+ and makes it seem as if these are the only ones that matter.
Motif, being older, has all the little things worked out. It's a mature toolkit. GTK+ and Qt are newer and are naturally missing lots of little features.
Motif will fall behind for two reasons:
1) The developers of Qt and GTK+ have the benefit of hindsight. They've used Motif, Win32, and Mac and are able to learn from the mistakes of the past. While the toolkits themselves aren't entirely mature, the foundations are very strong and well designed. These guys know what they're doing.
2) The proprietary attitude of the Motif developers. GUI development is driven by desktop applications and Linux is the hottest market for Unix desktops. Since Motif's licensing makes it difficult to support well under Linux, but GTK+ and Qt both work well under commercial Unix, Motif will die out. It makes no sense to use Motif when GTK+ apps will work better on Linux and be fully portable.
Interestingly, many of the shortcomings that were pointed out in GTK+ (I don't really follow Qt) are currently under active development. Pango, for example, addresses the internationalization issues and is real software. It's not finished, but it's far from being vapour.
I was wondering how long the tech. stock lunacy would go on. As somebody who holds a little bit of stock in a profitable brick-and-morter retailer, this is kind of gratifying. It was getting really annoying to see these outrageous valuations for money-losing companies.
I'm even kind of glad that the Linux stocks have returned to sanity. It's pretty clear that Linux will continue to grow exponentially over the next few years. It's not at all clear where and how much money will be made in the market.
RedHat, for example, will never be the cash cow that Microsoft was in the '90s. Even if they get 90% of the OS market, they'll never have the outrageous margins that MS had/has. The Open-Source model just won't support it. I'm positive they'll turn into a strong, profitable company, but that it's anybody's guess whether they will be a profitable $20M company or a profitable $20B company.
It's entirely possible that the big bucks in the Linux market will be made by companies like IBM, SGI, and SCO. It's just too early to tell how it will turn out.
They should write it themselves and contribute it.
on
Auditing for Linux?
·
· Score: 2
The mainstream Linux community (including the developers that have brought it this far) have no real interest in military-style security. This is one of those cases where the end user (the DoD) should scratch its own itch.
They have the means (money) and the motivation (money + security) to do this themselves or sponsor somebody else's efforts. The result would be an OS that exactly matches their requirements and that they can continue to mold to their own purposes without relying on some vendor.
Of course even if they don't do this some companies will. SGI and IBM have a lot riding on Linux and they need to sell into big government accounts, so they'll take care of it.
Can somebody check their copy of the code (I didn't download it) and see what the license was? If it was GPL or something similar then they can still assign the copyright, but they can't prevent people from distributing it.
The most sinister part of this, as far as I'm concerned, is that the administrator is now responsible for JUDGING what is legal and what isn't.
There are really only two ways to handle this 1)the administrator studies the law and becomes expert on all the subtleties and precedents AND defends his legal opinions in court, 2)anything that is even remotely questionable is banned.
If you thought IP laws were scary today, imagine what happens when your local ISP starts patrolling your site looking for anything that might possibly lead to legal action. Militant ISPs would make the whole idea of free speach and due process meaningless.
It might not help WINE directly, but it might be interesting to build a smart launcher for Windows software. If the executable is known to work well under WINE, use WINE (which would be faster). Otherwise, use BOCHS, which would provide better emulation at the expense of relatively slow execution.
I'm not sure I understand what's wrong with lookalike hardware? The PC industry is full of lookalike hardware and it's been a huge success. The competition has been great.
The problem with closed systems is that vendors will rely on their monopolies to guarantee them a market instead of providing the best possible product. Clearly the monopoly is in the best interest of the company that holds it (ie. Sony) but everybody else loses: the consumer, game manufacturers, and other console manufacturers.
Of course, as long as there are several strong players in the market (ie. Nintendo, Sega) Sony's monopoly is limited to Playstations, not game consoles in general. It's still bad, but not nearly as big a problem as Microsoft which has a lock on the desktop market as a whole.
Remember that Corel wants to go for the mainstream consumer market. AOL is the domininant player. Add to that the fact that AOL owns Netscape and it makes a whole lot of sense.
If you look at it another way, Corel would be foolish to try to take on Microsoft head-on (again) without some serious backing. AOL is the only ISP that's big enough (and hates Microsoft enough) to pull this off. Partnering with people like iDirect would only work if they had a network of similar sized ISPs across the continent.
I agree that a decent browser is important, but keep in mind that Linux distributions will start shipping with a kick-ass browser (Mozilla) within a few months. Windows users will have to struggle through a download in order to get a state-of-the-art browser.
I suppose streaming media is important for some people, but I don't really care. A non-proprietary standard for streaming media will emerge (maybe already has - I don't follow this stuff) and Linux will support it well.
For my personal use Linux is a great desktop. My business clients will start switching to Linux desktops once 1) Mozilla is released, 2) Corel Office Suite is released.
Average home users will switch when either 1) Linux gets more games, or 2) Playstations become so popular that people don't bother with PC games anymore. I suspect that both of these will occur to some extent over the next year and by next summer Linux will be in homes in a big way. If 1999 was the year of the iMac, 2001 will be the year of Linux Desktops.
Their server was struggling when "gnome.org" posted the link. With Slashdot posting as well they're down for the count. Did anybody get any mirrors? Please post-em if you have-em.
I don't really know how existing compressed filesystems are implemented, but since storing pointers to existing copies of data is an old compression technique, I always assumed this was part of it.
Now I suppose it's possible that existing compression only takes advantage of redundancy within a file. In that case extending this to the whole file system might be considered innovative - but I would ask why they didn't do that in the first place.
DevFS, for example, has been stable for ages and Richard has dutifully been releasing updated patches against current kernels. It was just a matter of convincing Linus that it was the `Right Thing'.
The softnet stuff is, in my mind, too radical a change for a feature freeze, but if it's really as good as people say then it might be worth it. I'm sure it will push the stable release back a month or so.
The most exciting new feature for me is the Logical Volume Manager included in 2.3.47. I've spent a lot of time administering AIX systems and the LVM is a Godsend for the harried system administrator. I don't know yet what the Linux LVM can do, but on AIX you can expand volumes while the system is running. I've heard that on HP you can shrink volumes as well. Even if the Linux LVM doesn't have all the bells and whistles, you can bet they will appear quickly now that the feature is in the mainstream kernel.
It looks like 2.4 will be a really nice release all-around. Not a lot of radical changes, but lots of performance improvements and useful little things.
Re:Some rules don't deserve to be respected.
on
A New DeCSS
·
· Score: 2
What you're saying is that you don't feel the stakes are high enough in this particular case to flout the law. That's your opinion and that's fine. But others feel differently.
I'm not claiming that the DVD situation is comparable to the holocaust. I am saying that those who go along with unjust laws, or worse, berate others for disobeying them, aren't the good citizens they believe they are.
The heart of the problem in this case is that corporations have successfully lobbied for laws that line their pockets at the expense of society as a whole. It's not just about watching DVDs, it's about screwing regular people and intimidating them (using the threat of law suits) into complying. That stinks and has no place in society.
Some rules don't deserve to be respected.
on
A New DeCSS
·
· Score: 4
Before you start with the self-rightious diatribes you should remember that disobeying bad laws has a long and honourable tradition.
The American Revolution, the Underground Railroad, the French Resistance, Jews escaping the Nazis, Ghandi's peaceful revolution... the list goes on. All of these things were horribly illegal.
The fact of the matter is that laws are made by people. Some people are ignorant, greedy, corrupt, or cruel and when these people make laws they need to be opposed using whatever means are most effective.
In this particular case we have shortsighted politicians who have perverted intellectual property laws far beyond the point where they serve any social good. The laws are wrong and the politians in charge are either too stupid or too corrupt to do anything about it. How do fight within the system if the system itself is broken?
> and it's great that it's coming from a big-name > company like Dell instead of some small, > obscure place... A small obscure place? You mean like IBM?... Ami.
I gather from reading the injunction (IANAL) that there is a big opening: find a country where click-contracts are explicitely invalid. Apparently the judge thinks that the law in Norway is unclear.
So the obvious thing to do is for somebody with appropriate skills in such a country to reverse-engineer CSS again. Then post a new (indepentant) version of deCSS to a media.
You would have to have some witnesses who would swear that this effort was independant. You wouldn't be able to use the current CSS as a starting point, but (I think) you could take advantage of the same hole in the Xing player along with information on HOW the original hacker did their magic.
Maybe the original hacker could create a "reverse-engineer-CSS" HOWTO with tips on technique, but no actual trade-secrets. Then people all over the place could post independant code and each version would require a separate legal challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose I should reserve judgement until I actually see one, but I think they're going to ruin AIBO by making it too gimmicky.
I've had a dog and he didn't need any coloured LEDs to let me know when he was happy, sad, or upset. An AIBO that looks sad by skulking around and not wagging it's tail is likely to get my sympathy, but an AIBO that flashes red lights at me would just be annoying. I wouldn't like a person who shouted "I'm happy now!" or "I'm sad now!" constantly, a robot that was that blatent would have me reaching for the power button ASAP.
Rather than add silly/gimicky features I'd rather they concentrated on things that would make AIBO more useful. Maybe a "call the police" or "call an ambulance" feature. A built-in GPS would be cool too: "AIBO, take me to the nearest pub."
1. The recent builds are MUCH better than just a few weeks ago, much less M14. It really is starting to shape up nicely.
2. I beleive the MPL allows Netscape (and only Netscape) to release the code under their own licence. If there own licence happens to be the GPL then that's their right.
I wouldn't have expected a Linux game to even break even. Linux is doing amazingly well in the Internet server market, but I didn't think the Linux desktop market really existed yet.
If it's true that the port paid for itself then game manufacturers can now afford to support Linux without losing their shirts. Seeing more games available will encourage users to switch to Linux. Seeing more users will encourage more game producers. Once the positive feedback loop is established things will snowball.
Getting to that break-even point is the hard part. If we've really reached it then this is a significant event.
The reviewer mentioned Postgres triggers, but didn't make it clear that triggers use a more general feature called stored procedures.
By coding lots of low-level functions as stored procedures that are stored _inside_ the database I can drastically reduce the number of database calls my application has to make.
The benchmarks he used can't show this (because he said himself that he doesn't use these features) but proper use of stored procedures should improve performance drastically while simplifying application code.
My experience in rural India is limited, but in the areas I visited I'd have to say that sanitation was a problem. Nutrition seemed OK, the power outages were a minor inconvenience (people just learned to live without for a few hours - wood stoves helped), but there were a lot of open sewers containing human waste.
I imagine some buried sewage pipes would go a long way to improving the health of the general population.
You're spoiled by the relatively reliable power available in the West. I'm sure the people in rural India would love to have more reliable power, but they're used to not having it. Rotating blackouts (because of lack of capacity) are a way of life.
The internet could bring with it educational opportunities that would be impossible otherwise. This is far more important in the long term than a few hours a day of extra power.
Plus, solving the energy problem would be very expensive. Power stations cost millions of dollars. That money would be better spent on sanitation systems. Internet access provided by existing cabling could be quite cheap.
The zoned memory management in 2.3 is a starting point for NUMA. It allows you to break the address space into segments which are treated differently (ie. Non-Uniformly).
SGI and IBM will have to cooperate, although maybe not officially. They'll each have teams adding features to the kernel and they'll talk to each other the same way all the other developers do. There's just no other way to do it.
He's latched on to some features that Motif has that haven't been fully realized in Qt or GTK+ and makes it seem as if these are the only ones that matter.
Motif, being older, has all the little things worked out. It's a mature toolkit. GTK+ and Qt are newer and are naturally missing lots of little features.
Motif will fall behind for two reasons:
1) The developers of Qt and GTK+ have the benefit of hindsight. They've used Motif, Win32, and Mac and are able to learn from the mistakes of the past. While the toolkits themselves aren't entirely mature, the foundations are very strong and well designed. These guys know what they're doing.
2) The proprietary attitude of the Motif developers. GUI development is driven by desktop applications and Linux is the hottest market for Unix desktops. Since Motif's licensing makes it difficult to support well under Linux, but GTK+ and Qt both work well under commercial Unix, Motif will die out. It makes no sense to use Motif when GTK+ apps will work better on Linux and be fully portable.
Interestingly, many of the shortcomings that were pointed out in GTK+ (I don't really follow Qt) are currently under active development. Pango, for example, addresses the internationalization issues and is real software. It's not finished, but it's far from being vapour.
I was wondering how long the tech. stock lunacy would go on. As somebody who holds a little bit of stock in a profitable brick-and-morter retailer, this is kind of gratifying. It was getting really annoying to see these outrageous valuations for money-losing companies.
I'm even kind of glad that the Linux stocks have returned to sanity. It's pretty clear that Linux will continue to grow exponentially over the next few years. It's not at all clear where and how much money will be made in the market.
RedHat, for example, will never be the cash cow that Microsoft was in the '90s. Even if they get 90% of the OS market, they'll never have the outrageous margins that MS had/has. The Open-Source model just won't support it. I'm positive they'll turn into a strong, profitable company, but that it's anybody's guess whether they will be a profitable $20M company or a profitable $20B company.
It's entirely possible that the big bucks in the Linux market will be made by companies like IBM, SGI, and SCO. It's just too early to tell how it will turn out.
The mainstream Linux community (including the developers that have brought it this far) have no real interest in military-style security. This is one of those cases where the end user (the DoD) should scratch its own itch.
They have the means (money) and the motivation (money + security) to do this themselves or sponsor somebody else's efforts. The result would be an OS that exactly matches their requirements and that they can continue to mold to their own purposes without relying on some vendor.
Of course even if they don't do this some companies will. SGI and IBM have a lot riding on Linux and they need to sell into big government accounts, so they'll take care of it.
Dunno, if it really says "Released under GPL" you can get a few thousand programmers to testify that this is perfectly clear to anybody in the field.
I can't think of any plausible way that "GPL" could be interpreted as something else in this context.
Can somebody check their copy of the code (I didn't download it) and see what the license was? If it was GPL or something similar then they can still assign the copyright, but they can't prevent people from distributing it.
The most sinister part of this, as far as I'm concerned, is that the administrator is now responsible for JUDGING what is legal and what isn't.
There are really only two ways to handle this 1)the administrator studies the law and becomes expert on all the subtleties and precedents AND defends his legal opinions in court, 2)anything that is even remotely questionable is banned.
If you thought IP laws were scary today, imagine what happens when your local ISP starts patrolling your site looking for anything that might possibly lead to legal action. Militant ISPs would make the whole idea of free speach and due process meaningless.
It might not help WINE directly, but it might be interesting to build a smart launcher for Windows software. If the executable is known to work well under WINE, use WINE (which would be faster). Otherwise, use BOCHS, which would provide better emulation at the expense of relatively slow execution.
I'm not sure I understand what's wrong with lookalike hardware? The PC industry is full of lookalike hardware and it's been a huge success. The competition has been great.
The problem with closed systems is that vendors will rely on their monopolies to guarantee them a market instead of providing the best possible product. Clearly the monopoly is in the best interest of the company that holds it (ie. Sony) but everybody else loses: the consumer, game manufacturers, and other console manufacturers.
Of course, as long as there are several strong players in the market (ie. Nintendo, Sega) Sony's monopoly is limited to Playstations, not game consoles in general. It's still bad, but not nearly as big a problem as Microsoft which has a lock on the desktop market as a whole.
...but yes, it's just speculation.
Remember that Corel wants to go for the mainstream consumer market. AOL is the domininant player. Add to that the fact that AOL owns Netscape and it makes a whole lot of sense.
If you look at it another way, Corel would be foolish to try to take on Microsoft head-on (again) without some serious backing. AOL is the only ISP that's big enough (and hates Microsoft enough) to pull this off. Partnering with people like iDirect would only work if they had a network of similar sized ISPs across the continent.
I agree that a decent browser is important, but keep in mind that Linux distributions will start shipping with a kick-ass browser (Mozilla) within a few months. Windows users will have to struggle through a download in order to get a state-of-the-art browser.
I suppose streaming media is important for some people, but I don't really care. A non-proprietary standard for streaming media will emerge (maybe already has - I don't follow this stuff) and Linux will support it well.
For my personal use Linux is a great desktop. My business clients will start switching to Linux desktops once 1) Mozilla is released, 2) Corel Office Suite is released.
Average home users will switch when either 1) Linux gets more games, or 2) Playstations become so popular that people don't bother with PC games anymore. I suspect that both of these will occur to some extent over the next year and by next summer Linux will be in homes in a big way. If 1999 was the year of the iMac, 2001 will be the year of Linux Desktops.
Their server was struggling when "gnome.org" posted the link. With Slashdot posting as well they're down for the count. Did anybody get any mirrors? Please post-em if you have-em.
I don't really know how existing compressed filesystems are implemented, but since storing pointers to existing copies of data is an old compression technique, I always assumed this was part of it.
Now I suppose it's possible that existing compression only takes advantage of redundancy within a file. In that case extending this to the whole file system might be considered innovative - but I would ask why they didn't do that in the first place.
DevFS, for example, has been stable for ages and Richard has dutifully been releasing updated patches against current kernels. It was just a matter of convincing Linus that it was the `Right Thing'.
The softnet stuff is, in my mind, too radical a change for a feature freeze, but if it's really as good as people say then it might be worth it. I'm sure it will push the stable release back a month or so.
The most exciting new feature for me is the Logical Volume Manager included in 2.3.47. I've spent a lot of time administering AIX systems and the LVM is a Godsend for the harried system administrator. I don't know yet what the Linux LVM can do, but on AIX you can expand volumes while the system is running. I've heard that on HP you can shrink volumes as well. Even if the Linux LVM doesn't have all the bells and whistles, you can bet they will appear quickly now that the feature is in the mainstream kernel.
It looks like 2.4 will be a really nice release all-around. Not a lot of radical changes, but lots of performance improvements and useful little things.
What you're saying is that you don't feel the stakes are high enough in this particular case to flout the law. That's your opinion and that's fine. But others feel differently.
I'm not claiming that the DVD situation is comparable to the holocaust. I am saying that those who go along with unjust laws, or worse, berate others for disobeying them, aren't the good citizens they believe they are.
The heart of the problem in this case is that corporations have successfully lobbied for laws that line their pockets at the expense of society as a whole. It's not just about watching DVDs, it's about screwing regular people and intimidating them (using the threat of law suits) into complying. That stinks and has no place in society.
Before you start with the self-rightious diatribes you should remember that disobeying bad laws has a long and honourable tradition.
The American Revolution, the Underground Railroad, the French Resistance, Jews escaping the Nazis, Ghandi's peaceful revolution... the list goes on. All of these things were horribly illegal.
The fact of the matter is that laws are made by people. Some people are ignorant, greedy, corrupt, or cruel and when these people make laws they need to be opposed using whatever means are most effective.
In this particular case we have shortsighted politicians who have perverted intellectual property laws far beyond the point where they serve any social good. The laws are wrong and the politians in charge are either too stupid or too corrupt to do anything about it. How do fight within the system if the system itself is broken?
I don't know what the Slashdot policy on this is - it would probably be good to delete the user.
Please don't moderate this up.
> and it's great that it's coming from a big-name > company like Dell instead of some small, > obscure place... A small obscure place? You mean like IBM? ... Ami.
I gather from reading the injunction (IANAL) that there is a big opening: find a country where click-contracts are explicitely invalid. Apparently the judge thinks that the law in Norway is unclear.
So the obvious thing to do is for somebody with appropriate skills in such a country to reverse-engineer CSS again. Then post a new (indepentant) version of deCSS to a media.
You would have to have some witnesses who would swear that this effort was independant. You wouldn't be able to use the current CSS as a starting point, but (I think) you could take advantage of the same hole in the Xing player along with information on HOW the original hacker did their magic.
Maybe the original hacker could create a "reverse-engineer-CSS" HOWTO with tips on technique, but no actual trade-secrets. Then people all over the place could post independant code and each version would require a separate legal challenge.