StarOffice runs on Windows too, so it doesn't necessarily mean they have 25K Linux machines. Also, StarOffice isn't quite open source. There's an OpenOffice subset that is, but Sun doesn't have the necessary licenses to release source to all of StarOffice.
RMS has *zero* power to choose to close Linux (or even the HURD) to commercial apps. The code is already out there and licensed such that all can use it and extend it. That *cannot* be undone. For code that is "owned" by the FSF, he/they could release further versions that are not GPLed. These versions would be ignored by the general Linux public and die a quiet death. Meanwhile, others would continue to develop the irrevocably GPLed current versions of gcc et al.
The FSF uses the LGPL pragmatically, when licensing code in that fashion furthers the ultimate goal of free software. If they were so gung-ho to abandon it, why create it in the first place?
The rest of your argument, being based on an incorrect understanding of the license issues, is thus baseless.
It seems to me that if the tree is in an area subjected to harsh environments that have landslides and fires might not be a candidate for forgetting about natural selection.
That bit seemed a bit hokey to me. It's in this supposedly dangerous area, yet it's over 100 years old. There can't be *that* high a risk of these problems.
I'm sure Microsoft has spent that much over the years on Office+Win9x+WinNT+Backoffice+etc (basically the functionality provided by RH 7.1).
Microsoft has approximately 20,000 programmers from what I've heard, which at (say) $100,000/year gives you $2 billion/year.
Probably a better comparison would be lines of code created/changed, although really what we care about (and would find nigh-impossible to measure) is the increase in utility of the software.
Convergence is one of those things that just doesn't work out in the ways people predict.
Convergence is generally dumb when you take two items that might as well be separate (TV and VCR), and combine them into one. All you've gained is fewer cables, one fewer power supplies, and a slightly simpler interface for normal viewing.
However, convergence works much better when the converged items share a lot of components. A TiVo and a computer (for example) are fairly similar. You might even say a computer is itself a convergence device, with game playing, word processing et al all merged into one. The cost of making a converged TiVo/computer isn't much higher than that of making one or the other device. You do lose the flexibility in the shared components, but the reduced cost should make up for it.
Instead of hacking the GBA, a better alternative might be to play ROM images on an iPaq, Yopy, or similar machine. Is there an emulator that will work on those systems? Presumbly GnuBoy could be ported to any Linux handheld. Cost is significantly higher, obviously, but you get a more generally useful system in the process. (Although getting it to play Kirby's Tilt and Tumble might be a real challenge.)
Rather than worry about battery usage, I'd rather just spring for a rechargable (or two) anyway.
Wormlights don't work very well. Perhaps there's a transparent coating available that diffuses reflections, as is available for eyeglasses.
Seriously, though, the gcc approach to this is, I think, better, if rather more verbose and awkward-looking. As I understand it, gcc looks for include guards, code like
#ifndef _MYFILE_H
#define _MYFILE_H
...
#endif
and if it finds it, it treats that like #pragma once for the given file. So there's no incompatibility with compilers that don't support #pragma once. Meanwhile, if for some necessary evil you need to include MyFile.h again, simply #undef _MYFILE_H and go.
RCA jacks. More rare, but I refuse to hook up a device through the casette deck (I don't even have one in my car anyway).
What about an RF transmitting system? I've never heard one to know how the audio quality is, but I know a number of CD changers can broadcast to some unused channel. That would make it easy to move the player from the car to another location, no hard-wired stuff.
Sure, blacking out their faces might be a little extreme
Extreme? It's inane. Can you call directory assistance to get the number of "the guy who looks like this"? Cameras set up all over the place doing face matching, so you can track their patterns and have an attractive recruiter "accidentally" bump into them? Not releasing names is one thing, pictures of faces quite another.
RIAA got their power when they controlled the channels between musicians and the public (you either signed a recording contract or you were totally out of luck, because of the costs of studios, recording, record production, etc).
They still control the key things: radio airtime and distribution channels. Payola still exists to effectively control what gets played on the radio, there's just middlemen that do it. Shelf space is also bought and sold, and the stores aren't going to let you buy placement once and damage their relationship with the big-name distributors. So musicians who want a chance at anything have to choose this monopolized system, get a very lucky break, or make a living doing live performances at clubs and the like.
There is a fair bit of evidence (see practically every time this discussion has happened on/.) that the Japanese were about ready to surrender anyway
Perhaps, but (a) I don't consider Slashdot claims authoritative, and (b) has anyone claimed the Americans had any reason to know this? In February of '45, all 22,000 defenders of Iwo Jima fought to the death, killing 6,000+ Americans in the process. In April, 16,000 Americans died at Okinawa, facing 1,400+ kamikaze planes, and 120,000 or more Japanese soldiers, 90% of whom died. It was not longer after the battle that Truman gave the go-ahead to drop the bomb, armed with pretty solid evidence that the Japanese were prepared to fight to the death.
I'd feel dirty donating money to a for-profit company...
One thing I've wondered about is whether it would ever work to buy "stock" in a person. I program professionally, but if 10,000 people contributed $100 (or some similar number), I'd quit my job and work on open source for the rest of my life, living on the investment proceeds. And the payoff for the investors would be the code I produce. Now, you don't know me from Adam, but perhaps if it was a "name" person (say Alan Cox), where previous rep was sufficient to spur investors, this might work. And perhaps if a few people were established this way, it would provide enough of a boost to add less well-known but competent and hard-working folks (like me) with recommendations, possibly with referenda on each person so hired each year where the investors judge whether the person has done enough in that year.
All this is about is an automated way to try and boost the success of in-vitro fertilization, where a couple having trouble conceiving provide their own eggs and sperm and technicians try to get fertilization to occur in a petri dish. The egg gets re-implanted in the female who then carries it to term.
So other than the picture in the article, how does this get us "16,00" Britney Spears?
All I need is a $50 case/power supply, $100 mainboard, $100 cpu, $20 worth of RAM
Are you going to toggle in programs from front panel switches? Don't forget a DVD drive. You should also add the price of a decent gamepad. I also suspect the PS2 has better graphics and MPEG display than most on-board solutions, although if we're just talking about the cheapest way to get a functional computer, that's not an issue.
I think Microsoft's real fear is that the U.S. government will start using more Linux.
For the government, switching to Linux and Star Office can mean a real cost savings over Windows and Office. They're a big enough customer that a name manufacturer would set up Linux machines in bulk, or provide ones without an OS, for less than the cost of a Windows/Office machine. The government could code what it needs (we've already seen the NSA doing this) or fund the fixes it needs for less than the cost of many, many Windows licenses and the paperwork to keep track of them. Multiple similar machines mean they only need to solve configuration hassles once.
That's one of the two ways I see Linux with the chance to make a real inroad on the desktop.
Has anyone tried using multiple small dishes to achieve the same sensitivity as a large dish, like they're doing with telescopes? A 40 foot dish -- or even an 18 foot one -- seems a bit excessive for most of us, but (say) 7 DSS dishes could be much more easily hidden.
In my state you can get a ticket for not wearing your seat belt. A cop can pull you over JUST FOR THAT. Why? What if I WANT to fly through my windshield?
If you or your front-seat passenger is flying through the windshield, you are jeopardizing the control of your car. Even after an initial impact, you can often do things to lessen the severity of an accident to others, and the seatbelt keeps you where you can do so.
Note that if you want to fly through your windshield, I believe that you are legally entitled to do so on your own private road. You can also drive an unsafe vehicle there. On government-owned roads, however, you have requirements that your vehicle be in reasonably safe condition and that you are capable of controlling it.
That implies that free software developers are either working for open-source companies (not likely, not many of them left that are profitable), doing non-computer jobs (again, not likely, if they know enough to program) or just plain unemployed.
They could also work computer jobs for firms that don't sell software. Perhaps as many as 2/3rds of all programmers aren't working on mass-market stuff, and there are webmasters, sysadmins, etc.
Re:Who's made the model work?
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 1
Sun's release of all the StarOffice source they could release should give them about as much credit as IBM in the open source game. And I think Oracle is the only company on your list that makes most of its money from software. You would be better off listing companies like Adobe, although even as the number 2 PC software company they're still tiny compared to Microsoft.
Never mind all the amazing technology (like, uh, the transistor...maybe you've heard of it...) that you use every day.
The vacuum tube was invented to improve the phone system, and the transistor to replace the unreliable, hot vacuum tube. The initial market was largely military, until Japanese companies like Sony developed the transistor radio. NASA didn't have a whole lot to do with it.
That suggests that Rambus really grovelled to get a license signed with Samsung. I imagine the payments have already stopped.
Heck, I would have stopped payment as soon as the original decision was handed down. The fee was for licensing patents, and invalid ones aren't. And after today's fraud ruling, heck, a contract obtained under fraud is invalid and I would stop paying, letting Rambus decide if they think they can sue us to get the money.
Slashdot Mirror
StarOffice runs on Windows too, so it doesn't necessarily mean they have 25K Linux machines. Also, StarOffice isn't quite open source. There's an OpenOffice subset that is, but Sun doesn't have the necessary licenses to release source to all of StarOffice.
Imagine a Beowolf[Sic] Cluster of THESE!!! Umm, wouldn't that be called a CPU?
RMS has *zero* power to choose to close Linux (or even the HURD) to commercial apps. The code is already out there and licensed such that all can use it and extend it. That *cannot* be undone. For code that is "owned" by the FSF, he/they could release further versions that are not GPLed. These versions would be ignored by the general Linux public and die a quiet death. Meanwhile, others would continue to develop the irrevocably GPLed current versions of gcc et al.
The FSF uses the LGPL pragmatically, when licensing code in that fashion furthers the ultimate goal of free software. If they were so gung-ho to abandon it, why create it in the first place?
The rest of your argument, being based on an incorrect understanding of the license issues, is thus baseless.
It seems to me that if the tree is in an area subjected to harsh environments that have landslides and fires might not be a candidate for forgetting about natural selection. That bit seemed a bit hokey to me. It's in this supposedly dangerous area, yet it's over 100 years old. There can't be *that* high a risk of these problems.
Microsoft will connect the word "viral" to all that is GPL.
And then, given Microsoft's other comments, people will believe viruses cause cancer.
I'm sure Microsoft has spent that much over the years on Office+Win9x+WinNT+Backoffice+etc (basically the functionality provided by RH 7.1).
Microsoft has approximately 20,000 programmers from what I've heard, which at (say) $100,000/year gives you $2 billion/year.
Probably a better comparison would be lines of code created/changed, although really what we care about (and would find nigh-impossible to measure) is the increase in utility of the software.
Convergence is one of those things that just doesn't work out in the ways people predict.
Convergence is generally dumb when you take two items that might as well be separate (TV and VCR), and combine them into one. All you've gained is fewer cables, one fewer power supplies, and a slightly simpler interface for normal viewing.
However, convergence works much better when the converged items share a lot of components. A TiVo and a computer (for example) are fairly similar. You might even say a computer is itself a convergence device, with game playing, word processing et al all merged into one. The cost of making a converged TiVo/computer isn't much higher than that of making one or the other device. You do lose the flexibility in the shared components, but the reduced cost should make up for it.
Instead of hacking the GBA, a better alternative might be to play ROM images on an iPaq, Yopy, or similar machine. Is there an emulator that will work on those systems? Presumbly GnuBoy could be ported to any Linux handheld. Cost is significantly higher, obviously, but you get a more generally useful system in the process. (Although getting it to play Kirby's Tilt and Tumble might be a real challenge.)
Rather than worry about battery usage, I'd rather just spring for a rechargable (or two) anyway.
Wormlights don't work very well. Perhaps there's a transparent coating available that diffuses reflections, as is available for eyeglasses.
What about the following, surely it's good ?
#pragma once
It's not good, and don't call me Shirley.
Seriously, though, the gcc approach to this is, I think, better, if rather more verbose and awkward-looking. As I understand it, gcc looks for include guards, code like
#ifndef _MYFILE_H
#define _MYFILE_H
...
#endif
and if it finds it, it treats that like #pragma once for the given file. So there's no incompatibility with compilers that don't support #pragma once. Meanwhile, if for some necessary evil you need to include MyFile.h again, simply #undef _MYFILE_H and go.
RCA jacks. More rare, but I refuse to hook up a device through the casette deck (I don't even have one in my car anyway).
What about an RF transmitting system? I've never heard one to know how the audio quality is, but I know a number of CD changers can broadcast to some unused channel. That would make it easy to move the player from the car to another location, no hard-wired stuff.
$make && make install $
[localhost:~] guest% gcc
gcc: Command not found.
[localhost:~] guest% make
make: Command not found.
Nor is an X Window package preloaded on Mac OS X, to the best of my knowledge. So for Joe Average User, it's a little more complicated than that.
(I have a Windows 2000 box in front of me, and a Mac OS X box just to my right.)
Sure, blacking out their faces might be a little extreme Extreme? It's inane. Can you call directory assistance to get the number of "the guy who looks like this"? Cameras set up all over the place doing face matching, so you can track their patterns and have an attractive recruiter "accidentally" bump into them? Not releasing names is one thing, pictures of faces quite another.
Has anyone hacked a Gameboy to give it a bigger, brighter screen? Or is the usual way to do that to run an emulator on a PC or Palm-like device?
RIAA got their power when they controlled the channels between musicians and the public (you either signed a recording contract or you were totally out of luck, because of the costs of studios, recording, record production, etc).
They still control the key things: radio airtime and distribution channels. Payola still exists to effectively control what gets played on the radio, there's just middlemen that do it. Shelf space is also bought and sold, and the stores aren't going to let you buy placement once and damage their relationship with the big-name distributors. So musicians who want a chance at anything have to choose this monopolized system, get a very lucky break, or make a living doing live performances at clubs and the like.
There is a fair bit of evidence (see practically every time this discussion has happened on /.) that the Japanese were about ready to surrender anyway
Perhaps, but (a) I don't consider Slashdot claims authoritative, and (b) has anyone claimed the Americans had any reason to know this? In February of '45, all 22,000 defenders of Iwo Jima fought to the death, killing 6,000+ Americans in the process. In April, 16,000 Americans died at Okinawa, facing 1,400+ kamikaze planes, and 120,000 or more Japanese soldiers, 90% of whom died. It was not longer after the battle that Truman gave the go-ahead to drop the bomb, armed with pretty solid evidence that the Japanese were prepared to fight to the death.
I'd feel dirty donating money to a for-profit company...
One thing I've wondered about is whether it would ever work to buy "stock" in a person. I program professionally, but if 10,000 people contributed $100 (or some similar number), I'd quit my job and work on open source for the rest of my life, living on the investment proceeds. And the payoff for the investors would be the code I produce. Now, you don't know me from Adam, but perhaps if it was a "name" person (say Alan Cox), where previous rep was sufficient to spur investors, this might work. And perhaps if a few people were established this way, it would provide enough of a boost to add less well-known but competent and hard-working folks (like me) with recommendations, possibly with referenda on each person so hired each year where the investors judge whether the person has done enough in that year.
All this is about is an automated way to try and boost the success of in-vitro fertilization, where a couple having trouble conceiving provide their own eggs and sperm and technicians try to get fertilization to occur in a petri dish. The egg gets re-implanted in the female who then carries it to term.
So other than the picture in the article, how does this get us "16,00" Britney Spears?
All I need is a $50 case/power supply, $100 mainboard, $100 cpu, $20 worth of RAM
Are you going to toggle in programs from front panel switches? Don't forget a DVD drive. You should also add the price of a decent gamepad. I also suspect the PS2 has better graphics and MPEG display than most on-board solutions, although if we're just talking about the cheapest way to get a functional computer, that's not an issue.
I think Microsoft's real fear is that the U.S. government will start using more Linux.
For the government, switching to Linux and Star Office can mean a real cost savings over Windows and Office. They're a big enough customer that a name manufacturer would set up Linux machines in bulk, or provide ones without an OS, for less than the cost of a Windows/Office machine. The government could code what it needs (we've already seen the NSA doing this) or fund the fixes it needs for less than the cost of many, many Windows licenses and the paperwork to keep track of them. Multiple similar machines mean they only need to solve configuration hassles once.
That's one of the two ways I see Linux with the chance to make a real inroad on the desktop.
Has anyone tried using multiple small dishes to achieve the same sensitivity as a large dish, like they're doing with telescopes? A 40 foot dish -- or even an 18 foot one -- seems a bit excessive for most of us, but (say) 7 DSS dishes could be much more easily hidden.
In my state you can get a ticket for not wearing your seat belt. A cop can pull you over JUST FOR THAT. Why? What if I WANT to fly through my windshield?
If you or your front-seat passenger is flying through the windshield, you are jeopardizing the control of your car. Even after an initial impact, you can often do things to lessen the severity of an accident to others, and the seatbelt keeps you where you can do so.
Note that if you want to fly through your windshield, I believe that you are legally entitled to do so on your own private road. You can also drive an unsafe vehicle there. On government-owned roads, however, you have requirements that your vehicle be in reasonably safe condition and that you are capable of controlling it.
That implies that free software developers are either working for open-source companies (not likely, not many of them left that are profitable), doing non-computer jobs (again, not likely, if they know enough to program) or just plain unemployed.
They could also work computer jobs for firms that don't sell software. Perhaps as many as 2/3rds of all programmers aren't working on mass-market stuff, and there are webmasters, sysadmins, etc.
Sun's release of all the StarOffice source they could release should give them about as much credit as IBM in the open source game. And I think Oracle is the only company on your list that makes most of its money from software. You would be better off listing companies like Adobe, although even as the number 2 PC software company they're still tiny compared to Microsoft.
Never mind all the amazing technology (like, uh, the transistor...maybe you've heard of it...) that you use every day.
The vacuum tube was invented to improve the phone system, and the transistor to replace the unreliable, hot vacuum tube. The initial market was largely military, until Japanese companies like Sony developed the transistor radio. NASA didn't have a whole lot to do with it.
That suggests that Rambus really grovelled to get a license signed with Samsung. I imagine the payments have already stopped.
Heck, I would have stopped payment as soon as the original decision was handed down. The fee was for licensing patents, and invalid ones aren't. And after today's fraud ruling, heck, a contract obtained under fraud is invalid and I would stop paying, letting Rambus decide if they think they can sue us to get the money.