The guy starts out the article saying that Intel's DDR implementation was crippled for political reasons. He also states that Athlons benefit from DDR more than P4.
Then the political aspect is ignored and he talks almost exclusively about technical issues about why Rambus might theoretically be better, and uses existing intel chipsets as evidence.
Hello? Answer the question, please? Has Intel ever come out with a non-crippled DDR chipset for the P4? How do Intel's DDR P4 chipsets compare to non-intel DDR P4 chipsets? (ARE there any non-intel P4 chipsets?)
How much of the problem is political, and how much of it is a real technical issue?
"So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security." -Gates memo.
I.E. we can't think of anything new to cram into windows that anybody would actually WANT (and it's getting harder to copy stuff since all our remaining competition is a Unix variant and can address things like latency that we'd have to throw windows out and start over to address) so we're going to stop doing new things and put a happy face on it. Heck, you're all going to a rental model anyway, we don't HAVE to do new stuff anymore. You'll keep paying us anyway or you desktop will stop working.
Grab the EMX package off of hobbes. It's a better compiler (gcc port to OS/2) and it comes with extensive documentation. And it's got most of the GNU library anyway...
BeOS was about latency, not throughput. When you move the mouse it moves NOW, not in a quarter of a second. Click on a button and it presses/releases IMMEDIATELY in response to what you did, and the new window snaps up NOW. It sucks as a router, but if having the GUI respond when you move it is what you think the system's first priority should be, then it's perfect.
Linux is about throughput and has sucky latency. Process switching is devoutly to be avoided. We won't put graphics in the kernel because that might slow down our packets per second as a router. We won't even apply the low-latency patches that have been floating around for a year and change. (Maybe in 2.5...)
Load a Linux box until it's thrashing and your rat pointer will jump inches at a time. You can't cut and paste text accurately when your mouse pointer jumps five letters a second and a half after you move it. That's how you get great throughput (batch up those transactions and run 'em through in CPU cache. Join together 50 mouse moves into one BIG mouse move!) But it sucks for GUI-ism, and that's what Windows users care about.
Moore's law will take care of half of this. As systems get faster, latency gets better because we deal with stuff as fast as it comes in. Nicing your X server down to -10 helps a bit, because it interrupts other tasks when it wants to do stuff, but that doesn't help applications you spawn and it doesn't do THAT much for the X server either because niceness is just a suggestion. Yet we don't even seem to do THAT as standard in Red Hat...
It's a question of what the system is optimized to DO. Getting good GUI performance from Linux has only been a goal for the past year and change. The KDE guys are trying it. The Gnome guys are trying to make sure the KDE guys aren't the ones to do it because they don't trust the KDE guys' judgement on licensing issues. The XFree86 guys are trying to undo the mistakes of the past 15 years. (That and get 3D acceleration, which is great, but 80 million triangles/second is reality (or the human perceptual threshold) and it won't be THAT long before Moore's law makes your low-end 3D card photorealistic images in realtime. And a hardware generation or three after that, software rendering will be able to do it. It becomes a much less interesting problem then...)
The kernel is fun, but the big block to Linux on the desktop isn't the kernel anymore. It's XFree86 and KDE. That's where effort can be used. But not until we understand the difference between latency and throughput. (Although getting the kernel to have seperate niceness settings for throughput and latency might be a good thing...)
And the cathedral and the bazaar is too long and complicated for him to read.
Talk about a prototype and a fan club. Somebody somewhere makes a small simple demonstration of an idea, for the same reason stamp collectors catalog stamps and ships in bottles get built.
This prototype takes maybe an afternoon, maybe a week. Maybe a few months. It's some guy's hobby project, and they're proud of it.
Then they release it to friends, who find it interesting or useful, and pass it on to THEIR friends, until a fan club forms around it.
The fan club is full of people using it, admiring it, improving it. These are the same kind of people who put on star trek conventions and publish fanzines, and they can organize a LOT of effort when they try.
In the case of software, the prototype acquires new code like crystals around a condensation nuclei, (or amendments to a bill in congress). It's there, and people want one more feature, idea, color change, or bug fix, so they tweak their version and then submit their changes in to the fan club so it goes into the "official" version. (Which is official because the fan club is where the fans are.)
The central maintainer of the project (who may be the creator or the prototype, a designated successor, or just a group of senior fans in the fan club), acts like a goalie. Their job is to keep stuff OUT of the next release of the project. They can't make anybody submit stuff, but any fanzine has a slush pile of submitted poetry that's ten times what they can print. And the vast majority of it stinks. (Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud.)
So the editor's job is to veto stuff, accepting only the 2% or so that's worthy of going in to the project, which will really improve it, and which is worth the effort. (THAT is where a lot of the quality of open source comes from: the presence of ten competing implementations of any idea and the freedom to reject nine of them.)
This is how open source is organized. People write it for the same reason young children play with "star wars" action figures making up their own stories. They'll do it for weeks at a time, because it's what they consider FUN. You may not see it as fun, but the same could be said about stamp collecting, rock climbing, or golf.
Ask yourself why there are so many millions of web pages out there, mostly with pictures of people's cats? What does a search engine like Google do? Fight off sturgeon's law by finding the 1% that's interesting. This is what book publishers do wading through the slush pile, what music publishers do sorting through demo tapes of garage bands. There's a reason the first really successful internet business was Yahoo.
This is nothing new. The internet simply reduced the costs of doing business to the point where fan clubs (which have ALWAYS made superior stuff because they care, but which can't afford manufacturing facilities to make everyone a copy) can get their stuff out there where everyone can use it.
Is there really less idle surfing, or just a smaller PERCENTAGE of idle surfing?
The web has ten times as many users as it did a few years ago, and it has a lot more established places to go. Idle surfing is no longer the ONLY thing to do, and idle surfers are no longer the only web users.
So this doesn't mean there are fewer clicks and eyeballs wandering around looking at people's cat pictures, but twice as many of them would still be a smaller percentage of a larger user base surfing a larger web...
What is Dell's intellectual property? Compaq? Gateway? What does ANY of them have that one of the others can't do?
They make PCs. They make white boxes with a brand name. They assemble commodity parts, interchangeable components available from multiple manufacturers.
The PC drove the minicomputer out of business, and has driven the mainframe to a niche role. Precisely because every vendor copied every other vendor's best stuff, did it even cheaper, and then improved on it. Not to found some dynasty where it could rest on its laurels, but to sell the next 6 months worth of product. They had to keep moving to stay alive, and this gave us Moore's law.
Is this BLATANTLY obvious, or is it just me? A smaller slice of the bigger pie. Absolute ruler of nothing, or a regular citizen in a rich and prosperous country...
Rob
Re:$ is made from HW, not SW
on
IBM Wants Linux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
>I'm reminded of the scene in "Pirates of Silicon
>Valley" where Gates and company were sitting
>down to negotiate with IBM and it was
>said, "Everybody knows that the real money is
>made in hardware, not software".
>
>Well IBM was wrong at the time in that statement
>but it might finally be the truth.
Actually, it was right at the time, but rapidly stopped being so. And now the pendulum's swinging back the other way.
Everything is a service industry. Manufacturing is a service; "products" are an effect often confused with a cause.
Hardware became commoditized. Interchangeable parts available from multiple vendors. Competing on price and functionality, but with transparency and compatability as the entry fee.
One vendor's software beat the other vendor's software because the hardware fought all its battles for it. IBM's PC didn't hurt apple, the PC -CLONES- drove IBM itself from the field, along with apple. Microsoft beat apple because the hardware fought all its battles for it. All it had to do was maintain a monopoly lock on the PC hardware platform and hang on for the ride.
Now commodity software is coming into fashion. It was called free software until it got marketing, and the marketers called it Open Source. Commoditization is the natural thing to happen to any mature market. A Linux system is made from interchangeable parts available from multiple sources, freely downloadable, transparent and compatable.
Red Hat, SuSE and TurboLinux are just like Dell, Compaq, and Gateway. They assemble commodity parts into a finished product, stamp a brand name on it, and sell it with a warantee. But you can put your own box together (or go to linuxfromscratch.com and assemble your own linux distribution). Most people choose not to, they start with an assembled system and customize it from there.
IBM lost its position in the PC market when it tried to close it up with the proprietary PS/2. It has had ten years to learn from its mistakes (and it has a new brain, Lou Gerstner's, to comprehend the blindlingly obvious with). It sees Linux, it comprehends "commodity software", and it's trying darn hard to play the game on the game's terms this time.
And so far, I think it's doing a decent job of it.
Dell clawed its way to the top past compaq and co. in large part by getting DEEPLY in bed with both Microsoft and Intel. Notice how Dell has been the last holdout to NOT ship AMD processors? Well they have similar commitments to Microsoft.
Dell also can't get anyone locally to work Linux support for it. They had to outsource all of it. Any Linux-friendly techies got totally burned out at Dell and left circa 1999, and ever since the local Linux crowd has stayed pretty far away from them. (They have a reputation as a bit of a slave driver around here. And we remember the time Bill Gates visited Austin and stayed at Michael Dell's house.) I don't remember who they outsource Linux support to, but if that deal fell through (or the company at the other end went under), they wouldn't have much choice but to pull the plug on Linux support. They CAN'T support it internally.
Specifically, he wrote the full-screen text editor. In assembly, I believe.
I was under the impression this was in 1979 (it's a reference from the book "Gates", which I haven't actually read but have seen excerpts from...) This says the sucker shipped in 1983. Did the product take a long time to come out...?
And now that he's dating again, he might be more inclined to insist on a bit of privacy. (The collective response of the FSF people to Stallman's acquisition of a significant other after all these years was, basically, "Thank God!". This info is a good four months out of date now, though. Dunno how things are going in Boston...)
>There's nothing novel about it anymore, and
>we're long past being surprised.
Actually, the reason it got posted was the escalation. From some nobody middle manager, to vice president mundie, to ballmer, and now to Gates. The thing is, nobody listened to mundie, they laughed at ballmer, and now gates is reminding people of his trial testimony. Microsoft's screming bloody murder and everybody's going "sucks to be you, doesn't it"?
Who do they escalate to afer this when people still don't believe them?
And once again, they're pointing out that the GPL is their real enemy, not free software. They're still happy to grab BSD code and embrace/extend/fork it to death. They're throwing a tantrum because the GPL won't let them fork off a proprietary version of other people's code.
MetroWerks here in Austin did the emulation layer for Apple's M68K->power switchover. They did a really clever thing of identifying long "runs" of code that nobody ever jumped into the middle of, then they treated them as one big instruction with a lot of side effects, and optimized them as a block. (Not one instruction at a time, but the whole mess into the most optimal set of new platform instructions they could.)
It was quite clever. It's also quite patented, and has been since before the Power PC came out. (And in a sane world those patents would have expired by now, but with patent lengths going the way of copyright...)
Eventually, when the patents expire, this sort of dynamic translation will be one big science with Java JITs, code morphing, and emulation all subsets of the same technology. And somebody will do a GPL implementation with pluggable front and back ends, and there will be much rejoicing.
And transmeta will STILL be better than iTanium because sucking VLIW instructions in from main memory across the memory bus (your real bottleneck) is just stupid. CISC has smaller instructions (since you can increment a register in 8 bits rather than 64), and you expand them INSIDE the chip where you clock multiply the sucker by a factor of twelve already, and you give it a big cache, and you live happily ever after. Intel's de-optimizing for what the real bottleneck is, and THAT is why iTanic isn't going to ship in our lifetimes.
Rob
Re:Single point of failure necessary for stability
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 2
> why anyone would want to go to the trouble
> just to view a specific web site when the
> alternative (use an existing domain name)
> would be easier.
Easier for the viewer, but definitely not easier for the person putting up the site.
There is a shortage of domain names, in part due to squatting. Any dictionary word is probably already taken, and the available two word combinations are getting a bit obscure. Things like "potato.com" have been taken since 1997 by squatters, but never used. To get a decent name, they hope people will buy the one they've already squatted on.
It would be TRIVIAL to fix the shortage by adding new domain names. Then you could get potato.tx or whatever if you're in texas.
But to make the squatting problem go away, you have to add a LOT of domain names. Adding them one at a time just opens up a new gold rush. Adding a hundred makes squatting pointless, and would make the existing pressure back off a bit. (The recession is helping there, though. But that's a temporary thing.)
As long as there's tight control, there will be squatting. Right now, domains aren't really considered part of the name by most people. they just assume it will be dot-com, and if that doesn't work they try dot org or dot net. (And if that doesn't work, they give up.) Domains should be more like area codes.
> Now as for this TLD dipute, ICANN is certainly
> acting in a high-handed manner, but they do
> have a minor point in that the people who set
> up and signed up for these alternative TLDs
> did so under the knowledge that they were
> non-standard and there were really just
> speculating that they might succeed in the
> future.
Clue: most of the growth of the internet since late 1994 falls under that category. And the "standard" is only standard because they say so.
Kind of like saying all these non-standard browser extensions like "tables" netscape threw into their browser should be banned from all future standards because people who go and implement non-standard extensions need to be punished. Standards should only be extended by committees who know what's good for us.
Nevermind users who are already trying to make the new thing work on their own initiative. Where would we be if standards documented existing reality rather than creating utopian ideals?
> Joining some of them to the main root
> now could be seen to be rewarding this and
> thereby encouraging all kinds of other people
> to set up non standard roots or TLDs
> themselves.
And this is a bad thing because...?
Because they're trying to lead/control the system rather than co-ordinate the activity of the users?
The internet is a free software phenomenon. A bazaar. Collaborative development. That kind of thing is co-ordinated, not led. If you lead, nobody's going to follow. IBM noticed that in the late 80's...
Rob
Single point of failure necessary for stability?
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 4
Whatever happend to the decentralized nature of the internet? Isn't there a reason we have more than one root server in the first place? Hello? What ARE these people smoking?
As for a single point of CONTROL, if we're not going to let Microsoft be it, and we're not too happy about the federal government trying that out with encryption exports or various "commnications indecency acts"... Why do they think we're going to let THEM do it?
The main problem with alternic type schemes is they need an alternate search engine. But if Google went along with it, there would be NO problem...
The argument "grandma doesn't know how to set her nameserver" is kind of bogus if you stop and think about it: five years ago grandma didn't know what the internet WAS. The web was just geeks creating value for other geeks, and then the rest of the world found it and wandered in to our party. If we're over creating value in one corner and the rest of the world isn't doing as much with their 95%, then the rest of the world will find us. Remember Napster? Geeks are being QUIET about AudioGalaxy, this time around...
Besides, remember usenet BEFORE AOL found it? A lot of people would consider the exclusivity (while it lasts) to be a good thing. Brains being the price of admission, and all. (Not trying to be bigoted, just saying it's not a BAD thing.)
Rob
Re:You call *that* a review?
on
Thief of Time
·
· Score: 3
I'm still waiting for Pratchett to pair off Susan with Ponder Stibbons. Imagine it: the ultimate geek/goth thing...
>What if I take GPL'ed code and create a COM
>component out of it. I releast the full source.
>3 months later, I decide to start writing a
>closed-source app and I find the component would
>be useful.
>Should my application now be covered under the
>GPL?
You're the author. Your rights to use the code do not originate from a license granting you access to somebody else's copyright. You OWN the copyright.
A license you grant delegating some of your rights to other people doesn't limit YOUR rights to your own work.
Unless, of course, you sign over the copyright. But that's not what a license does. (If your employer paid you to create something, they may own the copyright due to their contract with you. And the FSF wants people to sign their copyrights over to them so they'll have a stronger position if they ever have to sue anybody. But that's a seperate issue.)
This hasn't changed in 20 years. Anybody remember Sierra Online's "Softporn"?
People who invent ways to escape reality, who are fixed enough on their own fantasies that they can create good believable games, tend not to have the greatest social skills. The most dedicated game fans aren't exactly out there polishing their schmoozing muscles either.
The computer industry is 90% male. Gaming (paper and dice) is 90% male. The primary customer base for the intersection of gaming and computers is teenage boys. Everything from cars to cell phones have "spokesmodels" sitting on them in magazine ads.
As for the computer industry, Comdex IS held in las vegas every year. (Las vegas is like the movie "showgirls", only with more plot and the boring bits don't get as much screen time.)
The article DOES have some decent points it could have made, like cross-over games (from Ms. Pac-man to The Sims), or the general failure of attempts to make "girl-centric" computer games (although not universial, the "barbie" line just about breaks even, I'm told.)
But it doesn't make them, I only know about them from other sources. The author of this article came across as a pedanitc moralist shocked by something he just noticed, and predicting dire things if his viewpoint isn't universally imposed immediately. (Clue: the game industry IS making more money than hollywood. Right now. This has been true since the 80's...)
Okay, everybody who thinks the next april first RFC should be a protocol for email disclaimers, raise your hand.
The frightening part is, I know an awful lot of librarians who would implement it. (The people who run html verifiers against their web pages and then proudly display a logo indicating they have end of paragraph tags.)
Speed of light. Conservation of mass. Bureaucracy. Some things are just constant...
Lets see, if you're under 18 you face curfews (both late at night AND during the day when you "should be in school" even if you're home schooled). The drinking age has been raised to 21 almost everywhere, and the driving age and voting age aren't too far off. And of course you need to be "protected" from all sorts of things "for your own good". That kind of parental repression works so remarkably well with ciagarettes and alcohol, doesn't it? You can't BUY advertising that effective.
You still have to register for the draft at 18, though. (Although they're afraid of you might have a gun they didn't give you. After columbine and such they have metal detectors in school because they EXPECT kids to be violent psychopaths, complete with McCarthy style witch-hunts against nonconformist. Fun.)
Isn't it amazing that the generation that campaigned for youth rights in the 60's when THEY were teenagers are now voting republican, trying to censor the internet (the "free love" communes), strip-mining the environment (flower power), fighting a war on drugs (they're upset they didn't use the next generation's supply back in the 60's?) and generally being the same hypcritical pricks their parents were? (No real suprise here, although finding them retroactively defending nixon is kind of amusing.)
When did the phrase conservative replace the phrase "old fogey"?
Oh well, another 20 years and they'll start to die off en masse. (And they expect US to fund social security for them, after they looted the thing to fund Reganomics when they all became yuppies back in the 80's. Right.)
Slashdot Mirror
Then the political aspect is ignored and he talks almost exclusively about technical issues about why Rambus might theoretically be better, and uses existing intel chipsets as evidence.
Hello? Answer the question, please? Has Intel ever come out with a non-crippled DDR chipset for the P4? How do Intel's DDR P4 chipsets compare to non-intel DDR P4 chipsets? (ARE there any non-intel P4 chipsets?)
How much of the problem is political, and how much of it is a real technical issue?
She probably isn't an elf, either...
The really amusing part is that I'm an agnostic. :)
Rob
"So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security." -Gates memo.
I.E. we can't think of anything new to cram into windows that anybody would actually WANT (and it's getting harder to copy stuff since all our remaining competition is a Unix variant and can address things like latency that we'd have to throw windows out and start over to address) so we're going to stop doing new things and put a happy face on it. Heck, you're all going to a rental model anyway, we don't HAVE to do new stuff anymore. You'll keep paying us anyway or you desktop will stop working.
Rob
Grab the EMX package off of hobbes. It's a better compiler (gcc port to OS/2) and it comes with extensive documentation. And it's got most of the GNU library anyway...
BeOS was about latency, not throughput. When you move the mouse it moves NOW, not in a quarter of a second. Click on a button and it presses/releases IMMEDIATELY in response to what you did, and the new window snaps up NOW. It sucks as a router, but if having the GUI respond when you move it is what you think the system's first priority should be, then it's perfect.
Linux is about throughput and has sucky latency. Process switching is devoutly to be avoided. We won't put graphics in the kernel because that might slow down our packets per second as a router. We won't even apply the low-latency patches that have been floating around for a year and change. (Maybe in 2.5...)
Load a Linux box until it's thrashing and your rat pointer will jump inches at a time. You can't cut and paste text accurately when your mouse pointer jumps five letters a second and a half after you move it. That's how you get great throughput (batch up those transactions and run 'em through in CPU cache. Join together 50 mouse moves into one BIG mouse move!) But it sucks for GUI-ism, and that's what Windows users care about.
Moore's law will take care of half of this. As systems get faster, latency gets better because we deal with stuff as fast as it comes in. Nicing your X server down to -10 helps a bit, because it interrupts other tasks when it wants to do stuff, but that doesn't help applications you spawn and it doesn't do THAT much for the X server either because niceness is just a suggestion. Yet we don't even seem to do THAT as standard in Red Hat...
It's a question of what the system is optimized to DO. Getting good GUI performance from Linux has only been a goal for the past year and change. The KDE guys are trying it. The Gnome guys are trying to make sure the KDE guys aren't the ones to do it because they don't trust the KDE guys' judgement on licensing issues. The XFree86 guys are trying to undo the mistakes of the past 15 years. (That and get 3D acceleration, which is great, but 80 million triangles/second is reality (or the human perceptual threshold) and it won't be THAT long before Moore's law makes your low-end 3D card photorealistic images in realtime. And a hardware generation or three after that, software rendering will be able to do it. It becomes a much less interesting problem then...)
The kernel is fun, but the big block to Linux on the desktop isn't the kernel anymore. It's XFree86 and KDE. That's where effort can be used. But not until we understand the difference between latency and throughput. (Although getting the kernel to have seperate niceness settings for throughput and latency might be a good thing...)
Rob
And the cathedral and the bazaar is too long and complicated for him to read.
Talk about a prototype and a fan club. Somebody somewhere makes a small simple demonstration of an idea, for the same reason stamp collectors catalog stamps and ships in bottles get built.
This prototype takes maybe an afternoon, maybe a week. Maybe a few months. It's some guy's hobby project, and they're proud of it.
Then they release it to friends, who find it interesting or useful, and pass it on to THEIR friends, until a fan club forms around it.
The fan club is full of people using it, admiring it, improving it. These are the same kind of people who put on star trek conventions and publish fanzines, and they can organize a LOT of effort when they try.
In the case of software, the prototype acquires new code like crystals around a condensation nuclei, (or amendments to a bill in congress). It's there, and people want one more feature, idea, color change, or bug fix, so they tweak their version and then submit their changes in to the fan club so it goes into the "official" version. (Which is official because the fan club is where the fans are.)
The central maintainer of the project (who may be the creator or the prototype, a designated successor, or just a group of senior fans in the fan club), acts like a goalie. Their job is to keep stuff OUT of the next release of the project. They can't make anybody submit stuff, but any fanzine has a slush pile of submitted poetry that's ten times what they can print. And the vast majority of it stinks. (Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud.)
So the editor's job is to veto stuff, accepting only the 2% or so that's worthy of going in to the project, which will really improve it, and which is worth the effort. (THAT is where a lot of the quality of open source comes from: the presence of ten competing implementations of any idea and the freedom to reject nine of them.)
This is how open source is organized. People write it for the same reason young children play with "star wars" action figures making up their own stories. They'll do it for weeks at a time, because it's what they consider FUN. You may not see it as fun, but the same could be said about stamp collecting, rock climbing, or golf.
Ask yourself why there are so many millions of web pages out there, mostly with pictures of people's cats? What does a search engine like Google do? Fight off sturgeon's law by finding the 1% that's interesting. This is what book publishers do wading through the slush pile, what music publishers do sorting through demo tapes of garage bands. There's a reason the first really successful internet business was Yahoo.
This is nothing new. The internet simply reduced the costs of doing business to the point where fan clubs (which have ALWAYS made superior stuff because they care, but which can't afford manufacturing facilities to make everyone a copy) can get their stuff out there where everyone can use it.
Rob
Is there really less idle surfing, or just a smaller PERCENTAGE of idle surfing?
The web has ten times as many users as it did a few years ago, and it has a lot more established places to go. Idle surfing is no longer the ONLY thing to do, and idle surfers are no longer the only web users.
So this doesn't mean there are fewer clicks and eyeballs wandering around looking at people's cat pictures, but twice as many of them would still be a smaller percentage of a larger user base surfing a larger web...
Rob
What is Dell's intellectual property? Compaq? Gateway? What does ANY of them have that one of the others can't do?
They make PCs. They make white boxes with a brand name. They assemble commodity parts, interchangeable components available from multiple manufacturers.
The PC drove the minicomputer out of business, and has driven the mainframe to a niche role. Precisely because every vendor copied every other vendor's best stuff, did it even cheaper, and then improved on it. Not to found some dynasty where it could rest on its laurels, but to sell the next 6 months worth of product. They had to keep moving to stay alive, and this gave us Moore's law.
Is this BLATANTLY obvious, or is it just me? A smaller slice of the bigger pie. Absolute ruler of nothing, or a regular citizen in a rich and prosperous country...
Rob
>I'm reminded of the scene in "Pirates of Silicon
>Valley" where Gates and company were sitting
>down to negotiate with IBM and it was
>said, "Everybody knows that the real money is
>made in hardware, not software".
>
>Well IBM was wrong at the time in that statement
>but it might finally be the truth.
Actually, it was right at the time, but rapidly stopped being so. And now the pendulum's swinging back the other way.
Everything is a service industry. Manufacturing is a service; "products" are an effect often confused with a cause.
Hardware became commoditized. Interchangeable parts available from multiple vendors. Competing on price and functionality, but with transparency and compatability as the entry fee.
One vendor's software beat the other vendor's software because the hardware fought all its battles for it. IBM's PC didn't hurt apple, the PC -CLONES- drove IBM itself from the field, along with apple. Microsoft beat apple because the hardware fought all its battles for it. All it had to do was maintain a monopoly lock on the PC hardware platform and hang on for the ride.
Now commodity software is coming into fashion. It was called free software until it got marketing, and the marketers called it Open Source. Commoditization is the natural thing to happen to any mature market. A Linux system is made from interchangeable parts available from multiple sources, freely downloadable, transparent and compatable.
Red Hat, SuSE and TurboLinux are just like Dell, Compaq, and Gateway. They assemble commodity parts into a finished product, stamp a brand name on it, and sell it with a warantee. But you can put your own box together (or go to linuxfromscratch.com and assemble your own linux distribution). Most people choose not to, they start with an assembled system and customize it from there.
IBM lost its position in the PC market when it tried to close it up with the proprietary PS/2. It has had ten years to learn from its mistakes (and it has a new brain, Lou Gerstner's, to comprehend the blindlingly obvious with). It sees Linux, it comprehends "commodity software", and it's trying darn hard to play the game on the game's terms this time.
And so far, I think it's doing a decent job of it.
Rob
Nobody can tune for the slashdot effect. This site is a cross between a gossip column and a distributed denial of service attack...
Rob
Dell also can't get anyone locally to work Linux support for it. They had to outsource all of it. Any Linux-friendly techies got totally burned out at Dell and left circa 1999, and ever since the local Linux crowd has stayed pretty far away from them. (They have a reputation as a bit of a slave driver around here. And we remember the time Bill Gates visited Austin and stayed at Michael Dell's house.) I don't remember who they outsource Linux support to, but if that deal fell through (or the company at the other end went under), they wouldn't have much choice but to pull the plug on Linux support. They CAN'T support it internally.
Rob
Specifically, he wrote the full-screen text editor. In assembly, I believe.
I was under the impression this was in 1979 (it's a reference from the book "Gates", which I haven't actually read but have seen excerpts from...) This says the sucker shipped in 1983. Did the product take a long time to come out...?
Rob
>I absolutely disagree; Final Fantasy was an
>excellent movie that pushed the boundaries of
>technology and story telling.
Apparently in different directions...
Rob
Who ever thought we'd be saying this ten years ago, but...
GO IBM!!!!!
Rob
> Or, alternately, move in with Stallman
Nah, I've been in his office. There's no room.
And now that he's dating again, he might be more inclined to insist on a bit of privacy. (The collective response of the FSF people to Stallman's acquisition of a significant other after all these years was, basically, "Thank God!". This info is a good four months out of date now, though. Dunno how things are going in Boston...)
>There's nothing novel about it anymore, and
>we're long past being surprised.
Actually, the reason it got posted was the escalation. From some nobody middle manager, to vice president mundie, to ballmer, and now to Gates. The thing is, nobody listened to mundie, they laughed at ballmer, and now gates is reminding people of his trial testimony. Microsoft's screming bloody murder and everybody's going "sucks to be you, doesn't it"?
Who do they escalate to afer this when people still don't believe them?
And once again, they're pointing out that the GPL is their real enemy, not free software. They're still happy to grab BSD code and embrace/extend/fork it to death. They're throwing a tantrum because the GPL won't let them fork off a proprietary version of other people's code.
Rob
MetroWerks here in Austin did the emulation layer for Apple's M68K->power switchover. They did a really clever thing of identifying long "runs" of code that nobody ever jumped into the middle of, then they treated them as one big instruction with a lot of side effects, and optimized them as a block. (Not one instruction at a time, but the whole mess into the most optimal set of new platform instructions they could.)
It was quite clever. It's also quite patented, and has been since before the Power PC came out. (And in a sane world those patents would have expired by now, but with patent lengths going the way of copyright...)
Eventually, when the patents expire, this sort of dynamic translation will be one big science with Java JITs, code morphing, and emulation all subsets of the same technology. And somebody will do a GPL implementation with pluggable front and back ends, and there will be much rejoicing.
And transmeta will STILL be better than iTanium because sucking VLIW instructions in from main memory across the memory bus (your real bottleneck) is just stupid. CISC has smaller instructions (since you can increment a register in 8 bits rather than 64), and you expand them INSIDE the chip where you clock multiply the sucker by a factor of twelve already, and you give it a big cache, and you live happily ever after. Intel's de-optimizing for what the real bottleneck is, and THAT is why iTanic isn't going to ship in our lifetimes.
Rob
> why anyone would want to go to the trouble
> just to view a specific web site when the
> alternative (use an existing domain name)
> would be easier.
Easier for the viewer, but definitely not easier for the person putting up the site.
There is a shortage of domain names, in part due to squatting. Any dictionary word is probably already taken, and the available two word combinations are getting a bit obscure. Things like "potato.com" have been taken since 1997 by squatters, but never used. To get a decent name, they hope people will buy the one they've already squatted on.
It would be TRIVIAL to fix the shortage by adding new domain names. Then you could get potato.tx or whatever if you're in texas.
But to make the squatting problem go away, you have to add a LOT of domain names. Adding them one at a time just opens up a new gold rush. Adding a hundred makes squatting pointless, and would make the existing pressure back off a bit. (The recession is helping there, though. But that's a temporary thing.)
As long as there's tight control, there will be squatting. Right now, domains aren't really considered part of the name by most people. they just assume it will be dot-com, and if that doesn't work they try dot org or dot net. (And if that doesn't work, they give up.) Domains should be more like area codes.
> Now as for this TLD dipute, ICANN is certainly
> acting in a high-handed manner, but they do
> have a minor point in that the people who set
> up and signed up for these alternative TLDs
> did so under the knowledge that they were
> non-standard and there were really just
> speculating that they might succeed in the
> future.
Clue: most of the growth of the internet since late 1994 falls under that category. And the "standard" is only standard because they say so.
Kind of like saying all these non-standard browser extensions like "tables" netscape threw into their browser should be banned from all future standards because people who go and implement non-standard extensions need to be punished. Standards should only be extended by committees who know what's good for us.
Nevermind users who are already trying to make the new thing work on their own initiative. Where would we be if standards documented existing reality rather than creating utopian ideals?
> Joining some of them to the main root
> now could be seen to be rewarding this and
> thereby encouraging all kinds of other people
> to set up non standard roots or TLDs
> themselves.
And this is a bad thing because...?
Because they're trying to lead/control the system rather than co-ordinate the activity of the users?
The internet is a free software phenomenon. A bazaar. Collaborative development. That kind of thing is co-ordinated, not led. If you lead, nobody's going to follow. IBM noticed that in the late 80's...
Rob
Whatever happend to the decentralized nature of the internet? Isn't there a reason we have more than one root server in the first place? Hello? What ARE these people smoking?
As for a single point of CONTROL, if we're not going to let Microsoft be it, and we're not too happy about the federal government trying that out with encryption exports or various "commnications indecency acts"... Why do they think we're going to let THEM do it?
The main problem with alternic type schemes is they need an alternate search engine. But if Google went along with it, there would be NO problem...
The argument "grandma doesn't know how to set her nameserver" is kind of bogus if you stop and think about it: five years ago grandma didn't know what the internet WAS. The web was just geeks creating value for other geeks, and then the rest of the world found it and wandered in to our party. If we're over creating value in one corner and the rest of the world isn't doing as much with their 95%, then the rest of the world will find us. Remember Napster? Geeks are being QUIET about AudioGalaxy, this time around...
Besides, remember usenet BEFORE AOL found it? A lot of people would consider the exclusivity (while it lasts) to be a good thing. Brains being the price of admission, and all. (Not trying to be bigoted, just saying it's not a BAD thing.)
Rob
I'm still waiting for Pratchett to pair off Susan with Ponder Stibbons. Imagine it: the ultimate geek/goth thing...
>What if I take GPL'ed code and create a COM
>component out of it. I releast the full source.
>3 months later, I decide to start writing a
>closed-source app and I find the component would
>be useful.
>Should my application now be covered under the
>GPL?
You're the author. Your rights to use the code do not originate from a license granting you access to somebody else's copyright. You OWN the copyright.
A license you grant delegating some of your rights to other people doesn't limit YOUR rights to your own work.
Unless, of course, you sign over the copyright. But that's not what a license does. (If your employer paid you to create something, they may own the copyright due to their contract with you. And the FSF wants people to sign their copyrights over to them so they'll have a stronger position if they ever have to sue anybody. But that's a seperate issue.)
Rob
People who invent ways to escape reality, who are fixed enough on their own fantasies that they can create good believable games, tend not to have the greatest social skills. The most dedicated game fans aren't exactly out there polishing their schmoozing muscles either.
The computer industry is 90% male. Gaming (paper and dice) is 90% male. The primary customer base for the intersection of gaming and computers is teenage boys. Everything from cars to cell phones have "spokesmodels" sitting on them in magazine ads.
As for the computer industry, Comdex IS held in las vegas every year. (Las vegas is like the movie "showgirls", only with more plot and the boring bits don't get as much screen time.)
The article DOES have some decent points it could have made, like cross-over games (from Ms. Pac-man to The Sims), or the general failure of attempts to make "girl-centric" computer games (although not universial, the "barbie" line just about breaks even, I'm told.)
But it doesn't make them, I only know about them from other sources. The author of this article came across as a pedanitc moralist shocked by something he just noticed, and predicting dire things if his viewpoint isn't universally imposed immediately. (Clue: the game industry IS making more money than hollywood. Right now. This has been true since the 80's...)
Sigh...
Rob
The frightening part is, I know an awful lot of librarians who would implement it. (The people who run html verifiers against their web pages and then proudly display a logo indicating they have end of paragraph tags.)
Speed of light. Conservation of mass. Bureaucracy. Some things are just constant...
Rob
You still have to register for the draft at 18, though. (Although they're afraid of you might have a gun they didn't give you. After columbine and such they have metal detectors in school because they EXPECT kids to be violent psychopaths, complete with McCarthy style witch-hunts against nonconformist. Fun.)
Isn't it amazing that the generation that campaigned for youth rights in the 60's when THEY were teenagers are now voting republican, trying to censor the internet (the "free love" communes), strip-mining the environment (flower power), fighting a war on drugs (they're upset they didn't use the next generation's supply back in the 60's?) and generally being the same hypcritical pricks their parents were? (No real suprise here, although finding them retroactively defending nixon is kind of amusing.)
When did the phrase conservative replace the phrase "old fogey"?
Oh well, another 20 years and they'll start to die off en masse. (And they expect US to fund social security for them, after they looted the thing to fund Reganomics when they all became yuppies back in the 80's. Right.)
Rob