Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 27th Sep 2006 13:59 UTC, submitted by anonymous
In a move that some may have sensed was coming, Eric S. Raymond - one of the co-founders of the open-source movement - has joined the Freespire Leadership Board. Raymond believes desktop Linux is entering into a critical period, noting that historically, users have shifted operating systems during periods of fundamental changes in hardware platforms. He believes the PC vendors' embrace of 64-bit computing will provide desktop Linux a unique window of opportunity, which if missed, may not come along again for many years.
Thread beginning with comment 166225
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-01-01
Yes, I'm aware that OSI coined the term "open source." However starting OSI and starting the "open source movement" are different things, because the latter is just a marketing term for something that predates 1998. If I coined the term snafflebleur to mean "open source" and people started calling it "snafflebleur" I wouldn't have started the movement.
It's not a matter of disliking ESR, it's a matter of differentiating between what ESR was part of and what the summary suggests. It's like Al Gore being credited with inventing the Internet. I certainly don't respect Eric, because quite honestly I think he's a faker whose technical skills are dwarfed by a CS intern, and reading his book The Art of UNIX Programming only reinforced that, but I can keep my opinion of him distinct from history.
Being an Internet cheerleader just isn't important for the board of a business. If anything his more nutty positions--that I tend to ignore because they're insignificant to me--make him a target for derision by the mainstream. However he isn't highly visible outside of a comparatively small realm. It's not 1999 anymore. You certainly won't find CNN Money talking about this the way they would Eric Schmidt joining Apple's board of directors.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
Sponsored Links
Member since:
2005-07-12
"Business-friendly free software did not originate with OSI. Being a co-founder of OSI does not make one a "co-founder of open source movement,""
No, but the term "open source" originated with OSI.
" when the term "open source" is just a marketing term coined to represent an alternative to the FSF's philosophies that existed well before 1998."
And really, that was (and is) OSI's purpose - marketing - or giving businesses a warm fuzzy about using "open source software" or "free software", or however you want to call it.
Face it, as brilliant a programmer as Richard Stallman is, and as influential his GNU project, Free Software Foundation and GPL are, his going around yapping about "Free Software" typically repells businesses, and many moderate users who want to just use computers to get things done, or for play.
In geek/programmer terms, just consider OSI and the term "open source" as easy to use and transportable wrapper functions around the more prickely Free Software Foundation and the term "Free Software" API's. ;-)
And, once again, I'm not a big fan of ESR. He's an arrogant blow-hard whose technical knowledge/abilities are drawrfed by those of RMS or Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall or Andrew Morton or Guido Van Rossum or Alan Cox.
Nevetheless, ESR is highly visible, and he's a very good writer (he is very good at that), and he's been a constant advocate for open source. Give him credit for that, and Freespire for recognizing ESR's advocacy and writing abilities.
Edited 2006-09-27 21:41