I agree that Amazon has had a tremendous impact, it was a "visionary" idea, not the idea of online sales, but the vision that it was doable when Amazon started doing it... so, too disagree with the pooh-pooh-ers, but Bezos and Amazon didn't do it this year, they did it a long time ago. If Bezos deserves man of the year for 1999, then I say Berners-Lee (sp?) deserves it more... no, wait, give it to Noyce... no, wait, give it to Shockley... no, wait...
Time Magazine's Man of the Year is designed to generate PR and sell magazines, and it has nothing to do with anything in the real world. Didn't they give it one year to "the computer"? Doesn't "the Internet" deserve it just as much?
shucks, the original 32 bits lasted 68 years, and now that's been multiplied by 4 billion... that's an awfully long time, overkill even. I guess it would introduce too many weird incompatibilities, but wouldn't it be handy if time_t had a few of its 64 bits dedicated to fractional seconds? nah, usleep already confuses me.
An off-the-64bit topic question: when astronomers and nuclear physicists decide that we need a leap second, what happens to UTC? does Unix-midnight and midnight in Greenwich England no longer coincide because the number of seconds since 1970 no longer evenly arrives at date boundaries?
BTW, thanks for all of the other answers, everybody.
Microsoft is already in anti-trust hot water and is more likely to be force-able to release their APIs.
RealNetworks, on the other hand, while they do support linux, and they are not-Microsoft, is a totally proprietary shop, and not very privacy protective. You can't run their software without poking that fact into their database. I never check the send-me-email box, and yet, they do, telling me that I did, and then they expire the version and off we go to download another RealNetworks trojan horse. Perhaps if they get punished enough in the market, they will in desparation show a greater commitment to open standards.
Audio and video streaming standards should clearly be wide open -- wide open -- and, I think we are closer to getting that from Microsoft than we are from RealNetworks.
If these were both American companies, I would think that this would run into anti-trust trouble, especially in the current regulatory climate. However, given that this is an international deal, does anybody know how regulation works?
Re:Why does it matter that they use BSD?
on
Intel using FreeBSD
·
· Score: 1
It matters, or at least would be nice to know if they
used BSD so they didn't have to GPL their code or
used BSD because they measured it as more reliable or
this is an unsolved problem of finance theory, but many finance professors don't buy the "more affordable" reasoning because small investors can trade in odd-lots, and the odd-lot surcharge is not enough to explain the rise in share prices after a split.
Instead, it has been suggested a la game theory that the split is an informational signal that management insiders are bullish about continued increases in the share price. mentioned FWIW...
They are not required to patent it so someone else won't, because they would only need to show that they were already doing it before the patent: "prior art".
However, if the Patent Office is granting patents like this, they are required both to patent and to attempt enforcement, even if they don't expect to prevail! The SEC requires that officers of a company protect the monetary interests of minority (as in "not much stock", not ethnicity) shareholders. If patents and enforcements slow down the competition, they are pretty much obligated to try or they leave themselves open to shareholder lawsuits.
However, they also need to take boycott and negative public opinion into account, so RMS's proposed boycott is still a good idea if you want them to change their policy. I do.
Yes, but you on the other hand owe your life to ChrisUK because he caused you to compose and post that note and to subsequently hit reload 10x to see if anybody moderated or replied to you... had you not wasted all of that time, you would have gone out sooner and surely been hit by a bus yourself.
Thank your lucky stars that you are still alive and can now grow up to appreciate the sadness of Llewelyn's passing.
Re:RMS wrote too much code :-)
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 3
I don't think RMS is as famous for writing code as he is for advocating and giving away free and open source. He advocated for it through the Dark Ages, and now that he his ideas have proved to be the pre-eminent ideas for this age, it is his time in the sun.
Prior to that, K & R were famous, and prior to them, Knuth. Yep, they all wrote code and in some senses gave it away, but it was the ideas embodied in the code that they were giving away that make them famous. Linus is famous for the "just do it/can do" nature of his work, unlike all the bigger named, more experienced coders and architects who didn't deliver their kernel work to the mass of people who had x86s sitting in front of them.
Linux? GNU Linux? Lignux? and BSD licensing
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 2
The GPL does not... require one to name a product... with a name that mentions GNU. [Redhat has] chosen to call it RedHat Linux. Anything else you call it is simply wrong.... RMS... was unable to refute this point.
ROTFL! The irony of this that is that RMS makes a big deal in this article about how he's been so busy getting the BSD license changed so that you don't need to mention contributors, but he then keeps making such a big deal about having GNU mentioned in the context of linux. He's so rigidly idealogical that it is deliciously funny to catch him even slightly hypocritical.
Having had the laugh, though, I would point out that it could still be considered in good taste to mention GNU or FSF given the magnitude of their contribution. Think how upsetting it would be if MS made a distribution and called it "Windows 2001", which they apparently could if they wanted. Yikes!
I thought he was a great character, a geek alter ego.
Truth be told, it doesn't seem like it was that challenging a role and dozens of actors could have played it, no doubt, but Llewelyn would be among the top of them. I liked the way he played it, straight, rather than the typical wild-eyed or absent-minded professor like whoosie from Back to the Future. It was also nice to see technology presented as "it works and it's cool", unlike the numerous reminds-me-of-Jon-Katz portrayals of advanced technology where mankind always has to pay a price for hubris... though, the robot shooting demonstration gone awry in Robocop was pretty funny.
My favorite Q technologies were always the cars, rather than the pen-is-weapon sort of things. Oh, to have cars like those for my morning commute...
I keep reading about this false dichotomy between the powerful way and the easy way, or how nice it is to have both ways. Yeah, it's OK, but I don't want both ways, I want a new way, the easy powerful way.
We all know the benefits of the easy GUI way, and of the powerful/etc/file way, and we all know the drawbacks to each way too, so stop arguing about it! Jeez, all that is so obvious... but this apparently isn't:
Xconfiguration, and for other examples all the stuff in linuxconf, would work a lot better if these GUIs both did things for you and showed you what lines of what files were being changed. I mean, here's a poor-man's impl: the filenames are at hand because the programs are about to open them, just fire the output through diff and throw up a window that says "here are the filename deltas".
And, to make things even better: make the program that does the initial setup/install run the program you will later use to do the reconfig. The whole setup process would then be teaching you the config tool you'd be using later (does some FreeBSD stuff work this way?). And then, if you weren't sure during setup whether you wanted some feature, you'd feel safe that you could return to the question later and change your answer.
Re:Why is LISP superior?
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 3
How is LISP powerful?
Think of C: it has ints, floats, chars, structs, and vectors of those things, and pointers to any of those things (maybe I left out a few, but you get the idea). Then, totally separately, it has code for manipulating those "data" things.
C++ came along and it added some ways to connect your data to the appropriate code so you wouldn't mistakenly point the wrong code at the wrong data. But getting everyone to switch to C++ was a grueling 10 years because of all the training, and reprogramming it took, and it didn't really resulting in a more satisfying coding experience.
Turns out folks weren't satisfied, though, and now we've got Java, which restricted a lot of things you could do toward the end of making some other things easier. We've just started the grueling 10 years for this one, and I suspect some of the stuff that got restricted (essentially, they grabbed the ++ and chucked out the C) is stuff that a lot of folks want to keep doing...
Anyway, back to LISP: it was said earlier that LISP syntax was regular, but while true, that didn't capture what else is true: the textual representation of LISP is simple and regular, yes, but after it gets parsed it is also stored in memory in a simple and regular way: LISP looks at the world as "things" (like C's ints or floats) and lists of things, including other lists. Your program is just a list of things, and your program is "visible" to you as data, very simple data.
In C, it would be as if the entry point to your program was main(argc, argv, argp) where "argp" was a pointer to your program itself: "main(argc, argv, argp)..." Not a string that starts "main(...", but something more like an array of all of your tokens. The variables in your program would be references to your actualvariables (haven't you ever wished in a C program to have access to the symbol table that the compiler created and threw away? in LISP you do) But even beyond this, if you went deeper into your program, when you get to the token "for" (at the beginning of your for-loop), you could look up the code that implements "for" and see what its code does. Don't like what it does? Write your own version that behaves differently... that's been done many times in LISP so that today, loops are really functional.
Now, I'm not saying that everybody should rewrite how "for" works, or that all programs should manipulate code. But, one way to see how powerful LISP is is to see that LISP in its lifetime (since 1960) has made transitions similar to C to C++ to Java, but those transistions were made within the language itself, by people experimenting with new ideas to see which caught on. LISP erases the distinction between code and data in a really meaningful and powerful way.
So, that's just one powerful thing about LISP. I guess the other major one I'd mention is that the programming tricks and idioms that you learn (just like you learned to "for(p=x;*p;p++)" your way through C arrays) remain more universal and stable in LISP. "Walking" the LISP trees of data has remained the same from 1960 your first day learning the language to now. The "toolkit in your mind" that you carry with you does not have to constantly learn a zillion new things. It's as if you went to look at the implementation of a Java class and thought, "oh I see, it does something simple" rather than, "oh, looks like I need to go digest a bunch of other classes that this one has inherited from."
Hope this is useful... and I didn't even get to tail-recursion which is so cool that it blows all of this stuff away.
you covered a lot of stuff knowledgeably and clearly, thank you!
BTW, when I wrote "surreal", I was thinking of the porting process and running programs like emacs to editing code or run a debugger... yep, I could try doing that through HTTP as well:)
What is a mainframe from the point of view of linux? What sort of changes are required to port to a mainframe, particularly to a S390? Folks talk about stuff like IO channels and VMs but what are the salient features that I don't know about?
Assuming I'm familiar with von Neuman architecures, stack machines, microprocessors, minicomputers, memory mapped memory, memory mapped devices, IO ports, interrupts, and the unix concepts of streams, char devices, block devices, etc... what don't I know about mainframes? (Please don't make me read the source:)
One thing I *do* know from using them briefly, is that IBM "terminals" (3270s? something like that) are really weird: they are not simply connected via a serial cable. They have these extra control signals that light up indicators that say "you can't type now, I'm busy" and the text editors seem to do their editing on the "screen" locally and then send the changes back when you are done. I realize this has nothing to do with the kernel, but it would seem to make the whole experience quite surreal.
Stuff like wearable computing is perfect for opensource, and perfect for flexible, lightweight solutions, because nobody today knows what it's going to mean to "wear" a computer because nobody can imagine all the realms of possibility that open up.
In a sense, much of what we've seen of computers today was predictable: the Dick Tracy wristwatch, Flash Gordon's viewscreen technology, etc. If the future were that simple to predict, WinCE might have been the answer.
But what's going to make an "ultraportable" successful is going to be a surprize. The PalmPilot won in the handheld category just because it was a better product, but it's a really subtle thing to describe exactly what is better about it. Yet, hold it side by side to a WinCE device and in about 60 seconds you prefer it, despite its paucity of apps. And that kind of subtle usability attribute is really hard to predict, even for the developers. I expect [hey, it's not exactly profound] that wearables are going to have many of the same attributes, or even more. It'll be like trying on shoes: this one pinches... ahhh! this one feels comfy. Having a variety of robust, mutable opensource OS and app solutions available to play with is totally key to allowing the widest variety of Gyro Gearlooses to experiment with kooky quirky variations, but there will be a buncha cool stuff coming out the other end.
I was thinking the other day that the automobile was invented, looking back, pretty far into the last century. But we think of them as a 20th century device. I think in 20 years computers are going to seem to have undergone as rapid an advance. Yeah, there were some primitive devices available back in '99, and in "aught one", but nothing like what's new for '19!!
note: I'm also predicting that we'll be back to using 2 digits for years again, lickety split, but that's off-topic.
smarter for Sun to include more GNU productivity tools with Solaris
that's a great idea. Already, when I am called upon to admin a Solaris box out of the... er... box, I always set it up using RPMs (Redhat's package management system).
http://www.rpm.org/ has everything you'll need. You'll probably have to learn how to rebuild source RPMs which you've thus far avoided, but it's worth it, because suddenly a vast wealth of software becomes available and very easy to install, and very easy to deploy to a number of servers.
It's an interesting question as to whether PalmPilot makes sense as a standalone company. Does that maximize the value of the technology to its owners?
Clearly, it's the leading player in the handheld category of devices, and clearly handhelds are where a lot of action will be for the next few years. But equally, handhelds need to be wired, tethered, and tied to existing platforms for awhile to take advantage of the vast networks of data which already exist.
By being independent, PalmPilot would be free to make alliances all over the place. A company like Compaq, for instance, might not "deal" with IBM as readily as they would with an independent. However, an independent will have problems growing quickly enough to cover all of the opportunities. Here lies the strength of a company like IBM having a division like PalmPilot. Think what the Apple Macintosh might have done had it been an IBM product in the early 80's!
There may not actually be a way for one player to capture the lion's share of the economic value of this market. Go it alone and you risk being the VCR Beta or the Mac, while turning it into the industry standard like VHS means you are just one of many players. Of course, the Microsoft story shows that it can be done, but I'd think that would be hard to pull off in this market. Back when MS was creating its monopoly, reverse engineering and cloning the PC seemed daunting, but not today. Plus, competitors are much more wary given what Microsoft did. Opensourcing it would be VERY cool... for the customers. Hard to recommend it to 3Com with a totally straight face as it would open them up to shareholder lawsuits.
Anyway, it doesn't make sense as a division of 3Com, no synergies at all with the sales force, channels, customers, etc. So, how should they dispose of it? They undoubtedly have had an eye on some of the wild IPOs lately and figure that's the best way to get the most money out of it now (watch: they'll tout it as a linux pure-play!:) which might make a pile of dough for them but won't necessarily yield the most successful outcome for the platform.
Since some of the award nominees have used commercial software, I find it would fundamentally compromise my principles to attend the awards. If your writeup is funny, I might see it and smile, thus myself deriving indirect benefit from the commercial sale of software, so please stick to the facts:)
I guess they own the trademark, and a bunch of the code that's out there... but do they own other intellectual property involved, or is everyone simply worried about fragmentation?
Why doesn't ECMA simply go ahead and standardize the same thing under another name... perhaps the contracts that the current players in the Java industry have disallow them from going it "together" against Sun alone?
See, I'm speculating. It would be nice if someone who knew the answers could chime in.
I'm glad I read the thread because I learned the on-topic "HowTo use XWindows keypad instead of a mouse" stuff. Thanks!
But all of you people with the "my wrists hurt so I started standing on my head" stories, have you tried the Placebo Brand line of products? It will solve all of your problems. You see, medical science is only now beginning to discover that controlled studies involving double-blind trials are hogwash, essentially going to a lot of trouble for nothing, and masking some handy medicinal effects encountered in everyday situations.
It's so much better to ask one person what their experience was, one time, at one point in their life, hopefully when they were experimenting with a number of variables while their body was busy healing. And all of that sort of wisdom has been encapsulated in the Placeboard (pronounced pla-SEE-board) keyboard. Those with a bigger budget can also get the Placebowl (pronounced pla-SEE-bowl), a trackball inspired by AMF (it's the one with the three finger holes!) and the Placemat, a special ergonomically designed pad that keep food and other contaminants from creating too much mouse friction. (no, this one's pronounced PLACE-mat.) All of these are documented to have worked at least once for somebody.
Are you on an expense account? consider delaying to purchase their upcoming "YMMV" line.
the second best idea from that previous post was a closed source leonardo's notebook where you can see what everything does but you can't see how it works.
reposted to make it easy to see. hey, another idea popped into my head: Fermat's last theorem was closed source and look what a mess that turned into.
Slashdot Mirror
Time Magazine's Man of the Year is designed to generate PR and sell magazines, and it has nothing to do with anything in the real world. Didn't they give it one year to "the computer"? Doesn't "the Internet" deserve it just as much?
An off-the-64bit topic question: when astronomers and nuclear physicists decide that we need a leap second, what happens to UTC? does Unix-midnight and midnight in Greenwich England no longer coincide because the number of seconds since 1970 no longer evenly arrives at date boundaries?
BTW, thanks for all of the other answers, everybody.
And the 2038 problem too?
Are there other interesting things that get cleaned up, or turn out to be gotchas?
Microsoft is already in anti-trust hot water and is more likely to be force-able to release their APIs.
RealNetworks, on the other hand, while they do support linux, and they are not-Microsoft, is a totally proprietary shop, and not very privacy protective. You can't run their software without poking that fact into their database. I never check the send-me-email box, and yet, they do, telling me that I did, and then they expire the version and off we go to download another RealNetworks trojan horse. Perhaps if they get punished enough in the market, they will in desparation show a greater commitment to open standards.
Audio and video streaming standards should clearly be wide open -- wide open -- and, I think we are closer to getting that from Microsoft than we are from RealNetworks.
If these were both American companies, I would think that this would run into anti-trust trouble, especially in the current regulatory climate. However, given that this is an international deal, does anybody know how regulation works?
Instead, it has been suggested a la game theory that the split is an informational signal that management insiders are bullish about continued increases in the share price. mentioned FWIW...
However, if the Patent Office is granting patents like this, they are required both to patent and to attempt enforcement, even if they don't expect to prevail! The SEC requires that officers of a company protect the monetary interests of minority (as in "not much stock", not ethnicity) shareholders. If patents and enforcements slow down the competition, they are pretty much obligated to try or they leave themselves open to shareholder lawsuits.
However, they also need to take boycott and negative public opinion into account, so RMS's proposed boycott is still a good idea if you want them to change their policy. I do.
Thank your lucky stars that you are still alive and can now grow up to appreciate the sadness of Llewelyn's passing.
Prior to that, K & R were famous, and prior to them, Knuth. Yep, they all wrote code and in some senses gave it away, but it was the ideas embodied in the code that they were giving away that make them famous. Linus is famous for the "just do it/can do" nature of his work, unlike all the bigger named, more experienced coders and architects who didn't deliver their kernel work to the mass of people who had x86s sitting in front of them.
ROTFL! The irony of this that is that RMS makes a big deal in this article about how he's been so busy getting the BSD license changed so that you don't need to mention contributors, but he then keeps making such a big deal about having GNU mentioned in the context of linux. He's so rigidly idealogical that it is deliciously funny to catch him even slightly hypocritical.
Having had the laugh, though, I would point out that it could still be considered in good taste to mention GNU or FSF given the magnitude of their contribution. Think how upsetting it would be if MS made a distribution and called it "Windows 2001", which they apparently could if they wanted. Yikes!
Truth be told, it doesn't seem like it was that challenging a role and dozens of actors could have played it, no doubt, but Llewelyn would be among the top of them. I liked the way he played it, straight, rather than the typical wild-eyed or absent-minded professor like whoosie from Back to the Future. It was also nice to see technology presented as "it works and it's cool", unlike the numerous reminds-me-of-Jon-Katz portrayals of advanced technology where mankind always has to pay a price for hubris... though, the robot shooting demonstration gone awry in Robocop was pretty funny.
My favorite Q technologies were always the cars, rather than the pen-is-weapon sort of things. Oh, to have cars like those for my morning commute...
We all know the benefits of the easy GUI way, and of the powerful /etc/file way, and we all know the drawbacks to each way too, so stop arguing about it! Jeez, all that is so obvious... but this apparently isn't:
Xconfiguration, and for other examples all the stuff in linuxconf, would work a lot better if these GUIs both did things for you and showed you what lines of what files were being changed. I mean, here's a poor-man's impl: the filenames are at hand because the programs are about to open them, just fire the output through diff and throw up a window that says "here are the filename deltas".
And, to make things even better: make the program that does the initial setup/install run the program you will later use to do the reconfig. The whole setup process would then be teaching you the config tool you'd be using later (does some FreeBSD stuff work this way?). And then, if you weren't sure during setup whether you wanted some feature, you'd feel safe that you could return to the question later and change your answer.
Think of C: it has ints, floats, chars, structs, and vectors of those things, and pointers to any of those things (maybe I left out a few, but you get the idea). Then, totally separately, it has code for manipulating those "data" things.
C++ came along and it added some ways to connect your data to the appropriate code so you wouldn't mistakenly point the wrong code at the wrong data. But getting everyone to switch to C++ was a grueling 10 years because of all the training, and reprogramming it took, and it didn't really resulting in a more satisfying coding experience.
Turns out folks weren't satisfied, though, and now we've got Java, which restricted a lot of things you could do toward the end of making some other things easier. We've just started the grueling 10 years for this one, and I suspect some of the stuff that got restricted (essentially, they grabbed the ++ and chucked out the C) is stuff that a lot of folks want to keep doing...
Anyway, back to LISP: it was said earlier that LISP syntax was regular, but while true, that didn't capture what else is true: the textual representation of LISP is simple and regular, yes, but after it gets parsed it is also stored in memory in a simple and regular way: LISP looks at the world as "things" (like C's ints or floats) and lists of things, including other lists. Your program is just a list of things, and your program is "visible" to you as data, very simple data.
In C, it would be as if the entry point to your program was main(argc, argv, argp) where "argp" was a pointer to your program itself: "main(argc, argv, argp)..." Not a string that starts "main(...", but something more like an array of all of your tokens. The variables in your program would be references to your actualvariables (haven't you ever wished in a C program to have access to the symbol table that the compiler created and threw away? in LISP you do) But even beyond this, if you went deeper into your program, when you get to the token "for" (at the beginning of your for-loop), you could look up the code that implements "for" and see what its code does. Don't like what it does? Write your own version that behaves differently... that's been done many times in LISP so that today, loops are really functional.
Now, I'm not saying that everybody should rewrite how "for" works, or that all programs should manipulate code. But, one way to see how powerful LISP is is to see that LISP in its lifetime (since 1960) has made transitions similar to C to C++ to Java, but those transistions were made within the language itself, by people experimenting with new ideas to see which caught on. LISP erases the distinction between code and data in a really meaningful and powerful way.
So, that's just one powerful thing about LISP. I guess the other major one I'd mention is that the programming tricks and idioms that you learn (just like you learned to "for(p=x;*p;p++)" your way through C arrays) remain more universal and stable in LISP. "Walking" the LISP trees of data has remained the same from 1960 your first day learning the language to now. The "toolkit in your mind" that you carry with you does not have to constantly learn a zillion new things. It's as if you went to look at the implementation of a Java class and thought, "oh I see, it does something simple" rather than, "oh, looks like I need to go digest a bunch of other classes that this one has inherited from."
Hope this is useful... and I didn't even get to tail-recursion which is so cool that it blows all of this stuff away.
BTW, when I wrote "surreal", I was thinking of the porting process and running programs like emacs to editing code or run a debugger ... yep, I could try doing that through HTTP as well :)
Is somebody trying to prime the pump for Yet Another Internet Indy Phenom?
Assuming I'm familiar with von Neuman architecures, stack machines, microprocessors, minicomputers, memory mapped memory, memory mapped devices, IO ports, interrupts, and the unix concepts of streams, char devices, block devices, etc... what don't I know about mainframes? (Please don't make me read the source :)
One thing I *do* know from using them briefly, is that IBM "terminals" (3270s? something like that) are really weird: they are not simply connected via a serial cable. They have these extra control signals that light up indicators that say "you can't type now, I'm busy" and the text editors seem to do their editing on the "screen" locally and then send the changes back when you are done. I realize this has nothing to do with the kernel, but it would seem to make the whole experience quite surreal.
In a sense, much of what we've seen of computers today was predictable: the Dick Tracy wristwatch, Flash Gordon's viewscreen technology, etc. If the future were that simple to predict, WinCE might have been the answer.
But what's going to make an "ultraportable" successful is going to be a surprize. The PalmPilot won in the handheld category just because it was a better product, but it's a really subtle thing to describe exactly what is better about it. Yet, hold it side by side to a WinCE device and in about 60 seconds you prefer it, despite its paucity of apps. And that kind of subtle usability attribute is really hard to predict, even for the developers. I expect [hey, it's not exactly profound] that wearables are going to have many of the same attributes, or even more. It'll be like trying on shoes: this one pinches... ahhh! this one feels comfy. Having a variety of robust, mutable opensource OS and app solutions available to play with is totally key to allowing the widest variety of Gyro Gearlooses to experiment with kooky quirky variations, but there will be a buncha cool stuff coming out the other end.
I was thinking the other day that the automobile was invented, looking back, pretty far into the last century. But we think of them as a 20th century device. I think in 20 years computers are going to seem to have undergone as rapid an advance. Yeah, there were some primitive devices available back in '99, and in "aught one", but nothing like what's new for '19!!
note: I'm also predicting that we'll be back to using 2 digits for years again, lickety split, but that's off-topic.
that's a great idea. Already, when I am called upon to admin a Solaris box out of the... er... box, I always set it up using RPMs (Redhat's package management system).
http://www.rpm.org/ has everything you'll need. You'll probably have to learn how to rebuild source RPMs which you've thus far avoided, but it's worth it, because suddenly a vast wealth of software becomes available and very easy to install, and very easy to deploy to a number of servers.
Clearly, it's the leading player in the handheld category of devices, and clearly handhelds are where a lot of action will be for the next few years. But equally, handhelds need to be wired, tethered, and tied to existing platforms for awhile to take advantage of the vast networks of data which already exist.
By being independent, PalmPilot would be free to make alliances all over the place. A company like Compaq, for instance, might not "deal" with IBM as readily as they would with an independent. However, an independent will have problems growing quickly enough to cover all of the opportunities. Here lies the strength of a company like IBM having a division like PalmPilot. Think what the Apple Macintosh might have done had it been an IBM product in the early 80's!
There may not actually be a way for one player to capture the lion's share of the economic value of this market. Go it alone and you risk being the VCR Beta or the Mac, while turning it into the industry standard like VHS means you are just one of many players. Of course, the Microsoft story shows that it can be done, but I'd think that would be hard to pull off in this market. Back when MS was creating its monopoly, reverse engineering and cloning the PC seemed daunting, but not today. Plus, competitors are much more wary given what Microsoft did. Opensourcing it would be VERY cool... for the customers. Hard to recommend it to 3Com with a totally straight face as it would open them up to shareholder lawsuits.
Anyway, it doesn't make sense as a division of 3Com, no synergies at all with the sales force, channels, customers, etc. So, how should they dispose of it? They undoubtedly have had an eye on some of the wild IPOs lately and figure that's the best way to get the most money out of it now (watch: they'll tout it as a linux pure-play! :) which might make a pile of dough for them but won't necessarily yield the most successful outcome for the platform.
Very exciting time for the industry, though.
People like you ruin slashdot... alright, people like me are only kidding! :) really, it was a joke! I couldn't figure out what it did either.
Since some of the award nominees have used commercial software, I find it would fundamentally compromise my principles to attend the awards. If your writeup is funny, I might see it and smile, thus myself deriving indirect benefit from the commercial sale of software, so please stick to the facts :)
I guess they own the trademark, and a bunch of the code that's out there... but do they own other intellectual property involved, or is everyone simply worried about fragmentation?
Why doesn't ECMA simply go ahead and standardize the same thing under another name... perhaps the contracts that the current players in the Java industry have disallow them from going it "together" against Sun alone?
See, I'm speculating. It would be nice if someone who knew the answers could chime in.
But all of you people with the "my wrists hurt so I started standing on my head" stories, have you tried the Placebo Brand line of products? It will solve all of your problems. You see, medical science is only now beginning to discover that controlled studies involving double-blind trials are hogwash, essentially going to a lot of trouble for nothing, and masking some handy medicinal effects encountered in everyday situations.
It's so much better to ask one person what their experience was, one time, at one point in their life, hopefully when they were experimenting with a number of variables while their body was busy healing. And all of that sort of wisdom has been encapsulated in the Placeboard (pronounced pla-SEE-board) keyboard. Those with a bigger budget can also get the Placebowl (pronounced pla-SEE-bowl), a trackball inspired by AMF (it's the one with the three finger holes!) and the Placemat, a special ergonomically designed pad that keep food and other contaminants from creating too much mouse friction. (no, this one's pronounced PLACE-mat.) All of these are documented to have worked at least once for somebody.
Are you on an expense account? consider delaying to purchase their upcoming "YMMV" line.
reposted to make it easy to see. hey, another idea popped into my head: Fermat's last theorem was closed source and look what a mess that turned into.