I don't think that 'pre-Infocom' applies as a description of Scott Adams works. As a matter of fact, the first Zork was implemented as a direct result of the enthusiasm that some bright guys at MIT got when they saw 'Colossal Caves', the Fortran program that is really the first example of 'adventure'.
The first Infocom games date from the early 70's, and were later ported to popular platforms such as the Apple II. I've played some games by Scott Adams in the early 80's, and while they were fun, nothing could compare to Zork.
I think that's fine. MySQL is a nice software, but it obviously can't scale as far as Oracle can. It allows for a pretty cheap entry point (free or almost free). When you reach the point where you really need Oracle to keep running, believe me, buying an Oracle license is not going to be your biggest problem...
I agree partially with Patrick, specially because the contest was so loosely stated. However, if you do a thoroughly analysis of the result, Patric did not compress the files. All he did was to change some specific character with a end-of-file marker. The EOF will *always* take some space, be it in the form of a marker (such as Ctrl-Z) or in the form of a file length attribute. In this sense, I don't think that Patrick got a real solution to the compression problem. So, even discounting the file-system overhead (the empty space to fill out disk blocks), you have to take in account that the EOF marker is a implicit part of the compressed data, stored outside the files. He simply gambled some bytes inside the file for some bytes out.
Anyway, I think that he could go a bit further. Depending upon the random number generator, it is possible to compress the file a lot - mainly because there are no true random number generators, except if you use some natural random source such as radioactivity decay. If the random numbers are in fact "pseudo random numbers" generated by some mechanical/computational device, then it is possible to compress the data, using some particular algorithm.
Going a litttle further, it is interesting to note that the combination of the compressed data and the decompressor is not completely self contained. The decompressor includes to a lot of information that is not stored inside the executable file. For example, libraries can be linked. Even if the decompressor is written in assembly, the problem is still there - a lot of information may be contained in a single assembly instruction.
As an exercise, imagine the following scenario:
The original data has some particular sequence repeated in some places (even a random file can have such repetitions; in fact, a file containing only ones can be possibly generated by the best random number generator; it's improbable but it is possible)
This particular sequence can be regenerated by a simple CPU instruction
The decoder (written in assembly) uses this assembler instruction the reconstruct the sequence, using only one byte of code.
Is it a *real* compressed file? In this case, the CPU does contain the information needed to decompress the file; even if the information is not inside the compressed file itself, the information is part of the context. This is just to complicate things a little bit further...
In the end, we need to keep mind that using information that is implicit in the context is all that compression is about. We are removing redundant information that can be inferred later based on the context. In a contest like this, the context should be clearly stated to avoid this kind of discussion. Looking at things this way, maybe Patrick was right after all...
Why not use some kind of tube? Because it's way too expensive. Believe me, laying fiber is *not* an easy task. The biggest cost is deployment - much bigger than fiber itself.
(From the planning department of a small telephone company in Brazil)
I'm a bit late on this, but that's my 0.02 worth anyway. I remember similar discussions from a number of fields. Mom tells me that cooking was supposed to be knowing how to cut every kind of vegetable. Today we buy it already sliced and frozen. Also for machinery - any kind of it. As close as ten years ago me and some friends used to fix our own car engines. Today is everything electronic, so it's impossible to do it again.
Have we lost something? Yes, of course. We have better cars, and we have good food. It's everything ready for use. However, we used to do it ourselves before. Sometimes we messed up, and sometimes we did it great. Things just changed. Each generation lost something. When I began to use computers, you were supposed to know the innards of the CPU, memory cycles, TTL ports... It's not needed anymore. Someday the entire notion of files will not be needed also.
This has been happening for *ages*. For every generation people say that we are screwing up, because it will be impossible to live without knowing <this> or <that>. I dont think that we actually need to be afraid of this kind of change. I dont need to know how to fix my own car, or verything similar for that matter. However, I think that we *need* to understand the basics. While I can buy deli food, I like to know how to do it myself. The same for everything - computers, cars, and so on. It's out of my curiosity. I simply cant understand people who are lazy enough to ignore or suppress their own curiosity - they're just 'living dead' for me.
Nice piece. Now I'm thinking. What do make people think that software piracy is any different from music piracy?
Even with Microsoft monopoly, the software industry is full of opportunity. Anyone can learn how to code, and find a way to make money out of it. The music industry is not that simple.
Music is entertainment. For some idealistic minds, entertainment is not business. We all now thats its wrong - entertainment is BIG business anywhere in the world.
Maybe it's easier for college kids to see themselves making money out of code than making money out of music. So in a sense they are trying to protect their own future. To be a great musician is hard, and to be a top band is a distant dream.
Maybe file size matters. Some years ago, trading software was hot in BBSs. Most commercial software could be found for free in Warez BBSs all around. Many of them were large downloads at that time. Some could even fill an 1.2 Mb 5"1/4 floppy disk:-) It was not viable to download music, for technical reasons. PCs were not powerful enough for MP3 and similar codecs. Now if people try to copy Win2000 over the Internet... not even DSL is close to allow this to be done in the next few years.
Anyway thats my personal opinion... lets see what the guys outside here think...
I'm Brazilian. I dont checked where Corinthiao did came from, but the name of the team is Corinthians. And for those who do not know, its the actual champion of the Fifa World Cup for teams (not the World Cup of Nations). The team exists for about one hundred years now, and it's VERY popular in Brazil. To be sure, it's the second in popularity, just behind Flamengo (it's comparable to Barcelona in Spain, Milan in Italy, Manchester United in England). So this is SERIOUS business.
With that points in mind, please note that I DO NOT agree with this suit or its result. The team already have a national domain. However, bear in mind that the team just signed a BIG deal with an american group, Hicks Muse. This company has all the rights to explore the image of the team worldwide. This must come from them, not from the Brazilian team.
In this perspective, this is just your plain domain litigation... The team may be Brazilian, but surely the lawyers get they pay in dollars...
In its early times, Borland was somewhat developer friendly. Solid products and good documentation (at least judging from that times standards). At that time the GNU project was just starting, and most development was closed source. Borland was just that - a closed source company - but the Turbo Pascal community was somewhat different. There were groups like SWAG, and the ftp site at garbo.uwasa.fi (from Timo Salmi). Sharing code snippets was pretty common. Even the commercial libraries for Turbo Pascal used to cost much less than the equivalent ones for C, and almost all of them included source code. This was one of the reasons was Pascal survived so long - specially if you consider the strong pressure towards C (and later C++) in the academia and the industry.
Delphi was one of the most underrated software products in history. It alone saved Borland from bankrupt after a string of bad management decisions. Its amazing how many developers use it today. Maybe C++ or Java has more magazine coverage, but almost all commercial shops in Brazil use Delphi for things ranging from quick and dirty apps to full blown corporate suites. Its power and flexibility are amazing.
I think Kylix is going to be a very strong product, one that builds upon the strenghts of Delphi. It also can take Borland back to its initial days, and make Linux a truly viable alternative for commercial software development. The Pascal community can make a strong difference. Object Pascal structure makes easier than ever to share components, and the vast amount of quality free code for Delphi (RXLib is a wonderful example) is a tribute to this.
There is a trend towards the merger of old 'closed-source' companies and the newer 'open-source' philosophy. I think this is related to the maturiry of the product. Linux is technically well matured, and its ready for wide enterprise deployment. I see more of this happening in other fronts. Some kinds of application are already very mature, and open source equivalents are catching up pretty quickly. Let us say, if Lotus started supplying support for gnumeric? They were leaders in spreadsheet software, and yet carry a strong brand in that. Other companies could do similar things, with a word processor, for instance.
As for this announcement... companies like SCO are well stablished, have a recongnizable brand, and know how to handle their customer bases. However, it's impossible for SCO to stand against Windows. Being the only commercial supplier of x86 Unix with any life in it, I think it must be time for them to jump into the Linux wagon. I wonder if it's not too late.
SCO has very good administrative tools. Linux administrative tools are the nightmare of operators - people who know how to type, but dont know how to edit a file if told so. These people is responsible for some critical tasks such as backups, system shutdown and restart. Here in Brazil its common to find in smaller companies that the operators for the night turn dont know nothing of english, so its needed some simple interface where they cant be lost.
I think this can be the most successful combination. It will be somewhat weird to hear of 'gnumeric 1-2-3', 'SCO Linux', etc. For people who dislikes anything resembling old-fashioned corporations, that will be the utmost nightmare - their loved open source projects with corporate faces.
I wonder why people could ever think water must be rare outside earth. Besides the obvious limitations on temperature, it seems to be logical to find water in other places on the universe. Let us see: water is very stable, and is composed of very simple elements. Hydrogen is abundant - the most common element in the universe, and oxygen must not be so rare, because is such a 'light' atom.
What does matter is the relationship of water and life. Several properties of water are fundamental to the development of life as we know. There is some chance that other forms of life exist elsewhere based on something else. However, we dont know about other molecule as flexible as water.
Many people believe that history exhibits a cyclic behavior on time - in short, that it repeast itself. Some readers already commented about the older megacorporations, such as Standard Oil. Stories from the railroad companies also come to mind. In the turn of the 20th century the picture was ugly. People worked as slaves in factories and farms worldwide.
What happened that changed the picture? It was a slow but powerful change that came to a peak in last 30 years of the past century. Along time companies lost a lot of power for the State. This happened for a lot of reasons, but I think that the biggest one were the I and II World Wars. When such a big war effort happens, the State must prepare itself. This is the only exception allowed by the liberal thinkers as a role of the State - to protect national interests worldwide by the power of army.
As a result of the II World War the US grew to be the world most powerful country. In the past few years, the power of the US government dropped a lot. Now its only a shadow of its peak. The fact that there is no enemy anymore helped a lot. In this scenario it is easy for corporations to grow beyond acceptable limits. However, this same growth is one of the reasons that trigger rebelions and wars.
Do anyone think that all the countries around the world are going to accept colonization by American-based companies easily? The situation is already bad enough, even in some potentially big countries such as India, China and Russia. Also, some members of the stablishment dont like things as they are today. Sooner or later politicians and military wil try to do something to change it. Politics is a dirty game, specially when such amount of power is involved.
Please dont mistake me - as for myself I'm a pacifist. I dont believe in war, and I dont think it solves any problem. I'm just pointing out the fact the the shift in the balance is always marked by the ocurrence of violent periods and bloody wars. This is the mechanism that allow the State to overcome the power of corporations, and I fear that this may happen again shortly.
Complementing the above question. When a new software version is released, people that install it report bugs to the development team. However, everyone already knows the software, so they dont check if the documentation is updated accordingly. So here is the question: Do you think that we should test documentation, in the same sense that we test software? In this regard, what would be the motivation for experts to review the documentation?
One of the hard parts of the documentation process is keeping the docs in sync with the software. People tend to fix bugs and forget to update the docs. Telling developers to maintain it does not work for several reasons. The same problem applies for tutorials and things like that. What do you think could be made to make sure that all documents are kept updated?
I'm a user of Borland products since 1984. I actually used the first Turbo Pascal, v1.0. And it was amazing at the time. Imagine! Doing a complete edit-compile-run cycle in just a few seconds!
Time gone by, and Borland grew. At some time in the past they had a fairly broad line of compilers: Pascal, C, Basic, Assembler, and even Prolog! Now it's funny to think about the relation between developers and Borland at that time. A lot of developers loved Borland. They had it - fast compilers, support for several programming languages, passable editors and good libraries. Then came Windows.
I'm not sure how taht happened, but in a few months Borland lost all its momentum. And Microsoft got it right. And that was not only because of MS tactics, but MS got it right in several senses:
Microsoft began its TechNet and similar programs. They had the best documentation available. Of course, being the sole provider of the OS helps a lot:-) Also the performance of MS compilers was being enhanced at the same time, so it was a no-brainer for the average C/C++ shop.
On the other side, MS got Visual Basic. I know many people dislikes VB, but it was truly the first practical visual development environment. And don't tell me about Gupta SQL Windows and things like that. The design of their competitors was nice, but tools sucked. You need to factor the popularity of VBXs that allowed Joe Programmer to ship Windows apps in a few days.
Years later, Delphi (and BC++) saved Borland from bankrupt. In my opinion Delphi is another amazing feat. They got everything that was right in the VB concept, and added their own spice. Popularity grew once again. However, all of this was not sufficient to make them a viable alternative to the now gigantic MS monopoly.
Now we have a Linux version of the works. And I think that Borland can make it happen again. They know how to make it, as shown with Delphi. And I think that their entry will start a flow of activity in the Linux marketplace as not seen before. Let's face it - for a large commecial project, getting all those makefiles and dependencies right is a pain. Also most of the technical factors that were against Borland effort on the Windows market dont exist at all in Linux (see the hidden APIs). It's just a matter of getting it right once again. Given that, I think that they will have a very bright future, while helping Linux to lift one more restriction to win market share in the business side.
I think most geeks - if not every geek - dreams of designing and making games. It must be one of the must funny activities, and one of the more rewarding. However, it's damn hard. Several times I got myself dreaming about it, just to stop because I dont know how to start it. A good design makes actual code writing a lot easier.
Why games? Games are large and complicated systems. Games are also one of the best approximations that we have today of living systems - using such things as virtual reality environments, simulations and artificial intelligence (if there is such a thing).
In the earlier 90's it seemed that the game industry offered opportunities for starters. Now the game industry is a very much different environment, where large companies dominate the scene. In this sense, the dream of making off my own game seems very hard to attain. The cost to produce all the multimedia needed to make for an attractive game today is beyond most peoples pocket's. This is a shame, because a lot of people have very bright ideas, but have no way of realizing them.
This reminds me that I have a similar problem to solve. We need to find good rack-mounted, slim servers (1" high or so) to use as 'internet appliances' - firewall, TCP redirectors, cache servers, and so on. It may run any kind of *ix - Linux, BSD, Solaris, it doesnt matter. Just to make things harder, I need to find it for sale in Brazil...
I know that companies like Penguin computing have this kind of gear. Sun have it also - they have a pretty nice Netra series of servers, including a 1" high Ultra 440 Mhz. However, it seems that all this gear is targeted for the high end of the market - expensive, high performance servers. I would be very pleased to find a mid-performance inexpensive box - even a Celeron makes for a pretty good proxy box, you see.
I think that there could be some kind of standard for this class of computer, just like we have standard ATX towers. The power supply needed to be modular also -- an optional -48 Vdc would be nice for telcos, including colocated equipment.
For now I would like to knwo more about this, including some recommendations...
It's good to see someone as Woz interviewed here on Slashdot. And it was even better to read his answers, because it's very rare to see such depth in these days. Everything is relevant - but some point are really precious.
First of all, it's clear that Woz really believes in Open Source. But I found it strange because his answer on Open Source wasn't so enthusiastic as I thought it would be. Seems that Open Source is so natural to hime that he misses some things. For instance, at several points he does mention the value of information for research. It's related to his beliefs about teaching and personal computing. And this is one of the main advantages of the Open Source approach. So it seems that Open Source for him is much more important that even he realizes - up to the point of saying that his Apple ][ 2000 would be completeley documented, hardware and software.
Also it was funny to see his line about designing computers for the average person - he took himself as an example. Steve Wozniak is not an 'average person' - he's way up above the mark - yet somehow he does know what it takes to make something usable for the masses. Ideas that we take for granted - for instance personal computers with keyboards - were perfectly clear for him yet nobody else seemed to catch at that time.
In the end, it was a very good article. It shows that you can have your ideology, live it, and not have an inflated ego as a result. Woz humbleness should ashame some self proclaimed Open Source stars (thansk god he's not the only one...)
Also, gotta thow Gahndi in there. If one is consigering Dr. King, one should go straight to the source. He taught Dr. King everything he knew and made freedom possible for more than half a billion. King is such a navel-gazing, America-centric choice.
I agree... Gandhi's character was a prime model not only for Dr. King, but an example set for all mankind. The British Empire wasn't keen at all to free India, but with Gandhi's lead they were freed. Also Gandhi was great on defeat; now we know that if he got it right, maybe we wouldn't fear a nuclear war between India and Pakistan.
Gandhi also got a much longer war to fight. To keep that resolution over decades is not for the faint of heart. It makes for a much more global 'man of the century'.
It makes me think about why US is considering that many forms of 'cyberwar' are against laws of war. Many of the laws of the war are just common sense (bio weapons), some others are about honor (such as the laws regarding war prisoners). Modern war is very concerned about the precision of the attacks. Most mass weapons are considered to be unlawful, because they risk much more civilian lives than military targets.
Using this rationaly its easy to see why CyberWar is crime - its almost unstoppable. Using the Internet any country has the means of lauching a sucessful attack against any other. So its in US best interest to regard CyberWar as a crime. Please note that developing countries are much less subject to cyber attacks than the US, who are already highly wired. A single spy can potentially break entire systems, while an armed attack agains the US does not stand a chance.
In the end the US military are trying to defend themselves against one of the few kinds of attack that can effectively hit them. So much for war ethics...
I agree entirely with rde - this case must scalate to the Supreme Court as soon as possible. Otherwise MS will make it go forever, appealing on every court and using all the time possible. This industry changes too fast to allow for it.
Will MS settle? I dont know, but I am a little curious... what would be MS proposal? Would it give up some division of the company? What will be the most probable outcome of this settling?
I think people are being a little too alarmist about this issue. PC architecture and technologies will continue to evolve, as will the hobbyists.
Ok, I agree, its not that bad. And the iMac is an example that it can be done. What I'm afraid is that it can get much worse, by removing any chance of reinstalling the OS. I dont know if anyone would ever buy a machine like that (i know I wouldn't for sure) but it seems that many companies are targeting to do exactly this.
There is another thing - as you said 'the hobbyists'. Just now Linux and OSS techniques are becoming mainstream. This is a threat to the stablished business. The trend toward closed computers is to make sure that we continue to be only this - hobbyists - while the 'professional' companies make big money selling their closed, easy-to-use (?) boxes.
I see this as a reaction against a new economical paradigm that can change business forever. For me, open source is not just about code, is about doing things in a completeley different economical environment where creativity and intelectual skills are highly regarded (more than greed anyway). This environment grows as a network - the value grows with the square of the number of nodes. For me its the way to make our society a truly information-oriented one.
I'm quite sure that the PC as we all know have its days counted. It will turn into a mass-market device quicker than anyone expects. And the big loser in this case will be "us" - I mean, geeks, nerds and hackers alike... The agenda is very simple. First kill all expansion slots, making preconfigured machines. The price of these preconfigured machines drop fast... and the price of the open-slot computers start to rise (less productio, higher costs). It'll take little time for a simple 'traditional' PC to cost more than a few thousand bucks... and the preconfigured one, less than $500.00. This is an unstoppable cycle.
There are many reasons for this to happen. The hardware vendors want it - even Intel. Microsoft wants it, because it will make the current monopolistic discussions sound nonsense - there will be no software market as we know to discuss after all. Imagine millions of devices being sold in small shops with Windows CE preinstalled... MS will use it size to pressure electronics device makers, in order to force WindowsCE on everyone.
The death of the PC is a very sorrow event for the OSS community, because it will make impossible - or impractical - to keep developing Linux. Close devices, closed specs, make impossible to develop drivers. Even worse - a home computer could be specifically designed to make it hard to change the operating system, keeping the user 'stuck' with the preinstalled one.
I sincerely hope that this nightmare scenario do not happen. Many things can change. Maybe the market will not accept closed, unexpandable computers - this was tried before and failed after all. The business users may opt to keep using traditional PCs. Even best... if bigtime electronics manufacturers start using Linux on their PCs as an alternative to Microsoft...
All I know is that we will see a lot of changes in the market in the next few years. In five yeras, both the PC and the Internet will barely resemble what we know today.
Open Source would be too hard to push on... I think that Open Protocols are the *real* answer. If all Internet protocols were published things like that would never happen. You would get a truly competitive market - for every commercial, closed product, there would be several competitors, including Open Source efforts.
There are other reasons why I think that we should push Open Protocols over the Internet. First of all, the technical ones: it would become easier to spot security problems, protocols could be optimezed, and interoperability could be achieved. And then the "other" ones: safety for the user that know what is going on, freedom of choice... and its not incompatible with the commercial software industry. The software industry already implements a lot of commercial software based upon open specs, so why not make it mandatory?
There are two main techniques to speed up the modem. One was explained by other posters here: it's simply a matter of disabling time-consuming tasks such as compression and error correction. The second one is to use a faster interface between the modem and the operating system. I'll comment the two.
1) Compression in most modern modems is done using the V.42 specification. V.42 is actually very complex protocol which specifies frames that can be compressed. So you have to buffer data before compressing and sending. Error correction is done at the 'frame' level. There is a minimum latency to fill up the buffers before transmitting data.
Bottom line: If you disable V.42 you can subtract some milisseconds of your typical latency time. The connection is less reliable and have less bandwidth available, but its better for games.
2) The old fashioned UART interface is very slow. Even a 16550 uses a very small buffer for today's standards. This is one of the reasons to use a USB modem for better gaming experience. If this is a Winmodem, thay may have opted for a faster interface to transfer bytes from the CPU to the modem. Maybe they are using something like an ethernet interface, with larger packet buffers.
Bottom line: its possible to have a faster modem by using a faster interface instead of a plain UART.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that 'pre-Infocom' applies as a description of Scott Adams works. As a matter of fact, the first Zork was implemented as a direct result of the enthusiasm that some bright guys at MIT got when they saw 'Colossal Caves', the Fortran program that is really the first example of 'adventure'.
The first Infocom games date from the early 70's, and were later ported to popular platforms such as the Apple II. I've played some games by Scott Adams in the early 80's, and while they were fun, nothing could compare to Zork.
I think that's fine. MySQL is a nice software, but it obviously can't scale as far as Oracle can. It allows for a pretty cheap entry point (free or almost free). When you reach the point where you really need Oracle to keep running, believe me, buying an Oracle license is not going to be your biggest problem...
Anyway, I think that he could go a bit further. Depending upon the random number generator, it is possible to compress the file a lot - mainly because there are no true random number generators, except if you use some natural random source such as radioactivity decay. If the random numbers are in fact "pseudo random numbers" generated by some mechanical/computational device, then it is possible to compress the data, using some particular algorithm.
Going a litttle further, it is interesting to note that the combination of the compressed data and the decompressor is not completely self contained. The decompressor includes to a lot of information that is not stored inside the executable file. For example, libraries can be linked. Even if the decompressor is written in assembly, the problem is still there - a lot of information may be contained in a single assembly instruction.
As an exercise, imagine the following scenario:
- The original data has some particular sequence repeated in some places (even a random file can have such repetitions; in fact, a file containing only ones can be possibly generated by the best random number generator; it's improbable but it is possible)
- This particular sequence can be regenerated by a simple CPU instruction
- The decoder (written in assembly) uses this assembler instruction the reconstruct the sequence, using only one byte of code.
Is it a *real* compressed file? In this case, the CPU does contain the information needed to decompress the file; even if the information is not inside the compressed file itself, the information is part of the context. This is just to complicate things a little bit further...In the end, we need to keep mind that using information that is implicit in the context is all that compression is about. We are removing redundant information that can be inferred later based on the context. In a contest like this, the context should be clearly stated to avoid this kind of discussion. Looking at things this way, maybe Patrick was right after all...
Why not use some kind of tube? Because it's way too expensive. Believe me, laying fiber is *not* an easy task. The biggest cost is deployment - much bigger than fiber itself.
(From the planning department of a small telephone company in Brazil)
The Complete Alignment Table
First, the lawful characters:
Now the chaotic ones:
Chaotic Good: Download a copy of the movie from the 'Net. Watch it on a Linux machine.
Chaotic Neutral: Rolls a dice. 50% chance of paying to watch the movie.
Chaotic Evil: Buy a pirate copy of the movie. Hates the end of the movie, where the good guys always win.
Now the neutral bastards :-)
I'm a bit late on this, but that's my 0.02 worth anyway. I remember similar discussions from a number of fields. Mom tells me that cooking was supposed to be knowing how to cut every kind of vegetable. Today we buy it already sliced and frozen. Also for machinery - any kind of it. As close as ten years ago me and some friends used to fix our own car engines. Today is everything electronic, so it's impossible to do it again.
Have we lost something? Yes, of course. We have better cars, and we have good food. It's everything ready for use. However, we used to do it ourselves before. Sometimes we messed up, and sometimes we did it great. Things just changed. Each generation lost something. When I began to use computers, you were supposed to know the innards of the CPU, memory cycles, TTL ports... It's not needed anymore. Someday the entire notion of files will not be needed also.
This has been happening for *ages*. For every generation people say that we are screwing up, because it will be impossible to live without knowing <this> or <that>. I dont think that we actually need to be afraid of this kind of change. I dont need to know how to fix my own car, or verything similar for that matter. However, I think that we *need* to understand the basics. While I can buy deli food, I like to know how to do it myself. The same for everything - computers, cars, and so on. It's out of my curiosity. I simply cant understand people who are lazy enough to ignore or suppress their own curiosity - they're just 'living dead' for me.
- Even with Microsoft monopoly, the software industry is full of opportunity. Anyone can learn how to code, and find a way to make money out of it. The music industry is not that simple.
- Music is entertainment. For some idealistic minds, entertainment is not business. We all now thats its wrong - entertainment is BIG business anywhere in the world.
- Maybe it's easier for college kids to see themselves making money out of code than making money out of music. So in a sense they are trying to protect their own future. To be a great musician is hard, and to be a top band is a distant dream.
- Maybe file size matters. Some years ago, trading software was hot in BBSs. Most commercial software could be found for free in Warez BBSs all around. Many of them were large downloads at that time. Some could even fill an 1.2 Mb 5"1/4 floppy disk
:-) It was not viable to download music, for technical reasons. PCs were not powerful enough for MP3 and similar codecs. Now if people try to copy Win2000 over the Internet... not even DSL is close to allow this to be done in the next few years.
Anyway thats my personal opinion... lets see what the guys outside here think...With that points in mind, please note that I DO NOT agree with this suit or its result. The team already have a national domain. However, bear in mind that the team just signed a BIG deal with an american group, Hicks Muse. This company has all the rights to explore the image of the team worldwide. This must come from them, not from the Brazilian team.
In this perspective, this is just your plain domain litigation... The team may be Brazilian, but surely the lawyers get they pay in dollars...
In its early times, Borland was somewhat developer friendly. Solid products and good documentation (at least judging from that times standards). At that time the GNU project was just starting, and most development was closed source. Borland was just that - a closed source company - but the Turbo Pascal community was somewhat different. There were groups like SWAG, and the ftp site at garbo.uwasa.fi (from Timo Salmi). Sharing code snippets was pretty common. Even the commercial libraries for Turbo Pascal used to cost much less than the equivalent ones for C, and almost all of them included source code. This was one of the reasons was Pascal survived so long - specially if you consider the strong pressure towards C (and later C++) in the academia and the industry.
Delphi was one of the most underrated software products in history. It alone saved Borland from bankrupt after a string of bad management decisions. Its amazing how many developers use it today. Maybe C++ or Java has more magazine coverage, but almost all commercial shops in Brazil use Delphi for things ranging from quick and dirty apps to full blown corporate suites. Its power and flexibility are amazing.
I think Kylix is going to be a very strong product, one that builds upon the strenghts of Delphi. It also can take Borland back to its initial days, and make Linux a truly viable alternative for commercial software development. The Pascal community can make a strong difference. Object Pascal structure makes easier than ever to share components, and the vast amount of quality free code for Delphi (RXLib is a wonderful example) is a tribute to this.
There is a trend towards the merger of old 'closed-source' companies and the newer 'open-source' philosophy. I think this is related to the maturiry of the product. Linux is technically well matured, and its ready for wide enterprise deployment. I see more of this happening in other fronts. Some kinds of application are already very mature, and open source equivalents are catching up pretty quickly. Let us say, if Lotus started supplying support for gnumeric? They were leaders in spreadsheet software, and yet carry a strong brand in that. Other companies could do similar things, with a word processor, for instance.
As for this announcement... companies like SCO are well stablished, have a recongnizable brand, and know how to handle their customer bases. However, it's impossible for SCO to stand against Windows. Being the only commercial supplier of x86 Unix with any life in it, I think it must be time for them to jump into the Linux wagon. I wonder if it's not too late.
SCO has very good administrative tools. Linux administrative tools are the nightmare of operators - people who know how to type, but dont know how to edit a file if told so. These people is responsible for some critical tasks such as backups, system shutdown and restart. Here in Brazil its common to find in smaller companies that the operators for the night turn dont know nothing of english, so its needed some simple interface where they cant be lost.
I think this can be the most successful combination. It will be somewhat weird to hear of 'gnumeric 1-2-3', 'SCO Linux', etc. For people who dislikes anything resembling old-fashioned corporations, that will be the utmost nightmare - their loved open source projects with corporate faces.
I wonder why people could ever think water must be rare outside earth. Besides the obvious limitations on temperature, it seems to be logical to find water in other places on the universe. Let us see: water is very stable, and is composed of very simple elements. Hydrogen is abundant - the most common element in the universe, and oxygen must not be so rare, because is such a 'light' atom.
What does matter is the relationship of water and life. Several properties of water are fundamental to the development of life as we know. There is some chance that other forms of life exist elsewhere based on something else. However, we dont know about other molecule as flexible as water.
Many people believe that history exhibits a cyclic behavior on time - in short, that it repeast itself. Some readers already commented about the older megacorporations, such as Standard Oil. Stories from the railroad companies also come to mind. In the turn of the 20th century the picture was ugly. People worked as slaves in factories and farms worldwide.
What happened that changed the picture? It was a slow but powerful change that came to a peak in last 30 years of the past century. Along time companies lost a lot of power for the State. This happened for a lot of reasons, but I think that the biggest one were the I and II World Wars. When such a big war effort happens, the State must prepare itself. This is the only exception allowed by the liberal thinkers as a role of the State - to protect national interests worldwide by the power of army.
As a result of the II World War the US grew to be the world most powerful country. In the past few years, the power of the US government dropped a lot. Now its only a shadow of its peak. The fact that there is no enemy anymore helped a lot. In this scenario it is easy for corporations to grow beyond acceptable limits. However, this same growth is one of the reasons that trigger rebelions and wars.
Do anyone think that all the countries around the world are going to accept colonization by American-based companies easily? The situation is already bad enough, even in some potentially big countries such as India, China and Russia. Also, some members of the stablishment dont like things as they are today. Sooner or later politicians and military wil try to do something to change it. Politics is a dirty game, specially when such amount of power is involved.
Please dont mistake me - as for myself I'm a pacifist. I dont believe in war, and I dont think it solves any problem. I'm just pointing out the fact the the shift in the balance is always marked by the ocurrence of violent periods and bloody wars. This is the mechanism that allow the State to overcome the power of corporations, and I fear that this may happen again shortly.
Complementing the above question. When a new software version is released, people that install it report bugs to the development team. However, everyone already knows the software, so they dont check if the documentation is updated accordingly. So here is the question: Do you think that we should test documentation, in the same sense that we test software? In this regard, what would be the motivation for experts to review the documentation?
One of the hard parts of the documentation process is keeping the docs in sync with the software. People tend to fix bugs and forget to update the docs. Telling developers to maintain it does not work for several reasons. The same problem applies for tutorials and things like that. What do you think could be made to make sure that all documents are kept updated?
Time gone by, and Borland grew. At some time in the past they had a fairly broad line of compilers: Pascal, C, Basic, Assembler, and even Prolog! Now it's funny to think about the relation between developers and Borland at that time. A lot of developers loved Borland. They had it - fast compilers, support for several programming languages, passable editors and good libraries. Then came Windows.
I'm not sure how taht happened, but in a few months Borland lost all its momentum. And Microsoft got it right. And that was not only because of MS tactics, but MS got it right in several senses:
Years later, Delphi (and BC++) saved Borland from bankrupt. In my opinion Delphi is another amazing feat. They got everything that was right in the VB concept, and added their own spice. Popularity grew once again. However, all of this was not sufficient to make them a viable alternative to the now gigantic MS monopoly.
Now we have a Linux version of the works. And I think that Borland can make it happen again. They know how to make it, as shown with Delphi. And I think that their entry will start a flow of activity in the Linux marketplace as not seen before. Let's face it - for a large commecial project, getting all those makefiles and dependencies right is a pain. Also most of the technical factors that were against Borland effort on the Windows market dont exist at all in Linux (see the hidden APIs). It's just a matter of getting it right once again. Given that, I think that they will have a very bright future, while helping Linux to lift one more restriction to win market share in the business side.
Why games? Games are large and complicated systems. Games are also one of the best approximations that we have today of living systems - using such things as virtual reality environments, simulations and artificial intelligence (if there is such a thing).
In the earlier 90's it seemed that the game industry offered opportunities for starters. Now the game industry is a very much different environment, where large companies dominate the scene. In this sense, the dream of making off my own game seems very hard to attain. The cost to produce all the multimedia needed to make for an attractive game today is beyond most peoples pocket's. This is a shame, because a lot of people have very bright ideas, but have no way of realizing them.
This reminds me that I have a similar problem to solve. We need to find good rack-mounted, slim servers (1" high or so) to use as 'internet appliances' - firewall, TCP redirectors, cache servers, and so on. It may run any kind of *ix - Linux, BSD, Solaris, it doesnt matter. Just to make things harder, I need to find it for sale in Brazil...
I know that companies like Penguin computing have this kind of gear. Sun have it also - they have a pretty nice Netra series of servers, including a 1" high Ultra 440 Mhz. However, it seems that all this gear is targeted for the high end of the market - expensive, high performance servers. I would be very pleased to find a mid-performance inexpensive box - even a Celeron makes for a pretty good proxy box, you see.
I think that there could be some kind of standard for this class of computer, just like we have standard ATX towers. The power supply needed to be modular also -- an optional -48 Vdc would be nice for telcos, including colocated equipment.
For now I would like to knwo more about this, including some recommendations...
It's good to see someone as Woz interviewed here on Slashdot. And it was even better to read his answers, because it's very rare to see such depth in these days. Everything is relevant - but some point are really precious.
First of all, it's clear that Woz really believes in Open Source. But I found it strange because his answer on Open Source wasn't so enthusiastic as I thought it would be. Seems that Open Source is so natural to hime that he misses some things. For instance, at several points he does mention the value of information for research. It's related to his beliefs about teaching and personal computing. And this is one of the main advantages of the Open Source approach. So it seems that Open Source for him is much more important that even he realizes - up to the point of saying that his Apple ][ 2000 would be completeley documented, hardware and software.
Also it was funny to see his line about designing computers for the average person - he took himself as an example. Steve Wozniak is not an 'average person' - he's way up above the mark - yet somehow he does know what it takes to make something usable for the masses. Ideas that we take for granted - for instance personal computers with keyboards - were perfectly clear for him yet nobody else seemed to catch at that time.
In the end, it was a very good article. It shows that you can have your ideology, live it, and not have an inflated ego as a result. Woz humbleness should ashame some self proclaimed Open Source stars (thansk god he's not the only one...)
I agree... Gandhi's character was a prime model not only for Dr. King, but an example set for all mankind. The British Empire wasn't keen at all to free India, but with Gandhi's lead they were freed. Also Gandhi was great on defeat; now we know that if he got it right, maybe we wouldn't fear a nuclear war between India and Pakistan.
Gandhi also got a much longer war to fight. To keep that resolution over decades is not for the faint of heart. It makes for a much more global 'man of the century'.
Using this rationaly its easy to see why CyberWar is crime - its almost unstoppable. Using the Internet any country has the means of lauching a sucessful attack against any other. So its in US best interest to regard CyberWar as a crime. Please note that developing countries are much less subject to cyber attacks than the US, who are already highly wired. A single spy can potentially break entire systems, while an armed attack agains the US does not stand a chance.
In the end the US military are trying to defend themselves against one of the few kinds of attack that can effectively hit them. So much for war ethics...
Will MS settle? I dont know, but I am a little curious... what would be MS proposal? Would it give up some division of the company? What will be the most probable outcome of this settling?
Ok, I agree, its not that bad. And the iMac is an example that it can be done. What I'm afraid is that it can get much worse, by removing any chance of reinstalling the OS. I dont know if anyone would ever buy a machine like that (i know I wouldn't for sure) but it seems that many companies are targeting to do exactly this.
There is another thing - as you said 'the hobbyists'. Just now Linux and OSS techniques are becoming mainstream. This is a threat to the stablished business. The trend toward closed computers is to make sure that we continue to be only this - hobbyists - while the 'professional' companies make big money selling their closed, easy-to-use (?) boxes.
I see this as a reaction against a new economical paradigm that can change business forever. For me, open source is not just about code, is about doing things in a completeley different economical environment where creativity and intelectual skills are highly regarded (more than greed anyway). This environment grows as a network - the value grows with the square of the number of nodes. For me its the way to make our society a truly information-oriented one.
There are many reasons for this to happen. The hardware vendors want it - even Intel. Microsoft wants it, because it will make the current monopolistic discussions sound nonsense - there will be no software market as we know to discuss after all. Imagine millions of devices being sold in small shops with Windows CE preinstalled... MS will use it size to pressure electronics device makers, in order to force WindowsCE on everyone.
The death of the PC is a very sorrow event for the OSS community, because it will make impossible - or impractical - to keep developing Linux. Close devices, closed specs, make impossible to develop drivers. Even worse - a home computer could be specifically designed to make it hard to change the operating system, keeping the user 'stuck' with the preinstalled one.
I sincerely hope that this nightmare scenario do not happen. Many things can change. Maybe the market will not accept closed, unexpandable computers - this was tried before and failed after all. The business users may opt to keep using traditional PCs. Even best... if bigtime electronics manufacturers start using Linux on their PCs as an alternative to Microsoft...
All I know is that we will see a lot of changes in the market in the next few years. In five yeras, both the PC and the Internet will barely resemble what we know today.
There are other reasons why I think that we should push Open Protocols over the Internet. First of all, the technical ones: it would become easier to spot security problems, protocols could be optimezed, and interoperability could be achieved. And then the "other" ones: safety for the user that know what is going on, freedom of choice... and its not incompatible with the commercial software industry. The software industry already implements a lot of commercial software based upon open specs, so why not make it mandatory?
1) Compression in most modern modems is done using the V.42 specification. V.42 is actually very complex protocol which specifies frames that can be compressed. So you have to buffer data before compressing and sending. Error correction is done at the 'frame' level. There is a minimum latency to fill up the buffers before transmitting data.
Bottom line: If you disable V.42 you can subtract some milisseconds of your typical latency time. The connection is less reliable and have less bandwidth available, but its better for games.
2) The old fashioned UART interface is very slow. Even a 16550 uses a very small buffer for today's standards. This is one of the reasons to use a USB modem for better gaming experience. If this is a Winmodem, thay may have opted for a faster interface to transfer bytes from the CPU to the modem. Maybe they are using something like an ethernet interface, with larger packet buffers.
Bottom line: its possible to have a faster modem by using a faster interface instead of a plain UART.