Isaac: "A system organized around the weakest qualities of individuals will produce these same qualities in its leaders."
JC Denton: "Perhaps certain qualities are an inseparable part of human nature.
Isaac: "The mark of the educated man is the suppression of these qualities in favor of better ones. The same is true of civilization."
I know it's made by Microsoft and all, but what is wrong with NTFS? The five limitations described here don't really seem to matter. The real problems seem to be with Microsoft's implementation of NTFS (go figure). So please, tell me what is wrong with NTFS.
I'm pretty sure that it's their PR that is making gamers...er, everyone...hate them so much. Sure, their was a press release for the rootkit ordeal stating "If you don't know what it is, it can't hurt you." However, a better solution would have been to, say, not rootkit the music CDs in the first place and perhaps releasing a patch that actually fixed the problem. I hate Sony for the same reasons the majority of the people here hate Microsoft: their continued stupidity and deliberate handicapping of products and markets which they should not take part in. Is it bad PR? Yes - but shit in any other light would smell as foul.
Personally, I've remained unimpressed by current technologies for "faster" drives. For example, look at these benchmarks of Hitachi's 1 TB solution, compared with many other drives. The only significant difference between the 1 TB and the 15K raptor is the access latency time, which is half as much in the Raptor. However, just like in physical memory, latency doesn't seem to matter at all, as you can see in the benchmarks of file reading and writing, system bootup times and all the other benchmarks - the performance difference is insignificant at best. Who cares if your system boots up.9 seconds faster? Page 8 has some nice theoretical and entirely irrelevant differences in performance.
No, the true future of hard drives will be in reliability. Perhaps we'll have hard drives with four platters internally RAID1-ed. The spinning drive thing has it's limits in capacity and speed. I doubt we'll be able to go much further than 10 TB per 3.5-inch drive and I doubt we'll be able to spin a drive much faster than 15k RPM. Hell, a manufacturer could internally RAID-0 a drive for a performance boost...I hope somebody is working on that.
I'm sitting next to two computers right now, both running Ubuntu. One was purchased in 1996, the other's hard drives were purchased three years ago. The one from 1996 has a 16 GB hard drive, which, as I recall, was the biggest Gateway offered at the time. The other has four 320 GB drives on a RAID 5 (960 GB/894 GiB), which, as I recall, was the second largest behind the 500 GB drives at the time. 30 times larger in about 8 years.
Perhaps you've heard of perpindicular recording, which started early last year. Pretty soon it's going to be impossible to get a hard drive that doesn't have this new technology. You can easily argue that the technology can't go anywhere after this, but it does offer a 10x storage density increase, and you know somebody will be cramming more data blocks on a platter soon enough.
You see, the great thing about hard drives is that they're not critical to the operation of your computer. My Myth frontend has a 40 GB hard drive. The backend, located in a different room and accessed through the network, has 8 500 GB drives on a RAID 5. With the ever-increasing speed of networks, putting things somewhere else is getting easier every day. Sun has taken this idea to the next level with Project Blackbox. Another great thing is that if you need more space, it's fairly easy to just add another drive to your contraption - something you really can't do with processor speed or memory (to a certain point - 4 GB per stick is the highest I've seen).
I see your point - we don't want a datacenter in the basement of every home, but we don't NEED a better system of information storage NOW. There are a lot of ideas out there; most will fall through, but we'll get one, eventually, and that one will make all the difference in the world.
I like it - you're almost there, but you've got some problems. If I'm mistaken, feel free to correct me.
Bringing a plaintext vote out of the ballot box is bad and should not be done. While it may seem ridiculous, we don't want members of organized crime checking who voted which way. Only have the index number and an encrypted vote - they can check to see if the values are the same. This ensures that the vote has been properly recorded, beyond that doesn't really matter (we're running DRM - the user shouldn't need to know the private key). (see below for my continued objection)
As far as seeding goes, you shouldn't use milliseconds the vote was counted, as this leads to predictable keys. The voter's private key can be generated at any point until the transaction to the SQL (or other) database, so base it on an MD5 of their name, xored with the position of the strokes on the touchscreen, times the bits of the value of the cosine of the average time between strokes...you get the idea: 128 bits of completely random.
Assuming we're allowing the system to be as open as we can get, we'll let anyone query the database for anything. Which means that somebody could (easily) figure out who voted which way by decrypting every single vote. It's not exactly brute force when there are eventually only 2 major values to pick from. This means that you could take somebody's voting slip, look up their number in the database and, using all the information publicly available, find out who they voted for. Take away the printout, have the voter turn it in for recount purposes and removing public access to the database would fix this problem.
Anyway, the problem of ensuring the voting remains anonymous seems to run counter to ensuring that the voter's vote is counted properly. Your solution would work if you didn't allow public access to the database but...security through obscurity?
In my humble opinion, it is better to look back and incorrectly diagnose that "I wouldn't have bought this," then to look back and correctly say "I shouldn't have bought this."
I logged on, had 30 invites to Top Friends, 20 to Bestest Friends, 10 to Horoscope, 20 to graffiti and all this other crap that used to not be a part of Facebook. Instead of dealing with all that garbage, I quit Facebook. It used to be a nice networking application that served no real purpose. Now, Facebook seems to think it has a point.
I don't have a Facebook or a cell phone. I just hang around all the people I know all the time - if they want to talk to me, they just say "Travis." I say "What?" and turn my head slightly.
Agreed. Some guy commits the very definition of libel and is sued for libel. He appeals and the appellate judge still thinks he committed libel. It happens all the time. From what I know, they're not going to let him appeal to a higher court, because the higher courts read the case and say: "This is a clear act of libel and it's only seven and a half grand." Why the hell should we care? You ARE responsible for what you say, even on the internet. Case closed.
I'm a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think otherwise. Yet they do. People think I'm a nice guy, and the fact is that I'm a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn't care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work, if it just results in what I consider to be a better system. And I'm not just saying that. I'm really not a very nice person. I can say "I don't care" with a straight face, and really mean it.
That's actually the opposite of how it worked for me. I grew up on Windows - it worked and I dealt with it, not wanting to use Linux because it wouldn't have the familiar applications. At some point, I realized that I was using VLC, Firefox (now Gran Paradiso), Thunderbird, vim, Eclipse, MySQL, CodeWarrior, GAIM (now Pidgin) and OpenOffice - there was almost no barrier for me to Linux. I'm sure this is what is happening with tons of people. There's a good reason why Ubuntu is so popular: it has all your needed applications already there. It just works ®.
I once attempted to create a page-rendering engine, starting with XHTML. Eventually, I got a decent-working rendering engine. Unfortunately, anytime there was an error (even a minuscule one), my engine would completely fail. I can't even being to imagine the hell Gecko goes through to render a site like MySpace. I've often thought about a better way to implement a rendering engine, but most involve fixing the web developer's crappy code before attempting to render it, which is not possible in most cases. In C++, you can't compile with an error. Perhaps development software that isn't notepad (my software of choice) should add in validation service in the same way Visual Studio 2005 does.
The internet: We have the tools to rebuild it, but we don't want to spend a lot of money.
Sure, you're going to have outliers that sit on torrents 24/7, but I would say that such activity is not the norm. Most cases are people downloading the latest Shakira (or whatever bull is popular these days) and seeing that of the 15 songs on the album, 13 are filler and 2 are overplayed on the radio and proceeding to not buy the album. There is a good reason why this list of best-selling albums doesn't resemble what's played on the radio.
There should always be a reason to purchase a CD or go see a live show - the artist has to make it. For example, Georgia Tech hosted a T.I. (rapper) concert. I did not attend, but I was told that it sucked. He went on stage after some opening band, played about four songs and then left. Dream Theater is the perfect example of the opposite side of this: their album art is interesting and their live shows are nothing short of epic.
Should file-sharing be illegal? In my opinion, no. There will always be people pulling strings to get away with things they shouldn't - file-sharing just happens to be done by a lot of little people. If it is okay for Exxon to not pay for cleanup of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, it is okay for average Joe to sample a CD. Furthermore, if the music industry had latched on the opportunity right after Napster (you know, when they saw that people demanded music online) or not fought iTunes Music Store tooth-and-nail (you know, when they saw selling music online would work), maybe they would be in an entirely different situation. The law cannot (easily) make distinction between a sampler and a "bad" file-sharer and therefore, should let artists get more exposure through allowing file-sharing.
The problem is that there is absolutely no proof that file-sharing decreases revenue at all. Rolling Stone published an article that showed those who file share are more likely to spend the most money on music (not CDs in particular, but concerts, band t-shirts, etc.). I, for one, would not be such a huge Dream Theater fan if my friend hadn't of burned me a copy of Train of Thought to introduce me to the band. I downloaded a few songs off their CDs and now I am a proud owner of every single album and anxiously awaiting Systematic Chaos. There are tons of bands that people have introduced to me this way and I have spent tons of money on music and I'm sure I will continue to do so. And yes, I encourage people to buy music or attend concerts if they like the band.
You are absolutely correct: this graph shows the average miles per gallon of all vehicles in the United States. It is extremely telling that the graph is practically level since the mid 80s. To think that we haven't gained any more knowledge of engines is ridiculous - we should be improving fuel-efficiency standards, but we're not.
To address the GP, I recall reading somewhere that if the average vehicle got 28 miles per gallon (the actual number is between 25 and 30), we would not have to import a drop of oil from OPEC. Even if hybrids get only 50 mpg, the demand for fuel would decrease substantially. Furthermore, the technology that goes into hybrid vehicles could easily improve (it's a relatively new technology).
Yes, Windows Vista uses true multi-core optimization (XP SP2's scheduler does it, but Vista's does it better, according to Microsoft) so that when you're converting all your video files from MPEG TS to H.264 on a dual-core processor, you can convert two movies at once and they will end up on different cores. While Windows isn't exactly open-source, the Windows.h file and the.NET framework allow for operations that imply there is a method Windows uses to switch a thread's processor/core based on apartment state, priority and various other important things. I would imagine this operation takes quite a bit of time.
The Linux processor scheduler isn't as powerful and I cannot seem to find any documentation as to any multi-core optimizations. This isn't a huge deal, as only a few people would really see a difference (multiple number-crunching operations at once - specialty servers, video transcoders, world simulators) and it would most likely take a fundamental change to the way the scheduler works (which was just completely re-written for the 2.6 kernel).
I think both Windows and Linux could benefit from a operation for dedicating cores. When a thread is created, a function call such as
bool RequestDedicatedCore(PTHREAD)
before the thread is started which would request the OS to dedicate an entire core to a thread. There may be a 5% performance boost (and that's being generous) as the processor registers do not need reloading on thread changes, but the slight increase would make somebody happy.
I don't see how this is patentable at all - there is clearly prior art. An obvious example would be captcha - where a hosts asks a client a question only a good client would know the answer to. This isn't even a logical extension of that. A host (hard drive) ask the client (TiVo box) a question only a good client would know the answer to. The only change is that they ask multiple times - tons of file-sharing hosts already do this, every time to request a file. They ask randomly? Slashdot does this when you're using an beta build of Firefox that keeps screwing up your cookies and forgetting that you're logged in. This should not be patentable.
Even if the "encryption chips" need to be taken off the board and soldered to something else, someone is going to go through the effort for the next round of "TiVo Hacks."
Everyone that wants to make credit-card purchases should be issued a long string of random characters. Before submitting the request to make the purchase, data would be XORed such that the encryption is perfect. The credit card companies already have a method of issuing access to their networks, would adding this one be that much harder? I wouldn't mind carrying around a second credit card (SecureVisa instead of Visa, perhaps) until everybody got their systems changed over to the new kind (I'm thinking 10 years or so - companies have little incentive to actually do this without government intervention). The amount of purchases being made with credit cards hasn't significantly increased and probably won't anytime soon, whereas computing power has and always will.
And while we're on one-time pads (not technically ONE time), why don't any wireless encryption algorithms do this? When a device connects with the correct encryption key, exchange a 256-bit pad and communicate through that. Bam! Harder to break than AACS, because you're not broadcasting the initial private key. From what I've read, this is just the wireless form of the Wi-Fi Protected Startup method of key generation from WPA.
I understand where you're coming from, but the problem is that they can't just have the computer engineers working on hardware just join up with the people making their software. Sure, there those working on the hardware have to know about the software, but there is always a disconnect between the two teams. Besides, with unified drivers, a fix for the 8800 Ultra will reflect on the GTX and GTS. Releasing a new card is not impeding the development of better drivers, but making them more money to hire more computer scientists to make better drivers (etc.).
Does ATI provide proprietary drivers for Linux? Yes. Are alternative, open-source versions still necessary? Yes. I wouldn't fully trust Microsoft to implement anything correctly.
I would like to see.NET code run on Linux (and I guess OSX..), because it's a Java-like environment without the annoyances of Java. Sure, C++/CLR (my.NET language of choice) has its quirks (some of which I need C# to fix), but at least it isn't Java and it (hopefully) will soon be easy to cross-platform without anything more than minor annoyances.
What you're saying makes a lot of sense, but I'm a little confused as to how algorithms work. I've always thought that since algorithms were just a description of math, that they could not be patented. The problem becomes how one describes an algorithm. Starting with plain English, we might say "Iterate the list, comparing the current position to the next one. If the current is larger than the next, swap the data. Go through the same amount of times as you have data." It could be described in pseudo-code, Java, C++, FORTRAN, etc. At what point can I patent the ASBands Bubble Sort (if I wanted to)? What is the difference between description and implementation?
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's made by Microsoft and all, but what is wrong with NTFS? The five limitations described here don't really seem to matter. The real problems seem to be with Microsoft's implementation of NTFS (go figure). So please, tell me what is wrong with NTFS.
I'm pretty sure that it's their PR that is making gamers...er, everyone...hate them so much. Sure, their was a press release for the rootkit ordeal stating "If you don't know what it is, it can't hurt you." However, a better solution would have been to, say, not rootkit the music CDs in the first place and perhaps releasing a patch that actually fixed the problem. I hate Sony for the same reasons the majority of the people here hate Microsoft: their continued stupidity and deliberate handicapping of products and markets which they should not take part in. Is it bad PR? Yes - but shit in any other light would smell as foul.
Personally, I've remained unimpressed by current technologies for "faster" drives. For example, look at these benchmarks of Hitachi's 1 TB solution, compared with many other drives. The only significant difference between the 1 TB and the 15K raptor is the access latency time, which is half as much in the Raptor. However, just like in physical memory, latency doesn't seem to matter at all, as you can see in the benchmarks of file reading and writing, system bootup times and all the other benchmarks - the performance difference is insignificant at best. Who cares if your system boots up .9 seconds faster? Page 8 has some nice theoretical and entirely irrelevant differences in performance.
No, the true future of hard drives will be in reliability. Perhaps we'll have hard drives with four platters internally RAID1-ed. The spinning drive thing has it's limits in capacity and speed. I doubt we'll be able to go much further than 10 TB per 3.5-inch drive and I doubt we'll be able to spin a drive much faster than 15k RPM. Hell, a manufacturer could internally RAID-0 a drive for a performance boost...I hope somebody is working on that.
1 TB Hard Drive
I'm sitting next to two computers right now, both running Ubuntu. One was purchased in 1996, the other's hard drives were purchased three years ago. The one from 1996 has a 16 GB hard drive, which, as I recall, was the biggest Gateway offered at the time. The other has four 320 GB drives on a RAID 5 (960 GB/894 GiB), which, as I recall, was the second largest behind the 500 GB drives at the time. 30 times larger in about 8 years.
Perhaps you've heard of perpindicular recording, which started early last year. Pretty soon it's going to be impossible to get a hard drive that doesn't have this new technology. You can easily argue that the technology can't go anywhere after this, but it does offer a 10x storage density increase, and you know somebody will be cramming more data blocks on a platter soon enough.
You see, the great thing about hard drives is that they're not critical to the operation of your computer. My Myth frontend has a 40 GB hard drive. The backend, located in a different room and accessed through the network, has 8 500 GB drives on a RAID 5. With the ever-increasing speed of networks, putting things somewhere else is getting easier every day. Sun has taken this idea to the next level with Project Blackbox. Another great thing is that if you need more space, it's fairly easy to just add another drive to your contraption - something you really can't do with processor speed or memory (to a certain point - 4 GB per stick is the highest I've seen).
I see your point - we don't want a datacenter in the basement of every home, but we don't NEED a better system of information storage NOW. There are a lot of ideas out there; most will fall through, but we'll get one, eventually, and that one will make all the difference in the world.
I like it - you're almost there, but you've got some problems. If I'm mistaken, feel free to correct me.
Anyway, the problem of ensuring the voting remains anonymous seems to run counter to ensuring that the voter's vote is counted properly. Your solution would work if you didn't allow public access to the database but...security through obscurity?
I'll bet a barge is cheaper than Seaworld...
Most Significantly, perhaps is:
Firefox 3.0 Alpha 5 (Gran Paradiso)
From the 43 selectors 32 have passed, 4 are buggy and 7 are unsupported (Passed 369 out of 578 tests)
Get Firefox 3.0 Alpha 5 here: Mozilla's Public FTP
Yes, it is technically alpha software, although it is no less reliable than Firefox 2.0, from what I have found.
In my humble opinion, it is better to look back and incorrectly diagnose that "I wouldn't have bought this," then to look back and correctly say "I shouldn't have bought this."
I logged on, had 30 invites to Top Friends, 20 to Bestest Friends, 10 to Horoscope, 20 to graffiti and all this other crap that used to not be a part of Facebook. Instead of dealing with all that garbage, I quit Facebook. It used to be a nice networking application that served no real purpose. Now, Facebook seems to think it has a point.
I don't have a Facebook or a cell phone. I just hang around all the people I know all the time - if they want to talk to me, they just say "Travis." I say "What?" and turn my head slightly.
Agreed. Some guy commits the very definition of libel and is sued for libel. He appeals and the appellate judge still thinks he committed libel. It happens all the time. From what I know, they're not going to let him appeal to a higher court, because the higher courts read the case and say: "This is a clear act of libel and it's only seven and a half grand." Why the hell should we care? You ARE responsible for what you say, even on the internet. Case closed.
That's actually the opposite of how it worked for me. I grew up on Windows - it worked and I dealt with it, not wanting to use Linux because it wouldn't have the familiar applications. At some point, I realized that I was using VLC, Firefox (now Gran Paradiso), Thunderbird, vim, Eclipse, MySQL, CodeWarrior, GAIM (now Pidgin) and OpenOffice - there was almost no barrier for me to Linux. I'm sure this is what is happening with tons of people. There's a good reason why Ubuntu is so popular: it has all your needed applications already there. It just works ®.
Don't you mean: Take your legally purchased CDs with you?
Yeah, I'll see if I can find it on backup. Don't get your hopes up - I made it back when I thought RAID 5 could never fail, but I will look.
I once attempted to create a page-rendering engine, starting with XHTML. Eventually, I got a decent-working rendering engine. Unfortunately, anytime there was an error (even a minuscule one), my engine would completely fail. I can't even being to imagine the hell Gecko goes through to render a site like MySpace. I've often thought about a better way to implement a rendering engine, but most involve fixing the web developer's crappy code before attempting to render it, which is not possible in most cases. In C++, you can't compile with an error. Perhaps development software that isn't notepad (my software of choice) should add in validation service in the same way Visual Studio 2005 does.
The internet: We have the tools to rebuild it, but we don't want to spend a lot of money.
Sure, you're going to have outliers that sit on torrents 24/7, but I would say that such activity is not the norm. Most cases are people downloading the latest Shakira (or whatever bull is popular these days) and seeing that of the 15 songs on the album, 13 are filler and 2 are overplayed on the radio and proceeding to not buy the album. There is a good reason why this list of best-selling albums doesn't resemble what's played on the radio.
There should always be a reason to purchase a CD or go see a live show - the artist has to make it. For example, Georgia Tech hosted a T.I. (rapper) concert. I did not attend, but I was told that it sucked. He went on stage after some opening band, played about four songs and then left. Dream Theater is the perfect example of the opposite side of this: their album art is interesting and their live shows are nothing short of epic.
Should file-sharing be illegal? In my opinion, no. There will always be people pulling strings to get away with things they shouldn't - file-sharing just happens to be done by a lot of little people. If it is okay for Exxon to not pay for cleanup of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, it is okay for average Joe to sample a CD. Furthermore, if the music industry had latched on the opportunity right after Napster (you know, when they saw that people demanded music online) or not fought iTunes Music Store tooth-and-nail (you know, when they saw selling music online would work), maybe they would be in an entirely different situation. The law cannot (easily) make distinction between a sampler and a "bad" file-sharer and therefore, should let artists get more exposure through allowing file-sharing.
The problem is that there is absolutely no proof that file-sharing decreases revenue at all. Rolling Stone published an article that showed those who file share are more likely to spend the most money on music (not CDs in particular, but concerts, band t-shirts, etc.). I, for one, would not be such a huge Dream Theater fan if my friend hadn't of burned me a copy of Train of Thought to introduce me to the band. I downloaded a few songs off their CDs and now I am a proud owner of every single album and anxiously awaiting Systematic Chaos. There are tons of bands that people have introduced to me this way and I have spent tons of money on music and I'm sure I will continue to do so. And yes, I encourage people to buy music or attend concerts if they like the band.
You are absolutely correct: this graph shows the average miles per gallon of all vehicles in the United States. It is extremely telling that the graph is practically level since the mid 80s. To think that we haven't gained any more knowledge of engines is ridiculous - we should be improving fuel-efficiency standards, but we're not.
To address the GP, I recall reading somewhere that if the average vehicle got 28 miles per gallon (the actual number is between 25 and 30), we would not have to import a drop of oil from OPEC. Even if hybrids get only 50 mpg, the demand for fuel would decrease substantially. Furthermore, the technology that goes into hybrid vehicles could easily improve (it's a relatively new technology).
Yes, Windows Vista uses true multi-core optimization (XP SP2's scheduler does it, but Vista's does it better, according to Microsoft) so that when you're converting all your video files from MPEG TS to H.264 on a dual-core processor, you can convert two movies at once and they will end up on different cores. While Windows isn't exactly open-source, the Windows.h file and the .NET framework allow for operations that imply there is a method Windows uses to switch a thread's processor/core based on apartment state, priority and various other important things. I would imagine this operation takes quite a bit of time.
The Linux processor scheduler isn't as powerful and I cannot seem to find any documentation as to any multi-core optimizations. This isn't a huge deal, as only a few people would really see a difference (multiple number-crunching operations at once - specialty servers, video transcoders, world simulators) and it would most likely take a fundamental change to the way the scheduler works (which was just completely re-written for the 2.6 kernel).
I think both Windows and Linux could benefit from a operation for dedicating cores. When a thread is created, a function call such as
before the thread is started which would request the OS to dedicate an entire core to a thread. There may be a 5% performance boost (and that's being generous) as the processor registers do not need reloading on thread changes, but the slight increase would make somebody happy.I don't see how this is patentable at all - there is clearly prior art. An obvious example would be captcha - where a hosts asks a client a question only a good client would know the answer to. This isn't even a logical extension of that. A host (hard drive) ask the client (TiVo box) a question only a good client would know the answer to. The only change is that they ask multiple times - tons of file-sharing hosts already do this, every time to request a file. They ask randomly? Slashdot does this when you're using an beta build of Firefox that keeps screwing up your cookies and forgetting that you're logged in. This should not be patentable.
Even if the "encryption chips" need to be taken off the board and soldered to something else, someone is going to go through the effort for the next round of "TiVo Hacks."
Everyone that wants to make credit-card purchases should be issued a long string of random characters. Before submitting the request to make the purchase, data would be XORed such that the encryption is perfect. The credit card companies already have a method of issuing access to their networks, would adding this one be that much harder? I wouldn't mind carrying around a second credit card (SecureVisa instead of Visa, perhaps) until everybody got their systems changed over to the new kind (I'm thinking 10 years or so - companies have little incentive to actually do this without government intervention). The amount of purchases being made with credit cards hasn't significantly increased and probably won't anytime soon, whereas computing power has and always will.
And while we're on one-time pads (not technically ONE time), why don't any wireless encryption algorithms do this? When a device connects with the correct encryption key, exchange a 256-bit pad and communicate through that. Bam! Harder to break than AACS, because you're not broadcasting the initial private key. From what I've read, this is just the wireless form of the Wi-Fi Protected Startup method of key generation from WPA.
I understand where you're coming from, but the problem is that they can't just have the computer engineers working on hardware just join up with the people making their software. Sure, there those working on the hardware have to know about the software, but there is always a disconnect between the two teams. Besides, with unified drivers, a fix for the 8800 Ultra will reflect on the GTX and GTS. Releasing a new card is not impeding the development of better drivers, but making them more money to hire more computer scientists to make better drivers (etc.).
Does ATI provide proprietary drivers for Linux? Yes. Are alternative, open-source versions still necessary? Yes. I wouldn't fully trust Microsoft to implement anything correctly.
I would like to see .NET code run on Linux (and I guess OSX..), because it's a Java-like environment without the annoyances of Java. Sure, C++/CLR (my .NET language of choice) has its quirks (some of which I need C# to fix), but at least it isn't Java and it (hopefully) will soon be easy to cross-platform without anything more than minor annoyances.
What you're saying makes a lot of sense, but I'm a little confused as to how algorithms work. I've always thought that since algorithms were just a description of math, that they could not be patented. The problem becomes how one describes an algorithm. Starting with plain English, we might say "Iterate the list, comparing the current position to the next one. If the current is larger than the next, swap the data. Go through the same amount of times as you have data." It could be described in pseudo-code, Java, C++, FORTRAN, etc. At what point can I patent the ASBands Bubble Sort (if I wanted to)? What is the difference between description and implementation?