Language is dynamic. However, just because it's dynamic doesn't mean we should toss our grammar out the window. We're talking subject-verb agreement here. The fact is that, unlike you said, his change does increase the readability of the story. If your eyes stop, it's not an ignorable grammar error; it takes away from your appreciation of the actual article, and instead your mind suddenly focuses on the error and misses the point. This isn't our language dynamically changing. This is incorrect usage. "I is fine" may someday be correct, and it is certainly "dynamic," if that's the word you want to use, but the fact is that, right now, it's wrong. Similarly, "Microsoft have" is currently wrong in American English grammar. Someday (and even in Britain, IIRC) it may be correct, but in American English it's not.
All that said, the post is off topic, and, FWIW, the story has been corrected, but his point is perfectly valid. (And I think you'd have trouble making a case that Slashdot's grammar doesn't, on the whole, usually suck.;)
There are actually a large number of differences between PS2 and 3DO. 3DO was an untested platform that hurt itself irrecoverably by opening up with a $799 price tag. Like all new platforms, 3DO started with the classic chicken-egg problem of, "I won't buy it because there's no games," and "I won't write for it because there's no buyers," and then allowed the problem to manifest itself with a $799 price point. These two factors combined to hurt 3DO very early on, and it's not really a surprise at all that it couldn't recoup even with products like the 3DO Blaster that brought 3DO technology to the PC.
PlayStation2, on the other hand, has a radically different situation. Unlike the 3DO, not only does PlayStation2 already have market acceptance, but they've kept the barrier to entry low with a price tag of $299--less than half that of 3DO, and far more competitive with other systems. $299 might still be high, however, for a new platform when you can purchase a Dreamcast for $199 (I'll bet ~$170 by October) and an N64 for $99, except that PlayStation2 conveniently avoids the chicken-egg problem by supporting out-of-the-box almost the entire PSX library. With these things going for it, PS2 makes for a much more attractive platform for consumers ("hey, I can play my old games on it and get new PS2 games as they come out") and for developers, since people will buy the PS2 for the PSX library. Sony's been very smart here: they've been very careful to lower the entry point as low as they can for both developers and consumers. Quite impressive. So Sony has a much, much better chance to succede where 3DO failed.
And what's interesting is that this is beginning to show us their strategy. They've already got a box with unrivaled graphics power that ships with USB and Fire--I mean i.Link ports, and the US version will ship ready for a harddrive. By licensing the platform to third parties, it's clear that Sony is really trying to go head-to-head with almost everyone simultaneously. And what's incredible is they stand a chance of winning, even against Microsoft. Where else can you get a $299 machine that has workstation-like power and runs Linux?
This is just the beginning of the PlayStation saga. I think things are going to get a lot more interesting in the near future.
The only comment that I'd make about all of what you've asked for is that, while I completely agree that these features would make a kick-butt system, I'm not sure if UNIX is the place to implement them.
There are a lot of things in UNIX which are still very good, and which should go on in whatever new OS we make, such as the POSIX standard which, it seems, is getting supported almost everywhere. Things like preemptive multitasking, protected memory, true multi-user environments, named pipes, and quite a few other things should obviously be kept. But I think that beyond those basic things we should start over. If we were to create an OS which was going to truly be for the average consumer, we'd want to add things like a unified document format tag in files and dynamically-loadable drivers (à la QNX)--things which currently don't exist in UNIX, and for various reasons would be quite hard to add. Mac OS X has done a lot to add these things to UNIX, but I question whether or not, had OS X not had NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP herritage, whether OS X would use UNIX. Because the fact of the matter is that, when you implement all of those changes, you really don't have a UNIX box anymore in the traditional sense, but rather something totally different that's loosely based on UNIX technology. Whether there's any particular reason to start with UNIX to implement features like what you're asking, rather than to start from scratch or with another system, is something I would seriously question before the Open Source Community (tm) undertakes a project like this.
Meanwhile, about your complaint about X being the GUI: I think most people agree that X has major problems. Where I think most people fail to see something is that X isn't the only thing that is wrong with Linux GUIs. Linux GUIs are currently pretty much clones of either Windows95/98/NT/2000, Mac OS, or similar environments. Those GUIs were never designed for a UNIX system. If you want to build a GUI for a consumer system, those may be the way to go, but if you want to have a GUI for Linux, you should work to design a GUI from the ground up that is actually suited to Linux. What's better suited for Linux? I don't know. Maybe we just haven't figured out what aspects of Windows95's interface just aren't suited to Linux, which aspects are, and which ones we might be able to learn from but by counterexample and should start anew. Maybe what we need is something like Squeak's Morphic. And there's the definite possibility that a GUI just isn't suited for Linux--at least in its current state. But my point is that the problem lies deeper than X; it lies with the current way we're trying to marry Linux to a GUI.
Now I can finally use a nearly-complete version of Windows on my palm top! I've really been looking forward to this for a long time; it's really tough when all I use is my Palm all day and I forget what a crash looks like.
While it doesn't initially appear to work into Apple's plan, I think that Mac OS X/Intel is the next logical direction. I'll explain that as well as I can here.
Recently, as most people here I'm sure already know, Apple has been having major problems getting G4 chips that run at a reasonable speed; the 500 MHz G4s, which were supposed to be around in August, only arrived recently, while the 550 MHz and 600 MHz G4s we were supposed to have by now Motorola is now saying are impossible with the current design. If Motorola continues to have problems with this, it's in Apple's best interest to ensure that Mac OS X can run on a variety of platforms. Since Mac OS X can go wherever Darwin can go (you can actually swap different versions of Darwin right out from under Mac OS X, if you had need, for instance, of a file system that Mac OS X didn't support). So by porting Darwin to Intel, the biggest platform at the moment, Apple is making sure they're ready if they have to switch platforms soon.
As part of this step, Apple may well decide to release Mac OS X for Intel. While Mac OS X is definitely going to be a big thing, a good amount of that big thing is the backwards compatibility that Mac OS X provides via Classic and Carbon -- things you don't get on the Intel side. Intel users would only have Cocoa applications, and, at the moment, there just aren't that many. That, however, could play in favor of Apple. With few initial applications, Apple could release Mac OS X for Intel without worrying about it cutting into their hardware sales in the near future. It would be a way to test the waters without causing major problems. If people really seem to like Mac OS X for Intel, Apple could quickly begin turning Mac OS X/Intel into a major product in preparation to bail out of the PowerPC platform.
I have no idea if this is actually what's going through the minds at Cupertino, but I can certainly believe that it would be, and if it is then we're very likely to see Mac OS X/Intel in July as well as Mac OS X/PPC.
I'd assume by that he means that it complies with the requirements to qualify as an open-source license that were going to be used when "open-source" was going to be a trademark. I don't know whether those requirements are still online anymore, since the plan was scrapped when the trademark office refused to trademark Open Source because of prior art. (Sort of ironic when you think about the patent stuff going on now...)
I wonder why Sun seems in general to be so afraid of the GPL. They tend to release most of their work under their own "let's-see-if-we-can-get-some-hype" license, with only a few exceptions (the only other one I know is Jakarta). This seems like a step in the right direction, as, while not the GPL, it at least is an accepted "true" open-source license. However, I'm still curious: why is Sun (and other companies, such as Troll Tech and Apple) afraid of the GPL? What problems do they have with it that they feel they have to invent their own license?
I think that having open-source projects all under the same (or at least compatible) licenses is something that is truly necessary to open-source being a success. Otherwise, while you can bug fix to your heart's content, you loose the benefits of reuse. Whether it winds up being the GPL, Artistic License, a BSD-type license or whatever, I think that it would help if we could all agree on some license that was both flexible enough to make corporations happy without departing significantly from the spirit of the open-source community.
Actually, Apple has provided a nearly-complete Java-to-Cocoa layer for quite some time, which includes full access to Apple's XML tools. While you could use Sun's new XML API, then, it really gets you no benefit, and you'd probably be better off -- especially since your tool would be Mac OS X-specific anyway -- just using the Cocoa XML routines.
I (and it would seem everyone else) always assumed it would be a major corporation that gave us a test case on the GPL. We've kept our eyes on Red Hat, Microsoft, and Corel, and in the end a tiny one-man team who no one has ever even heard of that winds up being the first deliberate violator of the GPL. I wonder if we've just been looking at the wrong bunch...
Over in a MozillaZine article Chris Nelson says he talked to a Netscape engineer earlier and the name isn't final. Looks like News.com jumpted the gun again...
Slashdot Mirror
All that said, the post is off topic, and, FWIW, the story has been corrected, but his point is perfectly valid. (And I think you'd have trouble making a case that Slashdot's grammar doesn't, on the whole, usually suck. ;)
There are actually a large number of differences between PS2 and 3DO. 3DO was an untested platform that hurt itself irrecoverably by opening up with a $799 price tag. Like all new platforms, 3DO started with the classic chicken-egg problem of, "I won't buy it because there's no games," and "I won't write for it because there's no buyers," and then allowed the problem to manifest itself with a $799 price point. These two factors combined to hurt 3DO very early on, and it's not really a surprise at all that it couldn't recoup even with products like the 3DO Blaster that brought 3DO technology to the PC.
PlayStation2, on the other hand, has a radically different situation. Unlike the 3DO, not only does PlayStation2 already have market acceptance, but they've kept the barrier to entry low with a price tag of $299--less than half that of 3DO, and far more competitive with other systems. $299 might still be high, however, for a new platform when you can purchase a Dreamcast for $199 (I'll bet ~$170 by October) and an N64 for $99, except that PlayStation2 conveniently avoids the chicken-egg problem by supporting out-of-the-box almost the entire PSX library. With these things going for it, PS2 makes for a much more attractive platform for consumers ("hey, I can play my old games on it and get new PS2 games as they come out") and for developers, since people will buy the PS2 for the PSX library. Sony's been very smart here: they've been very careful to lower the entry point as low as they can for both developers and consumers. Quite impressive. So Sony has a much, much better chance to succede where 3DO failed.
And what's interesting is that this is beginning to show us their strategy. They've already got a box with unrivaled graphics power that ships with USB and Fire--I mean i.Link ports, and the US version will ship ready for a harddrive. By licensing the platform to third parties, it's clear that Sony is really trying to go head-to-head with almost everyone simultaneously. And what's incredible is they stand a chance of winning, even against Microsoft. Where else can you get a $299 machine that has workstation-like power and runs Linux?
This is just the beginning of the PlayStation saga. I think things are going to get a lot more interesting in the near future.
There are a lot of things in UNIX which are still very good, and which should go on in whatever new OS we make, such as the POSIX standard which, it seems, is getting supported almost everywhere. Things like preemptive multitasking, protected memory, true multi-user environments, named pipes, and quite a few other things should obviously be kept. But I think that beyond those basic things we should start over. If we were to create an OS which was going to truly be for the average consumer, we'd want to add things like a unified document format tag in files and dynamically-loadable drivers (à la QNX)--things which currently don't exist in UNIX, and for various reasons would be quite hard to add. Mac OS X has done a lot to add these things to UNIX, but I question whether or not, had OS X not had NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP herritage, whether OS X would use UNIX. Because the fact of the matter is that, when you implement all of those changes, you really don't have a UNIX box anymore in the traditional sense, but rather something totally different that's loosely based on UNIX technology. Whether there's any particular reason to start with UNIX to implement features like what you're asking, rather than to start from scratch or with another system, is something I would seriously question before the Open Source Community (tm) undertakes a project like this.
Meanwhile, about your complaint about X being the GUI: I think most people agree that X has major problems. Where I think most people fail to see something is that X isn't the only thing that is wrong with Linux GUIs. Linux GUIs are currently pretty much clones of either Windows95/98/NT/2000, Mac OS, or similar environments. Those GUIs were never designed for a UNIX system. If you want to build a GUI for a consumer system, those may be the way to go, but if you want to have a GUI for Linux, you should work to design a GUI from the ground up that is actually suited to Linux. What's better suited for Linux? I don't know. Maybe we just haven't figured out what aspects of Windows95's interface just aren't suited to Linux, which aspects are, and which ones we might be able to learn from but by counterexample and should start anew. Maybe what we need is something like Squeak's Morphic. And there's the definite possibility that a GUI just isn't suited for Linux--at least in its current state. But my point is that the problem lies deeper than X; it lies with the current way we're trying to marry Linux to a GUI.
If you do, please use contraceptives. The last thing we need right now are a bunch of baby bastard Microsofts.
...so long as one of your topics isn't, "What to Do if Your Computer Won't Boot."
Now I can finally use a nearly-complete version of Windows on my palm top! I've really been looking forward to this for a long time; it's really tough when all I use is my Palm all day and I forget what a crash looks like.
While it doesn't initially appear to work into Apple's plan, I think that Mac OS X/Intel is the next logical direction. I'll explain that as well as I can here.
Recently, as most people here I'm sure already know, Apple has been having major problems getting G4 chips that run at a reasonable speed; the 500 MHz G4s, which were supposed to be around in August, only arrived recently, while the 550 MHz and 600 MHz G4s we were supposed to have by now Motorola is now saying are impossible with the current design. If Motorola continues to have problems with this, it's in Apple's best interest to ensure that Mac OS X can run on a variety of platforms. Since Mac OS X can go wherever Darwin can go (you can actually swap different versions of Darwin right out from under Mac OS X, if you had need, for instance, of a file system that Mac OS X didn't support). So by porting Darwin to Intel, the biggest platform at the moment, Apple is making sure they're ready if they have to switch platforms soon.
As part of this step, Apple may well decide to release Mac OS X for Intel. While Mac OS X is definitely going to be a big thing, a good amount of that big thing is the backwards compatibility that Mac OS X provides via Classic and Carbon -- things you don't get on the Intel side. Intel users would only have Cocoa applications, and, at the moment, there just aren't that many. That, however, could play in favor of Apple. With few initial applications, Apple could release Mac OS X for Intel without worrying about it cutting into their hardware sales in the near future. It would be a way to test the waters without causing major problems. If people really seem to like Mac OS X for Intel, Apple could quickly begin turning Mac OS X/Intel into a major product in preparation to bail out of the PowerPC platform.
I have no idea if this is actually what's going through the minds at Cupertino, but I can certainly believe that it would be, and if it is then we're very likely to see Mac OS X/Intel in July as well as Mac OS X/PPC.
Given that if you had to wait too long you'd fall like a brick, I'm not sure "interesting" is the word I'd use.
Traffic Guy: You'd better not head over to the West Side unless you've got a lot of fuel, because...well, shit, there goes one now.
I'd assume by that he means that it complies with the requirements to qualify as an open-source license that were going to be used when "open-source" was going to be a trademark. I don't know whether those requirements are still online anymore, since the plan was scrapped when the trademark office refused to trademark Open Source because of prior art. (Sort of ironic when you think about the patent stuff going on now...)
I think that having open-source projects all under the same (or at least compatible) licenses is something that is truly necessary to open-source being a success. Otherwise, while you can bug fix to your heart's content, you loose the benefits of reuse. Whether it winds up being the GPL, Artistic License, a BSD-type license or whatever, I think that it would help if we could all agree on some license that was both flexible enough to make corporations happy without departing significantly from the spirit of the open-source community.
Now I can single-handedly beat Team Slashdot in SETI!
Actually, Apple has provided a nearly-complete Java-to-Cocoa layer for quite some time, which includes full access to Apple's XML tools. While you could use Sun's new XML API, then, it really gets you no benefit, and you'd probably be better off -- especially since your tool would be Mac OS X-specific anyway -- just using the Cocoa XML routines.
I (and it would seem everyone else) always assumed it would be a major corporation that gave us a test case on the GPL. We've kept our eyes on Red Hat, Microsoft, and Corel, and in the end a tiny one-man team who no one has ever even heard of that winds up being the first deliberate violator of the GPL. I wonder if we've just been looking at the wrong bunch...
Over in a MozillaZine article Chris Nelson says he talked to a Netscape engineer earlier and the name isn't final. Looks like News.com jumpted the gun again...