Looks like it. This could happen only in America. A outlaw business (prostitution) can sue legit business (file productions) for disrupting their business. With pool of cash in the hand of the IT companies, definitely a gold mine for the Lawyer Inc.
Settlements for tort litigation now exceed $200 billion annually in America. At 2% of GDP, this is far more than in other rich countries...
Of this, Trial Lawyers Inc, America's law firms, take a juicy $40 billion. Their revenue growth has been a remarkable 9% a year over the past three decades, more than the compound growth of the Dow Jones industrial average...
Trial Lawyers Inc now caters to at least 74 separate product lines. Alongside old favourites such as asbestos and malpractice lawsuits, hot growth markets now include lawsuits over obesity, mobile phones and mould, as well as more speculative innovations such as business disruption litigation on behalf of Hollywood prostitutes "disrupted" by film-production teams....
Litigation is now a big business with very nice growth potential. Maybe the investors of SCO are cashing into this trend in the American business. American firms can not compete in manufectures, not in software and all of these have been moved oversea. However, Litigation business as a busiess can not be outsourced and all have to be done in the US. As more companies are facing hardtime and going down in the IT industries, we can see a sea of intellecture properties related lawsue for the years to come.
SCO is at the forefront of this new growth trend and it definitely make sense to invest. What if SCO wins the litigation against IBM (remember, this is the same company suing Microsoft with Dr. DOS and won!). Does this track records make SCO management team the new sweetheart of the board of any dying IT company? Before we knew it, Sun will replace Scott McNealy with Darl McBride and every company that has ever used Java would be underfire. Of course, IBM still the target #1.
Linux is probably the biggest threat to TRON in Japan given Japanese government and large industrial giants like Panasonic and Sony's attitude toward Linux these days. On government side, the Japanese government is proposing to Chinese and Korean governments to develop Microsoft alternative based on Linux. Sony, Panasonic, and others were probably biggest licensee of TRON are moving to Linux.
What does TRON has to do to survive? Hooking up with enemy's enemy is a unavoidable.
Coupled with Tim's piece on Japan recently TIme: What's Right With Japan, it make perfect sense for Japan to try to drive its industrial power in this direction. Along the way of developing Astro Boy, there will be large number of technologies to be commericalized. With the increasing coolness of Japan, the images along with the technologies will allow Japanese electronic industries to export high value added products for in the next decades.
The purchasing power of individuals in Japan are still high. They could still shell out enough money to suppor the development of entertainment electionics. This is a great direction for Japan to go. The highly skill workers in Japan are perfect to make such new toys.
The plug-in is Inferno, not Plan 9. Inferno is a virtual machine very much like Java with a lot of cool ideas from Plan 9. Too bad that Lucent didn't know how to market it.
I had encountered with Inferno's marketing people from Lucent in 1997 to try to get Inferno for our research project in school at that time. The marketing people acted as if Inferno was a god sent gift and want us to sing a license so strict that may just well to ask me to sing over my first born.
Things got nasty and I post the complain to Inferno mailing list. Got reply from Dennis Richite. Man, that was an experience getting email from the Unix man himself. He was really nice and tried hard to help us. However, the marketing people still wouldn't let us have less restrict license.
Well... We had to do it in Java.:( I wish the open sourcing of Plan 9 could have happened long ago. We could have more fun and Plan 9 may went somewhere.
RedHat has spent a lot and work hard to build their brand name. Why do you think you are entitled to use the name? It will not send the message "Copying Linux is illegal" but "Copying RedHat is illegal." The message is clear. How would you feel if I use your name to sell goods and piss off the customers. They will not remember me but they will remeber you as a bad guys selling terrible goods.
China Netcom is still waiting for the 3G license which everyone is guessing the Chinese government will require China Netcom as well as China telecom to adapt the home grown 3G standard calls TD-SCDMA . TD-SCDMA is the third UMT approved 3G standards along with WCDMA and CDMA2000.
Because of the delay in licensing, China Netcom and China Telecom has been deployed PHS system called XiaoLingTong all over China. PHS is basically a extension to their fixed line operation and there are already company producing PHS/WiFi boxs and cards. The living in China is quickly become an metropaliton and China's national agenda are to build large and crowded city. With that kind of future, PHS + WiFi does make more sense then expensive deployment of 3G. You would be covered most of the time and I don't think we really have data that emergen that you just can't wait for a couple minutes to get it. If your life depending on instance access to data to that degreee, you'd better just stay home and have redundent links.
When it comes down to it, 3G is all about data but 3G can't deliver data comparable to 802.11b for another couple years and by that time, WiFi would have advanced already. 3G suppose to deliver superior voice quality but with the price difference, I rather use IP phone.
Overall, 3G is a hype created by global telecom to harvest more money from individual to archive better ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) for their business. With some of the telecom in a protected region still enjoy 20~30% profit margin these days, they will do everything in their power to discredit WiFi. It's good to see some of the telecom actually recognize this and step into WiFi.
You can already surf anonymously in China. Walk into a cybercafe, pay 25 cents an hour and you are set. No registration, no ID, just you and China's Great Firewall.;)
Wireless MAC address is unique and billing of WiFi services does tie you to the acceess. You will get less privacy using WiFi.
NeXTSTEP was running at most on 4 architectures at the same time (M68K, Intel X86, Sun Sparc and HP PA) and most of the applications are compiled to fat binary with one app having binaries for all architecture. This has been done and it's almost 10 years ago by the same engineering team in Apple now.
NeXTSTEP, now Cocoa, is a very clean framework that properly abstract the ysstem services so few applications needs to use anything low level in the system. The API is consistent across architecture and applications relying on the API can easily be compiled and run on any architecture.
It's possible for Apple to switch to another architecture once more then 90% of the apps coded to Cocoa spec rather then Cocoa/Carbon mix. At that time, it's just a matter of compile and run.
OS X is gaining momentum and getting 3rd parties supprt. It would take another two years for enough apps to ported to Cocoa to archive the critical mass necessary to make the "switch."
Because GSM is the most widely deploy standard in the world. What's in GPRS/1xRTT/3G? It's data!!! Expensive and low speed 2.5G/3G data. Combining WiFi with GSM, you get a 3G killer. Who needs to wait for 3G to realize while you can get WiFi data today in cheaper price and much higher bandwidth?
Is economy starting to outweigh politics even in China?:)
It has always been the case. Taiwan's business has been investing in China for long time. TSMC and UMC have had been in China for years, waiting for the restriction to be left by Taiwanese government and bargine better deal with the Chinese government.
With TSMC fab turning out those chips and Taiwanese mainboard/chipset vendors jumping on board, this could be very interesting.
There are a ton of people out there with technical expertise to add features to OS'd game engines, say new pixel shading routines or cool special effects.
There are also a ton of people out there who could come up with cool story lines, and put it all together. But some of them just cant draw for shit, that's where a sharing of pre-made models would be useful. Right now the flow of information is completely one-sided.
Why should people with the skills work on open source engine or artworks?
I have been using and working on free software since 1991. I worked on gcc, emacs, and others. I worked on them because I ran into problems using them and I had the skills to fix the problems. I contribute the patch back because there are no way I could profit from the patch and it would be a big harsh for me trying to keep up patching with newer release. I was driven by my selfishness and free software license like GPL helps to turn this selfishness into benefit for the public.
From this perspective, I don't see why someone would work on open source game engines or artworks. When I play games, I look for entertainment. I enjoy the suspension of belief and immerse myself into the world and fantasy created by the artists. I don't want to think about BSP, shader or polygon when I play. I am glad to pay for the artists and engineers to bring the games to life.
On the subject of Half-Life, Counter Strike started as a one man'd mod to realize his vision of the what the game like. It's driven by his desire to fulfill his fantasy and HL provided the right tool to realize it. The commerical success of Counter Strike was the side benefit.
Open source or free software isn't a religion. It's a philosophy on turning the collective selfishness of individuals into a common good. It works on things like kernels, compilers or editors which are used in daily work. I can't see how it works on games and artworks.
Amazon and EBay runs on J2EE? What gives you the impression? I don't think either one of them are running on J2EE. EBay has contracted IBM to redo it's web site but it's not yet moved to the new one.
Here is the article about EBay going to use WebSphere. If you read the discussion, it's not very certain how much J2EE is there for EBay version 3. Do anyone has any idea what version EBay is running now? Has it switched to version 3 yet?
The article says IBM is going to migrate. I am asking which HAS been switched to Java.
My point was that Java isn't proven in the backend mission critical type application. It's great that IBM is going to try doing that. However, it's NOT done yet.
When a vendor says "we will do it" doesn't really mean "we can do it," just "we will try to do it."
Plus, the names in the list: integration middleware, WebSphere software, Eclipse, WebSphere commerce, portal servers, Lotus Domino products, Tivoli management software and the DB2 database.
If I am not mistaken, most of these contains Java already. I don't think IBM is rewritting DB2 in Java anytime soon.
Again, please read my posting. I am not saying Java is bad. It's just not proven for mission critical type of system software.
But IBM will? Everybody here is missing the point that IBM doesn't seem to have any of these issues, and is in fact moving ALL of their enterprise applications to Java. And IBM is a LOT bigger company than Sun.
Name the IBM's mission critical systems what have been switched to Java.
On the surface, Sun and IBM are the same. Marketing the hell out of the idea of everyone should switch to Java. However, they know better internally. Java has not been proven to run those kind of mission critical backend system. What's the best J2EE platform has done so far? Running the front end window dressing Web Site!
Don't get me wrong. Java is promising but it's not yet proven. It even took C++ a long time to prove itself in a mission critical system.
I think the memo, even it's fake got a point. Sun has been spending more time on adding new future then making Java/J2EE a solid platform. Unlike programming in C/C++ where it's easy work around the bugs of the underlying OS, it's so much harder to do it in Java. We ran into problem with core dump of the VM in our projects from time to time. What can we really do in this situation? Not much other then go on the web site and see if there is a new release of VM and hope it may not have the same problem.
For Java to be adapted in real mission critical applications, I really hope that Sun can subjected Java to the same standards it holds for its backend system or just open source the VM! Without access to good support or the source codes, its harder to adapt it for mission critical system.
I remember this story from long time ago. While Sun needed a accounting system back in the 80s, they went for the best solution: IBM S/390. It's also during the same time, Sun was marketing very aggressively against main frame and want everyone to go to client/server solution.
I really respect Sun in this regard. It knows the limitation of its own technologies and would try to choose the best one their won.
Just like in the 80s, Sun has seen the future to be client/server but it choose S/390 to run their accounting. Right now, Sun won't bet its own mission critical data center type system with the toy language call Java.
Java is good for build small/middle scale application that replacing ASP or VB. However, it's not really a proven technologies for large backend mission critical system. Sun's engineers are doing what's best for their work and not falling for the hype Sun's own marketing is creating.
Plan 9 is supposed to correct what's wrong with the development Unix after Unix was "embrace and extended" by the Unix commercial vendors.
I used Plan 9 for about 9 months back in 1996. Here are some of the ideas behind it.
Everything in the system are files: This was a simple notion but powerful abstraction. Everything in the system is access through the file system API and all objects in the system have a representation in the file systems including low level network and graphics.
A per process private file name system: Plan 9 has the notion of a private file name space for each process. That means that I can create file system namespace on a individual process level.
A file system base network protocol call 9P All network services for Plan 9 are export as files to another machine.
A single sign on authentication system This has been featured a while ago. Check it out here
With these simple abstraction, you can do really cool things:
Recursive windowing system: the framebuffer of the systme is mounted at/dev/graph (or similar name. It was a while ago). Since one can build private name space for each process, just open up a new windows, mount its graphic context at the/dev/graph and launch another copy of the windowing system in the process. The new windowing system will think the windows as the whole screen. Comes pretty handy hacking windowing system.
Build firewall through remote file system. Say you have a machine that's on the edge with two ethernet cards and no routing enable between the two interfaces. Bascially a firewall. You can gain remote access by login into the machine, mount its/dev/eth0 to your current process's/dev/eth0 and launch browser in the process. Now, you are browsing using the firewall's external interface. This is done securely because of the private name space and single sign on. You are the only one open to the outside. The configuration of this firewall is "local" to you.
Build upon this and taking the Unix Small is Beautiful approach to problem solving. Plan 9 allows each program to perform small tasks well and provide the way to unified them together through private file name space.
Plan 9's design has a lot of impact on Linux, probably more then Linus would admit./proc file system, process as thread, and others. These abstract can be traced back to Plan 9. Seeing those implementation on Linux (a traditional Unix clone), it become evidenced why original Unix folks like Dennis Richite wanted to start a new project to correct the mistakes of Unix.;)
He is talking about Microsoft doing _exactly_ the same thing that Apple has done with OSX (use someone else's OS), except with Linux instead of BSD. Five years ago, would anyone have thought that Apple would use someone else's OS to run their UI? Heresy!
It was obvious that Apple is heading for the Unix based next generation when it was sallowed by NeXT and the return of Steve Jobs. The "acqusition" of NeXT happened in 1996.
However, I agree with you about the the point of moving Windows on top of Unix (Linux, BSD or even Mach). Typical users do not care about the underlying system they are running. The UI is what interact with them.
On the financial side, it goes by the old saying "A dollar saved is a dollar earn." Not having to maintain a large team of OS programmers would definitely save Microsoft a lot of money.
On the marketing side, Microsoft would have no problems make the users forgot about Linux is there. It's still called Windows XP (or Windows 2004/5/6) and it's still a Microsoft products.
The backward compatibility issues you brough up are easier for Microsoft to solve then what Apple has encounter because of existing projects like Wine. There wasn't open source effort to emulate OS 9 under Unix for Apple to reply on. Microsoft can easily leverage WINE to solve their backward compatibility problem when moving to Unix based kernel.
Overall, there are a lot to gain for Microsoft moving to Linux and few to lose. One thing for Microsoft to lose is face and making their attack on Linux now look like idiotic. But, hey, Bill G told us "640K is enough for everything, right?" I think Microsoft's management are excellent business people. The point brought up here should be clear to them.
Only one tatical problem I see for Microsoft to solve right now: "How to put Linux under Windows without promoting the status of our competitors." If Microsoft decided to adapt Linux as kernel, it has to do so not making market think it's putting a seal of approval of Linux, thus validate their OS competitors such as RedHat or SUSE, or in this case, GNOME or KDE.
I am expatriate living in Shanghai, China. I am posting this from a cyber cafe here. It's obvious to see why this is such a dumb idea for Nitendo and will destory Nintendo in China forever.
For most Chinese, cyber cafe serves as their introduction to computer, Internet, and compuer games. The machine I am on right now is a PIII 800 with Nvidia GeForce. The usage cost is about US$1 for 4 hours. It's 2AM on Sunday morning and the place is packed with young people in their early 20s. Most are playing games, some are watching movies and surfing the net.
The availabe games on this machines:
Counter Strike (number 1 game in China)
WarCraft III
Wolfenstein
Age of Empire II
MIR (a Korean MMORP, very popular here)
...Name your state of the art PC games
Now the picture should be clear. Chinese are introduced to computer games with flashy 3D graphics and online gaming. None of people in this room except me have any idea what games look like before 3D acceleration and Nitendo is nobody to them. With their first game experience with such hardware setup and game titles, Chiese customers would hardly be impressed even with next generation GameCube, let along the NES.
Moreover, China and Japan have a really bad history. In general, Chinese hate Japanese. If Nitendo actually bring NES to the Chinese market, all it takes is an editorial in People's Daily provoking the memory of Sino-Japan war history and paint the sales of NES an insult for the Chinese people as second class customers. It will make Nitendo notorious in China and ultimately destory any chance for Nitendo in Chinese market.
I really hope Nitendo be smart about Chinese market. I workship Shigeru Miyamoto. I have already pre-ordered Zelda for GameCube from the states and can't wait to play it. I hope my Chinese friends will eventually have the chance to appricate the art of the master game creator.
1% of the Chinese population are affluent white collars young professionals at their late 20 and early 30. 1% doesn't sound much but factor in the 1.2 billions population, that gives you a customer base of 12 millions people. This larger then the total population of some of the more "wealther" countries Nintendo have marketed. Majority of these affluent white collars professionals lives in 10 largest cities of China
The problem with companies entering China market is that they all think "There are 1.2 billions people in China and how do I grab all of them." This makes them comes up with strange idea about entering the market.
Chinese are pround, and to some extent, arrogant. Trying to dump things several generations behind the rest of the world will go against their national pride and destanted to failure.
You may say "but if they've never seen one before, how can they tell." Well, The most popular games in China is Counter Strike and played across the country in Internet cafe. If you talk about comptuer games in China, CS is the image poped up on most people's head. Anything less visually appealing then that will be obviously not state of the art.
The game consoles you saw in China are not officially released in China. Check out the games for PS2. They are either Japanese or English. None of the games is in Chinese. These machines carried back to China from oversea visits and the titles are pirated in China.
I used DUEL about 5 years ago. It's an extension to gdb and similar in design to Acid. I am not sure if its features have been integrated into GDB now.
Here is the official Dragon Product Brief. The list of software runs on Dragon are:
OS: Linux, VxWork, Windows CE
Apps: Apache Web, FTP, Email, NFS, X-Window
Basically Dragon is a MIPS instruction set CPU so whatever is availabe for Linux/MIPS probably runs on system based on Dragon as well. Dragon does not have its own instruction set.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like it. This could happen only in America. A outlaw business (prostitution) can sue legit business (file productions) for disrupting their business. With pool of cash in the hand of the IT companies, definitely a gold mine for the Lawyer Inc.
Litigation is now a big business with very nice growth potential. Maybe the investors of SCO are cashing into this trend in the American business. American firms can not compete in manufectures, not in software and all of these have been moved oversea. However, Litigation business as a busiess can not be outsourced and all have to be done in the US. As more companies are facing hardtime and going down in the IT industries, we can see a sea of intellecture properties related lawsue for the years to come.
SCO is at the forefront of this new growth trend and it definitely make sense to invest. What if SCO wins the litigation against IBM (remember, this is the same company suing Microsoft with Dr. DOS and won!). Does this track records make SCO management team the new sweetheart of the board of any dying IT company? Before we knew it, Sun will replace Scott McNealy with Darl McBride and every company that has ever used Java would be underfire. Of course, IBM still the target #1.
Linux is probably the biggest threat to TRON in Japan given Japanese government and large industrial giants like Panasonic and Sony's attitude toward Linux these days. On government side, the Japanese government is proposing to Chinese and Korean governments to develop Microsoft alternative based on Linux. Sony, Panasonic, and others were probably biggest licensee of TRON are moving to Linux.
What does TRON has to do to survive? Hooking up with enemy's enemy is a unavoidable.
Is this released to the public? If so, where is the link? Anyone? Thanks in advance!
Coupled with Tim's piece on Japan recently TIme: What's Right With Japan, it make perfect sense for Japan to try to drive its industrial power in this direction. Along the way of developing Astro Boy, there will be large number of technologies to be commericalized. With the increasing coolness of Japan, the images along with the technologies will allow Japanese electronic industries to export high value added products for in the next decades.
The purchasing power of individuals in Japan are still high. They could still shell out enough money to suppor the development of entertainment electionics. This is a great direction for Japan to go. The highly skill workers in Japan are perfect to make such new toys.
Well Jobs may not be looking for developers there, just a spiritual thing for him. ;)
The plug-in is Inferno, not Plan 9. Inferno is a virtual machine very much like Java with a lot of cool ideas from Plan 9. Too bad that Lucent didn't know how to market it.
:( I wish the open sourcing of Plan 9 could have happened long ago. We could have more fun and Plan 9 may went somewhere.
I had encountered with Inferno's marketing people from Lucent in 1997 to try to get Inferno for our research project in school at that time. The marketing people acted as if Inferno was a god sent gift and want us to sing a license so strict that may just well to ask me to sing over my first born.
Things got nasty and I post the complain to Inferno mailing list. Got reply from Dennis Richite. Man, that was an experience getting email from the Unix man himself. He was really nice and tried hard to help us. However, the marketing people still wouldn't let us have less restrict license.
Well... We had to do it in Java.
RedHat has spent a lot and work hard to build their brand name. Why do you think you are entitled to use the name? It will not send the message "Copying Linux is illegal" but "Copying RedHat is illegal." The message is clear. How would you feel if I use your name to sell goods and piss off the customers. They will not remember me but they will remeber you as a bad guys selling terrible goods.
China Netcom is still waiting for the 3G license which everyone is guessing the Chinese government will require China Netcom as well as China telecom to adapt the home grown 3G standard calls TD-SCDMA . TD-SCDMA is the third UMT approved 3G standards along with WCDMA and CDMA2000.
Because of the delay in licensing, China Netcom and China Telecom has been deployed PHS system called XiaoLingTong all over China. PHS is basically a extension to their fixed line operation and there are already company producing PHS/WiFi boxs and cards. The living in China is quickly become an metropaliton and China's national agenda are to build large and crowded city. With that kind of future, PHS + WiFi does make more sense then expensive deployment of 3G. You would be covered most of the time and I don't think we really have data that emergen that you just can't wait for a couple minutes to get it. If your life depending on instance access to data to that degreee, you'd better just stay home and have redundent links.
When it comes down to it, 3G is all about data but 3G can't deliver data comparable to 802.11b for another couple years and by that time, WiFi would have advanced already. 3G suppose to deliver superior voice quality but with the price difference, I rather use IP phone.
Overall, 3G is a hype created by global telecom to harvest more money from individual to archive better ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) for their business. With some of the telecom in a protected region still enjoy 20~30% profit margin these days, they will do everything in their power to discredit WiFi. It's good to see some of the telecom actually recognize this and step into WiFi.
You can already surf anonymously in China. Walk into a cybercafe, pay 25 cents an hour and you are set. No registration, no ID, just you and China's Great Firewall. ;)
Wireless MAC address is unique and billing of WiFi services does tie you to the acceess. You will get less privacy using WiFi.
NeXTSTEP was running at most on 4 architectures at the same time (M68K, Intel X86, Sun Sparc and HP PA) and most of the applications are compiled to fat binary with one app having binaries for all architecture. This has been done and it's almost 10 years ago by the same engineering team in Apple now.
NeXTSTEP, now Cocoa, is a very clean framework that properly abstract the ysstem services so few applications needs to use anything low level in the system. The API is consistent across architecture and applications relying on the API can easily be compiled and run on any architecture.
It's possible for Apple to switch to another architecture once more then 90% of the apps coded to Cocoa spec rather then Cocoa/Carbon mix. At that time, it's just a matter of compile and run.
OS X is gaining momentum and getting 3rd parties supprt. It would take another two years for enough apps to ported to Cocoa to archive the critical mass necessary to make the "switch."
Because GSM is the most widely deploy standard in the world. What's in GPRS/1xRTT/3G? It's data!!! Expensive and low speed 2.5G/3G data. Combining WiFi with GSM, you get a 3G killer. Who needs to wait for 3G to realize while you can get WiFi data today in cheaper price and much higher bandwidth?
It has always been the case. Taiwan's business has been investing in China for long time. TSMC and UMC have had been in China for years, waiting for the restriction to be left by Taiwanese government and bargine better deal with the Chinese government.
With TSMC fab turning out those chips and Taiwanese mainboard/chipset vendors jumping on board, this could be very interesting.
Why should people with the skills work on open source engine or artworks?
I have been using and working on free software since 1991. I worked on gcc, emacs, and others. I worked on them because I ran into problems using them and I had the skills to fix the problems. I contribute the patch back because there are no way I could profit from the patch and it would be a big harsh for me trying to keep up patching with newer release. I was driven by my selfishness and free software license like GPL helps to turn this selfishness into benefit for the public.
From this perspective, I don't see why someone would work on open source game engines or artworks. When I play games, I look for entertainment. I enjoy the suspension of belief and immerse myself into the world and fantasy created by the artists. I don't want to think about BSP, shader or polygon when I play. I am glad to pay for the artists and engineers to bring the games to life.
On the subject of Half-Life, Counter Strike started as a one man'd mod to realize his vision of the what the game like. It's driven by his desire to fulfill his fantasy and HL provided the right tool to realize it. The commerical success of Counter Strike was the side benefit.
Open source or free software isn't a religion. It's a philosophy on turning the collective selfishness of individuals into a common good. It works on things like kernels, compilers or editors which are used in daily work. I can't see how it works on games and artworks.
Amazon and EBay runs on J2EE? What gives you the impression? I don't think either one of them are running on J2EE. EBay has contracted IBM to redo it's web site but it's not yet moved to the new one.
Here is the article about EBay going to use WebSphere. If you read the discussion, it's not very certain how much J2EE is there for EBay version 3. Do anyone has any idea what version EBay is running now? Has it switched to version 3 yet?
The article says IBM is going to migrate. I am asking which HAS been switched to Java.
My point was that Java isn't proven in the backend mission critical type application. It's great that IBM is going to try doing that. However, it's NOT done yet.
When a vendor says "we will do it" doesn't really mean "we can do it," just "we will try to do it."
Plus, the names in the list: integration middleware, WebSphere software, Eclipse, WebSphere commerce, portal servers, Lotus Domino products, Tivoli management software and the DB2 database.
If I am not mistaken, most of these contains Java already. I don't think IBM is rewritting DB2 in Java anytime soon.
Again, please read my posting. I am not saying Java is bad. It's just not proven for mission critical type of system software.
Name the IBM's mission critical systems what have been switched to Java.
On the surface, Sun and IBM are the same. Marketing the hell out of the idea of everyone should switch to Java. However, they know better internally. Java has not been proven to run those kind of mission critical backend system. What's the best J2EE platform has done so far? Running the front end window dressing Web Site!
Don't get me wrong. Java is promising but it's not yet proven. It even took C++ a long time to prove itself in a mission critical system.
I think the memo, even it's fake got a point. Sun has been spending more time on adding new future then making Java/J2EE a solid platform. Unlike programming in C/C++ where it's easy work around the bugs of the underlying OS, it's so much harder to do it in Java. We ran into problem with core dump of the VM in our projects from time to time. What can we really do in this situation? Not much other then go on the web site and see if there is a new release of VM and hope it may not have the same problem.
For Java to be adapted in real mission critical applications, I really hope that Sun can subjected Java to the same standards it holds for its backend system or just open source the VM! Without access to good support or the source codes, its harder to adapt it for mission critical system.
I remember this story from long time ago. While Sun needed a accounting system back in the 80s, they went for the best solution: IBM S/390. It's also during the same time, Sun was marketing very aggressively against main frame and want everyone to go to client/server solution.
I really respect Sun in this regard. It knows the limitation of its own technologies and would try to choose the best one their won.
Just like in the 80s, Sun has seen the future to be client/server but it choose S/390 to run their accounting. Right now, Sun won't bet its own mission critical data center type system with the toy language call Java.
Java is good for build small/middle scale application that replacing ASP or VB. However, it's not really a proven technologies for large backend mission critical system. Sun's engineers are doing what's best for their work and not falling for the hype Sun's own marketing is creating.
Plan 9 is supposed to correct what's wrong with the development Unix after Unix was "embrace and extended" by the Unix commercial vendors.
I used Plan 9 for about 9 months back in 1996. Here are some of the ideas behind it.
Everything in the system are files: This was a simple notion but powerful abstraction. Everything in the system is access through the file system API and all objects in the system have a representation in the file systems including low level network and graphics.
A per process private file name system: Plan 9 has the notion of a private file name space for each process. That means that I can create file system namespace on a individual process level.
A file system base network protocol call 9P All network services for Plan 9 are export as files to another machine.
A single sign on authentication system This has been featured a while ago. Check it out here
With these simple abstraction, you can do really cool things:
Build upon this and taking the Unix Small is Beautiful approach to problem solving. Plan 9 allows each program to perform small tasks well and provide the way to unified them together through private file name space.
Plan 9's design has a lot of impact on Linux, probably more then Linus would admit. /proc file system, process as thread, and others. These abstract can be traced back to Plan 9. Seeing those implementation on Linux (a traditional Unix clone), it become evidenced why original Unix folks like Dennis Richite wanted to start a new project to correct the mistakes of Unix. ;)
Plan 9 From Bell Labs is the Plan 9 manifesto. Good overview into the system and the rest of the documents.
It was obvious that Apple is heading for the Unix based next generation when it was sallowed by NeXT and the return of Steve Jobs. The "acqusition" of NeXT happened in 1996.
However, I agree with you about the the point of moving Windows on top of Unix (Linux, BSD or even Mach). Typical users do not care about the underlying system they are running. The UI is what interact with them.
On the financial side, it goes by the old saying "A dollar saved is a dollar earn." Not having to maintain a large team of OS programmers would definitely save Microsoft a lot of money.
On the marketing side, Microsoft would have no problems make the users forgot about Linux is there. It's still called Windows XP (or Windows 2004/5/6) and it's still a Microsoft products.
The backward compatibility issues you brough up are easier for Microsoft to solve then what Apple has encounter because of existing projects like Wine. There wasn't open source effort to emulate OS 9 under Unix for Apple to reply on. Microsoft can easily leverage WINE to solve their backward compatibility problem when moving to Unix based kernel.
Overall, there are a lot to gain for Microsoft moving to Linux and few to lose. One thing for Microsoft to lose is face and making their attack on Linux now look like idiotic. But, hey, Bill G told us "640K is enough for everything, right?" I think Microsoft's management are excellent business people. The point brought up here should be clear to them.
Only one tatical problem I see for Microsoft to solve right now: "How to put Linux under Windows without promoting the status of our competitors." If Microsoft decided to adapt Linux as kernel, it has to do so not making market think it's putting a seal of approval of Linux, thus validate their OS competitors such as RedHat or SUSE, or in this case, GNOME or KDE.
I am expatriate living in Shanghai, China. I am posting this from a cyber cafe here. It's obvious to see why this is such a dumb idea for Nitendo and will destory Nintendo in China forever.
For most Chinese, cyber cafe serves as their introduction to computer, Internet, and compuer games. The machine I am on right now is a PIII 800 with Nvidia GeForce. The usage cost is about US$1 for 4 hours. It's 2AM on Sunday morning and the place is packed with young people in their early 20s. Most are playing games, some are watching movies and surfing the net.
The availabe games on this machines:
Now the picture should be clear. Chinese are introduced to computer games with flashy 3D graphics and online gaming. None of people in this room except me have any idea what games look like before 3D acceleration and Nitendo is nobody to them. With their first game experience with such hardware setup and game titles, Chiese customers would hardly be impressed even with next generation GameCube, let along the NES.
Moreover, China and Japan have a really bad history. In general, Chinese hate Japanese. If Nitendo actually bring NES to the Chinese market, all it takes is an editorial in People's Daily provoking the memory of Sino-Japan war history and paint the sales of NES an insult for the Chinese people as second class customers. It will make Nitendo notorious in China and ultimately destory any chance for Nitendo in Chinese market.
I really hope Nitendo be smart about Chinese market. I workship Shigeru Miyamoto. I have already pre-ordered Zelda for GameCube from the states and can't wait to play it. I hope my Chinese friends will eventually have the chance to appricate the art of the master game creator.
1% of the Chinese population are affluent white collars young professionals at their late 20 and early 30. 1% doesn't sound much but factor in the 1.2 billions population, that gives you a customer base of 12 millions people. This larger then the total population of some of the more "wealther" countries Nintendo have marketed. Majority of these affluent white collars professionals lives in 10 largest cities of China
The problem with companies entering China market is that they all think "There are 1.2 billions people in China and how do I grab all of them." This makes them comes up with strange idea about entering the market.
Chinese are pround, and to some extent, arrogant. Trying to dump things several generations behind the rest of the world will go against their national pride and destanted to failure.
You may say "but if they've never seen one before, how can they tell." Well, The most popular games in China is Counter Strike and played across the country in Internet cafe. If you talk about comptuer games in China, CS is the image poped up on most people's head. Anything less visually appealing then that will be obviously not state of the art.
The game consoles you saw in China are not officially released in China. Check out the games for PS2. They are either Japanese or English. None of the games is in Chinese. These machines carried back to China from oversea visits and the titles are pirated in China.
I used DUEL about 5 years ago. It's an extension to gdb and similar in design to Acid. I am not sure if its features have been integrated into GDB now.
Here is the official Dragon Product Brief. The list of software runs on Dragon are:
Basically Dragon is a MIPS instruction set CPU so whatever is availabe for Linux/MIPS probably runs on system based on Dragon as well. Dragon does not have its own instruction set.