In essence, Microsoft is replacing the DCOM RPC messaging technology with an XML/HTTP technology that allows for remote method invocation.
I thought this was the most intersting item in the article. DCOM going away is a Good Thing, since it's proprietary and, in an attempt to be based on COM, broken. But who'd have thought of going to XML/HTTP instead of something like Corba?
So what sorts of integration will be possible with Microsoft products that use the new standards? Like it or not, being able to communicate with MS products is an important and perhaps necessary feature that alternative software can provide to help drag people away from their habitual use of MS's stuff.
The cross-platform possibilities are also interesting.
Several people have posted that there aren't really very many jobs for writing Open Source software. Many others have rebutted, naming RedHat, Cygnus (aka RedHat), Compaq, etc.
But those are all technology companies, and there are many programming jobs that aren't in technology companies. Almost every medium-to-large company has an IS department that has real technology problems to solve every day, and it's in this kind of results-centirc environment that Linux and its kin have flourished in the past, and they still do today.
One shining example of this is Burlington Coat Factory. They have been using Unix for about as long as there has been Unix to use. They have an IS department that is constantly creating and improving the software that they need to use every day to sell coats. They have long realized that opening the source code for many of their tools can only help them, and that by using Open Source tools that already exist, they can leverage good stable code as a basis for their own future improvements. People in thier IS department have been contributing to projects like lprng, and the Red Hat distribution. It is in no small part due to their positive experiences with these projects that they felt comfortable embracing Linux.
There have got to be plenty of jobs doing real programming work for non-technology companies where Open Source is so natural a solution that it's hardly worth mentioning, and thus rarely gets news coverage.
I do not work for Burlington Coat Factory, although I have friends that do. I do not speak for BCF.
Well from what little I know, YCrCb is a digital sampling format for video. I take it that this chip, then, would be taking the digital YCrCb stream (after the DVD has been read and decoded) and turning it into an analog signal, for the S-Video or VGA output.
Which I guess means that you would actually want that chip's input to get pushed across the PCI bus.
Would you mind giving us a rundown on the hardware you're using, as well as how many/what kinds of hits you get, and how well the machine(s) stand up to it?
I didn't hate Jar Jar. I dunno that I loved him (although the graphics were impressive), but I didn't hate him.
I dunno if what follows is a spoiler, but if you haven't seen the movie, I recommend hitting ' back' quick and avoid this whole topic.
What I did hate was that The Force is apparently just a bunch of symbiotic critters that live inside your cells. This is HORRIBLE! I didn't WANT to know that; in fact, I don't really believe it. I was perfectly content with a mystic force that pervades the universe and has a Dark and Light side. That was enough.
But now we've got these symbiotic creatures, and so I suppose The Force cannot be where host creatures are not. Or something. Anyway, it just felt too much like Star Trek's constant impulse to explain everything in technobabble. I hated it, and I hope Lucus renigs in a later movie, where we find out that was just something they tell non-Jedi's to throw them off the scent.
--Chouser
FSF can (sometimes) sue
on
BSD vs GPL
·
· Score: 1
In your example, Red Hat Linux gets violated, and, as you said, the copyright holders can sue. Fortunately, besides the many private contributors, there are a few large, funded organizations that own pieces of that code. The FSF, for example, owns most (all?) of the GNU tools. Red Hat owns chunks of the installation stuff (RPM?), and companies like SendMail and Netscape might have something to say about it as well.
I have no basis to disagree with your analysis of 'problematic' parts of the GPL, but at least this one point is not quite as weak, I think, as you portray it.
I hate to be a wet blanket -- I enjoyed SnowCrash as much as the next geek. But there are some deeply rooted differences between 'virtual property' and real estate. That I would like to call out for discussion
Fisrt of all, I'd like to mention the idea of proximity. In the real world, we have heard that the most important thing about a piece of property is 'location' (x3). Part of this is because by being near something popular, an otherwise completely undeveloped location can become valuable, for a business, for advertising, for a home. But this is because being physically near something makes it easier to get there. This goes directly against the most powerful idea of a virtual world, namely that we aren't tied down by physical location. I can type in a URL and get to anywhere with the same amount of work. Being 'near' Yahoo, for example, doesn't even make sense. The nearest isomorphism would be links and/or banner ads. But both of these cases require the concent of the popular party, unlike neighbors in the physical world. To force the idea of 'nearness' upon a virtual world is to introduce arbitrary rules that dilute the power of that world. The only context in which you would want such rules is in a gaming environment, where rules hamper options and therefore increase challenge. Outside a gaming environment, extra challenge in navigation is rarely sought.
Second, we have to realize that a virtual world is created by someone, who is still capable and probably interested in continuing to create. So although hobbiests may be able to obtain real-world cash for ocasional pieces of virtual property, it cannot become an industry; whoever runs the system can too easily flood the market. For example, if people were making a living playing Ultima Online and selling the property they collect, think how much more an UO programmer could make by creating that same virtual property without working to earn it. The fact that this power must exist for any given virtual world to exist suggests that selling virtual property will never be a booming industry.
So as fun as the it is to watch UO approach the ideas of SnowCrash, they are both fictional worlds, and I'm afriad the real world will never have reason to attribute huge amounts of intinsic value to virtual property.
The CS program at the college I graduated from did a much better job at preparing sutdents for real-world software development than it did for academic persuits....which is either a positive or a negative depending on what you want to do.
True, none of the knowledge I use in my software programming job was gained from any of the classes I took while getting my degree.
But that is not the only way to measure the worth of college. I think the overall experience, personal development, and *gasp* gen. eds. were overall worth every penny I paid.
And the only reasons to take Computer Science over some other (right-brained, say) major is if 1) you like the classes (like me), or 2) feel the need to convince an employer that you know computer stuff.
True, none of the knowledge I use in my software programming job was gained from any of the classes I took while getting my degree.
But that is not the only way to measure the worth of college. I think the overall experience, personal development, and *gasp* gen. eds. were overall worth every penny I paid.
And the only reasons to take Computer Science over some other (right-brained, say) major is if 1) you like the classes (like me), or 2) feel the need to convince an employer that you know computer stuff.
True, none of the knowledge I use in my software programming job was gained from any of the classes I took while getting my degree.
But that is not the only way to measure the worth of college. I think the overall experience, personal development, and *gasp* gen. eds. were overall worth every penny I paid.
And the only reasons to take Computer Science over some other (right-brained, say) major is if 1) you like the classes (like me), or 2) feel the need to convince an employer that you know computer stuff.
Also, speaker sound tends to be significantly affected by their environment. Especially if there is supposed to be sound coming out the back, I bet the high frequencies would sound weird bouncing off a wall if it were too near.
On the other hand, the Apple license says 'discontinue use', while the GPL says you must not 'distribute' it. So if I write code on top of some GPL code and there's a conflict, I might have to stop publishing it, but I can keep using it myself.
The Apple license requires me to destroy even my copies. Am I reading that right?
They are not replacing their POS systems with Linux. Yet. But they are replacing the the back-end server in every store. Do you know how committed a company has to be to a technology to do something that big? They are also replacing their Sun workstations on engineers desks with Linux machines, one at a time.
Burlington was already smart enough to use Unix everywhere and avoid NT at all costs. Now they have proved smart enough to adopt Linux in a big way. I'd be willing to bet they'll be doing Linux at POS eventually as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought this was the most intersting item in the article. DCOM going away is a Good Thing, since it's proprietary and, in an attempt to be based on COM, broken. But who'd have thought of going to XML/HTTP instead of something like Corba?
So what sorts of integration will be possible with Microsoft products that use the new standards? Like it or not, being able to communicate with MS products is an important and perhaps necessary feature that alternative software can provide to help drag people away from their habitual use of MS's stuff.
The cross-platform possibilities are also interesting.--Chouser
But those are all technology companies, and there are many programming jobs that aren't in technology companies. Almost every medium-to-large company has an IS department that has real technology problems to solve every day, and it's in this kind of results-centirc environment that Linux and its kin have flourished in the past, and they still do today.
One shining example of this is Burlington Coat Factory. They have been using Unix for about as long as there has been Unix to use. They have an IS department that is constantly creating and improving the software that they need to use every day to sell coats. They have long realized that opening the source code for many of their tools can only help them, and that by using Open Source tools that already exist, they can leverage good stable code as a basis for their own future improvements. People in thier IS department have been contributing to projects like lprng , and the Red Hat distribution. It is in no small part due to their positive experiences with these projects that they felt comfortable embracing Linux.
There have got to be plenty of jobs doing real programming work for non-technology companies where Open Source is so natural a solution that it's hardly worth mentioning, and thus rarely gets news coverage.
I do not work for Burlington Coat Factory, although I have friends that do. I do not speak for BCF.
--Chouser
Which I guess means that you would actually want that chip's input to get pushed across the PCI bus.
--Chouser
Would you mind giving us a rundown on the hardware you're using, as well as how many/what kinds of hits you get, and how well the machine(s) stand up to it?
--Chouser
I didn't hate Jar Jar. I dunno that I loved him (although the graphics were impressive), but I didn't hate him.
I dunno if what follows is a spoiler, but if you haven't seen the movie, I recommend hitting ' back' quick and avoid this whole topic.
What I did hate was that The Force is apparently just a bunch of symbiotic critters that live inside your cells. This is HORRIBLE! I didn't WANT to know that; in fact, I don't really believe it. I was perfectly content with a mystic force that pervades the universe and has a Dark and Light side. That was enough.
But now we've got these symbiotic creatures, and so I suppose The Force cannot be where host creatures are not. Or something. Anyway, it just felt too much like Star Trek's constant impulse to explain everything in technobabble. I hated it, and I hope Lucus renigs in a later movie, where we find out that was just something they tell non-Jedi's to throw them off the scent.
--Chouser
In your example, Red Hat Linux gets violated, and, as you said, the copyright holders can sue. Fortunately, besides the many private contributors, there are a few large, funded organizations that own pieces of that code. The FSF, for example, owns most (all?) of the GNU tools. Red Hat owns chunks of the installation stuff (RPM?), and companies like SendMail and Netscape might have something to say about it as well.
I have no basis to disagree with your analysis of 'problematic' parts of the GPL, but at least this one point is not quite as weak, I think, as you portray it.
--Chouser
Fisrt of all, I'd like to mention the idea of proximity. In the real world, we have heard that the most important thing about a piece of property is 'location' (x3). Part of this is because by being near something popular, an otherwise completely undeveloped location can become valuable, for a business, for advertising, for a home. But this is because being physically near something makes it easier to get there. This goes directly against the most powerful idea of a virtual world, namely that we aren't tied down by physical location. I can type in a URL and get to anywhere with the same amount of work. Being 'near' Yahoo, for example, doesn't even make sense. The nearest isomorphism would be links and/or banner ads. But both of these cases require the concent of the popular party, unlike neighbors in the physical world. To force the idea of 'nearness' upon a virtual world is to introduce arbitrary rules that dilute the power of that world. The only context in which you would want such rules is in a gaming environment, where rules hamper options and therefore increase challenge. Outside a gaming environment, extra challenge in navigation is rarely sought.
Second, we have to realize that a virtual world is created by someone, who is still capable and probably interested in continuing to create. So although hobbiests may be able to obtain real-world cash for ocasional pieces of virtual property, it cannot become an industry; whoever runs the system can too easily flood the market. For example, if people were making a living playing Ultima Online and selling the property they collect, think how much more an UO programmer could make by creating that same virtual property without working to earn it. The fact that this power must exist for any given virtual world to exist suggests that selling virtual property will never be a booming industry.
So as fun as the it is to watch UO approach the ideas of SnowCrash, they are both fictional worlds, and I'm afriad the real world will never have reason to attribute huge amounts of intinsic value to virtual property.
--Chouser
Right! Except that doing it this way is slower, more expensive to build, more error-prone when using, and requires a stylus.
Great solution, people...
--Chouser
The CS program at the college I graduated from did a much better job at preparing sutdents for real-world software development than it did for academic persuits. ...which is either a positive or a negative depending on what you want to do.
--Chouser
True, none of the knowledge I use in my software programming job was gained from any of the classes I took while getting my degree.
But that is not the only way to measure the worth of college. I think the overall experience, personal development, and *gasp* gen. eds. were overall worth every penny I paid.
And the only reasons to take Computer Science over some other (right-brained, say) major is if 1) you like the classes (like me), or 2) feel the need to convince an employer that you know computer stuff.
--Chouser
True, none of the knowledge I use in my software programming job was gained from any of the classes I took while getting my degree.
But that is not the only way to measure the worth of college. I think the overall experience, personal development, and *gasp* gen. eds. were overall worth every penny I paid.
And the only reasons to take Computer Science over some other (right-brained, say) major is if 1) you like the classes (like me), or 2) feel the need to convince an employer that you know computer stuff.
--Chouser
True, none of the knowledge I use in my software programming job was gained from any of the classes I took while getting my degree.
But that is not the only way to measure the worth of college. I think the overall experience, personal development, and *gasp* gen. eds. were overall worth every penny I paid.
And the only reasons to take Computer Science over some other (right-brained, say) major is if 1) you like the classes (like me), or 2) feel the need to convince an employer that you know computer stuff.
--Chouser
Also, speaker sound tends to be significantly affected by their environment. Especially if there is supposed to be sound coming out the back, I bet the high frequencies would sound weird bouncing off a wall if it were too near.
--Chouser
That's a good quote... thanks.
On the other hand, the Apple license says 'discontinue use', while the GPL says you must not 'distribute' it. So if I write code on top of some GPL code and there's a conflict, I might have to stop publishing it, but I can keep using it myself.
The Apple license requires me to destroy even my copies. Am I reading that right?
--Chouser
Not that it matters to youre main point, but the DOS memory barrier was, I believe, at 640K
--Chouser
They are not replacing their POS systems with Linux. Yet. But they are replacing the the back-end server in every store. Do you know how committed a company has to be to a technology to do something that big? They are also replacing their Sun workstations on engineers desks with Linux machines, one at a time.
Burlington was already smart enough to use Unix everywhere and avoid NT at all costs. Now they have proved smart enough to adopt Linux in a big way. I'd be willing to bet they'll be doing Linux at POS eventually as well.
The title, I'm sure, should read 'Pov-Lab', since PovRay's source has been open for quite a while, I believe