No Practical Application - Don't be so sure
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Linux on Palm
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· Score: 2
as useful on a theoretical front as a Palm running Linux is, and as geeky it is to have a webserver in your pocket, there really is little, if any, practical application to this.
I am working now on an industrial application that requires handheld units to be interfaced via radio modems to a network, all for the purpose of factory floor automation. Obviously, there is a use for Linux on the palm pilot - I'd much rather work with a system where I've got full source code availability, than with PalmOS - which looks good, by the way, but is not open
However, we won't use palm pilots this time round - the technology is just a little to immature. One big problem is that all the radio modems available for the Palm seem to be oriented towards connectivity with cellphone networks. That's not what we want, we need a wireless LAN connection. This is where the consumer orientation of the Palm really shows. Maybe in another year that will change. In the mean time, we'll use older, uglier, heavier, keypad units that have been around for a while.
ESR is apparently right about this thing being a rumour and not much more. You will know this for yourself if you follow the links he gives instead of just reading the comments about his article. Here is what the original press release said:
GraphOn Corporation, (Nasdaq: GOJO) (www.graphon.com), a Silicon Valley web-enabling software company, today announced it has established alliances that it believes will afford millions of users throughout China Internet and network access to powerful server-based applications and speed adoption of Linux® as China's operating system of choice.
Presumeably somebody from Yahoo called the guy and got this quote:
"Enthusiasm for Linux is coming from the very highest level of the Government in China," says Robin Ford executive vice president of GraphOn.
Which was miraculously transformed on Slashdot into this:
YAHOO UK is reporting that the People's Republic of China will be naming Linux as its "Official Operating System"
Anyone can see how rediculous this whole chain of events was. I read Slashdot for facts, not for unsubstantiated rumours that generate threads containing articles consisting mostly of groundless speculation that get moderated up. This whole affair should be embarrassing to all of us - if it isn't, there is something wrong. What are we going to do to try to make it not happen again? The last thing we need is for Slashdot to gain a reputation as primarily a rumour mill - that's not what it is, I know that and you know that. But one fiasco like this can undo the good effects of dozens of informative, useful threads, as far as the clueless industry press is concerned.
That was my rant about truth and the need to pursue it. Now another short rant. ESR was completely wrong to have used this opportunity for publicizing his own political views. But, thanks a lot for debunking this thing for us.
This in no way means that I don't think China or any other country shouldn't enthusiastically adopt Linux, or the product of any other open-source effort, politics be dammed.
CJK - China/Japan/Korea - now, the governments of 2 out of 3 have officially endorsed Linux. Hmm, that just leaves Japan. Now, this is *good* for governments in general - why should they be spending their citizen's tax dollars on software that costs money? When there is better software that can be had for free?
Remember how Jerry kept beating the s100/Compupro horse long after it was dead? How he absolutely hated the IBM PC? Well - he changed his tune, just 4-5 years late, that's all. Jerry often takes a long time to "get it". This could of course be damaging to whatever happens to be cutting edge at the time - like Linux, for example - except that there aren't really that many folks who pay a lot of attention to Jerry any more. At least to his computer writings. (I'll always be a fan of his SF.) The reason for this is that the industry moved on, and his favorite soapbox, Byte mag, didn't. Or it moved, but it went in the wrong direction. Remember when Byte was chock full of good technical info? Then they tried to emulate the success of PC Mag, by getting more product reviews, surveys, etc. It didn't work. Because people were reading the mag for the tech info and not for product roundups. If it had worked, Jerry would still have a lot of influence, but as it is we mainly listen to what he has to say out of nostalgia. Or whatever.
Anyway, let's not get too excited about what Jerry has to say, he just didn't do his research, obviously. And his opinion doesn't matter much more than yours or mine, and probably reaches about the same number of people.
1 - Force them to divest their holdings in other companies,
2 - prevent them from investing in or aquiring other companies for 5 or 10 years, 3
3 - disallow any restrictive agreements, and
4 - force them to open up their prices, so everyon pays the same thing with the only discounts avaialable being those strictly based on volume.
5 - And drop those market development agreements.
In other words, regulate them. And what do you do if they cheat? Start this all again, while they continue to rack up those monopoly profits? And they will cheat - they've done it before (see how they made a mockery of the previous anti-tying settlement). Even worse is the precedent for regulation in the software business itself - a well-regulated monopoly is by necessity awfully dull, and is that what we really want?
I think that regulation of Microsoft is a non-starter. The remedy we need is to put the Windows source code, including future versions, in the public domain. Put the load/save parts of the office suites into the public domain for good measure, as well as anything resembles an interface protocol. Then we will at once cure the problem and apply a suitable penalty. As for restitution, I guess it's not necessary for the government to take care of it. The civil court system will probably handle that very well. Um, that leaves the little matter that breaking the antitrust laws is a felony crime of which directors and officers of the company may well be guilty. (As is perjury.) Presumeably a separate trial would be required, should the government decide to pursue it. Think Michael Milken.
Is this too harsh? Ah - no, it's not harsh, it's just life. Life will go on.
But it sure doesn't hurt for more people to know about it. I first heard about this in a Register article shortly after the anti-trust trial began, and mentioned it two days ago (though I admit it, I was wrong about exactly what act it was: IANAL.) I'm really surprised it hasn't been more extensively reported in the press. Here's a very fine link. Note particularly this part which says basically that BillG could do time in the slammer for all this.
I'd like to put another prediction on the table: the issue of whether remedies are going to include a large fine is far from settled. Consider that one way to prevent Microsoft from making predatorial acquistions is to confiscate the war chest.
That said, I think the primary file format should be zipped XML. DXF hails from the days of visicalc, i.e., DIF begat DXF - it's hard to find file formats that suck more. I wouldn't expect DWG to be much better, though I haven't looked at it. Generally, when you go spelunking through these 1980's era PC file formats you'd better bring your barf bag.
The general nature of Jackson's upcoming conclusions of law are fairly obvious. The question we should now be discussing is: exactly what should the remedies be? Since, next to Microsoft, we are the people who will be most affected by the outcome we need to make our voices heard. It's clear that remedies imposed on Microsoft must be of 3 different kinds:
Reparative Punitive Corrective
Reparative - repairing the damage. To the extent it's possible to determine the damage of course. This would also include the cancelation of benefits that Microsoft obtained by breaking the law - in other words, the confiscation of illegally obtained profits. Damages and illegal profits taken together are likely to amount to a very large amount - think in the order of $100 billion. Given Microsoft's current market capitalization in the order of $500 billion and other factors, this huge amount isn't out of the ballpark.
Punitive - there must be a punitive component in the remedies so that there is no mistaking the message: breaking the law is not something that will result in the mere confiscation of profits. If this were true, then there would be no reason not to break the law - if you win, you win big, but if you lose you just have to give back the profits and try again. To send this message clearly, the punitive component of the remedies should equal the reparative component. Think another $100 billion.
Corrective - There is one corrective measure that makes all others pale by comparison: force the source code of Windows (98 and NT) into the public domain. Most of Microsoft's illegal pressure tactics have involved playing games with the secret details of Windows software. The only way to end these games is to make the source code public. Does anybody object to the idea that it should be licensed under GPL? So that not only will it enter the public domain, but it will stay there.
Naturally, other questions have to be addressed, such as "what about Microsoft's abuse of its monopoly position in office suites?" "What about the bartering of favors from online service providers in return for advantages that Microsoft can grant based on its monopoly position?" etc. etc. But let's not lose sight of the most important remedy: the source code must become public property.
Now that the court has stated the obvious (that Microsoft is a monopoly and has abused their power and harmed consumers), I'd like to know what everyone thinks comes next.
OK, I'll bite. Bill Gates still thinks he's invincible and Bill Neukom still thinks he knows how to run the case better than the law firm he hired - and the rest of the corporation is too frightened of these guys to tell them the truth which is: they're both waaaaaaaay out of touch. So I predict that, after the judgement comes down and remedies are agreed upon, this will be pushed through to appeal. Unfortunately for Bill & Bill, this won't go to the Circuit appeal next - where they've already won a couple of verrrrrry favorable rulings - but instead to directly to the supreme court, courtesy of a provision of the the, um, Sherman act I think it is that allows the appeal court to be bypassed in cases where the enforcement of antitrust laws would be better served that way. In other words, to save time.
This turn of events will suddenly make things seem a whole lot less comfortable in terms of time frame for Bill & Bill, and the two of them would do well to reflect on the possible bad effects of negative shareholder sentiment should they come to be seen as having steered the corporation off the edge of a figurative legal cliff.
It could be that the "microsoft shareholder suit" turns out to be the finest spectator sport of the new millenium.
There's little doubt the findings of fact in this case will influence the parallel case against Microsoft for embrace/pollute of the Java platform. There's been lots of precedent for this kind of cross-pollination between court cases in the last couple of years, in these big high-tech actions. What Jackson has to say about Microsoft's behaviour on the Java front is pretty damning - ok, everybody knew it anyway, but now it's "found as fact":
Far from being the unintended consequence of an attempt to help Java developers more easily develop high-performing applications, incompatibility was the intended result of Microsoft s efforts.
Caveat: IANAJZ (I Am Not A Java Zealot). I just think that people should obey the law, even rich people. Looks like we're kinda heading in the right direction at this point... And, so, personally my mind was made up long ago in this matter, it's nice to see the judge agrees:-)
But the whole point is moot because if you want to listen to something that uses Real Player, you're SOL. It's just like once site I can't view in Linux because it uses Quicktime extensivly.
No, the point is that I personally don't care about Real Player any more because it's gotten way too commercial and annoying to use. Wait for it - Real Player will be superceded soon by something more to our taste, and with the added benefit of being open source and running under Linux.
About 2 years ago I stopped using Hotbot because it got just too annoying, for the same reason, even though it was still the search engine with the best query interface. This year, miraculously, along comes google and is the answer to all (or most) of my prayers. Worth waiting for. In the meantime, I slummed and used altavista (fast seach but horrible interface and lousy presentation of results).
I can see Real Player is headed the same direction - don't get too attached to it. I guess at this point I'll just surf around and find something that can decode streaming ra files. Or I'll wait. It's not that we've got so much time on our hands we have to spend it all listening to ra files;-)
...many pro-Linux people I know have been grumbling about the lack of the latest RealPlayer support and other niceties that people in the Windows world take for granted
Funny you should say that. I just add/*removed* Real Player from my Windows NT machine today because it has just come to suck too much. As far as a streaming audio player goes it's not particularly impressive, and really it just takes a nice open format (mp3), sticks its own header on it, and tries to pretend it's handling some kind of amazing super-secret format you can't live without. Then, it hits you with the ads you don't want, the channels you don't want, the registration you don't want to do (complete with rectal examination) and provides no way for you to prevent it from starting when Windows starts. So: out it goes. Enough is enough. I'll stick with streaming mp3, thankyou, or use other players for ra-formatted mp3 audio. And I won't have to put up with the file not being saved to disk by default, so you have to download it all again any time you want to rewind. No thanks, Real Player, goodbye.
Mozilla milestone M11 is apparently due out on tuesday. The milestone M10 was pretty darn near useable - I used it for a few hours until the unfinished state of the text edit fields finally stopped me. I wouldn't be surprised if M11 is a keeper.
The source code is 20 something Meg. Grab. Download. Build. Fix.:-)
Current I/O devices work just fine
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3D Window Manager
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None of this is going to be too useful until we get some good input and output devices to use with it. Think about it, how well does a mouse that moves around in 2d work in a 3d environment?
It works just fine. I know, because I have done it, quite a lot. BTW, don't think of my remarks as criticism - I'm just addressing some common misconceptions about 3D interfaces.
Same with your monitor, it is very limiting in a 3d environment.
Think of your eyes. Close one eye. You can still function perfectly well in a 3D world, right? So, no, a 2D monitor is not limiting in a 3d environment. Your eyes present a 2D map of a 3D world to your brain, the same as a 2D montitor does. The actual limitation is good motion and viewpoint control - this is a software issue much more than a hardware issue.
What we need are gloves and goggles.
Bzzzt. No. Have you ever tried it? You look like a space alien for one thing, the goggles shift around on your head, your hands get sweaty, and your arms give out after a few minutes. To convince yourself of this, try holding your arm straight out in front of you for 5 minutes. Your fingers are also a lot less accurate as positioning devices then you might think, especially without kick-ass force feedback, which won't be out of the labs any time soon.
Then this will become somewhat usefull.
It's going to become useful even without those things. Again, I'm not speculating because I've been using this technology for a few years. Once you've used it you'll find good ol' 2D desktops as restrictive and uninteresting as a green 25x80 text mode display. Probably.
Think of all the desk space you could have. All you have to do is turn your head to a blank area. Don't like where an application is? Grab it with the glove and move it.
Yes, correct. These are reasons why 3D desktops are good. Also consider: no more scroll bars - you just move your point of view instead. For graphs of functions, no need to pick a scale or limits - you just move closer if you want to zoom in, and the graph goes off to infinity if it wants to. For 3D graphs, no need to pick the viewpoint - you pick your own viewpoint, and fly around if you have to, to see the details. No need for zoom in general, for anything, you just move closer and further away.
There aren't really any disadvantages to a 3D interface that won't be solved in time, and by this I mean not very much time, which you might suspect from the screenshots you're looking at. To prove this to yourself, consider that any 3D interface can be turned into a standard 2D interface, e.g., by pointing you directly at a 2D rectangle containing your screen view at a distance that maps texels one-to-one to pixels, and keeping you from moving or turning.
Linux Today has this story - part 2- about Linux and Korea.
Thankyou - that's the most useful Korea link I've ever seen. Following a lead to the korean internet faq I found the following interesting statement:
Microsoft Korea came up with its own Hangul encoding, UHC(Unified Hangul Code: MS Code Page 949, Windows-949) stripping Hangul of its unique merit as 'phonetically-combined-writing' system and treating it just like Chinese letters, use it in Hangul Windows 95 and Windows NT (in case of Korean Windows NT 4.0, all internal processings are done in Unicode, but on the surface, it used UHC) despite repeated advices by Korean government to adopt ISO-10646.
Hmm. Talk about de-comoditizing standards. Well I guess if you can take control of an entire country's language encoding standard you've got a real kick-ass lock-in happening. BTW, thanks to your link I've now got hangul up and running in hanterm and Netscape - maybe that missing hangul howto just just say one thing: "get hanterm".
Korea seems to have decided that Microsoft is strategicly bad to deal with and that Linux is a better choice.
When did they decide that? I was there for some time last year and the impression I got is that Microsoft is rather dominant to say the least. In Korea the economic imperative is stronger than in many of the leading industrial countries with higher per capita GNP, making it harder to justify spending a lot of one's time doing something that doesn't produce an immediate paycheck. Translation: working as an MSCE pays the bills - being a Linux guru doesn't.
At least, that seems to have been the case till now. What may change that is the obvious utility of Linux on a departmental mail server, or proxy server, or VPN gateway, or odbc database server, etc. etc. The software cost of each of these applications being $0.0 (even less when converted to won:-) This will help breed a new class of Linux gurus in Korea that pull their own weight, income-wise.
Linux is far from entering the mainstream as a desktop system in Korea. There are a number or reasons for this but one of the big ones is the spotty internationalization support. It's certainly not a "sit in it and drive away" situation. Turbo Linux is jumping in to help fill this void, but tell me - why is there no hangul-howto (IOW how to install hangul) in the standard howto collections? So that you can easily work in hangul even in Redhat, Debian, or whatever?
In my opinion, we haven't done enough to support Linux take-up in one of the world's most populous and industrially advanced countries. Whoever is in Korea and is reading this, please correct me if I've said anything inaccurate.
If Dell decides to ship some of these machines with Windows, and some without, the ones using Linux/BSD/BeOS or whatever they use will undoubtably be cheaper. If I were a clue-free end user, that would imply to me that they were inferior OS's, since the hardware was identical.
Have no fear - in the end Adam Smith and the law of supply and demand will always win. IOW, cheaper==++sales. If the the "more expensive is better" crowd needs to be taken care of, offer an option that includes a full boxed set of your favorite Linux distribution - that should get the price up high enough, as well as provide plenty of late-night reading material. (Or early morning "thinking material", depends on your personal preference:)
The browsers should change their implementation of cookies so that, by default, foreign sites can't send me cookies along with their GIFs
A simpler solution is to disable cookies in the browser. Netscape at least has a setting for that
With Mozilla we can do what we want. Need to change the way cookies are handled? Go ahead - you've got the source. Want to build Junkbuster right in? Suit yourself. How about a random cookie feature - where you accept the cookie, but you return some fictional person's data... hey, if you implement that, I for one will use your patch.
Just a couple of niggles here. I'm not a hardware engineer, but I do believe that's wrong. At smaller feature sizes capacitors get more efficient and switching gets faster. Because your capacitor is more efficient you can use lower voltage. As voltage decreases so does power consumption, as the square. Less power consumption = less heat, so higher clock rates.
They (Mot) did so they could reduce costs. The more chips you squeeze onto a wafer, the more money you generate from said wafer.
Errr, somewhat correct. Yield plays a big part in the equation - as feature size goes down, so does yield, especially since new untried manufacturing processes have to be brought on line each time feature size ratchets down.
The bottom line is that smaller features size is good - very good.
Second problem: everyone is jumping over themselves to post quickly, and moderate quickly, so that the time taken to write a quality post gets lost in the noise.
That cuts both ways - for example, if nobody moderated quickly we'd all have to put up with a lot more "first post" type comments. The idea is quick, accurate moderation, not based on personal beliefs but based on objective assessment of quality.
I think Rob should consider preventing moderation on a new topic for the first thirty minutes or an hour. This allows content to filter in before the moderators jump the gun.
Please no! That would mean I (for one) would have to wait 30 minutes before reading the comments so I wouldn't have to wade through all the unmoderated posts.
Slashdot is getting badly broken lately.
If Slashdot is so badly broken, then why am I getting so much useful stuff from it every day?
BTW, someone should moderate your post up, if only for the interesting church & science analogy.
He replied, "no offense, but we, I mean the people who develop Linux, don't really give a damn about those kind of people."... I find it terminally sad that there isn't somebody out there that cares about the newbies.
You are talking about one guy, how can you make a generalization from that? There are obviously lots of people involved with Linux that care about newbies - who do you think is putting together the new graphical installs, the KDE gui stuff, etc, etc? Who writes all the howtos? And there are lots of Linux companies coming into the game that care a lot about newbies. There are also zillions of people out there hanging on chat channels for the express purpose of helping newbies (incidently, most of them are hardly out of the newbie category themselves).
Just remember that if you're a complete newbie, you have to be careful not to jump into the middle of forums where developers are exchanging ideas and start grabbing the bandwidth for yourself. Better to just sit and lurk, soak up what you can, then go off to find a more suitable forum for your questions.
OSS relies on people's good nature to get software written.
I've got news for you, my friend. If you've ever worked in a commercial software house you know that commercial software relies on people's good nature to get written. Why is this? It's human nature. Software development in a team, in a company is all about pissing contests, it's about who's ideas are going to get used, and seen to be used, who's going to get promoted, and thus not have to do real work like coding any more, and so on, and so forth, ad nauseum until you barf. That's the truth, can anybody tell me it isn't? So you see, in commercial development, there always has to be that one guy who doesn't give a sh*t, and just sits down and codes the thing until it's done, while everybody else plays musical chairs trying to be the guy that gets to move out of cubicle-land to the corner office.
In short, commercial software development seems to bring out the worst in people... now, if you have to rely on good nature, would you rather rely on open source, where the natural state of things is for people to be good natured because they're doing something satisfying, or... what?
Slashdot Mirror
This is good news for KOffice
as useful on a theoretical front as a Palm running Linux is, and as geeky it is to have a webserver in your pocket, there really is little, if any, practical application to this.
I am working now on an industrial application that requires handheld units to be interfaced via radio modems to a network, all for the purpose of factory floor automation. Obviously, there is a use for Linux on the palm pilot - I'd much rather work with a system where I've got full source code availability, than with PalmOS - which looks good, by the way, but is not open
However, we won't use palm pilots this time round - the technology is just a little to immature. One big problem is that all the radio modems available for the Palm seem to be oriented towards connectivity with cellphone networks. That's not what we want, we need a wireless LAN connection. This is where the consumer orientation of the Palm really shows. Maybe in another year that will change. In the mean time, we'll use older, uglier, heavier, keypad units that have been around for a while.
ESR is apparently right about this thing being a rumour and not much more. You will know this for yourself if you follow the links he gives instead of just reading the comments about his article. Here is what the original press release said:
GraphOn Corporation, (Nasdaq: GOJO) (www.graphon.com), a Silicon Valley web-enabling software company, today announced it has established alliances that it believes will afford millions of users throughout China Internet and network access to powerful server-based applications and speed adoption of Linux® as China's operating system of choice.
Presumeably somebody from Yahoo called the guy and got this quote:
"Enthusiasm for Linux is coming from the very highest level of the Government in China," says Robin Ford executive vice president of GraphOn.
Which was miraculously transformed on Slashdot into this:
YAHOO UK is reporting that the People's Republic of China will be naming Linux as its "Official Operating System"
Anyone can see how rediculous this whole chain of events was. I read Slashdot for facts, not for unsubstantiated rumours that generate threads containing articles consisting mostly of groundless speculation that get moderated up. This whole affair should be embarrassing to all of us - if it isn't, there is something wrong. What are we going to do to try to make it not happen again? The last thing we need is for Slashdot to gain a reputation as primarily a rumour mill - that's not what it is, I know that and you know that. But one fiasco like this can undo the good effects of dozens of informative, useful threads, as far as the clueless industry press is concerned.
That was my rant about truth and the need to pursue it. Now another short rant. ESR was completely wrong to have used this opportunity for publicizing his own political views. But, thanks a lot for debunking this thing for us.
This in no way means that I don't think China or any other country shouldn't enthusiastically adopt Linux, or the product of any other open-source effort, politics be dammed.
CJK - China/Japan/Korea - now, the governments of 2 out of 3 have officially endorsed Linux. Hmm, that just leaves Japan. Now, this is *good* for governments in general - why should they be spending their citizen's tax dollars on software that costs money? When there is better software that can be had for free?
Remember how Jerry kept beating the s100/Compupro horse long after it was dead? How he absolutely hated the IBM PC? Well - he changed his tune, just 4-5 years late, that's all. Jerry often takes a long time to "get it". This could of course be damaging to whatever happens to be cutting edge at the time - like Linux, for example - except that there aren't really that many folks who pay a lot of attention to Jerry any more. At least to his computer writings. (I'll always be a fan of his SF.) The reason for this is that the industry moved on, and his favorite soapbox, Byte mag, didn't. Or it moved, but it went in the wrong direction. Remember when Byte was chock full of good technical info? Then they tried to emulate the success of PC Mag, by getting more product reviews, surveys, etc. It didn't work. Because people were reading the mag for the tech info and not for product roundups. If it had worked, Jerry would still have a lot of influence, but as it is we mainly listen to what he has to say out of nostalgia. Or whatever.
Anyway, let's not get too excited about what Jerry has to say, he just didn't do his research, obviously. And his opinion doesn't matter much more than yours or mine, and probably reaches about the same number of people.
I'm really in favor of Scott McNealy's opinion.
1 - Force them to divest their holdings in other companies,
2 - prevent them from investing in or aquiring other companies for 5 or 10 years, 3
3 - disallow any restrictive agreements, and
4 - force them to open up their prices, so everyon pays the same thing with the only discounts avaialable being those strictly based on volume.
5 - And drop those market development agreements.
In other words, regulate them. And what do you do if they cheat? Start this all again, while they continue to rack up those monopoly profits? And they will cheat - they've done it before (see how they made a mockery of the previous anti-tying settlement). Even worse is the precedent for regulation in the software business itself - a well-regulated monopoly is by necessity awfully dull, and is that what we really want?
I think that regulation of Microsoft is a non-starter. The remedy we need is to put the Windows source code, including future versions, in the public domain. Put the load/save parts of the office suites into the public domain for good measure, as well as anything resembles an interface protocol. Then we will at once cure the problem and apply a suitable penalty. As for restitution, I guess it's not necessary for the government to take care of it. The civil court system will probably handle that very well. Um, that leaves the little matter that breaking the antitrust laws is a felony crime of which directors and officers of the company may well be guilty. (As is perjury.) Presumeably a separate trial would be required, should the government decide to pursue it. Think Michael Milken.
Is this too harsh? Ah - no, it's not harsh, it's just life. Life will go on.
But it sure doesn't hurt for more people to know about it. I first heard about this in a Register article shortly after the anti-trust trial began, and mentioned it two days ago (though I admit it, I was wrong about exactly what act it was: IANAL.) I'm really surprised it hasn't been more extensively reported in the press. Here's a very fine link. Note particularly this part which says basically that BillG could do time in the slammer for all this.
I'd like to put another prediction on the table: the issue of whether remedies are going to include a large fine is far from settled. Consider that one way to prevent Microsoft from making predatorial acquistions is to confiscate the war chest.
...dwg file format compatability would be needed, but that's probabaly the most un-open file format there is.
Did you check wotsit? (search for DWG)
That said, I think the primary file format should be zipped XML. DXF hails from the days of visicalc, i.e., DIF begat DXF - it's hard to find file formats that suck more. I wouldn't expect DWG to be much better, though I haven't looked at it. Generally, when you go spelunking through these 1980's era PC file formats you'd better bring your barf bag.
Reparative - repairing the damage. To the extent it's possible to determine the damage of course. This would also include the cancelation of benefits that Microsoft obtained by breaking the law - in other words, the confiscation of illegally obtained profits. Damages and illegal profits taken together are likely to amount to a very large amount - think in the order of $100 billion. Given Microsoft's current market capitalization in the order of $500 billion and other factors, this huge amount isn't out of the ballpark.
Punitive - there must be a punitive component in the remedies so that there is no mistaking the message: breaking the law is not something that will result in the mere confiscation of profits. If this were true, then there would be no reason not to break the law - if you win, you win big, but if you lose you just have to give back the profits and try again. To send this message clearly, the punitive component of the remedies should equal the reparative component. Think another $100 billion.
Corrective - There is one corrective measure that makes all others pale by comparison: force the source code of Windows (98 and NT) into the public domain. Most of Microsoft's illegal pressure tactics have involved playing games with the secret details of Windows software. The only way to end these games is to make the source code public. Does anybody object to the idea that it should be licensed under GPL? So that not only will it enter the public domain, but it will stay there.
Naturally, other questions have to be addressed, such as "what about Microsoft's abuse of its monopoly position in office suites?" "What about the bartering of favors from online service providers in return for advantages that Microsoft can grant based on its monopoly position?" etc. etc. But let's not lose sight of the most important remedy: the source code must become public property.
Now that the court has stated the obvious (that Microsoft is a monopoly and has abused their power and harmed consumers), I'd like to know what everyone thinks comes next.
OK, I'll bite. Bill Gates still thinks he's invincible and Bill Neukom still thinks he knows how to run the case better than the law firm he hired - and the rest of the corporation is too frightened of these guys to tell them the truth which is: they're both waaaaaaaay out of touch. So I predict that, after the judgement comes down and remedies are agreed upon, this will be pushed through to appeal. Unfortunately for Bill & Bill, this won't go to the Circuit appeal next - where they've already won a couple of verrrrrry favorable rulings - but instead to directly to the supreme court, courtesy of a provision of the the, um, Sherman act I think it is that allows the appeal court to be bypassed in cases where the enforcement of antitrust laws would be better served that way. In other words, to save time.
This turn of events will suddenly make things seem a whole lot less comfortable in terms of time frame for Bill & Bill, and the two of them would do well to reflect on the possible bad effects of negative shareholder sentiment should they come to be seen as having steered the corporation off the edge of a figurative legal cliff.
It could be that the "microsoft shareholder suit" turns out to be the finest spectator sport of the new millenium.
*** crosses self & intones IANAL
:-)
:-)
There's little doubt the findings of fact in this case will influence the parallel case against Microsoft for embrace/pollute of the Java platform. There's been lots of precedent for this kind of cross-pollination between court cases in the last couple of years, in these big high-tech actions. What Jackson has to say about Microsoft's behaviour on the Java front is pretty damning - ok, everybody knew it anyway, but now it's "found as fact":
Far from being the unintended consequence of an attempt to help Java developers more easily develop high-performing applications, incompatibility was the intended result of Microsoft s efforts.
Caveat: IANAJZ (I Am Not A Java Zealot). I just think that people should obey the law, even rich people. Looks like we're kinda heading in the right direction at this point... And, so, personally my mind was made up long ago in this matter, it's nice to see the judge agrees
Rambling. Tired. Satisfied.
But the whole point is moot because if you want to listen to something that uses Real Player, you're SOL. It's just like once site I can't view in Linux because it uses Quicktime extensivly.
;-)
No, the point is that I personally don't care about Real Player any more because it's gotten way too commercial and annoying to use. Wait for it - Real Player will be superceded soon by something more to our taste, and with the added benefit of being open source and running under Linux.
About 2 years ago I stopped using Hotbot because it got just too annoying, for the same reason, even though it was still the search engine with the best query interface. This year, miraculously, along comes google and is the answer to all (or most) of my prayers. Worth waiting for. In the meantime, I slummed and used altavista (fast seach but horrible interface and lousy presentation of results).
I can see Real Player is headed the same direction - don't get too attached to it. I guess at this point I'll just surf around and find something that can decode streaming ra files. Or I'll wait. It's not that we've got so much time on our hands we have to spend it all listening to ra files
...many pro-Linux people I know have been grumbling about the lack of the latest RealPlayer support and other niceties that people in the Windows world take for granted
Funny you should say that. I just add/*removed* Real Player from my Windows NT machine today because it has just come to suck too much. As far as a streaming audio player goes it's not particularly impressive, and really it just takes a nice open format (mp3), sticks its own header on it, and tries to pretend it's handling some kind of amazing super-secret format you can't live without. Then, it hits you with the ads you don't want, the channels you don't want, the registration you don't want to do (complete with rectal examination) and provides no way for you to prevent it from starting when Windows starts. So: out it goes. Enough is enough. I'll stick with streaming mp3, thankyou, or use other players for ra-formatted mp3 audio. And I won't have to put up with the file not being saved to disk by default, so you have to download it all again any time you want to rewind. No thanks, Real Player, goodbye.
Mozilla milestone M11 is apparently due out on tuesday. The milestone M10 was pretty darn near useable - I used it for a few hours until the unfinished state of the text edit fields finally stopped me. I wouldn't be surprised if M11 is a keeper.
:-)
The source code is 20 something Meg. Grab. Download. Build. Fix.
None of this is going to be too useful until we get some good input and output devices to use with it. Think about it, how well does a mouse that moves around in 2d work in a 3d environment?
It works just fine. I know, because I have done it, quite a lot. BTW, don't think of my remarks as criticism - I'm just addressing some common misconceptions about 3D interfaces.
Same with your monitor, it is very limiting in a 3d environment.
Think of your eyes. Close one eye. You can still function perfectly well in a 3D world, right? So, no, a 2D monitor is not limiting in a 3d environment. Your eyes present a 2D map of a 3D world to your brain, the same as a 2D montitor does. The actual limitation is good motion and viewpoint control - this is a software issue much more than a hardware issue.
What we need are gloves and goggles.
Bzzzt. No. Have you ever tried it? You look like a space alien for one thing, the goggles shift around on your head, your hands get sweaty, and your arms give out after a few minutes. To convince yourself of this, try holding your arm straight out in front of you for 5 minutes. Your fingers are also a lot less accurate as positioning devices then you might think, especially without kick-ass force feedback, which won't be out of the labs any time soon.
Then this will become somewhat usefull.
It's going to become useful even without those things. Again, I'm not speculating because I've been using this technology for a few years. Once you've used it you'll find good ol' 2D desktops as restrictive and uninteresting as a green 25x80 text mode display. Probably.
Think of all the desk space you could have. All you have to do is turn your head to a blank area. Don't like where an application is? Grab it with the glove and move it.
Yes, correct. These are reasons why 3D desktops are good. Also consider: no more scroll bars - you just move your point of view instead. For graphs of functions, no need to pick a scale or limits - you just move closer if you want to zoom in, and the graph goes off to infinity if it wants to. For 3D graphs, no need to pick the viewpoint - you pick your own viewpoint, and fly around if you have to, to see the details. No need for zoom in general, for anything, you just move closer and further away.
There aren't really any disadvantages to a 3D interface that won't be solved in time, and by this I mean not very much time, which you might suspect from the screenshots you're looking at. To prove this to yourself, consider that any 3D interface can be turned into a standard 2D interface, e.g., by pointing you directly at a 2D rectangle containing your screen view at a distance that maps texels one-to-one to pixels, and keeping you from moving or turning.
Linux Today has this story - part 2- about Linux and Korea.
:-)
Thankyou - that's the most useful Korea link I've ever seen. Following a lead to the korean internet faq I found the following interesting statement:
Microsoft Korea came up with its own Hangul encoding, UHC(Unified Hangul Code: MS Code Page 949, Windows-949) stripping Hangul of its unique merit as 'phonetically-combined-writing' system and treating it just like Chinese letters, use it in Hangul Windows 95 and Windows NT (in case of Korean Windows NT 4.0, all internal processings are done in Unicode, but on the surface, it used UHC) despite repeated advices by Korean government to adopt ISO-10646.
Hmm. Talk about de-comoditizing standards. Well I guess if you can take control of an entire country's language encoding standard you've got a real kick-ass lock-in happening. BTW, thanks to your link I've now got hangul up and running in hanterm and Netscape - maybe that missing hangul howto just just say one thing: "get hanterm".
Korea seems to have decided that Microsoft is strategicly bad to deal with and that Linux is a better choice.
:-) This will help breed a new class of Linux gurus in Korea that pull their own weight, income-wise.
When did they decide that? I was there for some time last year and the impression I got is that Microsoft is rather dominant to say the least. In Korea the economic imperative is stronger than in many of the leading industrial countries with higher per capita GNP, making it harder to justify spending a lot of one's time doing something that doesn't produce an immediate paycheck. Translation: working as an MSCE pays the bills - being a Linux guru doesn't.
At least, that seems to have been the case till now. What may change that is the obvious utility of Linux on a departmental mail server, or proxy server, or VPN gateway, or odbc database server, etc. etc. The software cost of each of these applications being $0.0 (even less when converted to won
Linux is far from entering the mainstream as a desktop system in Korea. There are a number or reasons for this but one of the big ones is the spotty internationalization support. It's certainly not a "sit in it and drive away" situation. Turbo Linux is jumping in to help fill this void, but tell me - why is there no hangul-howto (IOW how to install hangul) in the standard howto collections? So that you can easily work in hangul even in Redhat, Debian, or whatever?
In my opinion, we haven't done enough to support Linux take-up in one of the world's most populous and industrially advanced countries. Whoever is in Korea and is reading this, please correct me if I've said anything inaccurate.
If Dell decides to ship some of these machines with Windows, and some without, the ones using Linux/BSD/BeOS or whatever they use will undoubtably be cheaper. If I were a clue-free end user, that would imply to me that they were inferior OS's, since the hardware was identical.
Have no fear - in the end Adam Smith and the law of supply and demand will always win. IOW, cheaper==++sales. If the the "more expensive is better" crowd needs to be taken care of, offer an option that includes a full boxed set of your favorite Linux distribution - that should get the price up high enough, as well as provide plenty of late-night reading material. (Or early morning "thinking material", depends on your personal preference:)
The browsers should change their implementation of cookies so that, by default, foreign sites can't send me cookies along with their GIFs
A simpler solution is to disable cookies in the browser. Netscape at least has a setting for that
With Mozilla we can do what we want. Need to change the way cookies are handled? Go ahead - you've got the source. Want to build Junkbuster right in? Suit yourself. How about a random cookie feature - where you accept the cookie, but you return some fictional person's data... hey, if you implement that, I for one will use your patch.
they didn't HAVE to go smaller to get more speed.
Just a couple of niggles here. I'm not a hardware engineer, but I do believe that's wrong. At smaller feature sizes capacitors get more efficient and switching gets faster. Because your capacitor is more efficient you can use lower voltage. As voltage decreases so does power consumption, as the square. Less power consumption = less heat, so higher clock rates.
They (Mot) did so they could reduce costs. The more chips you squeeze onto a wafer, the more money you generate from said wafer.
Errr, somewhat correct. Yield plays a big part in the equation - as feature size goes down, so does yield, especially since new untried manufacturing processes have to be brought on line each time feature size ratchets down.
The bottom line is that smaller features size is good - very good.
first manned mission in 2010
linear increase in immigrants to 100/year by 2050
additional native-born population
Mar's population should get to 100,000,000 before anyone even thinks of trying to control it.
Second problem: everyone is jumping over themselves to post quickly, and moderate quickly, so that the time taken to write a quality post gets lost in the noise.
That cuts both ways - for example, if nobody moderated quickly we'd all have to put up with a lot more "first post" type comments. The idea is quick, accurate moderation, not based on personal beliefs but based on objective assessment of quality.
I think Rob should consider preventing moderation on a new topic for the first thirty minutes or an hour. This allows content to filter in before the moderators jump the gun.
Please no! That would mean I (for one) would have to wait 30 minutes before reading the comments so I wouldn't have to wade through all the unmoderated posts.
Slashdot is getting badly broken lately.
If Slashdot is so badly broken, then why am I getting so much useful stuff from it every day?
BTW, someone should moderate your post up, if only for the interesting church & science analogy.
He replied, "no offense, but we, I mean the people who develop Linux, don't really give a damn about those kind of people." ... I find it terminally sad that there isn't somebody out there that cares about the newbies.
You are talking about one guy, how can you make a generalization from that? There are obviously lots of people involved with Linux that care about newbies - who do you think is putting together the new graphical installs, the KDE gui stuff, etc, etc? Who writes all the howtos? And there are lots of Linux companies coming into the game that care a lot about newbies. There are also zillions of people out there hanging on chat channels for the express purpose of helping newbies (incidently, most of them are hardly out of the newbie category themselves).
Just remember that if you're a complete newbie, you have to be careful not to jump into the middle of forums where developers are exchanging ideas and start grabbing the bandwidth for yourself. Better to just sit and lurk, soak up what you can, then go off to find a more suitable forum for your questions.
Oh come now, let's not get carried away. In order to do that they would have to:
Stop applying sound principles of software engineering to the design of API's
Start shipping broken software on a regular basic
I'm not going to continue this, you know where it's going
Sun may have its faults, but one of them is not giving us crap to work with, and I don't think they plan to start any time soon
OSS relies on people's good nature to get software written.
I've got news for you, my friend. If you've ever worked in a commercial software house you know that commercial software relies on people's good nature to get written. Why is this? It's human nature. Software development in a team, in a company is all about pissing contests, it's about who's ideas are going to get used, and seen to be used, who's going to get promoted, and thus not have to do real work like coding any more, and so on, and so forth, ad nauseum until you barf. That's the truth, can anybody tell me it isn't? So you see, in commercial development, there always has to be that one guy who doesn't give a sh*t, and just sits down and codes the thing until it's done, while everybody else plays musical chairs trying to be the guy that gets to move out of cubicle-land to the corner office.
In short, commercial software development seems to bring out the worst in people... now, if you have to rely on good nature, would you rather rely on open source, where the natural state of things is for people to be good natured because they're doing something satisfying, or... what?