It's possible this is true, but my point was that Bunny was released about a year ago, before this week's proclamation. I'm curious about why they made the rule, given that they've considered web-first flicks to be meritorious in the past, and that they gave one an award without accidentally burning Hollywood to the ground.
Blue Sky Studios won an Oscar for Bunny, a brilliant CGI short that, among other things, pioneered the use of radiosity in a short film. (It's been too expensive for use in anything but stills until now.) Now, anyone with a better memory than mine should correct me, but I believe Bunny was first distributed with RealPlayer. It was several weeks before it was accepted into Spike & Mike's Animation Festival, which would have been the first time anyone would get to see it in the cinema.
Incidentally, Bunny is an amazing film. Great animation, music, writing, metaphors. In contrast to the well-written, but decidedly child-oriented Disney/Pixar stuff, which is visually stunning but conceptually lightweight, Bunny was about death. Nice to see CGI being used for real art for a change.
So? If it weren't for the grandfather clause, would this great short film be disqualified? Has anyone seen any press recognize that this assinine `ruling' has already been violated?
Of course, this is just one more ploy by the mice--3-dimensional incarnations of superintelligent hyperdimensional aliens--to make us think that it is we who are experimenting on them, and not vice versa. =)
I know--it's really sad how little we learn our lessons. After all, even if £100,000 is cheap for a satellite (and maybe we could launch several in each rocket), wouldn't it have been an awful lot cheaper and more reliable if we'd been thinking about this since the 80s? If every satellite and booster had a remote-controlled system for ditching itself into the ocean, well, there would be a lot of crap in the ocean. =) But at least astronauts wouldn't have to live in fear of decapitation by space crap.
For all the naysayers above me who claim (among other things) that moving at the same speed in orbit is the same as moving at the same velocity, the dudes at Spacecamp told me that the shuttle usually comes back with several sizeable dents from orthogonal collisions with microscopic paint chips at relative speeds of 10,000 mph. The windshield is half a foot thick and made out of really expensive reinforced glass/plastic/metal/what-have-you, and there's still a significant risk of it getting smashed by a chunk of metal.
Humans' ability to fsck up environments seems to have increased geometrically. In less than 20 years of commercial space exploitation, we've managed to screw up a volume, not just an area of the world, to the point where things as ridiculous as £100,000 orbital garbage collectors have started to seem like `not such a bad idea'.
Nah; given the current Lego trend toward sets with a few specialized pieces that can't really be used anywhere else--as opposed to the original vision of building things out of hundreds of generic pieces--the Babbagestorm set would come with about 5 pieces that couldn't be used anywhere else.
Which is not to say that they've opened the specs for the 390's; they're only supporting a free OS on it. The 390 is still as closed as an Apple. =)
I agree with the grandparent of this post that I've underestimated the contributions of corporations. Specifically, AT&T did a lot of wonderful things between '75 and '85 with Unix, C, and C++. They knew then that some degree of openness was good. Sun could learn a lot from them with regards to Java.
I believe MIT and SAIL were the founding institutions for GUIs. The fact that corporations have made such things far more useful to the mainstream is not surprising. This is a fine process: universities and the government invent a technology, put it in the public domain, and corporations polish and market it. But since firms did not invent most of the technology, there is competition and wonderfulness. If Netscape had invented HTML, or Apple could patent the very idea of a GUI? The computer world would be in deeper shit than it is now.
Well, yes and no. Corporate sponsorship does seem to be the 'wave of the future', and corporations can generally do these sorts of things more cheaply than NASA. (And of course Radio Shack won't be using their own humiliating parts or employees in the rover, any more than my college cafeteria caters our fund-raising dinners.) However, as other posts have noted, there are often more strings attached than when the government initiates the research.
When are congress[wo]men going to remeber their history?! Everything is being privatized now, as a continuing legacy of Reagan's "dismantling government" platform. Certainly, government is being dismantled, but somehow it isn't getting any cheaper.
There are two ways to get research done: let a monopolistic behemoth bribe some academicians to work for them, so that the corporation can patent their ideas. Bell Labs, Microsoft Research, IBM. This is very expensive, because first you pay for the research when you buy their products, then you really pay for their research when you buy the exorbitantly priced patented product. The other way to get research done is to pay a smart kid to go to grad school. This is how all but a handful of the major advances in CS have been accomplished, and why they were all public domain until the patent-craze started a few years ago. (The other reason most advances are public domain is that patented ideas are quickly superceded by public ones.)
So, in the short term, I can see why it's tempting to think that Radio Shack and Lunacorp going to the moon is a good thing. We all want to see the space program continue, but NASA is so underfunded that all they can do is send the shuttle up and down, up and down.... But most of the technological advances that make 2000 different from 1960 were invented or improved by the space program--rubber, plastic, microprocessors, tennis shoes, etc.
I doubt these bozos are going to come up with anything comparable to the inventions of the space-race geniuses, but some corporation like them could. And unless the government starts filling in the gaps Reagan left behind, the next great advances will all be patented by corporations which could get unimaginably big and powerful, and patents will become as effectively permanent as copyrights today.
Believe me, this is not the solution. The next ARPANET will not be invented by RadioShack.
Back when I was a geek in swaddling clothes, I downloaded QNIX onto a 1.44M floppy and booted my 386 into it.
Quite impressive--they'd fit a Unixish kernel, a Win3.1-type GUI, a simple text editor, and a web browser, along with drivers for virtually any video, modem (they weren't very standardized back then), etc., onto a bootable disk.
These days, even FreeBSD gets a little bigger and its requirements get a little heftier with every version. It's nice to see a company keeping it lean.
I was interviewing with Microsoft last Spring, and they asked me what I thought of their $400 million investment in WebTV. I said I thought these investments were one-in-a-hundred payoffs, and that WebTV wasn't going to be the one--it would be one of the ninety-nine.
Big IT companies got where they are because they jumped on the new paradigm as it was getting big. IBM killed earlier competitors by understanding the mainframe market, MS and Compaq killed IBM by understanding the PC market, and there are a hundred examples in smaller niches of the IT industry. Big companies are understandably paranoid about being replaced (call it Zeus syndrome--he defeated Chronos, so he's paranoid about his own children).
The point is, buying into new technologies like set-top boxes and wireless hand-held devices, toaster-ovens with Fast Ethernet, etc., won't do you a bit of good before the market is ready for them. WebTV, AFAIK, is dying, largely because PC prices crashed right after MS's investment in WebTV. Who would buy a set-top box for $250 when you can get an eMachine for $400?
Which brings me to my real point: there's something compelling about PCs. They're big, heavy, until recently they were ugly and pricey, they are notoriously difficult to use, and they become expensively obsolete in two years. Why in the world do people continue to buy them?
The reason is this: the longer people own PCs, the less likely they are to switch to a stripped-down version like WebTV. Five years ago, when a PC cost $2000 and many people only used them for web, email, and simple word processing, a WebTV for $400 (the original price) would have been attractive. Now, PCs are much cheaper, and most people have become accustomed to some of the additional functionality--games, spreadsheets, low-end desktop publishing--that WebTV can't provide. Over the next few years, the market may become less amenable to cheap, stripped-down devices, because people will become more attached to the extra stuff they can do on a real PC.
Sun has been celebrating the death of PCs for a decade now, and it hasn't done them an ounce of good. Proclaiming the new era has been fashionable forever, and companies like to do it because it sooths their Jovian paranoia, but PCs are only becoming more ubiquitous. Until non-PCs are sufficiently small, cheap, intuitive, and functional that they can replace virtually everything we want in a PC while adding everything we want in a hand-held, desktops will remain entrenched.
"I'm pretty sure that I will do everything to avoid the media in the future, but if I'm forced to talk with them, I'll have to get them to sign an agreement."
In reading your interviews, I've been continually impressed by your poise and intelligence in dealing with the media. Certainly, the mainstream media have distorted this story even more than most technical stories, but your efforts to get the correct information out have been laudable. You've certainly done a lot better than I could imagine myself doing at 16. Are you certain you want to avoid the media when you have such potential as a spokesman?
This isn't inherent to all JITs and code-morphing techniques, but Java does take a performance hit from having much more heap allocation than some other languages. An article in SIGLANG last Spring detailed a Java byte-code compiler that got around this problem. The compiler checked each dynamically allocated object to see if any references could be made to it outside its code-block--this is easy: just check if it is returned from the block (as the value of a function, say), or if its address is stored in a variable of higher scope (i.e., a variable that will outlast the code block). If not, it is compiled as a stack allocation, rather than a heap allocation. This algorithm eliminated %90 of unnecessary heap allocations. The JIT (translating byte-code to machine code) was altered to allow stack allocations like C, and whammo!--a %10 performance increase on Pentiums. There are a few optimizations like this that require a compiler to be able to see much or all of the code at once, rather than doing repeated optimizing passes over small sections of code. I wonder if these compiler algorithms are hard to incorporate in code-morphing techniques? On another note, Java has a lot of performance/memory usage problems that are due more to things like the sandbox-security system, lots of indirection, and the compromises necessary for system-indepence. These problems won't affect a code-morpher that translates from one machine language to another.
I posted to/. a while ago that Apple is and will continue to be a hardware company--they make great hardware, and the OS has been nothing but a liability to them for a long time. Even Quicktime can't be making serious revenue for Apple. OS upgrades may have been a significant source of revenue for Apple, but with the new wave of great hardware from Apple, aren't virtually all copies of MacOS "bought" preinstalled? Apple should give up any attempt at making revenue from software, and use OSS to gain hardware market share, in desktops and servers.
Apple now has a decent OS which will actually be an asset, but it's based on publicly available code and knowledge. I imagine Darwin is a major improvement on the state of the art, but I also imagine that any good team of OS programmers could approach its quality, since BSD and Mach are public (correct me?).
They should just release the whole damn MacOS X. Sure, some people would port it to cheaper Intel hardware, costing Apple revenue, but most people would run MOSX on G3/G4 hardware, and MOSX would kick butt even more if it were open-source. Its OSS development would be particularly fast since a) most OSS developers are already familiar with Mach & BSD, and b) this is so political.
The various forks of MOSX would certainly be less Euro and slick-looking than Jobs would prefer--hackers like to see the guts of a system; Jobs thinks the wave of the future has its guts sealed up tight--but Apple can take the improvements it likes and preinstall it (with source) on the servers and desktops it sells, maintaining the MacOS facade.
IBM (a hardware company with a few impressive forays into software) has begun to realize that it needs to become a hardware & services company, and use software as a tool, not a source of revenue. This realization led them to undercut their own costly, revenue-generating Unices by selling Linux pre-installed as an option on their servers. IBM has done extremely well recently with these strategies, and they've turned themselves around from the most hated monopoly of the early 80s into a hacker-friendly open-systems company. Apple could learn a lesson.
First of all, I agree that what an average finger-growing mouse experiences is likely to pale in comparison to the trauma of the average Avon bunny. Second, it seems we've been making reasonable (read: technology viable in 20 years) progress on getting appendages to grow themselves using native DNA instructions, rather than having to organize the cells ourselves. This would eventually be the only viable solution. I seem to remember someone working on regeneration of limbs in mice (doubtless the most well-understood mammal, due to all the experimentation). If we can do this genetically/automatically, current research with cow cells will be less than useless. Still, impressive stuff. Hopefully we'll soon see eyeballs sold in storefronts, like in Neuromancer.
Really? Then corporate IT has more sense in its head than I thought. Thanks for the info. Well, ever since IBM threw its hat into the ring, a commitment to Linux has been a respectable move.
The only real threat to Linux's credibility are the recent benchmarks showing Linux doesn't scale up to the really monstrous machines as well as proprietary Unices or even (dag nabbit!) NT. Frankly, I believe that; we haven't had good access to the big machines. So, besides Sun and SGI, DEC makes the most monstrous machines available. Wouldn't be nice if they got Linux to the point where it beat, say, AIX at least?
Well, the usual homilies apply here: The future of heterogenous computing is with Open-Source Unices.
NT Alpha may be keeping the chip on life suport right now, but, even though NT is stalled in the server market, Xeons (running various OSen) are continuing to infiltrate at alarming rates. I have no serious feelings about one architecture vs. another, only that the more the better, and that the only way to protect open standards is with heterogenous networks. One way to do this is to revive Alpha, and it won't happen unless Alpha throws in its lot with Open Source. The proprietary Unices are nice, but nothing they can do will make them stand out in a twenty-year-old, saturated market.
If Alpha runs Linux and *BSD really nicely, on the other hand.... They need to do what Intel's doing, giving help to the open OSen, but in a much bigger way. I hope Compaq has the commitment to do this in their current, risk-averse environment.
Whew.... You're a little lost. Companies think they make money because they control:
Source code: Otherwise they can't sell software.
Hardware specs: Otherwise (they believe) other people will design clones.
Passwords: all attempts to sell information off the net rely either on passwords or moral exhortations not to distribute copies.
Know-how: This, together with source code, enables companies to make $1E8's from customer support. If it were all available for the taking (as with the Linux HOWTOs), you'd never pay for a call. (Redhat survives, of course, but only as a convenience, not a necessity.)
Patents: This one's pretty obvious.
Demographics: Spammers of the net, mail, and telephones sell each other information about you. Open source doesn't address this one, but it's part of the mindset.
Want more examples? I believe a free information society would look more radically different than a society in which physical goods cost nothing.
You have a good point: companies *do* have to be reactive to Linux unless they "give away" their knowledge to it. But Linux forces companies to be reactive because they don't control its information, and they can't buy out anyone who does.
AOL needn't be reactive to Netscape anymore because they can buy Netscape and hence have sole control of its information. Mozilla, on the other hand, can do whatever it wants, and AOL probably hates that.
Did you just happen to read that in the jargon file ("You know you've been hacking too long when...") and think no one on/. reads the file, or are you one of the people ESR cites as living proof of this tendency? (When he first wrote it, he thought he was making it up.)
Well, look at MS, IBM, Dell.... Every IT company insanely overextends itself as quickly as possible, particularly any company involved in the internet. Consumers and client corporations are too stupid to wait for technologies to mature, so, in the words of an InfoWorld columnist, "being the first in any IT specialty will virtually guarantee you a 50% market share for the next three years." Should I take my 2,000-subscriber ISP, borrow $5 billion, hire a bunch of software and hardware engineers, and try to become the next DEC? Sure, why not?
Overextension generally leads to poor software, little-to-no customer service, and enormous profits. Companies that stay small and create great software (Symantec and Corel, for example) create wonderful products and get bulldozed.
What OS were the columnists considering for a set-top box that would have fewer requirements than Linux? They rightly mention that Java has high memory & processor requirements. (Sun's proverbial "toaster" applications won't run Java until the average toaster has a P100 and 8 megs.) But surely no journalist would think that Linux is more demanding than, say, any embedded OS Microsoft could come up with?
"...but Microsoft's position seems tenuous." Right, so why do most people back down? Why don't we sue Al Gore for using 'Open Source', and stand up for ourselves when M$ challenges a parody?
As has been said on/. many times before, a parody is one of the most protected forms of speech. I don't know what German law is like, or whether German, US, or international laws apply, but the point is, we're wimping out on the slander issue.
To harp on another favorite subject of ours, would a legal fund help us feel our backbone a little more? It wouldn't take an expensive lawyer to defend linux.de; in fact, if they hadn't backed down, M$ probably wouldn't have the balls to sue anyway--they'd lose.
On the one hand, huge companies with large legal staffs (who therefore don't pay anything significant to use their lawyers) can kill little people by sueing them to death.
On the other hand, particularly these days in our litigious society dominated by corporations richer than most countries, courts are quite likely to award legal fees to the winner. Thus, many extremely good law firms will take up a little person's case (plaintiff or defendant) for free, hoping to be repaid if/when they win.
So which is it? If Microsoft sues me tomorrow for slander because I told my girlfriend I hate Windows, besides the prospects for summary judgement, what defense do I have? Will I be able to find a firm that won't charge me anything to lose, or could I go bankrupt defending myself from spurious charges? Any corporate lawyers out there? =) J.
Oy--ignorance. Their first & second shorts were, I think, "Tricycle dreams" (don't quote me on that one) and "Luxo Jr.". The best short last year was Pixar's "Jerry's Game". The first two are available on one tape, the third on a separate tape; all cost about $20 and are available from pixar.com
Being a RISC fan, I'll believe that a PPC 400 Mhz chip is faster than a Pentium II 450; plus, we don't know about hard drives, memory, etc. And which Linux? Kernel 1.0? =)
I've downloaded, used, and erased Opera every six months since 1.3 or whatever. It's always been faster than Netscape or Internet Extorter, but it still crashed constantly--usually a clean crash, unlike IE or Navigator, but still....
Have they cleaned up their act? Are they fast *and* stable now?
For what it's worth (.02?) I always thought that C++ is great, and that those who think it's too complicated are weenies. It's the only popular language to have a full OO implementation--that is, it supports multiple inheritance, interfaces (in the form of abstract classes), operator overloading, RTTI, and friend classes and functions. Furthermore, C++ preserves the legacy of C by allowing inline functions to avoid the overhead usually associated with OOP's myriad function calls. VB, Java, even SmallTalk, and doubtless COOL all skip these features because they're deemed too complicated, and they all stay marginal compared to C/C++'s dominance.
There will always be RAD, and there will always be some C-like system programming language. As computers get more powerful and real programmers more expensive, companies increasingly try to pass off RAD prototypes written in prototyping languages like VB as full applications. One of the things that makes Linux go fast is that it has a commendable lack of core components written in anything but C.
IMNSHO, C++ is the only language that does not force the programmer to sacrifice speed for the sake of OO design. Most programming languages try to prevent direct access to pointer arithmetic, which is why they're slow and inflexible. Done now. =)
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It's possible this is true, but my point was that Bunny was released about a year ago, before this week's proclamation. I'm curious about why they made the rule, given that they've considered web-first flicks to be meritorious in the past, and that they gave one an award without accidentally burning Hollywood to the ground.
Incidentally, Bunny is an amazing film. Great animation, music, writing, metaphors. In contrast to the well-written, but decidedly child-oriented Disney/Pixar stuff, which is visually stunning but conceptually lightweight, Bunny was about death. Nice to see CGI being used for real art for a change.
So? If it weren't for the grandfather clause, would this great short film be disqualified? Has anyone seen any press recognize that this assinine `ruling' has already been violated?
Of course, this is just one more ploy by the mice--3-dimensional incarnations of superintelligent hyperdimensional aliens--to make us think that it is we who are experimenting on them, and not vice versa. =)
For all the naysayers above me who claim (among other things) that moving at the same speed in orbit is the same as moving at the same velocity, the dudes at Spacecamp told me that the shuttle usually comes back with several sizeable dents from orthogonal collisions with microscopic paint chips at relative speeds of 10,000 mph. The windshield is half a foot thick and made out of really expensive reinforced glass/plastic/metal/what-have-you, and there's still a significant risk of it getting smashed by a chunk of metal.
Humans' ability to fsck up environments seems to have increased geometrically. In less than 20 years of commercial space exploitation, we've managed to screw up a volume, not just an area of the world, to the point where things as ridiculous as £100,000 orbital garbage collectors have started to seem like `not such a bad idea'.
Sigh. My children are going to be angry at me.
Nah; given the current Lego trend toward sets with a few specialized pieces that can't really be used anywhere else--as opposed to the original vision of building things out of hundreds of generic pieces--the Babbagestorm set would come with about 5 pieces that couldn't be used anywhere else.
I agree with the grandparent of this post that I've underestimated the contributions of corporations. Specifically, AT&T did a lot of wonderful things between '75 and '85 with Unix, C, and C++. They knew then that some degree of openness was good. Sun could learn a lot from them with regards to Java.
I believe MIT and SAIL were the founding institutions for GUIs. The fact that corporations have made such things far more useful to the mainstream is not surprising. This is a fine process: universities and the government invent a technology, put it in the public domain, and corporations polish and market it. But since firms did not invent most of the technology, there is competition and wonderfulness. If Netscape had invented HTML, or Apple could patent the very idea of a GUI? The computer world would be in deeper shit than it is now.
When are congress[wo]men going to remeber their history?! Everything is being privatized now, as a continuing legacy of Reagan's "dismantling government" platform. Certainly, government is being dismantled, but somehow it isn't getting any cheaper.
There are two ways to get research done: let a monopolistic behemoth bribe some academicians to work for them, so that the corporation can patent their ideas. Bell Labs, Microsoft Research, IBM. This is very expensive, because first you pay for the research when you buy their products, then you really pay for their research when you buy the exorbitantly priced patented product. The other way to get research done is to pay a smart kid to go to grad school. This is how all but a handful of the major advances in CS have been accomplished, and why they were all public domain until the patent-craze started a few years ago. (The other reason most advances are public domain is that patented ideas are quickly superceded by public ones.)
So, in the short term, I can see why it's tempting to think that Radio Shack and Lunacorp going to the moon is a good thing. We all want to see the space program continue, but NASA is so underfunded that all they can do is send the shuttle up and down, up and down.... But most of the technological advances that make 2000 different from 1960 were invented or improved by the space program--rubber, plastic, microprocessors, tennis shoes, etc.
I doubt these bozos are going to come up with anything comparable to the inventions of the space-race geniuses, but some corporation like them could. And unless the government starts filling in the gaps Reagan left behind, the next great advances will all be patented by corporations which could get unimaginably big and powerful, and patents will become as effectively permanent as copyrights today.
Believe me, this is not the solution. The next ARPANET will not be invented by RadioShack.
Quite impressive--they'd fit a Unixish kernel, a Win3.1-type GUI, a simple text editor, and a web browser, along with drivers for virtually any video, modem (they weren't very standardized back then), etc., onto a bootable disk.
These days, even FreeBSD gets a little bigger and its requirements get a little heftier with every version. It's nice to see a company keeping it lean.
Big IT companies got where they are because they jumped on the new paradigm as it was getting big. IBM killed earlier competitors by understanding the mainframe market, MS and Compaq killed IBM by understanding the PC market, and there are a hundred examples in smaller niches of the IT industry. Big companies are understandably paranoid about being replaced (call it Zeus syndrome--he defeated Chronos, so he's paranoid about his own children).
The point is, buying into new technologies like set-top boxes and wireless hand-held devices, toaster-ovens with Fast Ethernet, etc., won't do you a bit of good before the market is ready for them. WebTV, AFAIK, is dying, largely because PC prices crashed right after MS's investment in WebTV. Who would buy a set-top box for $250 when you can get an eMachine for $400?
Which brings me to my real point: there's something compelling about PCs. They're big, heavy, until recently they were ugly and pricey, they are notoriously difficult to use, and they become expensively obsolete in two years. Why in the world do people continue to buy them?
The reason is this: the longer people own PCs, the less likely they are to switch to a stripped-down version like WebTV. Five years ago, when a PC cost $2000 and many people only used them for web, email, and simple word processing, a WebTV for $400 (the original price) would have been attractive. Now, PCs are much cheaper, and most people have become accustomed to some of the additional functionality--games, spreadsheets, low-end desktop publishing--that WebTV can't provide. Over the next few years, the market may become less amenable to cheap, stripped-down devices, because people will become more attached to the extra stuff they can do on a real PC.
Sun has been celebrating the death of PCs for a decade now, and it hasn't done them an ounce of good. Proclaiming the new era has been fashionable forever, and companies like to do it because it sooths their Jovian paranoia, but PCs are only becoming more ubiquitous. Until non-PCs are sufficiently small, cheap, intuitive, and functional that they can replace virtually everything we want in a PC while adding everything we want in a hand-held, desktops will remain entrenched.
You're quoted on the LiViD site as saying:
In reading your interviews, I've been continually impressed by your poise and intelligence in dealing with the media. Certainly, the mainstream media have distorted this story even more than most technical stories, but your efforts to get the correct information out have been laudable. You've certainly done a lot better than I could imagine myself doing at 16. Are you certain you want to avoid the media when you have such potential as a spokesman?
This isn't inherent to all JITs and code-morphing techniques, but Java does take a performance hit from having much more heap allocation than some other languages. An article in SIGLANG last Spring detailed a Java byte-code compiler that got around this problem. The compiler checked each dynamically allocated object to see if any references could be made to it outside its code-block--this is easy: just check if it is returned from the block (as the value of a function, say), or if its address is stored in a variable of higher scope (i.e., a variable that will outlast the code block). If not, it is compiled as a stack allocation, rather than a heap allocation. This algorithm eliminated %90 of unnecessary heap allocations. The JIT (translating byte-code to machine code) was altered to allow stack allocations like C, and whammo!--a %10 performance increase on Pentiums. There are a few optimizations like this that require a compiler to be able to see much or all of the code at once, rather than doing repeated optimizing passes over small sections of code. I wonder if these compiler algorithms are hard to incorporate in code-morphing techniques? On another note, Java has a lot of performance/memory usage problems that are due more to things like the sandbox-security system, lots of indirection, and the compromises necessary for system-indepence. These problems won't affect a code-morpher that translates from one machine language to another.
Apple now has a decent OS which will actually be an asset, but it's based on publicly available code and knowledge. I imagine Darwin is a major improvement on the state of the art, but I also imagine that any good team of OS programmers could approach its quality, since BSD and Mach are public (correct me?).
They should just release the whole damn MacOS X. Sure, some people would port it to cheaper Intel hardware, costing Apple revenue, but most people would run MOSX on G3/G4 hardware, and MOSX would kick butt even more if it were open-source. Its OSS development would be particularly fast since a) most OSS developers are already familiar with Mach & BSD, and b) this is so political.
The various forks of MOSX would certainly be less Euro and slick-looking than Jobs would prefer--hackers like to see the guts of a system; Jobs thinks the wave of the future has its guts sealed up tight--but Apple can take the improvements it likes and preinstall it (with source) on the servers and desktops it sells, maintaining the MacOS facade.
IBM (a hardware company with a few impressive forays into software) has begun to realize that it needs to become a hardware & services company, and use software as a tool, not a source of revenue. This realization led them to undercut their own costly, revenue-generating Unices by selling Linux pre-installed as an option on their servers. IBM has done extremely well recently with these strategies, and they've turned themselves around from the most hated monopoly of the early 80s into a hacker-friendly open-systems company. Apple could learn a lesson.
First of all, I agree that what an average finger-growing mouse experiences is likely to pale in comparison to the trauma of the average Avon bunny. Second, it seems we've been making reasonable (read: technology viable in 20 years) progress on getting appendages to grow themselves using native DNA instructions, rather than having to organize the cells ourselves. This would eventually be the only viable solution. I seem to remember someone working on regeneration of limbs in mice (doubtless the most well-understood mammal, due to all the experimentation). If we can do this genetically/automatically, current research with cow cells will be less than useless. Still, impressive stuff. Hopefully we'll soon see eyeballs sold in storefronts, like in Neuromancer.
The only real threat to Linux's credibility are the recent benchmarks showing Linux doesn't scale up to the really monstrous machines as well as proprietary Unices or even (dag nabbit!) NT. Frankly, I believe that; we haven't had good access to the big machines. So, besides Sun and SGI, DEC makes the most monstrous machines available. Wouldn't be nice if they got Linux to the point where it beat, say, AIX at least?
NT Alpha may be keeping the chip on life suport right now, but, even though NT is stalled in the server market, Xeons (running various OSen) are continuing to infiltrate at alarming rates. I have no serious feelings about one architecture vs. another, only that the more the better, and that the only way to protect open standards is with heterogenous networks. One way to do this is to revive Alpha, and it won't happen unless Alpha throws in its lot with Open Source. The proprietary Unices are nice, but nothing they can do will make them stand out in a twenty-year-old, saturated market.
If Alpha runs Linux and *BSD really nicely, on the other hand.... They need to do what Intel's doing, giving help to the open OSen, but in a much bigger way. I hope Compaq has the commitment to do this in their current, risk-averse environment.
Whew.... You're a little lost. Companies think they make money because they control:
Source code: Otherwise they can't sell software.
Hardware specs: Otherwise (they believe) other people will design clones.
Passwords: all attempts to sell information off the net rely either on passwords or moral exhortations not to distribute copies.
Know-how: This, together with source code, enables companies to make $1E8's from customer support. If it were all available for the taking (as with the Linux HOWTOs), you'd never pay for a call. (Redhat survives, of course, but only as a convenience, not a necessity.)
Patents: This one's pretty obvious.
Demographics: Spammers of the net, mail, and telephones sell each other information about you. Open source doesn't address this one, but it's part of the mindset.
Want more examples? I believe a free information society would look more radically different than a society in which physical goods cost nothing.
You have a good point: companies *do* have to be reactive to Linux unless they "give away" their knowledge to it. But Linux forces companies to be reactive because they don't control its information, and they can't buy out anyone who does.
AOL needn't be reactive to Netscape anymore because they can buy Netscape and hence have sole control of its information. Mozilla, on the other hand, can do whatever it wants, and AOL probably hates that.
Jesse.
Did you just happen to read that in the jargon file ("You know you've been hacking too long when...") and think no one on /. reads the file, or are you one of the people ESR cites as living proof of this tendency? (When he first wrote it, he thought he was making it up.)
Overextension generally leads to poor software, little-to-no customer service, and enormous profits. Companies that stay small and create great software (Symantec and Corel, for example) create wonderful products and get bulldozed.
What OS were the columnists considering for a set-top box that would have fewer requirements than Linux? They rightly mention that Java has high memory & processor requirements. (Sun's proverbial "toaster" applications won't run Java until the average toaster has a P100 and 8 megs.) But surely no journalist would think that Linux is more demanding than, say, any embedded OS Microsoft could come up with?
As has been said on /. many times before, a parody is one of the most protected forms of speech. I don't know what German law is like, or whether German, US, or international laws apply, but the point is, we're wimping out on the slander issue.
To harp on another favorite subject of ours, would a legal fund help us feel our backbone a little more? It wouldn't take an expensive lawyer to defend linux.de; in fact, if they hadn't backed down, M$ probably wouldn't have the balls to sue anyway--they'd lose.
On the one hand, huge companies with large legal staffs (who therefore don't pay anything significant to use their lawyers) can kill little people by sueing them to death.
On the other hand, particularly these days in our litigious society dominated by corporations richer than most countries, courts are quite likely to award legal fees to the winner. Thus, many extremely good law firms will take up a little person's case (plaintiff or defendant) for free, hoping to be repaid if/when they win.
So which is it? If Microsoft sues me tomorrow for slander because I told my girlfriend I hate Windows, besides the prospects for summary judgement, what defense do I have? Will I be able to find a firm that won't charge me anything to lose, or could I go bankrupt defending myself from spurious charges? Any corporate lawyers out there? =) J.
Oy--ignorance. Their first & second shorts were, I think, "Tricycle dreams" (don't quote me on that one) and "Luxo Jr.". The best short last year was Pixar's "Jerry's Game". The first two are available on one tape, the third on a separate tape; all cost about $20 and are available from pixar.com
Being a RISC fan, I'll believe that a PPC 400 Mhz chip is faster than a Pentium II 450; plus, we don't know about hard drives, memory, etc. And which Linux? Kernel 1.0? =)
I've downloaded, used, and erased Opera every six months since 1.3 or whatever. It's always been faster than Netscape or Internet Extorter, but it still crashed constantly--usually a clean crash, unlike IE or Navigator, but still....
Have they cleaned up their act? Are they fast *and* stable now?
For what it's worth (.02?) I always thought that C++ is great, and that those who think it's too complicated are weenies. It's the only popular language to have a full OO implementation--that is, it supports multiple inheritance, interfaces (in the form of abstract classes), operator overloading, RTTI, and friend classes and functions. Furthermore, C++ preserves the legacy of C by allowing inline functions to avoid the overhead usually associated with OOP's myriad function calls. VB, Java, even SmallTalk, and doubtless COOL all skip these features because they're deemed too complicated, and they all stay marginal compared to C/C++'s dominance.
There will always be RAD, and there will always be some C-like system programming language. As computers get more powerful and real programmers more expensive, companies increasingly try to pass off RAD prototypes written in prototyping languages like VB as full applications. One of the things that makes Linux go fast is that it has a commendable lack of core components written in anything but C.
IMNSHO, C++ is the only language that does not force the programmer to sacrifice speed for the sake of OO design. Most programming languages try to prevent direct access to pointer arithmetic, which is why they're slow and inflexible.
Done now. =)