They could have done better. If they didn't say it was in a handheld device it would be far more believable. If anyone is patient enough and willing to put the man hours (man decades) into arranging a quantum computer capable of doing it, I would expect it to be the US military or the Israelis. Just making the device would be an incredible challenge and accomplishment, even in a near absolute zero vacuum chamber where you could realistically manipulate single atoms. Putting it in to a handheld device is alien technology, it's startrek, it's not possible now.
I would upgrade my 512bit keys to at least 1024 if not 2048bits but I wouldn't worry about this.
"Iceage" would make a much more entertaining movie than Jurassic park was..
I'd like to see mamoths, sabre toothed cats, some of those horse/elephant type beasts they had there for a while, maybe some neaderethals (you know, the cats need to eat their natural food..)
Since it's under the Sun community license, this doesn't mean much. It probably wouldn't mean much even if it was truly free.
It will be interesting to see the solaris internals, I've heard all sorts of rumors about the quality of the code. I'm also curious about the implications of cross polination. With xBSD and Linux, there is some code sharing and the kernels are different but for the most part they perform very similar. I'm not trying to start a war here but BSD had the same problems that held linux back in the mindcraft study. To really see a difference you have to run a pretty extreme environment and even then I think a lot of Linux people are of the opinion that linux can be tuned to operate similarly to BSD. There really just isn't a lot for linux to take from BSD and drivers and hardware support are what BSD can take the most of from linux.
Solaris is a different beast, it is a known performer on the highend. I don't know if they use a single kernel for all solari or if a 64-way server kernel will be "open sourced" but SMP and multiprocessing have to be one of the key areas where BSD and linux could potentially benefit from Solaris. Now it is probably illegal, I haven't read the license but I know that we couldn't simply drop Sun code into Linux or BSD but they could potentially give us a road map to highend scalability. Who do they sue if we were to emulate their code?
I'm not going to defend him or defend his ideas but there is something that's worth pointing out. As a society and probably even as species, our psychology has changed. 55 years ago we couldn't destroy ourselves. Now we can. When Teller was born, humans didn't have that capability. We've grown up not just knowing about it, some people grew up with nightmares about it (in some places they made you do bomb drills at school!) and with it implicitly labeled as evil. We even second guess the actions which ended WWII in Japan, which is good so that we can learn from what we've done but shouldn't and can't pass judgement on those actions simply because we have such a different perspective and the benefit of hindsight. We think differently now.
Then when you think of something like nuclear excavating, it sounds like an absolutely insane idea. You think of fallout, radiation contamination, etc.. Teller's job for a good portion of his career was to make nuclear bombs more dangerous and more deadly. There are bombs with low radiation and very low fallout, there are also bombs that use special isotopes (salt bombs) that have less explosive power but have extended levels of radiation and fallout that lasts for milleniums. We probably have bombs now that have such diminised radioactive effects that you couldn't tell if it was nuclear or conventional the next day. We already know that these nuclear weapons were built, we just don't know how many (look at the w70 warhead.) At that point, you're practically excavating with TNT, aren't you? It's still not a very comfortable idea, I certainly don't want them doing that anywhere near me, but I don't think Teller was insane.
He's just got a much different perspective, we've been raised to believe everything nuclear is evil. He made a career out of harnessing the power of it all. Are you convinced that there is absolutley no peaceful use of nuclear weapons? I respect for at least trying to find some.
I was a great OS/2 user and advocate at one time. I still love WPS. I do think that this is for the best though.
IBM let some large customers dictate OS/2 design and destiny. That compromised its integrity. There are PM bugs that had to be propagated because of backward compatibility. There are input queue defects that were never fixed becuase of compatibility. The clean API and robustness came into question. To be a good OS/2 programmer you had to be an "OS/2 hacker" not a hacker but a specific type of hacker that knew the tricks of OS/2. A clean API doesn't mean anything if there are special cases.
I left when I noticed that getting OS/2 apps built wasn't as important as porting GPLed apps, X based apps and doing ports of windows apps. IBM never supported the OS/2 developer community and didn't even provide compilers for a long time, all while paying some companies to port applications while not even acknowledging others. It couldn't take off. You have to support yourself, OS/2 was wonderful at running windows and DOS applications but that isn't enough.
IBM used too many things from too many different people, it will never be opensourced or GPLed simply because of the legal complexity. There isn't enough money to replace the parts MS owns. This is something that is currently being investigated within IBM, there are a lot of products which simply cannot be opensourced for that reason.
It's sad but I can't say it wasn't comming. On the other hand, we've learned a tremendous amount from it. I think that Linux is on an unstoppable course, it's developer friendly and rich, it has a community of users and believers who get things done with or without the help of others (no relying on WinOS2 here...) and KDE and GNOME are going places IBM never made it with WPS and OpenDoc. Give it another year or two and you won't miss WPS at all. Plus being part of the linux community is about 100x better than anything I ever experienced on OS/2, the OS/2 community acted like they were the underdogs and couldn't change it. Linux is going to change the rules before the community admits defeat. How's that expression go? The king is dead, God save the king... If you've been using OS/2 a lot then you probably use a lot of GNU stuff already, you're ready for it.
I thought SPARC was pretty open before. Same with PowerPC, Sun and IBM will give the the masks and schematics, it will just cost you some money. The thing is that you need to have a whole lot more money to actually make use of them. It cost somehting but it was still quite reasonable compared to some other deals. (try getting pentium3 masks, IBM used to get Intel's masks because IBM fabbed most of Intel's chips and traded patents with them, try doing it without that)
I think this stuff is good, I want to say that clearly. I also think it's a PR thing trying to ride the Linux wave. Years ago, you published your specs and standards and your design took off (IBM and the PC/AT ISA) you want to milk it for some money but that was the general scheme (IBM had some BIOS issues as I recall but everything else was pretty much out in the open.) MS stepped in and changed the rules a bit, they would flood the market with cheap software (I much have got 5 free windows 3.x licenses from MS. I own 3 compilers that I've never paid them for, among other things) establish market dominance and then jab you down the road when nobody can challenge your authority.
IBM and Sun are placed in a situation where they have spent billions developing great products and they can't move them because Intel owns the industry, for the most part. They are doing the only thing that they can do without quitting, they are making it easier to use their products. You build a PowerPC motherboard, you're going to buy chips from IBM and motorola, or you're going to fab your own and your going to pay IBM to do it. Same with Sparc, you build a sparc and you're probably going to put solaris on it, sell a few of them and your users are going to buy a faster sparc in a few years and sun is going to sell that.
This is good stuff, it's pro-competition but it's still just and means to and end. I'd like to believe that IBM and Sun would run the world differently if they were in Intel's shoes but I'm not convinced. As it stands, I have yet to see an affordable PowerPC motherboard on sale. (by affordable I mean in line with an sx164, which can still be pricey, let alone Pentium motherboard prices.)
I bought the $50 single user edition from them because I liked it and it did stuff I needed to get done. Sure there was the free/non-free thing but I was buying a piece of Linux software and I happen to think it's a pretty good one, not perfect but pretty good.
What has always rubbed me wrong was that I paid $50 and got just a little bit more than you get for free, a cute little book, a bunch of fonts and clipart, and a CD. If I paid $200 more, I'd get a few extra components, is Sun giving those away? If I download another copy from sun do I get more stuff? That would be an improvement.
Honestly though, SO will never be opensource and it will eventually suffer because of that. GNOME workbench and KOffice will mature and they will integrate so nicely that they will be the choice products. SO never will so long as the source is kept private and Sun runs the show, but it's a nice stop-gap solution.
Re:The Viability of Be and Linux
on
Be on the G4
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· Score: 1
- Very Good stability. I've had it crash occasionally, but only when I run it completely out of memory. Don't do that and you're at Linux levels of stability.
Your point is good but there is something else. My non-experimental Linux (stable kernel, even number, no "Nelson patches" or experimental stuff) has never crashed. There isn't any thin ice to avoid. OS/2 was like that. If I avoided a few WPS operations, the thing would run forever. There were a few things that would lock it up though. It's like being in prison, sure it's minimum security and you can play golf but if you walk too close to the fence you might get shot. It's extremely liberating to not worry about anything crashing the system.
- Superior multitasking - I find it a much smoother system than Linux.
BeOS does feel nice. I'm not sure that is multitasks any better than anything else but it certainly looks like it does and the GUI feels smooth. They did the right thing in this respect. OS/2 and Linux both can suffer from poor GUI performance during mutlitasking, OS/2 won a lot of benchmarks and was understood to be better than Windows but it didn't look good when you click and then wait a second for something to get painted on the screen, even though the work was happening. User perception is important here and BeOS is great at it.
- If you know C++, the API is said to be fantastic.
It's nice but it's not any better than any other I've used. At least not dramatically. MFC is nice to use. QT is nice. GTK+ is nice. BeOS is nice. It's not compelling enough to make me rank it above another.
- Cool applications like e-Picture and GoBe Productive make me think the platform has a good long-term future - despite all the "No Apps!" noises, they are coming, and what's there is great. Apps tend to have an original, well-throught out flair which I find very endearing. They still aren't as full featured as Microsoft Word and Excel, but who uses all those features, anyway?
OS/2 had a lot of applications. Mainstreet is important. With OS/2 or BeOS you're pretty much guaranteed to not be on it. Whether or not you can work matters but it only matters to people who are already sold on the platform. It doesn't bring new users in. There is a huge difference between filling a void for a group of users and creating a value for non-users. ABM is the only reason to really run out and get Be right now and even then Linux has far more users and far more support, you have to get frustrated with the learning curve before you dive on to Be from linux.
- No released version of Netscape yet. Opera is out and works well, but you have to pay to use it past 30 days.
No version of netscape ever, at this point. BeZilla will be a reality but netscape never will.
No java and the core group of users don't seem to be programmers are two other problems I see. Be's got a tough road but they can make themselves relevent. They've got incredibly loyal followers (they are pretty much just believers at this point, there are a lot of Be claims that have never been tested yet, a la mindcraft) and they seem to be getting an inordinant amount of media support despite their low sales, alternatives to MS are hip and Be is riding that wave well. I hope the new politics of being a public company don't destroy their chances, they were in a tight spot and needed money to keep going but now they have to produce something.
But JLG's holding is in stock that had no value prior to the IPO. Intel fronted real cash.
It's a presumtion to assume that Intel is calling shots (although it seems entirely reasonable since they did have cash and Be is operating at a loss) but it's not because JLG has more power in the situation.
JLG's out to make money off the deal, just like Intel. They are both doing th best thing in that interest by only supporting x86. They just don't have the resources to support more than that. Being a Be user sucked quite a bit when the software community was split between two different platforms, there was always something I wanted that only ran on the other platform. If they get big or if they decide to focus on set-top-boxes (a very real possibility come two or three losing quarters with no rise in stock price) they should then return to multiplatform focus.
Is it that they are still as arrogant as ever or do they really want to be relegated to one of the fringe zelot groups like Amiga, Be, and OS/2?
Linux and the OSS and freedomware communities have enough zelots as it is, fortunately Linux has gained enough popularity to get over that. What was intended with that article? Sounds like arrogance or jeolousy to me, it's unfortunate because some of the BSDs have tremendous potential but they will never make an in roads with that attitude. They like to say that their community is more intelligent and more informed on the whole but that just got proved wrong, they are no different than any of the others.
This has been to court before. It's not your's, then you don't have privacy or the expectation of it. Most employers will state that. In some rare circumstance you might be able to pull something off (like they find out that you are homosexual from an email and then fire you, if they never told you that the email might be monitored. Even then I wouldn't bet on it.)
You've got to be kidding if you think this is an invasion of privacy. When you started working there they told you about using corporate equipment for things. There is a degree of trust and respect, you call your wife from work and talk to her about dinner or weekend plans. You send emails to your friends from time to time. Porn is a perfectly reasonable place to draw that line, it can be sexual harassment, and it can invade the privacy of people who accidentally see it.
The alternative is to start your own company, buy your own hardware, hire your own people and the let them do whatever they want. And then deal with the work place harassment suit when a female employee sues you. We're talking about the bottom level of professionalism here, we're not talking about peering into people's private lives. If you want to view porn then do it privately, not in your place of business.
They're catering to the vi crowd...;) who else could the possibly be after?
While on this subject, has anyone got used the xemacs widget for much? I keep thinking that if it had a GTK+ wrapper, and it plugged in with glade or gIDE or something it would be pretty much unstoppable.
OTP is provably secure, if used properly. Use a pad twice and it's not just insecure, but it's almost completely insecure.. Conventional block ciphers and stream ciphers suffer from weaknesses but they are usually only partial weaknesses.
If you've got important data, a good source of random bits, and the discipline to use it, OTP is unbeatable. For most of us something like PGP is plenty, (or GPG, when are they going to plug RSA in? on my birthday next year?)
In some circles, the belief is that the outside world has caught up with NSA technology, I've heard more than one well known cryptographer make that statement, it's really just an issue of funding. NSA can build bigger and faster computers but there is a level where that doesn't add up to much. RSA (800+bit) and 3DES are most likely secure beyond your lifetime..
How come these people spend more time making defensive moves like this instead of progressing and coming up with new techniques to investigate with? They can't read your email so they propose ways to make it less secure. They missed the boat, they need to plan for an era where electronic transimitions are protected and useless to them. Imagine if intel pulled this crap? They sue MS to keep them from publishing software that runs slow on their chips instead of making faster chips...
This is an interesting law though. They aren't proposing that anything be weakened (read: learn how to secure a box and learn some encryption) they are just proposing that the government be allowed to crack in to your computer, unannounced, with a "sealed warrant" and look around. It sounds like they think they are pretty good if you ask me. Then, if you've not done anything wrong, you would potentially never know about the intrusion. (or on the otherhand, if you're breaking one law and they get a sealed warrant because they think you're breaking another law and they find evidence for the first crime they can go get another sealed warrant and then gather evidence and you never knew why they suspected you in the first place)
I think this is just more good news. For the time being, neither alpha or PowerPC are going to be your average geek's machine, let alone you average user but the competition is good.
IBM and Motorola are in a curious position, they have developed a good modern highend processor but because of the cost factors associated with PCs today they are having trouble pushing as many as they'd like. Likewise both have invested enough and depend enough on the architecture that they can't kill it. Free specs and cheap mobos only bodes well.
Look at the netdriver, very cool, very sexy, very expensive for what you get. If they could cut a few hundred dollars off the price, you'd have a top notch internet appliance, a serious iMac competitor. I think the rationale from IBM could be one of two things, it could be good will, they had something they didn't need so they went public with it or it could also be that they think that if PPC mobos drop in cost enough they believe that they can compete with Intel and AMD on a manufacturing cost basis and as PCs continue to drop in cost the freeness of linux will begin to play a huge factor.
If you're building linux based internet appliances, hardware cost is you only problem. They are already committed to making more and better processors and will be for some time to come. It's a good move on their part and I think the community will benefit too. If I could buy a PowerPC chip and mobo for just a little more than an Intel, I'd probably do it.
I disagree, RISC is significantly different than CISC and it has proven itself to be so much better that x86 is copying it.
The main difference now is that RISC chips generally won't let you do things like add from a location in memory without loading the value at that location first and x86 will still let you do that. If you want to write fast x86 code you will write it like you would write RISC code. The philosophies are very different still. Intel has just been good at adopting the ideas that IBM, Mips and DEC put out first.
What RISC and CISC don't mean is a way to measure performance, that's why the marketeers use it but most users and probably even a lot of programmers don't know and don't need to know the differences.
Is any politican going to ever wake up and realize that it's the 1990's and almost the 21st century? They've been trying to put "the reds" in Cuba under for years with this type of law. You've got no control over the link, what if slashdot posted a "buy your bong at xyz" would we all be breaking the law? It would be far more sound to attack the owners of websites that post the information in the first place, not that that isn't stupid also.
The cybersquaters bill sounds much more reasonable and overdue but it's not without problems. Can I protect my corporate image by registering extra domains that are similar? How far does that protection go? Can I be anticompetitive with it? American culture is so slanted toward lawsuits and making bucks in court that I can only respect the attempt that this bill is making but I hope it's not vague.
Isn't staroffice written in their starbasic or what ever their custom language is?
I was under that impression, it makes a lot of sense if you're making something as complicated as StarOffice and you're planning on supporting a bunch of platforms.
Windows out performs linux at what? And how does beos perform at that?
It remains to be seen if beos can out perform linux or windows. I'd also watch out for future developments from apple, they've got a great foundation to build on right now, they may tie that media market up for a long time to come.
What specifically allows them to work with newer hardware better? In the days of windows hardware I'd guess that anything unMS has less of a chance of working with newer hardware.
GUI also don't sell computers
Be's future is in set top and low end hardware if their smart. That's a virgin market ripe for the taking and BeOS can do that job wonderfully, no question about that.
I want AMD to do well as much as the next guy, but it's not like this is an aggressive anti-comptetitive measure. It's a price cut. They are supposed to be competitors. How come the negative conotation was used?
I think it just makes good business sense for Borland to port Delphi and JBuiler to other platforms, they simply can't compete on Windows anymore outside of a few niches. That means linux
On the other hand, the Free software community has done very well for itself in terms of development tools. I can't think of anything we're really lacking that Borland provides. Sure there are somethings but in general, there aren't too many if any development tasks you can't get done already. That leaves me wondering where Delphi, JBuilder, IBM's Visual Age compilers, etc.. all fit in to the linux infrastructure. It provides an attractive option for ISVs who demand support but most OSS/FS projects, if not all, will still use GCC.
I would like to play with Delphi on linux, especially if it can build GTK+ or QT GUIs but I'm not sure I'd shell out the $200 for it and I can't say I know a lot of linux people who would.
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I would upgrade my 512bit keys to at least 1024 if not 2048bits but I wouldn't worry about this.
I'd like to see mamoths, sabre toothed cats, some of those horse/elephant type beasts they had there for a while, maybe some neaderethals (you know, the cats need to eat their natural food..)
It will be interesting to see the solaris internals, I've heard all sorts of rumors about the quality of the code. I'm also curious about the implications of cross polination. With xBSD and Linux, there is some code sharing and the kernels are different but for the most part they perform very similar. I'm not trying to start a war here but BSD had the same problems that held linux back in the mindcraft study. To really see a difference you have to run a pretty extreme environment and even then I think a lot of Linux people are of the opinion that linux can be tuned to operate similarly to BSD. There really just isn't a lot for linux to take from BSD and drivers and hardware support are what BSD can take the most of from linux.
Solaris is a different beast, it is a known performer on the highend. I don't know if they use a single kernel for all solari or if a 64-way server kernel will be "open sourced" but SMP and multiprocessing have to be one of the key areas where BSD and linux could potentially benefit from Solaris. Now it is probably illegal, I haven't read the license but I know that we couldn't simply drop Sun code into Linux or BSD but they could potentially give us a road map to highend scalability. Who do they sue if we were to emulate their code?
Am I the only one who sees some non-emulation uses for this technology? I'm think multiple processors.
Then when you think of something like nuclear excavating, it sounds like an absolutely insane idea. You think of fallout, radiation contamination, etc.. Teller's job for a good portion of his career was to make nuclear bombs more dangerous and more deadly. There are bombs with low radiation and very low fallout, there are also bombs that use special isotopes (salt bombs) that have less explosive power but have extended levels of radiation and fallout that lasts for milleniums. We probably have bombs now that have such diminised radioactive effects that you couldn't tell if it was nuclear or conventional the next day. We already know that these nuclear weapons were built, we just don't know how many (look at the w70 warhead.) At that point, you're practically excavating with TNT, aren't you? It's still not a very comfortable idea, I certainly don't want them doing that anywhere near me, but I don't think Teller was insane.
He's just got a much different perspective, we've been raised to believe everything nuclear is evil. He made a career out of harnessing the power of it all. Are you convinced that there is absolutley no peaceful use of nuclear weapons? I respect for at least trying to find some.
IBM let some large customers dictate OS/2 design and destiny. That compromised its integrity. There are PM bugs that had to be propagated because of backward compatibility. There are input queue defects that were never fixed becuase of compatibility. The clean API and robustness came into question. To be a good OS/2 programmer you had to be an "OS/2 hacker" not a hacker but a specific type of hacker that knew the tricks of OS/2. A clean API doesn't mean anything if there are special cases.
I left when I noticed that getting OS/2 apps built wasn't as important as porting GPLed apps, X based apps and doing ports of windows apps. IBM never supported the OS/2 developer community and didn't even provide compilers for a long time, all while paying some companies to port applications while not even acknowledging others. It couldn't take off. You have to support yourself, OS/2 was wonderful at running windows and DOS applications but that isn't enough.
IBM used too many things from too many different people, it will never be opensourced or GPLed simply because of the legal complexity. There isn't enough money to replace the parts MS owns. This is something that is currently being investigated within IBM, there are a lot of products which simply cannot be opensourced for that reason.
It's sad but I can't say it wasn't comming. On the other hand, we've learned a tremendous amount from it. I think that Linux is on an unstoppable course, it's developer friendly and rich, it has a community of users and believers who get things done with or without the help of others (no relying on WinOS2 here...) and KDE and GNOME are going places IBM never made it with WPS and OpenDoc. Give it another year or two and you won't miss WPS at all. Plus being part of the linux community is about 100x better than anything I ever experienced on OS/2, the OS/2 community acted like they were the underdogs and couldn't change it. Linux is going to change the rules before the community admits defeat. How's that expression go? The king is dead, God save the king... If you've been using OS/2 a lot then you probably use a lot of GNU stuff already, you're ready for it.
I think this stuff is good, I want to say that clearly. I also think it's a PR thing trying to ride the Linux wave. Years ago, you published your specs and standards and your design took off (IBM and the PC/AT ISA) you want to milk it for some money but that was the general scheme (IBM had some BIOS issues as I recall but everything else was pretty much out in the open.) MS stepped in and changed the rules a bit, they would flood the market with cheap software (I much have got 5 free windows 3.x licenses from MS. I own 3 compilers that I've never paid them for, among other things) establish market dominance and then jab you down the road when nobody can challenge your authority.
IBM and Sun are placed in a situation where they have spent billions developing great products and they can't move them because Intel owns the industry, for the most part. They are doing the only thing that they can do without quitting, they are making it easier to use their products. You build a PowerPC motherboard, you're going to buy chips from IBM and motorola, or you're going to fab your own and your going to pay IBM to do it. Same with Sparc, you build a sparc and you're probably going to put solaris on it, sell a few of them and your users are going to buy a faster sparc in a few years and sun is going to sell that.
This is good stuff, it's pro-competition but it's still just and means to and end. I'd like to believe that IBM and Sun would run the world differently if they were in Intel's shoes but I'm not convinced. As it stands, I have yet to see an affordable PowerPC motherboard on sale. (by affordable I mean in line with an sx164, which can still be pricey, let alone Pentium motherboard prices.)
So you've got a dreamcast and you're already bored with it?
What has always rubbed me wrong was that I paid $50 and got just a little bit more than you get for free, a cute little book, a bunch of fonts and clipart, and a CD. If I paid $200 more, I'd get a few extra components, is Sun giving those away? If I download another copy from sun do I get more stuff? That would be an improvement.
Honestly though, SO will never be opensource and it will eventually suffer because of that. GNOME workbench and KOffice will mature and they will integrate so nicely that they will be the choice products. SO never will so long as the source is kept private and Sun runs the show, but it's a nice stop-gap solution.
do that and you're at Linux levels of stability.
Your point is good but there is something else. My non-experimental Linux (stable kernel, even number, no "Nelson patches" or experimental stuff) has never crashed. There isn't any thin ice to avoid. OS/2 was like that. If I avoided a few WPS operations, the thing would run forever. There were a few things that would lock it up though. It's like being in prison, sure it's minimum security and you can play golf but if you walk too close to the fence you might get shot. It's extremely liberating to not worry about anything crashing the system.
- Superior multitasking - I find it a much smoother system than Linux.
BeOS does feel nice. I'm not sure that is multitasks any better than anything else but it certainly looks like it does and the GUI feels smooth. They did the right thing in this respect. OS/2 and Linux both can suffer from poor GUI performance during mutlitasking, OS/2 won a lot of benchmarks and was understood to be better than Windows but it didn't look good when you click and then wait a second for something to get painted on the screen, even though the work was happening. User perception is important here and BeOS is great at it.
- If you know C++, the API is said to be fantastic.
It's nice but it's not any better than any other I've used. At least not dramatically. MFC is nice to use. QT is nice. GTK+ is nice. BeOS is nice. It's not compelling enough to make me rank it above another.
- Cool applications like e-Picture and GoBe Productive make me think the platform has a good long-term
future - despite all the "No Apps!" noises, they are coming, and what's there is great. Apps tend to have
an original, well-throught out flair which I find very endearing. They still aren't as full featured as Microsoft
Word and Excel, but who uses all those features, anyway?
OS/2 had a lot of applications. Mainstreet is important. With OS/2 or BeOS you're pretty much guaranteed to not be on it. Whether or not you can work matters but it only matters to people who are already sold on the platform. It doesn't bring new users in. There is a huge difference between filling a void for a group of users and creating a value for non-users. ABM is the only reason to really run out and get Be right now and even then Linux has far more users and far more support, you have to get frustrated with the learning curve before you dive on to Be from linux.
- No released version of Netscape yet. Opera is out and works well, but you have to pay to use it past 30
days.
No version of netscape ever, at this point. BeZilla will be a reality but netscape never will.
No java and the core group of users don't seem to be programmers are two other problems I see. Be's got a tough road but they can make themselves relevent. They've got incredibly loyal followers (they are pretty much just believers at this point, there are a lot of Be claims that have never been tested yet, a la mindcraft) and they seem to be getting an inordinant amount of media support despite their low sales, alternatives to MS are hip and Be is riding that wave well. I hope the new politics of being a public company don't destroy their chances, they were in a tight spot and needed money to keep going but now they have to produce something.
It's a presumtion to assume that Intel is calling shots (although it seems entirely reasonable since they did have cash and Be is operating at a loss) but it's not because JLG has more power in the situation.
JLG's out to make money off the deal, just like Intel. They are both doing th best thing in that interest by only supporting x86. They just don't have the resources to support more than that. Being a Be user sucked quite a bit when the software community was split between two different platforms, there was always something I wanted that only ran on the other platform. If they get big or if they decide to focus on set-top-boxes (a very real possibility come two or three losing quarters with no rise in stock price) they should then return to multiplatform focus.
Linux and the OSS and freedomware communities have enough zelots as it is, fortunately Linux has gained enough popularity to get over that. What was intended with that article? Sounds like arrogance or jeolousy to me, it's unfortunate because some of the BSDs have tremendous potential but they will never make an in roads with that attitude. They like to say that their community is more intelligent and more informed on the whole but that just got proved wrong, they are no different than any of the others.
You've got to be kidding if you think this is an invasion of privacy. When you started working there they told you about using corporate equipment for things. There is a degree of trust and respect, you call your wife from work and talk to her about dinner or weekend plans. You send emails to your friends from time to time. Porn is a perfectly reasonable place to draw that line, it can be sexual harassment, and it can invade the privacy of people who accidentally see it.
The alternative is to start your own company, buy your own hardware, hire your own people and the let them do whatever they want. And then deal with the work place harassment suit when a female employee sues you. We're talking about the bottom level of professionalism here, we're not talking about peering into people's private lives. If you want to view porn then do it privately, not in your place of business.
While on this subject, has anyone got used the xemacs widget for much? I keep thinking that if it had a GTK+ wrapper, and it plugged in with glade or gIDE or something it would be pretty much unstoppable.
OTP is provably secure, if used properly. Use a pad twice and it's not just insecure, but it's almost completely insecure.. Conventional block ciphers and stream ciphers suffer from weaknesses but they are usually only partial weaknesses.
If you've got important data, a good source of random bits, and the discipline to use it, OTP is unbeatable. For most of us something like PGP is plenty, (or GPG, when are they going to plug RSA in? on my birthday next year?)
In some circles, the belief is that the outside world has caught up with NSA technology, I've heard more than one well known cryptographer make that statement, it's really just an issue of funding. NSA can build bigger and faster computers but there is a level where that doesn't add up to much. RSA (800+bit) and 3DES are most likely secure beyond your lifetime..
Does this make NT single platform again?
This is an interesting law though. They aren't proposing that anything be weakened (read: learn how to secure a box and learn some encryption) they are just proposing that the government be allowed to crack in to your computer, unannounced, with a "sealed warrant" and look around. It sounds like they think they are pretty good if you ask me. Then, if you've not done anything wrong, you would potentially never know about the intrusion. (or on the otherhand, if you're breaking one law and they get a sealed warrant because they think you're breaking another law and they find evidence for the first crime they can go get another sealed warrant and then gather evidence and you never knew why they suspected you in the first place)
This bill will fail and we can protect ourselves.
IBM and Motorola are in a curious position, they have developed a good modern highend processor but because of the cost factors associated with PCs today they are having trouble pushing as many as they'd like. Likewise both have invested enough and depend enough on the architecture that they can't kill it. Free specs and cheap mobos only bodes well.
Look at the netdriver, very cool, very sexy, very expensive for what you get. If they could cut a few hundred dollars off the price, you'd have a top notch internet appliance, a serious iMac competitor. I think the rationale from IBM could be one of two things, it could be good will, they had something they didn't need so they went public with it or it could also be that they think that if PPC mobos drop in cost enough they believe that they can compete with Intel and AMD on a manufacturing cost basis and as PCs continue to drop in cost the freeness of linux will begin to play a huge factor.
If you're building linux based internet appliances, hardware cost is you only problem. They are already committed to making more and better processors and will be for some time to come. It's a good move on their part and I think the community will benefit too. If I could buy a PowerPC chip and mobo for just a little more than an Intel, I'd probably do it.
The main difference now is that RISC chips generally won't let you do things like add from a location in memory without loading the value at that location first and x86 will still let you do that. If you want to write fast x86 code you will write it like you would write RISC code. The philosophies are very different still. Intel has just been good at adopting the ideas that IBM, Mips and DEC put out first.
What RISC and CISC don't mean is a way to measure performance, that's why the marketeers use it but most users and probably even a lot of programmers don't know and don't need to know the differences.
The cybersquaters bill sounds much more reasonable and overdue but it's not without problems. Can I protect my corporate image by registering extra domains that are similar? How far does that protection go? Can I be anticompetitive with it? American culture is so slanted toward lawsuits and making bucks in court that I can only respect the attempt that this bill is making but I hope it's not vague.
I was under that impression, it makes a lot of sense if you're making something as complicated as StarOffice and you're planning on supporting a bunch of platforms.
It remains to be seen if beos can out perform linux or windows. I'd also watch out for future developments from apple, they've got a great foundation to build on right now, they may tie that media market up for a long time to come.
What specifically allows them to work with newer hardware better? In the days of windows hardware I'd guess that anything unMS has less of a chance of working with newer hardware.
GUI also don't sell computers
Be's future is in set top and low end hardware if their smart. That's a virgin market ripe for the taking and BeOS can do that job wonderfully, no question about that.
I want AMD to do well as much as the next guy, but it's not like this is an aggressive anti-comptetitive measure. It's a price cut. They are supposed to be competitors. How come the negative conotation was used?
Isn't it 64bit? You could give an IP address to everything that uses electricity and have plenty left over.
On the other hand, the Free software community has done very well for itself in terms of development tools. I can't think of anything we're really lacking that Borland provides. Sure there are somethings but in general, there aren't too many if any development tasks you can't get done already. That leaves me wondering where Delphi, JBuilder, IBM's Visual Age compilers, etc.. all fit in to the linux infrastructure. It provides an attractive option for ISVs who demand support but most OSS/FS projects, if not all, will still use GCC.
I would like to play with Delphi on linux, especially if it can build GTK+ or QT GUIs but I'm not sure I'd shell out the $200 for it and I can't say I know a lot of linux people who would.