Many Adobe-converted scanned pages seem to be just a sequence of TIFF images with the OCR'ed text also contained in the PDF file. The OCR'ed text is never displayed, but can be used for searching (in my experience, Adobe's OCR is not very good).
So, a simple conversion would consist of just putting the scanned TIFF images in sequence into a PDF file.
I think a licence like that would be more in the spirit of the GPL.
While one can debate the merits of a license of the kind you propose, I don't think it is necessarily "in the spirit of the GPL". As I understand RMS, his point with the GPL was to ensure that programmers can obtain and modify the source code to the software they depend on. Linking source distribution to binary distribution, rather than use in for-profit applications, was a deliberate decision.
I would also be surprised if RMS didn't explicitly consider this when designing the GPL. After all, around MIT, Internet-based servers and services, distributed computation, mobile code, remote procedure calls, and all that were not exactly a new thing even in the 1980's. (The amazing thing to people coming out of that environment is that it is 2000 and the world still hasn't even caught up with a fraction of the technology developed and in use back then.)
I used and installed AIX for several years and I don't share your enthusiasm.
Smit was not bad as a text based admin tool (I found the X11 version very cumbersome). But the problem with it was that for many operations, it was, in fact, the only choice you had, because command line equivalents either didn't exist at all or were not well documented.
Another problem with AIX system management was that much of the configuration information went into a big binary database somewhere. That made it nearly impossible to manipulate that information from scripts. Furthermore, if AIX ran out of space while writing the system management database, the system would become unstable or unbootable.
What AIX has going for it is that it's a robust, stable system once it's running (in part, due to the hardware). But I don't think AIX system management is a good model for Linux to aim for. That's why they make all different kinds. If you like AIX or NT, they are widely available; I see no need to turn Linux into either of them.
I have used LVM for a number of years, including IBM's LVM. As far as I am concerned, logical volumes are a bad idea. Why?
LVs complicate system management; in particular, they make it more difficult to figure out what physical devices a file system actually depends on, and they make it much more likely that you make a mistake when setting up disks.
LVs break the correspondence between block numbers and head positions. With simple physical mappings, small differences in block numbers usually correspond to small head movements, something file system designs tend to rely on, but with LVs, all bets are off.
If you take advantage of LVs spanning multiple disks, you just multiplied your risk of data loss, because if any one of those disks goes, so does the whole file system.
There are better solutions to the problem LVs are supposed to address:
If you need file systems bigger than a single disk, use RAID.
GNU Parted and PartitionMagic already provide you with the ability to resize partitions without a full backup and restore; you don't need LVMs for that.
If you use several file systems to limit how much space particular applications can eat up, consider using quotas instead.
One of these days, Linux may get concatenated mounts, which would give you another, very reliable and simple way of having file systems span multiple disks. Adding concatenated mounts would probably not be any harder than hacking in an LVM.
IBM's LVM was one of the reasons I hated using AIX (they did similarly oddball and nonstandard stuff in some other areas). I consider it a poorly designed facility. While we can't keep people from porting stuff to Linux, I hope Linux distributions will not incorporate that kind of nonsense; Linux configuration and system management needs to get simpler, not more complex.
The drive for systems like LVM is understandable because UNIX and Linux file systems and large scale data management are not perfect. For example, a big ISP that runs out of disk space on some important partition and needs more space quickly has a legitimate problem. But rather than rushing to a half-baked solution like LVMs, let's identify what the problems are we really want to solve and come up with good solutions to them. With upcoming technologies like object-based disk storage systems, there seem to be much more straightforward and reliable answers than LVM.
Instant messaging that is tied to some big company other than your ISP and that relies on proprietary protocols is fundamentally flawed. There is no reason to give a single company that much control over some basic communications technology.
IM should either be a server-side service like SMTP, provided by your ISP, a peer to peer system like Gnutella, or an open distributed system like IRC. In fact, with minimal additions, IRC could be the basis for a global, distributed IM system.
People have talked about breaking out the Gecko HTML engine (and maybe the Rhino JavaScript engine) and integrating them with other toolkits, like Tcl/Tk, FLTK, wxWindows, etc.
Putting together Gecko/Rhino (both of which seem fairly mature and fast) with a mature, fast toolkit could result in a very small, light, and fast web browser for those of us who just want to browse.
Unfortunately, none of those efforts seem to have matured enough yet even for an alpha release.
Fischertechnik is another brick-based system that has been around for decades. It started out much more oriented towards mechanical engineering than Lego. In fact, it is used quite a bit for prototyping, in particular in Germany. You can find more information at the US distributor and the German site.
I like running Linux and use it on all my PCs. Still, while others may have different preferences, but I don't like the idea of an OS-specific boot loader, or something that is as complex as a Linux kernel.
What I want in a BIOS is
good support for configuring and troubleshooting the system (power management, boot sequence, disabling devices, querying the hardware configuration, etc.)
good support for booting multiple operating systems
good support for basic disk operations (format, maybe partition)
some minimal driver support for important devices that is usable (though not necessarily optimal) by a protected mode operating system
some ability to communicate with the BIOS to perform some of the above operations from a running operating system (where it makes sense)
It seems to me that Open Firmware is a good contender and starting point. It is already fairly widely used, it is programmable, and it seems to work fairly well. One of the nicer features is that it is actually programmable (in Forth) and provides full access to the machine. So, you can load extensions (e.g., new partitioning schemes) into it easily and portably. I believe there is an open source project trying to create an Open Firmware implementation for PCs (I can't find the link, though).
I think window managers need this kind of functionality, and there would be race conditions if they lost the grab and needed to regrab.
However, maybe X11 window managers could monitor grabbing and override the grab from any misbehaved applications. That way, they could implement appropriate policies for their environment (hotkey fix, timeout, clicking-clears-grab, etc.).
Sony has a digital camera based on the MiniDisc (check their web site). Unfortunately, it's about $2300.
The reason the MiniDisc hasn't caught on more for computers is likely concerns of the audio recording industry (Sony is a big recording company in addition to an electronics vendor). Otherwise, it would be the clear choice of things like the Zip drive and Superdisk.
You make good points. They are sources of frequent complaints about X11. It's not clear how well they can be addressed, though, by any system.
In terms of speed, you are not going to see a 3X improvement because both Windows and X11 run fairly close to the speed of the hardware.
For resizing, the current approach clearly isn't optimal, but it isn't entirely clear what needs to happen. Windows just rearranges everything. We could have the same for X11 by introducing a "desktop changed" event and updating the X window manager. Is it worth it? Is it the right thing to do? Who knows.
As for stability, I have yet to see X11 crash, and I run some pretty weird stuff. It may be unstable on some specific hardware, but bad drivers can happen on any system, including Berlin. Most problems that look like "taking down the GUI" in X11 are simply misbehaved applications that grab the keyboard and mouse and don't release it; you can fix that by switching to a text console and killing the offending application. Perhaps X11 could add a keyboard combination to release all grabs or to do a "warm restart" to get out of misbehaved applications.
There's a much bigger problem with putting more functionality on the server in the way Berlin does: how do you add new widgets? Since Berlin is written in native code, you'd have to upload native code into the server. Now that isn't exactly safe.
The only sensible way I find of implementing that kind of design is with a safe, platform neutral language, like PostScript or Java.
In fact, most of the goals of Berlin seem already satisfied using Java as a display server: widgets run in the server, a resolution independent API, etc. I think the Berlin effort might be better expended on implementing AWT and the Java2D imaging API on raw hardware in an open source project.
The X11 folks weren't stupid, and design like Berlin's were around before X11 even was created. To me, it really appears that the Berlin model is fatally flawed.
Re:Sorry, but I don't see that this is very useful
on
Berlin 0.2.0 Released
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· Score: 2
X11 can make fonts large enough if you configure it correctly. In any case, when hardware becomes good enough that pixels don't matter, adding a resolution independent imaging API to X11 is easy. In fact, people are already working on it.
I'm not sure where you got that idea from. The original developers of UNIX, who went on to Plan 9 and Inferno, were religious about removing features they didn't consider useful. Programs and system calls that they considered useless would first go onto a DEPRECATED manual page, and eventually be removed unceremoniously.
Berlin is about as far from the philosophy of the original UNIX developers as a window system can be, with its extensive use of C++ and distributed objects. If you want to see how UNIX folks design a window system, take a look at 8 1/2 and rio in Plan 9.
When looking at the demo on a Thinkpad laptop, I don't actually see much of an improvement. I'm somewhat surprised; after all, I thought having roughly three times the number of addressable pixels ought to help significantly.
Does it actually look like a significant improvement to you?
Yes, Microsoft Research has a lot of good people doing some interesting stuff. Keep in mind, though, that many of them have only been there for a couple of years, though, and the excellent work they have been doing at Microsoft has just been a continuation of work done elsewhere (ClearType may be an exception).
Whether Microsoft Research will be a long term fixture among top industrial research labs remains to be seen. It's also unclear whether Microsoft Research will be any more successful at technology transfer into products than other labs. Apple, for comparison, used to spend a lot of money on research (Gates was bragging publically he didn't have to spend any, he'd just take Apple's results) but disintegrated within a couple of years when the company wasn't doing so well.
With their wealth and promise of stock options, Microsoft has had an easy time luring away people from other research labs until now. Losing so many good people has been pretty bad for those other labs, as you can imagine, and that has given Microsoft Research the reputation of begin a raider (in line with the generally aggressive stance of Microsoft).
Who cares? Microsoft has built a huge company on imitation and copying technology deveoped by other companies. For other companies or open source projects not to do the same would be foolish. If it's legal and it works, why not beat them at their own game?
None of this has anything to do with real "innovation" anyway. The resemblance between the UIs may make users feel warm and fuzzy, but it hardly represents any kind of technological advance. And Microsoft copied this particular feature from others anyway.
As an open source alternative to Windows, Eazel seems to be going in the right direction: make everything as familiar to Windows users as possible but try to enhance the usability incrementally. From a technological point of view, I have to admit to a certain disappointment, however: there are a lot of nifty things they could have done with a new UI.
The study is clearly double blind study by disinterested parties, and from the way it was conducted, it seems like the folks were simply trying to get ammunition for supporting their beliefs. In fact, from the article, it appears that many of their conclusions are based on a lot of inference.
In any case, if airplane safety is threatened by radio transmissions in the milliwatt (PDAs) and hundreds of milliwatt (cell phone) range, there is clearly something wrong with the design of those airplanes and navigational systems. Those planes need to get grounded and upgraded. That's both because passengers won't stick to the regulations, and since an adversary can trivially build tiny devices that emit lots of power and disrupt a large part of the spectrum.
This is the right technology for displaying floating objects about a foot cubed in size, as you need in medicine and engineering. It's not the right technology for 3D gaming; as the reviewer notes "the 3D effect was nowhere near as good [in Heavy Gear II]" and "we saw intimations of the 3D effect".
For games, the most important cue is motion parallax--the way a 3D image changes when you move your head. The "3D monitor" actually makes this worse, not better, since the stereo cues also don't behave right when you move your head.
For 3D gaming, the best thing is going to be a head mounted display. Ideally, it will have considerable peripheral vision, since that gives a sense of immersion. Used with gyroscopic sensors, a head mounted display lets you look around naturally, and if you add head tracking of some form (an accelerometer may be sufficient), it can display motion parallax as well. Once you have a head mounted display, if you also want to throw in stereo, that's pretty easy.
I have been running RedHat Linux on Thinkpads for years and it runs just fine.
The "problem" with the WinModem is best solved by not using the WinModem at all. It doesn't even work quite right under Windows, and I think it was altogether a bad idea.
If you get a modem PCMCIA card (maybe a combo with Ethernet), you end up with a nice, fast, reliable, standard modem that works from both Linux and Windows. If you need your PCMCIA slots for something else, could go with a USB or serial port modem.
I'm talking about making a product. That involves creating lots of drivers, experience with lots of PC machines, putting into place support, and, most importantly, getting software developers to recompile their software for Intel. Merely porting the software is pretty easy.
If you want MacOS on Intel hardware, don't hold your breath. Apple likely doesn't want to cut into their own hardware sales, and supporting the PC architecture and its messy collection of hardware would be a lot of work. Their policy in this area is likely to be haphazard for years to come.
So while the Microsoft appeals process drags on, Apple ports Mac OS X to Intel, leveraging the ease of porting it has so carefully maintained.
This was already done once and Jobs canceled the project after it was mostly finished. This would cut into Apple hardware sales, and it appears unacceptable to Apple internal politics.
Millions of Windows users tired of IRQ conflicts, eternal consultant visits, convoluted interface design, and painful aesthetics can now install Mac OS X on their existing computer, keeping their data and their applications. Millions do.
IRQ conflicts are a problem with the PC hardware. In fact, some of the clunkiness of Windows is due to the hardware: the myriads of screen resolutions, keyboards, peripherals, and protocols Windows needs to support.
With it's BSD/mach core and Aqua interface, Mac OS X starts to make serious inroads as a server operating system.
Why would people care about the Aqua UI? For most experienced server administrators, any UI is a nuisance. Maybe you hang out with a different group of server administrators than I do.
It could happen...
It seems unlikely. I also don't think the outcome is desirable: in my judgement, Apple's technology has stagnated years ago and they are now concentrating on consumer features. Besides, Jobs is probably even less pleasant to deal with than Gates.
A more likely outcome is that millions of people will end up using systems like the Playstation II for all their Internet access and most of their computing needs, and WebTV, PC, and Macintosh will be left in the dust. On the server side, more and more people will run BSD or Linux on the low end and Solaris on the high end, and server software will increasingly be written in Java.
I consider this premature. Yes, the technology is ready, but companies seem unable to deploy this kind of technology reliably.
Even in the area of credit and charge cards, where billions of dollars are lost to fraud, companies still use completely unsecure systems.
I have also had several experiences where companies have duplicated electronic records, swapped electronically stored signatures, etc. With paper, fraud is quite possible, but with electronic signatures, both fraud and programming accidents are possible.
And, should there be a dispute, the situation in court is also disadvantageous for the consumer with electronic signatures. With paper, you can always ask them to produce the record. With electronic signatures, it ends up being your security expert against theirs, and they can afford to pay a lot more for their experts.
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So, a simple conversion would consist of just putting the scanned TIFF images in sequence into a PDF file.
While one can debate the merits of a license of the kind you propose, I don't think it is necessarily "in the spirit of the GPL". As I understand RMS, his point with the GPL was to ensure that programmers can obtain and modify the source code to the software they depend on. Linking source distribution to binary distribution, rather than use in for-profit applications, was a deliberate decision.
I would also be surprised if RMS didn't explicitly consider this when designing the GPL. After all, around MIT, Internet-based servers and services, distributed computation, mobile code, remote procedure calls, and all that were not exactly a new thing even in the 1980's. (The amazing thing to people coming out of that environment is that it is 2000 and the world still hasn't even caught up with a fraction of the technology developed and in use back then.)
Smit was not bad as a text based admin tool (I found the X11 version very cumbersome). But the problem with it was that for many operations, it was, in fact, the only choice you had, because command line equivalents either didn't exist at all or were not well documented.
Another problem with AIX system management was that much of the configuration information went into a big binary database somewhere. That made it nearly impossible to manipulate that information from scripts. Furthermore, if AIX ran out of space while writing the system management database, the system would become unstable or unbootable.
What AIX has going for it is that it's a robust, stable system once it's running (in part, due to the hardware). But I don't think AIX system management is a good model for Linux to aim for. That's why they make all different kinds. If you like AIX or NT, they are widely available; I see no need to turn Linux into either of them.
There are better solutions to the problem LVs are supposed to address:
IBM's LVM was one of the reasons I hated using AIX (they did similarly oddball and nonstandard stuff in some other areas). I consider it a poorly designed facility. While we can't keep people from porting stuff to Linux, I hope Linux distributions will not incorporate that kind of nonsense; Linux configuration and system management needs to get simpler, not more complex.
The drive for systems like LVM is understandable because UNIX and Linux file systems and large scale data management are not perfect. For example, a big ISP that runs out of disk space on some important partition and needs more space quickly has a legitimate problem. But rather than rushing to a half-baked solution like LVMs, let's identify what the problems are we really want to solve and come up with good solutions to them. With upcoming technologies like object-based disk storage systems, there seem to be much more straightforward and reliable answers than LVM.
IM should either be a server-side service like SMTP, provided by your ISP, a peer to peer system like Gnutella, or an open distributed system like IRC. In fact, with minimal additions, IRC could be the basis for a global, distributed IM system.
Putting together Gecko/Rhino (both of which seem fairly mature and fast) with a mature, fast toolkit could result in a very small, light, and fast web browser for those of us who just want to browse.
Unfortunately, none of those efforts seem to have matured enough yet even for an alpha release.
Fischertechnik is another brick-based system that has been around for decades. It started out much more oriented towards mechanical engineering than Lego. In fact, it is used quite a bit for prototyping, in particular in Germany. You can find more information at the US distributor and the German site.
What I want in a BIOS is
It seems to me that Open Firmware is a good contender and starting point. It is already fairly widely used, it is programmable, and it seems to work fairly well. One of the nicer features is that it is actually programmable (in Forth) and provides full access to the machine. So, you can load extensions (e.g., new partitioning schemes) into it easily and portably. I believe there is an open source project trying to create an Open Firmware implementation for PCs (I can't find the link, though).
However, maybe X11 window managers could monitor grabbing and override the grab from any misbehaved applications. That way, they could implement appropriate policies for their environment (hotkey fix, timeout, clicking-clears-grab, etc.).
I have; I just don't like the answers they came up with.
The reason the MiniDisc hasn't caught on more for computers is likely concerns of the audio recording industry (Sony is a big recording company in addition to an electronics vendor). Otherwise, it would be the clear choice of things like the Zip drive and Superdisk.
In terms of speed, you are not going to see a 3X improvement because both Windows and X11 run fairly close to the speed of the hardware.
For resizing, the current approach clearly isn't optimal, but it isn't entirely clear what needs to happen. Windows just rearranges everything. We could have the same for X11 by introducing a "desktop changed" event and updating the X window manager. Is it worth it? Is it the right thing to do? Who knows.
As for stability, I have yet to see X11 crash, and I run some pretty weird stuff. It may be unstable on some specific hardware, but bad drivers can happen on any system, including Berlin. Most problems that look like "taking down the GUI" in X11 are simply misbehaved applications that grab the keyboard and mouse and don't release it; you can fix that by switching to a text console and killing the offending application. Perhaps X11 could add a keyboard combination to release all grabs or to do a "warm restart" to get out of misbehaved applications.
The only sensible way I find of implementing that kind of design is with a safe, platform neutral language, like PostScript or Java.
In fact, most of the goals of Berlin seem already satisfied using Java as a display server: widgets run in the server, a resolution independent API, etc. I think the Berlin effort might be better expended on implementing AWT and the Java2D imaging API on raw hardware in an open source project.
The X11 folks weren't stupid, and design like Berlin's were around before X11 even was created. To me, it really appears that the Berlin model is fatally flawed.
X11 can make fonts large enough if you configure it correctly. In any case, when hardware becomes good enough that pixels don't matter, adding a resolution independent imaging API to X11 is easy. In fact, people are already working on it.
Berlin is about as far from the philosophy of the original UNIX developers as a window system can be, with its extensive use of C++ and distributed objects. If you want to see how UNIX folks design a window system, take a look at 8 1/2 and rio in Plan 9.
Does it actually look like a significant improvement to you?
Whether Microsoft Research will be a long term fixture among top industrial research labs remains to be seen. It's also unclear whether Microsoft Research will be any more successful at technology transfer into products than other labs. Apple, for comparison, used to spend a lot of money on research (Gates was bragging publically he didn't have to spend any, he'd just take Apple's results) but disintegrated within a couple of years when the company wasn't doing so well.
With their wealth and promise of stock options, Microsoft has had an easy time luring away people from other research labs until now. Losing so many good people has been pretty bad for those other labs, as you can imagine, and that has given Microsoft Research the reputation of begin a raider (in line with the generally aggressive stance of Microsoft).
None of this has anything to do with real "innovation" anyway. The resemblance between the UIs may make users feel warm and fuzzy, but it hardly represents any kind of technological advance. And Microsoft copied this particular feature from others anyway.
As an open source alternative to Windows, Eazel seems to be going in the right direction: make everything as familiar to Windows users as possible but try to enhance the usability incrementally. From a technological point of view, I have to admit to a certain disappointment, however: there are a lot of nifty things they could have done with a new UI.
That should be "the study is clearly NOT a double blind study by disinterested parties"...
In any case, if airplane safety is threatened by radio transmissions in the milliwatt (PDAs) and hundreds of milliwatt (cell phone) range, there is clearly something wrong with the design of those airplanes and navigational systems. Those planes need to get grounded and upgraded. That's both because passengers won't stick to the regulations, and since an adversary can trivially build tiny devices that emit lots of power and disrupt a large part of the spectrum.
For games, the most important cue is motion parallax--the way a 3D image changes when you move your head. The "3D monitor" actually makes this worse, not better, since the stereo cues also don't behave right when you move your head.
For 3D gaming, the best thing is going to be a head mounted display. Ideally, it will have considerable peripheral vision, since that gives a sense of immersion. Used with gyroscopic sensors, a head mounted display lets you look around naturally, and if you add head tracking of some form (an accelerometer may be sufficient), it can display motion parallax as well. Once you have a head mounted display, if you also want to throw in stereo, that's pretty easy.
The "problem" with the WinModem is best solved by not using the WinModem at all. It doesn't even work quite right under Windows, and I think it was altogether a bad idea.
If you get a modem PCMCIA card (maybe a combo with Ethernet), you end up with a nice, fast, reliable, standard modem that works from both Linux and Windows. If you need your PCMCIA slots for something else, could go with a USB or serial port modem.
If you want MacOS on Intel hardware, don't hold your breath. Apple likely doesn't want to cut into their own hardware sales, and supporting the PC architecture and its messy collection of hardware would be a lot of work. Their policy in this area is likely to be haphazard for years to come.
This was already done once and Jobs canceled the project after it was mostly finished. This would cut into Apple hardware sales, and it appears unacceptable to Apple internal politics.
IRQ conflicts are a problem with the PC hardware. In fact, some of the clunkiness of Windows is due to the hardware: the myriads of screen resolutions, keyboards, peripherals, and protocols Windows needs to support.
Why would people care about the Aqua UI? For most experienced server administrators, any UI is a nuisance. Maybe you hang out with a different group of server administrators than I do.
It seems unlikely. I also don't think the outcome is desirable: in my judgement, Apple's technology has stagnated years ago and they are now concentrating on consumer features. Besides, Jobs is probably even less pleasant to deal with than Gates.
A more likely outcome is that millions of people will end up using systems like the Playstation II for all their Internet access and most of their computing needs, and WebTV, PC, and Macintosh will be left in the dust. On the server side, more and more people will run BSD or Linux on the low end and Solaris on the high end, and server software will increasingly be written in Java.
Even in the area of credit and charge cards, where billions of dollars are lost to fraud, companies still use completely unsecure systems.
I have also had several experiences where companies have duplicated electronic records, swapped electronically stored signatures, etc. With paper, fraud is quite possible, but with electronic signatures, both fraud and programming accidents are possible.
And, should there be a dispute, the situation in court is also disadvantageous for the consumer with electronic signatures. With paper, you can always ask them to produce the record. With electronic signatures, it ends up being your security expert against theirs, and they can afford to pay a lot more for their experts.