I was afraid display encryption was going to happen sooner or later. If it catches on, it could be a real blow to content creation because you may end up having to license software to be able to create content.
However, I don't see any reason why cryptographic hardware like that can't have open source drivers: as long as the hardware itself is secure, it can rely on open source software to establish a secure channel to whatever Internet server or other device it wants to talk to for verification.
A lot of open source source code has come from corporate research labs and other parts of corporations. On the other hand, many universities, even those that traditionally were quite inclined towards open source, are strongly reinforcing their patent and intellectual property licensing efforts.
It is both universities and corporations that are holding on more tightly to intellectual property, in the belief that this is a way in which they can boost revenues. And the huge amounts of money that have been flowing into startups, plus the change in patent practices, are fueling the greed. (Sadly, the patent system is like the prisoner's dilemma: if every company stopped submitting software patents, most people would be better off, but if any particular company stops unilaterally, they'll lose big.)
The way to stem the tide is not to keep researchers out of companies, but to get open source friendly researchers into companies. Furthermore, the factors that have led to these kinds of changes need to be addressed; foremost, the patent system needs to be reformed, and the strongest arguments for reform can be made from a corporate environment.
Universities and government labs also need significant reform: increasingly, there seems to be an enmeshing of university business interests, commercial interests of professors, and students who get caught in the middle. Over the years, I have seen a tightening of regulations and enforcement, and if you are a student, you may well want to check your contract with the university: the open source project you are working on may well legally belong to them.
So, advocate open source and argue against software patents wherever you are. But don't shun working for corporations: if you do, all that you will accomplish is that the people with the money and connections are the ones that aren't interested in open source. As for startup money drawing people away from research careers, that's a big concern, but what can you do about it?
It's dangerous to draw conclusions about scientific studies from press releases or news articles. However, there are some general points to keep in mind. Furthermore, Nie, the director of the institute where the study took place, seems to make some pretty definitive statements about it that pretty clearly indicate his interpretation, an interpretation I find questionable.
First, the most glaring one is the inclusion of television viewing. Television is probably the most intellectually worthless, un-social and passive activity one can engage in (that isn't to say one should never watch television; after all, the occasional ice cream is great fun even if it is nutritionally worthless, but too much ice cream leads to obesity). Just about any Internet activity is more social, more interactive, and more stimulating. There is good reason to believe that the Internet primarily displaces television viewing time, and that's altogether the best thing that can happen.
The Internet also displaces traditional newspaper reading. Good: newspapers have had a hold on the information business far too long. The Internet offers more variety of information and more ability for dialog than traditional newspapers.
Another issue, of course, is that the study does not appear to take into account social interactions over the Internet.
Even if the study had found that there is a negative correlation between time spent on personal social interaction and time spent on the Internet, that doesn't imply a causal relationship.
I think a study like this needs to be carried out with great caution and without bias. From what has been reported, the study does not appear to support the conclusions attributed to it. And based on its likening of non-social activities like television viewing and newspaper reading in the category of "social interaction", it seems like the authors of the study had definite biases.
The study basically just seems to be saying that the Internet is taking away time from the things that people used to do. Well, big surprise. If you spend a few hours on the Internet per day, that's bound to happen. As long as it's television and newspaper time, I think that's hardly a loss. And it seems pretty likely that the Internet causes people to read and write more than in the past, as well as exposing them to new ideas. And that's a big win from my point of view.
There's a middle ground between keeping Linux obscure and making Linux suitable for the masses. That middle ground is using it for server applications, embedded applications, engineering, and research--what it is being used for right now. Having Linux replace Windows for the non-technical user, on the other hand, is an unproven proposition and, I think, threatens the integrity of Linux.
That middle ground is also keeping around a diversity of operating systems, together with open protocols. Being locked into Linux is no more fun in the long run than being locked into Windows, no matter how nice Linux may look right now.
Connell takes it as a given that Linux ought to try to be just like Windows: a CD-installable desktop operating system for the masses. There are several problems with that thinking.
First, the notion of a CD-installable general purpose operating system is itself outmoded. The consumer market is moving towards embedded and specialized devices. Linux will play a big role in that market, but making it user friendly will be done by the for profit companies that make the devices. Even in the PC market itself, most non-technical users never install applications, let alone a whole operating system.
Second, open source efforts like GNU and Linux worked because users/customers were also developers: they could make intelligent suggestions for how to improve software and often even supply and share the enhancements themselves. Non-technical users contribute nothing to this ecology and it is debatable whether the open source community should expend a lot of scarce resources on such user communities.
Third, the world needs an operating system for technically savvy users. The idea of one operating system for everybody is Microsoft's, and if I wanted to use that kind of system, I would (I have licenses to all the Microsoft software). World domination by any operating system, be it Linux or Windows, is bad because it means trying to make one system fit everybody's needs, and that cannot be anything other than a mediocre compromise.
Let's aim for open standards, open protocols, and open device interfaces, not world domination by Linux or any other system.
I'm concerned about this influx of commercial software on Linux. If I wanted to use that kind of software, why would I be using Linux?
I think the Gimp is actually a better, if less mature, program than Corel PhotoPaint. Likewise, I think Emacs is a better IDE than what Inprise/Borland have to offer.
Those commercial Windows-based tools have been designed to appear simple to learn and use. But they reach their limits quickly when it comes to customizability and scripting. The risk is that more and more Linux users will go the "easy" route, get the "free entry level" commercial tools and never learn what Linux and UNIX are all about.
I suppose that a Windows-like environment with a working POSIX-compliant kernel and modular GUI toolkit is still better than a Windows-like environment with a Win32 API, but I think there is a lot more to Linux/UNIX than just that, and this influx of commercial tools threatens it.
Of course, Metcalf got it completely wrong likening open source to communism.
Microsoft is making huge profits. If anybody makes huge profits in a capitalist system, that's an indication of market inefficiencies. Open source eliminates those inefficiencies: it's an efficient way by which consumers, who currently pay unreasonably high prices for Windows, force prices down.
Open source is a completely natural, capitalist result of the cost structure of creating and distributing software.
Issues of free will vs. determinism were very popular among philosophers in the past, but I don't believe they are meaningful: there is nothing you can do to distinguish the two possibilities physically. You might as well discuss how many angels dance on the proverbial head of a pin.
What does strike me as ironic (from the summary) is that someone going through such lengths to seek explanations of consciousness claims to be based in Zen, which teaches that many of the phenomena he seeks explanations for are simply illusions.
Generally, I like the idea of defensive open source patents. However, the approach taken by RT-Linux doesn't work.
UNISYS, too, stated that some software could use the GIF patent free and later changed their mind. Promises and intents are just that; what matters for patent licensing is a contractual relationship between the licensor and the licensee, and merely posting one's intent on some site isn't sufficient. Also, the particular license chosen for RT-Linux looks like it imposes some serious burdens on other real time Linux developers. Besides a contractual relationship, the only other choice for patents is placing it in the public domain.
The only choice I see for ensuring that open source-related patents remain credible and open is to assign them to an organization whose charter irrevocably binds them to particular licensing conditions.
As for the specific patent, there is ample, specific prior art.
I'd recommend to the author to abandon this patent and work with the open source community on a better approach for the next patent.
numerous techniques for 3D shape recovery
on
Minolta 3D Camera
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· Score: 2
Numerous techniques for 3D shape recovery have been developed. Some are based on finding correspondences between points in different views of the object; you can think of it as a sophisticated form of triangulation (and originally, it was done by hand). Some use video sequences and extract shape from motion. Some use multiple cameras for stereo. You can get 3D shape from shading, from texture, from focus, and from lots of other image properties. Those are all passive techniques. Passive autofocus systems, as found in many AF SLR cameras, can be thought of as a very simple form of passive 3D shape recovery.
There is also a wide range of active techniques. In those techniques, you don't just use a camera, but you also use some kind of light source. Structured light-based 3D recovery can be done in real time and there are lots of approaches to that as well. You can think of active autofocus systems, found on many P/S cameras, as structure light systems.
Both software-only and software/hardware combinations for 3D shape recovery from images are commercially available, and some are also available for free as research code. Still, don't expect this to be easy or completely automated.
I have used JFS and ext2 side-by-side for several years. AIX ran on a succession of high-end IBM workstation with a fast SCSI drive, and Linux on a succession of mid-range IBM PC with IDE drive. Even given the disparity in hardware, JFS was never significantly faster than ext2, and for operations that created lots of small files, it was 3-4 times slower. And despite the promise of fast boots ("no fsck"), the AIX machines overall booted much slower than Linux. And, between the two, the AIX machine was the only one that I ever lost a file system on after a power failure.
In fact, more generally, I'd be really hard pressed to think of anything I would want in Linux from AIX (maybe the Fortran 90 compiler).
When it comes to systems like Irix, AIX, JFS, etc., you have to realize that a lot of smart people have worked on them for a long time. Some people may view that as an advantage. I don't. The motivation of those engineers was to be able to point to new features they implemented when their performance review came up every year, to do well on benchmarks, and maybe to write some papers for technical conferences. Leaving "good enough" alone was definitely not in their interest.
And those engineers were backed by big software development organizations that debugged and tested that code for every release, and by big consulting and field support engineers that helped customers configure the zillions of options that those systems had, most of which hardly anybody ever needed.
Linux keeps things simple. It gets good performance using comparatively straightforward code. That's a big win in my book, and I think it's the reason why so many people prefer Linux to proprietary systems. Let's not spoil that advantage by incorporating all those dusty decks from IBM, SGI, and other big companies that fit neither with the Linux code development infrastructure nor with the end user support infrastructure. The only party that benefits if Linux gets overly complex is companies that sell support.
Let's assume that the QPL is actually like the GPL with an option to pay to get out of it for commercial applications (I think that interpretation is incorrect, but that's a different discussion). I still think that's a bad license for a major Linux GUI toolkit.
For some libraries, GPL is fine. But a GUI toolkit is a core piece of functionality for an operating system. I believe it is good to get as many commercial vendors to use a single standard GUI toolkit. And this is really no different from the Linux kernel itself: I can write commercial software running under the Linux kernel without going open source. LGPL best encourages that kind of use.
I think Qt isn't a good choice as a major Linux toolkit: as a GPL'ed system, I think its license is too restrictive to allow universal use, and as a for-pay commercial toolkit, I think it's too expensive compared to commercial alternatives. And the QPL and Troll Tech's statements about it always leave a lingering doubt about licensing issues for both free and commercial software development. Qt is technically not bad, but to me, it isn't so much better than the alternatives to warrant living with that kind of hassle.
It's just an announcement. We all know about Microsoft pre-competitive announcements to stall competing (in this case, open source) product efforts.
Microsoft wants to dominate the on-line media market. If they accept Linux as a viable operation system (at least in the short term), this makes sense: it gives them a few % more market share.
If you read the article, you see that their player has the predictable closed-source controls: digital rights management enforced through a binary-only distribution.
I think this is fairly predictable behavior on the part of a large, rational corporation that wants to dominate the market, eliminate competition, and control the use of media. In the long run, I think it is not generally in the interest of Linux users.
With media obsolescence and decay a fact of life, your best bet is to keep copying your content between machines and media. In fact, there is historical precedent: that's how a lot of content has survived so far.
It's also important not to store content in formats that become undecodable. So, Word 97 is out for archival storage. If the content is in ASCII or UNICODE format, you can probably hack up a parser that gets most of the information back. It is also useful to store source code in a common and reasonably simple language (C, Fortran, core Java, Scheme; not C++) that can decode the content along with the content. For example, for encrypted data, I usually store a source copy of the crypto program along with it. I consider good formats for long term storage formats like HTML, PBM, JPEG (with decoder), MPEG, and Sun audio format.
The article claims that keeping track of shapes as objects in the server is some breakthrough development. Well, maybe for Apple. The rest of us have had that kind of graphics canvases in our toolkits for years (with Tcl/Tk and GNOME being only fairly recent examples). The reason why they aren't used for everything is because it's not always either efficient or convenient to do so.
The use of transparency in the UI isn't new either, not even in a commercial product. Even Windows 2000 uses transparency for its menues.
Altogether, from what I have seen, Aqua is an evolutionary enhancement to the UI. It will appeal visually to a lot of people and that's why it will receive some enthusiastic reviews. But I don't think it changes interaction with the computer in any fundamental or important way.
I don't think streaming video is necessary yet for Linux to catch on on the desktop: most people's connections are still too slow. Once Linux is used widely by end-users (including in things like set-top boxes and handheld devices), industry itself will have an incentive to address this issue: the producers of those devices will want a streaming media solution, and the content providers will want to reach Linux users.
As for how this development will happen, who knows. As far as I'm concerned, it's a myth that open source development is particularly fast. Most things take a few years longer to appear in open source form than their commercial predecessors. That doesn't bother me. And traditionally, proprietary protocols that end up predominating the market become public one way or another anyway. The major concern is patent protection, but that's only a temporary block.
Of course, Microsoft does try to dominate media delivery: their on-line reading efforts and Windows Media are examples. We do need to be vigilant, but I don't think their strategy will work out in the long run.
Why people want streaming media other than MP3 and MPEG-2, however, is still beyond me. I don't think there is a lot of interesting content out there. For the most interesting content available only in WMF and Real, like news, reading the article is faster than watching a video.
Proprietary, plug-in based architectures like QT have numerous disadvantages for end users. Because the plug-ins are binary and OS-dependent, you may not be able to access your video content after you upgrade your OS, and you are very unlikely to be able to read it a decade from now. The binary nature of the plug-ins allows vendors to control the use of the content (i.e., it may be too cumbersome to record it). And you may be tied to a single vendor or platform.
I also wonder why people want this. I have seen very little video in QT format on the web that isn't just product promotion. If people want to sell me something, I think they should put the video into a format I can read. Most content that could be considered informational at all (and I'm using the term "informational" lightly) is in Real format or Windows Media Player format. And much scientific and public video content is in MPEG format.
I think Linux (and the world) needs free, open-source streaming and archival audio and video formats. MPEG and the H.xxx standards are probably the best bets right now, despite some patent issues; both have open source implementations. On the other hand, I think an influx of proprietary media architectures and clients simply takes away the incentive to do things right for Linux, and I don't understand why people who want that kind of software don't just buy a Windows or Mac OS machine (OS X, if you want a UNIX-like kernel).
I think the current HCI work has some serious conceptual problems. Much of it is driven by the needs of naive users and by what is easily measurable in an experimental setting. But being able to push a button a fraction of a second faster may lead to an incremental improvement in user satisfaction, but it doesn't make for any signficant interesting changes to the way people interact with computers.
I think imitating Windows/MacOS and applying current HCI principles in systems like KDE and Gnome will be nice in that it makes Linux accessible and comparable to those other desktop platforms.
But I hope that in the medium term, Linux will serve as a platform for more interesting and more important UI breakthroughs, including UIs geared towards expert users. Linux is probably in the best position for that because it seems a lot more flexible and extensible than those other systems. And, more importantly, Linux has expert users that can often themselves modify and improve the UI and share those modifications.
I find most of the Gemstar patents mystifying. Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that they are not obvious, European television has had on-screen television guides at least since the 80's in the form of the Teletex system, built into most midrange and upscale receivers (the information is transmitted in a few extra scanlines at the bottom, like CC in the US).
Of course, I find many of the web patents equally mystifying. Again, there is ample prior art for the shopping card, e-commerce, and other web techniques in the Minitel system that has been used widely in Europe for many years before e-commerce started to be used in the US.
It seems likely that some viruses will be able to develop resistance to this drug. The rational thing would be to reserve it for life threatening infections, rather than use it for the common cold. But no matter what would be best for society, I suspect in the current corporate-friendly environment, that is an impossibility. But, then, given the cost, maybe HMOs won't cover it.
I don't know who proposed it first, but it certainly wasn't Microsoft's idea. The idea of using year-based version numbers was kicked around in the PC press for a number of years before Windows 95, and I think even some HCI expert proposed it in one of his books.
Apple may or may not be legally right, but in terms of marketing, this seems like a dumb move. The more computers don't look like Windows, the more acceptable it will be for people to use non-Windows machines.
It is questionable that what @Home claims is the problem is actually the problem. Even if it were, scanning for proxy servers would be the wrong solution.
@Home needs to protect their news servers so that only authenticated customers can post (proxy or not). If there is a spam, they can then identify where it came from and should selectively take action against that customer. Since @Home actually runs cables to their customer's homes, they don't even have the problem that customers cancel and resubscribe under a different identity; unlike other ISPs, they actually can enforce their policies. The UDP against them should continue until they do.
I think the influx of Windows/Macintosh tools to Linux threatens the soul of Linux because it threatens to make Linux more like Windows/Macintosh. If Linux were ultimately to become merely an open source version of Windows or MacOS, I'd much rather be using Solaris.
My problem with the Windows/Macintosh approach to computing is that it is based around GUI tools. And because everything is done with GUI tools, there is no pressure to make it accessible programmatically and through plain text files.
If Linux/UNIX starts relying heavily on GUI tools as well, it will follow the same path, because the pressure to keep things simple and logical from a command line perspective will have been removed. In fact, there are already beginnings of that in various parts of Linux, where rather than designing a logical and simple textual configuration system, programs increasingly rely on graphical tools.
CodeWarrior is a fairly benign representative of the Windows/Macintosh approach to programming. Still, why should dpeople moving to Linux not use Emacs? And if they really want to use something like CodeWarrior, why not use at least an open source system instead?
From my point of view, it may actually be a good thing that CodeWarrior isn't coming to Linux. But, of course, your preferences for what Linux is to become may differ.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I don't see any reason why cryptographic hardware like that can't have open source drivers: as long as the hardware itself is secure, it can rely on open source software to establish a secure channel to whatever Internet server or other device it wants to talk to for verification.
It is both universities and corporations that are holding on more tightly to intellectual property, in the belief that this is a way in which they can boost revenues. And the huge amounts of money that have been flowing into startups, plus the change in patent practices, are fueling the greed. (Sadly, the patent system is like the prisoner's dilemma: if every company stopped submitting software patents, most people would be better off, but if any particular company stops unilaterally, they'll lose big.)
The way to stem the tide is not to keep researchers out of companies, but to get open source friendly researchers into companies. Furthermore, the factors that have led to these kinds of changes need to be addressed; foremost, the patent system needs to be reformed, and the strongest arguments for reform can be made from a corporate environment.
Universities and government labs also need significant reform: increasingly, there seems to be an enmeshing of university business interests, commercial interests of professors, and students who get caught in the middle. Over the years, I have seen a tightening of regulations and enforcement, and if you are a student, you may well want to check your contract with the university: the open source project you are working on may well legally belong to them.
So, advocate open source and argue against software patents wherever you are. But don't shun working for corporations: if you do, all that you will accomplish is that the people with the money and connections are the ones that aren't interested in open source. As for startup money drawing people away from research careers, that's a big concern, but what can you do about it?
First, the most glaring one is the inclusion of television viewing. Television is probably the most intellectually worthless, un-social and passive activity one can engage in (that isn't to say one should never watch television; after all, the occasional ice cream is great fun even if it is nutritionally worthless, but too much ice cream leads to obesity). Just about any Internet activity is more social, more interactive, and more stimulating. There is good reason to believe that the Internet primarily displaces television viewing time, and that's altogether the best thing that can happen.
The Internet also displaces traditional newspaper reading. Good: newspapers have had a hold on the information business far too long. The Internet offers more variety of information and more ability for dialog than traditional newspapers.
Another issue, of course, is that the study does not appear to take into account social interactions over the Internet.
Even if the study had found that there is a negative correlation between time spent on personal social interaction and time spent on the Internet, that doesn't imply a causal relationship.
I think a study like this needs to be carried out with great caution and without bias. From what has been reported, the study does not appear to support the conclusions attributed to it. And based on its likening of non-social activities like television viewing and newspaper reading in the category of "social interaction", it seems like the authors of the study had definite biases.
The study basically just seems to be saying that the Internet is taking away time from the things that people used to do. Well, big surprise. If you spend a few hours on the Internet per day, that's bound to happen. As long as it's television and newspaper time, I think that's hardly a loss. And it seems pretty likely that the Internet causes people to read and write more than in the past, as well as exposing them to new ideas. And that's a big win from my point of view.
That middle ground is also keeping around a diversity of operating systems, together with open protocols. Being locked into Linux is no more fun in the long run than being locked into Windows, no matter how nice Linux may look right now.
First, the notion of a CD-installable general purpose operating system is itself outmoded. The consumer market is moving towards embedded and specialized devices. Linux will play a big role in that market, but making it user friendly will be done by the for profit companies that make the devices. Even in the PC market itself, most non-technical users never install applications, let alone a whole operating system.
Second, open source efforts like GNU and Linux worked because users/customers were also developers: they could make intelligent suggestions for how to improve software and often even supply and share the enhancements themselves. Non-technical users contribute nothing to this ecology and it is debatable whether the open source community should expend a lot of scarce resources on such user communities.
Third, the world needs an operating system for technically savvy users. The idea of one operating system for everybody is Microsoft's, and if I wanted to use that kind of system, I would (I have licenses to all the Microsoft software). World domination by any operating system, be it Linux or Windows, is bad because it means trying to make one system fit everybody's needs, and that cannot be anything other than a mediocre compromise.
Let's aim for open standards, open protocols, and open device interfaces, not world domination by Linux or any other system.
I think the Gimp is actually a better, if less mature, program than Corel PhotoPaint. Likewise, I think Emacs is a better IDE than what Inprise/Borland have to offer.
Those commercial Windows-based tools have been designed to appear simple to learn and use. But they reach their limits quickly when it comes to customizability and scripting. The risk is that more and more Linux users will go the "easy" route, get the "free entry level" commercial tools and never learn what Linux and UNIX are all about.
I suppose that a Windows-like environment with a working POSIX-compliant kernel and modular GUI toolkit is still better than a Windows-like environment with a Win32 API, but I think there is a lot more to Linux/UNIX than just that, and this influx of commercial tools threatens it.
Microsoft is making huge profits. If anybody makes huge profits in a capitalist system, that's an indication of market inefficiencies. Open source eliminates those inefficiencies: it's an efficient way by which consumers, who currently pay unreasonably high prices for Windows, force prices down.
Open source is a completely natural, capitalist result of the cost structure of creating and distributing software.
What does strike me as ironic (from the summary) is that someone going through such lengths to seek explanations of consciousness claims to be based in Zen, which teaches that many of the phenomena he seeks explanations for are simply illusions.
UNISYS, too, stated that some software could use the GIF patent free and later changed their mind. Promises and intents are just that; what matters for patent licensing is a contractual relationship between the licensor and the licensee, and merely posting one's intent on some site isn't sufficient. Also, the particular license chosen for RT-Linux looks like it imposes some serious burdens on other real time Linux developers. Besides a contractual relationship, the only other choice for patents is placing it in the public domain.
The only choice I see for ensuring that open source-related patents remain credible and open is to assign them to an organization whose charter irrevocably binds them to particular licensing conditions.
As for the specific patent, there is ample, specific prior art.
I'd recommend to the author to abandon this patent and work with the open source community on a better approach for the next patent.
There is also a wide range of active techniques. In those techniques, you don't just use a camera, but you also use some kind of light source. Structured light-based 3D recovery can be done in real time and there are lots of approaches to that as well. You can think of active autofocus systems, found on many P/S cameras, as structure light systems.
Both software-only and software/hardware combinations for 3D shape recovery from images are commercially available, and some are also available for free as research code. Still, don't expect this to be easy or completely automated.
In fact, more generally, I'd be really hard pressed to think of anything I would want in Linux from AIX (maybe the Fortran 90 compiler).
When it comes to systems like Irix, AIX, JFS, etc., you have to realize that a lot of smart people have worked on them for a long time. Some people may view that as an advantage. I don't. The motivation of those engineers was to be able to point to new features they implemented when their performance review came up every year, to do well on benchmarks, and maybe to write some papers for technical conferences. Leaving "good enough" alone was definitely not in their interest.
And those engineers were backed by big software development organizations that debugged and tested that code for every release, and by big consulting and field support engineers that helped customers configure the zillions of options that those systems had, most of which hardly anybody ever needed.
Linux keeps things simple. It gets good performance using comparatively straightforward code. That's a big win in my book, and I think it's the reason why so many people prefer Linux to proprietary systems. Let's not spoil that advantage by incorporating all those dusty decks from IBM, SGI, and other big companies that fit neither with the Linux code development infrastructure nor with the end user support infrastructure. The only party that benefits if Linux gets overly complex is companies that sell support.
For some libraries, GPL is fine. But a GUI toolkit is a core piece of functionality for an operating system. I believe it is good to get as many commercial vendors to use a single standard GUI toolkit. And this is really no different from the Linux kernel itself: I can write commercial software running under the Linux kernel without going open source. LGPL best encourages that kind of use.
I think Qt isn't a good choice as a major Linux toolkit: as a GPL'ed system, I think its license is too restrictive to allow universal use, and as a for-pay commercial toolkit, I think it's too expensive compared to commercial alternatives. And the QPL and Troll Tech's statements about it always leave a lingering doubt about licensing issues for both free and commercial software development. Qt is technically not bad, but to me, it isn't so much better than the alternatives to warrant living with that kind of hassle.
- It's just an announcement. We all know about Microsoft pre-competitive announcements to stall competing (in this case, open source) product efforts.
- Microsoft wants to dominate the on-line media market. If they accept Linux as a viable operation system (at least in the short term), this makes sense: it gives them a few % more market share.
- If you read the article, you see that their player has the predictable closed-source controls: digital rights management enforced through a binary-only distribution.
I think this is fairly predictable behavior on the part of a large, rational corporation that wants to dominate the market, eliminate competition, and control the use of media. In the long run, I think it is not generally in the interest of Linux users.It's also important not to store content in formats that become undecodable. So, Word 97 is out for archival storage. If the content is in ASCII or UNICODE format, you can probably hack up a parser that gets most of the information back. It is also useful to store source code in a common and reasonably simple language (C, Fortran, core Java, Scheme; not C++) that can decode the content along with the content. For example, for encrypted data, I usually store a source copy of the crypto program along with it. I consider good formats for long term storage formats like HTML, PBM, JPEG (with decoder), MPEG, and Sun audio format.
The use of transparency in the UI isn't new either, not even in a commercial product. Even Windows 2000 uses transparency for its menues.
Altogether, from what I have seen, Aqua is an evolutionary enhancement to the UI. It will appeal visually to a lot of people and that's why it will receive some enthusiastic reviews. But I don't think it changes interaction with the computer in any fundamental or important way.
As for how this development will happen, who knows. As far as I'm concerned, it's a myth that open source development is particularly fast. Most things take a few years longer to appear in open source form than their commercial predecessors. That doesn't bother me. And traditionally, proprietary protocols that end up predominating the market become public one way or another anyway. The major concern is patent protection, but that's only a temporary block.
Of course, Microsoft does try to dominate media delivery: their on-line reading efforts and Windows Media are examples. We do need to be vigilant, but I don't think their strategy will work out in the long run.
Why people want streaming media other than MP3 and MPEG-2, however, is still beyond me. I don't think there is a lot of interesting content out there. For the most interesting content available only in WMF and Real, like news, reading the article is faster than watching a video.
I also wonder why people want this. I have seen very little video in QT format on the web that isn't just product promotion. If people want to sell me something, I think they should put the video into a format I can read. Most content that could be considered informational at all (and I'm using the term "informational" lightly) is in Real format or Windows Media Player format. And much scientific and public video content is in MPEG format.
I think Linux (and the world) needs free, open-source streaming and archival audio and video formats. MPEG and the H.xxx standards are probably the best bets right now, despite some patent issues; both have open source implementations. On the other hand, I think an influx of proprietary media architectures and clients simply takes away the incentive to do things right for Linux, and I don't understand why people who want that kind of software don't just buy a Windows or Mac OS machine (OS X, if you want a UNIX-like kernel).
I think imitating Windows/MacOS and applying current HCI principles in systems like KDE and Gnome will be nice in that it makes Linux accessible and comparable to those other desktop platforms.
But I hope that in the medium term, Linux will serve as a platform for more interesting and more important UI breakthroughs, including UIs geared towards expert users. Linux is probably in the best position for that because it seems a lot more flexible and extensible than those other systems. And, more importantly, Linux has expert users that can often themselves modify and improve the UI and share those modifications.
Of course, I find many of the web patents equally mystifying. Again, there is ample prior art for the shopping card, e-commerce, and other web techniques in the Minitel system that has been used widely in Europe for many years before e-commerce started to be used in the US.
It seems likely that some viruses will be able to develop resistance to this drug. The rational thing would be to reserve it for life threatening infections, rather than use it for the common cold. But no matter what would be best for society, I suspect in the current corporate-friendly environment, that is an impossibility. But, then, given the cost, maybe HMOs won't cover it.
I don't know who proposed it first, but it certainly wasn't Microsoft's idea. The idea of using year-based version numbers was kicked around in the PC press for a number of years before Windows 95, and I think even some HCI expert proposed it in one of his books.
Does the method used by Mandrake for resizing partitions infringe on the patent? This could be a problem for distributing in the US.
Apple may or may not be legally right, but in terms of marketing, this seems like a dumb move. The more computers don't look like Windows, the more acceptable it will be for people to use non-Windows machines.
@Home needs to protect their news servers so that only authenticated customers can post (proxy or not). If there is a spam, they can then identify where it came from and should selectively take action against that customer. Since @Home actually runs cables to their customer's homes, they don't even have the problem that customers cancel and resubscribe under a different identity; unlike other ISPs, they actually can enforce their policies. The UDP against them should continue until they do.
My problem with the Windows/Macintosh approach to computing is that it is based around GUI tools. And because everything is done with GUI tools, there is no pressure to make it accessible programmatically and through plain text files.
If Linux/UNIX starts relying heavily on GUI tools as well, it will follow the same path, because the pressure to keep things simple and logical from a command line perspective will have been removed. In fact, there are already beginnings of that in various parts of Linux, where rather than designing a logical and simple textual configuration system, programs increasingly rely on graphical tools.
CodeWarrior is a fairly benign representative of the Windows/Macintosh approach to programming. Still, why should dpeople moving to Linux not use Emacs? And if they really want to use something like CodeWarrior, why not use at least an open source system instead?
From my point of view, it may actually be a good thing that CodeWarrior isn't coming to Linux. But, of course, your preferences for what Linux is to become may differ.