I was just wondering. Is this being done in real time like Quake or real time like Grim Fandango? Because if its the latter, then this is not very impressive, having already been done by, er, Grim Fandango, the real time 3d graphic adventure.
The salient points about Opera are the tiny file size, small memory footprint and speedy operation. Mozilla doesn't yet come close to meeting any of these factors. Although, the open source community being what it is, I would be very surprised if the community didn't produce a "browser only" package to rival Opera. If that were done, it would be very interesting to pit Opera (closed-source, proprietary) browser against the open source developed Mozilla. I reserve judgement as to which I suspect would come out as the leaner, faster, more standards-compliant browser. I wish somebody at Opera could please answer me this though: why, oh why use an MDI interface for a web browser?
So I doubt that quantum mechanics will really form that much of a barrier to the size of circuitry. It'll require a new methodology and new techniques to be sure, but it's hardly like it'll be impossible to make some analog of electronic circuits at very small scales.
Unfortunately what happens at about 0.05 microns is that wires pressed that close together form a structure know as a Josephson Junction (a magnetic flux-sensitive quantum barrier). Under certain conditions, electrons can arbitrarily jump from one wire to another, depending on the exact number of flux quanta mediating the junction at the time. Unfortunately in a standard work environment, controlling magnetic fields to the level of quanta is next to impossible, thus setting an upper limit on the coherence of classical circuitry at the sub.05 micron limit. This was my initial assertion and it still stands, despite insubstantial denials.
That is, of course, not to say however that there will be no further progress along the road of computing. Quantum effects may one day prove to be the saviour of computing, and time will off course tell whether we ultimately have a quantum computer sitting on our desks in ten years time.
However, you all know as well as I do that Moore's law is coming to an end, and to attempt to deny that without sound scientific reasoning seems to me like a bad case of denial.
This technology will probably have limited use in producing circuits that are ever finer, as this takes you well into the realm of unpredictable quantum effects, where circuits can no longer be guaranteed to behave in a predictable way.
In fact, quantum effects start to come into play at around 0.05 microns, a resolution it will be possible to achive using Extreme Ultra Violet and/or X-ray lithography, ultimately rendering any technological attempt to produce smaller circuitry quite pointless.
IMHO, it would make sense if Americans would get a grip on reality and use the DVB standard that the rest of the world already uses. Then these pointless bickerings over standards would have been resolved *years* ago.
As much as I agree with the idea of *ultimately* getting rid of proprietary software from the linux distros, I also think it should be done in a practicable way. Simply yanking it out from underneath current and potential users would be very damaging to the distribution.
It is, after all the users that justify the existence of Debian and to deny that is the mark of a zealot. Whilst the arguments are sound - nobody is going to prevent users from downloading, using or compiling proprietary software but, unfortunately even in the Linux world, users are beginning to possess the same mentality as Windows users - "Why should I have to download, compile, install it all on my own and read the vast amount of documentation on how to integrate it with Debian, when Mandrake, RedHat, Microsoft do all that for me?".
And therein lies the problem. From a political standpoint, it most definitely *should* be available for anyone out there in a apt package ready to be easily installed into an otherwise free Debian system. It will have to be a matter of sane compromise: 95% of Debian users won't be able to create packages for their software and sadly, most software requires some serious tweaking for it to fit into Debian.
Unfortunately for all, Debian seems recently to have taken major steps away from sanity and towards free software zealot status. You'd be forgiven for thinking, based on the actions of many of its adherents recently, that Debian was a religion rather than a damn fine OS. Just remember that zealotry is the enemy of reason.
Once again, we see Free Software supporters acting like zealots, putting some ill-founded political principle in favour of the needs and desires of their users. Believe me, I expect to find Netscape, KDE, Pine et al. as part of my linux distro. And if it's not there, then why go through the arse of downloading all this extra stuff, when Mandrake gives you everything you need?
Come on guys, stop acting like some petty Stallmanesque psychonauts, and start thinking about what's best for your users, and hence for Debian, because without users, you are as nothing. Reject the amendment, and include KDE in Debian. Maybe then we won't all think of you as a group of pointless obsessives on some illogical crusade against proprietary software.
How about clearly and calmly sending copies of the DMCA provisions for fair use, and the First Amendment of the US constitution to microsoft over and over again, until they get a clue. Failing that a greased, sharpened stick and a game of hunt the lawyer could help improve matters.
An indeed, the term "hack" also was used to refer in Oxford to both journalists, and those most reprehensible of beasts, student politicians after your vote.
It seems that many people (including the author of the article) are implying that there is some malice on the part on whoever chose to define the words the way they have. It is, however, nothing more than linguistic evolution. The people who compile the Oxford English Dictionary have strict rules on word identification that they follow to the letter. There is no stupidity or oversight on their part.
To gain an entry in the OED, the researchers need to demonstrate a minimum of TWELVE published uses of the word with its new definition over a period of not less than FIVE years. On identifying this, an entry into the OED is made. Thus, the definition of a hacker in its new, controversial form has appeared because that is the way many people define it. This is the process of linguistic evolution, and it is constant and unstoppable.
To decry such a natural process is pointless, and should put you in mind of your grandparents complaining about how "they've hijacked the word 'gay' no it doesn't mean happy any more no it's disgusting isn't it?". There is nothing anyone can do about the redefinition of 'hacker' though. It will, from now on, always have the dual meaning, and the media feel entirely justified in using it as it is in the dictionary, as well as being a commonly accepted term by 400 million people. If you wish to help the OED correctly define 'cracker' then maybe you could supply them with a series of published articles spanning five years. Then it would appear in a later edition.
The only other potential solution is to find a new word for 'hacker' (non-malicious) meaning, and then use 'hacker' the same as the rest of the English-speaking world do, and then this thread will go away forever.
I would like to clarify that my assertion about Caldera: I am not claiming that Caldera has done nothing of worth, indeed I refuse to believe that anybody would be stupid enough to sink money into a company that they didn't think was contributing a positive way.
My assertion is that Caldera is a company that is in no way set apart from its competitors. Indeed most of the achievements you claim are past glories. Its plans for the future are uncertain. And given the strength of some of its competitors, that should be a real cause of concern for investors.
However it is not. Hence my assertion that Caldera is a company floating on a wave of 'linux is great' euphoria and investor stupidity.
The Forbes article makes what seems to be a very reasonable criticism of Caldera, which is that it is an uninspiring company with a bland public imgae, that does little of worth to set it apart from its competitors.
This point of view presumably is not in any way in keeping with the feeling of most investors however, who seem to be keeping the company's shares in high demand.
It seems to me therefore that this company is being buoyed up solely by the fact that it does 'something with linux'. Given its lack of branding and strong competitors like RedHat and VA, I am assuming that investors don't care what exactly it does with linux, and that the mere mention of the OS that has become the daytrader's best friend is enough to drive share prices to inexplicable and unsustainable levels
The market for tech stocks is getting ridiculous at the moment, and what better example could there be than this; an uninspiring company, in an already crowded field, with an uncertain future business model, and people can't get enough.
Caldera will be remembered as an also ran. A company whose sole claim to fame (apart from 'doing linux') is that they failed to win a court case against the evil empire and settlesd for about $42 dollars and a field full of goats. Long live market stupidity!
gypsumfantastic
+++ The meaning of a statement is the method of its resolution
It seems to me that this is just a tacit admission by a major hardware manufacturer that Linux is well ahead of Doze, Solaris and any other OSes that are being developed for IA64. Based on Microsoft's previous record, we might see a 64 bit IA64 windows sometime in 2002, and Solaris is for the time being on hold, after a rather childish slagging match between Intel and Sun with each one claiming that the other was not pulling their weight by doing a fair share of the porting effort. As a result, when Itanium arrives, there will be only one viable choice - Linux. So if you are a hardware manufacturer that would like to be able to take advantage of the new architecture - then you can wait 2 years for MS, or you can just bite the bullet (jump on the bandwagon?) now. It's a question of simple, obvious business sense.
Check out some of the patents that IBM hold for holographic data storage in birefringent crystals. In a few years we could be looking at datacrystals the like of which would make Mr. Spock proud. The capacity? About 400-600Tb is the figure that IBM quoted. (See New Scientist passim)
You might be thinking of common misconception people have about glass. You've probablt been told that windows in Medieval buildings are significantly wider at the bottom than the top. Yes the are, 50% of the time. The deformations are caused by inadequate glass manufacture techniques in the middle ages. For a standard sheet of glass, 1m X 1m, 5mm thick, the deformation over the a 1,000 year period is about 200 microns. Good enough for a hard drive.
I don't think it'll ever come, as Be has had a major change in direction, and is now an 'internet appliance OS'. Be is in no way superior to any of the other Oses being considered for these devices, but it will be first out of the door, and so is likely to catch on. There will never be a proper MU version of BeOS, or a server version, as that is out of the scope of the company's direction. They are only picking fights that they can win. Your is safe.
Most of the articles say that RealNetworks are licensing the codec - and to me this suggests them paying M$ money. This being and the case, and given what we know about billg et al. and their mentalities, I don't think you'll be seeing WMF in an open source GRealPlayer any time soon. You can bet your life that in trying to develop an open source codec some corporobod will claim patent violation or infringement of their DMCA rights. That's the kind of pants that these people like to throw at us well-meaning types.
The original story behind the MPL is that the GPL suffers from a kind of Viral nature: when you use it on a project, any other projects or bits of code that come into contact with it or ar descended from it also have to be GPL as well. This is potentially nightmarish for Sun, who may wish to incorporate changes to Forte into other closed-source products, and so the MPL was developed. There is a more detailed explanation in Mozilla.org's history pages Needless to say, the ability for Sun to use any
I want to know whether in theory there is any reason why this couldn't be done? No computer company has a claim to having invented it necessarily, but that sort of thinking isn't holding Amazon back...
But the question is, could they do it? What is to stop them? In the light of these actions by apple is it not a perfectly plausible course of action for them to take? I mean, they may not have invented it, but that didn't stop Amazon, did it?
Just a thought: what would happen if say, Dell or Gateway decided to copyright the eggshell-beige cuboid box look for PCs? Is this a possibility, or is the whole idea just a big sweaty pile of echydna's poo?
Slashdot Mirror
Q: Mr Valenti, do you know whether one plus one is equal to two?
Mr Cooper: Ambiguous. Incomplete hypothetical. Lacks foundation and assumes facts not in evidence. Answer yes or no.
Mr Garbus: Go ahead. Please.
The Witness: I don't know.
Q: Do you have any recollections of the past 35 years, at all?
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Mr Garbus: So then what did you do with the chicken?
Mr Cooper: Client-Attorney confidentiality.
I was just wondering. Is this being done in real time like Quake or real time like Grim Fandango? Because if its the latter, then this is not very impressive, having already been done by, er, Grim Fandango, the real time 3d graphic adventure.
The salient points about Opera are the tiny file size, small memory footprint and speedy operation. Mozilla doesn't yet come close to meeting any of these factors. Although, the open source community being what it is, I would be very surprised if the community didn't produce a "browser only" package to rival Opera. If that were done, it would be very interesting to pit Opera (closed-source, proprietary) browser against the open source developed Mozilla. I reserve judgement as to which I suspect would come out as the leaner, faster, more standards-compliant browser. I wish somebody at Opera could please answer me this though: why, oh why use an MDI interface for a web browser?
Unfortunately what happens at about 0.05 microns is that wires pressed that close together form a structure know as a Josephson Junction (a magnetic flux-sensitive quantum barrier). Under certain conditions, electrons can arbitrarily jump from one wire to another, depending on the exact number of flux quanta mediating the junction at the time. Unfortunately in a standard work environment, controlling magnetic fields to the level of quanta is next to impossible, thus setting an upper limit on the coherence of classical circuitry at the sub .05 micron limit. This was my initial assertion and it still stands, despite insubstantial denials.
That is, of course, not to say however that there will be no further progress along the road of computing. Quantum effects may one day prove to be the saviour of computing, and time will off course tell whether we ultimately have a quantum computer sitting on our desks in ten years time.
However, you all know as well as I do that Moore's law is coming to an end, and to attempt to deny that without sound scientific reasoning seems to me like a bad case of denial.
In fact, quantum effects start to come into play at around 0.05 microns, a resolution it will be possible to achive using Extreme Ultra Violet and/or X-ray lithography, ultimately rendering any technological attempt to produce smaller circuitry quite pointless.
IMHO, it would make sense if Americans would get a grip on reality and use the DVB standard that the rest of the world already uses. Then these pointless bickerings over standards would have been resolved *years* ago.
It is, after all the users that justify the existence of Debian and to deny that is the mark of a zealot. Whilst the arguments are sound - nobody is going to prevent users from downloading, using or compiling proprietary software but, unfortunately even in the Linux world, users are beginning to possess the same mentality as Windows users - "Why should I have to download, compile, install it all on my own and read the vast amount of documentation on how to integrate it with Debian, when Mandrake, RedHat, Microsoft do all that for me?".
And therein lies the problem. From a political standpoint, it most definitely *should* be available for anyone out there in a apt package ready to be easily installed into an otherwise free Debian system. It will have to be a matter of sane compromise: 95% of Debian users won't be able to create packages for their software and sadly, most software requires some serious tweaking for it to fit into Debian.
Unfortunately for all, Debian seems recently to have taken major steps away from sanity and towards free software zealot status. You'd be forgiven for thinking, based on the actions of many of its adherents recently, that Debian was a religion rather than a damn fine OS. Just remember that zealotry is the enemy of reason.
Come on guys, stop acting like some petty Stallmanesque psychonauts, and start thinking about what's best for your users, and hence for Debian, because without users, you are as nothing. Reject the amendment, and include KDE in Debian. Maybe then we won't all think of you as a group of pointless obsessives on some illogical crusade against proprietary software.
How about clearly and calmly sending copies of the DMCA provisions for fair use, and the First Amendment of the US constitution to microsoft over and over again, until they get a clue. Failing that a greased, sharpened stick and a game of hunt the lawyer could help improve matters.
An indeed, the term "hack" also was used to refer in Oxford to both journalists, and those most reprehensible of beasts, student politicians after your vote.
To gain an entry in the OED, the researchers need to demonstrate a minimum of TWELVE published uses of the word with its new definition over a period of not less than FIVE years. On identifying this, an entry into the OED is made. Thus, the definition of a hacker in its new, controversial form has appeared because that is the way many people define it. This is the process of linguistic evolution, and it is constant and unstoppable.
To decry such a natural process is pointless, and should put you in mind of your grandparents complaining about how "they've hijacked the word 'gay' no it doesn't mean happy any more no it's disgusting isn't it?". There is nothing anyone can do about the redefinition of 'hacker' though. It will, from now on, always have the dual meaning, and the media feel entirely justified in using it as it is in the dictionary, as well as being a commonly accepted term by 400 million people. If you wish to help the OED correctly define 'cracker' then maybe you could supply them with a series of published articles spanning five years. Then it would appear in a later edition.
The only other potential solution is to find a new word for 'hacker' (non-malicious) meaning, and then use 'hacker' the same as the rest of the English-speaking world do, and then this thread will go away forever.
To be honest, I think I can be as expressive in source code as I can in English,
Take this bit of expressive C++ for example:
// I disapprove of the DMCA
// I think it is unconstitutional
Martin
Are you saying that Landau essentially said that this is one conjecture that cannot be proved? If so is it possible to prove that it cannot be proved?
Surely, if you offer money for a proof, you would feel obliged to offer it to anyone who can prove that it cannot be proved?
I'm going to bed. My head hurts.
I would like to clarify that my assertion about Caldera: I am not claiming that Caldera has done nothing of worth, indeed I refuse to believe that anybody would be stupid enough to sink money into a company that they didn't think was contributing a positive way.
My assertion is that Caldera is a company that is in no way set apart from its competitors. Indeed most of the achievements you claim are past glories. Its plans for the future are uncertain. And given the strength of some of its competitors, that should be a real cause of concern for investors.
However it is not. Hence my assertion that Caldera is a company floating on a wave of 'linux is great' euphoria and investor stupidity.
GypsumFantastic
The Forbes article makes what seems to be a very reasonable criticism of Caldera, which is that it is an uninspiring company with a bland public imgae, that does little of worth to set it apart from its competitors.
This point of view presumably is not in any way in keeping with the feeling of most investors however, who seem to be keeping the company's shares in high demand.
It seems to me therefore that this company is being buoyed up solely by the fact that it does 'something with linux'. Given its lack of branding and strong competitors like RedHat and VA, I am assuming that investors don't care what exactly it does with linux, and that the mere mention of the OS that has become the daytrader's best friend is enough to drive share prices to inexplicable and unsustainable levels
The market for tech stocks is getting ridiculous at the moment, and what better example could there be than this; an uninspiring company, in an already crowded field, with an uncertain future business model, and people can't get enough.
Caldera will be remembered as an also ran. A company whose sole claim to fame (apart from 'doing linux') is that they failed to win a court case against the evil empire and settlesd for about $42 dollars and a field full of goats. Long live market stupidity!
gypsumfantastic
+++ The meaning of a statement is the method of its resolution
It seems to me that this is just a tacit admission by a major hardware manufacturer that Linux is well ahead of Doze, Solaris and any other OSes that are being developed for IA64. Based on Microsoft's previous record, we might see a 64 bit IA64 windows sometime in 2002, and Solaris is for the time being on hold, after a rather childish slagging match between Intel and Sun with each one claiming that the other was not pulling their weight by doing a fair share of the porting effort. As a result, when Itanium arrives, there will be only one viable choice - Linux. So if you are a hardware manufacturer that would like to be able to take advantage of the new architecture - then you can wait 2 years for MS, or you can just bite the bullet (jump on the bandwagon?) now. It's a question of simple, obvious business sense.
Check out some of the patents that IBM hold for holographic data storage in birefringent crystals. In a few years we could be looking at datacrystals the like of which would make Mr. Spock proud. The capacity? About 400-600Tb is the figure that IBM quoted. (See New Scientist passim)
You might be thinking of common misconception people have about glass. You've probablt been told that windows in Medieval buildings are significantly wider at the bottom than the top. Yes the are, 50% of the time. The deformations are caused by inadequate glass manufacture techniques in the middle ages. For a standard sheet of glass, 1m X 1m, 5mm thick, the deformation over the a 1,000 year period is about 200 microns. Good enough for a hard drive.
I don't think it'll ever come, as Be has had a major change in direction, and is now an 'internet appliance OS'. Be is in no way superior to any of the other Oses being considered for these devices, but it will be first out of the door, and so is likely to catch on. There will never be a proper MU version of BeOS, or a server version, as that is out of the scope of the company's direction. They are only picking fights that they can win. Your is safe.
Most of the articles say that RealNetworks are licensing the codec - and to me this suggests them paying M$ money. This being and the case, and given what we know about billg et al. and their mentalities, I don't think you'll be seeing WMF in an open source GRealPlayer any time soon. You can bet your life that in trying to develop an open source codec some corporobod will claim patent violation or infringement of their DMCA rights. That's the kind of pants that these people like to throw at us well-meaning types.
The original story behind the MPL is that the GPL suffers from a kind of Viral nature: when you use it on a project, any other projects or bits of code that come into contact with it or ar descended from it also have to be GPL as well. This is potentially nightmarish for Sun, who may wish to incorporate changes to Forte into other closed-source products, and so the MPL was developed. There is a more detailed explanation in Mozilla.org's history pages Needless to say, the ability for Sun to use any
I want to know whether in theory there is any reason why this couldn't be done? No computer company has a claim to having invented it necessarily, but that sort of thinking isn't holding Amazon back...
But the question is, could they do it? What is to stop them? In the light of these actions by apple is it not a perfectly plausible course of action for them to take? I mean, they may not have invented it, but that didn't stop Amazon, did it?
Just a thought: what would happen if say, Dell or Gateway decided to copyright the eggshell-beige cuboid box look for PCs? Is this a possibility, or is the whole idea just a big sweaty pile of echydna's poo?