The protocol might be a good one. It's tough to tell from the article. (personally I'm skeptical of anything that jumps on the XML band wagon lately)
However, it's not going to replace HTTP for the following reasons:
This appears to be designed for peer to peer communications where the connection is maintained, and multiple messages can be sent back and forth. HTTP on the other hand is like a remote procedure call - you pass in data and get a response. Do you think Yahoo or Slashdot wants to keep an open socket for each person connecting?
HTTP is already standardized and firmly in place. I don't think FTP would be done the same way today if they had to do it again, but it's a standard and it's staying. Same with HTTP.
HTTP is simple enough for novice programmers to implement on top of BSD socket calls. This new creature is going to require a third party library or a serious investment of time.
"The screenshots are pretty, but one has got to wonder if the requirements of gnome might be excessive for modern PDAs."
Something being an excessive resource hog is the recipe for it to be a success. Look all around. We don't know what to do with the exponential growth of our computers, so we put increasingly bloated stuff on it.
On Win32, witness COM. What you mean you didn't want to load a 500k DLL just to put a new kind of button on the screen? Oops, that DLL loads MFC42.dll. There goes another 2 megs. It's ok though the machine can handle it, and it is a really cool button.
For the free software crowd, witness emacs. Forget the HURD, emacs is where their real operating systems development is going on.
Streaming video, Downloadable MP3s, Gnutella traffic (my first Unix account had a 500K quota - that would be about 30 seconds of sound), people LIKE resource hogs. I predict anything that is a pig and is applied to a machine that can barely handle it will be a success.
(Note: I didn't even have to pick on the easy targets like why Word 2000 feels slower on a 500 MHz machine than Word x.x did on an old 386.)
Orange on the left, Blue on the right
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Cleartype In Depth
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· Score: 1
I'm sure the analysis to get these results is much more sophisticated. Without a doubt it will be or is patented, but wouldn't a poor-man's approximation of this be to anti-alias (pixel interpolate) with blue tints on the right and orange tints on the left (instead of grey as is more standard)?
I'll bet the algorithm is much simpler if you do it that way, and you'd probably get 90% of the results with 10% of the effort.
Re:Another attack on open source from RMS
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RMS On 'Open' Motif
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Restrictions on use are obnoxious and aginst the spirit of free software.
You mean like not allowing GPL code to be used in closed source projects? I refuse to use any library code that falls under the stricter GPL, and any free software I write will be truly free and fall under a BSD style license. Stallman's view of free is "you're free to agree with me."
Admittedly, I'm content as a user to use any full blown applications that are GPL. I certainly won't be contributing back to them though. I don't want my contributions to be restricted like that. Maybe that's the crux of it - GPL stuff gives me freedom as a user, but not freedom as a developer.
The restrictions the free software foundation puts on it's software are, to me, very similar to the ones being put on Motif. It's almost ironic that Stallman has an issue with this. The net result is that I can't legally use it unless I agree with their view on life. The license on things like Python, IJG, and PNG give me real freedom.
Doesn't anyone else find it incredibly funny that the Offspring are selling Napster shirts, hats and stickers without approval from Napster. (Thus violating Napster's trademark.) This link from Wired has more details. (Who knows though, Wired could have gotten it wrong... they often do.)
It's almost as if the Offspring are saying "Sure you can violate our copyright, but we're going to violate your trademark." I think it's brilliant. It will be a horrible problem with public relations if Napster sues to protect it's trademark, but they'll lose it if they don't. Lets see how Napster feels about intellectual property when it's their own.
TRADEMARKS Trademarks owned by Napster Napster, the Napster logo, and all other trademarks, service marks, and trade names of Napster appearing on this web site are owned by Napster. Napster's trademarks, logos, service marks, and trade names may not be used in connection with any product or service that is not Napster's, in any manner that is likely to cause confusion, or in any manner that disparages or discredits Napster. All other trademarks, product or service names, brand names, company names and/or logos appearing on this web site are the property of their respective owners.
(My emphasis in italics.)
- Of course I think I'm right. If I thought I was wrong I'd change my mind. (That doesn't apply to spelling. I know I'm wrong there.)
Really, this may not be a bad approach to things if you think about it. Those ideas which have the most potential to be lucrative will get the most financial backing for a challenge when applicable. Sort of a patent natural selection if you will. The only thing the USPTO does is fact check the legal documents, rubber stamp them as being a vaild patent and then let the lawyers settle it on the back end.
It is a terrible approach when you're the one getting dragged into court because some company got a rubber stamp patent on something obvious and has more money to enforce it than you do to defend against it.
The courts are to presume the patent is valid because the patent office approved it. If the patent office isn't doing their job throwing out cheezy patents, then the courts shouldn't make this presumption.
It's very difficult to win a law suit when the other side has a LOT more money. Add to that the fact that the judge and jury are even less qualified to understand the technical matter of the patent than the patent office is in the first place, and you have a really bad situation for small companies writing software using relatively obvious techniques.
The patent system is really very broken, and from the sounds of this article the problem starts at the top.
8GB of motherboard memory is well and good if you can easily change your OS and hardware. Something like this would be a drop in performance booster for when you are stuck with a legacy system that has grown beyond it's original boundaries.
Imagine you developed a Windows NT system to keep development simple (yes some things are simpler on Windows), then your system becomes a success. More of a success than the system can handle. Your choices are:
Rewrite it for a more scalable system
Throw heavy duty hardware at it (like an 8 Gig RAM disk)
Which solution costs less and get finished faster?
I look forward to the day when standard hard drives are done with RAM of some flavor. What's all this silly business with spinning disks and moving parts? Feels kind of archaic doesn't it?
Sure I think I'm right. If I thought I was wrong, I'd change my mind.
What happens when someone writes a piece of proprietary software using an algorithm described in one of these patents? Will you sue to enforce the position?
If the answer is yes, then you're just as guilty as the big bad corporations of stifling competition in the industry by using the terribly confused patent office to restrict the use of mathematical algorithms in developing products.(I'm not terribly familiar with the patents in question, but mostly they look like signal processing algorithms, and to my mind that means they are just mathematics.)
If the answer is no, then you should ask your lawyers if the patent will hold it's value. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you have to enforce a patent against all violators for it to continue to be valid.
Software patents are all around bad. Software is just an extension of discrete mathematics, and mathematics were never intended to be patentable.
IMHO, the best thing for people who want freedom to do is to publish their algorithms so that someone else can't come along and patent it later. Prior art databases are a noble cause.
If you want to force people to put their software under GPL, then you might be on the right track. I question the morality of that though. Forcing people to use your definition of freedom (even though it is a pretty good one, and better than most), isn't as free as it could be.
I can't help but think that the legal system is going to continue to be clueless in matters like these.
I wonder if the judge would find a problem if the user uploaded his own copy of the music, and only that user could use his uploaded copy. (Probably not)
Given the previous, would the judge find it illegal to use compression in the uploading process? (Probably not)
If the compression was _really_ good, and an entire 600 megabyte CD could be compressed to just a few bytes, would that be illegal? (Probably not) (Stretch your mind, and imagine a really bitchin new advancement came along and blew away the standard compression algorithms.)
Effectively what MP3.com has done is to have both sides of the communication (the person uploading, and MP3.com as the receiver) agree to a really efficient dictionary style compression scheme. The serial number on the CD is enough to encode all of the information on the CD when both sides have the same dictionary in their compression scheme.
Doesn't really matter though. (I mean besides to MP3.com) The recording and movie industries can try to keep fighting technology at every oportunity, but when you chop off one head another one grows back and is stronger. Shut down Napster and Gnutella pops up to elliminate the weakness of having centralized servers. Do a better job on DVD encryption, and someone will write a video driver to capture the raw bits on their way to the display. Same thing for digital music encryption. Information does truly want to be free, and there isn't anything anyone can do to stop it.
Eventually, a successor to Gnutella will be able to transmit files privately and anonymously too. Not only will no one be able to shut it down, no one will be able to know what you're doing, who you are, or that you're there. The legal battles against Napster, MP3.com and others will become insignificant at that point.
Don't optimize a single thing until you find there is a problem! Instead, write clean readable code that you can work on later if you need to.
I've spent the last couple months fixing and replacing a bunch of web code written by a guy who thought performance was everything. You have to get it working first. His code does the wrong thing incredibly fast. Bloody Fucking Useless (TM). I'll spare you the details of his N-Tier Network with Application Servers and crap. I've rewritten half of it in plain old (slow) ASP, and I'm getting much better performance and an easier time fixing bugs.
Once it works, evaluate whether you have a performance problem. If you don't, then leave the damned thing alone.
If you do, start profiling. It's not wasting time where you think it is, guaranteed. Ask the super dawgs of optimization (the John Carmacks, Michael Ahbrashs etc...) how many times they just "knew" where the problem was only to be totally surprized once they broke out and profiled it.
Anyone complaining about how Perl, Python, ASP, PHP or whatever is so much slower than C/C++ is really missing the boat. Web pages spit text out the front door, and talk to files or database through the back door. There is seldom an algorithm to be seen, and most the of processor time is spent doing something other than interpreting your script.
It's a lot easier to optimize a query, add an index, put more memory in the server, disable the screen saver, whatever than it is to rewrite everything in C++ using ODBC.
Once you do rewrite it in C++, you're back to where you started. It's still too slow, and now you need to restructure the query, add memory, turn off the screen saver or whatever...
One other thing, don't believe the hype. Everything latest and greatest is not necessarily fastest and best. Microsoft get's paid when you replace your old perfectly good stuff with whatever they've just released. No one is ever going to convince me that ADO is faster than ODBC when ADO uses ODBC to do its work. What the hell is MTS good for? It's a solution to a problem I haven't seen.
Slashdot Mirror
The protocol might be a good one. It's tough to tell from the article. (personally I'm skeptical of anything that jumps on the XML band wagon lately)
However, it's not going to replace HTTP for the following reasons:
"The screenshots are pretty, but one has got to wonder if the requirements of gnome might be excessive for modern PDAs."
Something being an excessive resource hog is the recipe for it to be a success. Look all around. We don't know what to do with the exponential growth of our computers, so we put increasingly bloated stuff on it.
On Win32, witness COM. What you mean you didn't want to load a 500k DLL just to put a new kind of button on the screen? Oops, that DLL loads MFC42.dll. There goes another 2 megs. It's ok though the machine can handle it, and it is a really cool button.
For the free software crowd, witness emacs. Forget the HURD, emacs is where their real operating systems development is going on.
Streaming video, Downloadable MP3s, Gnutella traffic (my first Unix account had a 500K quota - that would be about 30 seconds of sound), people LIKE resource hogs. I predict anything that is a pig and is applied to a machine that can barely handle it will be a success.
(Note: I didn't even have to pick on the easy targets like why Word 2000 feels slower on a 500 MHz machine than Word x.x did on an old 386.)
I'm sure the analysis to get these results is much more sophisticated. Without a doubt it will be or is patented, but wouldn't a poor-man's approximation of this be to anti-alias (pixel interpolate) with blue tints on the right and orange tints on the left (instead of grey as is more standard)?
I'll bet the algorithm is much simpler if you do it that way, and you'd probably get 90% of the results with 10% of the effort.
Restrictions on use are obnoxious and aginst the spirit of free software.
You mean like not allowing GPL code to be used in closed source projects? I refuse to use any library code that falls under the stricter GPL, and any free software I write will be truly free and fall under a BSD style license. Stallman's view of free is "you're free to agree with me."
Admittedly, I'm content as a user to use any full blown applications that are GPL. I certainly won't be contributing back to them though. I don't want my contributions to be restricted like that. Maybe that's the crux of it - GPL stuff gives me freedom as a user, but not freedom as a developer.
The restrictions the free software foundation puts on it's software are, to me, very similar to the ones being put on Motif. It's almost ironic that Stallman has an issue with this. The net result is that I can't legally use it unless I agree with their view on life. The license on things like Python, IJG, and PNG give me real freedom.
It's almost as if the Offspring are saying "Sure you can violate our copyright, but we're going to violate your trademark." I think it's brilliant. It will be a horrible problem with public relations if Napster sues to protect it's trademark, but they'll lose it if they don't. Lets see how Napster feels about intellectual property when it's their own.
Here's the relavent section from Napster's license terms page:
(My emphasis in italics.)
- Of course I think I'm right. If I thought I was wrong I'd change my mind. (That doesn't apply to spelling. I know I'm wrong there.)
Really, this may not be a bad approach to things if you think about it. Those ideas which have the most potential to be lucrative will get the most financial backing for a challenge when applicable. Sort of a patent natural selection if you will. The only thing the USPTO does is fact check the legal documents, rubber stamp them as being a vaild patent and then let the lawyers settle it on the back end.
It is a terrible approach when you're the one getting dragged into court because some company got a rubber stamp patent on something obvious and has more money to enforce it than you do to defend against it.
The courts are to presume the patent is valid because the patent office approved it. If the patent office isn't doing their job throwing out cheezy patents, then the courts shouldn't make this presumption.
It's very difficult to win a law suit when the other side has a LOT more money. Add to that the fact that the judge and jury are even less qualified to understand the technical matter of the patent than the patent office is in the first place, and you have a really bad situation for small companies writing software using relatively obvious techniques.
The patent system is really very broken, and from the sounds of this article the problem starts at the top.
Imagine you developed a Windows NT system to keep development simple (yes some things are simpler on Windows), then your system becomes a success. More of a success than the system can handle. Your choices are:
Which solution costs less and get finished faster?
I look forward to the day when standard hard drives are done with RAM of some flavor. What's all this silly business with spinning disks and moving parts? Feels kind of archaic doesn't it?
Sure I think I'm right. If I thought I was wrong, I'd change my mind.
What happens when someone writes a piece of proprietary software using an algorithm described in one of these patents? Will you sue to enforce the position?
If the answer is yes, then you're just as guilty as the big bad corporations of stifling competition in the industry by using the terribly confused patent office to restrict the use of mathematical algorithms in developing products.(I'm not terribly familiar with the patents in question, but mostly they look like signal processing algorithms, and to my mind that means they are just mathematics.)
If the answer is no, then you should ask your lawyers if the patent will hold it's value. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you have to enforce a patent against all violators for it to continue to be valid.
Software patents are all around bad. Software is just an extension of discrete mathematics, and mathematics were never intended to be patentable.
IMHO, the best thing for people who want freedom to do is to publish their algorithms so that someone else can't come along and patent it later. Prior art databases are a noble cause.
If you want to force people to put their software under GPL, then you might be on the right track. I question the morality of that though. Forcing people to use your definition of freedom (even though it is a pretty good one, and better than most), isn't as free as it could be.
I can't help but think that the legal system is going to continue to be clueless in matters like these.
I wonder if the judge would find a problem if the user uploaded his own copy of the music, and only that user could use his uploaded copy. (Probably not)
Given the previous, would the judge find it illegal to use compression in the uploading process? (Probably not)
If the compression was _really_ good, and an entire 600 megabyte CD could be compressed to just a few bytes, would that be illegal? (Probably not) (Stretch your mind, and imagine a really bitchin new advancement came along and blew away the standard compression algorithms.)
Effectively what MP3.com has done is to have both sides of the communication (the person uploading, and MP3.com as the receiver) agree to a really efficient dictionary style compression scheme. The serial number on the CD is enough to encode all of the information on the CD when both sides have the same dictionary in their compression scheme.
Doesn't really matter though. (I mean besides to MP3.com) The recording and movie industries can try to keep fighting technology at every oportunity, but when you chop off one head another one grows back and is stronger. Shut down Napster and Gnutella pops up to elliminate the weakness of having centralized servers. Do a better job on DVD encryption, and someone will write a video driver to capture the raw bits on their way to the display. Same thing for digital music encryption. Information does truly want to be free, and there isn't anything anyone can do to stop it.
Eventually, a successor to Gnutella will be able to transmit files privately and anonymously too. Not only will no one be able to shut it down, no one will be able to know what you're doing, who you are, or that you're there. The legal battles against Napster, MP3.com and others will become insignificant at that point.
Don't optimize a single thing until you find there is a problem! Instead, write clean readable code that you can work on later if you need to.
I've spent the last couple months fixing and replacing a bunch of web code written by a guy who thought performance was everything. You have to get it working first. His code does the wrong thing incredibly fast. Bloody Fucking Useless (TM). I'll spare you the details of his N-Tier Network with Application Servers and crap. I've rewritten half of it in plain old (slow) ASP, and I'm getting much better performance and an easier time fixing bugs.
Once it works, evaluate whether you have a performance problem. If you don't, then leave the damned thing alone.
If you do, start profiling. It's not wasting time where you think it is, guaranteed. Ask the super dawgs of optimization (the John Carmacks, Michael Ahbrashs etc...) how many times they just "knew" where the problem was only to be totally surprized once they broke out and profiled it.
Anyone complaining about how Perl, Python, ASP, PHP or whatever is so much slower than C/C++ is really missing the boat. Web pages spit text out the front door, and talk to files or database through the back door. There is seldom an algorithm to be seen, and most the of processor time is spent doing something other than interpreting your script.
It's a lot easier to optimize a query, add an index, put more memory in the server, disable the screen saver, whatever than it is to rewrite everything in C++ using ODBC.
Once you do rewrite it in C++, you're back to where you started. It's still too slow, and now you need to restructure the query, add memory, turn off the screen saver or whatever...
One other thing, don't believe the hype. Everything latest and greatest is not necessarily fastest and best. Microsoft get's paid when you replace your old perfectly good stuff with whatever they've just released. No one is ever going to convince me that ADO is faster than ODBC when ADO uses ODBC to do its work. What the hell is MTS good for? It's a solution to a problem I haven't seen.