Whatever you may think of their commercial arm, Microsoft have a flourishing and highly-respected research division, who knock out stuff like this all the time. Some of it is GPLed, some of it is BSDed, etc etc. What's the big deal?
The sad thing is, it's far harder to "break into" the game industry in the same spectacular way as did, say, the wunderkids of the 1980s. (I'm thinking of Crammond, the Oliver twins, Braben and Bell, etc etc.)
These days, there's such an emphasis on expensive production effects (full motion video, Hollywood actors, life-modelled action, and so on) that you can't really do anything that competes on your own.
Such is the price of progress. It's a far cry from the day when one teenager could write a best-selling game (Jet Set Willy) or two undergraduates could introduce a totally new genre into gaming with one game (Elite). The question is, have we lost something? Does all this glitz and glamour stifle true innovation?
The problem with the internet is not necessarily with the infrastructure itself. It is more to do with the localised view of network concerns, eg. routing and so forth.
It has been known theoretically for some time that intelligent routing software with global knowledge of the network is able to cope far better with faults. Indeed, some of Cisco's more advanced routers have rudimentary implementations of some of the theoretical ideas.
Far more exciting, though, is the work going on at Sychron. The founders of this company are leaders in the field of research into high-performace, scalable, fault-tolerant parallel computing and networks, and are now applying their knowledge to the internet; specifically, to servers and routing.
So you never know, if more people take on ideas like these, the internet may become a more enjoyable place.
Given this apparent 'snub' from what is historically their largest business partner, perhaps Intel will make an extra effort to push the StrongARM-derived XScale architecture.
This architecture is particularly suitable for web appliances - indeed the majority of the world's web appliances and set top boxes currently use ARM technology. So maybe Intel will pull the carpet from under Microsoft's feet on this one, by making the XScale the dominant web appliance architecture.
It will certainly be interesting to see which product has the greater ability to set the standard for a fast-growing market; Microsoft's software, or the low-power chips of Intel/ARM? Not that this choice is mutually exclusive of course (WinCE runs on ARM after all) - but this is certainly a major crack in an old partnership.
Good news for Transmeta, of course - all this development makes the Crusoe seem a little less commercially vaporous...
Ah, I see, the famous Mozilla quality control - we can't be bothered to fix the bugs, so we'll just disable the feature.
It strikes me as tragic that five years ago, one man could write a complete web browser in ARM assembler, compliant with the standards of the day, and giving the nicest output I have ever seen from the web on any platform - and yet today there are hundreds of probably very talented people working on Mozilla, and it's still bloated, bug-ridden and slow.
Nothing doing, I'm afraid - no mod points today. You have my sympathies, though.:-)
Here at Oxford the Maths faculty give an excellent course on the Foundations of Mathematics, available to Computation students as well as Maths and Maths + Comp students. Covers axiomatic set theory, mathematical logic, and basic computability (although the latter is barely more than an introduction).
I personally do joint schools Maths + Comp, but I may have taken the course if I just did straight computing, as it's very interesting. Shame your place doesn't let you do it...
Never mind - those of us with half a clue about mathematics (including those of us who have spent the past week revising their Foundations of Mathematics work:-) ) know that you are right.
Maybe the best way for portals to stay in business would be to follow the example of these folks.
The SeeThru website was originally launched to tie-in with a (rather crap) British TV drama called (wait for it) "Attachments", and set in the heady world of dot.com startups (or, seemingly synonomously, the heady world of Hoxton!). The attention to detail is rather touching, and it's fairly impressive that they've kept it running now that the program is no longer on the air.
I believe Attachments is due for a second series in the spring, so presumably they'll just take up from where the website has currently got to in 'real life'.
The whole thing is funded by World Productions I believe. I wonder if they do venture capital...?!:-)
It has to be said, the English patent office is usually reasonably sensible - but then again, I imagine the number of entirely daft patents that must engulf the US office is probably greater than the total number of UK applications!
Hopefully we'll also be able to exert some influence in the EU; unless of course something terrible happens at the election in May...:-/
Having said that, this doesn't look too encouraging on the EPO front. Let's hope the UK's decisive action will spread common sense around the continent.
But I think jwz has the right idea with his new project; it looks like it will be extremely cool, and there's some 'geek' element to it by the inclusion of a pack of Linux terminals.
We had a talk recently by someone from IBM all about the technology behind Deep Blue, and its current and future applications. He didn't mention PlayStation 3...:-)
(The talk was fairly interesting but he glossed over a LOT of interesting details and expounded at length his own rather ill-formed opinions on artificial intelligence, which I thought was a pity.)
The curiosity might also have something to do with the fact that this code (or rather Windows in the broader sense) runs on 90% of the world's computers...
When you "get sourcecode," you don't just get a text dump. You also get some documentation, and the code itself has comments.
Exactly. Which is why the previous poster's analogy with Netscape is not entirely accurate; when the Mozilla source code was initially released, it had scant documentation and was stripped of comments!
The more I consider the GPL, the more I see it as a tool for RMS and the FSF to force their religion down everyone's throat.
Like it or not (and I don't), that's EXACTLY what it is, by Stallman's own admission. He sees the GPL as a useful tool to force people to develop free software, the idea being that once a 'critical mass' of GPL software exists it will be hard to develop significant new programs without them also falling under the licence.
Slashdot Mirror
Graham Nelson is here in Oxford, not at Cambridge as the article suggests.
For a non-command-line editor, Scintilla (or rather the SciTE editor that is based upon it) is good.
Whatever you may think of their commercial arm, Microsoft have a flourishing and highly-respected research division, who knock out stuff like this all the time. Some of it is GPLed, some of it is BSDed, etc etc. What's the big deal?
The sad thing is, it's far harder to "break into" the game industry in the same spectacular way as did, say, the wunderkids of the 1980s. (I'm thinking of Crammond, the Oliver twins, Braben and Bell, etc etc.)
These days, there's such an emphasis on expensive production effects (full motion video, Hollywood actors, life-modelled action, and so on) that you can't really do anything that competes on your own.
Such is the price of progress. It's a far cry from the day when one teenager could write a best-selling game (Jet Set Willy) or two undergraduates could introduce a totally new genre into gaming with one game (Elite). The question is, have we lost something? Does all this glitz and glamour stifle true innovation?
Over to you kids...
Nope; in fact, it's a shit browser.
The problem with the internet is not necessarily with the infrastructure itself. It is more to do with the localised view of network concerns, eg. routing and so forth.
It has been known theoretically for some time that intelligent routing software with global knowledge of the network is able to cope far better with faults. Indeed, some of Cisco's more advanced routers have rudimentary implementations of some of the theoretical ideas.
Far more exciting, though, is the work going on at Sychron. The founders of this company are leaders in the field of research into high-performace, scalable, fault-tolerant parallel computing and networks, and are now applying their knowledge to the internet; specifically, to servers and routing.
So you never know, if more people take on ideas like these, the internet may become a more enjoyable place.
There's already a language called Ruby; it's a circuit design language that's been around since at least as early as 1990.
More info here.
Given this apparent 'snub' from what is historically their largest business partner, perhaps Intel will make an extra effort to push the StrongARM-derived XScale architecture.
This architecture is particularly suitable for web appliances - indeed the majority of the world's web appliances and set top boxes currently use ARM technology. So maybe Intel will pull the carpet from under Microsoft's feet on this one, by making the XScale the dominant web appliance architecture.
It will certainly be interesting to see which product has the greater ability to set the standard for a fast-growing market; Microsoft's software, or the low-power chips of Intel/ARM? Not that this choice is mutually exclusive of course (WinCE runs on ARM after all) - but this is certainly a major crack in an old partnership.
Good news for Transmeta, of course - all this development makes the Crusoe seem a little less commercially vaporous...
Ah, I see, the famous Mozilla quality control - we can't be bothered to fix the bugs, so we'll just disable the feature.
It strikes me as tragic that five years ago, one man could write a complete web browser in ARM assembler, compliant with the standards of the day, and giving the nicest output I have ever seen from the web on any platform - and yet today there are hundreds of probably very talented people working on Mozilla, and it's still bloated, bug-ridden and slow.
Nothing doing, I'm afraid - no mod points today. You have my sympathies, though. :-)
Here at Oxford the Maths faculty give an excellent course on the Foundations of Mathematics, available to Computation students as well as Maths and Maths + Comp students. Covers axiomatic set theory, mathematical logic, and basic computability (although the latter is barely more than an introduction).
I personally do joint schools Maths + Comp, but I may have taken the course if I just did straight computing, as it's very interesting. Shame your place doesn't let you do it...
Never mind - those of us with half a clue about mathematics (including those of us who have spent the past week revising their Foundations of Mathematics work :-) ) know that you are right.
I know he's been posting a lot of Slashdot stories lately, but giving Michael Sims his own TV show is surely over the top....
...I'd be a little suspicious. Someone called "Bono", submitting a story about a product called "The Edge"? Looks like someone's got a U2 fixation! :-)
Yes, I must stop doing that. In my defence, they are based in England..
Maybe the best way for portals to stay in business would be to follow the example of these folks.
:-)
The SeeThru website was originally launched to tie-in with a (rather crap) British TV drama called (wait for it) "Attachments", and set in the heady world of dot.com startups (or, seemingly synonomously, the heady world of Hoxton!). The attention to detail is rather touching, and it's fairly impressive that they've kept it running now that the program is no longer on the air.
I believe Attachments is due for a second series in the spring, so presumably they'll just take up from where the website has currently got to in 'real life'.
The whole thing is funded by World Productions I believe. I wonder if they do venture capital...?!
It has to be said, the English patent office is usually reasonably sensible - but then again, I imagine the number of entirely daft patents that must engulf the US office is probably greater than the total number of UK applications!
:-/
Hopefully we'll also be able to exert some influence in the EU; unless of course something terrible happens at the election in May...
Having said that, this doesn't look too encouraging on the EPO front. Let's hope the UK's decisive action will spread common sense around the continent.
I wouldn't really want to go to one.
But I think jwz has the right idea with his new project; it looks like it will be extremely cool, and there's some 'geek' element to it by the inclusion of a pack of Linux terminals.
Being a Haiku fan, all my filenames on Linux are in 5.7.5 format. I find it helps me attain inner calm whenever I have to use emacs to load a file. :-)
We had a talk recently by someone from IBM all about the technology behind Deep Blue, and its current and future applications. He didn't mention PlayStation 3... :-)
(The talk was fairly interesting but he glossed over a LOT of interesting details and expounded at length his own rather ill-formed opinions on artificial intelligence, which I thought was a pity.)
The curiosity might also have something to do with the fact that this code (or rather Windows in the broader sense) runs on 90% of the world's computers...
Your example is bad, as it's public domain rather than GPL.
Good point though.
When you "get sourcecode," you don't just get a text dump. You also get some documentation, and the code itself has comments.
Exactly. Which is why the previous poster's analogy with Netscape is not entirely accurate; when the Mozilla source code was initially released, it had scant documentation and was stripped of comments!
The more I consider the GPL, the more I see it as a tool for RMS and the FSF to force their religion down everyone's throat.
Like it or not (and I don't), that's EXACTLY what it is, by Stallman's own admission. He sees the GPL as a useful tool to force people to develop free software, the idea being that once a 'critical mass' of GPL software exists it will be hard to develop significant new programs without them also falling under the licence.
As seen on Slashdot:
:-)
Sunday March 04, @08:37AM - Transistors 3 atoms wide
Thursday March 08, @08:08PM - Transistors 1 atom wide
So where will we be next Monday?
Hilarious - but I meant 'medium' as in 'singular of 'media''.