No, stop the microsoft-bashing long enough to look at what is going on here.
The left hand invents a bloated file format that makes a 2000-byte document take up a megabyte (or whatever the exact anti-compression ratio is). (For current purposes, we'll say Microsoft Office. Not the only offender, but the most amusing in this context).
Now, the right hand figures out that they don't feel like sending all those bloated bits over the wire. Users will eventually figure out they should be sending plain text, perhaps.
Just sit back and watch the show. If we had *tried* to promote open standards in email, we couldn't have done this well.
Well, BSD or X11 licenses don't have a patent license (at least not expressly), so I'm not sure whether the problems are unique to this license.
But yes, if there are patents on Iron Python, then anyone downstream of Microsoft wouldn't be able to distribute a patched version unless they also removed anything covered by patents, as I understand it.
Although you are right that the "including derived works" language could possibly contradict the patent clause.
Not sure what this all means, but the license raised my eyebrows too.
I've been developing with gcj since mid-2005. I would say that gcj (and the tools built with it like eclipse) are starting to be usable for the first time (as of the Fedora Core 4 updates from fall 2005 - haven't tried Fedora Core 5 yet but I'm eagerly awaiting to see if they got line numbers in stack traces working - that's a key thing which is missing in 4).
Now, "usable" means you can develop with them. It doesn't mean bug-free or complete. For one thing, the features correspond to Sun's 1.4 - little/no 1.5 stuff yet.
So going with Sun is still the path of least resistance, but if you are an open source bigot^H^H^H^H^Henthusiast, give gcj a try. It is really easy to install on Fedora (and perhaps a few others like Ubuntu).
It may or may not be a direct solution to the original poster's problem, but rpath linux is designed to let different distribution forks exist without duplicating the parts which are in common. For example, Foresight Linux is a distribution which has bleeding edge GNOME, but they can share the non-GNOME parts of the distribution with regular rpath linux.
Despite the corporate looking web page, most of this stuff is open source.
The confusion here is that VoIP stands for two related, but different, things. TFA was (as far as I can tell) just about using IP internally to your building to replace your PBX and phone-specific wiring. At the edge of your company, the calls would be sent over regular phone lines. The article wasn't very explicit about this, but given comments about things like avoiding two sets of wiring, that's what I'm pretty sure they were talking about.
Something like iConnectHere, Vonage, etc, are about sending voice over the internet. And in this case it is a lot harder to make sure you are getting the quality of service that you need for voice.
These two different ways of using VoIP both have the potential to be revolutionary, but in different ways. In one cases it is the PBX vendor in the crosshairs, in the other the long-distance or local phone company.
P/E of 115 is based on earnings for the last 12 months. While the exact time period isn't such a big deal for a stable company, for one growing as fast as google, there's a big difference between whether you take the last 12, or the last 3, or what. By comparison, the P/E based on projected earnings is 44.41 (as reported on yahoo). Of course the fishy part about this one is that word "projected", but on the whole it is probably a fairer number than the 115.
By comparison, Microsoft, IBM, and HP are in the range of 13-25.
You also have to consider the growth rate (see PEG or Price to Earnings to Growth ratio).
Conclusion: Google may be a bit pricey as a stock, but on the whole its crazy stock price rise has been driven by crazy earnings growth. Barring some kind of accounting scandal, this makes it a rather different situation than a dot-com-bubble rise in stock price.
Well, my local NPR radio station here in California is offering the radio SHARK as a premium you get for donating money. (The radio SHARK is a tuner which receives radio programs and records them to a computer; as far as I can tell from their website, there is no DRM).
Don't know if the station had some heavy discussion about DRM, or even thought about it, but it would appear that not everyone in the content production and distribution business are as worried about pushing DRM as we assume.
It includes all the people (engineers, scientists, etc). That's to build the rover, to launch it, to operate it on the cruise to Mars, to operate it on Mars (see those rooms full of people on TV? Multiply by how much each is making), to run the radio dishes and communications hardware, to analyze the data, etc. I don't know whether the launcher itself would be included, but that's only $50 million or less (closer numbers are probably buried somewhere at JSC or other sites with launcher prices).
Having said all that, $800 million for two rovers is a bit more pricey than Mars Pathfinder, Mars Odyssey, the Stardust comet mission, etc, which were more in the $200-300 million range or so (for a single spacecraft, though). Some say that NASA cut corners a bit too far (as seen by the failures of Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Observer); others say they merely failed to reinvent themselves in terms of finding more efficient ways to do things.
Keep in mind that the funding for the prize expires on 1 Jan 2005 ("the X PRIZE is fully funded through January 1, 2005, through private donations and backed by an insurance policy" from the X Prize web site). That's less than 13 months from now. Scaled Composites, which I suppose is the leader, is planning flight tests for the next 6-9 months leading "eventually" to a 100 km altitude which is the altitude needed to win the prize.
That doesn't give them a lot of extra time if they experience trouble. Of course what is great about having multiple teams is that if one falters, another may succeed. Given the number of things which can go wrong (a zillion technical things, and of course the legal/funding/etc ones), however, it isn't hard to imagine all the teams being delayed past the deadline.
But having said all that, it is great to see this activity going on. Should be fun to watch!
Voyager launched in the late 70's, so I didn't forget it, I just didn't do a very good job of specifying the time frame I had in mind. The dry spell would have been roughly for launches from 1979 to 1993.
I'd say "no thanks" to the price tag. I'd rather have 12 or so of the New Frontiers programs (which are about $700 million and powered by an RTG - see http://centauri.larc.nasa.gov/newfrontiers/ ).
That way you can launch a mission every year and when (not if) one blows up, you didn't have all your eggs in that basket.
I don't long for the bad old days of the 70's and 80's, in which there was one mission a decade (Viking, then Galileo, then Cassini, with nothing in between).
The concept of being able to see the previous version sounds good. But on VMS, file versions didn't really achieve this all that well. Classic example: how do you delete a file?
Try #1:
DELETE FOO.TXT
This is really the wrong answer. If you have FOO.TXT;1 and FOO.TXT;2, then this command deletes FOO.TXT;2 and any attempt to access FOO.TXT will get you FOO.TXT;1.
Try #2:
DELETE FOO.TXT;*
This is the common recommendation, but you've now lost the ability to see any of the old versions.
The GNU file utilities (and emacs and some other GNU programs) have a file versioning scheme which is somewhat similar to VMS but somewhat better. Look at commands like "VERSION_CONTROL=numbered cp foo bar".
Personally, I usually put things which matter in CVS. With the CVS server in a distant city (at an ISP which provides ssh shell accounts). That gives me off-site backups.
You don't say whether you ran Ultrix ^W Digital Unix ^W Tru64, or VMS. If it is the latter, they are planning on porting it to IA64. Lots of details at http://www.openvms.digital.com/ including which applications are being ported and which ones are being replaced (e.g. Netscape is being replaced by something Mozilla based).
I have nostalgia for VMS too but I can't say it is much more than nostalgia. Even FreeVMS (http://www.free-vms.org/ or http://www.panix.com/~kingdon/free-vms.html ) hasn't ended up being more than a handful of tools for migration/interoperability between VMS and Unix.
However, they are no longer made.
See Mechanical level machine for the info on the mechanical machines or Federal Election Commission (scroll down to "Voting Systems") for similar pages on all the different systems.
I agree that the most high tech is often not the best. Canada uses hand-counted ballots, and as far as I know, they are quite happy with it. (I've heard people in the US suggest it, but dismiss it based on the cost of paying the ballot counters).
Well, seems to me that SMTP, NNTP, HTTP, etc
are easier to develop for because they are
textual.
HTTP may be just about the ideal balance:
use text for things which tend to be small,
but capable of sending a large payload (e.g. a PNG image which the protocol just needs to wrap, not do anything with) in binary.
The thing about protocol layering and/or marshalling is: do you have good debugging tools (at a minimum, log what is going across the wire and be able to interactively enter data and see results)? For binary protocols like TCP and IP, largely yes ("telnet" client in the case of TCP;
tcpdump for both TCP and IP). And maybe some RPC packages have these kinds of thing (I haven't used them enough to know). But an app which rolls their own binary format generally doesn't.
Well, I've been on projects in which people say "oh, you rearrange that code first, then I'll do my thing" (more informally than your "air traffic controller" example, but kind of the same thing). It can sometimes be helpful, but all too often it gives an excuse for inaction ("well, I couldn't do xxx because yyy had to happen first"). One thing which can help a bit is continuous integration - run "cvs update" often and checkin as often as you can (say, whenever your automated tests pass). Oh, and of course trying to not do everything right before the deadline (although it can be hard to change a culture and I'm not sure it is worth it). Other than that, I don't know of any magic bullets - just to say that dealing with the pain of continuous (or at least frequent) integration is better than the alternatives (such as having everyone do their patch against a build from last week and then having an overworked release manager try to assemble them into a working program).
"33. We've been doubling sales every 18 months. However, when you start from zero, it takes a long while." -- Stephen Yeo, a marketing director at Windows-terminal manufacturer Wyse, explaining his company's less-than-meteoric rise, to ZDNet UK"
is that in marketing-speak, this is a totally normal thing to say. Only in plain english do "zero" and "double" have their mathematical meanings.
And my reaction to the "Tibet-themed bash" is why couldn't I work for one of those companies, even for a little while? All in all, I'd rather have seriousness and profits, but for a break?
But of course the most relevant to Linux is:
The Gartner Group issues trading cards featuring its analysts.
Hmm. I often read (and/or skim) court rulings (especially from the Supreme Court), and usually they more or less make sense. But this one... Geez. She starts off with pages on the subject of whether a word means what it seems to mean. And then several more pages about how this applies to "computer" and other words in the hyperlink case. I can sort of see the need for all this, but no wonder patents are such a black art.
What about manufacturing vs producing ideas?
on
Patent Nonsense
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It is a good article. One issue which they didn't mention is the recent trend towards companies which just produce intellectual property, and don't actually make anything (for example, who license chip designs to manufacturers). This is mostly a recent trend (say, last 10-20 years). Not that I'm saying this is a good trend - I'd be hard pressed to say that the world is bettter of with Rambus than without it. Maybe it comes down to: is there a shortage of ideas? Or is there a shortage of people who actually put those ideas into production use and hone off the fine edges? For the most part, intellectual property protection addresses the former and not the latter.
Mod parent up. The key words in the article are "cost- and
power-sensitive embedded applications". Cost I would guess would be
more like single or double digits of dollars than what we think of as
a CPU price. Power is a bit more arguable, as some "non-embedded"
systems are starting to care somewhat about power (e.g. laptops), but
still. Summary: this may be interesting, but it isn't a competitor
for IA64, x86-64, sparc, alpha, etc.
Not that surprising, if I correctly recall Linus's comments at ALS. Although Linus mentioned various caveats with the preemptive kernel patch (some of which are improved in more recent versions of the patch), they didn't really add up to "the whole concept is broken". More like "not for 2.4".
When MIT's AI lab was getting started (around the 1960's I think), they got really interested in robotics. Now, this isn't obvious to me. What does intelligence have to do with robotics? Doesn't a Turing Test (which by its nature involves bits, rather than physical world) more accurately reflect the nature of intelligence? Well, the thinking at the AI lab was that robots were faced with a much more realistic picture of what humans had to navigate. That robotics by its nature involves dealing with uncertainty, with unpredictability, and so building a virtual intelligence wouldn't really illuminate the real problems of intelligence.
OK, this guy says that he was busted because the government didn't like his opinions, but in fact he had been cracking web sites and putting in that troop.cgi thing. Somehow that doesn't sound like an opinion to me. There's also the question of bomb-making information which is potentially thornier, but also isn't really opinion (at least, not opinion about globalization - opinion about bomb policy I suppose might be a bit more debateable).
Paves the way for something related
on
Time for a Beer?
·
· Score: 2
Now we just need to modify it to show the closest Linux User Group. Of course, that might be somewhat redundant with the advertised function;-).
Pictures of euro coins and notes
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
There is various information at eu.int and the European Common Bank site, including pictures of the coins (both by themselves and in publicity-photo type poses), various policies (such as how you say "euro" and "euros" in various languages), and more.
Slashdot Mirror
No, stop the microsoft-bashing long enough to look at what is going on here.
The left hand invents a bloated file format that makes a 2000-byte document take up a megabyte (or whatever the exact anti-compression ratio is). (For current purposes, we'll say Microsoft Office. Not the only offender, but the most amusing in this context).
Now, the right hand figures out that they don't feel like sending all those bloated bits over the wire. Users will eventually figure out they should be sending plain text, perhaps.
Just sit back and watch the show. If we had *tried* to promote open standards in email, we couldn't have done this well.
Well, BSD or X11 licenses don't have a patent license
(at least not expressly),
so I'm not sure whether the problems are unique
to this license.
But yes, if there are patents on Iron Python, then
anyone downstream of Microsoft wouldn't be able
to distribute a patched version unless they also
removed anything covered by patents, as I understand
it.
Although you are right that the "including derived
works" language could possibly contradict the patent clause.
Not sure what this all means, but the license raised
my eyebrows too.
I've been developing with gcj since mid-2005. I would say that gcj (and the tools built with it like eclipse) are starting to be usable for the first time (as of the Fedora Core 4 updates from fall 2005 - haven't tried Fedora Core 5 yet but I'm eagerly awaiting to see if they got line numbers in stack traces working - that's a key thing which is missing in 4).
Now, "usable" means you can develop with them. It doesn't mean bug-free or complete. For one thing, the features correspond to Sun's 1.4 - little/no 1.5 stuff yet.
So going with Sun is still the path of least resistance, but if you are an open source bigot^H^H^H^H^Henthusiast, give gcj a try. It is really easy to install on Fedora (and perhaps a few others like Ubuntu).
It may or may not be a direct solution to the original poster's problem, but rpath linux is designed to let different distribution forks exist without duplicating the parts which are in common. For example, Foresight Linux is a distribution which has bleeding edge GNOME, but they can share the non-GNOME parts of the distribution with regular rpath linux. Despite the corporate looking web page, most of this stuff is open source.
The confusion here is that VoIP stands for two related, but different, things. TFA was (as far as I can tell) just about using IP internally to your building to replace your PBX and phone-specific wiring. At the edge of your company, the calls would be sent over regular phone lines. The article wasn't very explicit about this, but given comments about things like avoiding two sets of wiring, that's what I'm pretty sure they were talking about.
Something like iConnectHere, Vonage, etc, are about sending voice over the internet. And in this case it is a lot harder to make sure you are getting the quality of service that you need for voice.
These two different ways of using VoIP both have the potential to be revolutionary, but in different ways. In one cases it is the PBX vendor in the crosshairs, in the other the long-distance or local phone company.
P/E of 115 is based on earnings for the last 12 months. While the exact time period isn't such a big deal for a stable company, for one growing as fast as google, there's a big difference between whether you take the last 12, or the last 3, or what. By comparison, the P/E based on projected earnings is 44.41 (as reported on yahoo). Of course the fishy part about this one is that word "projected", but on the whole it is probably a fairer number than the 115.
By comparison, Microsoft, IBM, and HP are in the range of 13-25.
You also have to consider the growth rate (see PEG or Price to Earnings to Growth ratio).
Conclusion: Google may be a bit pricey as a stock, but on the whole its crazy stock price rise has been driven by crazy earnings growth. Barring some kind of accounting scandal, this makes it a rather different situation than a dot-com-bubble rise in stock price.
Well, my local NPR radio station here in California is offering the radio SHARK as a premium you get for donating money. (The radio SHARK is a tuner which receives radio programs and records them to a computer; as far as I can tell from their website, there is no DRM).
Don't know if the station had some heavy discussion about DRM, or even thought about it, but it would appear that not everyone in the content production and distribution business are as worried about pushing DRM as we assume.
It includes all the people (engineers, scientists, etc). That's to build the rover, to launch it, to operate it on the cruise to Mars, to operate it on Mars (see those rooms full of people on TV? Multiply by how much each is making), to run the radio dishes and communications hardware, to analyze the data, etc. I don't know whether the launcher itself would be included, but that's only $50 million or less (closer numbers are probably buried somewhere at JSC or other sites with launcher prices).
Having said all that, $800 million for two rovers is a bit more pricey than Mars Pathfinder, Mars Odyssey, the Stardust comet mission, etc, which were more in the $200-300 million range or so (for a single spacecraft, though). Some say that NASA cut corners a bit too far (as seen by the failures of Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Observer); others say they merely failed to reinvent themselves in terms of finding more efficient ways to do things.
Keep in mind that the funding for the prize expires on 1 Jan 2005 ("the X PRIZE is fully funded through January 1, 2005, through private donations and backed by an insurance policy" from the X Prize web site). That's less than 13 months from now. Scaled Composites, which I suppose is the leader, is planning flight tests for the next 6-9 months leading "eventually" to a 100 km altitude which is the altitude needed to win the prize.
That doesn't give them a lot of extra time if they experience trouble. Of course what is great about having multiple teams is that if one falters, another may succeed. Given the number of things which can go wrong (a zillion technical things, and of course the legal/funding/etc ones), however, it isn't hard to imagine all the teams being delayed past the deadline.
But having said all that, it is great to see this activity going on. Should be fun to watch!
Voyager launched in the late 70's, so I didn't forget it, I just didn't do a very good job of specifying the time frame I had in mind. The dry spell would have been roughly for launches from 1979 to 1993.
I'd say "no thanks" to the price tag. I'd rather have 12 or so of the New Frontiers programs (which are about $700 million and powered by an RTG - see http://centauri.larc.nasa.gov/newfrontiers/ ).
That way you can launch a mission every year and when (not if) one blows up, you didn't have all your eggs in that basket.
I don't long for the bad old days of the 70's and 80's, in which there was one mission a decade (Viking, then Galileo, then Cassini, with nothing in between).
The concept of being able to see the previous version sounds good. But on VMS, file versions didn't really achieve this all that well. Classic example: how do you delete a file?
Try #1:
DELETE FOO.TXT
This is really the wrong answer. If you have FOO.TXT;1 and FOO.TXT;2, then this command deletes FOO.TXT;2 and any attempt to access FOO.TXT will get you FOO.TXT;1.
Try #2:
DELETE FOO.TXT;*
This is the common recommendation, but you've now lost the ability to see any of the old versions.
The GNU file utilities (and emacs and some other GNU programs) have a file versioning scheme which is somewhat similar to VMS but somewhat better. Look at commands like "VERSION_CONTROL=numbered cp foo bar".
Personally, I usually put things which matter in CVS. With the CVS server in a distant city (at an ISP which provides ssh shell accounts). That gives me off-site backups.
You don't say whether you ran Ultrix ^W Digital Unix ^W Tru64, or VMS. If it is the latter, they are planning on porting it to IA64. Lots of details at http://www.openvms.digital.com/
including which applications are being ported and which ones are being replaced (e.g. Netscape is being replaced by something Mozilla based).
I have nostalgia for VMS too but I can't say it is much more than nostalgia. Even FreeVMS (http://www.free-vms.org/ or http://www.panix.com/~kingdon/free-vms.html ) hasn't ended up being more than a handful of tools for migration/interoperability between VMS and Unix.
Those mechanical systems are indeed pretty good.
However, they are no longer made. See Mechanical level machine for the info on the mechanical machines or Federal Election Commission (scroll down to "Voting Systems") for similar pages on all the different systems.
I agree that the most high tech is often not the best. Canada uses hand-counted ballots, and as far as I know, they are quite happy with it. (I've heard people in the US suggest it, but dismiss it based on the cost of paying the ballot counters).
Well, seems to me that SMTP, NNTP, HTTP, etc are easier to develop for because they are textual.
HTTP may be just about the ideal balance: use text for things which tend to be small, but capable of sending a large payload (e.g. a PNG image which the protocol just needs to wrap, not do anything with) in binary.
The thing about protocol layering and/or marshalling is: do you have good debugging tools (at a minimum, log what is going across the wire and be able to interactively enter data and see results)? For binary protocols like TCP and IP, largely yes ("telnet" client in the case of TCP; tcpdump for both TCP and IP). And maybe some RPC packages have these kinds of thing (I haven't used them enough to know). But an app which rolls their own binary format generally doesn't.
Well, I've been on projects in which people say "oh, you rearrange that code first, then I'll do my thing" (more informally than your "air traffic controller" example, but kind of the same thing). It can sometimes be helpful, but all too often it gives an excuse for inaction ("well, I couldn't do xxx because yyy had to happen first"). One thing which can help a bit is continuous integration - run "cvs update" often and checkin as often as you can (say, whenever your automated tests pass). Oh, and of course trying to not do everything right before the deadline (although it can be hard to change a culture and I'm not sure it is worth it). Other than that, I don't know of any magic bullets - just to say that dealing with the pain of continuous (or at least frequent) integration is better than the alternatives (such as having everyone do their patch against a build from last week and then having an overworked release manager try to assemble them into a working program).
The best thing about
is that in marketing-speak, this is a totally normal thing to say. Only in plain english do "zero" and "double" have their mathematical meanings.And my reaction to the "Tibet-themed bash" is why couldn't I work for one of those companies, even for a little while? All in all, I'd rather have seriousness and profits, but for a break?
But of course the most relevant to Linux is:
Hmm. I often read (and/or skim) court rulings (especially from the Supreme Court), and usually they more or less make sense. But this one... Geez. She starts off with pages on the subject of whether a word means what it seems to mean. And then several more pages about how this applies to "computer" and other words in the hyperlink case. I can sort of see the need for all this, but no wonder patents are such a black art.
It is a good article. One issue which they didn't mention is the recent trend towards companies which just produce intellectual property, and don't actually make anything (for example, who license chip designs to manufacturers). This is mostly a recent trend (say, last 10-20 years). Not that I'm saying this is a good trend - I'd be hard pressed to say that the world is bettter of with Rambus than without it. Maybe it comes down to: is there a shortage of ideas? Or is there a shortage of people who actually put those ideas into production use and hone off the fine edges? For the most part, intellectual property protection addresses the former and not the latter.
Mod parent up. The key words in the article are "cost- and power-sensitive embedded applications". Cost I would guess would be more like single or double digits of dollars than what we think of as a CPU price. Power is a bit more arguable, as some "non-embedded" systems are starting to care somewhat about power (e.g. laptops), but still. Summary: this may be interesting, but it isn't a competitor for IA64, x86-64, sparc, alpha, etc.
Not that surprising, if I correctly recall Linus's comments at ALS. Although Linus mentioned various caveats with the preemptive kernel patch (some of which are improved in more recent versions of the patch), they didn't really add up to "the whole concept is broken". More like "not for 2.4".
When MIT's AI lab was getting started (around the 1960's I think), they got really interested in robotics. Now, this isn't obvious to me. What does intelligence have to do with robotics? Doesn't a Turing Test (which by its nature involves bits, rather than physical world) more accurately reflect the nature of intelligence? Well, the thinking at the AI lab was that robots were faced with a much more realistic picture of what humans had to navigate. That robotics by its nature involves dealing with uncertainty, with unpredictability, and so building a virtual intelligence wouldn't really illuminate the real problems of intelligence.
OK, this guy says that he was busted because the government didn't like his opinions, but in fact he had been cracking web sites and putting in that troop.cgi thing. Somehow that doesn't sound like an opinion to me. There's also the question of bomb-making information which is potentially thornier, but also isn't really opinion (at least, not opinion about globalization - opinion about bomb policy I suppose might be a bit more debateable).
Now we just need to modify it to show the closest Linux User Group. Of course, that might be somewhat redundant with the advertised function ;-).
There is various information at eu.int and the European Common Bank site, including pictures of the coins (both by themselves and in publicity-photo type poses), various policies (such as how you say "euro" and "euros" in various languages), and more.