In general, I'm with the PSP people in terms of the overall design. Dual screens with a stylus strikes me as an attempt to be clever. Clever doesn't really work with these types of machines. Something simple and elegant works much better in these cases. The DS is relying on a dual screen gimmick and in my experience, gimmicks don't do too well.
The PSP has a very clean ergonomic design. The only thing that the PSP is missing is a second analog control. If it had that, I would say that it would be absolutely perfect in layout.
The two issues that worry me are proprietary media and data formats. I'd feel happier if it had some industry standard small data disk format. I'd also feel happier if they announced it could support a lot of media formats, including MPEG, MP3 and Ogg. To my mind, something that could play good games and support those formats would be something I would be seriously tempted in buying.
The price is also something where I think Sony may be rushing in too soon. Steve Jobs blew it with the Newton because while the concept was good the technology hadn't hit the right price point. While I think the PSP has a clean design, if it's too expensive, we've got yet another overprinced and overambitious piece of hardware to add to the list of other bold experiments.
The Nokia N-gauge makes me uneasy, and for that matter some of the early PDA-cell phone combos that are a bit bulky. The fact is that a cell phone has a different style of usage than a PDA and the ideal ergonomics for each are different.
Still, expanding a cell phone and putting a display and a few more controls on it doesn't strike me as unworkable. I sometimes think existing cell phones are way too small, even if it makes them easier to carry around.
Computers are multifunction devices. A lot of people here are way too young to remember the dedicated word processing devices that used to be so common. People don't think anything of using their computers for a vast range of things. Now think about setting up a handheld computer that can do a vast range of things as well, including VoIP. Then it looks more reasonable.
I can easily see cell phones with a small display being used for making voice calls, surfing the web, playing video and music, and being used for playing games as well.
It will not replace the desktop computer, people still need to sit down with a full size keyboard and a gross display, but the amount of time that people have to spend at a full computer will drop and the amount of time they can spend away from the desk will increase.
The situation in the Atari crash and the situation now are so completely different that I can't tell what the author is thinking in trying to compare the two of them. The author reminds me of those people who keep claiming the End of the World is nigh and the Sky is Falling and all of that stuff. He wants to rain on everyone's parade.
First off, graphics hasn't hit a plateau. It is on an S curve. We've just reached the point where it is tapering off. But we've nowhere near hit the limit there. Remember the Lord of the Rings movies? Remember the final battle? Can Warcraft match those sorts of graphics with those sorts of numbers of troops? The moment that personal computers can generate those sorts of graphics real time, I'll be willing to conceed we're maxxing out.
And there are still things that are hellish to model on computers. The flooding of Isengard was done with models because the computers weren't up to the task. Eventually, we'll have software that can model water flowing like that for movies and then years down the road it will appear in games. But it will take some time for it to cross over.
Photorealistic dynamic human avatars are still the cutting edge of CGI (and we haven't even gotten there yet). Admittedly, the developments are more incremental now than they used to be, but they're still there. I want my game to look like it was being performed by live actors on a real set. The graphics ain't there yet.
Physics, as others have noted, is an issue. Related is the idea that every object in a world can be interacted with or affected by the player. We've a long way to go in the physics area, but this is more in the region of gameplay.
AI on the other hand, still has a ways to go on the S curve. The major limitation of games these days is that social interactions still for the most part have to be pre-scripted. There are a few games that are slowly making the first few steps past that, but we've got a long way to go.
Of course physics and AI and gameplay issues aren't obvious. The writer of this article is taking a very superficial view of games (and of the gaming industry) by noting that just because two games look similar, they are the same. Just comparing the looks of the Madden games isn't enough. If he had done a comparison of game feature by game feature and shown that there was little incremental improvement, then he might make a point. As it stands, he sounds incredibly shallow and superficial.
GTA3 was a breakthrough in gameplay more than anything else. An open world where there were multiple issues for solving problems. There are other games out there that instead of having one solution to a problem or one style of ultimate gameplay are allowing a range of approaches. These games look a lot like other games of less depth and complexity, but only someone who looked at the surface of things would say there was no difference.
Games are going to be changing a lot under the hood going forward. The one good point of the article was that graphics improvements are no longer a primary selling point any more. All games are starting to look good. Now issues involving AI and physics and gameplay are coming to the fore.
Assuming the best case scenario where the school system asked for a donation and Microsoft offered a $2000 discount on what would be a $11,000 package, whoever was in charge of drafting that deal should have known that the offer was going to be refused. A nation that poor can't afford usual Microsoft prices.
In short, Microsoft made a very dumb decision making that sort of offer. As someone else said, it's like giving a homeless person asking for a meal a fifty cent coupon off a five dollar meal. Yes, you owe the homeless person absolutely nothing but making that sort of offer is verging on an insult, and at the very least is showing incredible stupidity.
If Microsoft had to give $2000 in free software, why not make it a smaller number of Office/Window packages? Instead of offering just Office or just Windows offer a smaller combination of both. Of course that still skips support costs and so likely would have been tossed out but hey...
In any case, it's not hard to see why Linux is becoming increasingly popular in third world nations. In those places you practically expect Microsoft to start promoting piracy of its software just to keep Linux from becoming more entrenched.
Or for something else. There are a lot of subscription services on the Internet for various things. Various premimum and subscription-only services.
Something that AOL could do would be to cut deals with a lot of these providers, to get a discounted rate with these providers. And yes, a lot of these premium services would be very likely to be willing to give a discount in return for the number of potential subscribers AOL could toss in their direction.
From the customer end, AOL gives discounted rates for various premimum services or even effectively free under the base rate. And they give centralized billing as well for all these subscription services. Just go to a single area and checkmark off what you want and don't want.
AOL could even offer caching for these services as well, which also benefits both from the provider and and from the customer end. That's probably how they could negotiate a reduced rate "Give us the content at a lower fee and we'll be eating the bandwidth costs on our end". And the AOL customers are pulling this stuff off of AOL servers then.
Yes, the Internet is all about eliminating the middlemen, but the fact is that middlemen have their uses. Of course I doubt that AOL is going to see this until its too late.
Is that as a player I want to explore different aspects of the game, go through a lot of different character classes. I also don't want to keep restarting a new character every time I want to change classes. In games like Diablo, where you have a finite world (in duration as well as space) that is reset every time you have a new game and your character has no real social identity with other players, it's not a big deal to kill an old character and start a new one.
However in a persistant world, I might want to have my character go through a great deal many careers, while at the same time keeping the same character, that I am interacting with other players with. I don't want to have to tell my friends that I'm now character Y instead of character X.
While obviously games are an escape from reality in some sense, there is one thing from them I wouldn't mind seeing taken. The opportunity to learn new skills while letting old skills decay. Or the ability to sacrifice old skills, deliberately weakening my character, so I can have more room to learn new skills and powers more cheaply.
Once I'm done with a magician, I might decide to turn my character into a fighter and let their magical skills decay. In time I might move on to a cleric and let the sword and related skills rot. All the time I'm still character X even if my profession changes.
Of course to properly handle this you need a point-based system or something like the upcoming Dungeon Seige, where characters simply grow in whatever skills they use. Levelling becomes a thing of the past. I do not consider this a bad thing. Levels are just a game mechanic device to regulate advancement. There are countless pen and paper RPGs that find the concept of levels nonsensical.
The power cap is annoying to powergamers who want godlike levels of power, but some may find it more of a challenge to grow in power within the limits of the game. It also reduces the power spectrum spread that a MMORPG has to encompass. Once players reach the power cap, it all comes down to optimization within that level, and because they can drop a few points here and add a few there they can tinker with their characters endlessly.
Ideally a game should have more things for the players to do than grow in power endlessly. Or they can allow for 'king of the hill' advancement. You can give great swords of power out that every player will want. All of a sudden, hanging onto a weapon like that becomes the challenge. You can give social ranks based on peer acclaim that will grant extra power to a character. All of a sudden, players worry about the support of their peers and they risk the chance of dropping in power.
That's something you can do in a persistant world game, let characters drop in power and give them a chance to regain what they have lost, not to mention keeping them less complacent about what they have. This adds to the replayability without the need to start a new character. They can build characters that have real history to them. Some of the most famous people in history, such as Napoleon, had drops as well as rises.
Of course for games like Diablo I/II, where you have a world with a finite plotlength as well as finite size, you might as well go for the oneshot player system. I'm talking about games like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot where you have a world that you play a prolonged part of.
The time between a bug being discovered and being fixed. That is a kicker. Let's suppose that you had two pieces of software. One had twenty security holes found in a year, but every hole was fixed in one day. The other one had five holes, but they took six months to be fixed. Which piece of software had more known security holes at any given time?
The big issue is 'how many unresolved security holes are there for software X at any given time'. Even more than the number of bugs, that is a really significant number. Microsoft execs are whining about people discussing bugs out in public. The fact is that people started doing this in order to get companies to correct their code.
I won't say that OSS is more secure than proprietary software. I will say that OSS on average tends to have a much higher turnaround for getting bugs fixed and not leaving a system with known problems for very long.
To really do Lord of the Rings properly
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LotR Cleans Up at AFI
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I would prefer to see it done as an epic miniseries that took as many episodes as it needed to get things done right. Either that or you do it as six movies, one for each book, and you can include all the leisurely preparations that Frodo took in the book to get to Rivendell and the whole Tom Bombadil incident.
Even so, I think Peter Jackson did some right things in taking a lot of what was related in the council debate and showing it on camera, with the capture of Gandalf and so forth. In fact, if you did the miniseries concept I would have played up that element, showing the Ringwraiths harassing the dwarves and the whole bit with Gandalf and in general the shadows gathering around the Shire while the hobbits took their time.
The Glorfindel/Arwen substition I have mixed feelings about. Not that we ever got much of a view of Arwen in the books but she always struck me as the more domestic type and so it wasn't quite true to character. I wouldn't have minded having the whole Aragorn/Arwen meeting that was given in one of the Appendices in flashback at some point to fill the background in as an alternate way to bring her in.
1. Fully document all existing API's, protocols and file formats down to any compression/encryption algorithms used for media formats, and document six months in advance of release all new API's, protocols and file formats.
2. Force Microsoft to allow use by competitors of any patented algorithsm used the reading or writing of said data formats above.
3. Forbid Microsoft from writing any API, protocol or file format that prohibits anyone from writing software to interact with those API's, protocols or reading and writing those file formats.
4. Restrict Microsoft only to only charging for each license sold for a given computer rather than offering a cheaper rate that charges the company for every computer sold. And that rate must be the same for all computer manufacturers.
5. Related to that, no exclusionary rules about what can be bundled on a PC.
The first three points hits Microsoft in its embrace and extend strategy. It opens up the field to fair competition and allows other people to produce software that interoperates with Microsoft software.
The last two points prohibit Microsoft from punishing any companies that try to push non-Microsoft software.
Right now the technology is a bit expensive and slow to be used to replace conventional publishing methods. However in time it is going to get cheap enough with good enough quality that the major bookstore chains are going to be able to invest in these machines and come up with licensing deals with the major (and minor) publishers.
In time, yes, what will happen is that the copies of books on the shelves will be strictly display copies for people to browse through. When they find a copy of a book they like, they go up to the counter or perhaps a kiosk and punch in an order for a book they want and then they go and pick up their order at some counter in the bookstore. Through the bookstore's website you can go and order up a bunch of books and then drive down and pick them up in person. Or you can do the mail order thing if you're too lazy to do that.
In the end the people who lose are the small bookstores and the chains like Amazon who are going to get nailed in the convenience factor business unless they can do enough a discount for the reduced expense of not maintaining a series of stores all over the place.
Traditional presses are not going to go away. The Harry Potter books and other hyped up books will still be cheaper on the mass runs. So there will be shipping even so. However stores are likely to under-order and make it up on the print-on-demand side, assuming the publishers go for that. Likely as not there will be some tug-of-war on the major releases between publisher and seller.
Prices should drop in the vanity press business though, and you'll see more self-publishing going on. People who want to publish books can have a button on their website that will refer you to some print-on-demand shop that has the book in the catalog. The writer will probably pay some fee for having their book stored on the site but if enough books get published the rental fee is waived and there might even be a profit (worse than going through a main publisher, but it is a way to get a track record).
Of course once electronic paper gets good enough in quality that a bound book filled with epaper is economical and comfortable to use, expect to see the rules go out the window.
My opinion is that the whole history of computing has been moving mainframe technology down to the personal computer. Virtual Memory and emulation combined together seamlessly will in time be the norm on personal computers, at least I hope so. The idea is that the user can just click on an old Macintosh application or an old DOS application and automatically boot into the appropriate virtual machine with emulated CPU.
Once upon a time Detroit said that what people wanted was more and more power out of their automobiles. Then the Japanese came up with the astounding brilliant innovation that what people really wanted was reliability and fuel economy. Right now the computer industry more or less says that we need more and more CPU power, but I think they are going to eventually find what consumers want is reliaibility and compatibility. They don't want to be told "Program X will not run on your computer". Instead they will sacrifice a little performance to have something that will be able to run all of their older games and other programs.
Sony and Microsoft both have strong brand name recognition and are huge companies that can pour a lot of money in. That's how they could get in. The Linux angle wasn't enough to overcome that. If Panasonic or some other big consumer company threw its hat in the ring, that's one thing. A total unknown, that's another. The whole Linux issue is the only reason this is getting press attention at all.
Whether there is room for a new player really depends on whether Microsoft can make the Xbox work. That isn't necessarily a given. Even an experienced company like Sega or Nintendo can stumble (Dreamcast and N64 respectively). Sony got real lucky with the PSX and it's not clear how the PSX2 will shake out.
Even if the XBox bombs, the only way a new contendor will get back in will be one with a lot of brand name recognition in computers or consumer electronics. And if the XBox doesn't bomb, then the only way there's going to be a new major player is if Sony or Nintendo get shoved out of the market first (and that can happen, given what happened to Sega).
What will be interesting is what happens if people can get Linux booted and even optimized for running on the XBox. Instead of having the Indrema as a Linux gaming console, people will start turning it into one anyway, even if the selection of games is more slender. Ditto for the Sony PSX2 and the Nintendo Gamecube. People end up porting Linux to just about anything that can run it.
There are two types of equations in physics. There are fundamental equations and derived equations. Fundamental equations are purely empirical beasties, whose sole justification for their existance is that they match the data that science produces when you plug numbers into them. In theory there are only two equations that are properly empirical, the general theory of relativity and the standard model of physics (in practice there are a few more physical phenomena whose underpinnings are not well enough understood to be linked to those two equations).
Then there are derived equations, like the special theory of relativity and the various laws concerning the index of refraction. These equations have certain conditions and assumptions built into them and it is possible to come up with phenomena that seemingly defy them because you're breaking the assumptions they're founded on. A nail sticking to a magnet defies the law of gravity, but that's only because the law of gravity by itself assumes no other forces in action, for example.
So in short no laws of physics were broken by this. No doubt some aspects of quantum mechanics were used to undermine what is effectively classical physics.
Microsoft could easily regret the subscription model they are pushing here. In fact it could destroy their domination in the market even faster in the long term. Consider this scenario:
Linux vendors can offer a subscription service. They can even offer levels of subscription services. There are various features that can be offered. Technical support experts on call are one of them, obviously enough. A second one is keeping track of bug fixes and security fixes as well as new feature releases. These can then be offered in some sort of automated update system. Companies that really want peace of mind can go buy a service where the company maintains programmers to do immediate bug fixes for problems and then submit these to the software groups in question (a way that companies can honorably make money off of open source that benefits the community).
Whether or not a company is viable this path remains to be seen, but under a cheap subscription model it can possibly add up enough to make a profit. Now the whole thing is that anyone else can go into the service business. As a result the whole thing is going to be horribly competitive. There's no inherent development costs but your margins are as thin as you can make them. So what does one of these companies do in order to get more subscribers?
They offer a "finder's fee" to the OEMs. They *pay* the OEM a certain amount for bundling a PC with a contract that requires a certain length of subscription and a penalty fee for opting out before then that turns them a profit even if the customer bails out on them. Now all of a sudden there is a lot of incentive to push PCs out the door with this Linux service installed on them. The Linux vendor can even offer customizations like PC OEM branding as well built in, once the other services follow suit.
Now Microsoft is still going to be a big brand name at this point and PC OEMs are going to be reluctant to directly cross the Redmond giant even then. But there are sneakier ways for them to push Linux without appearing to push Linux. In all of the major trade magazines, the OEMs start advertising the prices of their machines at the subsidized Linux rate while talking about the benefits of Microsoft software. Customers go to buy and find out they can only get the lower cost with Linux software, which their reps assure has the equivalent functionality for basic application software. A lot of consumers might well decide to give Linux a try just because of that.
All of a sudden Microsoft is hoist by its own petard. They crow about subscription models and then find the hypercompetitive Linux subscription market finding a new way to get their foot in the door. Microsoft can only do one thing and stop receiving a tithe with every PC sold and start paying the OEMs more. Of course they end up charging more on a monthly basis to make back their costs and support their developer base. Now the OEMs are happily sticking the screws to Microsoft and being paid to carry their software and Microsoft is taking damage to its revenue streams from the PC tax, which now comes from them.
Of course the companies can fight back, if they cut the OEM dealers in on a percentage of the subscription for a given contract. Shaves their margins even thinner but it gives incentive for the OEMs to push the Linux service. Some OEMs might decide to even go with their own Linux distribution and service contracts and cut out the middleman. Either way, this forces Microsoft to offer a percentage of their subscriptions to the OEM in question, further damaging their revenue streams. At that point you've pretty much finished all you can bribe the OEMs with.
Short term this restores Microsoft back to its dominant position. They can pay more because they can rent more expensively. In the longer term though I think it will burn them in the end. IBM has a reputation for service and will be pushing a service model of their own in time (I still believe that for all of their vendor agnosticism once the service model becomes dominant IBM will break down and create their own distribution). In the long run companies look at those monthly rental fees and their beancounters eventually will realize the Linux vendors are offering more for the dollar and switch over.
Of course some weird geeky types will decide they'd rather not go with a subscription service. I figure you'll see a few small name PC vendors that you can buy a vanilla PC from with the Linux distribution of your choice with no service contract built in. These are the sort of people who watch freshmeat and handle their own software upgrades or even roll their own distributions.
So in short subscription-ware in the long term will be the best thing that ever happened from an OEM perspective and from a consumer perspective. From a software vendor perspective its miserable, but that's the whole nature of business. In the long run I think Linux still beats out on Microsoft because it is cheaper for everyone involved, even if it is less profitable for some.
Normally I'd be on the side of the person who owns the trademark except there are a few things about this that I do not like.
First off, getting SSH as the name of an IETF protocol, and then trademarking it. This is the act that really stinks. Its as bad as Apple's Firewire stunt, getting an IEEE protocol set up and trademarking the name associated with it. This reeks of trademark trapping, or trying to grant oneself a monopoly with regards to an IETF protocol, or at least an unfair advantage. Only his software can use the name of the protocol in the name of the software using the protocol. It would be like trademarking HTTP.
Second off, I am somewhat suspicious at the time lag involved between the founding of OpenSSH and the present. If you're going to do the trademark enforcement thing, do it at the very beginning and go with the lawyers and accept the PR meltdown that is going to result because you did a sleazy thing like trademark an IETF protocol in the first place.
In short, this is someone who is trying to have it both ways. Playing the IETF and open standards game while still having the trademark and the exclusive right to make software with the name of that protocol in it. He tried to engineer himself an unfair marketing advantage and some reasonable uses of the SSH protocol name are causing him business confusion. You will notice there is no talk of his changing his software name and setting up a new trademark. And while you can talk about his investment in the mindshare of the SSH name, he did it in a fashion that puts other people trying to use the SSH protocol at an unfair disadvantage.
Now, perhaps I am being unfair here, perhaps he did not intend to do things that way, at least not consciously. But the end result is the same. He took an open protocol name and trademarked it so that no one else could use the protocol name in software that implements the software protocol but him, giving him an unfair advantage. Now that people are trying to erode that unfair advantage, he is crying foul, and after other people have invested work in the OpenSSH brand name as well.
Oh yes, and tradmarking "Secure Shell" strikes me about on the level of trying to trademark "Windows". You might be able to do it but its a really sleazy thing to try. Whatever sympathy I have for him was completely destroyed when that fact came to surface. This is a person using trademarks in an abusive fashion and I'd like to see that reap the rewards it deserves.
Universities will love things like this. There is a need for three dimensional rendering tools in engineering and art classes, and schools do like to trim dollars. These classes often don't require the fancy bells and whistles that are required in the top end rendering programs. Likewise people who don't use these tools profesionally (and have a decent budget) will gravitate to these things.
Another blessing is that it will force the cost of the professional version of these programs down. As I have observed before, the bright side about open source programs is that they raise the bottom line. All of a sudden te functionality of OpenFX becomes the baseline standard and people have to look at the other features and ask themselves if they really need that other stuff. Especially as people start copying the features in the top end programs and add them to the GPL'd stuff.
I don't know how many different OSS 3D renderers there will be after a time. I suspect that there's really only going to be mindshare (given the resources required to create a program like this) in one program. There may be major rearchitectures over time, but I think there will be consolidation on that point between this and any other GPL'd renderers out there.
What will be interesting is any evolution towards cross fertilization with software like Crystal Space, the GPL'd 3D engine. Sooner or later people will think it might not be a bad idea to make sure stuff created in the modeller and renderer works directly well with an engine to use such things in games. Open source makes such things possible.
To my mind the whole point of Linux, GNOME, KOffice, Apache and every other open source project isn't to produce bleeding edge software. It is to raise the bottom line of functionality for software. Anti-aliased fonts are now becoming a part of Linux, which means that every future operating system from now on needs to offer them.
Sure, Microsoft is forging ahead with.NET as Linux catches up in so many directions such as with their desktop software, printer support (e.g. CUPS) and so forth. But Linux is raising the bottom line and as the gaps are filled in, its becoming a stable and functional operating system that costs nothing. And Microsoft has to work harder to justify charging money for their operating system.
In a way I hope Linux doesn't drive Microsoft out of the operating business. The only way that Microsoft is going to survive against the Linux threat is to start pushing ahead and finding ways to be competitive in terms of delivering value, instead of creative in ways of gouging money.
If Microsoft wants to keep the checklist of features that makes Windows superior and worth paying money for long, they're going to have to keep adding items. Anti-aliased text has just been removed from the list of items that Microsoft can hold over Linux.
But I empathize with some of his opinions. To my mind the whole system of managing files needs to be revised. I have an elaborate system of folders and symbolic links and customized menus to allow me to get to various frequently used files. The problem is when I start getting the urge to wander through my vast accumilation of files.
And then there are my directories for applications and configuration files for the operating system. I want something that can be as transparent as possible and yet also allows me to call up as much information as I want to configure it as possible. Transparent when I don't care yet I can pop the hood and look whenever I want.
That is an issue that the GNOME and KDE people are going to have to solve eventually. The idea of components is a really neat one but how does one keep track of and manage dozens of components? Not from a computer level, a computer has a nigh infinite capacity that way, but from a human level. It's a related issue to how does one organize a bunch of disconnected pieces of data of varying types so that users can manage it simply.
I'm not talking about an 'appliance', not really. I'd just like to see our top brains in the computer field work on the problem of how to manage vast amounts of heterogenous data in a seamless and transparent fashion, and to do the same for managing programs. And as Raskin says, to have as little between the user and his data as possible (one step beyond Raskin, after all, a program lies between a user and his data).
They have some points that a pure Linux company working with GPL'd software is going to have a lot harder time making money than a companhy selling proprietary software. I happen to agree that the Linux market is overhyped and saturated compared to the user base and we're going to be seeing a lot of consolidation. I don't see companies like Ximian and Eazel having an easy time lasting on their own and expect them to end up fusing with companies like Red Hat and other software firms. These companies will make a living selling update support for bug fixes and security patches. They will be paid the money to keep track of all the fixes an administrator needs to keep their system secure. Some people will insist on going to Freshmeat and other sites and doing it by hand but the average consumer won't care to do such things.
In fact that's where I see the subscription model actually working. I don't think people are going to want to rent their word processor. I do think they'll be willing to pay a subscription fee for bug fixes on a regular basis in some sort of one-click or even no-click fashion. And corporations might be willing to pay these companies to have expert programmers ready to handle bug fixes. That's a major and in some ways a legitimate worry about Linux and other GPL'd software (of course companies that sell proprietary software are at liberty to ignore requests). But a company might be able to make a living selling subscriptions to have a stable of programmers to respond to corporate bug fix requests.
Then there is Intel and IBM. Microsoft did not talk about how these companies are going to be making money using Linux. Intel has been jerked around by Microsoft far too often and Linux can't do that to them. Linux is a way for them to sell hardware, including experimental new CPU's they make. If the subscription model above doesn't pan out, there will still be investment from the hardware people because the fundamnetal rule is that software sells hardware. I can see Intel working on GPL'd software for computation intensive tasks like voice recognition just so they can sell more powerful boxes.
That Linux tends to follow than lead is partly true. I'm not certain whether ASP and the.NET model is going to be the Next Big Thing. I've seen a lot of those things in the industry and so far they tend to fall short of expectations with a few rare exceptions, and even those take longer to get working than necessary.
Knowing the Linux developer community, most likely the response will be for developers to work on their own personal ASP software, so they can have a Linux box at home with their files and software and access it and use it from wherever they are. Not X, but a more sophistcated setup that doesn't send mouse clicks over the network. Initially this will be set up for single or few users and then other developers will work out the scalability issues. Pretty soon the proprietary ASP software is under serious fire from the GPL'd variety and the companies selling that service are cutting costs and competing with each other and the corporations themselves can move from one vendor to another or even set up something in house because they're using public domain software.
If the machine independent feature of.NET takes off, no doubt someone will work on GPL'd variety to compete with the other proprietary versions. Yes, Linux is playing catch up but I see this as the natural cycle of the software industry. The proprietary companies have to keep innovating to keep ahead of the GPL'd software. They can't afford to rest on their laurels. They want people to buy proprietary software, they're going to have to make it worth it over the GPL'd variety. They can't just toss in an annoying paperclip and call it innovation. They have to clearly move ahead.
With luck we will see a computer industry with cheap and reliable and decently functioned open source software for the masses. Corporations and people wanting premium stuff will buy proprietary software that clearly has added value and those companies will be desperately pushing forward as the open source community creates open source equivalents for that premium software and pushes the bottom line forward. Consumers will pay companies a subscription fee so they can keep their systems up to date easily and hardware vendors will be pouring money in so they can sell more hardware. And Microsoft will actually have to give stable and usefully featured software if they want the big bucks.
This development is nowhere near surprising. My personal feeling is that we're going to see far fewer Linux companies and distributions in the future, falling into three categories.
The first category will be Linux distributions that form out of the merger or shutting down of all the various commercial vendors. I know, this Red Hat/Eazel thing isn't a merger but I would not be surprised to see it turn into a merger eventually. We're already seeing buyouts and shutdown of rival Linux distributions. I honestly don't know how much room there is in the market for different commercial Linux distributions. I see room for at least two in each regional market more likely three, but probably not much more than three. And if things head in a certain direction, that third could be Microsoft.
The second one will be major hardware vendors going with their own Linux distribution. Vendors that sell specialized hardware or hardware with special functionality might well go with their own optimized version of Linux. A company that sells graphics workstations would quite likely ship a version of Linux with their own optimized drivers and all sorts of performance tuning to squeeze maximum performance out of the hardware. Or a company might decide that licensing costs from one of the above vendor are higher than the cost of doing it in house. Personally, I think it more likely they'll end up doing a customized version of a regular distribution, but some really exotic varients might need more.
The third category will be specialized distributions that are non-profit or serve niche markets. Debian will last until the heat death of the universe and will be the source from which all non-commercial distributions spring. There might also be distributions for ready-made beowulf clusters and so forth. I think more often than not they will be volunteer efforts or a minor division of some company making its fortune in other ways.
The first time will make its money off of support contracts and subscription auto-update features especially for things like security fixes. The second sort of company will be using Linux to sell hardware with minimal software development costs. The third category won't be trying to make money or won't view this as their main source of revenue.
The first category, in terms of investiment in Linux development, will be focusing on ease of installation and deinstallation as well as ease of use. The second category will tend to focus on driver development and hardware support. The third category will focus on either things that aren't viewed as commercially viable or at best niche categories of software.
Not sure this technology will take off, anyone remember bubble memory or any of a dozen other pieces of technology set to take over the world? But it could, and through the same process that personal computers blew away minicomputers. Originally, personal computers were crap compared to minis. Slower, less reliable, less functional, you name it. Anyone who wanted to replace their minis with a bunch of PCs would have been looked at as insane. Now these days, people run very powerful and sophisticated software that mini's used to do on their PCs and now you have SETI using all that networked power to do supercomputer work.
If they get this technology to actually work commercially, it could destroy conventional chipmaking techniques. Sure, these things will be slower than normal chips. However as the book _Innovator's Dilemma_ clearly states, what usually happens is that this technology will end up filling a new niche on the low end. Take embedded systems. This plastic technology is a natural fit for that sort of thing. Sure, its slower but most embedded systems are not CPU hogs anyway, and the lower cost and higher production rates outweigh the disadvantages of the reduced processor speed. The manufacturers of this technology work on refining the density of the circuity they're printing on the plastic, improving performance. Slowly they start eroding at the conventional chip technology market from the bottom up. Chip makers keep giving up the low end as they focus on the high end.
The problem is you can't keep doing that forever. Sooner or later you run out of ground. So in a few decades, you might find that for everything but the luxury high performance end of things, all your circuits are printed plastic instead of etched silicon. That's how companies can get burned going with the "sure" technology and get blasted out of the market from below. The low end inevitabily eats up into the high end with cheap technology improvements.
Not that I'm saying this is going to happen. A lot depends on whether they can make this work commercially and how well the technology scales. But it could happen. Don't go dismissing it out of hand. The smart answer is 'wait and see'.
I tend to break software development into two areas, computer science and software engineering. Voice recognition, code morphing, cracking mathematical problems and so forth are computer science. Writing a word processor or a monolithic operating system or even a virtualizer is more software engineering. It's not like new ground is being broken in writing an x86 virtualizer, the art is documented already. As the previous post commented, MATLAB is based on well known algorithms.
Open source projects tend to be better at software engineering projects rather than computer science projects. The GNU project did very well creating the GNU tools because that was software engineering. Building a serious operating system based on a microkernel is closer to comptuter science and so got bogged down. Monolithic kernels are software engineering and so Linux took off. Even Ogg Vorbis is really just taking the well studied field of compression and the focus is on sidestepping patents than trying for something oh wow and state of the art.
To my mind, this is where the difference between commercial and open source software should lie. The commercial companies should be pushing the state of the art and working on all this gee wow stuff that people will be willing to make money on. The Open Source people should see this and then promptly reverse engineer it as the state of the art trickles down to the level that it becomes software engineering and the commercial people should be plowing on ahead and finding better things to focus their money on.
Apple is trying to do it with OS X and their rewriting of the BSD kernel. They've done some fascinating things there with Quartz and display PDF that I really hope the GNOME/KDE folks are looking at to implement in their own systems, not to mention the GNU/Linux crowd with the innovations on folder bundling and moving all system resources into XML files. Apple is steadily innovating in their products. Microsoft's.NET has a few interesting ideas and whatever good pieces are in it hopefully will be appropriated by Open Source people to be put into GNU/Linux.
Personally, I want to have a personal computer based on GPL'd software that has all of the functionality of a mainframe down to the virtual machines and scalable multiprocessor support, with all of the newer innovations that have cropped up like XML resource files, Display PDF for graphics, CORBA for handling widgets and so on. All of that is really more software engineering (yes, expensive in time and expertise software engineering but still that). The media players on the system should all be dealing with well defined media formats that anyone can write a free encoder or decoder to in GPL'd software.
All the money I should be spending on the system should be for things like voice recognition and things that I know are cutting edge and state of the art and require money to finance. My biggest beef with Microsoft is that they gouge out huge amounts of money and frankly there are very few technical innovations that they have spearheaded themselves. At least Apple goes and raises the standard for what one should expect out of a personal computer.
In the ideal world, the universities develop new ideas, the commercial companies take these ideas and turn them into money-making projects and after the newness of the ideas has worn off and their genuine value has sunk in, the open source people move in and incorporate it into widely available open source software, forcing the commercial companies to move on to something new. This is rough on the commercial software companies but no one said that life was going to be or should be easy on them.
Trying to keep on topic with the discussion, even if I am not asking a question, virtualization is a solved problem and goes back decades. Now that personal computers have reached the right level of performance to handle such things (as with other features of mainframes that trickle down when PCs get fast enough) it is only natural to start writing Open Source projects to implement it. VMWare folks need to find somewhere else to move onto, or to simply conceed to plex86 and start working on selling support of the project. They could look to see if they could combine something like VMWare with Transmeta's code morphing, perhaps even to virtualizing different processors on one machine. There are directions they can still go, there is still room for improvement. Or they can compete the way the rivals to XFree86 compete, with a wider range of driver support. In short, I feel little sympathy for VMWare. If they can't keep ahead of plex86, then they're doing something wrong.
More functionality moved into user space as separate modules/ and less functionality in kernel space. A reduced need for recompiling the kernel. Yes, there will be some performance hits here but now that we're starting to move into Ghz range we might be able to shed a few percentage points of performance in return for more modularity. The ideal world involves going to something like HURD but I don't think that's going to happen. Still, a direction towards more modularity is good.
Honestly, most of the suggestions that have been going on here have been in the area of layers on top of the kernel. Not that they don't need to be done, but they're the sort of things that Linus is not going to be messing with. I think that replacing X with something with a more well thought out API, or taking the standard GNU tools and replacing them with tools that use a set of XML configuration files are nifty things, but these are not strictly things that concern the kernel.
I think the VM is an idea whose time is finally coming. Processor speed is coming up fast enough and for common applications (primarily in the consumer market) that even with the performance hit by running the VM with either JIT compilation or code morphing (or even both) still leaves you with good performance for common applications. And the benefit you get from compatibility issues really makes life pleasant with a well designed VM.
Honestly, as people keep wanting to run x86 code and the hardware people are having fits from trying to boost even more performance trying to run x86 code directly, you're just going to see the total surrender and the declaring of the x86 instruction set as a VM spec not unlike the Amiga VM spec, only not quite as well thought out.
From there its a shorter leap to supporting multiple instruction sets and the emulation of legacy systems really takes off. Combine that with something like VMWare and you've got a system that can boot up virtual machines of all sorts of hardware configurations to run legacy software. And something like the Amiga VM with an artificially designed instruction set that would be impossible to do in hardware suddenly looks attractive from a development standpoint.
To answer your post, you could combine the VM with Linux. At that point you can create Linux binaries that will run on any processor type. Companies that don't want to release their source code (and I am quite understanding of companies not wishing to do that) can release a binary that will run across all processor lines.
I did think it was cheesy to use the Amiga name though. I tend to agree with others the name should have been allowed to go into honorable retirement.
HURD to me is more of a research kernel. It's there to see if a Microkernel setup can go from a toy OS setup to a real OS setup. To my mind it is the alpha for the next operating system after Linux, or when they decide that adding functionality to the kernel isn't going to work anymore and they need to start moving stuff into user space and trimming the kernel down. When they do that, they can look over the work that HURD has done and the things that it has learned in the process. I see it as research for overhead issues and how to make a microkernel fast enough for real use, and how to debug and optimize a microkernel setup. The lessons learned with HURD will help elsewhere.
The sad fact is I don't see HURD taking off, ever. It doesn't really offer enough significant advantages over Linux to convince people to move. The advantages are more from the development perspective than from a user perspective. Transparent FTP isn't quite enough to get people to move over, for example. Something like EROS (www.eros-os.org) is more likely to be the successor to Linux because of the incorporation of significant functionality into the kernel that could not be easily installed into Linux.
In short HURD is a neat idea and the lessons that are learned from its development will most likely be harnessed elsewhere (e.g. we shouldn't try X, the HURD people had all these sorts of problems when they tried that approach).
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In general, I'm with the PSP people in terms of the overall design. Dual screens with a stylus strikes me as an attempt to be clever. Clever doesn't really work with these types of machines. Something simple and elegant works much better in these cases. The DS is relying on a dual screen gimmick and in my experience, gimmicks don't do too well.
The PSP has a very clean ergonomic design. The only thing that the PSP is missing is a second analog control. If it had that, I would say that it would be absolutely perfect in layout.
The two issues that worry me are proprietary media and data formats. I'd feel happier if it had some industry standard small data disk format. I'd also feel happier if they announced it could support a lot of media formats, including MPEG, MP3 and Ogg. To my mind, something that could play good games and support those formats would be something I would be seriously tempted in buying.
The price is also something where I think Sony may be rushing in too soon. Steve Jobs blew it with the Newton because while the concept was good the technology hadn't hit the right price point. While I think the PSP has a clean design, if it's too expensive, we've got yet another overprinced and overambitious piece of hardware to add to the list of other bold experiments.
The Nokia N-gauge makes me uneasy, and for that matter some of the early PDA-cell phone combos that are a bit bulky. The fact is that a cell phone has a different style of usage than a PDA and the ideal ergonomics for each are different.
Still, expanding a cell phone and putting a display and a few more controls on it doesn't strike me as unworkable. I sometimes think existing cell phones are way too small, even if it makes them easier to carry around.
Computers are multifunction devices. A lot of people here are way too young to remember the dedicated word processing devices that used to be so common. People don't think anything of using their computers for a vast range of things. Now think about setting up a handheld computer that can do a vast range of things as well, including VoIP. Then it looks more reasonable.
I can easily see cell phones with a small display being used for making voice calls, surfing the web, playing video and music, and being used for playing games as well.
It will not replace the desktop computer, people still need to sit down with a full size keyboard and a gross display, but the amount of time that people have to spend at a full computer will drop and the amount of time they can spend away from the desk will increase.
The situation in the Atari crash and the situation now are so completely different that I can't tell what the author is thinking in trying to compare the two of them. The author reminds me of those people who keep claiming the End of the World is nigh and the Sky is Falling and all of that stuff. He wants to rain on everyone's parade.
First off, graphics hasn't hit a plateau. It is on an S curve. We've just reached the point where it is tapering off. But we've nowhere near hit the limit there. Remember the Lord of the Rings movies? Remember the final battle? Can Warcraft match those sorts of graphics with those sorts of numbers of troops? The moment that personal computers can generate those sorts of graphics real time, I'll be willing to conceed we're maxxing out.
And there are still things that are hellish to model on computers. The flooding of Isengard was done with models because the computers weren't up to the task. Eventually, we'll have software that can model water flowing like that for movies and then years down the road it will appear in games. But it will take some time for it to cross over.
Photorealistic dynamic human avatars are still the cutting edge of CGI (and we haven't even gotten there yet). Admittedly, the developments are more incremental now than they used to be, but they're still there. I want my game to look like it was being performed by live actors on a real set. The graphics ain't there yet.
Physics, as others have noted, is an issue. Related is the idea that every object in a world can be interacted with or affected by the player. We've a long way to go in the physics area, but this is more in the region of gameplay.
AI on the other hand, still has a ways to go on the S curve. The major limitation of games these days is that social interactions still for the most part have to be pre-scripted. There are a few games that are slowly making the first few steps past that, but we've got a long way to go.
Of course physics and AI and gameplay issues aren't obvious. The writer of this article is taking a very superficial view of games (and of the gaming industry) by noting that just because two games look similar, they are the same. Just comparing the looks of the Madden games isn't enough. If he had done a comparison of game feature by game feature and shown that there was little incremental improvement, then he might make a point. As it stands, he sounds incredibly shallow and superficial.
GTA3 was a breakthrough in gameplay more than anything else. An open world where there were multiple issues for solving problems. There are other games out there that instead of having one solution to a problem or one style of ultimate gameplay are allowing a range of approaches. These games look a lot like other games of less depth and complexity, but only someone who looked at the surface of things would say there was no difference.
Games are going to be changing a lot under the hood going forward. The one good point of the article was that graphics improvements are no longer a primary selling point any more. All games are starting to look good. Now issues involving AI and physics and gameplay are coming to the fore.
Assuming the best case scenario where the school system asked for a donation and Microsoft offered a $2000 discount on what would be a $11,000 package, whoever was in charge of drafting that deal should have known that the offer was going to be refused. A nation that poor can't afford usual Microsoft prices.
In short, Microsoft made a very dumb decision making that sort of offer. As someone else said, it's like giving a homeless person asking for a meal a fifty cent coupon off a five dollar meal. Yes, you owe the homeless person absolutely nothing but making that sort of offer is verging on an insult, and at the very least is showing incredible stupidity.
If Microsoft had to give $2000 in free software, why not make it a smaller number of Office/Window packages? Instead of offering just Office or just Windows offer a smaller combination of both. Of course that still skips support costs and so likely would have been tossed out but hey...
In any case, it's not hard to see why Linux is becoming increasingly popular in third world nations. In those places you practically expect Microsoft to start promoting piracy of its software just to keep Linux from becoming more entrenched.
Or for something else. There are a lot of subscription services on the Internet for various things. Various premimum and subscription-only services.
Something that AOL could do would be to cut deals with a lot of these providers, to get a discounted rate with these providers. And yes, a lot of these premium services would be very likely to be willing to give a discount in return for the number of potential subscribers AOL could toss in their direction.
From the customer end, AOL gives discounted rates for various premimum services or even effectively free under the base rate. And they give centralized billing as well for all these subscription services. Just go to a single area and checkmark off what you want and don't want.
AOL could even offer caching for these services as well, which also benefits both from the provider and and from the customer end. That's probably how they could negotiate a reduced rate "Give us the content at a lower fee and we'll be eating the bandwidth costs on our end". And the AOL customers are pulling this stuff off of AOL servers then.
Yes, the Internet is all about eliminating the middlemen, but the fact is that middlemen have their uses. Of course I doubt that AOL is going to see this until its too late.
Is that as a player I want to explore different aspects of the game, go through a lot of different character classes. I also don't want to keep restarting a new character every time I want to change classes. In games like Diablo, where you have a finite world (in duration as well as space) that is reset every time you have a new game and your character has no real social identity with other players, it's not a big deal to kill an old character and start a new one.
However in a persistant world, I might want to have my character go through a great deal many careers, while at the same time keeping the same character, that I am interacting with other players with. I don't want to have to tell my friends that I'm now character Y instead of character X.
While obviously games are an escape from reality in some sense, there is one thing from them I wouldn't mind seeing taken. The opportunity to learn new skills while letting old skills decay. Or the ability to sacrifice old skills, deliberately weakening my character, so I can have more room to learn new skills and powers more cheaply.
Once I'm done with a magician, I might decide to turn my character into a fighter and let their magical skills decay. In time I might move on to a cleric and let the sword and related skills rot. All the time I'm still character X even if my profession changes.
Of course to properly handle this you need a point-based system or something like the upcoming Dungeon Seige, where characters simply grow in whatever skills they use. Levelling becomes a thing of the past. I do not consider this a bad thing. Levels are just a game mechanic device to regulate advancement. There are countless pen and paper RPGs that find the concept of levels nonsensical.
The power cap is annoying to powergamers who want godlike levels of power, but some may find it more of a challenge to grow in power within the limits of the game. It also reduces the power spectrum spread that a MMORPG has to encompass. Once players reach the power cap, it all comes down to optimization within that level, and because they can drop a few points here and add a few there they can tinker with their characters endlessly.
Ideally a game should have more things for the players to do than grow in power endlessly. Or they can allow for 'king of the hill' advancement. You can give great swords of power out that every player will want. All of a sudden, hanging onto a weapon like that becomes the challenge. You can give social ranks based on peer acclaim that will grant extra power to a character. All of a sudden, players worry about the support of their peers and they risk the chance of dropping in power.
That's something you can do in a persistant world game, let characters drop in power and give them a chance to regain what they have lost, not to mention keeping them less complacent about what they have. This adds to the replayability without the need to start a new character. They can build characters that have real history to them. Some of the most famous people in history, such as Napoleon, had drops as well as rises.
Of course for games like Diablo I/II, where you have a world with a finite plotlength as well as finite size, you might as well go for the oneshot player system. I'm talking about games like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot where you have a world that you play a prolonged part of.
The time between a bug being discovered and being fixed. That is a kicker. Let's suppose that you had two pieces of software. One had twenty security holes found in a year, but every hole was fixed in one day. The other one had five holes, but they took six months to be fixed. Which piece of software had more known security holes at any given time?
The big issue is 'how many unresolved security holes are there for software X at any given time'. Even more than the number of bugs, that is a really significant number. Microsoft execs are whining about people discussing bugs out in public. The fact is that people started doing this in order to get companies to correct their code.
I won't say that OSS is more secure than proprietary software. I will say that OSS on average tends to have a much higher turnaround for getting bugs fixed and not leaving a system with known problems for very long.
I would prefer to see it done as an epic miniseries that took as many episodes as it needed to get things done right. Either that or you do it as six movies, one for each book, and you can include all the leisurely preparations that Frodo took in the book to get to Rivendell and the whole Tom Bombadil incident.
Even so, I think Peter Jackson did some right things in taking a lot of what was related in the council debate and showing it on camera, with the capture of Gandalf and so forth. In fact, if you did the miniseries concept I would have played up that element, showing the Ringwraiths harassing the dwarves and the whole bit with Gandalf and in general the shadows gathering around the Shire while the hobbits took their time.
The Glorfindel/Arwen substition I have mixed feelings about. Not that we ever got much of a view of Arwen in the books but she always struck me as the more domestic type and so it wasn't quite true to character. I wouldn't have minded having the whole Aragorn/Arwen meeting that was given in one of the Appendices in flashback at some point to fill the background in as an alternate way to bring her in.
1. Fully document all existing API's, protocols and file formats down to any compression/encryption algorithms used for media formats, and document six months in advance of release all new API's, protocols and file formats.
2. Force Microsoft to allow use by competitors of any patented algorithsm used the reading or writing of said data formats above.
3. Forbid Microsoft from writing any API, protocol or file format that prohibits anyone from writing software to interact with those API's, protocols or reading and writing those file formats.
4. Restrict Microsoft only to only charging for each license sold for a given computer rather than offering a cheaper rate that charges the company for every computer sold. And that rate must be the same for all computer manufacturers.
5. Related to that, no exclusionary rules about what can be bundled on a PC.
The first three points hits Microsoft in its embrace and extend strategy. It opens up the field to fair competition and allows other people to produce software that interoperates with Microsoft software.
The last two points prohibit Microsoft from punishing any companies that try to push non-Microsoft software.
Right now the technology is a bit expensive and slow to be used to replace conventional publishing methods. However in time it is going to get cheap enough with good enough quality that the major bookstore chains are going to be able to invest in these machines and come up with licensing deals with the major (and minor) publishers.
In time, yes, what will happen is that the copies of books on the shelves will be strictly display copies for people to browse through. When they find a copy of a book they like, they go up to the counter or perhaps a kiosk and punch in an order for a book they want and then they go and pick up their order at some counter in the bookstore. Through the bookstore's website you can go and order up a bunch of books and then drive down and pick them up in person. Or you can do the mail order thing if you're too lazy to do that.
In the end the people who lose are the small bookstores and the chains like Amazon who are going to get nailed in the convenience factor business unless they can do enough a discount for the reduced expense of not maintaining a series of stores all over the place.
Traditional presses are not going to go away. The Harry Potter books and other hyped up books will still be cheaper on the mass runs. So there will be shipping even so. However stores are likely to under-order and make it up on the print-on-demand side, assuming the publishers go for that. Likely as not there will be some tug-of-war on the major releases between publisher and seller.
Prices should drop in the vanity press business though, and you'll see more self-publishing going on. People who want to publish books can have a button on their website that will refer you to some print-on-demand shop that has the book in the catalog. The writer will probably pay some fee for having their book stored on the site but if enough books get published the rental fee is waived and there might even be a profit (worse than going through a main publisher, but it is a way to get a track record).
Of course once electronic paper gets good enough in quality that a bound book filled with epaper is economical and comfortable to use, expect to see the rules go out the window.
My opinion is that the whole history of computing has been moving mainframe technology down to the personal computer. Virtual Memory and emulation combined together seamlessly will in time be the norm on personal computers, at least I hope so. The idea is that the user can just click on an old Macintosh application or an old DOS application and automatically boot into the appropriate virtual machine with emulated CPU.
Once upon a time Detroit said that what people wanted was more and more power out of their automobiles. Then the Japanese came up with the astounding brilliant innovation that what people really wanted was reliability and fuel economy. Right now the computer industry more or less says that we need more and more CPU power, but I think they are going to eventually find what consumers want is reliaibility and compatibility. They don't want to be told "Program X will not run on your computer". Instead they will sacrifice a little performance to have something that will be able to run all of their older games and other programs.
Sony and Microsoft both have strong brand name recognition and are huge companies that can pour a lot of money in. That's how they could get in. The Linux angle wasn't enough to overcome that. If Panasonic or some other big consumer company threw its hat in the ring, that's one thing. A total unknown, that's another. The whole Linux issue is the only reason this is getting press attention at all.
Whether there is room for a new player really depends on whether Microsoft can make the Xbox work. That isn't necessarily a given. Even an experienced company like Sega or Nintendo can stumble (Dreamcast and N64 respectively). Sony got real lucky with the PSX and it's not clear how the PSX2 will shake out.
Even if the XBox bombs, the only way a new contendor will get back in will be one with a lot of brand name recognition in computers or consumer electronics. And if the XBox doesn't bomb, then the only way there's going to be a new major player is if Sony or Nintendo get shoved out of the market first (and that can happen, given what happened to Sega).
What will be interesting is what happens if people can get Linux booted and even optimized for running on the XBox. Instead of having the Indrema as a Linux gaming console, people will start turning it into one anyway, even if the selection of games is more slender. Ditto for the Sony PSX2 and the Nintendo Gamecube. People end up porting Linux to just about anything that can run it.
There are two types of equations in physics. There are fundamental equations and derived equations. Fundamental equations are purely empirical beasties, whose sole justification for their existance is that they match the data that science produces when you plug numbers into them. In theory there are only two equations that are properly empirical, the general theory of relativity and the standard model of physics (in practice there are a few more physical phenomena whose underpinnings are not well enough understood to be linked to those two equations).
Then there are derived equations, like the special theory of relativity and the various laws concerning the index of refraction. These equations have certain conditions and assumptions built into them and it is possible to come up with phenomena that seemingly defy them because you're breaking the assumptions they're founded on. A nail sticking to a magnet defies the law of gravity, but that's only because the law of gravity by itself assumes no other forces in action, for example.
So in short no laws of physics were broken by this. No doubt some aspects of quantum mechanics were used to undermine what is effectively classical physics.
Microsoft could easily regret the subscription model they are pushing here. In fact it could destroy their domination in the market even faster in the long term. Consider this scenario:
Linux vendors can offer a subscription service. They can even offer levels of subscription services. There are various features that can be offered. Technical support experts on call are one of them, obviously enough. A second one is keeping track of bug fixes and security fixes as well as new feature releases. These can then be offered in some sort of automated update system. Companies that really want peace of mind can go buy a service where the company maintains programmers to do immediate bug fixes for problems and then submit these to the software groups in question (a way that companies can honorably make money off of open source that benefits the community).
Whether or not a company is viable this path remains to be seen, but under a cheap subscription model it can possibly add up enough to make a profit. Now the whole thing is that anyone else can go into the service business. As a result the whole thing is going to be horribly competitive. There's no inherent development costs but your margins are as thin as you can make them. So what does one of these companies do in order to get more subscribers?
They offer a "finder's fee" to the OEMs. They *pay* the OEM a certain amount for bundling a PC with a contract that requires a certain length of subscription and a penalty fee for opting out before then that turns them a profit even if the customer bails out on them. Now all of a sudden there is a lot of incentive to push PCs out the door with this Linux service installed on them. The Linux vendor can even offer customizations like PC OEM branding as well built in, once the other services follow suit.
Now Microsoft is still going to be a big brand name at this point and PC OEMs are going to be reluctant to directly cross the Redmond giant even then. But there are sneakier ways for them to push Linux without appearing to push Linux. In all of the major trade magazines, the OEMs start advertising the prices of their machines at the subsidized Linux rate while talking about the benefits of Microsoft software. Customers go to buy and find out they can only get the lower cost with Linux software, which their reps assure has the equivalent functionality for basic application software. A lot of consumers might well decide to give Linux a try just because of that.
All of a sudden Microsoft is hoist by its own petard. They crow about subscription models and then find the hypercompetitive Linux subscription market finding a new way to get their foot in the door. Microsoft can only do one thing and stop receiving a tithe with every PC sold and start paying the OEMs more. Of course they end up charging more on a monthly basis to make back their costs and support their developer base. Now the OEMs are happily sticking the screws to Microsoft and being paid to carry their software and Microsoft is taking damage to its revenue streams from the PC tax, which now comes from them.
Of course the companies can fight back, if they cut the OEM dealers in on a percentage of the subscription for a given contract. Shaves their margins even thinner but it gives incentive for the OEMs to push the Linux service. Some OEMs might decide to even go with their own Linux distribution and service contracts and cut out the middleman. Either way, this forces Microsoft to offer a percentage of their subscriptions to the OEM in question, further damaging their revenue streams. At that point you've pretty much finished all you can bribe the OEMs with.
Short term this restores Microsoft back to its dominant position. They can pay more because they can rent more expensively. In the longer term though I think it will burn them in the end. IBM has a reputation for service and will be pushing a service model of their own in time (I still believe that for all of their vendor agnosticism once the service model becomes dominant IBM will break down and create their own distribution). In the long run companies look at those monthly rental fees and their beancounters eventually will realize the Linux vendors are offering more for the dollar and switch over.
Of course some weird geeky types will decide they'd rather not go with a subscription service. I figure you'll see a few small name PC vendors that you can buy a vanilla PC from with the Linux distribution of your choice with no service contract built in. These are the sort of people who watch freshmeat and handle their own software upgrades or even roll their own distributions.
So in short subscription-ware in the long term will be the best thing that ever happened from an OEM perspective and from a consumer perspective. From a software vendor perspective its miserable, but that's the whole nature of business. In the long run I think Linux still beats out on Microsoft because it is cheaper for everyone involved, even if it is less profitable for some.
Normally I'd be on the side of the person who owns the trademark except there are a few things about this that I do not like.
First off, getting SSH as the name of an IETF protocol, and then trademarking it. This is the act that really stinks. Its as bad as Apple's Firewire stunt, getting an IEEE protocol set up and trademarking the name associated with it. This reeks of trademark trapping, or trying to grant oneself a monopoly with regards to an IETF protocol, or at least an unfair advantage. Only his software can use the name of the protocol in the name of the software using the protocol. It would be like trademarking HTTP.
Second off, I am somewhat suspicious at the time lag involved between the founding of OpenSSH and the present. If you're going to do the trademark enforcement thing, do it at the very beginning and go with the lawyers and accept the PR meltdown that is going to result because you did a sleazy thing like trademark an IETF protocol in the first place.
In short, this is someone who is trying to have it both ways. Playing the IETF and open standards game while still having the trademark and the exclusive right to make software with the name of that protocol in it. He tried to engineer himself an unfair marketing advantage and some reasonable uses of the SSH protocol name are causing him business confusion. You will notice there is no talk of his changing his software name and setting up a new trademark. And while you can talk about his investment in the mindshare of the SSH name, he did it in a fashion that puts other people trying to use the SSH protocol at an unfair disadvantage.
Now, perhaps I am being unfair here, perhaps he did not intend to do things that way, at least not consciously. But the end result is the same. He took an open protocol name and trademarked it so that no one else could use the protocol name in software that implements the software protocol but him, giving him an unfair advantage. Now that people are trying to erode that unfair advantage, he is crying foul, and after other people have invested work in the OpenSSH brand name as well.
Oh yes, and tradmarking "Secure Shell" strikes me about on the level of trying to trademark "Windows". You might be able to do it but its a really sleazy thing to try. Whatever sympathy I have for him was completely destroyed when that fact came to surface. This is a person using trademarks in an abusive fashion and I'd like to see that reap the rewards it deserves.
Universities will love things like this. There is a need for three dimensional rendering tools in engineering and art classes, and schools do like to trim dollars. These classes often don't require the fancy bells and whistles that are required in the top end rendering programs. Likewise people who don't use these tools profesionally (and have a decent budget) will gravitate to these things.
Another blessing is that it will force the cost of the professional version of these programs down. As I have observed before, the bright side about open source programs is that they raise the bottom line. All of a sudden te functionality of OpenFX becomes the baseline standard and people have to look at the other features and ask themselves if they really need that other stuff. Especially as people start copying the features in the top end programs and add them to the GPL'd stuff.
I don't know how many different OSS 3D renderers there will be after a time. I suspect that there's really only going to be mindshare (given the resources required to create a program like this) in one program. There may be major rearchitectures over time, but I think there will be consolidation on that point between this and any other GPL'd renderers out there.
What will be interesting is any evolution towards cross fertilization with software like Crystal Space, the GPL'd 3D engine. Sooner or later people will think it might not be a bad idea to make sure stuff created in the modeller and renderer works directly well with an engine to use such things in games. Open source makes such things possible.
To my mind the whole point of Linux, GNOME, KOffice, Apache and every other open source project isn't to produce bleeding edge software. It is to raise the bottom line of functionality for software. Anti-aliased fonts are now becoming a part of Linux, which means that every future operating system from now on needs to offer them.
.NET as Linux catches up in so many directions such as with their desktop software, printer support (e.g. CUPS) and so forth. But Linux is raising the bottom line and as the gaps are filled in, its becoming a stable and functional operating system that costs nothing. And Microsoft has to work harder to justify charging money for their operating system.
Sure, Microsoft is forging ahead with
In a way I hope Linux doesn't drive Microsoft out of the operating business. The only way that Microsoft is going to survive against the Linux threat is to start pushing ahead and finding ways to be competitive in terms of delivering value, instead of creative in ways of gouging money.
If Microsoft wants to keep the checklist of features that makes Windows superior and worth paying money for long, they're going to have to keep adding items. Anti-aliased text has just been removed from the list of items that Microsoft can hold over Linux.
But I empathize with some of his opinions. To my mind the whole system of managing files needs to be revised. I have an elaborate system of folders and symbolic links and customized menus to allow me to get to various frequently used files. The problem is when I start getting the urge to wander through my vast accumilation of files.
And then there are my directories for applications and configuration files for the operating system. I want something that can be as transparent as possible and yet also allows me to call up as much information as I want to configure it as possible. Transparent when I don't care yet I can pop the hood and look whenever I want.
That is an issue that the GNOME and KDE people are going to have to solve eventually. The idea of components is a really neat one but how does one keep track of and manage dozens of components? Not from a computer level, a computer has a nigh infinite capacity that way, but from a human level. It's a related issue to how does one organize a bunch of disconnected pieces of data of varying types so that users can manage it simply.
I'm not talking about an 'appliance', not really. I'd just like to see our top brains in the computer field work on the problem of how to manage vast amounts of heterogenous data in a seamless and transparent fashion, and to do the same for managing programs. And as Raskin says, to have as little between the user and his data as possible (one step beyond Raskin, after all, a program lies between a user and his data).
They have some points that a pure Linux company working with GPL'd software is going to have a lot harder time making money than a companhy selling proprietary software. I happen to agree that the Linux market is overhyped and saturated compared to the user base and we're going to be seeing a lot of consolidation. I don't see companies like Ximian and Eazel having an easy time lasting on their own and expect them to end up fusing with companies like Red Hat and other software firms. These companies will make a living selling update support for bug fixes and security patches. They will be paid the money to keep track of all the fixes an administrator needs to keep their system secure. Some people will insist on going to Freshmeat and other sites and doing it by hand but the average consumer won't care to do such things.
.NET model is going to be the Next Big Thing. I've seen a lot of those things in the industry and so far they tend to fall short of expectations with a few rare exceptions, and even those take longer to get working than necessary.
.NET takes off, no doubt someone will work on GPL'd variety to compete with the other proprietary versions. Yes, Linux is playing catch up but I see this as the natural cycle of the software industry. The proprietary companies have to keep innovating to keep ahead of the GPL'd software. They can't afford to rest on their laurels. They want people to buy proprietary software, they're going to have to make it worth it over the GPL'd variety. They can't just toss in an annoying paperclip and call it innovation. They have to clearly move ahead.
In fact that's where I see the subscription model actually working. I don't think people are going to want to rent their word processor. I do think they'll be willing to pay a subscription fee for bug fixes on a regular basis in some sort of one-click or even no-click fashion. And corporations might be willing to pay these companies to have expert programmers ready to handle bug fixes. That's a major and in some ways a legitimate worry about Linux and other GPL'd software (of course companies that sell proprietary software are at liberty to ignore requests). But a company might be able to make a living selling subscriptions to have a stable of programmers to respond to corporate bug fix requests.
Then there is Intel and IBM. Microsoft did not talk about how these companies are going to be making money using Linux. Intel has been jerked around by Microsoft far too often and Linux can't do that to them. Linux is a way for them to sell hardware, including experimental new CPU's they make. If the subscription model above doesn't pan out, there will still be investment from the hardware people because the fundamnetal rule is that software sells hardware. I can see Intel working on GPL'd software for computation intensive tasks like voice recognition just so they can sell more powerful boxes.
That Linux tends to follow than lead is partly true. I'm not certain whether ASP and the
Knowing the Linux developer community, most likely the response will be for developers to work on their own personal ASP software, so they can have a Linux box at home with their files and software and access it and use it from wherever they are. Not X, but a more sophistcated setup that doesn't send mouse clicks over the network. Initially this will be set up for single or few users and then other developers will work out the scalability issues. Pretty soon the proprietary ASP software is under serious fire from the GPL'd variety and the companies selling that service are cutting costs and competing with each other and the corporations themselves can move from one vendor to another or even set up something in house because they're using public domain software.
If the machine independent feature of
With luck we will see a computer industry with cheap and reliable and decently functioned open source software for the masses. Corporations and people wanting premium stuff will buy proprietary software that clearly has added value and those companies will be desperately pushing forward as the open source community creates open source equivalents for that premium software and pushes the bottom line forward. Consumers will pay companies a subscription fee so they can keep their systems up to date easily and hardware vendors will be pouring money in so they can sell more hardware. And Microsoft will actually have to give stable and usefully featured software if they want the big bucks.
This development is nowhere near surprising. My personal feeling is that we're going to see far fewer Linux companies and distributions in the future, falling into three categories.
The first category will be Linux distributions that form out of the merger or shutting down of all the various commercial vendors. I know, this Red Hat/Eazel thing isn't a merger but I would not be surprised to see it turn into a merger eventually. We're already seeing buyouts and shutdown of rival Linux distributions. I honestly don't know how much room there is in the market for different commercial Linux distributions. I see room for at least two in each regional market more likely three, but probably not much more than three. And if things head in a certain direction, that third could be Microsoft.
The second one will be major hardware vendors going with their own Linux distribution. Vendors that sell specialized hardware or hardware with special functionality might well go with their own optimized version of Linux. A company that sells graphics workstations would quite likely ship a version of Linux with their own optimized drivers and all sorts of performance tuning to squeeze maximum performance out of the hardware. Or a company might decide that licensing costs from one of the above vendor are higher than the cost of doing it in house. Personally, I think it more likely they'll end up doing a customized version of a regular distribution, but some really exotic varients might need more.
The third category will be specialized distributions that are non-profit or serve niche markets. Debian will last until the heat death of the universe and will be the source from which all non-commercial distributions spring. There might also be distributions for ready-made beowulf clusters and so forth. I think more often than not they will be volunteer efforts or a minor division of some company making its fortune in other ways.
The first time will make its money off of support contracts and subscription auto-update features especially for things like security fixes. The second sort of company will be using Linux to sell hardware with minimal software development costs. The third category won't be trying to make money or won't view this as their main source of revenue.
The first category, in terms of investiment in Linux development, will be focusing on ease of installation and deinstallation as well as ease of use. The second category will tend to focus on driver development and hardware support. The third category will focus on either things that aren't viewed as commercially viable or at best niche categories of software.
Not sure this technology will take off, anyone remember bubble memory or any of a dozen other pieces of technology set to take over the world? But it could, and through the same process that personal computers blew away minicomputers. Originally, personal computers were crap compared to minis. Slower, less reliable, less functional, you name it. Anyone who wanted to replace their minis with a bunch of PCs would have been looked at as insane. Now these days, people run very powerful and sophisticated software that mini's used to do on their PCs and now you have SETI using all that networked power to do supercomputer work.
If they get this technology to actually work commercially, it could destroy conventional chipmaking techniques. Sure, these things will be slower than normal chips. However as the book _Innovator's Dilemma_ clearly states, what usually happens is that this technology will end up filling a new niche on the low end. Take embedded systems. This plastic technology is a natural fit for that sort of thing. Sure, its slower but most embedded systems are not CPU hogs anyway, and the lower cost and higher production rates outweigh the disadvantages of the reduced processor speed. The manufacturers of this technology work on refining the density of the circuity they're printing on the plastic, improving performance. Slowly they start eroding at the conventional chip technology market from the bottom up. Chip makers keep giving up the low end as they focus on the high end.
The problem is you can't keep doing that forever. Sooner or later you run out of ground. So in a few decades, you might find that for everything but the luxury high performance end of things, all your circuits are printed plastic instead of etched silicon. That's how companies can get burned going with the "sure" technology and get blasted out of the market from below. The low end inevitabily eats up into the high end with cheap technology improvements.
Not that I'm saying this is going to happen. A lot depends on whether they can make this work commercially and how well the technology scales. But it could happen. Don't go dismissing it out of hand. The smart answer is 'wait and see'.
I tend to break software development into two areas, computer science and software engineering. Voice recognition, code morphing, cracking mathematical problems and so forth are computer science. Writing a word processor or a monolithic operating system or even a virtualizer is more software engineering. It's not like new ground is being broken in writing an x86 virtualizer, the art is documented already. As the previous post commented, MATLAB is based on well known algorithms.
.NET has a few interesting ideas and whatever good pieces are in it hopefully will be appropriated by Open Source people to be put into GNU/Linux.
Open source projects tend to be better at software engineering projects rather than computer science projects. The GNU project did very well creating the GNU tools because that was software engineering. Building a serious operating system based on a microkernel is closer to comptuter science and so got bogged down. Monolithic kernels are software engineering and so Linux took off. Even Ogg Vorbis is really just taking the well studied field of compression and the focus is on sidestepping patents than trying for something oh wow and state of the art.
To my mind, this is where the difference between commercial and open source software should lie. The commercial companies should be pushing the state of the art and working on all this gee wow stuff that people will be willing to make money on. The Open Source people should see this and then promptly reverse engineer it as the state of the art trickles down to the level that it becomes software engineering and the commercial people should be plowing on ahead and finding better things to focus their money on.
Apple is trying to do it with OS X and their rewriting of the BSD kernel. They've done some fascinating things there with Quartz and display PDF that I really hope the GNOME/KDE folks are looking at to implement in their own systems, not to mention the GNU/Linux crowd with the innovations on folder bundling and moving all system resources into XML files. Apple is steadily innovating in their products. Microsoft's
Personally, I want to have a personal computer based on GPL'd software that has all of the functionality of a mainframe down to the virtual machines and scalable multiprocessor support, with all of the newer innovations that have cropped up like XML resource files, Display PDF for graphics, CORBA for handling widgets and so on. All of that is really more software engineering (yes, expensive in time and expertise software engineering but still that). The media players on the system should all be dealing with well defined media formats that anyone can write a free encoder or decoder to in GPL'd software.
All the money I should be spending on the system should be for things like voice recognition and things that I know are cutting edge and state of the art and require money to finance. My biggest beef with Microsoft is that they gouge out huge amounts of money and frankly there are very few technical innovations that they have spearheaded themselves. At least Apple goes and raises the standard for what one should expect out of a personal computer.
In the ideal world, the universities develop new ideas, the commercial companies take these ideas and turn them into money-making projects and after the newness of the ideas has worn off and their genuine value has sunk in, the open source people move in and incorporate it into widely available open source software, forcing the commercial companies to move on to something new. This is rough on the commercial software companies but no one said that life was going to be or should be easy on them.
Trying to keep on topic with the discussion, even if I am not asking a question, virtualization is a solved problem and goes back decades. Now that personal computers have reached the right level of performance to handle such things (as with other features of mainframes that trickle down when PCs get fast enough) it is only natural to start writing Open Source projects to implement it. VMWare folks need to find somewhere else to move onto, or to simply conceed to plex86 and start working on selling support of the project. They could look to see if they could combine something like VMWare with Transmeta's code morphing, perhaps even to virtualizing different processors on one machine. There are directions they can still go, there is still room for improvement. Or they can compete the way the rivals to XFree86 compete, with a wider range of driver support. In short, I feel little sympathy for VMWare. If they can't keep ahead of plex86, then they're doing something wrong.
More functionality moved into user space as separate modules/ and less functionality in kernel space. A reduced need for recompiling the kernel. Yes, there will be some performance hits here but now that we're starting to move into Ghz range we might be able to shed a few percentage points of performance in return for more modularity. The ideal world involves going to something like HURD but I don't think that's going to happen. Still, a direction towards more modularity is good.
Honestly, most of the suggestions that have been going on here have been in the area of layers on top of the kernel. Not that they don't need to be done, but they're the sort of things that Linus is not going to be messing with. I think that replacing X with something with a more well thought out API, or taking the standard GNU tools and replacing them with tools that use a set of XML configuration files are nifty things, but these are not strictly things that concern the kernel.
I think the VM is an idea whose time is finally coming. Processor speed is coming up fast enough and for common applications (primarily in the consumer market) that even with the performance hit by running the VM with either JIT compilation or code morphing (or even both) still leaves you with good performance for common applications. And the benefit you get from compatibility issues really makes life pleasant with a well designed VM.
Honestly, as people keep wanting to run x86 code and the hardware people are having fits from trying to boost even more performance trying to run x86 code directly, you're just going to see the total surrender and the declaring of the x86 instruction set as a VM spec not unlike the Amiga VM spec, only not quite as well thought out.
From there its a shorter leap to supporting multiple instruction sets and the emulation of legacy systems really takes off. Combine that with something like VMWare and you've got a system that can boot up virtual machines of all sorts of hardware configurations to run legacy software. And something like the Amiga VM with an artificially designed instruction set that would be impossible to do in hardware suddenly looks attractive from a development standpoint.
To answer your post, you could combine the VM with Linux. At that point you can create Linux binaries that will run on any processor type. Companies that don't want to release their source code (and I am quite understanding of companies not wishing to do that) can release a binary that will run across all processor lines.
I did think it was cheesy to use the Amiga name though. I tend to agree with others the name should have been allowed to go into honorable retirement.
HURD to me is more of a research kernel. It's there to see if a Microkernel setup can go from a toy OS setup to a real OS setup. To my mind it is the alpha for the next operating system after Linux, or when they decide that adding functionality to the kernel isn't going to work anymore and they need to start moving stuff into user space and trimming the kernel down. When they do that, they can look over the work that HURD has done and the things that it has learned in the process. I see it as research for overhead issues and how to make a microkernel fast enough for real use, and how to debug and optimize a microkernel setup. The lessons learned with HURD will help elsewhere.
The sad fact is I don't see HURD taking off, ever. It doesn't really offer enough significant advantages over Linux to convince people to move. The advantages are more from the development perspective than from a user perspective. Transparent FTP isn't quite enough to get people to move over, for example. Something like EROS (www.eros-os.org) is more likely to be the successor to Linux because of the incorporation of significant functionality into the kernel that could not be easily installed into Linux.
In short HURD is a neat idea and the lessons that are learned from its development will most likely be harnessed elsewhere (e.g. we shouldn't try X, the HURD people had all these sorts of problems when they tried that approach).