I don't think a legal background is required to spot the logical flaw here: the issue was the act's constitutionality, not how it compares with policies elsewhere. Yes, I'm sure this is a fascinating subject for internationally-minded judges everywhere, but unless you place the WIPO treaty above the constitution, it's completely irrelevant.
I read Steven's opinion, and he's very, very careful to only quote applicable case law. Even the asides on English legal precedents are only there to provide the context for the 1790 law. The contrast with the halfwitted new-millenium blather above could not be greater.
On this basis, we'll next be hearing about the 'practical benefits' of restricting free speech or assuming that Pi is 3.
Microsoft has done some pretty good advancements and achievements in the SMP realm
Hmmm. Given that SMP has been around an awfully long time, I find this a little hard to believe. And I also remember talking to a senioir DB guy at Microsoft where he was explaining how they'd just started to do SMP optimization in the OS - this was for an NT SP in 1998 or 99.
Moft? Not sure who they are, but I'm pretty sure Stratus VOS had these variations on locks in 1986, since they were heavily into SMP, they might have been in Multics too (like everything else).
Hardly single handedly - all their sequence data was from public research.
And they didn't win - the public effort was described in Nature magazine, and the Celera one in Science, both on the week of 12th Feb 2001.
However, Celera's attempt to violate the international Bermuda agreement of 1996 and turn our own genes into proprietary information did act as a spur to the public effort. Thank goodness they were able to respond.
What you really meant to say was brand X cartridges proved to be flawed - instead you are implying that any third party cartridges will be flawed, a conclusion which your evidence does not support.
What is needed is a trusted body that is capable of certifying compatibility. If the printer manufacturer is unable or unwilling to perform this role then a large user, a consumers' organization or another agency can do so.
Sometimes third parties are essential to the proper functioning of markets.
Good luck! Eclipse is very solid if you want an IDE for developing SWT apps, & it works with GTK 2 on Linux. More details from the newsgroups, or possibly from the Wiki site.
Evolution underlies most of molecular level biology these days.
"From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and people.
These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of right action.
History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have attained to any agreement about these matters..."
The fact that you can change window managers isn't the issue. Mono is a platform not a desktop, and the Mono hype is encouraging people to make huge commitments with their application developments.
We may not all realize it, but actually all Linux developments are in fairly desperate straits - we have to go cross (hardware) platform to be viable in a world of PDAs, tablets etc. but the only cross-platform solutions are Java and Mono.
Personally, I'd rather be in the same boat as Sun, IBM, Oracle and BEA than deal with the Beast, but a vocal minority on/. still likes to pretend that there's no difference between Sun's IPR policies and Microsoft's.
I wonder how many more stories like this it will take to convince them otherwise?
Wow, thanks for the heads up! I hope you've taken the trouble to alert Microsoft to your findings - they'll obviously be kicking themselves soon, having invested several billion in Dotnet. Rumor has it they're even coding the next version of Office in C#!
Clearly a bunch of clueless losers. Meanwhile, us fortunate Linux 'strategists' don't actually have to do anything but sit back and wait for the Dotnet and Java worlds to spontaneously implode. When that happens, all those Java and C Sharp coders will be desperate to return to the productive and efficient world of C++. Linux is clearly anticipating this collapse, and positioning itself perfectly to capture the market for huge generic C++ and C APIs while the big companies are engaged on what you have so clearly shown to be a wild goose chase.
Me, I'm going to return to that C++ KDE tetris app I was working on - hey, I'll even do a a binary distribution for you! One Yellow Dog Linux on PPC build coming right up... enjoy!
Indeed, no end-user can be expected to compile things - might be too complex, or beyond the capability of a constrained hardware environment.
But Linux apps need to be cross (hardware) platform, the i386-only world disappeared a long time ago. Binary distributions can't cater for this, since the producers don't have access to all the platforms.
This is why Java and Dotnet have appeared. Yet this rather obvious problem never seems to be addressed by those who make strategic decisions regarding Linux. Why?
For example, we have good Java support on Linux, yet all our resources seem to be devoted to churning out obsolescent C and C++ apps.
Isn't it about time we picked a VM and stuck with it?
You have provided a link to a timeline whose first entry is this (unavailable) letter, along with similar entries for the IBM 360, BBN system, PDP 10 etc. Appearence in the timeline therefore should therefore not be interpreted as meaning that this paper was part of the Multics project, any more than it was part of other contemporary work such as CTSS and DTSS.
A content-aware store and a virtual machine (for cross-platform portability if nothing else) are so obviously essential that even Microsoft has got around to implementing them.
Meanwhile, we have a few ideas floating around in ReiserFS, this KDE file manager and PostgreSQL, plus a scarily naive attempt at cloning Dotnet.
If it wasn't for Linux's decent Java support we could start writing the obit now.
Also, to get slightly more on topic, it's interesting that the more famous explorations (finding the source of the Nile etc.) were effectively motivated and financed by an audience back home that had a fascination with exploration, with Africa and for adventure stories in general.
Henry Stanley was sent to find Dr Livingstone by James Gordon Bennett, the proprietor of the New York Herald. Other explorers enjoyed colossal book sales. One hopes that interest would be as great, and as lucrative, in future explorations.
First, there's no particular reason to pick the 18th century - most major British colonies were established in the 17th, and most economic development was in the 19th.
Second, the outcome (an empire) is irrelevant to a discussion about plans and motives. This is important when looking at British expansion, since the evidence for grand imperialist plans is surprisingly thin on the ground for the key periods. Rather, the pattern was a trading arrangement that morphed into an administration (India), or a colony that eventually managed to conflict with the indiginous population, so dragging in the mother country (Africa).
The pivotal year for British imperialism is often quoted as being 1857, when the Indian uprising occurred. Until then, India and other territories were controlled via a haphazard collection of treaties, usually in collusion with local maharajahs, chiefs and princes. After 1857, imperialism took hold in earnest, with much more control exerted from London, suppression of indiginous rights and imperialist 'management' schemes such as pan-African railroads.
With regard to enslavement, it should be fairly obvious that you can either capture slaves or buy them. In fact, nearly all slaves were bought - by European traders, from African merchants. Control of slavery was never a significant motive in British imperialism, and of course it was abolished in 1838, well before the empire peaked.
Based on 3 years of advocacy in/. on this theme I think it's safe to say that there is no danger of this happening.
Dotnet and Java are irrelevant side-issues to the majority of Linux-based developers. In these people's minds, KDE and Gnome look-and-feel minutiae are are genuinely considered more important than the ability to package an application for deployment on an ARM PDA and an x86 desktop.
Indeed, the reality-distortion field is so pervasive that, when faced with real requirements for a VM, these people can happily contemplate discarding all collective experience of open source implementations of Perl, Python, Scheme, TCL, Java etc. in favour of the risky and pathetically derivative 'clone all Dotnet' strategy.
If somebody had predicted in, say, 1997 that we'd get ourselves into such a hopeless mess I don't think I'd have believed them.
Mono is attempting to produce a.NET "clone" if you will, for the Linux platform. It's doubtful that lawsuits / litigation will arise because C#/CLI is an open standard (ECMA).
So if someone gives me their lawnmower, I can assume they won't mind me clearing out the rest of their garage?
Certainly Sun occupies a preeminent position as a certifier of Java technologies, but other companies can offer the guarantees that businesses seek - IBM and BEA, for example.
For example, this Redhat press release covers the certification of the JRockit JVM on Redhat 8 by BEA. This is targeted at the corporate audience, and makes no mention of Sun - their role was one step removed in that they certified JRockit as a J2SE implementation.
And some people don't seem to appreciate the difficulty of achieving 100% compatibility.
DotGNU/Mono will always be in catch-up mode since technical policy is entirely decided by MS. It is impossible to work with DotGNU/Mono without confronting this 'political' reality. Fortunately, it is likely that your customers will continue to see value in other platforms such as Java, so your future is not entirely dependent on the emergence of Microsoft knock-offs.
You are expressing exactly the mindset of Adobe, Oracle etc. who will also be developing for this platform.
By clearly stating your requirement for a high-level of compatibility, you are exposing the fundamental weakness of Dotnet cloning efforts:
Unlike, say, Java or Python, the value of Dotnet clones is not directly related to their functionality but to their compatibility. Moreover, this relationship is highly disproportionate - even a few incompatibilities can dramatically diminish their value, since users (other developers) will not make the effort to support the small non-MS market if it compromises their main market developments.
The only viable route for open source is for it to be based on an open platform - a platform unencumbered by compatibility with proprietary technologies. This can certainly make use of Dotnet, but it can do so without ceding control to Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an example of its rationality? Wow.
I don't think a legal background is required to spot the logical flaw here: the issue was the act's constitutionality, not how it compares with policies elsewhere. Yes, I'm sure this is a fascinating subject for internationally-minded judges everywhere, but unless you place the WIPO treaty above the constitution, it's completely irrelevant.
I read Steven's opinion, and he's very, very careful to only quote applicable case law. Even the asides on English legal precedents are only there to provide the context for the 1790 law. The contrast with the halfwitted new-millenium blather above could not be greater.
On this basis, we'll next be hearing about the 'practical benefits' of restricting free speech or assuming that Pi is 3.
Microsoft has done some pretty good advancements and achievements in the SMP realm
Hmmm. Given that SMP has been around an awfully long time, I find this a little hard to believe. And I also remember talking to a senioir DB guy at Microsoft where he was explaining how they'd just started to do SMP optimization in the OS - this was for an NT SP in 1998 or 99.
Moft? Not sure who they are, but I'm pretty sure Stratus VOS had these variations on locks in 1986, since they were heavily into SMP, they might have been in Multics too (like everything else).
Hardly single handedly - all their sequence data was from public research.
And they didn't win - the public effort was described in Nature magazine, and the Celera one in Science, both on the week of 12th Feb 2001.
However, Celera's attempt to violate the international Bermuda agreement of 1996 and turn our own genes into proprietary information did act as a spur to the public effort. Thank goodness they were able to respond.
What you really meant to say was brand X cartridges proved to be flawed - instead you are implying that any third party cartridges will be flawed, a conclusion which your evidence does not support.
What is needed is a trusted body that is capable of certifying compatibility. If the printer manufacturer is unable or unwilling to perform this role then a large user, a consumers' organization or another agency can do so.
Sometimes third parties are essential to the proper functioning of markets.
Good luck! Eclipse is very solid if you want an IDE for developing SWT apps, & it works with GTK 2 on Linux.
More details from the newsgroups, or possibly from the Wiki site.
Evolution underlies most of molecular level biology these days.
"From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and people.
These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of right action.
History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have attained to any agreement about these matters..."
T H Huxley, Essays upon Some Controverted Questions (1892)
Well, we know that, but you'll see that whenever cross-platform issues come up, the solution proposed is usually 'recompile it, dummy'.
And layers like IBM Eclipse SWT are half-way between universal top-to-bottom implementations like Swing and semi-portable toolkits like Qt.
The fact that you can change window managers isn't the issue. Mono is a platform not a desktop, and the Mono hype is encouraging people to make huge commitments with their application developments.
/. still likes to pretend that there's no difference between Sun's IPR policies and Microsoft's.
We may not all realize it, but actually all Linux developments are in fairly desperate straits - we have to go cross (hardware) platform to be viable in a world of PDAs, tablets etc. but the only cross-platform solutions are Java and Mono.
Personally, I'd rather be in the same boat as Sun, IBM, Oracle and BEA than deal with the Beast, but a vocal minority on
I wonder how many more stories like this it will take to convince them otherwise?
That right? Well, Eclipse, JBuilder, IDEA and WebLogic work well enough for me, maybe the CLR just needs some time to mature.
Bottom line is that it's a lot easier to squeeze better performance out of a JVM than it is to maintain umpteen code 'ports'.
Pretty sad that today's generously donated efforts are fated to be tomorrow's awkward legacy, don't you think?
Wow, thanks for the heads up! I hope you've taken the trouble to alert Microsoft to your findings - they'll obviously be kicking themselves soon, having invested several billion in Dotnet. Rumor has it they're even coding the next version of Office in C#!
Clearly a bunch of clueless losers. Meanwhile, us fortunate Linux 'strategists' don't actually have to do anything but sit back and wait for the Dotnet and Java worlds to spontaneously implode. When that happens, all those Java and C Sharp coders will be desperate to return to the productive and efficient world of C++. Linux is clearly anticipating this collapse, and positioning itself perfectly to capture the market for huge generic C++ and C APIs while the big companies are engaged on what you have so clearly shown to be a wild goose chase.
Me, I'm going to return to that C++ KDE tetris app I was working on - hey, I'll even do a a binary distribution for you! One Yellow Dog Linux on PPC build coming right up... enjoy!
Binary Distributions For Everything.
Indeed, no end-user can be expected to compile things - might be too complex, or beyond the capability of a constrained hardware environment.
But Linux apps need to be cross (hardware) platform, the i386-only world disappeared a long time ago. Binary distributions can't cater for this, since the producers don't have access to all the platforms.
This is why Java and Dotnet have appeared. Yet this rather obvious problem never seems to be addressed by those who make strategic decisions regarding Linux. Why?
For example, we have good Java support on Linux, yet all our resources seem to be devoted to churning out obsolescent C and C++ apps.
Isn't it about time we picked a VM and stuck with it?
You have provided a link to a timeline whose first entry is this (unavailable) letter, along with similar entries for the IBM 360, BBN system, PDP 10 etc. Appearence in the timeline therefore should therefore not be interpreted as meaning that this paper was part of the Multics project, any more than it was part of other contemporary work such as CTSS and DTSS.
Well, strategy is not a Linux strong point.
A content-aware store and a virtual machine (for cross-platform portability if nothing else) are so obviously essential that even Microsoft has got around to implementing them.
Meanwhile, we have a few ideas floating around in ReiserFS, this KDE file manager and PostgreSQL, plus a scarily naive attempt at cloning Dotnet.
If it wasn't for Linux's decent Java support we could start writing the obit now.
I think Multics dates from 1965, see History and 1965 paper on the file system.
Also, to get slightly more on topic, it's interesting that the more famous explorations (finding the source of the Nile etc.) were effectively motivated and financed by an audience back home that had a fascination with exploration, with Africa and for adventure stories in general.
Henry Stanley was sent to find Dr Livingstone by James Gordon Bennett, the proprietor of the New York Herald. Other explorers enjoyed colossal book sales. One hopes that interest would be as great, and as lucrative, in future explorations.
Not really.
First, there's no particular reason to pick the 18th century - most major British colonies were established in the 17th, and most economic development was in the 19th.
Second, the outcome (an empire) is irrelevant to a discussion about plans and motives. This is important when looking at British expansion, since the evidence for grand imperialist plans is surprisingly thin on the ground for the key periods. Rather, the pattern was a trading arrangement that morphed into an administration (India), or a colony that eventually managed to conflict with the indiginous population, so dragging in the mother country (Africa).
The pivotal year for British imperialism is often quoted as being 1857, when the Indian uprising occurred. Until then, India and other territories were controlled via a haphazard collection of treaties, usually in collusion with local maharajahs, chiefs and princes. After 1857, imperialism took hold in earnest, with much more control exerted from London, suppression of indiginous rights and imperialist 'management' schemes such as pan-African railroads.
With regard to enslavement, it should be fairly obvious that you can either capture slaves or buy them. In fact, nearly all slaves were bought - by European traders, from African merchants. Control of slavery was never a significant motive in British imperialism, and of course it was abolished in 1838, well before the empire peaked.
Maybe the Linux crowd could learn a few things
/. on this theme I think it's safe to say that there is no danger of this happening.
Based on 3 years of advocacy in
Dotnet and Java are irrelevant side-issues to the majority of Linux-based developers. In these people's minds, KDE and Gnome look-and-feel minutiae are are genuinely considered more important than the ability to package an application for deployment on an ARM PDA and an x86 desktop.
Indeed, the reality-distortion field is so pervasive that, when faced with real requirements for a VM, these people can happily contemplate discarding all collective experience of open source implementations of Perl, Python, Scheme, TCL, Java etc. in favour of the risky and pathetically derivative 'clone all Dotnet' strategy.
If somebody had predicted in, say, 1997 that we'd get ourselves into such a hopeless mess I don't think I'd have believed them.
Interesting takes on what's really important in a platform, but with a distinctly 1980s flavour.
Hopefully I'm not the only one that regards Java and Dotnet as having changed the ground rules forever.
Bottom line is that a standard Linux can't compete without a standard VM.
I think it [the kernel] should be the only standardized thing in Linux
Rubbish. What needs to be provided is as familiar an environment as possible
As a developer, I would like to know that I can count on certain libraries being included
The only thing that needs to be standardized are the configuration files
-1 Fanciful
Dotnet is not an open standard, only C# and the CLR, comprising approx 120 classes out of 1200 in Dotnet, are standardized.
Mono is attempting to produce a .NET "clone" if you will, for the Linux platform. It's doubtful that lawsuits / litigation will arise because C#/CLI is an open standard (ECMA).
So if someone gives me their lawnmower, I can assume they won't mind me clearing out the rest of their garage?
Yes indeed. Two more quotes for you:
"anything that you can treat as construction can and should be automated"
Martin Fowler, Refactoring (2000)
"any [programming] processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself"
Alan Turing, The ACE Report (1946)
This is not a dig at MF - I think he's a cut above the GoF because he recognises many of the fundamentals.
Certainly Sun occupies a preeminent position as a certifier of Java technologies, but other companies can offer the guarantees that businesses seek - IBM and BEA, for example.
For example, this Redhat press release covers the certification of the JRockit JVM on Redhat 8 by BEA. This is targeted at the corporate audience, and makes no mention of Sun - their role was one step removed in that they certified JRockit as a J2SE implementation.
And some people don't seem to appreciate the difficulty of achieving 100% compatibility.
DotGNU/Mono will always be in catch-up mode since technical policy is entirely decided by MS. It is impossible to work with DotGNU/Mono without confronting this 'political' reality. Fortunately, it is likely that your customers will continue to see value in other platforms such as Java, so your future is not entirely dependent on the emergence of Microsoft knock-offs.
You are expressing exactly the mindset of Adobe, Oracle etc. who will also be developing for this platform.
By clearly stating your requirement for a high-level of compatibility, you are exposing the fundamental weakness of Dotnet cloning efforts:
Unlike, say, Java or Python, the value of Dotnet clones is not directly related to their functionality but to their compatibility. Moreover, this relationship is highly disproportionate - even a few incompatibilities can dramatically diminish their value, since users (other developers) will not make the effort to support the small non-MS market if it compromises their main market developments.
The only viable route for open source is for it to be based on an open platform - a platform unencumbered by compatibility with proprietary technologies. This can certainly make use of Dotnet, but it can do so without ceding control to Microsoft.