To get truely accurate reproduction you'd need to use a very high bitrate (at least 192, probably 256), but I'm don't need perfect reproduction. I use 128 kbps Vorbis to encode all my music, so I can have all my albums on my computer, and have a nice random playlist of 3500 songs -- the quality is easily good enough to listen to while coding, or game playing.
By all means stick with MP3 -- Vorbis will be out there for you when Fraunhofer start getting serious in chasing after unlicensed MP3 encoders.
There's been a lot of nonsense comparing MP3/Vorbis with VHS/Beta. This completely ignores the fact that all the software players which will play MP3s should also be able to play Vorbis files: they play well with each other, and there is absolutely no reason why both should not coexist for a long time to come (just like GIF/PNG, which is a much more valid comparison).
To my (tin) ears, Bladeenc does a very good job at 160kbps.
BladeEnc is just a mildly tweaked version of the ISO sample code. If you want to stay with MP3, get
a recent version of Lame and you'll be amazed how much better the music will sound at the same bitrate.
I tinkered around with Vorbis, but "ogg123" (clone
of mpg123) locked my FreeBSD system up solid when
I tried to play a tune--so I scrapped it.
Looking through the
Vorbis development archives,
I see some reports of (fixed) problems with OpenBSD, but nothing about FreeBSD. Download it again and try it - and if there are still problems, email them a bug report.
Firstly, for me Vorbis sounds better than MP3 (even using the latest Lame versions) at the same bitrates: the perceptual model it uses must be better suited to my ears:). At 128 kbps, most MP3 files sound very washed out to me. Beta 4 has its own problems, but it already sounds better than MP3 to me. (I've also experimented with a prerelease of version 1, which has produced some excellent sounding 80kpbs files).
Secondly, patent issues DO matter. Perhaps not to the college kid that pirates all the software he uses anyway, but to people that matter, like the makers of hardware music players, or console games, that won't have to pay the MP3(pro/whatever) licencing fees.
As far as I've been able to find out, MP3Pro has about a 15 KHz cutoff, and then tries to add the high frequencies back in automatically when it plays: sounds good when it works, but blurry and awful when it fails. It's probably a touch better at compressing than Vorbis release 1 will be -- but I won't be able to play MP3Pro files back in Linux, or using a player I write myself, will I?
Lack of portable hardware players. All the players on the market today support mp3 and wma, but none play ogg. This is a problem.
Yes, this is a problem if you use portable MP3 players (which I don't). However, the specs for the Vorbis 1.0 decoder weren't finalized until a few weeks ago (and the sample decoder still has some memory usage issues), so you can't really expect any companies to have implemented decoding yet.
AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg.
Well, you're wrong. Anything that can do MP3 encoding on the fly should be able to do it with Vorbis as well. As an example, have a look at
CDex, the best Windows ripper/encoder. Most Linux encoders I've seen (for MP3 as well as Vorbis) seem to use the 2 step process, but this should be seamless to the outside user, and not much slower -- you're probably noticing a slow copy because the ripping (with Grip at least) uses CDParanoia, which is quite slow but very accurate.
And with my massive mp3s sitting there, I'd like to have a program that could convert from mp3 to ogg.
Please don't do this. Transcoding almost always leads to very low quality files -- and will lead people who listen to them to assume that all the artifacts are due to OGG, and not to the transcoding process.
MP3 encoding creates certain artifacts. Vorbis creates others. By encoding to MP3, and then Vorbis, you are getting 2 sets of artifacts, plus the Vorbis coder has to waste bits encoding the MP3-created artifacts. MP3 players aren't going to go away, so please don't transcode: re-rip instead.
I could not tell a difference between ogg and mp3 sound quality
Note that all the encoders kicking around are of (at best) the beta 4 release, which, amongst other issues, has no channel coupling. You can expect at least a 10% reduction in file-size in the final release compared with beta 4, and more if you let it try lossy channel coupling (akin to joint stereo in the MP3 world). Beta 4 at 128 kbps already sounds better than 128 kbps MP3s - the final release will sound the same at 112 kpbs.
One thing is certain, I'll never use the wma format.
Actually, they would be better off lowering the prices and making legal purchase less of a hassle
Exactly. It annoys me no end that they charge more for CDs than for tapes, despite CDs costing less than tapes to produce. When consumer groups here (in the UK) complained about this, instead of reducing the price of CDs, they increased the price of tapes.
When are the record companies going to recognise that.MP3s and CDs are complementary, rather than being in direct competition? I have bought plenty of CDs after listening to MP3s - indeed, when I left university and my free fast internet access, I didn't buy any CDs for 6 months.
Sometimes I wish our copyright systems were purged, and we went back to plagiarism and copying, like England in Shakespeare's day (and Taiwan today).
You are drawing the wrong conclusions from the history of the last 100 years.
What we have seen in the last couple of thousand years is a very interesting evolutionary landscape of economies. Over time, economies will tend to move toward an evolutionary stable model, and stay there until an external influence jolts the system enough to move into another state. Just because something is evolutionary stable, does not mean that it provides 'the best guarantee for across the board increase in standard of living': a ruling system is successful if it perpetuates itself.
One of the most successful models in human history has been the monarchy, which develops natually from dictatorship. Another is the managed market economy, which develops natually from an unfettered free market once people get tired of stepping over all the dead bodies in the streets.
'Communism' is an example of an evolutionary unstable model: even if reached (and none of the so-called 'communist' states of the 20th century were actually communist), it quickly regresses into despotism.
Eliding a little, consider a simple situation in game theory: the two prisoners. They are both kept seperate, and given a chance to confess to a crime. If neither confess, they get off. If one confesses, and the other doesn't, then the one confessing gets 10 years, and the one who doesn't is killed. If both confess, they both get life imprisonment. The best outcome for the both of them is for neither to confess, but this isn't what will happen: the expected outcome for a prisoner who confesses is much better than the expected outcome for a prisoner who doesn't confess.
The conclusion: don't assume that the solutions that are around today represent 'the best', they represent 'the least worst'.
Why do you call this pattern bizarre? That's how I'd scan if I wrote a worm: if you manage to infect a computer at a particular IP adress, then you have some evidence that computers 'close' to that one will probably be vulnerable as well, so you attempt to infect 'close' computers more than 'distant' ones.
You keep trying the 'distant' ones every now and then, just in case you get lucky.
Yes, I don't think I've ever used the 'redundant' moderation, except when moderating multiply posted spam comments (back before 'slow down cowboy' was so much in evidence).
I'm never entirely sure that I know the boundaries between 'troll' and 'flamebait', though.
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Python isn't pure, it's a lovely mixed metaphor language. You can do 'old style' modular code, or object oriented code, or functional programming. And as for complaining about 'main', what does this looks like:
The release candidate of the Vorbis decoder was only released last month, so give hardware companies some time to implement the algorithms... (Vorbis decoding also currently takes quite a bit more memory than MP3 decoding - this is being worked on). The release candidate of the encoder will be out in the next few weeks: once it reaches version 1 then, believe me, you'll be seeing a lot more of Vorbis.
Personally, I'm going to be re-encoding all my CDs to Vorbis (if only because it'll save me about a gig of hard disc space).
On the.PNG issue: yes, Slashdot are being enormously hypocritical in slamming UNISYS and then continuing to use GIFs, particularly when PNG support is very widespread.
hmm... I'd forgotten about that account, to be honest (I've not been in Oxford for quite a while). When I can remember the password to change my settings to the i.am redirection, I'll update it:)
The way I see it, MS is introducing the abstraction of the CLR as a way to get people writing programs which are portable to the new 64 bit PC architectures around the corner, before they are available. If all Windows apps are already written to the CLR, then Windows XP running on a 64-but Intel/AMD consumer desktop will be an easier sell.
Wow. Very interesting - I'd not thought of that, but it makes a lot of sense. They are going to have to transition their user base over to IA64 eventually (and it'll be a long, slow process): and given that IA32 code would have a major performance penalty on IA64 anyway, they can see a CLR as providing a great way to move between platforms. I've been wondering for ages what the advantage to Microsoft is in moving to a bytecode, and IA64 seems like the factor that would have kicked it off.
Microsoft released all the specs to ECMA so that any idiot can write a compiler to compile any language to the CLR (gcc2clr anyone?)
The problem with this, just like the problem with the Java bytecode, is that the CLR isn't language neutral: some languages are a much better fit. There have been reports, for example, that ActiveState are finding it very hard to get a.NET port of Perl working properly. The.NET CLR is (as is to be expected) C# oriented, just like Java's is Java oriented. The CLR isn't magically better than Java.
I suppose a project would be to put the CLR as a GCC backend (given that bytecodes are just virtualised processors). It would probably be horribly inefficient, though.
The problem with this faq-as-press-release is that it really doesn't give us the right view of.NET. What, for example, exactly is an 'XML Web Service'? It's not described in the document you cut+pasted. What is used is about 20 meaningless buzzphrases: '.NET experiences', 'XML Web services', etc.
What is interesting is that the only uses they have mentioned for.NET are Hailstorm and '.NET experiences' using Passport. This shows how central they believe Passport is to.NET, and reveals why they can be happy with a reimplementation of.NET-minus-Passport: with out Passport, you won't be able to provide alternatives to any of the bits of.NET which Microsoft care about.
Thanks for posting the FAQ, vacuous and empty though it was:)
But, once again, this isn't a matter of Gnome vs KDE. Ximian are deeply involved in Gnome, it's true, but.NET and Mono are seperate from that. There is nothing stopping KDE from using the work of the Mono project (as a slightly seperate example, people have already produced working code which adds a SOAPDCOP layer to KDE, which would make remote KDE administration much easier).
Who has been claiming that Ximian are evil? They are misguided idealists, and will probably be very disenchanted in a couple of years after Microsoft has finished playing with them, but they are not evil at all.
Please try and seperate GNOME/KDE and 'for Mono'/'against Mono' in your mind. THEY ARE DIFFERENT.
At least there's a nice open specification for Java/ECMAScript -- even if it's a bitch to implement properly (almost all the bugs left with JavaScript in Konqueror are due to strange, wrong code in web pages: code hacked up just enough so that it works in IE5, and then the users interpret a failure in the page as a browser failure, not a website failure). I really don't understand why people let so many opaque file formats (like Flash, and Word.DOC) exist.
dotGNU isn't a passport equivalent, it's intended to be a complete replacement for.NET, using its own design (unlike Mono, which is a reimplementation of.NET). They also want to have a model with distributed code compliled to a common language runtime.
What's confusing me is why they feel they have to completely reinvent technologies which have been around for years (and that's ignoring debate about the whole design concept behind dotGnu and.NET). In the.NET example, there is no need to use C# for example - a bastardised halfbreed of C++, Java and Visual Basic. The arrogance of Microsoft in thinking that they can just make tens of thousands of programmers learn a new computer language is incredible -- even more amazing is that they seem to be succeeding! In the dotGnu and.NET examples - why do they need to invent a whole new bytecode? We already have the choice of several alternative (Java bytecode, Lisp compilers even, the GCC backend language, Python bytecode, etc). Years of development time spent on something that seems utterly, completely useless.
Most of the ire that Ximian causes is attributable to de Icaza. Look at this quote, for example:
de Icaza said, ".NET is the next step towards language unification, but you have to look at this technology with cold eyes, and not let your passions be in the middle (against Microsoft, for Linux, for KDE, against GNOME, etc) or you will live a life of bitterness."
Now, why on earth did de Icaza bring in Gnome and KDE into this discussion? They have absolutely nothing to do with.NET or Mono (except, presumably, that he'll be working with people to make Gnome front ends more than he will to make KDE front ends). While the point he's making is a good one, you can bet that loads of people will turn it into a Gnome vs KDE bashing session (I thought they'd all died down a year ago, but the wierd desktop trolls seem to be back with a vengance).
Mono is worrying for several reasons. Firstly, it validates.NET as a viable multi-OS platform, and legitimizes areas of Microsoft PR where they try and portray themselves as a lovely, caring sharing company with open standards, but minus all that nasty fraud and anarchy you get with the GPL.
Secondly, it means we are forced into Microsoft's vision of the future, with bloated common language runtimes (the idea of which I've always hated, in Java as well), and a massive standard library which Microsoft are free to define (and look how good a job they did with the Windows API).
Thirdly, it does nothing to stop Microsoft from bait-and-switching - having their OSes include 'NET-XP with special new features', which just happen to be unspecified and incompatible with the ECMA specification. 95% of the people using.NET will be on Windows, and won't care if it doesn't interoperate with some strange reimplementation made by a company they've never heard of.
Fourth, Ximian don't seem to ever stop and wonder whether they should actually be following Microsoft at all. de Icaza has said many times that he wants Gnome to be more like Windows (which makes the Gnome trolls that bash KDE seem even more pathetic than they actually are). Windows has a lot of interesting and already implemented technology in OLE/COM/DCOM/whatever - but that doesn't mean that we should blindly follow in their footsteps.
All that said, they seem to be set in their decision to go ahead with Mono, and I wish them luck.
I don't recall any Slashdot trolls in 98 or 99 saying that Gnome would fail. They were all too busy bitching about how KDE would never succeed, and how Gnome was the RMS-anointed true desktop.
Then Trolltech spoilt all their fun last year by GPLing QT, making KDE (by rights) the GNU desktop of choice (RMS has said many times that he prefers the GPL to the LGPL -- he even changed the L in LGPL from 'library' to 'lesser'). Now that the Slashdot idiots have realised that they can't make KDE go away, they've turned on Gnome, because they don't know how to do anything productive.
Quite possibly - I left before their big conversion to Open Source (worked there before going to university, just as they were beginning to wonder how this Internet thing would impact their business).
I was working at IBM when OS/2 Warp came out (and they gave every single employee a free copy, which was a nice supply of extra floppy disks for me:). You won't believe how bitter they were at how their relationship with Microsoft had turned from very close (OS/2 was going to be a MS-IBM joint production, with Windows as a feeder route) to sour backbiting.
No matter how big a company you are, it's really not a good idea to get IBM mad at you. I'd say that it was the residual resentment at Microsoft, and the realisation that the same could happen with any of their other partners, that led them to be so interested in Open Source and Linux: if the software is free and easily portable, then that's more money to be made in hardware and services, and IBM is just 1 massive hardware and services supplier, that has to produce software as a sideline to get the hardware to work.
Many companies have lucrative relationships with Microsoft, but that doesn't mean that MS are liked, or respected, or trusted.
Slashdot Mirror
To get truely accurate reproduction you'd need to use a very high bitrate (at least 192, probably 256), but I'm don't need perfect reproduction. I use 128 kbps Vorbis to encode all my music, so I can have all my albums on my computer, and have a nice random playlist of 3500 songs -- the quality is easily good enough to listen to while coding, or game playing.
By all means stick with MP3 -- Vorbis will be out there for you when Fraunhofer start getting serious in chasing after unlicensed MP3 encoders.
There's been a lot of nonsense comparing MP3/Vorbis with VHS/Beta. This completely ignores the fact that all the software players which will play MP3s should also be able to play Vorbis files: they play well with each other, and there is absolutely no reason why both should not coexist for a long time to come (just like GIF/PNG, which is a much more valid comparison).
As one simple example of the usage of PNG -- I believe that all the graphics in KDE are in the PNG format.
BladeEnc is just a mildly tweaked version of the ISO sample code. If you want to stay with MP3, get a recent version of Lame and you'll be amazed how much better the music will sound at the same bitrate.
I tinkered around with Vorbis, but "ogg123" (clone of mpg123) locked my FreeBSD system up solid when I tried to play a tune--so I scrapped it.
Looking through the Vorbis development archives, I see some reports of (fixed) problems with OpenBSD, but nothing about FreeBSD. Download it again and try it - and if there are still problems, email them a bug report.
Two reasons.
:). At 128 kbps, most MP3 files sound very washed out to me. Beta 4 has its own problems, but it already sounds better than MP3 to me. (I've also experimented with a prerelease of version 1, which has produced some excellent sounding 80kpbs files).
Firstly, for me Vorbis sounds better than MP3 (even using the latest Lame versions) at the same bitrates: the perceptual model it uses must be better suited to my ears
Secondly, patent issues DO matter. Perhaps not to the college kid that pirates all the software he uses anyway, but to people that matter, like the makers of hardware music players, or console games, that won't have to pay the MP3(pro/whatever) licencing fees.
As far as I've been able to find out, MP3Pro has about a 15 KHz cutoff, and then tries to add the high frequencies back in automatically when it plays: sounds good when it works, but blurry and awful when it fails. It's probably a touch better at compressing than Vorbis release 1 will be -- but I won't be able to play MP3Pro files back in Linux, or using a player I write myself, will I?
Yes, this is a problem if you use portable MP3 players (which I don't). However, the specs for the Vorbis 1.0 decoder weren't finalized until a few weeks ago (and the sample decoder still has some memory usage issues), so you can't really expect any companies to have implemented decoding yet.
AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg.
Well, you're wrong. Anything that can do MP3 encoding on the fly should be able to do it with Vorbis as well. As an example, have a look at CDex, the best Windows ripper/encoder. Most Linux encoders I've seen (for MP3 as well as Vorbis) seem to use the 2 step process, but this should be seamless to the outside user, and not much slower -- you're probably noticing a slow copy because the ripping (with Grip at least) uses CDParanoia, which is quite slow but very accurate.
And with my massive mp3s sitting there, I'd like to have a program that could convert from mp3 to ogg.
Please don't do this. Transcoding almost always leads to very low quality files -- and will lead people who listen to them to assume that all the artifacts are due to OGG, and not to the transcoding process. MP3 encoding creates certain artifacts. Vorbis creates others. By encoding to MP3, and then Vorbis, you are getting 2 sets of artifacts, plus the Vorbis coder has to waste bits encoding the MP3-created artifacts. MP3 players aren't going to go away, so please don't transcode: re-rip instead.
I could not tell a difference between ogg and mp3 sound quality
Note that all the encoders kicking around are of (at best) the beta 4 release, which, amongst other issues, has no channel coupling. You can expect at least a 10% reduction in file-size in the final release compared with beta 4, and more if you let it try lossy channel coupling (akin to joint stereo in the MP3 world). Beta 4 at 128 kbps already sounds better than 128 kbps MP3s - the final release will sound the same at 112 kpbs.
One thing is certain, I'll never use the wma format.
Damn right.
Exactly. It annoys me no end that they charge more for CDs than for tapes, despite CDs costing less than tapes to produce. When consumer groups here (in the UK) complained about this, instead of reducing the price of CDs, they increased the price of tapes.
When are the record companies going to recognise that .MP3s and CDs are complementary, rather than being in direct competition? I have bought plenty of CDs after listening to MP3s - indeed, when I left university and my free fast internet access, I didn't buy any CDs for 6 months.
Sometimes I wish our copyright systems were purged, and we went back to plagiarism and copying, like England in Shakespeare's day (and Taiwan today).
You are drawing the wrong conclusions from the history of the last 100 years.
What we have seen in the last couple of thousand years is a very interesting evolutionary landscape of economies. Over time, economies will tend to move toward an evolutionary stable model, and stay there until an external influence jolts the system enough to move into another state. Just because something is evolutionary stable, does not mean that it provides 'the best guarantee for across the board increase in standard of living': a ruling system is successful if it perpetuates itself.
One of the most successful models in human history has been the monarchy, which develops natually from dictatorship. Another is the managed market economy, which develops natually from an unfettered free market once people get tired of stepping over all the dead bodies in the streets.
'Communism' is an example of an evolutionary unstable model: even if reached (and none of the so-called 'communist' states of the 20th century were actually communist), it quickly regresses into despotism.
Eliding a little, consider a simple situation in game theory: the two prisoners. They are both kept seperate, and given a chance to confess to a crime. If neither confess, they get off. If one confesses, and the other doesn't, then the one confessing gets 10 years, and the one who doesn't is killed. If both confess, they both get life imprisonment. The best outcome for the both of them is for neither to confess, but this isn't what will happen: the expected outcome for a prisoner who confesses is much better than the expected outcome for a prisoner who doesn't confess.
The conclusion: don't assume that the solutions that are around today represent 'the best', they represent 'the least worst'.
Why do you call this pattern bizarre? That's how I'd scan if I wrote a worm: if you manage to infect a computer at a particular IP adress, then you have some evidence that computers 'close' to that one will probably be vulnerable as well, so you attempt to infect 'close' computers more than 'distant' ones.
You keep trying the 'distant' ones every now and then, just in case you get lucky.
Yes, I don't think I've ever used the 'redundant' moderation, except when moderating multiply posted spam comments (back before 'slow down cowboy' was so much in evidence).
I'm never entirely sure that I know the boundaries between 'troll' and 'flamebait', though.
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... so how would you spell 'whinge'? 'winge' isn't right. Or do you think that 'whinge' is an alternate spelling of 'whine' (which it isn't)?
Python isn't pure, it's a lovely mixed metaphor language. You can do 'old style' modular code, or object oriented code, or functional programming. And as for complaining about 'main', what does this looks like:
if __name__=='__main__': print "Main!"
The release candidate of the Vorbis decoder was only released last month, so give hardware companies some time to implement the algorithms... (Vorbis decoding also currently takes quite a bit more memory than MP3 decoding - this is being worked on). The release candidate of the encoder will be out in the next few weeks: once it reaches version 1 then, believe me, you'll be seeing a lot more of Vorbis.
.PNG issue: yes, Slashdot are being enormously hypocritical in slamming UNISYS and then continuing to use GIFs, particularly when PNG support is very widespread.
Personally, I'm going to be re-encoding all my CDs to Vorbis (if only because it'll save me about a gig of hard disc space).
On the
hmm... I'd forgotten about that account, to be honest (I've not been in Oxford for quite a while). When I can remember the password to change my settings to the i.am redirection, I'll update it :)
Until then, consider me a man of mystery.
The way I see it, MS is introducing the abstraction of the CLR as a way to get people writing programs which are portable to the new 64 bit PC architectures around the corner, before they are available. If all Windows apps are already written to the CLR, then Windows XP running on a 64-but Intel/AMD consumer desktop will be an easier sell.
Wow. Very interesting - I'd not thought of that, but it makes a lot of sense. They are going to have to transition their user base over to IA64 eventually (and it'll be a long, slow process): and given that IA32 code would have a major performance penalty on IA64 anyway, they can see a CLR as providing a great way to move between platforms. I've been wondering for ages what the advantage to Microsoft is in moving to a bytecode, and IA64 seems like the factor that would have kicked it off.
Microsoft released all the specs to ECMA so that any idiot can write a compiler to compile any language to the CLR (gcc2clr anyone?)
The problem with this, just like the problem with the Java bytecode, is that the CLR isn't language neutral: some languages are a much better fit. There have been reports, for example, that ActiveState are finding it very hard to get a
I suppose a project would be to put the CLR as a GCC backend (given that bytecodes are just virtualised processors). It would probably be horribly inefficient, though.
The problem with this faq-as-press-release is that it really doesn't give us the right view of .NET. What, for example, exactly is an 'XML Web Service'? It's not described in the document you cut+pasted. What is used is about 20 meaningless buzzphrases: '.NET experiences', 'XML Web services', etc.
.NET are Hailstorm and '.NET experiences' using Passport. This shows how central they believe Passport is to .NET, and reveals why they can be happy with a reimplementation of .NET-minus-Passport: with out Passport, you won't be able to provide alternatives to any of the bits of .NET which Microsoft care about.
:)
What is interesting is that the only uses they have mentioned for
Thanks for posting the FAQ, vacuous and empty though it was
But, once again, this isn't a matter of Gnome vs KDE. Ximian are deeply involved in Gnome, it's true, but .NET and Mono are seperate from that. There is nothing stopping KDE from using the work of the Mono project (as a slightly seperate example, people have already produced working code which adds a SOAPDCOP layer to KDE, which would make remote KDE administration much easier).
Who has been claiming that Ximian are evil? They are misguided idealists, and will probably be very disenchanted in a couple of years after Microsoft has finished playing with them, but they are not evil at all.
Please try and seperate GNOME/KDE and 'for Mono'/'against Mono' in your mind. THEY ARE DIFFERENT.
At least there's a nice open specification for Java/ECMAScript -- even if it's a bitch to implement properly (almost all the bugs left with JavaScript in Konqueror are due to strange, wrong code in web pages: code hacked up just enough so that it works in IE5, and then the users interpret a failure in the page as a browser failure, not a website failure). I really don't understand why people let so many opaque file formats (like Flash, and Word .DOC) exist.
dotGNU isn't a passport equivalent, it's intended to be a complete replacement for .NET, using its own design (unlike Mono, which is a reimplementation of .NET). They also want to have a model with distributed code compliled to a common language runtime.
.NET). In the .NET example, there is no need to use C# for example - a bastardised halfbreed of C++, Java and Visual Basic. The arrogance of Microsoft in thinking that they can just make tens of thousands of programmers learn a new computer language is incredible -- even more amazing is that they seem to be succeeding! In the dotGnu and .NET examples - why do they need to invent a whole new bytecode? We already have the choice of several alternative (Java bytecode, Lisp compilers even, the GCC backend language, Python bytecode, etc). Years of development time spent on something that seems utterly, completely useless.
What's confusing me is why they feel they have to completely reinvent technologies which have been around for years (and that's ignoring debate about the whole design concept behind dotGnu and
de Icaza said, ".NET is the next step towards language unification, but you have to look at this technology with cold eyes, and not let your passions be in the middle (against Microsoft, for Linux, for KDE, against GNOME, etc) or you will live a life of bitterness."
Now, why on earth did de Icaza bring in Gnome and KDE into this discussion? They have absolutely nothing to do with .NET or Mono (except, presumably, that he'll be working with people to make Gnome front ends more than he will to make KDE front ends). While the point he's making is a good one, you can bet that loads of people will turn it into a Gnome vs KDE bashing session (I thought they'd all died down a year ago, but the wierd desktop trolls seem to be back with a vengance).
Mono is worrying for several reasons. Firstly, it validates .NET as a viable multi-OS platform, and legitimizes areas of Microsoft PR where they try and portray themselves as a lovely, caring sharing company with open standards, but minus all that nasty fraud and anarchy you get with the GPL.
Secondly, it means we are forced into Microsoft's vision of the future, with bloated common language runtimes (the idea of which I've always hated, in Java as well), and a massive standard library which Microsoft are free to define (and look how good a job they did with the Windows API).
Thirdly, it does nothing to stop Microsoft from bait-and-switching - having their OSes include 'NET-XP with special new features', which just happen to be unspecified and incompatible with the ECMA specification. 95% of the people using .NET will be on Windows, and won't care if it doesn't interoperate with some strange reimplementation made by a company they've never heard of.
Fourth, Ximian don't seem to ever stop and wonder whether they should actually be following Microsoft at all. de Icaza has said many times that he wants Gnome to be more like Windows (which makes the Gnome trolls that bash KDE seem even more pathetic than they actually are). Windows has a lot of interesting and already implemented technology in OLE/COM/DCOM/whatever - but that doesn't mean that we should blindly follow in their footsteps.
All that said, they seem to be set in their decision to go ahead with Mono, and I wish them luck.
I don't recall any Slashdot trolls in 98 or 99 saying that Gnome would fail. They were all too busy bitching about how KDE would never succeed, and how Gnome was the RMS-anointed true desktop.
Then Trolltech spoilt all their fun last year by GPLing QT, making KDE (by rights) the GNU desktop of choice (RMS has said many times that he prefers the GPL to the LGPL -- he even changed the L in LGPL from 'library' to 'lesser'). Now that the Slashdot idiots have realised that they can't make KDE go away, they've turned on Gnome, because they don't know how to do anything productive.
Quite possibly - I left before their big conversion to Open Source (worked there before going to university, just as they were beginning to wonder how this Internet thing would impact their business).
(I'm a geographic group theorist, not a number theorist :)
Aren't 'trancendental' and 'non-algebraic' the same thing? I thought they both mean 'not a root of any polynomial with integer coefficients'?
Interesting that you didn't mention IBM :)
:). You won't believe how bitter they were at how their relationship with Microsoft had turned from very close (OS/2 was going to be a MS-IBM joint production, with Windows as a feeder route) to sour backbiting.
I was working at IBM when OS/2 Warp came out (and they gave every single employee a free copy, which was a nice supply of extra floppy disks for me
No matter how big a company you are, it's really not a good idea to get IBM mad at you. I'd say that it was the residual resentment at Microsoft, and the realisation that the same could happen with any of their other partners, that led them to be so interested in Open Source and Linux: if the software is free and easily portable, then that's more money to be made in hardware and services, and IBM is just 1 massive hardware and services supplier, that has to produce software as a sideline to get the hardware to work.
Many companies have lucrative relationships with Microsoft, but that doesn't mean that MS are liked, or respected, or trusted.