ESR seems to pick X vs NeWS and Jini. Note that at that time both examples are still in conception and relatively lack of adherents.
If you want to gain support rapidly, Open Source seems to win. However, things that already been established like Java, it is not necessarily like that, because Java has a lot of adherents and it's a mature platform already. Try to tell the same story for Windows or MS Office and see how Bill Gates would fall laughing.
And potential revenue multiplier is moot. Potential remains potential until it can be realized. Do you think that by open-sourcing Java would increase the sales for Sun's hardware? Give me a break.... Everyone knows that Java can run in any platform. The hardware platform selection to run Java squarely depends on price/performance and need.
I know it's lame to answer my own post, but for a possible demo setting, you can put a DVD ISO image at a webpage and get it to the demo computer.
Mathematically speaking, let's say DVD's content is 9.4 GB, which is equivalent to 75.2 GBits. Divide this by 2.5 GBit/sec = 30.08 secs. Since "typical" TCP/IP utilization is roughly 70%, divide this number with 0.7, so the estimated transfer time is roughly 43 seconds, plus some delay if the source is pretty far away from the demo place.
Transfering a full DVD content in less than 1 minute is damn impressive. Just let them taste the "raw" power of the 2.5 GBit link.
If you want to use streaming, make sure you have a high end CPU to back it up. Note that Ethernet is poor in contention management. It would exacerbate multi-client performance, but you can avoid this using FDDI based cards, which some clients find it not desirable. But it can be a good demo if their main motive is for tele-conferencing or whatnot.
If you want to gain more insights, here's an article by Intel. It's their advertisements for IXP, but nevertheless a good read with nice statistics.
Use PCI-X based cards to minimize CPU utilization. And of course, you should put a decent memory (fast and big enough) if you decide to buffer the transfer -- maybe a PC4000 512MB RAM. Then, if you decide to save the transfer or for the sending part, use a SCSI or SATA based HDD. Everything else can be el-cheapo based, IMHO. You can put a low-end CPU if the CPU utilization is low enough and then boast it in the demo.;)
For the obvious, make sure you run OS with minimal background processes to reduce CPU overhead. IMHO http-based transfer works wonder for clients interested in "real-world" application.
No, they want more influence that IMHO rather over-reaching. This paragraph show it:
The question is significant because Sun and other tools vendors want to ensure that a system for creating tool plug-ins can coexist with the Eclipse approach, which IBM favors. Large Java companies and Microsoft encourage add-ons to their products to make their tools more attractive to developers.
So, what Sun essentially wants is to have unified plugin system -- which I think it should be up to any IDE developer on how to do it rather than forcing the plugin standard. Sun sees Eclipse as a prospective unifier.
I speculate that this would have something to do with the Java beans -- which was designed to be the definitive plugin standard for Java IDEs. Unfortunately, Java beans are so poorly designed that all developers would need to extend the basic features by a whole lot. Eclipse did that and succeeded. Morever, hordes of open source programmer backed it up and become de facto standard.
What I see is that Sun wanted to get the momentum to recoup the control it has lost.
You can send some printouts of screenshots about your works if you're cautious about the CDs.
Elucidate me, but I would think that those resumes would be forwarded by the HR dept to the ones that can "grade" you personally (i.e. the ones that request the hiring). HR people might not be smart/brave enough to try your CD, but I anticipate some people in the computing dept might have some ideas about testing it in a sandbox/try-out system.
Unfortunately, many projects are covered under NDAs.
Not necessarily source code. Binary is sufficient. Even if the binaries are covered by the NDA, you can still show the screenshots -- with sensitive information being blurred. Of course you'll need to obtain permission for this. If you can't even get screenshots, then you can include some public slides about the project. If you still can't obtain public slides, then reference letters from your boss would suffice. If you can't get it either, tough luck...
The point is to show that you do have valid proofs that you did this and that.
For example, people applying for art positions (like 3D artist) will send a resume but not a portfolio. What's up with that? I could not care less where they went to school, I only care what they can do.
Well, I guess that we should tailor the resume and whatever we submit according to the position...
If it's an artist, portfolio is the most important thing.
If it's a coder, probably a CD that contains a collection of his work (again, portfolio) would be appreciated. A CS degree is a plus, although not too necessary (depends).
If it's an academic position: publications, teaching experience, research projects / funding, and educational background. Almost the same goes for grad students (perhaps plus the GPA).
Not only that... it also depends on the taste of the recruiters... Some of them prefer physical portfolios rather than digital ones, etc... So, the best guess is I guess try to show stuff that make us stand out and get recruited.
For products in monopolistic environments, "Profit Margin" can be quite high, and piracy can be one incentive for companies to reduce it to more reasonable levels. For industries where profit margin is already quite low, decrease in sales have to be made up by increases in price to increase the profit margin (and hence maintain survival levels of total profits).
For monopolistic environments,... uhmm... What about this scenario: You invent a product, somebody in China "pirated" it a few months after the first release. The production costs only $10, since you have to recoup research costs, you sell the product for $50 and hopefully will decrease the price after some time. But these Chinese guys sell it for $12. This scenario would really hurt you, the inventor. Of course you still can match it down to $12 or $13, but how can you recoup the million bucks you spent for R&D that the pirates don't spent?
Of course you can say if the product is cracked within first few months is either lame or leaked info, but what if it happens?
Well, surely it is not fair for the consumers if you still sell the product for $50 for a long time after you've recouped the R&D costs. Most companies keep the price. That has to change.
I thought it worth pointing out that this is already the case in many 3rd-world countries: patents such as the ones for AIDS drugs are often not enforced in regions where people couldn't possibly afford them, for humanitarian reasons.
This is the case why we need to revamp this freaking IP law. We need to be fair -- to the consumers and to the companies. I don't have any good solution at the moment, but maybe govts or UN should donate for this cause and companies must offer the drugs for less price for govt/UN deals?
And I can't agree with that stance. It provides no incentive to make the research cost-effective, and instead fleeces the money out of you and me.
Ok, what business model would you propose for an R&D? Companies that I know of said that R&D is sort of gambling: Either you win big or lose big. You cannot force your scientists to produce something on deadlines. You can set them goals, but imposing deadlines would either lead to incomplete products, or inferior ones. Why is this the case? Because in R&D, you're wading through uncharted waters. You don't know when and where you'll reach an island. What you need to do is to explore and it's hard.
Of course there is another kind of "research", which is effectively either implementing the result of a more mature research or do a small engineering improvements. This AFAIK leads to less breakthrough, but of course you can impose deadlines on these ones because the waters are already charted, it's just that nobody ever goes there yet. Sure, in this case, there are hoops and catches, but it's far less than the first one. The research of this second kind will bring less breakthroughs but a more certain profitability.
Big companies put their bets on the first type of researches. They also do the second type of researches too. Unless they're lucky, researches of the first type usually takes on a long time and often fails. And when it fails, it fails big time. I won't say that the failure translates to uselessness because it may lead to better solution the next time around (e.g. bulb, by Edison). If companies can't recover much out of these failures, don't you think it would "punish" big companies not to do the first kind of researches? Of course you can argue that companies should do research in cost-effective manner, but how? Nobody in the 15th would've known how long it would take to sail around the world.
Ideally the uncharted waters should be commissioned to academia and funded by govts, but hey... if that's the case then the result of the research shouldn't be sold to the companies... But that doesn't mean the industry can't do the first kind of R&D profitably...
Anyway, what we ask is a fair price -- fair for both sides: the consumers and the companies. IP law shouldn't be used to crank up prices beyond reasonable level. Companies should listen to the consumers to foster goodwill. Consumers must also recognize and willing to pay for production and R&D costs behind products. Piracy can effectively nullify costs beyond raw material and slim profit margin, which may hurt the companies.
The problem with this mindset is that how can companies supposed to sustain research costs (that may cost them millions)? Sure, production cost alone is cheap, but if companies can't offset those research cost (or whatever) to innovate such products, it would eventually lead to scarcity of innovation. Yes, sure, governments still fund researches and academia/open source folks may still do researches anyway, but don't forget that those companies also have important roles. How about the scientists that does it?
Think about it over. Not all people have such socialist mindset. If you were a brilliant scientist and you make an important innovation (such as paraplegic instant cure), heck of course you'd like to make a good fortune out of that after your toiling 20-30 years of research. If you found out that your innovation is pirated, do you feel like... "oh thank God, they copied it over"?
Well, I don't say that the current IP law is good, but we should strike the balance on that. IP law is good, but in the current state it's being misused to hyperinflate the price. We definitely need to reform it, but we should not condone piracy.
I used to buy cheap bulk no-name CDs. However, about 1 year later, the aluminum coating was flaky and fell out of the CD... So, when you can see the light through the hole from the fell-out coating... So, the CD breaks.
In this case, coating it would have helped. I dunno whether it would end up the same way as stated in the article, though.
But, if you can spend more money on CD-Rs, you'd be better up with branded CD-Rs and apply no labels.
IIRC, Visual Basic is released much earlier than Delphi. I remember using VB3 in Win3.1 before Delphi 1 was even out. It's already pretty good. The breakthrough was IIRC the speed of Delphi. That forces the VB to fix its speed.
No, I mean, when you put --with-alsa flag when you compile KDE-Multimedia, it would throw a compilation error. Not using it with ALSA per se. Of course, you can use OSS-compatibility layer of ALSA and compile KMidi with OSS instead... BUT, that causes the other packages of KDE-Multimedia not ALSA-enabled too. Of course if you munge the configuration file, you can get around this, but what a pain!
See this bug report for details. It's been an outstanding bug like more than 1 year! Yet virtually nobody appreciate this issue!
This was a bummer because in some sound cards, ALSA driver is far superior (e.g. in SB Live or Audigy) both in terms of performance and features.
Now that KMidi is gone for good in KDE 3.2 beta and hopefully someone would incorporate newer ALSA into Timidity backend.
It's good to notice that KMidi is dropped from KMultimedia. It's a pain because of the old Timidity engine (which is KMidi's back-end) still uses the old ALSA 0.5. It causes compilation problems if you compile KMultimedia with ALSA yourself. And KDE people decided to get rid of it at the moment and cited that it's not an easy fix.
It's too bad because AFAIK that's the simplest program for MIDI playing using synthesizers (albeit not that good). Other programs are geared toward compositions... Any suggestions?
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I hate the term "taikonaut". You know what? Without proper pronunciation (as most westerners do), taiko can mean leper. (And thus becomes a pun). Better use "yuhangyuan" instead.
Slashdot Mirror
ESR seems to pick X vs NeWS and Jini. Note that at that time both examples are still in conception and relatively lack of adherents.
If you want to gain support rapidly, Open Source seems to win. However, things that already been established like Java, it is not necessarily like that, because Java has a lot of adherents and it's a mature platform already. Try to tell the same story for Windows or MS Office and see how Bill Gates would fall laughing.
And potential revenue multiplier is moot. Potential remains potential until it can be realized. Do you think that by open-sourcing Java would increase the sales for Sun's hardware? Give me a break.... Everyone knows that Java can run in any platform. The hardware platform selection to run Java squarely depends on price/performance and need.
this seems more like a patent for embedding a script within XML, which is IMHO fair enough.
Can we say Ant anyone? In a way, Ant is also a script, albeit it's geared towards installation. Or did I miss something?
I know it's lame to answer my own post, but for a possible demo setting, you can put a DVD ISO image at a webpage and get it to the demo computer.
Mathematically speaking, let's say DVD's content is 9.4 GB, which is equivalent to 75.2 GBits. Divide this by 2.5 GBit/sec = 30.08 secs. Since "typical" TCP/IP utilization is roughly 70%, divide this number with 0.7, so the estimated transfer time is roughly 43 seconds, plus some delay if the source is pretty far away from the demo place.
Transfering a full DVD content in less than 1 minute is damn impressive. Just let them taste the "raw" power of the 2.5 GBit link.
If you want to use streaming, make sure you have a high end CPU to back it up. Note that Ethernet is poor in contention management. It would exacerbate multi-client performance, but you can avoid this using FDDI based cards, which some clients find it not desirable. But it can be a good demo if their main motive is for tele-conferencing or whatnot.
If you want to gain more insights, here's an article by Intel. It's their advertisements for IXP, but nevertheless a good read with nice statistics.
Use PCI-X based cards to minimize CPU utilization. And of course, you should put a decent memory (fast and big enough) if you decide to buffer the transfer -- maybe a PC4000 512MB RAM. Then, if you decide to save the transfer or for the sending part, use a SCSI or SATA based HDD. Everything else can be el-cheapo based, IMHO. You can put a low-end CPU if the CPU utilization is low enough and then boast it in the demo. ;)
For the obvious, make sure you run OS with minimal background processes to reduce CPU overhead. IMHO http-based transfer works wonder for clients interested in "real-world" application.
In related news, Timothy has posted 10 latest news consecutively! Yay Timothy! :) I think you have the device that surpresses Taco from posting ;)
very soon they'll propose to build better road, maybe highway
It really gives a new meaning to Information Superhighway!
No, they want more influence that IMHO rather over-reaching. This paragraph show it:
The question is significant because Sun and other tools vendors want to ensure that a system for creating tool plug-ins can coexist with the Eclipse approach, which IBM favors. Large Java companies and Microsoft encourage add-ons to their products to make their tools more attractive to developers.
So, what Sun essentially wants is to have unified plugin system -- which I think it should be up to any IDE developer on how to do it rather than forcing the plugin standard. Sun sees Eclipse as a prospective unifier.
I speculate that this would have something to do with the Java beans -- which was designed to be the definitive plugin standard for Java IDEs. Unfortunately, Java beans are so poorly designed that all developers would need to extend the basic features by a whole lot. Eclipse did that and succeeded. Morever, hordes of open source programmer backed it up and become de facto standard.
What I see is that Sun wanted to get the momentum to recoup the control it has lost.
I bet this guy is wishing his parents had given him a more common name
Yeah, like... Anonymous Coward... That would score 138K hits in Google
You can send some printouts of screenshots about your works if you're cautious about the CDs.
Elucidate me, but I would think that those resumes would be forwarded by the HR dept to the ones that can "grade" you personally (i.e. the ones that request the hiring). HR people might not be smart/brave enough to try your CD, but I anticipate some people in the computing dept might have some ideas about testing it in a sandbox/try-out system.
Unfortunately, many projects are covered under NDAs.
Not necessarily source code. Binary is sufficient. Even if the binaries are covered by the NDA, you can still show the screenshots -- with sensitive information being blurred. Of course you'll need to obtain permission for this. If you can't even get screenshots, then you can include some public slides about the project. If you still can't obtain public slides, then reference letters from your boss would suffice. If you can't get it either, tough luck...
The point is to show that you do have valid proofs that you did this and that.
For example, people applying for art positions (like 3D artist) will send a resume but not a portfolio. What's up with that? I could not care less where they went to school, I only care what they can do.
Well, I guess that we should tailor the resume and whatever we submit according to the position...
If it's an artist, portfolio is the most important thing.
If it's a coder, probably a CD that contains a collection of his work (again, portfolio) would be appreciated. A CS degree is a plus, although not too necessary (depends).
If it's an academic position: publications, teaching experience, research projects / funding, and educational background. Almost the same goes for grad students (perhaps plus the GPA).
Not only that... it also depends on the taste of the recruiters... Some of them prefer physical portfolios rather than digital ones, etc... So, the best guess is I guess try to show stuff that make us stand out and get recruited.
And, to use it, recite:
Go go gadget tickle-me-uberdevice!
:-)
For products in monopolistic environments, "Profit Margin" can be quite high, and piracy can be one incentive for companies to reduce it to more reasonable levels. For industries where profit margin is already quite low, decrease in sales have to be made up by increases in price to increase the profit margin (and hence maintain survival levels of total profits).
For monopolistic environments,... uhmm... What about this scenario: You invent a product, somebody in China "pirated" it a few months after the first release. The production costs only $10, since you have to recoup research costs, you sell the product for $50 and hopefully will decrease the price after some time. But these Chinese guys sell it for $12. This scenario would really hurt you, the inventor. Of course you still can match it down to $12 or $13, but how can you recoup the million bucks you spent for R&D that the pirates don't spent?
Of course you can say if the product is cracked within first few months is either lame or leaked info, but what if it happens?
Well, surely it is not fair for the consumers if you still sell the product for $50 for a long time after you've recouped the R&D costs. Most companies keep the price. That has to change.
I thought it worth pointing out that this is already the case in many 3rd-world countries: patents such as the ones for AIDS drugs are often not enforced in regions where people couldn't possibly afford them, for humanitarian reasons.
This is the case why we need to revamp this freaking IP law. We need to be fair -- to the consumers and to the companies. I don't have any good solution at the moment, but maybe govts or UN should donate for this cause and companies must offer the drugs for less price for govt/UN deals?
And I can't agree with that stance. It provides no incentive to make the research cost-effective, and instead fleeces the money out of you and me.
Ok, what business model would you propose for an R&D? Companies that I know of said that R&D is sort of gambling: Either you win big or lose big. You cannot force your scientists to produce something on deadlines. You can set them goals, but imposing deadlines would either lead to incomplete products, or inferior ones. Why is this the case? Because in R&D, you're wading through uncharted waters. You don't know when and where you'll reach an island. What you need to do is to explore and it's hard.
Of course there is another kind of "research", which is effectively either implementing the result of a more mature research or do a small engineering improvements. This AFAIK leads to less breakthrough, but of course you can impose deadlines on these ones because the waters are already charted, it's just that nobody ever goes there yet. Sure, in this case, there are hoops and catches, but it's far less than the first one. The research of this second kind will bring less breakthroughs but a more certain profitability.
Big companies put their bets on the first type of researches. They also do the second type of researches too. Unless they're lucky, researches of the first type usually takes on a long time and often fails. And when it fails, it fails big time. I won't say that the failure translates to uselessness because it may lead to better solution the next time around (e.g. bulb, by Edison). If companies can't recover much out of these failures, don't you think it would "punish" big companies not to do the first kind of researches? Of course you can argue that companies should do research in cost-effective manner, but how? Nobody in the 15th would've known how long it would take to sail around the world.
Ideally the uncharted waters should be commissioned to academia and funded by govts, but hey... if that's the case then the result of the research shouldn't be sold to the companies... But that doesn't mean the industry can't do the first kind of R&D profitably...
Anyway, what we ask is a fair price -- fair for both sides: the consumers and the companies. IP law shouldn't be used to crank up prices beyond reasonable level. Companies should listen to the consumers to foster goodwill. Consumers must also recognize and willing to pay for production and R&D costs behind products. Piracy can effectively nullify costs beyond raw material and slim profit margin, which may hurt the companies.
The problem with this mindset is that how can companies supposed to sustain research costs (that may cost them millions)? Sure, production cost alone is cheap, but if companies can't offset those research cost (or whatever) to innovate such products, it would eventually lead to scarcity of innovation. Yes, sure, governments still fund researches and academia/open source folks may still do researches anyway, but don't forget that those companies also have important roles. How about the scientists that does it?
Think about it over. Not all people have such socialist mindset. If you were a brilliant scientist and you make an important innovation (such as paraplegic instant cure), heck of course you'd like to make a good fortune out of that after your toiling 20-30 years of research. If you found out that your innovation is pirated, do you feel like... "oh thank God, they copied it over"?
Well, I don't say that the current IP law is good, but we should strike the balance on that. IP law is good, but in the current state it's being misused to hyperinflate the price. We definitely need to reform it, but we should not condone piracy.
I used to buy cheap bulk no-name CDs. However, about 1 year later, the aluminum coating was flaky and fell out of the CD... So, when you can see the light through the hole from the fell-out coating... So, the CD breaks.
In this case, coating it would have helped. I dunno whether it would end up the same way as stated in the article, though.
But, if you can spend more money on CD-Rs, you'd be better up with branded CD-Rs and apply no labels.
IIRC, Visual Basic is released much earlier than Delphi. I remember using VB3 in Win3.1 before Delphi 1 was even out. It's already pretty good. The breakthrough was IIRC the speed of Delphi. That forces the VB to fix its speed.
Gee... I wish I had a similar device for "See it early" Slashdot post... ;P
No, I mean, when you put --with-alsa flag when you compile KDE-Multimedia, it would throw a compilation error. Not using it with ALSA per se. Of course, you can use OSS-compatibility layer of ALSA and compile KMidi with OSS instead... BUT, that causes the other packages of KDE-Multimedia not ALSA-enabled too. Of course if you munge the configuration file, you can get around this, but what a pain!
See this bug report for details. It's been an outstanding bug like more than 1 year! Yet virtually nobody appreciate this issue!
This was a bummer because in some sound cards, ALSA driver is far superior (e.g. in SB Live or Audigy) both in terms of performance and features.
Now that KMidi is gone for good in KDE 3.2 beta and hopefully someone would incorporate newer ALSA into Timidity backend.
It's good to notice that KMidi is dropped from KMultimedia. It's a pain because of the old Timidity engine (which is KMidi's back-end) still uses the old ALSA 0.5. It causes compilation problems if you compile KMultimedia with ALSA yourself. And KDE people decided to get rid of it at the moment and cited that it's not an easy fix.
It's too bad because AFAIK that's the simplest program for MIDI playing using synthesizers (albeit not that good). Other programs are geared toward compositions... Any suggestions?
Here you go.
Hey hey... wait there moderators... The parent post is a joke. Wha??
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At least mispelling of yuhangyuan won't mean much. It would be really funny when people say China send lepernauts to the sky! LOL!
I hate the term "taikonaut". You know what? Without proper pronunciation (as most westerners do), taiko can mean leper. (And thus becomes a pun). Better use "yuhangyuan" instead.