There is no question what Napster was designed for. It's a tool for trading around MP3s, the vast majority of which have always been of the illegal sort. Saying that they shouldn't be held responsible for the content on their service is like saying that silencers and radar detectors shouldn't be illegal (in the states where they are). There is no question that it is a tool designed and used for copyright infringement. Just because there is a slight chance that it could potentially be being used for good doesn't invalidate the fact that it widely encourages and seems designed for piracy.
Oh, and by the way, welcome to the mutability of the English language. You won't see most people griping about the use of "artificial" in negative connotations despite the fact that 300 years ago it was a term of high praise.
Who honestly thinks that the developers of Napster didn't go into this with eyes wide open? They'd have to be absolutely clueless to think that only legit MP3s would be traded, and people that clueless about the nature of MP3 trade would've never had the interest in making the software in the first place.
And are you going to buy their CDs? Heck, no. You've been stealing music from a well-known, talented band. Why buy a whole album from a no-name when you can try it out for free? Then, why buy their album when you already have their music free?
The RIAA has a good point. I, and many of my friends, have access to music that we would have never spent the money on ourselves. Heck, we really like these bands, but instead of buying their CDs, we'll just buy another hard drive to hold their music and the music of hundreds more artists. It's not like they wouldn't have gotten our money anyway. We just spend it on other things now that we can get their works for free.
I once bought a Japanese import of "...And Justice for All" for $40 dollars because it had an extra track, "The Prince," on it. You think I'd do that again when I can get the MP3 for free? Yeah right -- and I actually support going after pirates like myself. Just look at the rest of you whiners. I personally hope Metallica wins the lawsuit. Despite what the developers say, Napster is nothing more than a tool for delivering pirated MP3s. I'd like to see a good conservative guess at how much of Napster's traffic is illegal. 95%? 99%? More?
Don't give us that "alienating your fans" business. That's pretty much the same as telling auto manufacturers to not condemn car theives. Metallica makes their living off of making music that kicks ass. Just because we are fans doesn't mean we have the right to take their music and not pay for them.
For crying out loud. If they're truly you're favorite band, then PAY them for their service. People who bitch at bands who want to be paid for their job are truly disgusting to me. These people may be fans, but they are "looters" none the less. If someone picks my pocket, they'd better not have the termerity to be surprised and upset when I get angry at them for it.
PalmPilots would be a Bad Idea. For one thing, many educators have already banned them from classrooms because of the IR communications features which make cheating easy. For another thing, you'd have to teach every student how to use PalmPilot Graffiti just to use the darn things. Special Ed. students who have a hard enough time learning to write English properly can learn to type (albiet often very slowly) but might have an incredible difficulty with Graffiti.
Furthermore, you'd be training them on a task only applicable to using PalmPilots, unlike teaching them typing on a laptop. You'd also have to spend valuable teaching time getting the students (and the teachers!) proficient with the devices.
All in all, a laptop, while bulkier and more expensive, is a better choice for students. Of course, I can just see the excuses now: "But, Ms. Gulibelle, my laptop battery just died! I can't take the test today."
Does anyone else remember this article from a year ago about the first "photonic circuits" being developed by a company called Nanovation? The link to the story in that article is dead, but I found another one. Ever since then, I've been pondering how to get around the hideous bottleneck that modern memory is, and the only solution I've arrived at is to make an optical RAM equivalent based on similar technology. The only problem is that, I haven't been able to figure out a way of connecting it to the CPU without basically including it as an unupgradeable L2 or L3 cache with normal slow memory beyond it.
Now, however, we have a device capable of nicely interfacing with an optical cable for 100 GB/sec speeds. This may be the interface we need for making "slots" for upgradable optical RAM. Cool! I can't wait to get to move to fully optical computers. This is the technology of the future. I just hope that the people creating these technologies will be willing to license their patents out to other companies.
I believe this is just IBM's SOI (silicon on insulator) technology, though I could be wrong. This technology is already being used in the G3 chips being used in Powerbooks, if I remember correctly.
Yes, IBM was, and still is manufacturing PowerPC chips. The PowerPC archetecture is owned by the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) consordium and is based off of the older IBM POWER archetecture. There was a split over the inclusion of Altivec, which is Motorola's technology to help to DSP in embedded devices and personal computers, but IBM continues to make high-end server chips.
There will probably never be a Macintosh that uses the POWER4 chip, though. The POWER4 is a 64-bit PowerPC implemenation intended for high-end IBM servers. It is not meant to go in a Mac. The 500 MHz memory bus and matching RAM alone would drive the price of a Mac far beyond consumer's reach. It will also not include Altivec, which Apple is betting heavily on. We will likely as not be stuck behind x86 chips in power for awhile unless Motorola can get off their duff and fix the PPC 7400 production problems or get a newer, better chip out the door.
Unfortunately, though, some of the design goals of FreeNet as I understand are antithetical to using this method. FreeNet caches copies across nodes. Frequently requested files are cached on local servers. This is deliberately added redundancy. This seems to partially be for speed purposes and to eliminate single points of failure for the network.
Since the stated goal seems to be free preservation of information for the whole world for all time, I don't see that it's likely that it's intended for files to expire like for Usenet. I really have to wonder how this caching system works and what happens to rarely requested files. The lack of indexable searching makes me wonder how hard it would be to check for redundancies in a distributed filesystem like this. I doubt it would be feasable, but let's wait until next week to see what the designer has to say.
In your own FAQ, you pretty much sidestep the entire issue that FreeNet would become a humongous "warez" distribution system by saying that it's merely a more efficient means of doing what others have been doing before. Ignoring the seeming subtle endorsement of piracy through the system, I'll raise an important question for adminstrators of FreeNet nodes.
In your FAQ, you say that it is very hard for FreeNet node admins to know what is on their site. With the inevitable proliferation of "warez" on the site, how will the system avoid getting bogged down with hundreds of illegal copies of popular pieces of software?
For example, when Diablo 2 finally comes out in the stores, what would prevent servers from being overloaded with:
/software/games/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/RPGs/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/rpg/Diablo2.iso
/warez/l337gam3z/Diablo2.iso
/fr33gam3z/war3z/rpg/diabloII.crack.iso
/mywarez/ObfuscatedDistributionKey/Diablo2.image
...etc.?
' You could literally have hundreds of 650 Mb images of games floating around jamming up everyone's nodes. With the lack of searchability, no one would know what keys hook into what files. Without this knowledge, warez people might keep uploading copies to different keys, thus flooding the system. In essence, does not the lack of protection against piracy and the seemingly intentional goal of keeping admins from controlling their system threaten to bring down the entire network under the burden of warez and junk?
How can code be free speech? If I make a piece of hardware do exactly the same thing as a piece of software, does the piece of hardware become "speech"?
I would say probably not. The ruling linked to in the article above says that code is an expressive means of transmitting ideas about computer programming, essentially the algorithms. This means that compiled binaries, which are the end product and are not an expressive means of transmitting these ideas, are not protected under free speech. Similarly, hardware, which is not an expression of it's own design, will not be protected, though the plans and schema may be.
As a result, your average Windows virus is not protected, but there may be concern over macro and script viruses. In the end, though, virus source code may be treated like the infamous "Anarchist's Cookbook." The text is protected, but the use of many of the ideas and techniques within the book is still criminal.
On the other hand, does this mean that the GPL now has teeth, since derivative versions may not be stopped by the owner of the original version? Perhaps Mattel will have no recourse against CPHack since it has been spread across the community.
Re:Major problem with split along product lines
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 2
The major problem I have with opening the source to Windows or splitting into competing "Baby Bills" is that it will make Windows even more of a de-facto standard. While it may be a good thing to let people work on and improve Windows, there are fundamental archetectural and design flaws which are entrenched in the system design that cannot be overcome without breaking compatibility. We'd then never be rid of Windows, and the network effect, the applications barrier to entry, would still be in place.
Instead, we must hope for what did happen with the Baby Bells, that the resulting companies would have no loyalty to each other. By splitting along product lines, we eliminate much of the network effect by preventing product tying. Many divisions of Microsoft are not entirely Windows dependent, and might move on to provide better support for other platform, thus giving them a better chance to replace Windows.
We'll see what the judge does. I worry, though, that the case has set a precedence that Microsoft's contract pratices are not illegal.
It will be very interesting to see what MS does over the next few months to shore the share price up. I hope they don't do anything illegal in the process. That would be tragic.
You mean, nothing more illegal that what they're already doing? Microsoft stock is a ticking time bomb on Wall Street. When the house of cards keeping it up falls, many investors, mutual funds, and company 401k's will be hurt by their deception. Just look at the NASDAQ today. It was down over 200 points this morning just from the break-off of negotiations this weekend.
I'll be happy to see their stock burn, but I worry that too many people will be hurt by having recklessly invested in the company. Then again, it may be just desserts for backing an unethical company.
Personally, I hope not. A bunch of smaller companies all sharing the same product lines but having less developers to maintain them doesn't seem like a good idea for the marketplace or for consumers.
The remedy I prefer is one where they are divided along product lines. Some of the most important divisions to be made are:
Seperate Office from all Windows.
Seperate Explorer from all Windows.
Seperate BackOffice from NT.
Personally, I think seperating the DOS-derived Win98 codebase from from the NT codebase is a bad idea since we all know that Win98 and its future derivatives are technology the company is trying to phase out. It would be equivalent to seperating out Word 6.0 from Office 2000. The company with the older product wouldn't be a competitor and would be saddled with bad technology. Seperating out WinCE might not be a bad idea, though, since it's fundamentally a different code base and target market.
Some other ideas might be seperating out their developer tools or their multimedia tools into another company. I'd also like to see if they do split the companies up who gets what subsidy and tangetal business that Microsoft has absorbed and bought out over the years. Maybe a seperate holding company for their subsidies would be a good idea.
Microsoft is the world's largest Mac software company. With some of their products given to seperate companies from the OS company, we might see more platform independent products from those companies. Without an interest in keeping loyal to Windows, we might see such products ported to Linux and other OSes in the future. The lack of loyalty for one another combined with the inability to bundle might mean an end to Windows as a platform and the dawn of a better age for consumers.
I hope that today will be remembered as a great day for all of us who have suffered from Microsoft business practices. Personally, I'm going to party like it's.. oh, wait... that was last year.
Did any one else set up a local copy of the game on a Novell Network and alternate turns with other people? Man, we played a lot of BBS games in local directories on our high school's Novell labs. I kind of miss those old days.
BTW, anyone else ever get so many Good points that they overflowed and became Evil? Yeah, being evil with a Federation ship. Bwah ha ha haah.
Apple won't release Sorenson for money reasons. The Sorenson codec is one of the primary advantages of Quicktime 4 that allows it to compete with other formats. If they free up Sorenson to everyone else, then they lose that competitive advantage. That's one reason it won't be freed up for xanim anytime soon.
BTW, the topic IS: "Why Hasn't Apple Released Quicktime for UNIX?"
Anyone ever find themselves wondering why Xerox didint flat out sue the shit out of Apple in the 80's?
No, not really. As many people forget or flat out ignore, Apple legally licensed the rights to use PARC's GUI ideas. They paid money for it rather than ripping someone else off and then crying about their victim "abusing" them for wanting some money for the ideas they ripped off.
Apple embraces Open Source when it works for them and protects their revenue streams. There's a big difference between OSS and the cases Apple has been a part of recently. In OSS, Apple is giving permission to use their stuff. In those court cases, people took things without permission. Just because you give some ideas away doesn't mean that your a hypocrite if people steal the ones you don't. It's like giving someone a bit of your peas at supper and then getting called bad if you complain when someone else tries to grab your steak.
First, Quicktime is not a codec, it is a multimedia component container format with synchronization information built-in and set of libraries for displaying the info contained in that format. Components can be video, audio, vector graphics, text, MIDI music, 3D models, and other things. A codec, or "compressor-decompressor", is an algorithm to encode/decode components of this format such as sound or audio, usually for compression purposes.
Second, the fact that Quicktime runs on Windows, which will never run on a Macintosh, is a problem in that it provides users with Quicktime without having to buy Apple hardware. Windows Quicktime not running on Apple hardware is a downside of making it for Windows. Them losing OS share on their own hardware is insignificant in terms of monetary loss to losing hardware AND OS sales.
Third, open sourcing Mac OS X is a BIG deal. It would mean that you might no longer need to buy a Mac to get the advantages of the Mac OS. Mac OS X is not "just another Unix" -- it's a competitor desktop OS that if ported to Intel could devour Windows sales (though still kill Apple due to a loss of hardware sales). Opensourcing Darwin on Intel isn't a big deal, though.
Apple does like Linux -- at least on their PPC machines. Otherwise, how would you explain MkLinux, which started out as an internal Apple project and this Apple site which hosts the latest versions of the kernel to run on G4 systems? I'm sure they could care less about who takes over their hardware as long as they can keep making money selling it.
As I've mentioned before. Porting Quicktime to UNIX is probably a technical issue of getting it to run inside X and with the non-standard sound APIs on various UNIXes.
It's not the Darwin layer that's the problem. The problem is that Quicktime is an application heavily dependent on graphics and sound APIs. Quicktime relies pretty heavily on the QuickDraw and Quartz APIs AFAIK. Porting from those to X is NOT a trivial task. I remember reading somewhere that you could sort of port Mac apps to Windows taking advantage of all the Mac OS calls they basically reimplemented on top of Windows to get Quicktime to get Quicktime to work on Windows.
This is thorny enough, but at least X is a graphics standard. The bigger problem is the total lack of sound standards for Unix. While Loki's little API in development is a nice idea, it's hardly universal across Unix platforms. It's also not proven to be reliable.
These are probably the primary reasons against porting to Unix.
If you read the press release, it doesn't look like XFS is anywhere near as stable and ready for inclusion into 2.4 are ReiferFS. There are plenty of warnings about "don't smoke near this code" and a good list of features that are missing from the filesystem. This include RT I/O, Guaranteed Rate I/O, and ACLs.
ReiserFS may have some performance bugs, but it doesn't seem like people are afraid of its fragility like SGI is of their Linux XFS code. This code will probably NOT see inclusion into kernel 2.4.
If someone posted defamatory statements or inside info about a company that shouldn't be leaked out, that company could sue Slashdot to get the names or IPs of the person who posted the messages. With the Anonymous Coward system, Slashdot retains legal safety from having their servers raided for such info. A court who attempts to do so anyway may given Slashdot grounds for a serious civil lawsuit. The worst that can legally happen is that they are asked to remove the comment from the archives.
Yeah, AC trolls suck hard, but their abuse of the system and the community isn't worth the legal trade-off. I really like the idea of a FIRST POST filter, but the emphasis on on-line rights means that a censorship filter won't be put in place. People will continue to enjoy their "right" to ruin the experience for those of us who actually care about the site and like to use its forums for what they're intended for.
It of course depends on what you are doing, but for 90% of applications and, AFAIK, 100% of OSes, yes, it would kick the tail off of a normal PC.
Of course, this is assuming that you have the same datapath width to main memory. If, like RDRAM, you have 1/4 or 1/8 of the datapath width, then, no, you won't have an improvement. This also assumes that you don't have ungodly latency in responses from requests to main memory. If it takes forever to service each request, then it doesn't matter how fast it comes back to the CPU once it's found. The article on Tom's hardware linked to above is an excellent summary of all I've read about RDRAM vs. SDRAM DDR that I've read on the web.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no question what Napster was designed for. It's a tool for trading around MP3s, the vast majority of which have always been of the illegal sort. Saying that they shouldn't be held responsible for the content on their service is like saying that silencers and radar detectors shouldn't be illegal (in the states where they are). There is no question that it is a tool designed and used for copyright infringement. Just because there is a slight chance that it could potentially be being used for good doesn't invalidate the fact that it widely encourages and seems designed for piracy.
Oh, and by the way, welcome to the mutability of the English language. You won't see most people griping about the use of "artificial" in negative connotations despite the fact that 300 years ago it was a term of high praise.
Who honestly thinks that the developers of Napster didn't go into this with eyes wide open? They'd have to be absolutely clueless to think that only legit MP3s would be traded, and people that clueless about the nature of MP3 trade would've never had the interest in making the software in the first place.
And are you going to buy their CDs? Heck, no. You've been stealing music from a well-known, talented band. Why buy a whole album from a no-name when you can try it out for free? Then, why buy their album when you already have their music free?
The RIAA has a good point. I, and many of my friends, have access to music that we would have never spent the money on ourselves. Heck, we really like these bands, but instead of buying their CDs, we'll just buy another hard drive to hold their music and the music of hundreds more artists. It's not like they wouldn't have gotten our money anyway. We just spend it on other things now that we can get their works for free.
I once bought a Japanese import of "...And Justice for All" for $40 dollars because it had an extra track, "The Prince," on it. You think I'd do that again when I can get the MP3 for free? Yeah right -- and I actually support going after pirates like myself. Just look at the rest of you whiners. I personally hope Metallica wins the lawsuit. Despite what the developers say, Napster is nothing more than a tool for delivering pirated MP3s. I'd like to see a good conservative guess at how much of Napster's traffic is illegal. 95%? 99%? More?
Don't give us that "alienating your fans" business. That's pretty much the same as telling auto manufacturers to not condemn car theives. Metallica makes their living off of making music that kicks ass. Just because we are fans doesn't mean we have the right to take their music and not pay for them.
For crying out loud. If they're truly you're favorite band, then PAY them for their service. People who bitch at bands who want to be paid for their job are truly disgusting to me. These people may be fans, but they are "looters" none the less. If someone picks my pocket, they'd better not have the termerity to be surprised and upset when I get angry at them for it.
PalmPilots would be a Bad Idea. For one thing, many educators have already banned them from classrooms because of the IR communications features which make cheating easy. For another thing, you'd have to teach every student how to use PalmPilot Graffiti just to use the darn things. Special Ed. students who have a hard enough time learning to write English properly can learn to type (albiet often very slowly) but might have an incredible difficulty with Graffiti.
Furthermore, you'd be training them on a task only applicable to using PalmPilots, unlike teaching them typing on a laptop. You'd also have to spend valuable teaching time getting the students (and the teachers!) proficient with the devices.
All in all, a laptop, while bulkier and more expensive, is a better choice for students. Of course, I can just see the excuses now: "But, Ms. Gulibelle, my laptop battery just died! I can't take the test today."
Does anyone else remember this article from a year ago about the first "photonic circuits" being developed by a company called Nanovation? The link to the story in that article is dead, but I found another one. Ever since then, I've been pondering how to get around the hideous bottleneck that modern memory is, and the only solution I've arrived at is to make an optical RAM equivalent based on similar technology. The only problem is that, I haven't been able to figure out a way of connecting it to the CPU without basically including it as an unupgradeable L2 or L3 cache with normal slow memory beyond it.
Now, however, we have a device capable of nicely interfacing with an optical cable for 100 GB/sec speeds. This may be the interface we need for making "slots" for upgradable optical RAM. Cool! I can't wait to get to move to fully optical computers. This is the technology of the future. I just hope that the people creating these technologies will be willing to license their patents out to other companies.
She was working for Red Hat!
Yes.
I believe this is just IBM's SOI (silicon on insulator) technology, though I could be wrong. This technology is already being used in the G3 chips being used in Powerbooks, if I remember correctly.
Yes, IBM was, and still is manufacturing PowerPC chips. The PowerPC archetecture is owned by the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) consordium and is based off of the older IBM POWER archetecture. There was a split over the inclusion of Altivec, which is Motorola's technology to help to DSP in embedded devices and personal computers, but IBM continues to make high-end server chips.
There will probably never be a Macintosh that uses the POWER4 chip, though. The POWER4 is a 64-bit PowerPC implemenation intended for high-end IBM servers. It is not meant to go in a Mac. The 500 MHz memory bus and matching RAM alone would drive the price of a Mac far beyond consumer's reach. It will also not include Altivec, which Apple is betting heavily on. We will likely as not be stuck behind x86 chips in power for awhile unless Motorola can get off their duff and fix the PPC 7400 production problems or get a newer, better chip out the door.
Yes, please post that link if you have it.
Unfortunately, though, some of the design goals of FreeNet as I understand are antithetical to using this method. FreeNet caches copies across nodes. Frequently requested files are cached on local servers. This is deliberately added redundancy. This seems to partially be for speed purposes and to eliminate single points of failure for the network.
Since the stated goal seems to be free preservation of information for the whole world for all time, I don't see that it's likely that it's intended for files to expire like for Usenet. I really have to wonder how this caching system works and what happens to rarely requested files. The lack of indexable searching makes me wonder how hard it would be to check for redundancies in a distributed filesystem like this. I doubt it would be feasable, but let's wait until next week to see what the designer has to say.
In your FAQ, you say that it is very hard for FreeNet node admins to know what is on their site. With the inevitable proliferation of "warez" on the site, how will the system avoid getting bogged down with hundreds of illegal copies of popular pieces of software?
For example, when Diablo 2 finally comes out in the stores, what would prevent servers from being overloaded with:
- /software/games/Diablo2.iso
- /software/games/RPGs/Diablo2.iso
- /software/games/rpg/Diablo2.iso
- /warez/l337gam3z/Diablo2.iso
- /fr33gam3z/war3z/rpg/diabloII.crack.iso
- /mywarez/ObfuscatedDistributionKey/Diablo2.imag
e
- ...etc.?
'You could literally have hundreds of 650 Mb images of games floating around jamming up everyone's nodes. With the lack of searchability, no one would know what keys hook into what files. Without this knowledge, warez people might keep uploading copies to different keys, thus flooding the system. In essence, does not the lack of protection against piracy and the seemingly intentional goal of keeping admins from controlling their system threaten to bring down the entire network under the burden of warez and junk?
How can code be free speech? If I make a piece of hardware do exactly the same thing as a piece of software, does the piece of hardware become "speech"?
I would say probably not. The ruling linked to in the article above says that code is an expressive means of transmitting ideas about computer programming, essentially the algorithms. This means that compiled binaries, which are the end product and are not an expressive means of transmitting these ideas, are not protected under free speech. Similarly, hardware, which is not an expression of it's own design, will not be protected, though the plans and schema may be.
As a result, your average Windows virus is not protected, but there may be concern over macro and script viruses. In the end, though, virus source code may be treated like the infamous "Anarchist's Cookbook." The text is protected, but the use of many of the ideas and techniques within the book is still criminal.
On the other hand, does this mean that the GPL now has teeth, since derivative versions may not be stopped by the owner of the original version? Perhaps Mattel will have no recourse against CPHack since it has been spread across the community.
The major problem I have with opening the source to Windows or splitting into competing "Baby Bills" is that it will make Windows even more of a de-facto standard. While it may be a good thing to let people work on and improve Windows, there are fundamental archetectural and design flaws which are entrenched in the system design that cannot be overcome without breaking compatibility. We'd then never be rid of Windows, and the network effect, the applications barrier to entry, would still be in place.
Instead, we must hope for what did happen with the Baby Bells, that the resulting companies would have no loyalty to each other. By splitting along product lines, we eliminate much of the network effect by preventing product tying. Many divisions of Microsoft are not entirely Windows dependent, and might move on to provide better support for other platform, thus giving them a better chance to replace Windows.
We'll see what the judge does. I worry, though, that the case has set a precedence that Microsoft's contract pratices are not illegal.
You mean, nothing more illegal that what they're already doing? Microsoft stock is a ticking time bomb on Wall Street. When the house of cards keeping it up falls, many investors, mutual funds, and company 401k's will be hurt by their deception. Just look at the NASDAQ today. It was down over 200 points this morning just from the break-off of negotiations this weekend.
I'll be happy to see their stock burn, but I worry that too many people will be hurt by having recklessly invested in the company. Then again, it may be just desserts for backing an unethical company.
Personally, I hope not. A bunch of smaller companies all sharing the same product lines but having less developers to maintain them doesn't seem like a good idea for the marketplace or for consumers.
The remedy I prefer is one where they are divided along product lines. Some of the most important divisions to be made are:
Personally, I think seperating the DOS-derived Win98 codebase from from the NT codebase is a bad idea since we all know that Win98 and its future derivatives are technology the company is trying to phase out. It would be equivalent to seperating out Word 6.0 from Office 2000. The company with the older product wouldn't be a competitor and would be saddled with bad technology. Seperating out WinCE might not be a bad idea, though, since it's fundamentally a different code base and target market.
Some other ideas might be seperating out their developer tools or their multimedia tools into another company. I'd also like to see if they do split the companies up who gets what subsidy and tangetal business that Microsoft has absorbed and bought out over the years. Maybe a seperate holding company for their subsidies would be a good idea.
Microsoft is the world's largest Mac software company. With some of their products given to seperate companies from the OS company, we might see more platform independent products from those companies. Without an interest in keeping loyal to Windows, we might see such products ported to Linux and other OSes in the future. The lack of loyalty for one another combined with the inability to bundle might mean an end to Windows as a platform and the dawn of a better age for consumers.
I hope that today will be remembered as a great day for all of us who have suffered from Microsoft business practices. Personally, I'm going to party like it's.. oh, wait... that was last year.
Did any one else set up a local copy of the game on a Novell Network and alternate turns with other people? Man, we played a lot of BBS games in local directories on our high school's Novell labs. I kind of miss those old days.
BTW, anyone else ever get so many Good points that they overflowed and became Evil? Yeah, being evil with a Federation ship. Bwah ha ha haah.
Apple won't release Sorenson for money reasons. The Sorenson codec is one of the primary advantages of Quicktime 4 that allows it to compete with other formats. If they free up Sorenson to everyone else, then they lose that competitive advantage. That's one reason it won't be freed up for xanim anytime soon.
BTW, the topic IS: "Why Hasn't Apple Released Quicktime for UNIX?"
Anyone ever find themselves wondering why Xerox didint flat out sue the shit out of Apple in the 80's?
No, not really. As many people forget or flat out ignore, Apple legally licensed the rights to use PARC's GUI ideas. They paid money for it rather than ripping someone else off and then crying about their victim "abusing" them for wanting some money for the ideas they ripped off.
Apple embraces Open Source when it works for them and protects their revenue streams. There's a big difference between OSS and the cases Apple has been a part of recently. In OSS, Apple is giving permission to use their stuff. In those court cases, people took things without permission. Just because you give some ideas away doesn't mean that your a hypocrite if people steal the ones you don't. It's like giving someone a bit of your peas at supper and then getting called bad if you complain when someone else tries to grab your steak.
First, Quicktime is not a codec, it is a multimedia component container format with synchronization information built-in and set of libraries for displaying the info contained in that format. Components can be video, audio, vector graphics, text, MIDI music, 3D models, and other things. A codec, or "compressor-decompressor", is an algorithm to encode/decode components of this format such as sound or audio, usually for compression purposes.
Second, the fact that Quicktime runs on Windows, which will never run on a Macintosh, is a problem in that it provides users with Quicktime without having to buy Apple hardware. Windows Quicktime not running on Apple hardware is a downside of making it for Windows. Them losing OS share on their own hardware is insignificant in terms of monetary loss to losing hardware AND OS sales.
Third, open sourcing Mac OS X is a BIG deal. It would mean that you might no longer need to buy a Mac to get the advantages of the Mac OS. Mac OS X is not "just another Unix" -- it's a competitor desktop OS that if ported to Intel could devour Windows sales (though still kill Apple due to a loss of hardware sales). Opensourcing Darwin on Intel isn't a big deal, though.
Apple does like Linux -- at least on their PPC machines. Otherwise, how would you explain MkLinux, which started out as an internal Apple project and this Apple site which hosts the latest versions of the kernel to run on G4 systems? I'm sure they could care less about who takes over their hardware as long as they can keep making money selling it.
As I've mentioned before. Porting Quicktime to UNIX is probably a technical issue of getting it to run inside X and with the non-standard sound APIs on various UNIXes.
It's not the Darwin layer that's the problem. The problem is that Quicktime is an application heavily dependent on graphics and sound APIs. Quicktime relies pretty heavily on the QuickDraw and Quartz APIs AFAIK. Porting from those to X is NOT a trivial task. I remember reading somewhere that you could sort of port Mac apps to Windows taking advantage of all the Mac OS calls they basically reimplemented on top of Windows to get Quicktime to get Quicktime to work on Windows.
This is thorny enough, but at least X is a graphics standard. The bigger problem is the total lack of sound standards for Unix. While Loki's little API in development is a nice idea, it's hardly universal across Unix platforms. It's also not proven to be reliable.
These are probably the primary reasons against porting to Unix.
If you read the press release, it doesn't look like XFS is anywhere near as stable and ready for inclusion into 2.4 are ReiferFS. There are plenty of warnings about "don't smoke near this code" and a good list of features that are missing from the filesystem. This include RT I/O, Guaranteed Rate I/O, and ACLs.
ReiserFS may have some performance bugs, but it doesn't seem like people are afraid of its fragility like SGI is of their Linux XFS code. This code will probably NOT see inclusion into kernel 2.4.
If someone posted defamatory statements or inside info about a company that shouldn't be leaked out, that company could sue Slashdot to get the names or IPs of the person who posted the messages. With the Anonymous Coward system, Slashdot retains legal safety from having their servers raided for such info. A court who attempts to do so anyway may given Slashdot grounds for a serious civil lawsuit. The worst that can legally happen is that they are asked to remove the comment from the archives.
Yeah, AC trolls suck hard, but their abuse of the system and the community isn't worth the legal trade-off. I really like the idea of a FIRST POST filter, but the emphasis on on-line rights means that a censorship filter won't be put in place. People will continue to enjoy their "right" to ruin the experience for those of us who actually care about the site and like to use its forums for what they're intended for.
Yeah, but it was nicer than what I was actually thinking.
It of course depends on what you are doing, but for 90% of applications and, AFAIK, 100% of OSes, yes, it would kick the tail off of a normal PC.
Of course, this is assuming that you have the same datapath width to main memory. If, like RDRAM, you have 1/4 or 1/8 of the datapath width, then, no, you won't have an improvement. This also assumes that you don't have ungodly latency in responses from requests to main memory. If it takes forever to service each request, then it doesn't matter how fast it comes back to the CPU once it's found. The article on Tom's hardware linked to above is an excellent summary of all I've read about RDRAM vs. SDRAM DDR that I've read on the web.