After reading all the scathing criticism lately about Mono and OOo being tainted by MS patents, it leaves me to wonder why WINE never had so many skeptics (though it did have a few). With the same line of reasoning, WINE should be at a greater risk.
Anyway not that I think any of these will face any problems, 1. Anti-Trust - It will be difficult for MS to pull of anything close to killing a small competitor out of business using patents. 2. Massive attrition at Microsoft - All things being equal, people tend to work for saner, lesser-evil companies. There is a certain pride in it, and I don't fancy a lot of people saying - Yeah I work for SCO! (I just dug this interesting article from Paul Graham about MS Patents) 3. MS has benefited from interoperability, and cross-technology support for years (Remember how Word had Word perfect emulation modes and shortcuts). I don't think patents cover those APIs too. 4. And piss off the large clients?? 5. Total loss of good-will and PR disaster. 6. Can OIN (Open Innovation Network) patents be used against Microsoft? 7. Only a tiny fraction of Mono and OOo will ever fall under the patenttotine, and those will no doubt be re-written and re-implemented the same weekend.
If anyone is thinking of traveling backwards in time, here is a simple reason why it is unlikely to happen. Assuming us earthlings have millions of years ahead of us, we have not seen a traveler yet from AD 1,000,000. If they actually will find time travel (backwards) wouldn't one of them visit us in the next million years.
But then this could be explained in many ways, the easiest being that we nuked each other at some point and took thousands of years of research down with it.
I feel its so much better that it happened now, Fail-Fast is always better. Good to have answers early on.
If we don't want such things to happen, why don't we move to more restrictive licenses? Should we actually expect people (or even worse, corporations) to always act in good faith, even when there is no obligation to do so? Why not put it all down in paper then. IM(H)O, Open Source still has not found a balancing act between pragmatism and staying true to the cause. Which is why we have issue with GPL v2 and v3. The deal (according to Eben Moglin) violates GPL v3, but v2-v3 debate is now more like a 50-50 split.
Lets all go GPL v3, or shut up.
Anyway, it is not that I found something terribly wrong with the deal. Mainly because it changes _nothing_ for existing users. It is just that Novell customers get an additional benefit. Meanwhile the Open Innovation Network still protects Open Source patents, the Mono team still maintains that the have not violated any patents, good news for getting Open-Office to open Word 2007 XML files (and more compatibility) and some other. But on the other hand, it does create a division and give Novell somewhat an unfair advantage.
One good thing about MS driving this is that unlike some standards body which can only prescribe what to do, they could start implementing this on Exchange servers. While most of the mail servers are _not_ Exchange, this could start the adoption cycle.
Maybe something like how the "nofollow" tag became a standard to stop comment-spam on blogs. It isn't any official standard, but when blogger, and mov-type, wordpress and google followed it became an unofficial standard.
Outsourcing is like a motel en route to automation.
Most of the low tech jobs will eventually get replaced by computing anyway. Call Centres: Either with users being provided better do-it-urself tools (Like Interactive telephone based services), and websites. The population is getting more tech, savvy. Programming: Evolve better tools, languages. There is no need to implement a requirement, when the requirement definition itself could be an implementation. It is usually the architecting and coding that gets outsourced; redundant i'd say. [While I agree Ruby is a really inadequete example, atleast things dont get repeated out there.]
And finally, don't ban outsourcing in the meantime. Because America has benefitted from its own exports. Services are just another commodity, saying that it is not is akin to saying 'Services are the ONLY commodity' that should be exported.
I think MS is getting better these days. They released the.Net Framework source code (called ROTOR) under the same license (Shared Source). Though you can't use it commercially, it actually compiles on multiple platforms. Good for students and guys working on alternate implementations, though you cant lift code from it. They also started a new code sharing community called CodePlex.
Eventually they might open up a lot of platform code, maybe even Windows itself. I still remember BillG saying that way back in 2000, that they might someday. Among other things it will depend on the quality of source code, you really wouldn't want people to see all those//HACK-HACKs and//FIXME:BAD-BAD-WAAAH-WAAH code. The.Net codebase is awesome, so it was easier to open. (Not saying thats the only criteria).
Perhaps, with the new guys sitting on top, people like Ray Ozzie MS might change. Hopefully they "know" that openness is freedom, and freedom will last.
MS has been active in the Automotive sector for quite some time now, and is one of the biggest players in the market. They have a full fledged Automotive Division, and some of their systems based on CE go into Fiat, Volvo and others I dont know.
So if you think they just jumped into it, well no. They've been there for a long time now. And seem to be doing quite well. This will buy them lots of publicity.
And anyway, safety on F1 cars are multiple times redundant and even if the software fails there is a mechanical framework protecting the driver. The software largely handles monitoring tasks, warnings and such.
The future is obviously going to be media heavy, with tons of pics/videos all over the place. As such, better media formats are required. No doubt.
But when MS bundles decoders with the OS, it automatically gets a huge installed base. Now how will an open format compete with that, which the users will have to download? The MS format might get adopted even if it is proprietary. Which is very very bad.
jpeg2k has no adoption is for the same reason.
Interestingly, this is where a "platform" like Firefox becomes more important. As a delivery channel, of open formats. If Firefox ever becomes the dominant browser, that will solve a lot of the distribution problems. Of course, the Firefox team will decide what to bundle, but I am sure they are nice people.
Its come to a stage where the biggies are using patents just to create an entry barrier for smaller companies and individuals. There can be no other reason why Microsoft would still want patents in place, considering that they have gotten hit over and over again, and again by patents which atleast violate the principle of common sense. Surely, MS (and most other companies which refuse to come out against patents) would have some game plan there.
I hope you Americans will use your vote to fix the broken patent system. I live in India, but if I want to build something I have to worry whether some jerk has patented the most obvious part of it, thanks to USPTO. I cant even imagine how they would judge the merits of a technical patent. Fuck.
Security with AJAX is of course an important consideration as it's asychronous and a malicious user could write data back to your database if implemented incorrectly.
That statement is a little misleading, as security is not directly related to requests being asynchronous. I think what the poster meant is that being asynchronous, AJAX application make lots of calls to the back end. In a non-AJAX app, typically you fetch the data during the page load. In AJAX app, users request sections of the page to be refreshed, meaning a lot more finely grained methods to the backend are exposed.
The survey seems to induce a little bias among the choices. It is a little inexplicable.
1. All companies except MS is there for thier hardware products. 2. How many people know that MS makes hardware? Wouldn't this automatically align his/her mind to think in terms of quality of hardware? (Oh... Microsoft, I don't have any MS gadget. They should suck, I dont even know them!) 3. If the trust is so low, why did MS still have the most profitable quarter ever last month? 4. MS hardware tend to be of very high quality, say what you will about the software.
Re:Vista Graphics could be an issue
on
Apple Joins BAPCo
·
· Score: 1
Small Correction. Aero Glass uses DX 9, but needs a fairly good card by today's standards. (It does not need DirectX 10, except for games and 3D)
My point was why would Apple throw in a DirectX card into a Mac, when its(DirectX's) sole use will be on Windows. Even when negotiating with card vendors, wouldn't it be cheaper to get a custom graphics card with all the DirectX circuitry taken out? Why waste transistors on capability you will never use.
What part of the BSD license does Theo not understand? Apple and SCO aren't "freeloaders", they are using the software under the intended license. Furthermore, what makes Theo think that people want to run OpenSSH? At this point, it's as entrenched as Windows--nobody has a choice.
Dear friend, herein lies the indelible mark of your misunderstanding of the free software _Movement_, and will live on even after you are dead and gone.
The help he is asking is pocket change for the companies which use OpenSSH. For the work done in making it compatible with major projects of those companies. __If you read the article__ you will also note how IBM sends customer complaints to the OpenSSH team. And how Sun refused to pay for travel!
I find it painful.
Vista Graphics could be an issue
on
Apple Joins BAPCo
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Vista requires _really_ powerful graphics capabilities to display its higher end Aero Glass interface. This relies on DirectX 10. Older cards will have downgraded UI. But, Apple does not need to incorporate these $-sucking monsters into its machines, as they are not required by OS X (which uses OpenGL).
This means the Apple machines will not be the ideal machines to run Vista.
Alas! The slashdot crowd had already written dozens of comments around how the OS is slow; while the article is basically talking about a slow and inefficient process, and legacy baggage leading to complexity. Why dont you RTFA first!!!
[One article is even saying its because of the Windows paging mechanism problem, of course modded +5 insightful!]
I have been installing and testing Vista since the early betas. To the last one, build 5308. I have seen things getting better all along the way, from better graphics, speed and more reliability. It looked like a mess earlier, but then they cut features and made schedules more realistic.
Build 5308 is feature complete, and has not crashed even once. It supports all the devices on my machine. Now why the hell would they rewrite 60% of a perfectly well running system??? Microsoft has said that most of the work remaining is related to security and performance. I trust them, because I have seen it.
I read the article, I could not find the source of this information. The memo that was included does not speak about this 60% figure. They have not mentioned any other sources. Now why is this making news!!!??
The fact that Windows OS now outnumbers UNIX boxes is neither suprising nor noteworthy. They've been chipping away at the server market for ages. Bound to happen eventually. Linux is more compatible with Unix, now well supported, and FREE! Why are these shops moving to Windows then? All their applications will have to be completely re-written for Windows. How is this bound to happen eventually?
Linux growth is faster (Upgrades along the Windows path don't count, we're talking complete platform migration) I believe. Sure. Its way easier to grow from 10 to 20 (100% growth) than from 100,000 to 200,000 (of course, thats an exageration) . Looking at growth rate is pointless, unless the figures are comparable.
The company I work for generally buys Dell servers with no OS, on which we then install Windows Server 2003 (from our MSDN subscription) or Linux, depending on what the server will be used for. I don't imagine we're the only ones, either; I wonder how common this practice is
This practice is unlikely to be very common, atleast since its absolutely illegal. The Windows Server license that comes with MSDN is for development purposes only (non-commercial). Additionally, you cannot go about and install it all around, then you will need multiple MSDN licenses.
About Linux, I am not sure whether you will be violating. I heard its like free beer or something.
This could become one of the biggest challenges for Open Source in the years to come. The biggies could but these companies (often run by a handful of good men) for a small sum; and then change the way they function. Of course the old source will still be available, but the guys who know the intricacies will no longer be working on it. Bug fixes might be late, new features may never come. Many of the old users will leave, some stay hoping for the best. All the roadmaps vanish. Until someone picks up the ashes and starts again. Rebirth.
I am not sure how fair it will be to ask any company/people to not take a multi-MILLION dollar offer, so that they would remain FREE.
You can mod this funny, 'cause after I finished writing it feels like a para from MadMax.
To me this sounds more like a marketing ploy. So that they could go to potential clients and say, "Look we are so secure and futuristic that we need embedded chips in humans to access our critical datacenter!". Client is left stunned.
IANA American, but I hope that the goverment would do something if this was forced on the employees working in the datacenter. After all, what can this achieve which cannot be done with a retinal scan, RFID tag combo? If the criminal can pass the retinal scan, can't he also pluck the RFID from the employee and stick into his arm?
Huh..... I would hate it if someone said they are gonna put a chip inside my body. Wait till someone gets hurt and the company gets sued for a million dollars.
Are you saying that people just woke up to this "trend"? The industry decided years ago that Mhz war will stop, and everyone will try to put more cores in. Its not like no-one else knew it was coming.
IRIX and Solaris are known to scale far beyond 4 processors. So does almost every other OS. Linux scales to 1000s of processors, in IBMs supercomputers. Windows 2003 Datacenter supports 64 processors (Which is more than enough for a regular commercial application. In case you want more, instead of scaling up, you should be scaling OUT.) AIX, HP-UX etc also have great support.
If they can come out with a system that appeals to developers and business users, then they could take on Apple, Sun, Dell and others again SGI competing with APPLE and DELL???? In what segment, but in the figment of your imagination?
SGI?? They lost $100m in 2004, $72m in 2005. They are nearly _dead_ and looking for a sell-out. In many ways they deserve it, I still remember their CD drive being priced 10 times higher than the ones in the market if you wanted to replace one. And of course, being totally proprietary nothing else would fit in. Who is buying IRIX now? And SGI now focuses on Linux.
I don't know who modded you interesting. And I did not know SGI still had fans!
This is silly. Microsoft made a conscious decision to license software per CPU (or per Slot) rather than core, and they had announced that they are doing so because multi-core looked like the natural way in which CPUs will improve, given that the Mhz war has ended. In fact they were the first major company to do so.
Also, this does not really eat into MS bottom line compared to Oracle or IBM. Most of MS revenue comes from the the desktop, while they are just competing in servers. Sql Server suddenly becomes more attractive, given Oracles complicated multi-core policy. (Remember that Oracle earlier announced that every core is a CPU, its just recently that they realized it will be a disaster and modified their original plans.)
Earlier CPU speeds doubled every 18 months. Multi-core will simply take another approach to achieving the same. I am not sure how this will hurt software companies any more than increasing cycles/sec.
The target surely seems to be Vista. If Linux did not do this it would have meant that Vista would have a free ride with fancy hardware accelerated 3D transparent glassy glossy grossy interfaces. For J6P, the OS is only as good as it looks.
Since Miguel is involved I sure hope we can target all this hardware accelerated goodness with Mono as well. Mono makes making Linux apps amazingly easy, atleast for those of us with years of Windows programming background. This step is absolutely essential for Mono while it tries for Windows API compatibility. The upcoming Windows APIs (called WinFX, which is.Net based) include something called Avalon, which benefits (and at times requires) hardware accelerated graphics. If X did not have hardware accelerated graphics, this would have been a block in the progress of Mono.
Well, for Mono lovers this is the reason to rejoice.
This has all the potential to start a new revolution in P2P bandwidth sharing, just like Napster. In the end, the whole this is pretty good for easy/cheap internet access. But....
The whole thing rests with a private company. Unlike Napster: 1. The entry barrier is huge. [We are not dealing with data alone] 2. It is difficult to switch to another service; unlike Kazaa to eDonkey to BitTorrent. The reach of the service is local, for Napster it was anyone anywhere with a Network Connection. 3. The guy who started this, is more of a shrewd businessman. He may not give a damn about all that "Freedom" that we really care about. 4. Lots of chicken and egg issues for a competitor to spring up [like ISP support]
By 2008, if this service has 5 million people hooked (like Napster); then where will we stand? To emphasize, unlike switching email providers, or P2P servers, the entry barrier will be monstrous; and only an investment from the likes of Microsoft or IBM will create a competitor.
By end 2006, we are gonna miss these all time hits from the charts 1. Duke Nukem Forever (also Duke Nukem Whenever, Duke Nukem If Ever) 2. Windows Vista (formerly Longhorn) 3. PS3
Google's Beta products are good candidates, they never seem to get released too.;)
Slashdot Mirror
After reading all the scathing criticism lately about Mono and OOo being tainted by MS patents, it leaves me to wonder why WINE never had so many skeptics (though it did have a few). With the same line of reasoning, WINE should be at a greater risk.
Anyway not that I think any of these will face any problems,
1. Anti-Trust - It will be difficult for MS to pull of anything close to killing a small competitor out of business using patents.
2. Massive attrition at Microsoft - All things being equal, people tend to work for saner, lesser-evil companies. There is a certain pride in it, and I don't fancy a lot of people saying - Yeah I work for SCO! (I just dug this interesting article from Paul Graham about MS Patents)
3. MS has benefited from interoperability, and cross-technology support for years (Remember how Word had Word perfect emulation modes and shortcuts). I don't think patents cover those APIs too.
4. And piss off the large clients??
5. Total loss of good-will and PR disaster.
6. Can OIN (Open Innovation Network) patents be used against Microsoft?
7. Only a tiny fraction of Mono and OOo will ever fall under the patenttotine, and those will no doubt be re-written and re-implemented the same weekend.
If anyone is thinking of traveling backwards in time, here is a simple reason why it is unlikely to happen. Assuming us earthlings have millions of years ahead of us, we have not seen a traveler yet from AD 1,000,000. If they actually will find time travel (backwards) wouldn't one of them visit us in the next million years.
But then this could be explained in many ways, the easiest being that we nuked each other at some point and took thousands of years of research down with it.
Ahh, i should get some sleep.
I feel its so much better that it happened now, Fail-Fast is always better. Good to have answers early on.
If we don't want such things to happen, why don't we move to more restrictive licenses? Should we actually expect people (or even worse, corporations) to always act in good faith, even when there is no obligation to do so? Why not put it all down in paper then. IM(H)O, Open Source still has not found a balancing act between pragmatism and staying true to the cause. Which is why we have issue with GPL v2 and v3. The deal (according to Eben Moglin) violates GPL v3, but v2-v3 debate is now more like a 50-50 split.
Lets all go GPL v3, or shut up.
Anyway, it is not that I found something terribly wrong with the deal. Mainly because it changes _nothing_ for existing users. It is just that Novell customers get an additional benefit. Meanwhile the Open Innovation Network still protects Open Source patents,
the Mono team still maintains that the have not violated any patents, good news for getting Open-Office to open Word 2007 XML files (and more compatibility) and some other. But on the other hand, it does create a division and give Novell somewhat an unfair advantage.
One good thing about MS driving this is that unlike some standards body which can only prescribe what to do, they could start implementing this on Exchange servers. While most of the mail servers are _not_ Exchange, this could start the adoption cycle.
Maybe something like how the "nofollow" tag became a standard to stop comment-spam on blogs. It isn't any official standard, but when blogger, and mov-type, wordpress and google followed it became an unofficial standard.
Outsourcing is like a motel en route to automation.
Most of the low tech jobs will eventually get replaced by computing anyway.
Call Centres:
Either with users being provided better do-it-urself tools (Like Interactive telephone based services), and websites. The population is getting more tech, savvy.
Programming:
Evolve better tools, languages. There is no need to implement a requirement, when the requirement definition itself could be an implementation. It is usually the architecting and coding that gets outsourced; redundant i'd say. [While I agree Ruby is a really inadequete example, atleast things dont get repeated out there.]
And finally, don't ban outsourcing in the meantime. Because America has benefitted from its own exports. Services are just another commodity, saying that it is not is akin to saying 'Services are the ONLY commodity' that should be exported.
I think MS is getting better these days. They released the .Net Framework source code (called ROTOR) under the same license (Shared Source). Though you can't use it commercially, it actually compiles on multiple platforms. Good for students and guys working on alternate implementations, though you cant lift code from it. They also started a new code sharing community called CodePlex.
//HACK-HACKs and //FIXME:BAD-BAD-WAAAH-WAAH code. The .Net codebase is awesome, so it was easier to open. (Not saying thats the only criteria).
Eventually they might open up a lot of platform code, maybe even Windows itself. I still remember BillG saying that way back in 2000, that they might someday. Among other things it will depend on the quality of source code, you really wouldn't want people to see all those
Perhaps, with the new guys sitting on top, people like Ray Ozzie MS might change. Hopefully they "know" that openness is freedom, and freedom will last.
MS has been active in the Automotive sector for quite some time now, and is one of the biggest players in the market. They have a full fledged Automotive Division, and some of their systems based on CE go into Fiat, Volvo and others I dont know.
So if you think they just jumped into it, well no. They've been there for a long time now. And seem to be doing quite well. This will buy them lots of publicity.
And anyway, safety on F1 cars are multiple times redundant and even if the software fails there is a mechanical framework protecting the driver. The software largely handles monitoring tasks, warnings and such.
The future is obviously going to be media heavy, with tons of pics/videos all over the place. As such, better media formats are required. No doubt.
But when MS bundles decoders with the OS, it automatically gets a huge installed base. Now how will an open format compete with that, which the users will have to download? The MS format might get adopted even if it is proprietary. Which is very very bad.
jpeg2k has no adoption is for the same reason.
Interestingly, this is where a "platform" like Firefox becomes more important. As a delivery channel, of open formats. If Firefox ever becomes the dominant browser, that will solve a lot of the distribution problems. Of course, the Firefox team will decide what to bundle, but I am sure they are nice people.
Its come to a stage where the biggies are using patents just to create an entry barrier for smaller companies and individuals. There can be no other reason why Microsoft would still want patents in place, considering that they have gotten hit over and over again, and again by patents which atleast violate the principle of common sense. Surely, MS (and most other companies which refuse to come out against patents) would have some game plan there.
I hope you Americans will use your vote to fix the broken patent system. I live in India, but if I want to build something I have to worry whether some jerk has patented the most obvious part of it, thanks to USPTO. I cant even imagine how they would judge the merits of a technical patent. Fuck.
Security with AJAX is of course an important consideration as it's asychronous and a malicious user could write data back to your database if implemented incorrectly.
That statement is a little misleading, as security is not directly related to requests being asynchronous. I think what the poster meant is that being asynchronous, AJAX application make lots of calls to the back end. In a non-AJAX app, typically you fetch the data during the page load. In AJAX app, users request sections of the page to be refreshed, meaning a lot more finely grained methods to the backend are exposed.
non-AJAX:
LoadMainPage()
AJAX:
LoadTitles()
LoadSections()
LoadSummary()
The survey seems to induce a little bias among the choices. It is a little inexplicable.
1. All companies except MS is there for thier hardware products.
2. How many people know that MS makes hardware? Wouldn't this automatically align his/her mind to think in terms of quality of hardware? (Oh... Microsoft, I don't have any MS gadget. They should suck, I dont even know them!)
3. If the trust is so low, why did MS still have the most profitable quarter ever last month?
4. MS hardware tend to be of very high quality, say what you will about the software.
Small Correction. Aero Glass uses DX 9, but needs a fairly good card by today's standards. (It does not need DirectX 10, except for games and 3D)
My point was why would Apple throw in a DirectX card into a Mac, when its(DirectX's) sole use will be on Windows. Even when negotiating with card vendors, wouldn't it be cheaper to get a custom graphics card with all the DirectX circuitry taken out? Why waste transistors on capability you will never use.
What part of the BSD license does Theo not understand? Apple and SCO aren't "freeloaders", they are using the software under the intended license.
Furthermore, what makes Theo think that people want to run OpenSSH? At this point, it's as entrenched as Windows--nobody has a choice.
Dear friend, herein lies the indelible mark of your misunderstanding of the free software _Movement_, and will live on even after you are dead and gone.
The help he is asking is pocket change for the companies which use OpenSSH. For the work done in making it compatible with major projects of those companies. __If you read the article__ you will also note how IBM sends customer complaints to the OpenSSH team. And how Sun refused to pay for travel!
I find it painful.
Vista requires _really_ powerful graphics capabilities to display its higher end Aero Glass interface. This relies on DirectX 10. Older cards will have downgraded UI. But, Apple does not need to incorporate these $-sucking monsters into its machines, as they are not required by OS X (which uses OpenGL).
This means the Apple machines will not be the ideal machines to run Vista.
Alas! The slashdot crowd had already written dozens of comments around how the OS is slow; while the article is basically talking about a slow and inefficient process, and legacy baggage leading to complexity. Why dont you RTFA first!!!
[One article is even saying its because of the Windows paging mechanism problem, of course modded +5 insightful!]
Sigh. When will things get better over here.
I have been installing and testing Vista since the early betas. To the last one, build 5308. I have seen things getting better all along the way, from better graphics, speed and more reliability. It looked like a mess earlier, but then they cut features and made schedules more realistic.
Build 5308 is feature complete, and has not crashed even once. It supports all the devices on my machine. Now why the hell would they rewrite 60% of a perfectly well running system??? Microsoft has said that most of the work remaining is related to security and performance. I trust them, because I have seen it.
I read the article, I could not find the source of this information. The memo that was included does not speak about this 60% figure. They have not mentioned any other sources. Now why is this making news!!!??
Nonsense.
The fact that Windows OS now outnumbers UNIX boxes is neither suprising nor noteworthy. They've been chipping away at the server market for ages. Bound to happen eventually.
Linux is more compatible with Unix, now well supported, and FREE! Why are these shops moving to Windows then? All their applications will have to be completely re-written for Windows. How is this bound to happen eventually?
Linux growth is faster (Upgrades along the Windows path don't count, we're talking complete platform migration) I believe.
Sure. Its way easier to grow from 10 to 20 (100% growth) than from 100,000 to 200,000 (of course, thats an exageration) . Looking at growth rate is pointless, unless the figures are comparable.
The company I work for generally buys Dell servers with no OS, on which we then install Windows Server 2003 (from our MSDN subscription) or Linux, depending on what the server will be used for.
I don't imagine we're the only ones, either; I wonder how common this practice is
This practice is unlikely to be very common, atleast since its absolutely illegal. The Windows Server license that comes with MSDN is for development purposes only (non-commercial). Additionally, you cannot go about and install it all around, then you will need multiple MSDN licenses.
About Linux, I am not sure whether you will be violating. I heard its like free beer or something.
This could become one of the biggest challenges for Open Source in the years to come. The biggies could but these companies (often run by a handful of good men) for a small sum; and then change the way they function. Of course the old source will still be available, but the guys who know the intricacies will no longer be working on it. Bug fixes might be late, new features may never come. Many of the old users will leave, some stay hoping for the best. All the roadmaps vanish. Until someone picks up the ashes and starts again. Rebirth.
I am not sure how fair it will be to ask any company/people to not take a multi-MILLION dollar offer, so that they would remain FREE.
You can mod this funny, 'cause after I finished writing it feels like a para from MadMax.
To me this sounds more like a marketing ploy. So that they could go to potential clients and say, "Look we are so secure and futuristic that we need embedded chips in humans to access our critical datacenter!". Client is left stunned.
IANA American, but I hope that the goverment would do something if this was forced on the employees working in the datacenter. After all, what can this achieve which cannot be done with a retinal scan, RFID tag combo? If the criminal can pass the retinal scan, can't he also pluck the RFID from the employee and stick into his arm?
Huh..... I would hate it if someone said they are gonna put a chip inside my body. Wait till someone gets hurt and the company gets sued for a million dollars.
Are you saying that people just woke up to this "trend"? The industry decided years ago that Mhz war will stop, and everyone will try to put more cores in. Its not like no-one else knew it was coming.
IRIX and Solaris are known to scale far beyond 4 processors.
So does almost every other OS. Linux scales to 1000s of processors, in IBMs supercomputers. Windows 2003 Datacenter supports 64 processors (Which is more than enough for a regular commercial application. In case you want more, instead of scaling up, you should be scaling OUT.) AIX, HP-UX etc also have great support.
If they can come out with a system that appeals to developers and business users, then they could take on Apple, Sun, Dell and others again
SGI competing with APPLE and DELL???? In what segment, but in the figment of your imagination?
SGI?? They lost $100m in 2004, $72m in 2005. They are nearly _dead_ and looking for a sell-out. In many ways they deserve it, I still remember their CD drive being priced 10 times higher than the ones in the market if you wanted to replace one. And of course, being totally proprietary nothing else would fit in. Who is buying IRIX now? And SGI now focuses on Linux.
I don't know who modded you interesting. And I did not know SGI still had fans!
This is silly. Microsoft made a conscious decision to license software per CPU (or per Slot) rather than core, and they had announced that they are doing so because multi-core looked like the natural way in which CPUs will improve, given that the Mhz war has ended. In fact they were the first major company to do so.
Also, this does not really eat into MS bottom line compared to Oracle or IBM. Most of MS revenue comes from the the desktop, while they are just competing in servers. Sql Server suddenly becomes more attractive, given Oracles complicated multi-core policy. (Remember that Oracle earlier announced that every core is a CPU, its just recently that they realized it will be a disaster and modified their original plans.)
Earlier CPU speeds doubled every 18 months. Multi-core will simply take another approach to achieving the same. I am not sure how this will hurt software companies any more than increasing cycles/sec.
The target surely seems to be Vista. If Linux did not do this it would have meant that Vista would have a free ride with fancy hardware accelerated 3D transparent glassy glossy grossy interfaces. For J6P, the OS is only as good as it looks.
.Net based) include something called Avalon, which benefits (and at times requires) hardware accelerated graphics. If X did not have hardware accelerated graphics, this would have been a block in the progress of Mono.
Since Miguel is involved I sure hope we can target all this hardware accelerated goodness with Mono as well. Mono makes making Linux apps amazingly easy, atleast for those of us with years of Windows programming background. This step is absolutely essential for Mono while it tries for Windows API compatibility. The upcoming Windows APIs (called WinFX, which is
Well, for Mono lovers this is the reason to rejoice.
This has all the potential to start a new revolution in P2P bandwidth sharing, just like Napster. In the end, the whole this is pretty good for easy/cheap internet access. But....
The whole thing rests with a private company.
Unlike Napster:
1. The entry barrier is huge. [We are not dealing with data alone]
2. It is difficult to switch to another service; unlike Kazaa to eDonkey to BitTorrent. The reach of the service is local, for Napster it was anyone anywhere with a Network Connection.
3. The guy who started this, is more of a shrewd businessman. He may not give a damn about all that "Freedom" that we really care about.
4. Lots of chicken and egg issues for a competitor to spring up [like ISP support]
By 2008, if this service has 5 million people hooked (like Napster); then where will we stand? To emphasize, unlike switching email providers, or P2P servers, the entry barrier will be monstrous; and only an investment from the likes of Microsoft or IBM will create a competitor.
I will never sign-up for this!
By end 2006, we are gonna miss these all time hits from the charts
;)
1. Duke Nukem Forever (also Duke Nukem Whenever, Duke Nukem If Ever)
2. Windows Vista (formerly Longhorn)
3. PS3
Google's Beta products are good candidates, they never seem to get released too.