I make a living writing custom browser based applications, and mostly use JSP/Servlets for the job. . . So I feel that I am part of the "Java user community" and as such I can tell you that I would feel no relief if Sun chose to open source Java.
Microsoft effectively broke Java by extending it to allow the implimention of native windows widgets that wouldn't run cross platform and since Sun owns Java they were able to sue, and win. I think if Java were open source MS would be free to break it again. It's an old argument and one that we have heard over and over again but it has staying power, I believe, because it is true.
Oh, do read the fscking article before posting, just for once!
Yes, I too make my living writing (mainly) servlets. I think this article makes a lot of sense. The whole stack of tools I use for Java is open source. Partially this is necessity: the stuff I write and sell is open source, so it can't depend on for pay components. But it also can't depend on closed source components because my customers need to know that they can still maintain it if I walk under a bus. They need to have the source.
And, frankly, in today's climate, the same applies to Sun. The computer game is too rough and too fast moving for any second-tier player, like Sun, to have any guarantees of surviving. And people aren't going to bet their businesses on a technology which might disappear from under them just because Bill Gates decided to buy Sun with the spare change for a couple of beers.
If Sun choose - as this article suggests - to dual license Java, with one license being entirely closed and proprietary and the other being the GPL, then Microsoft cannot legally poison the well. Any change they make, they have to publish the source.
If Sun GPL Java they still own Java and they can still sue if Microsoft breaks the terms of the GPL. For Sun to adopt the strategy outlined in this article would, in my mind, be a win for all of us - for you and me as software developers, for our customers' security in their business strategies, and for Sun. I really hope (but don't in the least expect) that Sun will follow this advice.
When you're talking about large enterprise installations, or installations where people want the backing or support of a company, Linux does cost money - ie: Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Yeah, you can download new packages and install updates, but it's easier to use RHN, etc.
This is an oft-repeated argument "against" Linux, however it is a misrepresentation.
First, a number of different Linux distributions (most notably Debian, but also Gentoo, Connectiva...) offer incredibly streamlined update processes (much more so than, say, Windows or even RHN).
I agree it's a misrepresentation, but I think it's an interesting misrepresentation for two reasons:
Microsoft only see commercial distributions as their competition. Their mindset cannot deal with and therefore doesn't recognise or respond to the competition from non-commercial distributions e.g. Debian. When did you last hear a Microsoft spokesman make any reference at all to Debian? And yet Debian is a well known and widely used distribution.
Microsoft are incapable of admitting that anyone may want Linux because it's Linux - or even, because it isn't Windows. They think the problem is just price.
Of course, both of these things may just be the face Microsoft wants to show to the outside world. Inside, Microsoft may be sweating about Linux's open source, better security performance, better response to new security problems, better modularisation, better performance on low-power hardware. Inside, Microsoft may be studying strategies to combat projects like Debian, and, indeed, this studious 'no comment' policy may be part of such a strategy.
But I don't think it is.
Of course, in a big organisation like Microsoft, someone is studying why users really choose Open Source over closed. Of course, in a big organisation like Microsoft, someone is looking at Debian as a competitor. But the feeling I get is that the people at the top aren't. The feeling I get is that the people at the top have a very focussed mindset, wholly within the money economy. They're concentrating on 'strategizing' the marketplace, seeing money ('monetization') as the only value. They don't see that in software itself the money-based market is itself under threat from the gift economy, from an economy based on reputation and esteem instead of money. And of course from their point of view this may be pragmatic - Microsoft, as a commercial corporation, cannot compete in a 'non-monetarized' market. But if I'm right, they are blind to the main threat that's facing them.
Get this -- they caught the guy after he stole about $64,000 CAD, found out that he entered the country illegally and... sent him to prison? Nope. Our illustrious Canadian gov't deported him.
So do you want to pay taxes to support the guy in prison? Prison is expensive. Someone's got to pay for it. You want your taxes to go up? Sending him home stops the problem just as effectively as sending him to prison, and costs a lot less.
If we let girls compete whereever they choose (and I see no reason not to) then we also need to be intellectually honest enough that there's one "free for all" class, and one "females only", and we can no longer pretend it's "equal".
I'm sorry, where's the need for a 'females only' class? Who's calling for it, apart from insecure immature males?
You'd have a situation where it'd basically be a male as "World-Champion" (or whatever) in any sport, and the females would be relegated to "World-Champion - female only class"
Unless, of course, you had a female world champion in the open class, which is a priori equally likely. Women can't win at the highest level in the toughest sport in the world? Tell that to Ellen MacArthur.
An X server is still nice for remote display situations, but honestly: Who does that anymore (and could they not be accomodated with VNC)?
Me, and no.
No for several reasons:
VNC is slow, primarily because it copies bitmaps. X is much faster, because it copies graphics primitives.
VNC does not keep up with dynamically changing displays at all well. X does this fine.
VNC clients are much buggier than X servers, giving many more gliches and crashes.
Don't get me wrong, I also like and use VNC, mainly to control Windows machines. Indeed, I frequently run VNC as part of a remote X session, and, this afternoon, was running a Windows Terminal Services session inside a VNC session in xvncviewer on my KDE desktop.
The point is that with X, it's completely irrelevent whether or not your programs (including your window manager) are running on the box your sat at, or another box in another building, or on fifty different boxes scattered all over the network. It all just works. I tend to run these days with the X server on my laptop, wherever I happend to be, with an 802.11b link; my window manager and lightweight apps on my desktop machine; and eclipse (and, consequntly, javac and tomcat) running on the compile server. That gives me an incredibly high performance system with a client I can use sitting at the bottom of the garden. You cannot do that with VNC, or Windows Terminal Services, or anything other than X.
The UN found lots of chemical weapons. Iraq documented in detail the elimination of part of them. What's the simplest explanation as to why they refused to document elimination of the rest, even after threat of invasion?
Their neighbours - against most of whom they'd fought bitter wars - would realise they were defenceless and give them a good kicking?
Seriously, if you were Saddam, facing a seriously pissed off Iran on one border, a seriously pissed off Kuwait on another border, and some well organised and seriously pissed off Kurds in your own country (not to mention a fairly thoroughly disaffected population) would you have wanted to dance around saying 'look, look, I'm defenceless'? You'd be bloody mad. Saddam was between a rock and a hard place. Both the rock and the hard place were of his own making, but to admit he hadn't got any significant weaponry would have been suicidal. To claim he had would have been suicidal too. So muddying the water was the only strategy he could use which had any chance of working. It didn't work, but that doesn't make it stupid.
I agree with all the people who say that demonstrating the software the customer actually wants to use is best, and that gee whizzery can detract from a presentation. But the most exciting demo of high bandwidth networking I've seen concerned a remote controlled robot vehicle. I was in Japan. I was given a pair of virtual reality goggles. As I walked forward, a little robot in Canada rolled forward, and I got to see in real time what it was seeing. As I turned my head, the little robot turned its cameras, accurately tracking my motion. That was an incredibly effective demo. They also did the same thing with a rear projection cube (i.e. a room about twenty feet square where each wall is a rear-projection screen) but it only really works for the person the system is tracking - everyone else in the room gets parallax distortion.
The people who were giving the demo were the Internet2 crew - they would know what bits you needed to make this work.
My Apple Lisa 2 (aka, Mac XL) dated 1984 had that feature.
You know, I was thinking just the same thing? I didn't have a Lisa, but I did have a 128k Mac, and it did auto-insertion-and-open very neatly. As you say, in '84. That's a mere thirteen years before this was filed.
I've been saying from the beginning that the reason SCO can't produce the code of 'theirs' which they claim has been copied into Linux is because they've never actually seen it. Now they confirm exactly that:
MR. HEISE:...
We have given the technology based upon the information we have. The answers to interrogatories that they are complaining say, yes, but for those given technologies you have not identified the specific lines. What we have said in our answers to interrogatories is we can't identify those specific lines because it comes from your confidential code which we don't have access to yet.
My response, also through the feedback form, was as follows:
This story is highly libellous, and appears to have no basis whatever. There is no evidence that I am aware of that the MyDoom virus has anything to do with any Linux users or promoters.
I feel personally libelled; I feel that my company has been libelled; and I request that you withdraw or ammend this story as soon as possible.
This is the worst sort of gutter journalism and the BBC should distance itself from it as soon as possible.
It's sorta like arguing if a speech I wrote violates the Kings laws, rather than asking if the king should have the right to restrict peoples speech at all to begin with.
Linux, which can be copied and modified freely, has been a hit among businesses since it can be run on personal computer hardware and is based on the widely-used Unix platform.
My emphasis. The claim that Linux is 'based on' UNIX is, after all, what the current law suits are about.
I'd like to start by saying how honoured I am that, for the first time in several years of posting hundreds of messages to Slashdot, it's on this story that I've been moderated as a 'Troll'. I would have thought 'Troll' is precisely the label you give to people who say things that people are not allowed to say.
Secondly
It depends on what you call a concentration camp. If the Nazi term is meant, then no, it's certainly not. No children, no Zyklon B, no exploiting of the work force of innocent civilians, no gruesome medical experiments.
My first wife's mother and her parents were held in concentration camps before and during during the second world war. They were german jewish bankers. Several of her relatives died. But they didn't die until late in the war. In the nineteen thirties when the concentration camps were first opened, there were no children, no Zyklon B (or other forms of execution), no gruesome medical experiments, and no excessive exploitation of labour. The prisoners were (unlike those at Guantanamo) able to associate freely and able to practice their religion. Also unlike those at Guantanamo, they had some degree of privacy. In other words, for the first ten years of their existance, the Nazi concentration camps were more liberal and less harsh than Guantanamo is now. What will Guantanamo be like in ten years time? Will it then be the only US concentration camp? Is it now the only US concentration camp, or are there others, in Afghanistan perhaps, of which we are not being told?
The clear point is, the prisoners at Guantanamo have clear rights both under the Geneva Conventions - which the US is signatory to - and under US law. But they are not being permitted to exercise those rights. Like the jews of Nazi Germany, they have been placed outside the protection of the law. They have been made Untermensch.
Being European and leaning slightly to the left I'd like to see that page drawn up. And please don't be coy with details, I know my German history. Make sure to mark the counterparts of the Holocaust and the Gleichschaltung in bold so I won't miss them.
Jews to Belsen, Muslims to Guantanamo Bay...
The Nazi concentration camps weren't death camps to begin with. It took several years between the start of the policy of vilification of Muslims - sorry, I meant Jews - and the start of the policy of extermination. But it's a process, and one which the United States has clearly begun. Like the Jews at Belsen, the Muslims at Guantanamo Bay have been made Untermensch, outside the protection of normal law.
Muslim citizens in the United States are already subject to arbitrary arrest and detention without charge. They're subject to invasive searches and monitoring when they travel. They're already subject to threats and abuse from their neighbours. This is just what the Jews in Germany were experiencing in the late twenties and early thirties. And the first concentration camp has now been operating for over a year.
Remember:
In Germany first they came for the communists
and I did not speak out-
because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out-
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out-
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics
and I did not speak out-
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me-
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
They're coming for the muslims now. What are you going to do?
Thus my question, "What do they want, CGI scripts?". The idea of eCommerce over the web started taking off in the '98-'99 time frame. About then, the technologies starting showing up to support it. Prior to that, CGI scripts and ColdFusion (only a short time prior) were the only options.
Here's an e-commerce site which I wrote in 1997 and which hasn't had any significant redevelopment since 1998. Obviously it wasn't the first one I'd written, but it's the oldest that's still in use. As you can see it' written in PHP. Yes, I know it doesn't take credit card transactions online - the software can, but the owner asked for this to be switched off because he was to tight to pay for the certificate. The software can also do two different types of online auction, but this is also now switched off.
There was nothing new or clever about e-commerce systems in 1997; I wrote my first one in 1995.
If you go here
you'll find a whole entirely data driven website (no static pages at all) which I wrote in January 1996. It obviously wasn't my first such website, but it's the oldest one that the Wayback machine has records of as most of the earlier ones were on intranets. Parts of it were written in C CGIs but most of it was written in PHP version 2.
I've been building database driven web systems since 1994, and these days do it mainly in Servlets and am 'Proficient in Java'. My girlfriend developed an Oracle based financial information system on her college's Intranet in 1994, using Mosaic as the client because Netscape didn't yet exist. Having seven years experience of Web technologies and (now) being proficient in Java is not particularly difficult or interesting - there are lots of us about.
Interesting question. In the big section on 'what do you use Linux for' was a thing about print servers. Our print server is BSD, not Linux, so I put 'don't use' - because it's not something we use Linux for. If they assume we use Windows for our print servers, that's their problem.
My view is that in the longer term this case is destined to be viewed as one of the great examples of unacceptable corporate behaviour - an example, alongside Enron, of the total breakdown of ethics in corporate governance. It's going to be held up in legislatures and in MBA courses as an exemplar of behaviour to be condemned utterly.
And Boies has voluntarily chosen to associate himself with it... I really find that difficult to understand. He cannot come out of it with credit. Prospective clients are not going to want their names tarnished by association with this mess. There's a good chance that he'll never be able to work again. Why is he doing it?
TRS-80 Model I/III - these affordable computers were the first to have inexpensive networking. They had a multiplexer device avaiable (think hub) that workied through the casette port - one computer could 'save' to another 'loading' computer. Cheap, by clever, flie-level networking for the masses.
Are you sure that's the first? I agree the TRS80s were early, but the Acorn Atom (1980 - and I have one from that year with the network card) had Econet, a network with up to 255 nodes per subnet and a protocol for servers (machines with hard disk and/or printers) to advertise themselves to clients.
I've been interested in this project for some time and have been exchanging email with Karl Nicolai about it. Yes, OK, a gearbox is not going to be a win on a road racing bike for a number of reasons, but not all bikes are road-racing bikes. On any mountain bike (I'm particularly interested in cross country bikes, where weight does matter) this is a potential win.
It's true that in perfect conditions a deraileur system is more efficient than a gearbox. But mountain bikes operate in less than perfect conditions. Sticks and branches get tangled in delicate deraileur mechs and wreck them. The increasingly delicate deraileur chain operates in a cloud of grit particles which cause rapid wear to all parts of the drive train. And the chain operates for much of the time at transverse angles which sap its efficiency - these angles get more extreme as the number of gears increases. So in mountain bike conditions deraileurs don't deliver anything like the efficiency that chain systems offer in optimal conditions.
The Rohloff hub isn't new. It has been an upmarket preferred fit on European touring bikes and recumbents (and some audaxes) for some time. It's a robust, reliable and efficient unit. Furthermore, it's only about 200gm overall heavier than an equivalent deraileur setup. Karl Nicolai's innovation has been to put the Rohloff at the suspension pivot, thus putting all that expensive engineering into the most protected part of the frame and also substantially reducing the unsprung weight.
However, if the gearbox is going to be around the bottom bracket it doesn't have to be epicyclic, and consequently a cheaper, simpler and possibly lighter gearbox than the Rohloff could be used. Also, you could do away with the primary drive chain, which is an inefficiency on the current Nucleon design.
The benefits you get are a very much more robust and reliable drive train with even gear spacings. The weight penalty will probably end up less than 100 grammes (perhaps even less as the structure of the gearbox becomes an integral part of the frame), and the efficiency penalty in real world conditions - for mountain bikes - is likely to be nil.
So I think within five years we'll see gearbox driven cross country mountain bikes wich are competitive in terms of weight and efficiency with deraileur models. The gearbox will not be an aftermarket fit - it will be integral with the frame. It will offer about twelve to fourteen ratios, but as these will all be usable and will be evenly spaced with no duplication this will be adequate to compete with the so-called 27 speed deraileur systems (which typically have lots of overlap and duplication).
master ship builders were forced to drink all of the water that seeped into the belly of the ship during the first day's sail. a man could explode or drown from ingesting hundreds of gallons of water. master ship builders relied on doing the job correctly, not on a piece of paper.
Man, you have an amazing imagination!
Wood swells when it gets wet. If you build a woden boat completely tight, then when you put it in the water there's a good chance it will fail from the compression - you'll burst the fastenings. So wooden boats are not built completely tight, and when first put in the water they leak. Even a medium sized wooden ship will leak several tons of water on its first day after launch.
If your claim were true, Europeans would never have got to the Americas (which might be a very good thing).
If any random person (and your interviewer would count, unless they are Magnum PI) can locate you over the web, using nothing more than Google (or any other search engine), you have a lot more to worry about than whether or not your prospective employer knows too much about you.
Well, you can find out all about me
without a great deal of difficulty. You havebeen able to for years (even further back than the wayback machine remembers). I don't have a problem with this. I'm my own employer, and as I'm allergic to bosses I expect I always will be. If what I think or write shocks or offends you, that's your problem.
If you're so paranoid that you don't like the idea of other people knowing about you, fair enough. I'm not.
Slashdot Mirror
And the cream of the joke is that if you do it links straight back to....
This thread!
Oh, do read the fscking article before posting, just for once!
Yes, I too make my living writing (mainly) servlets. I think this article makes a lot of sense. The whole stack of tools I use for Java is open source. Partially this is necessity: the stuff I write and sell is open source, so it can't depend on for pay components. But it also can't depend on closed source components because my customers need to know that they can still maintain it if I walk under a bus. They need to have the source.
And, frankly, in today's climate, the same applies to Sun. The computer game is too rough and too fast moving for any second-tier player, like Sun, to have any guarantees of surviving. And people aren't going to bet their businesses on a technology which might disappear from under them just because Bill Gates decided to buy Sun with the spare change for a couple of beers.
If Sun choose - as this article suggests - to dual license Java, with one license being entirely closed and proprietary and the other being the GPL, then Microsoft cannot legally poison the well. Any change they make, they have to publish the source.
If Sun GPL Java they still own Java and they can still sue if Microsoft breaks the terms of the GPL. For Sun to adopt the strategy outlined in this article would, in my mind, be a win for all of us - for you and me as software developers, for our customers' security in their business strategies, and for Sun. I really hope (but don't in the least expect) that Sun will follow this advice.
I agree it's a misrepresentation, but I think it's an interesting misrepresentation for two reasons:
Of course, both of these things may just be the face Microsoft wants to show to the outside world. Inside, Microsoft may be sweating about Linux's open source, better security performance, better response to new security problems, better modularisation, better performance on low-power hardware. Inside, Microsoft may be studying strategies to combat projects like Debian, and, indeed, this studious 'no comment' policy may be part of such a strategy.
But I don't think it is.
Of course, in a big organisation like Microsoft, someone is studying why users really choose Open Source over closed. Of course, in a big organisation like Microsoft, someone is looking at Debian as a competitor. But the feeling I get is that the people at the top aren't. The feeling I get is that the people at the top have a very focussed mindset, wholly within the money economy. They're concentrating on 'strategizing' the marketplace, seeing money ('monetization') as the only value. They don't see that in software itself the money-based market is itself under threat from the gift economy, from an economy based on reputation and esteem instead of money. And of course from their point of view this may be pragmatic - Microsoft, as a commercial corporation, cannot compete in a 'non-monetarized' market. But if I'm right, they are blind to the main threat that's facing them.
So do you want to pay taxes to support the guy in prison? Prison is expensive. Someone's got to pay for it. You want your taxes to go up? Sending him home stops the problem just as effectively as sending him to prison, and costs a lot less.
I'm sorry, where's the need for a 'females only' class? Who's calling for it, apart from insecure immature males?
Unless, of course, you had a female world champion in the open class, which is a priori equally likely. Women can't win at the highest level in the toughest sport in the world? Tell that to Ellen MacArthur.
Me, and no.
No for several reasons:
Don't get me wrong, I also like and use VNC, mainly to control Windows machines. Indeed, I frequently run VNC as part of a remote X session, and, this afternoon, was running a Windows Terminal Services session inside a VNC session in xvncviewer on my KDE desktop.
The point is that with X, it's completely irrelevent whether or not your programs (including your window manager) are running on the box your sat at, or another box in another building, or on fifty different boxes scattered all over the network. It all just works. I tend to run these days with the X server on my laptop, wherever I happend to be, with an 802.11b link; my window manager and lightweight apps on my desktop machine; and eclipse (and, consequntly, javac and tomcat) running on the compile server. That gives me an incredibly high performance system with a client I can use sitting at the bottom of the garden. You cannot do that with VNC, or Windows Terminal Services, or anything other than X.
Their neighbours - against most of whom they'd fought bitter wars - would realise they were defenceless and give them a good kicking?
Seriously, if you were Saddam, facing a seriously pissed off Iran on one border, a seriously pissed off Kuwait on another border, and some well organised and seriously pissed off Kurds in your own country (not to mention a fairly thoroughly disaffected population) would you have wanted to dance around saying 'look, look, I'm defenceless'? You'd be bloody mad. Saddam was between a rock and a hard place. Both the rock and the hard place were of his own making, but to admit he hadn't got any significant weaponry would have been suicidal. To claim he had would have been suicidal too. So muddying the water was the only strategy he could use which had any chance of working. It didn't work, but that doesn't make it stupid.
I thought it was impossible sufficiently to misunderestimate Bush?
The people who were giving the demo were the Internet2 crew - they would know what bits you needed to make this work.
You know, I was thinking just the same thing? I didn't have a Lisa, but I did have a 128k Mac, and it did auto-insertion-and-open very neatly. As you say, in '84. That's a mere thirteen years before this was filed.
[Grocklaw's emphasis]
This is the worst sort of gutter journalism and the BBC should distance itself from it as soon as possible.
Well said that man.
My emphasis. The claim that Linux is 'based on' UNIX is, after all, what the current law suits are about.
Secondly
My first wife's mother and her parents were held in concentration camps before and during during the second world war. They were german jewish bankers. Several of her relatives died. But they didn't die until late in the war. In the nineteen thirties when the concentration camps were first opened, there were no children, no Zyklon B (or other forms of execution), no gruesome medical experiments, and no excessive exploitation of labour. The prisoners were (unlike those at Guantanamo) able to associate freely and able to practice their religion. Also unlike those at Guantanamo, they had some degree of privacy. In other words, for the first ten years of their existance, the Nazi concentration camps were more liberal and less harsh than Guantanamo is now. What will Guantanamo be like in ten years time? Will it then be the only US concentration camp? Is it now the only US concentration camp, or are there others, in Afghanistan perhaps, of which we are not being told?
The clear point is, the prisoners at Guantanamo have clear rights both under the Geneva Conventions - which the US is signatory to - and under US law. But they are not being permitted to exercise those rights. Like the jews of Nazi Germany, they have been placed outside the protection of the law. They have been made Untermensch.
Jews to Belsen, Muslims to Guantanamo Bay... The Nazi concentration camps weren't death camps to begin with. It took several years between the start of the policy of vilification of Muslims - sorry, I meant Jews - and the start of the policy of extermination. But it's a process, and one which the United States has clearly begun. Like the Jews at Belsen, the Muslims at Guantanamo Bay have been made Untermensch, outside the protection of normal law.
Muslim citizens in the United States are already subject to arbitrary arrest and detention without charge. They're subject to invasive searches and monitoring when they travel. They're already subject to threats and abuse from their neighbours. This is just what the Jews in Germany were experiencing in the late twenties and early thirties. And the first concentration camp has now been operating for over a year.
Remember:
They're coming for the muslims now. What are you going to do?
Here's an e-commerce site which I wrote in 1997 and which hasn't had any significant redevelopment since 1998. Obviously it wasn't the first one I'd written, but it's the oldest that's still in use. As you can see it' written in PHP. Yes, I know it doesn't take credit card transactions online - the software can, but the owner asked for this to be switched off because he was to tight to pay for the certificate. The software can also do two different types of online auction, but this is also now switched off.
There was nothing new or clever about e-commerce systems in 1997; I wrote my first one in 1995.
If you go here you'll find a whole entirely data driven website (no static pages at all) which I wrote in January 1996. It obviously wasn't my first such website, but it's the oldest one that the Wayback machine has records of as most of the earlier ones were on intranets. Parts of it were written in C CGIs but most of it was written in PHP version 2.
I've been building database driven web systems since 1994, and these days do it mainly in Servlets and am 'Proficient in Java'. My girlfriend developed an Oracle based financial information system on her college's Intranet in 1994, using Mosaic as the client because Netscape didn't yet exist. Having seven years experience of Web technologies and (now) being proficient in Java is not particularly difficult or interesting - there are lots of us about.
Interesting question. In the big section on 'what do you use Linux for' was a thing about print servers. Our print server is BSD, not Linux, so I put 'don't use' - because it's not something we use Linux for. If they assume we use Windows for our print servers, that's their problem.
And Boies has voluntarily chosen to associate himself with it... I really find that difficult to understand. He cannot come out of it with credit. Prospective clients are not going to want their names tarnished by association with this mess. There's a good chance that he'll never be able to work again. Why is he doing it?
Are you sure that's the first? I agree the TRS80s were early, but the Acorn Atom (1980 - and I have one from that year with the network card) had Econet, a network with up to 255 nodes per subnet and a protocol for servers (machines with hard disk and/or printers) to advertise themselves to clients.
I've been interested in this project for some time and have been exchanging email with Karl Nicolai about it. Yes, OK, a gearbox is not going to be a win on a road racing bike for a number of reasons, but not all bikes are road-racing bikes. On any mountain bike (I'm particularly interested in cross country bikes, where weight does matter) this is a potential win.
It's true that in perfect conditions a deraileur system is more efficient than a gearbox. But mountain bikes operate in less than perfect conditions. Sticks and branches get tangled in delicate deraileur mechs and wreck them. The increasingly delicate deraileur chain operates in a cloud of grit particles which cause rapid wear to all parts of the drive train. And the chain operates for much of the time at transverse angles which sap its efficiency - these angles get more extreme as the number of gears increases. So in mountain bike conditions deraileurs don't deliver anything like the efficiency that chain systems offer in optimal conditions.
The Rohloff hub isn't new. It has been an upmarket preferred fit on European touring bikes and recumbents (and some audaxes) for some time. It's a robust, reliable and efficient unit. Furthermore, it's only about 200gm overall heavier than an equivalent deraileur setup. Karl Nicolai's innovation has been to put the Rohloff at the suspension pivot, thus putting all that expensive engineering into the most protected part of the frame and also substantially reducing the unsprung weight.
However, if the gearbox is going to be around the bottom bracket it doesn't have to be epicyclic, and consequently a cheaper, simpler and possibly lighter gearbox than the Rohloff could be used. Also, you could do away with the primary drive chain, which is an inefficiency on the current Nucleon design.
The benefits you get are a very much more robust and reliable drive train with even gear spacings. The weight penalty will probably end up less than 100 grammes (perhaps even less as the structure of the gearbox becomes an integral part of the frame), and the efficiency penalty in real world conditions - for mountain bikes - is likely to be nil.
So I think within five years we'll see gearbox driven cross country mountain bikes wich are competitive in terms of weight and efficiency with deraileur models. The gearbox will not be an aftermarket fit - it will be integral with the frame. It will offer about twelve to fourteen ratios, but as these will all be usable and will be evenly spaced with no duplication this will be adequate to compete with the so-called 27 speed deraileur systems (which typically have lots of overlap and duplication).
Man, you have an amazing imagination!
Wood swells when it gets wet. If you build a woden boat completely tight, then when you put it in the water there's a good chance it will fail from the compression - you'll burst the fastenings. So wooden boats are not built completely tight, and when first put in the water they leak. Even a medium sized wooden ship will leak several tons of water on its first day after launch.
If your claim were true, Europeans would never have got to the Americas (which might be a very good thing).
Well, you can find out all about me without a great deal of difficulty. You have been able to for years (even further back than the wayback machine remembers). I don't have a problem with this. I'm my own employer, and as I'm allergic to bosses I expect I always will be. If what I think or write shocks or offends you, that's your problem.
If you're so paranoid that you don't like the idea of other people knowing about you, fair enough. I'm not.