I'm with you on this. This is so much VaporHARDware at this point. Seems to be the normal MS strategy of putting out the vapors(also known as farting) two years in advance to squish the competition before it happens.
Look - so you come up with some way to apply a patch that doesn't contain any of the original source code. (Get's around that particular arguement.) But - what is the end result after a patch is applied. It is without arguement a derivative work covered by the original codes' license. Further - I choose to distribute this NEW derivative work under the original terms of the original code. We're back to GPL'd code.
If you have some silly license that doesn't allow the result to be distributed under GPL - no-one will apply said patch. So then the arguement becomes irrelevant!
California has had a law since around 1980 that took away a companies right to claim anything you developed on your own time using only your own resources. If you used ANY company resources they can claim it, or did it on their time. Thus, I'm pretty sure that any such clause in a contract in CA is invalid. From my understanding, you can't be compelled to give this right away.
Not a lawyer, but your mileage may vary. I do know that my employer was the one that notified us of the law and notified us that that portion of our employment agreement was now void.
First - please consider that Software patents right now are protected for something like 17 years(or whatever the number is) so 3-5 years is a vast improvement. Bezos is asking for reform and is prominant enough to be listened too. Example: Mr. Phil Karn has been yelling about this for a few years now but no-one has listened to him. Phil's is really only known in certain internet engineering cirlces and amateur radio. Bezos is known on Wall Street. WAY DIFFERENT level of celebrity. My point is that baby steps are more likely to be acceptable.
Now onto the idea itself, Bezos' claim and RMS.
Bezos' claim about use of "defensive patents" is an idea of heard before, and seen in action. Look into the history of many of the high tech patent battles and you'll find suit and counter-suit. If they get settled out of court ( the nominal pattern ) you finally see them trading stock portfolio rights. It's a little like having a war chest for patent fights. This DOES happen. The measure is - will Amazon be the first to go to court. If not, then indeed they are taking a defensive stand.
(Note - none of the above is trying to defend the relevance or whether the concept of their patent is reasonable or obvious..just that companies behave this way, and he isn't any different.)
With respect to RMS, he has never been known for being willing to compromise, so you'd expect less from him? In this case his response is as predictable as the Sun rising.
Well, I've got one on order down at Circuit City with no mention of the net access cost. It was $108(tax included...) so now it's off to Frys for a hard drive;-)
Well - that IS a problem, but there are solutions available. First, there are open source software solutions that are being developed to do gate level synthesis. The Alliance VHDL environment can already do Xilinx synth as an example. The place and route still requires commercial solutions, but there are folks that have access to those tools around;-)
Crusoe isn't revolutionary, but rather evolutionary. It isn't the first VLIW machine by a ways. Rather, it is their decendant. It DOES fix what has been the achilles heel of VLIW - that you had to recompile for every addition of a new functional unit. It recompiles the code - on-the-fly!
As for the article - he's right up there with Algore, i.e. the inventer of the internet as far as his current prognosications....at least Metcalfe can make SOME claim to being involved in networking;-)
I wrote the fellow what I thought was a reasoned and polite letter. My response was curt - A response to the effect that my mail was deleted - apparently because I didn't fully agree with him.
I happen to have read a rather complete biography of Tesla when I was a kid, I'm an EE, and a ham radio operator too. Edison, Tesla, Marconi, etc are heroes of mine, and I have a fair idea of the accurate story. I happen to know that at least in EE school, Tesla isn't given short-shrift as to what he invented.
The guy has an agenda of his own that doesn't allow him to discuss it in a reasoned manner.
Think about it for a minute - what products does Corel offer? Well first it was a Word processor/Business suite. Next they put together an OS package for the end user. The last piece of the puzzle is development languages/Data Base system. Sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's product mix.
Sure seems that MS is settting up to compete with MS across the spectrum.
Beating a modern compiler is easy...if you have the right backround. For people that came into programming when 16KBytes was ALOT of memory, assembly coding in an efficient manner is like breathing air. For folks that grew up in the era of 16Mb isn't enough to boot my OS, well... hopefully you see my point.
Modern compilers are marevelous pieces of technology...and I've worked with some of the best folks in the field at one time or another (most of these folks are off working at HP or Intel right now on Merced me thinks..) Those same folks could write better code than their compilers produced.
Note - The Merced and it's breathern are considered decendants of the VLIW machines built in the 80's. Alot of the same people are working on Merced that were the engineers at those VLIW startups.
I'll just say that when the compiler and the machine are already married together, the compiler DOES know about the size of the caches. I'm specifically talking about VLIW hardware as oppossed to a super-scalar machine that has multiple execution units. The main difference between these two classes of machines is that the super-scalar machine has a hardware layer that is doing the instruction scheduling where a VLIW box has the compiler doing that function. Thus I feel your observation is more of an apples and oranges situation.
I think the problem with this arguement comes down to who owns the data. You own a copy of the data which you are licensed to view, but not the data itself when it comes to DVD's. The DVD content is STILL owned by the copyright holder.
It's a legal fine point, but one that is probably sufficient to kill this line of defense.
Years ago I worked at a company that was going to bring VLIW to the commercial world. One of the things they had to invent was MUCH smarter compiler technology. That was in 1985, so the basic ideas involved here are at least that old.
Anyway, when the compiler DOES know the hardware, especially VLIW machines, they can indeed do a job as GOOD as a human. (Look - they won't usually do better jobs, when the guys who designed the machine write code, they're going to do what the compiler is trying to emulate..) But from what I remember, static profiling was considered "good enough" back then if the VLIW machine is built right.
Most codes spend most of their time in inner most loops. If those loops can be rolled up correctly for VLIW you can be executing different interations of the loop within the same instruction slot. Being able to do this is usually the largest performance payoff. If you have a GOOD compiler in the first place, that KNOWS the hardware, then JIT and morphing aren't needed, or help.
The place that I see the morphing being a step forward is that VLIW machines were considered architectural dead-ends until just now. If I use one of these smart compilers for a machine with say 7 functional units, the code that emitted won't work on a machine with 8 functional units, or at least not be optimized any longer. These machines didn't scale well until now! Code-morphing technology completely removes this limitation!
Why would a manufacturer choose Linux as their first OS. Ask VA Linux? No - it's not because they have Linux in their name;-)
Seriously - as one who has been around Unix box development most of his career, OS kernel development is an expensive operation for a company. Doesn't it make more sense to leverage a workable free OS to do the job, i.e. move it to the state you need it in, instead of supporting the entire required infrastructure yourself? That is the single largest reason for a company like SGI or HP to move into the Linux camp with both feet. That isn't to say that they WILL, but it seems like a reasonable move from a stock-holder's point of view, i.e. dollars and sense;-)
First consider the large number of manufacturers that have adopted linux as a second OS. It's likely that a few of them will migrate to Linux as their MAIN OS. Certainly SGI seems to be putting a large piece of their efforts into such a path.
Then there are the manufacturers like VA Linux that use it as their MAIN OS. These guys could go with another OS like one of the BSD's...but Linux has the most momentum (and external support..)
Solaris being "free" doesn't enable either of these two classes of manufacturers. It takes a third player.
Lastly - the open source movement has it's own reason for being and is it's own success story beyond linux. Solaris doesn't play into this part of the story at all.
I think this is GREAT! It carries the message that Linux started delivering to it's logical conclusion. The OS isn't a profit point anymore, but merely part of the iron. Sun makes the majority of their money from the HARDWARE!
But ol' Microsoft can't say that. How do they justify thousands of dollars for W2K when their largest competitor (in the server arena in particular) isn't charging ANYTHING!
Well, I just got this nice pretty box from AOL today. I instructed by wife to place it in the approriate file(round that is...)
Yet I wonder if AOL is going to wind up with a class-action lawsuit for sending a deadly computer virus in the US mail. I mean - explain the difference between this and a mail-based virus? They both wreck your machine!
You are amazed that publishing something about cryptography could be illegal. Ah my son - you should have been around when the IEEE tried to hold a symposium on it back in the early 80's. The NSA tried to get the entire proceedings classified! Things are bad right now - but in some ways they were a whole lot worse!
WD sold off the high-end disk drive controller division to Adaptec 4 years ago or so. (The group was then sold to TI...sheesh). I'd guess that most if not all of their expertise in SCSI went with the sale (personal note -they are GREAT engineers, I had fun working with them.)
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? It DOES run a linux distro - that was
the original hack. Someone found an even
simpler way to get netbsd onto it too!
Now they claim they've made it un-hackable -
time will tell.
I'm with you on this. This is so much VaporHARDware at this point. Seems to be the normal MS strategy of putting out the vapors(also known as farting) two years in advance to squish the competition before it happens.
Hey Bill. TO LATE!
That's true - and no-one EVER distributed
the original code except the book publisher.
So if the original code is available under GPL
already - who's going to pay attention to the
patch?
Look - so you come up with some way to
apply a patch that doesn't contain any of the
original source code. (Get's around that
particular arguement.) But - what is the
end result after a patch is applied. It is
without arguement a derivative work covered by
the original codes' license. Further - I choose
to distribute this NEW derivative work under the
original terms of the original code. We're back
to GPL'd code.
If you have some silly license that doesn't allow
the result to be distributed under GPL - no-one will apply said patch. So then the arguement becomes irrelevant!
Actually, depends on where you signed this.
California has had a law since around 1980 that took away a companies right to claim anything you developed on your own time using only your own resources. If you used ANY company resources they can claim it, or did it on their time. Thus, I'm pretty sure that any such clause in a contract in CA is invalid. From my understanding, you can't be compelled to give this right away.
Not a lawyer, but your mileage may vary. I do know that my employer was the one that notified us of the law and notified us that that portion of our employment agreement was now void.
First - please consider that Software patents
right now are protected for something like 17 years(or whatever the number is) so 3-5 years is a vast improvement. Bezos is asking for reform and is prominant enough to be listened too. Example: Mr. Phil Karn has been yelling about this for a few years now but no-one has listened to him. Phil's is really only known in certain internet engineering cirlces and amateur radio. Bezos is known on Wall Street. WAY DIFFERENT level of celebrity. My point is that baby steps are more likely to be acceptable.
Now onto the idea itself, Bezos' claim and RMS.
Bezos' claim about use of "defensive patents" is an idea of heard before, and seen in action. Look into the history of many of the high tech patent battles and you'll find suit and counter-suit. If they get settled out of court ( the nominal pattern ) you finally see them trading stock portfolio rights. It's a little like having a war chest for patent fights. This DOES happen.
The measure is - will Amazon be the first to go to court. If not, then indeed they are taking a defensive stand.
(Note - none of the above is trying to defend the relevance or whether the concept of their patent is reasonable or obvious..just that companies behave this way, and he isn't any different.)
With respect to RMS, he has never been known for being willing to compromise, so you'd expect less from him? In this case his response is as predictable as the Sun rising.
Well, I've got one on order down at Circuit ;-)
City with no mention of the net access cost.
It was $108(tax included...) so now it's off
to Frys for a hard drive
Should be a fun hack!
okay - so the symbolic link is aimed at an NFS
mounted file system. Or maybe it's an ftp'able file system - both have been done.
This is a non-invention. Heck, I remember using sym-links on BSD 4.2 in 1984.
Well - that IS a problem, but there are solutions available. First, there are open source software solutions that are being developed to do gate level synthesis. The Alliance VHDL environment can already do Xilinx synth as an example. The place and route still requires commercial solutions, but there are folks that have access to those tools around ;-)
Steve
I've been an "information worker" for 20 years and the average work week is a minimum of 40 hours and more likely 60 hours a week.
Crusoe isn't revolutionary, but rather evolutionary. It isn't the first VLIW machine by a ways. Rather, it is their decendant. It DOES fix what has been the achilles heel of VLIW - that you had to recompile for every addition of a new functional unit. It recompiles the code - on-the-fly!
;-)
As for the article - he's right up there with Algore, i.e. the inventer of the internet as far as his current prognosications....at least Metcalfe can make SOME claim to being involved in networking
I think that's more appropriately 65K reasons to not believe the MS FUD.
Steve
I wrote the fellow what I thought was a reasoned and polite letter. My response was curt - A response to the effect that my mail was deleted - apparently because I didn't fully agree with him.
I happen to have read a rather complete biography of Tesla when I was a kid, I'm an EE, and a ham radio operator too. Edison, Tesla, Marconi, etc are heroes of mine, and I have a fair idea of the accurate story. I happen to know that at least in EE school, Tesla isn't given short-shrift as to what he invented.
The guy has an agenda of his own that doesn't allow him to discuss it in a reasoned manner.
Think about it for a minute - what products does Corel offer? Well first it was a Word processor/Business suite. Next they put together an OS package for the end user. The last piece of the puzzle is development languages/Data Base system. Sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's product mix.
Sure seems that MS is settting up to compete with MS across the spectrum.
Jilles,
Beating a modern compiler is easy...if you have the right backround. For people that came into programming when 16KBytes was ALOT of memory, assembly coding in an efficient manner is like breathing air. For folks that grew up in the era of 16Mb isn't enough to boot my OS, well... hopefully you see my point.
Modern compilers are marevelous pieces of technology...and I've worked with some of the best folks in the field at one time or another (most of these folks are off working at HP or Intel right now on Merced me thinks..) Those same folks could write better code than their compilers produced.
Note - The Merced and it's breathern are considered decendants of the VLIW machines built in the 80's. Alot of the same people are working on Merced that were the engineers at those VLIW startups.
I'll just say that when the compiler and the machine are already married together, the compiler DOES know about the size of the caches. I'm specifically talking about VLIW hardware as oppossed to a super-scalar machine that has multiple execution units. The main difference between these two classes of machines is that the super-scalar machine has a hardware layer that is doing the instruction scheduling where a VLIW box has the compiler doing that function. Thus I feel your observation is more of an apples and oranges situation.
I think the problem with this arguement comes down to who owns the data. You own a copy of the data which you are licensed to view, but not the data itself when it comes to DVD's. The DVD content is STILL owned by the copyright holder.
It's a legal fine point, but one that is probably sufficient to kill this line of defense.
Years ago I worked at a company that was going to bring VLIW to the commercial world. One of the things they had to invent was MUCH smarter compiler technology. That was in 1985, so the basic ideas involved here are at least that old.
Anyway, when the compiler DOES know the hardware, especially VLIW machines, they can indeed do a job as GOOD as a human. (Look - they won't usually do better jobs, when the guys who designed the machine write code, they're going to do what the compiler is trying to emulate..) But from what I remember, static profiling was considered "good enough" back then if the VLIW machine is built right.
Most codes spend most of their time in inner most loops. If those loops can be rolled up correctly for VLIW you can be executing different interations of the loop within the same instruction slot. Being able to do this is usually the largest performance payoff. If you have a GOOD compiler in the first place, that KNOWS the hardware, then JIT and morphing aren't needed, or help.
The place that I see the morphing being a step forward is that VLIW machines were considered architectural dead-ends until just now. If I use one of these smart compilers for a machine with say 7 functional units, the code that emitted won't work on a machine with 8 functional units, or at least not be optimized any longer. These machines didn't scale well until now! Code-morphing technology completely removes this limitation!
Why would a manufacturer choose Linux as their first OS. Ask VA Linux? No - it's not because they have Linux in their name ;-)
;-)
Seriously - as one who has been around Unix box development most of his career, OS kernel development is an expensive operation for a company. Doesn't it make more sense to leverage a workable free OS to do the job, i.e. move it to the state you need it in, instead of supporting the entire required infrastructure yourself? That is the single largest reason for a company like SGI or HP to move into the Linux camp with both feet. That isn't to say that they WILL, but it seems like a reasonable move from a stock-holder's point of view, i.e. dollars and sense
I don't think this is really the case.
First consider the large number of manufacturers that have adopted linux as a second OS. It's likely that a few of them will migrate to Linux as their MAIN OS. Certainly SGI seems to be putting a large piece of their efforts into such a path.
Then there are the manufacturers like VA Linux that use it as their MAIN OS. These guys could go with another OS like one of the BSD's...but Linux has the most momentum (and external support..)
Solaris being "free" doesn't enable either of these two classes of manufacturers. It takes a third player.
Lastly - the open source movement has it's own reason for being and is it's own success story beyond linux. Solaris doesn't play into this part of the story at all.
I think this is GREAT! It carries the message that Linux started delivering to it's logical conclusion. The OS isn't a profit point anymore, but merely part of the iron. Sun makes the majority of their money from the HARDWARE!
But ol' Microsoft can't say that. How do they justify thousands of dollars for W2K when their largest competitor (in the server arena in particular) isn't charging ANYTHING!
I just love it!
Well, I just got this nice pretty box from AOL today. I instructed by wife to place it in the approriate file(round that is...)
Yet I wonder if AOL is going to wind up with a class-action lawsuit for sending a deadly computer virus in the US mail. I mean - explain the difference between this and a mail-based virus? They both wreck your machine!
You are amazed that publishing something about cryptography could be illegal. Ah my son - you should have been around when the IEEE tried to hold a symposium on it back in the early 80's. The NSA tried to get the entire proceedings classified! Things are bad right now - but in some ways they were a whole lot worse!
Man!
With all the IP lawsuit news - it's now
"Slashdot -News about alleged IP theft..."
Sheesh!
WD sold off the high-end disk drive controller division to Adaptec 4 years ago or so. (The group was then sold to TI...sheesh). I'd guess that most if not all of their expertise in SCSI went with the sale (personal note -they are GREAT engineers, I had fun working with them.)