Scansoft's CEO is Paul Ricci, a slime-breathing pond-scum who used to be an executive at Xerox. It doesn't surprise me that they are giving the original creators of the software the shaft. Ricci managed to fail his way upwards out of Xerox, and is probably busy driving Scansoft slowly out of business now.
Without all the mumbo-jumbo, the way you can pick out multiple phases of the signal is to have a couple of antennas, spaced at about maybe 1/4 wavelength apart or so. It's called "diversity" and radios in cars have had it since the 1940's, only it's not so popular anymore. You just pick the antenna that has the best strength or signal coded for you or whatever.
For a project I worked on at Keio Univ. in Japan, we ordered some of the Axis web cams, which use an older version of the same chip, as well as some of the developer boards.
The system works as advertised; developing software and deploying it is very easy, you just do a "make" in the source directory on your host, and it builds the flash rom image, and you download it via ethernet with a single command. You can ftp over to the board to upload binaries or other files, and there's a telnet client.
The only problems I had with the dev board were that it doesn't really have much useful I/O on it. It has three serial ports and 16 bit parallel port, which can be used as an IDE drive or USB port, but at the time we got the system, you had to kind of roll your own interface. And at the time the drivers for the parallel port weren't shipping standard so I had to write my own kernel driver for it.
I was having a party and wanted to get some new music for it the day before. I used Kazaa to search and download some christmas songs by Louis Armstrong, other older Jazz and Barrelhouse artists, and some contemporary ones.
I would have been happy to pay around.25 to.50 per song. I wanted them right away, I wanted a big selection, I didn't want to have CD's to change and purchase and discard the packaging.
I would love to put money in the hands of the artists directly. I contribute to web sites such as dyndns.org , eff, granitecanyon, etc, that provide services, even though it is not required.
I think the music publishing industry are a bunch of thugs and parasites, by and large, and they have been crushing the smaller and independent studios and artists, while calling the public thieves and pirates. They are now petitioning congress to install monitoring in all of our computing equipment.
People, this HAS TO STOP. Right now we fight back through the EFF, and other public interest groups. Give them money and take the time to write to your congress people, before you are thrown in jail by the record companies.
I first came across Boa a couple of years ago because it was running on the Axis webcam, which is a webcam running Linux in 8 MB of RAM and 2 MB of Flash ROM. It was impressive to see such a small footprint web server being used in production for an embedded appliance, running Linux.
Just last week, I wanted to implement a custom server for my house; I have a Model 28 teletype, which I wanted to hook to the ethernet. I took an old PC, and downloaded a copy of Boa. I then added code to it's main select() loop to service the serial port connected to the teletype. Now I have a state of the art ethernet-to-teletype gateway machine. It was easy to do because Boa is simple and easy to understand. So people whining about which web server is "faster" are missing the point entirely; Developer's time is worth much more than CPU time in most situations. And developing using Boa's source base was the best option for what I needed to do.
Everyone needs to start referring to Palladium as "restricted" computing, rather than "secure" or "trusted". It is more accurate, and will better serve to explain to people in a word what they are getting railroaded into accepting.
People need to understand the power of words in this battle. This is a battlefield of ideas, and we are losing the battle, because of the massive PR machine of Microsoft and Hollywood.
I've used Postgres in a dozen relational database-backed server projects in the last three years. It installs faster than MySQL, I can do a Postgres install in literally ten minutes to get a functioning basic configuration.
Sometimes, I believe the MySQL advocates are in some kind of strange parallel universe. Postgres is a real Oracle-killer at the low and medium end, and is a breeze to install and maintain.
People might have gotten scared off by the old buggy Postgres implementations circa 1993 or so, but that code is long gone, the system was totally rewritten and since 7.0 has been creeping up on Oracle territory. MySQL by contrast, still lacks basic required stuff like ANSI syntax and tranactions.
If people accept Microsoft's rhetoric, that Palladium is about providing "protection", then we have already lost the battle. It is like conceding the term "Pro-life" to the opposition in a debate on abortion.
Palladium should instead always be referred to in more precise technical terms; it serves to "restrict" capabilities of the user's hardware.
Always use the word "restrict" and Palladium in the same sentence. Don't refer to protection, since protection of the user's interests is only a possible but unlikely application of the technology. The protection is clear for Hollywood, but totally absent for the end user like you and me. The goal is to stop your PC from being able to process any data except under the terms of the organization who encoded it.
The technology is all engineering ways of restricting the user's access to their own hardware. Don't forget that, and you will have a much clearer picture to present to people who are curious about this technology.
People, I am really humored by all of this "let's give Microsoft a fair hearing" crap.
You don't have to speculate on what life with hardware Palladium is going to be like. Microsoft has already given a nice taste of how they are going to play nice with Hollywood, and give you, the user, the bum's rush.
Last year I got a IBM Thinkpad laptop running Windows 2K. It had in it a DVD player drive.
I was in Japan, so I wanted to play a Japanese DVD. Yes, it had a non-North-America zone code.
So I put it in the DVD player, and I was told that I could not play the DVD, because it was not the right zone.
The driver control planel has an option to change the international zone for the DVD. So I set it to Asia. A warning dialog comes up and says (to paraphase) "You have changed the zone on your DVD player. We will let you do this two more times. After that the DVD player will be disabled, and you cannot re-enable it even if you re-install the operating system. It will be slag. Fuck you, you fucking video pirate!"
Well, it didn't use those words precisely, but the effect was the same. The hardware was telling me that I was a thief and it would self destruct. No appeal, no mercy, just the word of Microsoft.
If you think Microsoft is going to do things differently when then own the whole CPU, keyboard, video, and disk drive, you better think again. Wake up, you sheep!
Microsoft has not explained any consumer benefits
on
The Power of Palladium
·
· Score: 2
There is something really weird going on here. If you look carefully at all the Microsoft propaganda on Palladium, and at the snow job article that Steven Levy published, you will notice that there are actually no compelling benefits described for users. Palladium does not solve *any* problems that users have today, in any manner that cannot be solved with software alone that already exists. What is does do is define mechanisms whereby third parties can easily restrict what you can do on your own machine.
Honestly, encrypting the video signal from your PC motherboard to the display provides absolutely no benefit to the user. How often have you found criminals or terrorists intercepting the wires behind your PC on your desk? Gosh, it must happen to me at least twice a week. I wish I could encrypt the video signals so no one could tamper with them. Yeah right. But hey, it will keep Hollywood from letting you watch movie clips on your PC. Oh boy, they really are looking out for my best interests.
It is so totally obvious that the only 'protection" provided by Palladium is for Hollywood and the BSA. I find it insane that people are arguing the merits of this, when no compelling user benefits have been offered by the makers.
In the future, I would in fact like to have a way to securely store and execute my code on other people's server hardware, without giving them access to it. However, there is zero evidence that Microsoft will ever actually offer this as a service, and zero evidence that they will allow other people to offer this as a service either. I can think of several ways to provide this service in reasonably secure ways using existing technology today, however, and without selling my own soul to Microsoft.
WAP is such a disaster because it is not a standard at all. Each phone and each service has enough random incompatibilities that the chance of successfully reaching a given WAP site is about 30% or less. In Japan, all imode sites are essentially compatible, plus cHTML is a much better page description language than WAP for phones. WAP has basically torpedoed the entire cell phone industry in the US. Thanks guys!
Look at my website for J2ME and iAppli notes
on
Learning Wireless Java
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I was in Japan for two years, and did
extensive programming on the iAppli
(Java that runs on iMode phones) and J2ME
platforms. I even wrote a web browser for
J2ME. You can see it all and get the source
at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/hqm/imode and also
at sourceforge, look for the http://bearlib.sourceforge.net/ bearlib libraries.
Maybe if people stopped programming in C they wouldn't keep having integer overflow and buffer overflow bugs. This has been a solved problem in Lisp forever. Even Java has integer overflow, the C weenies never really learn to part with their old ways.
Most new Japanese phones have cameras already
on
Cheap Cell Phone Cameras
·
· Score: 3, Informative
What is the big news here? J-Phone in Japan has been selling mobile phones with cameras for the last two years now. DoCoMo now makes its own line, and the J-Phones can now send short movies. The US is way behind in mobile phone technology, with a divided and hopelessly bug-ridden wireless data infrastructure, due to the greed and stupidity of the wireless carriers and the "WAP" idiocy.
In Japan where essentially everyone carries a mobile phone, at a big event such as a fireworks display, you can tell when there is a critical density of people around because your cell phone cannot acquire a channel.
Wolfram is taking credit for other's work again
on
A New Kind of Science
·
· Score: 2
See DigitalPhilosophy.org. A scientist named Edward Fredkin had formulated much the framework of looking at physics as being fundamentally an informational process.
Fredkin was the first one to postulate that information is conserved, and invented many ways of applying cellular automata to building the framework for a new underlying theory of physics.
Fredkin worked on this stuff long before Wolfram started looking at it; Wolfram absorbed a lot of Fredkin's ideas in the mid 1980's, and the sad thing is that as usual he provides virtually no credit, in all of his enormous book.
In Japan, the best selling mobile handsets are the ones with cameras in them. I used a FOMA video phone in Japan, and the reaction I had was that I must get one. It is not for showing your face when you talk, but for pointing at things, like "I'm trying to unjam this printer" or "I'm trying to remove my sink in the bathroom, how do I disconnect the water pipes?". And when you have real 30 fps frame rate on video, it is qualitatively different experience than crappy ISDN video conferencing.
People will make imaging a mandatory feature on phones, when they actually see it. It is only the US mobile phone industry that is screwing up so badly that we are 2-3 years behind the Japanese in terms of technology. WAP was probably the cause of at least half the lossage. In Japan, they just deployed plain old HTML (i-Mode) on phones and it worked ten times better than the WAP garbage that was being pushed in the US and Europe.
Simple idea: separate the power supply from the PC
on
Shuttle's SS50 reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
People are complaining hard about the noise from the power supply fans in some of these small form factor PCs. The problem is you are stuck with a hard-to-replace small power supply which may be noisy, built into the case.
Here's an idea, how about remove the power supply from the PC case entirely. Just put a connector on the PC to accept 5V and maybe +/- 12V. You don't need 110 VAC flowing into the machine, it just needs 5V internally. The +/- 12V don't need much power, and could probably be run from a small DC/DC converter in the case. But the high current 5V supply should come from an external box. It could be a big quiet power supply tucked under a desk or something. It seems stupid to keep buying expensive high-end quiet power supplies for a PC.
The people making this lawsuit have no idea what they are talking about.
I lived in Japan for two years, and just returned to the US. I found that the cell phones in Japan are literally years ahead of phones in the US, and data and Internet features like iMode, email, and Java apps on the handset, which simply work in Japan, are completely hopelessly brokne in the US.
As far as I can tell this lossage is due precisely to the lack of any leverage that carriers have over handset makers in the US. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo, and the other carriers, dictate exactly what features they want, and thus they get high quality user experience; all the phones have compatible web browsers, color displays, internet email, and other features. The features all work almost perfectly across the different handset models from different manufacturers.
Contrast this to the pathetic piece of junk called WAP in the US, where each phone has different incompatible implementations. Some phones have color WBMP support (hah!), others handle GIF, other PNG, others JPG. Some carriers gateways have byte limits of 1 kbyte, others higher, no telling which is which though. Chance of actually displaying a color picture, or a proper web page on your phone: about zero.
Email does not work consistently on US phones, and Java applets are still science fiction. People have the WAP forum to thank for this pathetic situation. They were so greedy that they tried to get all the carriers to standardize prematurely on technology that solved non-existent problems. NTT DoCoMo just went ahead and basically just built HTML 2.0 into thier phones (iMode) and it works an order of magnitude better than WAP.
C# is just a clone of Java with the serial numbers filed off. What is persuasive is the big honking library that goes with it. Sun looked at every library developed for Java, took all the best ones, plus some other goodies, and rolled them into the huge CLR standard libraries. So what you get out of the box is a lot of really useful functionality. The core language is irrelevant, and in fact they have bindings from the.NET libraries to Javascript, VB, and many other languages.
Until the Mono people can clone that library, Microsoft will have the edge. But hopefully, it shoudn't be too hard to clone the library, as long as lots of open source heavyweights get
into the act (IBM, I mean, and Sun if they have any brains).
Slashdot Mirror
Scansoft's CEO is Paul Ricci, a slime-breathing pond-scum who used to be an executive at Xerox. It doesn't surprise me that they are giving the
original creators of the software the shaft. Ricci managed to fail his way upwards out of Xerox, and is probably busy driving Scansoft slowly out of business now.
I want the IP address of your server please. Post
it here on Slashdot. Then see how much of a
Internet security jock you are.
Without all the mumbo-jumbo, the way you can
pick out multiple phases of the signal is to have a couple of antennas, spaced at about maybe 1/4 wavelength apart or so. It's called "diversity" and radios in cars have had it since the 1940's, only it's not so popular anymore. You just pick the antenna that has the best strength or signal coded for you or whatever.
For a project I worked on at Keio Univ. in Japan, we ordered some of the Axis web cams, which use an older
version of the same chip, as well as some of the developer boards.
The system works as advertised; developing software and
deploying it is very easy, you just do a "make" in the source directory on your host, and it builds the flash rom image, and you download it via ethernet with a single command. You can ftp over to the board to upload binaries or other files, and there's a telnet client.
The only problems I had with the dev board were that it doesn't really have much useful I/O on it.
It has three serial ports and 16 bit parallel port, which can be used as an IDE drive or USB port, but at the time we got the system, you had to kind of roll your own interface. And at the time the drivers for the parallel port weren't
shipping standard so I had to write my own kernel
driver for it.
I was having a party and wanted to get some new
.25 to .50 per song. I wanted them right away, I wanted a big selection, I didn't want to have CD's to change and purchase and discard the packaging.
music for it the day before. I used Kazaa to
search and download some christmas songs by
Louis Armstrong, other older Jazz and Barrelhouse artists, and some contemporary ones.
I would have been happy to pay around
I would love to put money in the hands of the artists directly. I contribute to web sites such as dyndns.org , eff, granitecanyon, etc, that provide services, even though it is not required.
I think the music publishing industry are a bunch of thugs and parasites, by and large, and they have been crushing the smaller and independent
studios and artists, while calling the public thieves and pirates. They are now petitioning congress to install monitoring in all of our computing equipment.
People, this HAS TO STOP. Right now we fight back
through the EFF, and other public interest groups. Give them money and take the time to write to your congress people, before you are thrown in jail by the record companies.
I first came across Boa a couple of years ago because it was running
on the Axis webcam, which is a webcam running Linux in 8 MB of RAM and 2 MB of Flash ROM. It
was impressive to see such a small footprint web server being used in production for an embedded appliance, running Linux.
Just last week, I wanted to implement a custom server for my house; I have a Model 28 teletype, which I wanted to hook to the ethernet. I took
an old PC, and downloaded a copy of Boa. I then added code to it's main select() loop to service the serial port connected to the teletype. Now I have a state of the art ethernet-to-teletype gateway machine. It was easy to do because Boa is
simple and easy to understand. So people whining about which web server is "faster" are missing the point entirely; Developer's time is worth much more than CPU time in most situations. And developing using Boa's source base was the best option for what I needed to do.
Free Software! YEAH!
I got one to use for my Model 28 teletype server, which runs in the living room.
Everyone needs to start referring to Palladium
as "restricted" computing, rather than "secure" or "trusted". It is more accurate, and will
better serve to explain to people in a word what they are getting railroaded into accepting.
People need to understand the power of words in this battle. This is a battlefield of ideas, and we are losing the battle, because of the massive PR machine of Microsoft and Hollywood.
I've used Postgres in a dozen relational database-backed server projects in the last three years. It installs faster than MySQL, I can do a Postgres install in literally ten minutes to get a functioning basic configuration.
Sometimes, I believe the MySQL advocates are in some kind of strange parallel universe. Postgres is a real Oracle-killer at the low and medium end, and is a breeze to install and maintain.
People might have gotten scared off by the old
buggy Postgres implementations circa 1993 or so, but that code is long gone, the system was totally
rewritten and since 7.0 has been creeping up on
Oracle territory. MySQL by contrast, still lacks basic required stuff like ANSI syntax and tranactions.
In Japan, the Yamanote line has flat panel
displays on the trains, which show news, weather, and of course lots of ads.
I don't see the point of putting the displays on the tunnel walls, except for a "gee whiz" factor which quickly evaporates.
If people accept Microsoft's rhetoric, that
Palladium is about providing "protection", then
we have already lost the battle. It is like
conceding the term "Pro-life" to the opposition in a debate on
abortion.
Palladium should instead always be referred to
in more precise technical terms; it serves to
"restrict" capabilities of the user's hardware.
Always use the word "restrict" and Palladium in
the same sentence. Don't refer to protection, since
protection of the user's interests is only a possible but unlikely application of the technology. The protection is clear for Hollywood, but totally absent for the end user like you and me. The goal is to stop your
PC from being able to process any data
except under the terms of the organization
who encoded it.
The
technology is all engineering ways of restricting the user's
access to their own hardware. Don't forget that,
and you will have a much clearer picture to present
to people who are curious about this technology.
People, I am really humored by all of this "let's give Microsoft a fair hearing" crap.
You don't have to speculate on what life with
hardware Palladium is going to be like. Microsoft
has already given a nice taste of how they are
going to play nice with Hollywood, and give you,
the user, the bum's rush.
Last year I got a IBM Thinkpad laptop running Windows 2K. It had in it a DVD player drive.
I was in Japan, so I wanted to play a Japanese
DVD. Yes, it had a non-North-America zone code.
So I put it in the DVD player, and I was told that
I could not play the DVD, because it was not the
right zone.
The driver control planel has an option to change the international zone for the DVD. So I set it to
Asia. A warning dialog comes up and says
(to paraphase) "You have changed the zone on your
DVD player. We will let you do this two more times. After that the DVD player will be disabled, and you cannot re-enable it even
if you re-install the operating system. It will
be slag. Fuck you, you fucking video pirate!"
Well, it didn't use those words precisely, but the effect
was the same. The hardware was telling me that I was a thief and it would self destruct. No appeal,
no mercy, just the word of Microsoft.
If you think Microsoft is going to do things
differently when then own the whole CPU, keyboard, video, and disk drive, you better think again. Wake up, you sheep!
There is something really weird going on here. If you look carefully at all the Microsoft propaganda on Palladium, and at the snow job article that Steven Levy published, you will notice that there are actually no compelling benefits described for users. Palladium does not
solve *any* problems that users have today, in any manner that cannot be solved with software alone that already exists. What is does do is
define mechanisms whereby third parties can
easily restrict what you can do on your own machine.
Honestly, encrypting the video signal from your PC
motherboard to the display provides absolutely no
benefit to the user. How often have you found
criminals or terrorists intercepting the wires behind your PC on your desk? Gosh, it must happen to me at least twice a week. I wish I could
encrypt the video signals so no one could tamper with them. Yeah right. But hey, it will keep
Hollywood from letting you watch movie clips
on your PC. Oh boy, they really are looking out
for my best interests.
It is so totally obvious that the only 'protection" provided by Palladium is
for Hollywood and the BSA. I find it insane that people are arguing the merits of this, when no
compelling user benefits have been offered
by the makers.
In the future, I would in fact like to have a way
to securely store and execute my code on other
people's server hardware, without giving them access to it. However, there is zero evidence that Microsoft will ever actually offer this as a service, and zero evidence that they will allow other people to offer this as a service either. I can think of several ways to
provide this service in reasonably secure ways using existing technology today, however, and without selling my own soul to Microsoft.
He founded Cygnus, which was the leading
free software developer until they were
bought by RedHat for $600 million. I doubt
Gilmore needs a job now.
You are sooo right..
WAP is such a disaster because it is not a standard at all. Each phone and each service has
enough random incompatibilities that the chance of
successfully reaching a given WAP site is about 30% or less. In Japan, all imode sites are
essentially compatible, plus cHTML is a much better page description language than WAP for phones. WAP has basically torpedoed the entire
cell phone industry in the US. Thanks guys!
I was in Japan for two years, and did extensive programming on the iAppli (Java that runs on iMode phones) and J2ME platforms. I even wrote a web browser for J2ME. You can see it all and get the source at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/hqm/imode and also at sourceforge, look for the http://bearlib.sourceforge.net/ bearlib libraries.
Maybe if people stopped programming in
C they wouldn't keep having integer overflow
and buffer overflow bugs. This has been a solved
problem in Lisp forever.
Even Java has integer overflow, the C weenies never really learn to part with their old ways.
What is the big news here? J-Phone in Japan
has been selling mobile phones with cameras for
the last two years now. DoCoMo now makes its own
line, and the J-Phones can now send short movies.
The US is way behind in mobile phone technology,
with a divided and hopelessly bug-ridden wireless data infrastructure, due to the greed and stupidity of the wireless carriers and the "WAP" idiocy.
In Japan where essentially everyone carries a mobile phone, at a big event such as a fireworks display, you can tell when
there is a critical density of people around because your
cell phone cannot acquire a channel.
See DigitalPhilosophy.org. A scientist named Edward Fredkin had formulated much the framework of looking at physics as being fundamentally an informational process.
Fredkin was the first one to postulate that information is conserved, and invented many
ways of applying cellular automata to building the framework for a new underlying theory of
physics.
Fredkin worked on this stuff long
before Wolfram started looking at it; Wolfram absorbed a lot of Fredkin's ideas in the mid 1980's, and the sad thing is that as usual he provides virtually no credit, in all of his enormous book.
People interested in the concept of the universe
as a digital computer should look at
http://www.digitalphilosophy.org.
Fredkin was thinking about this stuff long before Wolfram was born.
In Japan, the best selling mobile handsets
are the ones with cameras in them.
I used a FOMA video phone in Japan, and the reaction I had was that I must get one. It is not
for showing your face when you talk, but for
pointing at things, like "I'm trying to unjam
this printer" or "I'm trying to remove my sink
in the bathroom, how do I disconnect the water pipes?". And when you have real 30 fps frame rate
on video, it is qualitatively different experience than
crappy ISDN video conferencing.
People will make imaging a mandatory feature
on phones, when they actually see it. It is only
the US mobile phone industry that is screwing
up so badly that we are 2-3 years behind the
Japanese in terms of technology. WAP was probably
the cause of at least half the lossage. In Japan,
they just deployed plain old HTML (i-Mode) on phones and it worked ten times better than
the WAP garbage that was being pushed in the US
and Europe.
People are complaining hard about the noise
from the power supply fans in some of these
small form factor PCs. The problem is you are
stuck with a hard-to-replace small power supply which may be noisy, built into the case.
Here's an idea, how about remove the power supply from the PC case entirely. Just put a connector on the PC to accept 5V and maybe +/- 12V.
You don't need 110 VAC
flowing into the machine, it just needs 5V internally. The +/- 12V don't need much power, and could probably be run from a small DC/DC converter in the case. But the high current 5V supply should come from an external box. It could be a
big quiet power supply tucked under a desk or something. It seems stupid to keep buying expensive high-end quiet power supplies for a PC.
The people making this lawsuit have no idea what
they are talking about.
I lived in Japan for two years, and just returned to the US. I found that the cell phones in Japan are literally years ahead of phones in the US, and data and Internet features like iMode, email, and Java apps on the handset, which simply work
in Japan, are completely hopelessly brokne in the US.
As far as I can tell this lossage is due precisely to the lack of any leverage that carriers have over handset makers in the US. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo, and the other carriers, dictate exactly what features they want, and thus
they get high quality user experience; all the phones have compatible web browsers, color displays, internet email, and other features. The features all work almost perfectly across the different handset models from different manufacturers.
Contrast this to the pathetic piece of junk called WAP in the US, where each phone has different incompatible implementations. Some phones have color WBMP support (hah!), others handle GIF, other PNG, others JPG. Some carriers gateways have byte limits of 1 kbyte, others higher, no telling which is which though. Chance of actually displaying a color picture, or a proper web page on your phone: about zero.
Email does not work consistently on US phones, and Java applets are still science fiction. People have the WAP forum to thank for this
pathetic situation. They were so greedy that they
tried to get all the carriers to standardize prematurely on technology that solved non-existent problems. NTT DoCoMo just went ahead and basically just built HTML 2.0 into thier phones (iMode) and it works an order of magnitude better than WAP.
C# is just a clone of Java with the .NET libraries to
serial numbers filed off. What is persuasive
is the big honking library that goes with it.
Sun looked at every library developed for Java,
took all the best ones, plus some other goodies, and rolled them into the huge CLR
standard libraries. So what you get out of the box is a lot of really useful functionality. The core language is irrelevant, and in fact they
have bindings from the
Javascript, VB, and many other languages.
Until the Mono people can clone that library, Microsoft will have the edge. But hopefully, it
shoudn't be too hard to clone the library,
as long as lots of open source heavyweights get
into the act (IBM, I mean, and Sun if they have
any brains).