There are free IDEs (Eclipse, Forte), and there are free UML tools (ArgoUML, probably others). If they aren't good enough yet, they will improve further. And the only good product Rational has ever had, Purify, has a better open source equivalent already.
Microsoft's old strategy of killing competitors by buying them doesn't work with open source. Sorry, Bill.
Microsoft can't buy Forte or Eclipse. If they eliminate Borland's products, that will simply reduce the fragmentation of non-Microsoft development tools--not necessarily a bad thing.
Unless someone clarifies the legal status of Mono in regards to Microsoft's patents, this is 100% definitely the situation that will occur.
But it isn't just Microsoft's patents. Anybody could sue implementors of Java or C# over patent infringement. Microsoft can sue Sun over Microsoft's Java-related patents. Sun can sue Microsoft over Sun's bulging patent portfolio.
We need to look at who holds which patents and which languages they affect. We also need to look at who has made what legally binding commitments.
My impression so far is that Microsoft has no patents that are important to either Java or C# implementations, while Sun has several such patents. Furthermore, Microsoft has had to disclose any relevant patents as part of the ECMA standardization process, while Sun has pulled out of standardization processes over IP issues. I don't know whether Microsoft is a threat, but they sure look like less of a threat to me than Sun at this point.
I don't see an end to Moore's law. But instead of ever faster CPUs, we'll see improvements through massive parallelism. In 10-20 years, your desktop may well contain hundreds of CPUs, each with their own memory and a fast communications network. We don't need any new technology for that, just steadily decreasing manufacturing costs.
Apple's QuickTime is a container format for multimedia streams; it is NOT a digital video format by itself. If I tell you that something is a QuickTime stream, you will have no idea whether you'll be able to decode it. In fact, you will have no idea whether it's even video.
If these cell phones use "QuickTime", including the ability to use new codecs, then they are effectively using a proprietary format. If they use what QuickTime usually refers to, the QuickTime stream format with Sorenson, then they definitely are using a proprietary format.
If the cell phones use MPEG4, then it's misleading for Apple to claim that they use "QuickTime", which would imply that Apple has some sort of special power over the format; if all they actually use is MPEG4, then Apple is just one of many companies that can provide software or hardware for it.
So, you are right that the QuickTime stream format is open and document; QuickTime just isn't a open streaming video format by itself because it doesn't define how the video is actually encoded.
And your point is? A small part of the MPEG4 standard is based on an Apple stream format. That doesn't make MPEG4 the same as QuickTime. Most of the MPEG4 standard is about completely different things from a stream standard, things that just aren't in QuickTime at all. And I still can't play general QuickTime streams with a non-proprietary decoder.
What it comes down to is that either Apple is lying when they are saying that some cell phone will incorporate "QuickTime", because what it actually includes is MPEG4, or the cell phone actually includes QuickTime and the content cannot be generated with an MPEG4 encoder.
MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, MJPEG, the h.XXX standards, Ogg, and a few others. Those formats are open, documented, and have open viewers and servers available.
The primary problem that airbags address is hitting the windshield or steering wheel with your head. But on a motorcycle, the head is already well protected by the helmet. The main concern would seem to be the spine. Is an airbag the best way of protecting that?
Perhaps the various semi-rigid body armors are better after all. Does anybody know how effective they actually are? Are there any studies or tests?
QuickTime isn't MPEG4 and QuickTime streams are intrinsically not fully open because they are a container for proprietary video streams. Apple also keeps confusing the issues with their claims that MPEG4 is somehow based on QuickTime; there is some historical relationship, but they are different.
For truly open formats, you have to stick either exclusively to the stuff that is standardized by a standards body, or you have to go with a fully free and open codebase. 90% open doesn't count. Open stream format with the possibility of proprietary codecs doesn't count.
Apple's efforts with QuickTime are really no different from those of Real or Microsoft: they want to dominate multimedia with a format that they control. Their confusing statements about openness and relationships with MPEG4 are simply attempts to muddy the waters and confuse the issues. The best thing consumers can do is to say "no" to all of them--because otherwise consumers are going to pay the price in the long run. There are plenty of alternatives--we don't need Apple, Microsoft, or Real for multimedia.
Those Microsoft patents don't cover anything related to the C# or Java languages. They are general patents on distributed systems. Even if they hold up, they don't affect the Mono language or runtime.
In contrast, the Sun patent that I cite goes to the core of Java implementations: if you implement a working JVM, you infringe that patent, no ifs or buts about it.
Nothing forces Microsoft to leverage their patents against every infringer,
Well, if Microsoft has a patent that covers both C# and Java,what kind of systems do you think they would be going after first? I would guess Java.
Note that as part of the ECMA C# standardization process, Microsoft committed to RAND licensing of all C#-related patents. Sun, in contrast, withdrew their standards body applications over IP issues and has never made a legally binding commitment.
I think neither company is to be trusted. Both have claimed openness, and both are doing a lot of underhanded things behind the scenes. Until either company makes legally binding commitments, neither is to be trusted. And, no, the fluff we have been getting from Sun over the JCP is not a legally binding commitment.
Standards processes involve an independent body that controls and supervises the standardization process. Standards bodies have well-defined and proven rules that many people established and agreed on before any individual standard is being considered.
The standardization process often involves a whole host of legal agreements and guarantees that don't exist with the JCP. For example, many standards bodies, not only is the submitter bound to disclosure of related patents and RAND licensing terms of their patents, but so are the other members of the standards body.
So, yes, Sun might be very good about taking third party input (although, in my experience, they aren't), but taking third party input is not the main point of standards bodies. Well-understood, well-defined rules and legal guarantees are, and those are present only to a much smaller degree with the JCP.
Another problem with the JCP is that it isn't producing a standard for Java, it's producing a large set of pieces that define specific bits of functionality. Think of it this way: do you know what APIs were part of the Java platform in March 2000? What about today? The only definition of what the Java platform comprises is whatever Sun decides to put into their latest release. A standards body, in contrast, produces a complete and consistent definition at a specific point in time. If we had an "ISO Java 2002" standard, everybody could implement it that and third party implementations could be compatible with that. Later decisions by Sun wouldn't affect compatibility. But, of course, that is exactly what Sun doesn't want.
Isn't that quite obvious? Hire the people who best know the systems, and TCO will be low and things will go well.
Well, apparently not to these research firms.
In any case, I claim that they make a methodological flaw: they generally assume that they need about as many people for Linux maintenance as they do for Windows and that those people are more expensive. The Linux sysadmins may or may not be more expensive, but you need only a fraction of them, so overall, TCO for Linux is lower in the long run.
Live, spinning RAIDs are good. Their individual drives will fail after a few years, but you just keep replacing them. As long as you are reasonably vigilant, your risk of total data loss is low.
If you want a medium you can keep on a shelf, properly stored optical disks or optical tapes are probably your best bet. While nobody knows for certain, they are much less likely to show the kinds of degradations you get with purely magnetic media. You can buy special archival CD-Rs (and, presumably, DVD-Rs) that should last for decades.
Magnetic tape is probably the worst long-term backup medium. While you can get lucky and it can last a few decades, data on it often becomes unreadable after a few years through a variety of mechanisms.
With tape, the failure of a tape drive doesn't separate your from your data (unless it catches on fire with the tape in it or something.) You can just get a new tape drive and you are good to go again.
Not really. If you just keep tape sitting on the shelf, magnetization from one layer will transfer to the next and the tape will become unusable over time. The oxide will also start flaking off after a while and the carrier will become brittle.
While you can be lucky and read tape after a few decades, you can't really rely on it for more than a few years.
That has the additional advantage that the star of the movie would have a somewhat more believable age.
looks like they don't know what they are doing
on
Turn-Key Linux Audio
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· Score: 2
It seems like they are trying to avoid RPM dependency hell by having a custom install script. I'm sorry, but that makes little sense. RPM has solutions for automatic downloading and upgrading of packages. They should just use them, rather than writing weird shell scripts for which nobody knows what they do or what they do to the system.
Perhaps even better would be if they just switched to Debian and made sure that all the stuff they wanted to install was in Debian. While Debian and RedHat packages are technically a toss-up, in practice, automatic installation and dependency maintenance works much, much better with Debian because of the large number of maintainers. Using Debian, all their students would need to type is "apt-get install turnkeyaudio".
Grandma doesn't have to worry about it: all grandma sees is less spam, and possibly an electronic stamp that says "this message brought to you by 'Working for a Cure for Cancer'".
Since we don't have micropayments, maybe a better approach is to have senders pay in terms of useful participation in grid computing.
A distributed system like SETI@Home, or maybe your own grid, can hand out cryptographic tokens for work units (say, a CPU minute), and the sender can then use those tokens to reach recipients.
In essence, the tokens act as digital postage stamps, but the payment is in useful CPU cycles, not useless cryptographic computations or money.
This has been suggested again and again. It was an old hat even when Bill Gates talked about it a few years ago.
The problem has always been that there simply is no feasible payment mechanism to support it. If we ever get micropayments in some form, then people can implement this.
I seriously doubt it. X11 is a protocol, not a library or an API or and implementation. Microsoft can't "take over" that protocol. And Microsoft would be hard pressed creating an implementation of X11 that's much better than XFree86---XFree86 is quite good (in fact, XFree86 is quite good compared to the Windows graphics subsystem).
When people talk about X11 being supposedly slow, they usually mean desktops and toolkits like Gnome/Gtk+ and KDE/Qt. Microsoft could do better in that area by designing a better X11 toolkit, but I doubt they will.
Most likely, Microsoft will port MFC to X11, and they will end up with something pretty similar to Gtk+ and Qt: toolkits that work well enough but don't take good advantage of X11. It's just one more toolkit for X11.
TCO depends on a lot of factors. If you hire good UNIX/Linux system managers, you only need a small number, your systems will run like clockwork, and your TCO will be low.
If you are running a Windows shop and put people with only MCSE training to work on UNIX/Linux machines, they won't know what to do, they won't even know how to find out what to do, and they will hate it. Your systems will run miserably and your TCO will be high.
What does that mean? Your Linux TCO depends on how your run your shop. If you do things right, the achievable TCO is better for Linux than for Windows.
I believe those who make investments (both in time and/or money) do have a fairly solid guarantee that Sun will be held accountable for these statements even if they decide to "go back on their word."
I don't think so; perhaps, you might be able to get them for unfair business practices, but you couldn't force them to license patents. Besides, the published language is pretty vague, so Sun can almost certainly say things like "oh, no, we didn't mean THAT patent, we only meant those other patents".
I don't think any open-source developer in his right mind would "throw their lot in with either company."
If groups like the Apache foundation or Mono build large software systems involving Java or C#, they are tying themselves to those languages, and they are giving those companies a hell of a lot of publicity and value.
However, open-source developers are more than willing to support open technologies, even if they are backed by big mean corporations
C++ is an open technology backed by big, mean corporations; I have no problem with that. Java and C#, so far, are closed technologies because the companies that created them have also patented important chunks of those language and runtime definitions and have not dedicated those patents to the public domain.
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I don't. It's just Windows XP with a few pen hacks added and a reasonable, but not overwhelmingly good connected handwriting recognition engine.
Can Linux compete? Sure. It's had pen input for many years. You'll probably see good connected handwriting recognition for Linux before long as well.
Microsoft's old strategy of killing competitors by buying them doesn't work with open source. Sorry, Bill.
Microsoft can't buy Forte or Eclipse. If they eliminate Borland's products, that will simply reduce the fragmentation of non-Microsoft development tools--not necessarily a bad thing.
But it isn't just Microsoft's patents. Anybody could sue implementors of Java or C# over patent infringement. Microsoft can sue Sun over Microsoft's Java-related patents. Sun can sue Microsoft over Sun's bulging patent portfolio.
We need to look at who holds which patents and which languages they affect. We also need to look at who has made what legally binding commitments.
My impression so far is that Microsoft has no patents that are important to either Java or C# implementations, while Sun has several such patents. Furthermore, Microsoft has had to disclose any relevant patents as part of the ECMA standardization process, while Sun has pulled out of standardization processes over IP issues. I don't know whether Microsoft is a threat, but they sure look like less of a threat to me than Sun at this point.
I don't see an end to Moore's law. But instead of ever faster CPUs, we'll see improvements through massive parallelism. In 10-20 years, your desktop may well contain hundreds of CPUs, each with their own memory and a fast communications network. We don't need any new technology for that, just steadily decreasing manufacturing costs.
If these cell phones use "QuickTime", including the ability to use new codecs, then they are effectively using a proprietary format. If they use what QuickTime usually refers to, the QuickTime stream format with Sorenson, then they definitely are using a proprietary format.
If the cell phones use MPEG4, then it's misleading for Apple to claim that they use "QuickTime", which would imply that Apple has some sort of special power over the format; if all they actually use is MPEG4, then Apple is just one of many companies that can provide software or hardware for it.
So, you are right that the QuickTime stream format is open and document; QuickTime just isn't a open streaming video format by itself because it doesn't define how the video is actually encoded.
What it comes down to is that either Apple is lying when they are saying that some cell phone will incorporate "QuickTime", because what it actually includes is MPEG4, or the cell phone actually includes QuickTime and the content cannot be generated with an MPEG4 encoder.
MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, MJPEG, the h.XXX standards, Ogg, and a few others. Those formats are open, documented, and have open viewers and servers available.
Perhaps the various semi-rigid body armors are better after all. Does anybody know how effective they actually are? Are there any studies or tests?
For truly open formats, you have to stick either exclusively to the stuff that is standardized by a standards body, or you have to go with a fully free and open codebase. 90% open doesn't count. Open stream format with the possibility of proprietary codecs doesn't count.
Apple's efforts with QuickTime are really no different from those of Real or Microsoft: they want to dominate multimedia with a format that they control. Their confusing statements about openness and relationships with MPEG4 are simply attempts to muddy the waters and confuse the issues. The best thing consumers can do is to say "no" to all of them--because otherwise consumers are going to pay the price in the long run. There are plenty of alternatives--we don't need Apple, Microsoft, or Real for multimedia.
Those Microsoft patents don't cover anything related to the C# or Java languages. They are general patents on distributed systems. Even if they hold up, they don't affect the Mono language or runtime.
In contrast, the Sun patent that I cite goes to the core of Java implementations: if you implement a working JVM, you infringe that patent, no ifs or buts about it.
Nothing forces Microsoft to leverage their patents against every infringer,
Well, if Microsoft has a patent that covers both C# and Java,what kind of systems do you think they would be going after first? I would guess Java.
Note that as part of the ECMA C# standardization process, Microsoft committed to RAND licensing of all C#-related patents. Sun, in contrast, withdrew their standards body applications over IP issues and has never made a legally binding commitment.
I think neither company is to be trusted. Both have claimed openness, and both are doing a lot of underhanded things behind the scenes. Until either company makes legally binding commitments, neither is to be trusted. And, no, the fluff we have been getting from Sun over the JCP is not a legally binding commitment.
The standardization process often involves a whole host of legal agreements and guarantees that don't exist with the JCP. For example, many standards bodies, not only is the submitter bound to disclosure of related patents and RAND licensing terms of their patents, but so are the other members of the standards body.
So, yes, Sun might be very good about taking third party input (although, in my experience, they aren't), but taking third party input is not the main point of standards bodies. Well-understood, well-defined rules and legal guarantees are, and those are present only to a much smaller degree with the JCP.
Another problem with the JCP is that it isn't producing a standard for Java, it's producing a large set of pieces that define specific bits of functionality. Think of it this way: do you know what APIs were part of the Java platform in March 2000? What about today? The only definition of what the Java platform comprises is whatever Sun decides to put into their latest release. A standards body, in contrast, produces a complete and consistent definition at a specific point in time. If we had an "ISO Java 2002" standard, everybody could implement it that and third party implementations could be compatible with that. Later decisions by Sun wouldn't affect compatibility. But, of course, that is exactly what Sun doesn't want.
Putting together a good news story with audio is much harder than writing. Why not start with a "credibility system" for text?
And your point is... what?
Well, apparently not to these research firms.
In any case, I claim that they make a methodological flaw: they generally assume that they need about as many people for Linux maintenance as they do for Windows and that those people are more expensive. The Linux sysadmins may or may not be more expensive, but you need only a fraction of them, so overall, TCO for Linux is lower in the long run.
If you want a medium you can keep on a shelf, properly stored optical disks or optical tapes are probably your best bet. While nobody knows for certain, they are much less likely to show the kinds of degradations you get with purely magnetic media. You can buy special archival CD-Rs (and, presumably, DVD-Rs) that should last for decades.
Magnetic tape is probably the worst long-term backup medium. While you can get lucky and it can last a few decades, data on it often becomes unreadable after a few years through a variety of mechanisms.
Not really. If you just keep tape sitting on the shelf, magnetization from one layer will transfer to the next and the tape will become unusable over time. The oxide will also start flaking off after a while and the carrier will become brittle.
While you can be lucky and read tape after a few decades, you can't really rely on it for more than a few years.
That has the additional advantage that the star of the movie would have a somewhat more believable age.
Perhaps even better would be if they just switched to Debian and made sure that all the stuff they wanted to install was in Debian. While Debian and RedHat packages are technically a toss-up, in practice, automatic installation and dependency maintenance works much, much better with Debian because of the large number of maintainers. Using Debian, all their students would need to type is "apt-get install turnkeyaudio".
Grandma doesn't have to worry about it: all grandma sees is less spam, and possibly an electronic stamp that says "this message brought to you by 'Working for a Cure for Cancer'".
A distributed system like SETI@Home, or maybe your own grid, can hand out cryptographic tokens for work units (say, a CPU minute), and the sender can then use those tokens to reach recipients.
In essence, the tokens act as digital postage stamps, but the payment is in useful CPU cycles, not useless cryptographic computations or money.
The problem has always been that there simply is no feasible payment mechanism to support it. If we ever get micropayments in some form, then people can implement this.
When people talk about X11 being supposedly slow, they usually mean desktops and toolkits like Gnome/Gtk+ and KDE/Qt. Microsoft could do better in that area by designing a better X11 toolkit, but I doubt they will.
Most likely, Microsoft will port MFC to X11, and they will end up with something pretty similar to Gtk+ and Qt: toolkits that work well enough but don't take good advantage of X11. It's just one more toolkit for X11.
If you are running a Windows shop and put people with only MCSE training to work on UNIX/Linux machines, they won't know what to do, they won't even know how to find out what to do, and they will hate it. Your systems will run miserably and your TCO will be high.
What does that mean? Your Linux TCO depends on how your run your shop. If you do things right, the achievable TCO is better for Linux than for Windows.
I don't think so; perhaps, you might be able to get them for unfair business practices, but you couldn't force them to license patents. Besides, the published language is pretty vague, so Sun can almost certainly say things like "oh, no, we didn't mean THAT patent, we only meant those other patents".
I don't think any open-source developer in his right mind would "throw their lot in with either company."
If groups like the Apache foundation or Mono build large software systems involving Java or C#, they are tying themselves to those languages, and they are giving those companies a hell of a lot of publicity and value.
However, open-source developers are more than willing to support open technologies, even if they are backed by big mean corporations
C++ is an open technology backed by big, mean corporations; I have no problem with that. Java and C#, so far, are closed technologies because the companies that created them have also patented important chunks of those language and runtime definitions and have not dedicated those patents to the public domain.