If the Apache foundation lawyers have a signed paper copy of the aformentioned
letter, yes.
That's a contract between Sun and the Apache foundation, not a contract
with anybody else. The license on what Sun ships hasn't changed. Sun's
attitude towards "contamination" hasn't changed. Besides, where is
the text of that contract? Where are the signed copies?
GNU/Linux is a implementation based on Unix and the Posix standards. Unix
was proprietary licensed by AT&T,
But UNIX wasn't patented and AT&T wasn't all that litigious about it
(all they wanted was that people honored their copyrights). And POSIX
was an open standard, unencumbered by patents. None of that applies
to Java (or C#).
Does this mean that the open source development community should avoid
any and all frameworks and patented methords?
Indeed, it shouldn't. But it should stay out of the line of fire of
two major, greedy, and litigious players.
Well, the tactics you employ under the shear weight of contradictory linked
evidence is a tactic I find often applied by members of the Microsoft Shill
persuasion. No, I don't work for Sun, IBM or any other vendor in the IT industry,
but I do admire and promote postive behavour when I see it.
I do like to promote positive behavior, too. That's why I supported
Java and open source strongly during the first few years, when Sun promised
to create an open standard, to encourage third party implementations, to
improve numerical peformance and type safety, and to open source their implementation.
Sun has broken every one of those promises, and the weight of evidence
is that Sun is a duplicitous company that is not to be trusted.
Sun, in fact, has a long history of taking open source software and making
it proprietary, and that hasn't stopped with Java either. Swing, for
example, was also ready to be open sourced (IFC), but Sun took it proprietary.
Before that, of course, they built their entire company on BSD UNIX.
Sun is also in trouble as a company, and they have failed to evolve the Java
platform technically. This is not a company with which one negotiates or
on whose products one builds open source software, in particular since Sun
has no technology that is in any way distinguished. In fact, Java has fallen
behind technically so badly that it really cannot be recomended anymore.
I don't know whether you are merely clueless or whether you have some stake
in Sun, but either way, your arguments don't hold water and the direction
you propose for open source is dangerous. We have given Sun more leeway
than just about any other company, and they have taken unfair advantage of
open source again and again. This should stop now.
Why is this in the X section?
on
Fresco M1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't see what Berlin/Fresco has to do with the X Window System. Fresco used to be an X11 toolkit, but now it's something completely different.
Which at least is an effectively legally binding commitment for the aformention JSRs.
If you think that a statement of intent on a web page somewhere is a legally binding contract, I have a bridge to sell you.
Once again, Where are the equivalent public declarations from Microsoft?
Who cares? Neither Java nor C# break technically any new ground. They would have been interesting if they had become open standards, but neither did. Instead, they have become a quagmire of patents and intellectual property claims. Why argue about which one is the lesser of two evils? The open source community should not touch either of them. Let Sun and Microsoft battle it out; let's hope they'll sue each other out of business.
By the way g4dget, are you any relation to John Carroll?
What an idiotic question. You think everybody who isn't enamored with Sun must be a Microsoft shill? I don't work for either Sun or Microsoft. As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft management consists of a bunch of megalomaniacal sleazeballs, but so does Sun management.
Now, what about you? You keep deflecting criticism of Sun by making completely irrelevant comparisons with Microsoft. Do you work for Sun by any chance?
and therefore are effectively granting open source developer members full rights to re-implement the standard.
There is nothing legally binding there. Sun can do whatever they want at any time, and they can define whatever they like to be part of the JCP or not.
But is it safer to create an open source Java framework than to re-implementing.NET - Hell yes.
Why re-implement either if neither company is playing fair? There is nothing technically particularly interesting or novel about either language.
My point is that the one patent you cite is not relevant.
If you want to talk about patents more generally, yes, Microsoft is patenting a lot of C# related stuff. But so is Sun. Both companies are lying when they say that they are creating "open systems". We have no more reason to trust Sun than Microsoft.
The best approach for the open source community is to give both Sun and Microsoft the cold shoulder. Let McNealy and Gates play out their megalomaniac power plays and let us get on with writing good software.
You are reaching if you think that combining Sun's statement on the JCP together with some minor revisions of Java2 mean that Sun makes available all their patents for free Java implementations.
At least Sun is making concrete steps towards being more open.
Sun has made no legally binding commitments on keeping Java open. Sun even pulled out of two standardization processes because they didn't even want to disclose their patents, let along license them.
Where are the equivalent public declarations from Microsoft?
There are none (well, they have committed to RAND, but that's of no interest to open source).
The upshot is that both Microsoft and Sun are spreading PR and FUD. Neither of them has made any legally binding commitment to an open system or language. Neither system offers anything technically new or interesting. That's why the open source community shouldn't waste any more time on either of them.
I don't know how much clearer one can put this: that agreement applies only to software and specifications developed as part of the JCP. It does not apply to the entire Java platform or any of the stuff Sun cooks up on their own.
That is, almost everything in the Java 2 platform is completely Sun proprietary. Sun even renegged on standardizing it through ISO/ECMA, which would at least have required them to disclose what patents apply.
C#/CLI has patent problems. But so does Java/JVM, and at this point, they look more serious than those with C#/CLI. If you want an open platform, you have to look somewhere else: neither C#/CLI nor Java/JVM fits the bill.
I really have to wonder if the rest of the world sees the US as we did Nazi-Germany in the late 30s/early 40s, a powerful expanding force that needs to be stopped.
Not yet, but it may happen. The US has analogous power, but it is still a democratic and free nation at its core. But that is slowly changing: religious and political extremists are moving more and more into the mainstream in the US and the population is accepting more and more restrictions on free speech and freedom of association.
So we have waited around for 10 years waiting for Iraq to live up to their agreements. How much longer should we wait around?
Another 10 years? Who knows? Who cares? There are plenty of countries that are violating UN resolutions and that possess weapons of mass destructions. Are we going to attack them all? Why start with Iraq?
Bush is picking on Iraq in particular because it's politically expedient and because he has a bone to pick with that country. And for that, we have to pay billions of dollars and put American lives at risk.
I have heard many on the Left decry that the US is going alone, and now that the UN has passed a resolution, that the US controls the UN. I have yet hear what a comprehensive solution as to what should be done.
The UN didn't have a choice but to vote the way they did when the US forced the issue. The whole thing is still the responsibility of the US, and if the US stopped pursuing it, nobody else would bother.
I see nothing in that patent application that has anything directly to do with C#/CLI. That patent has to do with distributed computation, and it would apply equally to systems implemented in Java or C++.
I don't see anything in it that would apply to a conforming C#/CLI implementation.
But in terms of pure technological merit, c# is a damn good language!
I'd say it's "decent", a modest improvement over Java.
It's very exciting to be able to build stuff using vs.net, and deploy on linux.
Yuck. VisualStudio is probably the main reason why Windows software sucks so badly: it lets people without a clue throw together software they have no business writing, and it makes on-going software maintenance and evolution unnecessarily hard even for people who know what they are doing. I very much hope that the junk coming out of VS.net will continue to depend on Microsoft proprietary libraries and will not make it to the Linux platform.
In comparison, Sun has granted the Apache and all open source developers FULL access to the specs, test kits and granted the full rights to develop competing products under the JSPA [apache.org].
This is wrong, or at least highly misleading. Sun has granted rights only to standard developed under the JCP from here on forward (and then only to participants in the JCP):
* For Sun-led specifications finalized from here forward (including revisions to existing specifications) the license terms will allow independent implemenations under open source licenses.
Sun has hundreds of patents on core Java technologies that are unrelated to JCP efforts, and Sun has granted no licenses to those. You would likely run into those if you tried to create an independent Java implementation.
Both C#/CLI and Java/JVM should be considered proprietary platforms covered by numerous patents. And both Sun and Microsoft have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted on intellectual property issues or commitments to open standards.
There are plenty of high quality, truly open languages and runtimes out there. Open source software developers are fools to waste any time on either C# or Java until Microsoft and/or Sun make binding commitments to make those platforms truly open.
Sadly, *NIX has never really implimented anything like COM.
UNIX has had things like COM. But because in UNIX programmers have a choice and because COM sucks technically, most people ended up using other solutions.
Each programming language still has to be manually extended in some form or another to recognise new APIs
Each language has its own APIs for extension with native code. That is by choice. But, no, you don't need to manually create new interfaces for each language.
So, really: what is the need for C# on *NIX? None of my c# code that I am writing will port,
Your Windows C++ code won't port to UNIX either. So what? Does that make C++ useless on Linux? I don't think so.
I guess I have some rather severe misgivings about this - how useful is this going to be given the lack of the proprietary MS libraries that you are going to need to run real-world applications, or move code in a portable fashion from one machine to another?
Yes, it is. People have written lots of portable, useful code in ANSI C or ANSI C++, and those standard libraries are much more limited than the ECMA/ISO C# libraries. The ECMA/ISO C# libraries contain pretty much all the primitives you need in order to talk to the OS (I/O, networking, threads, processes, etc.). Almost all the other.NET libraries are fluff that is easily replaced by pure C# libraries. Besides, WORA is overrated. I really don't care whether it takes a little bit of hacking and conditionalization to move my code from Linux to Windows.
One good thing that could come out of this is that it might force Sun to loosen it's grip on Java a bit so that we get more serious open JVM's etc.
I used to think that, too. But now, I think the time for that has come and passed. Sun has missed the opportunity to create a Java standard, they have pissed off pretty much anybody willing to invest the time to build a third party JVM and runtime, and they have become stuck with a number of stupid technical decisions in the JVM.
I think C#/CLI is a decent language and runtime, and the open source implementations
of it are shaping up quite well. C#/CLI are mostly a copy of Java, but they
fix some nagging technical issues with Java/JVM.
According to Microsoft, third-party developers
who want to develop or deploy an implementation of C# development tools and
CLI-compliant virtual machines, which are part of the.Net framework, must
enter into a reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) license agreement with
Microsoft. That's the short answer. [...]
According to Microsoft's director of intellectual
property Michele Herman, who I interviewed earlier this year, the answer is
a qualified yes. "If someone implemented a product that conforms to the specification,
we believe we have a patent or one pending that's essential to implementing
the specification.
This has also been reported elsewhere and confirmed by Microsoft. What
the patents in question are remains unclear; given that C#/CLI also really
is just a copy of earlier technologies (and even Java/JVM hardly contains
new ideas), the patents are probably bogus, but that wouldn't keep Microsoft
from causing big legal troubles.
Note that the situation with Java/JVM isn't much better. Sun has
been filing hundreds of patents on Java/JVM-related technologies, some of
which look like they are essential for creating compatible implementations
(e.g., the bytecode type checking), and Sun's intellectual property policy
towards third party Java-related projects and implementations has often been
hostile. Sun has repeatedly tried to kill third party Java implementations
(all conforming Java implementations depend on Sun source code). Sun has
had to be dragged kicking and screaming even to the point where they don't
claim ownership of ideas developed by others (!) as part of the community
process. And Sun renegged on their promise to make Java a language
standard twice. Sun is not to be trusted either.
I think both Sun and Microsoft are equally duplicitous and manipulative
when it comes to Java or C#, respectively. My conclusion is that, until
either Sun or Microsoft or both make a firm, binding commitment on intellectual
property issues, neither platform is suitable for widespread adoption by
open source projects. Furthermore, until Sun and/or Microsoft create open
standards without even a hint of patent encumbrances, even commercial software
developers should consider both systems the equivalent of VisualBasic: a
proprietary language that can be changed by its creators at will and for
which there will be no viable independent third party implementations.
C# or Java could have been a great thing if they had turned out to be
open, standardized, and widely used. But, frankly, there are plenty
of better languages and runtimes than either C# or Java around anyway, so
given that those languages remain proprietary, why bother with them?
It may be a "copy control method", or a "copyright enforcement method", or a "copy prevention method", or, perhaps more accurately, a "fair use prevention method". But copyright is a legal construct, no something that has a "method".
As for "leaving out in the cold", I don't see why you shouldn't be able to get at the CD audio tracks with a computer CD player--upcoming players will almost certainly let you get at the multiple disk directories that companies like Sony are using for "copy prevention".
In any case, even if Sony has a strong copy prevention method, hat's just more incentive to copy the music through an analog channel once. After that, you never have to deal with Sony's hare-brained copy prevention schemes again.
Yes, eye contact is important in human-to-human interactions--that's been known scientifically for decades, and anecdotally for millennia. It's also been known that eye contact, as well a facial expressions, are very important in video conferencing, and furthermore, that they suffer greatly if there is any appreciable delay.
The notion, however, that human computer interaction becomes better by mimicking human to human interaction seems ridiculous. Computers are tools. I no more want to engage in social eye contact with a computer than I want to with my drill, my car, or my vacuum cleaner.
Eye contact is used to regulate attention in social situations--a precious commodity among humans. But when it comes to tools and appliances, I expect them to pay full attention to me all the time, but to respond only when spoken to. None of that involves eye contact.
The 'code morphing' technology also uses an astonishing amount of ram, up to 64mb in some cases, so linux users who need all that ram for gnome should steer clear of this chip.
Unlike Windows users, Linux users have a choice: there are plenty of low-footprint GUIs and desktops around there for Linux.
Of course, a machine that doesn't have enough memory to run Gnome will find running Windows XP even more taxing. Given current memory prices, all this is academic anyway: even a bloated system like Windows XP will fit onto any laptop built with this chip.
"just another neat idea", like LISP machines and the Amiga before it.
Huh? The Lisp machines were poorly engineered: they expended way too much silicon on things that didn't need hardware support. That's why they failed. Current processors could benefit from a little more support for dynamic languages, but not like the Lisp machines.
I'm not sure what kind of distinctive technical features you see on the Amiga. It was a nice machine, but much of what made it nice is completely mainstream now.
A Code-Morphing core could be used as a testbed for new ideas in CPU and instruction set designs.
It is: that's what JITs essentially are. And if you want a VLIW backend, you can get a VLIW processor from Intel.
You can record on your PDA or digital recorder and then have it transcribed on your PC.
I think the problem with the older speech recognition systems was that they weren't good enough for most people. Also, making them work on low-end processors is a lot of work--it requires a lot of optimization and assembly language programming. The market just isn't enough to make that kind of investment.
False. The ".doc" format is definitely not simple. It's also
not a raw dump of memory, it's objects that have been serialized into OLE
structured storage, which you can think of an evil twin of the already evil FAT file system.
Probably one of the *least* robust file formats I know of
My worry here is that if whole university clusters were opened up, so even
an inefficient O(n^3) problem ran in reasonable time, it sucks up an inordinately
large amount of processing power, slowing down the entire organization, while
the student running that problem has no idea that with some better written
mathematicode they could solve the problem in O(n) time,
[...] In summary: extra cycles are a currency that is far too often traded in
for lazy programming instead of increased performance.
Worst case complexity (which is what "an O(n^3) problem" usually refers to)
has little to do with how long programs take to run. What matters is
average case complexity on representative distributions of problem instances.
Now, what about complexity? Well, a lazily implemented algorithm with
average case complexity O(n) will beat a highly optimized algorithm with average
case complexity O(n^3) easily when problems get larger. And you need
to keep implementations of algorithms with better complexity simpler because
the algorithms tend to be more complex. The irony is that a lot of
software today is inefficient and bloated because the programmers spent a
lot of time optimizing tiny little pieces and creating software that is so
complex and difficult to maintain that they can't fix the big picture (Microsoft
Office, KDE, Gnome, etc. come to mind).
Furthermore, for many problems, programmer time is much more valuable than
computer time. Even if it takes 10 times as long to run or 10 times as many
CPUs, an inefficient implementation is often preferable if it takes 1/2 as
long to implement. And the simpler and lazier you keep the implementation,
the less likely you are to introduce bugs. Students find that out when
they miss the problem set deadline trying to hand-optimize and chase down
bugs they introduced during optimization.
In short, your attitude is probably at the root of a lot of bugs in today's
software. Programmers need to get lazier for software to improve, and,
as a bonus, lazily written software will often run faster, too.
Slashdot Mirror
If the Apache foundation lawyers have a signed paper copy of the aformentioned letter, yes.
That's a contract between Sun and the Apache foundation, not a contract with anybody else. The license on what Sun ships hasn't changed. Sun's attitude towards "contamination" hasn't changed. Besides, where is the text of that contract? Where are the signed copies?
GNU/Linux is a implementation based on Unix and the Posix standards. Unix was proprietary licensed by AT&T,
But UNIX wasn't patented and AT&T wasn't all that litigious about it (all they wanted was that people honored their copyrights). And POSIX was an open standard, unencumbered by patents. None of that applies to Java (or C#).
Does this mean that the open source development community should avoid any and all frameworks and patented methords?
Indeed, it shouldn't. But it should stay out of the line of fire of two major, greedy, and litigious players.
Well, the tactics you employ under the shear weight of contradictory linked evidence is a tactic I find often applied by members of the Microsoft Shill persuasion. No, I don't work for Sun, IBM or any other vendor in the IT industry, but I do admire and promote postive behavour when I see it.
I do like to promote positive behavior, too. That's why I supported Java and open source strongly during the first few years, when Sun promised to create an open standard, to encourage third party implementations, to improve numerical peformance and type safety, and to open source their implementation. Sun has broken every one of those promises, and the weight of evidence is that Sun is a duplicitous company that is not to be trusted.
Sun, in fact, has a long history of taking open source software and making it proprietary, and that hasn't stopped with Java either. Swing, for example, was also ready to be open sourced (IFC), but Sun took it proprietary. Before that, of course, they built their entire company on BSD UNIX.
Sun is also in trouble as a company, and they have failed to evolve the Java platform technically. This is not a company with which one negotiates or on whose products one builds open source software, in particular since Sun has no technology that is in any way distinguished. In fact, Java has fallen behind technically so badly that it really cannot be recomended anymore.
I don't know whether you are merely clueless or whether you have some stake in Sun, but either way, your arguments don't hold water and the direction you propose for open source is dangerous. We have given Sun more leeway than just about any other company, and they have taken unfair advantage of open source again and again. This should stop now.
I don't see what Berlin/Fresco has to do with the X Window System. Fresco used to be an X11 toolkit, but now it's something completely different.
If you think that a statement of intent on a web page somewhere is a legally binding contract, I have a bridge to sell you.
Once again, Where are the equivalent public declarations from Microsoft?
Who cares? Neither Java nor C# break technically any new ground. They would have been interesting if they had become open standards, but neither did. Instead, they have become a quagmire of patents and intellectual property claims. Why argue about which one is the lesser of two evils? The open source community should not touch either of them. Let Sun and Microsoft battle it out; let's hope they'll sue each other out of business.
By the way g4dget, are you any relation to John Carroll?
What an idiotic question. You think everybody who isn't enamored with Sun must be a Microsoft shill? I don't work for either Sun or Microsoft. As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft management consists of a bunch of megalomaniacal sleazeballs, but so does Sun management.
Now, what about you? You keep deflecting criticism of Sun by making completely irrelevant comparisons with Microsoft. Do you work for Sun by any chance?
There is nothing legally binding there. Sun can do whatever they want at any time, and they can define whatever they like to be part of the JCP or not.
But is it safer to create an open source Java framework than to re-implementing .NET - Hell yes.
Why re-implement either if neither company is playing fair? There is nothing technically particularly interesting or novel about either language.
If you want to talk about patents more generally, yes, Microsoft is patenting a lot of C# related stuff. But so is Sun. Both companies are lying when they say that they are creating "open systems". We have no more reason to trust Sun than Microsoft.
The best approach for the open source community is to give both Sun and Microsoft the cold shoulder. Let McNealy and Gates play out their megalomaniac power plays and let us get on with writing good software.
You are reaching if you think that combining Sun's statement on the JCP together with some minor revisions of Java2 mean that Sun makes available all their patents for free Java implementations.
At least Sun is making concrete steps towards being more open.
Sun has made no legally binding commitments on keeping Java open. Sun even pulled out of two standardization processes because they didn't even want to disclose their patents, let along license them.
Where are the equivalent public declarations from Microsoft?
There are none (well, they have committed to RAND, but that's of no interest to open source).
The upshot is that both Microsoft and Sun are spreading PR and FUD. Neither of them has made any legally binding commitment to an open system or language. Neither system offers anything technically new or interesting. That's why the open source community shouldn't waste any more time on either of them.
That is, almost everything in the Java 2 platform is completely Sun proprietary. Sun even renegged on standardizing it through ISO/ECMA, which would at least have required them to disclose what patents apply.
C#/CLI has patent problems. But so does Java/JVM, and at this point, they look more serious than those with C#/CLI. If you want an open platform, you have to look somewhere else: neither C#/CLI nor Java/JVM fits the bill.
Not yet, but it may happen. The US has analogous power, but it is still a democratic and free nation at its core. But that is slowly changing: religious and political extremists are moving more and more into the mainstream in the US and the population is accepting more and more restrictions on free speech and freedom of association.
Another 10 years? Who knows? Who cares? There are plenty of countries that are violating UN resolutions and that possess weapons of mass destructions. Are we going to attack them all? Why start with Iraq?
Bush is picking on Iraq in particular because it's politically expedient and because he has a bone to pick with that country. And for that, we have to pay billions of dollars and put American lives at risk.
I have heard many on the Left decry that the US is going alone, and now that the UN has passed a resolution, that the US controls the UN. I have yet hear what a comprehensive solution as to what should be done.
The UN didn't have a choice but to vote the way they did when the US forced the issue. The whole thing is still the responsibility of the US, and if the US stopped pursuing it, nobody else would bother.
I see nothing in that patent application that has anything directly to do with C#/CLI. That patent has to do with distributed computation, and it would apply equally to systems implemented in Java or C++. I don't see anything in it that would apply to a conforming C#/CLI implementation.
I'd say it's "decent", a modest improvement over Java.
It's very exciting to be able to build stuff using vs.net, and deploy on linux.
Yuck. VisualStudio is probably the main reason why Windows software sucks so badly: it lets people without a clue throw together software they have no business writing, and it makes on-going software maintenance and evolution unnecessarily hard even for people who know what they are doing. I very much hope that the junk coming out of VS.net will continue to depend on Microsoft proprietary libraries and will not make it to the Linux platform.
This is wrong, or at least highly misleading. Sun has granted rights only to standard developed under the JCP from here on forward (and then only to participants in the JCP):
Sun has hundreds of patents on core Java technologies that are unrelated to JCP efforts, and Sun has granted no licenses to those. You would likely run into those if you tried to create an independent Java implementation.
Both C#/CLI and Java/JVM should be considered proprietary platforms covered by numerous patents. And both Sun and Microsoft have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted on intellectual property issues or commitments to open standards.
There are plenty of high quality, truly open languages and runtimes out there. Open source software developers are fools to waste any time on either C# or Java until Microsoft and/or Sun make binding commitments to make those platforms truly open.
UNIX has had things like COM. But because in UNIX programmers have a choice and because COM sucks technically, most people ended up using other solutions.
Each programming language still has to be manually extended in some form or another to recognise new APIs
Each language has its own APIs for extension with native code. That is by choice. But, no, you don't need to manually create new interfaces for each language.
So, really: what is the need for C# on *NIX? None of my c# code that I am writing will port,
Your Windows C++ code won't port to UNIX either. So what? Does that make C++ useless on Linux? I don't think so.
Yes, it is. People have written lots of portable, useful code in ANSI C or ANSI C++, and those standard libraries are much more limited than the ECMA/ISO C# libraries. The ECMA/ISO C# libraries contain pretty much all the primitives you need in order to talk to the OS (I/O, networking, threads, processes, etc.). Almost all the other .NET libraries are fluff that is easily replaced by pure C# libraries. Besides, WORA is overrated. I really don't care whether it takes a little bit of hacking and conditionalization to move my code from Linux to Windows.
One good thing that could come out of this is that it might force Sun to loosen it's grip on Java a bit so that we get more serious open JVM's etc.
I used to think that, too. But now, I think the time for that has come and passed. Sun has missed the opportunity to create a Java standard, they have pissed off pretty much anybody willing to invest the time to build a third party JVM and runtime, and they have become stuck with a number of stupid technical decisions in the JVM.
An even better reason not to incorporate eye contact into interaction with machines.
The biggest problem I see is that Microsoft is claiming patents on the CLI:
This has also been reported elsewhere and confirmed by Microsoft. What the patents in question are remains unclear; given that C#/CLI also really is just a copy of earlier technologies (and even Java/JVM hardly contains new ideas), the patents are probably bogus, but that wouldn't keep Microsoft from causing big legal troubles.
Note that the situation with Java/JVM isn't much better. Sun has been filing hundreds of patents on Java/JVM-related technologies, some of which look like they are essential for creating compatible implementations (e.g., the bytecode type checking), and Sun's intellectual property policy towards third party Java-related projects and implementations has often been hostile. Sun has repeatedly tried to kill third party Java implementations (all conforming Java implementations depend on Sun source code). Sun has had to be dragged kicking and screaming even to the point where they don't claim ownership of ideas developed by others (!) as part of the community process. And Sun renegged on their promise to make Java a language standard twice. Sun is not to be trusted either.
I think both Sun and Microsoft are equally duplicitous and manipulative when it comes to Java or C#, respectively. My conclusion is that, until either Sun or Microsoft or both make a firm, binding commitment on intellectual property issues, neither platform is suitable for widespread adoption by open source projects. Furthermore, until Sun and/or Microsoft create open standards without even a hint of patent encumbrances, even commercial software developers should consider both systems the equivalent of VisualBasic: a proprietary language that can be changed by its creators at will and for which there will be no viable independent third party implementations.
C# or Java could have been a great thing if they had turned out to be open, standardized, and widely used. But, frankly, there are plenty of better languages and runtimes than either C# or Java around anyway, so given that those languages remain proprietary, why bother with them?
As for "leaving out in the cold", I don't see why you shouldn't be able to get at the CD audio tracks with a computer CD player--upcoming players will almost certainly let you get at the multiple disk directories that companies like Sony are using for "copy prevention".
In any case, even if Sony has a strong copy prevention method, hat's just more incentive to copy the music through an analog channel once. After that, you never have to deal with Sony's hare-brained copy prevention schemes again.
The notion, however, that human computer interaction becomes better by mimicking human to human interaction seems ridiculous. Computers are tools. I no more want to engage in social eye contact with a computer than I want to with my drill, my car, or my vacuum cleaner.
Eye contact is used to regulate attention in social situations--a precious commodity among humans. But when it comes to tools and appliances, I expect them to pay full attention to me all the time, but to respond only when spoken to. None of that involves eye contact.
As others posted, your information is not entirely correct. Check out this site [apache.org] for information.
I'm sorry, but where does that differ from what I said?
How noisy is this thing? I didn't see any mention of that in the review.
Unlike Windows users, Linux users have a choice: there are plenty of low-footprint GUIs and desktops around there for Linux.
Of course, a machine that doesn't have enough memory to run Gnome will find running Windows XP even more taxing. Given current memory prices, all this is academic anyway: even a bloated system like Windows XP will fit onto any laptop built with this chip.
Huh? The Lisp machines were poorly engineered: they expended way too much silicon on things that didn't need hardware support. That's why they failed. Current processors could benefit from a little more support for dynamic languages, but not like the Lisp machines.
I'm not sure what kind of distinctive technical features you see on the Amiga. It was a nice machine, but much of what made it nice is completely mainstream now.
A Code-Morphing core could be used as a testbed for new ideas in CPU and instruction set designs.
It is: that's what JITs essentially are. And if you want a VLIW backend, you can get a VLIW processor from Intel.
I think the problem with the older speech recognition systems was that they weren't good enough for most people. Also, making them work on low-end processors is a lot of work--it requires a lot of optimization and assembly language programming. The market just isn't enough to make that kind of investment.
.doc is a simple dump of the memory state,
False. The ".doc" format is definitely not simple. It's also not a raw dump of memory, it's objects that have been serialized into OLE structured storage, which you can think of an evil twin of the already evil FAT file system.
Probably one of the *least* robust file formats I know of
Yes, that's true.
My worry here is that if whole university clusters were opened up, so even an inefficient O(n^3) problem ran in reasonable time, it sucks up an inordinately large amount of processing power, slowing down the entire organization, while the student running that problem has no idea that with some better written mathematicode they could solve the problem in O(n) time,
[...]
In summary: extra cycles are a currency that is far too often traded in for lazy programming instead of increased performance.
Worst case complexity (which is what "an O(n^3) problem" usually refers to) has little to do with how long programs take to run. What matters is average case complexity on representative distributions of problem instances.
Now, what about complexity? Well, a lazily implemented algorithm with average case complexity O(n) will beat a highly optimized algorithm with average case complexity O(n^3) easily when problems get larger. And you need to keep implementations of algorithms with better complexity simpler because the algorithms tend to be more complex. The irony is that a lot of software today is inefficient and bloated because the programmers spent a lot of time optimizing tiny little pieces and creating software that is so complex and difficult to maintain that they can't fix the big picture (Microsoft Office, KDE, Gnome, etc. come to mind).
Furthermore, for many problems, programmer time is much more valuable than computer time. Even if it takes 10 times as long to run or 10 times as many CPUs, an inefficient implementation is often preferable if it takes 1/2 as long to implement. And the simpler and lazier you keep the implementation, the less likely you are to introduce bugs. Students find that out when they miss the problem set deadline trying to hand-optimize and chase down bugs they introduced during optimization.
In short, your attitude is probably at the root of a lot of bugs in today's software. Programmers need to get lazier for software to improve, and, as a bonus, lazily written software will often run faster, too.