Size, volume, cost, and safety has to be just right for a mass-market product. And those issues are very sensitive to available materials and demand.
New materials are beginning to make fuel cells feasible. They will happen once everything falls into place.
Look at handhelds: the Palm was not the first by a long shot, nor technically the best, but Palm was lucky that when they came to market, all the pieces had fallen into place and they hit the right price point (and, yes, it was luck).
Is there any reason to believe that AltiVec is better than Intel's or AMD's vectorized instruction set? Maybe it's better on the G4 than its equivalent on the P4, but maybe it also has more silicon devoted to it there.
ahem. What is your magic sunlight to electricity converter? If it is the current generation of solar cells, I hate to burst your bubble,
Oh, please, read a little bit about large scale solar energy before opining.
no 'friendly' energy. Just energy sources that are less destructive than others.
Nonsense. Energy sources do not have to be "destructive"--they can be sustainable and have a small, one-time impact on the environment.
"plant based fuels" means chemicals in the ground a la the mass argriculture we currently practice in growing food
Absolutely not. Unlike showy supermarket fruits, most plants grow without fertilizers or pesticides, and many plants are suitable for making fuel.
How exactly do you plan to recycle inert chemicals into useful batteries for the next generation of equipment?
Oh, come on, that's elementary chemistry. For example, for lead-acid batteries, you recover the remaining solid lead and melt it down. You recover the various lead compounds from the acid and reduce them back to metallic lead. And the acid itself, free of heavy metals, can be neutralized and the resulting salt disposed of harmlessly. The process doesn't even require much energy. Other batteries can be recycled similarly.
Except for the x86, Macintosh is already almost a PC: PCI, USB, IEEE1394, AGP, ATA, etc. Even their BIOS is not homegrown anymore. And the mainstream PC hardware architecture has gotten pretty powerful--it's unlikely that Apple can do any better. PC vendors also have started eliminating complex legacy stuff pretty aggressively--in another year or two, ISA, parallel ATA, and PS/2 will likely be history, and BIOSes (for better or worse) will be based around ACP.
Apple can't switch to the x86 because their app vendors would be in hell trying to port their AltiVec optimizations to MMX/SSE/3DNow!/SSE2.
Without AltiVec or MMX, the G4, AMD, and P4 seem to be roughly equivalent at the same clock speed. And not many applications are optimized for AltiVec--not many can be.
Overall, Apple might well benefit in terms of performance by going with x86, even if a tiny handful of hand-optimized applications possibly gets a little slower.
Whatever they do, Apple should probably go with a 64bit architecture, since 4Gbytes is getting a bit tight. Maybe Itanium is the answer?
That's roughly how I felt about DCL compared to UNIX shells back when I was occasionally using VMS.
Sorry, but from a UNIX perspective, I just don't see that much difference between NT and VMS: to me, they both embody roughly the same approach to OS design, an approach that I don't like. The fact that between the two, VMS is a much better and more mature OS doesn't change that opinion.
But obviously someone must like something about it, since a lot of people are paying a lot of money for both VMS and NT.
There is no such thing as 'enviromentally friendly power'.
Sure there is. Solar power captured in deserts and converted into hydrogen would have much less impact on the environment than any current technology. Windpower and other technologies can also be put in place where they have very little impact. Plant-based fuels have no more impact than other agriculture (less, actually).
"Friendly" doesn't mean that there is absolutely no effect on the environment, it just means that the effects are much more limited and predictable than they are now, and that those methods are sustainable.
If you choose to ignore the batteries, yes. But even a small electric car is a rolling toxic waste dump with current battery technology.
None of that needs to be released into the environment for their operation, and all of it can be recycled.
Furthermore, once there is a demand, people will make incremental improvements and come up with cheaper, lighter, and better battery technologies.
That toxic nuclear material came from the environment in the first place.
No. The fissionable material put into in nuclear reactors both has a very long half life, is not very radioactive, and is contained in geologically stable formations and minerals. That's because it has been around for such a long time before being extracted for use in nuclear power plants: anything short-lived has already decayed long ago, anything that isn't tightly contained in its geological environment has been washed out long ago. All you get with natural radioactive minerals is very slow decay and very slow weathering over a huge area.
Once you refine this stuff and put it into a nuclear reactor, you convert it into something with a much shorter halflife (on a geological time scale, not a human time scale), and it is much more concentrated, much more chemically reactive, and much less geologically stable form.
After being "burned" in a power plant there's less of it than when you started,
what with that pesky first law of thermodynamics and all.
There is a little bit less mass, but the resulting radioactive material is much more dangerous. Furthermore, you also end up contaminating huge amounts of previously non-radioactive materials with dangerous radioactive isotopes through neutron capture.
Then it's returned to the environment, typically in a more geologically stable place than where it came from.
Absolutely not. Apart from the fact that what we return to the environment is completely different from what we took from it, we have no idea how geologically stable specific sites are in the future or how our storage methods hold up over millenia. For natural radioactive minerals, since they have been where they are for so long, it's a good bet that they are going to stay there, up to slow processes like weathering.
Even if you could "recycle" the core materials very efficiently, you would still end up with enormous amounts of radioactive materials from the building materials and structural materials. And their half lives are all over the place.
It's the feel, not the commands, that are similar: non-uniform pathname notation, distinguished command/scripting language, pathname expansion by commands, an plethora of security bits, lots of special cases all over the place.
should have a go at VMS so they could see exactly how different an OS that's NOT UNIX really is.
Indeed. While details differ, VMS has many of the same complexities of other mainframe and minicomputer operating systems of yore. UNIX was explicitly created as a reaction to that style of design. I just don't get why people think systems like VMS were ever a good design.
The NT command interpreter is a full scripting language. There are command line equivalents for NT system management. Of course, NT comes with print queues. Command queues are a third party add-on.
Until coal & gas are not used anymore, pure EV is bad for the environment.
Electricity can be produced by environmentally friendly means--we need neither oil, gas, or nuclear power. Furthermore, even oil and gas-powered plants can reduce emissions much more effectively than automobiles--they can use much better catalysts and filters, and they could even eliminate carbon dioxide emissions. They also avoid most of the pollution resulting from refining and transporting gasoline.
Another reason why electric cars are environmentally friendly is because they simply don't come in the kind of behemoths that gasoline powered cars come in. And they don't have to: if you want a lot of power in an SUV, you need a big engine and that's going to depress gas mileage. Electric motors give you a lot more flexibility.
Furthermore, even if there were currently an environmental disadvantage of pure EVs (which I don't believe there actually is if you work it all out), you wouldn't have to eliminate all coal and gas powered electric plants, you'd only have to replace a fraction of them with environmentally more friendly technologies, or upgrade a fraction of them to run more cleanly.
The real problem is that because the anti-nuke lobby has made it uneconomical to run nuclear power plants,
If only it were true. Nuclear energy is environmentally the most harmful energy source imaginable because it leaves behind waste that is both highly toxic and completely indestructible by chemical or biological means. We should eliminate it completely as soon as possible--we just don't need it.
It's fine for zipping around cities like San Francisco, Seattle, or Portland. Still, I agree that they should have increased the range somewhat for US distances.
The biggest problem was that it was very hard to get these things. Also, people don't want to commit to something if the company isn't going to stick with it.
I would have liked to buy one, but they never became available for sale around here (only a tiny number of leases) and they had almost no dealers. These cars would be great for cities like SF because they are very easy to park.
Also, in the transition from Norway to the US, they should have (and could have) increased the range a little bit to match the longer distances in the US.
If this failure weren't adequately explained by the usual corporate incompetence, one might thing that Ford was deliberately trying to set Think up for failure.
The same guy who was responsible for VMS is responsible for Windows NT. You can think of NT as an attempt of a next generation VMS, with a DOS-like command line and a Windows GUI.
And the relationship between VMS and UNIX is analogous to the relationship between Windows NT and Linux. VMS was indeed considered very secure--probably because it had lots of "security features". In real life, however, VMS systems were often a lot less secure than UNIX systems because it was nearly impossible to get all the security setting right. More generally, UNIX was built around a small number of simple ideas and paradigms, while VMS attempted to be the all-singing-all-dancing operating system.
So, if you want to get that "old VMS feeling", just fire up a Windows NT or XP machine and type at the command line--it's roughly the same.
It is correct that Java was initially sold to the mass market for the applet ability.
Yes--and that's why people went out on a limb to push for the adoption of Java and why Java initially became successful. The fact that Sun has failed to do the right things to make that initial vision come true is a major letdown.
Today, Java is a capable server-side programming environment, but sandboxing and cross-platform support are much less important on the server. That's why.NET is a serious threat and why Sun lost so much marketshare to Flash and Microsoft.
but unless much more breakthrough level results are obtained, soon, the AIDS epidemic will become a catastrophic event that will have no less impact on the world today as the Black Plague had in times past.
We already have an effective vaccine for HIV: education. Nobody has to be afraid of catching HIV because whether they do or not is entirely under their own control (with a few exceptions like rape or malpractice). That doesn't mean that we shouldn't also look for treatments or invest in health care (people do all sorts of things voluntarily that result in disease or death, and we have an obligation to help them), but it does mean that nobody has to be afraid of HIV.
And, in fact, education and prevention are our only options. Treatment will never solve the crisis in Africa--the continent is so poor that people can't even afford aspirin or childhood vaccinations--long term treatment for a complex illness like HIV simply is not going to reach most people.
More importantly, however, my point is that we will have epidemics with 90% mortality sooner or later. It has happened before (to other species) and it will inevitably happen to humans at some point. That's just the way biology works. There is no point in being "scared" of something that is basically inevitable. We can, however, reduce the impact of such an epidemic through better public health measures.
If the theory of an ancient chimp epidemic would hold true for humans, he said, "the implications are pretty scary."
I don't see anything particularly scary about it: the fact that we have the data from chimps may well let us develop better drugs.
If the biologists are "scared" by the fact that 90% of a population may have been wiped out by a virus--well, welcome to the real world. Those things happen to real world species. Humans are particularly susceptible because of travel and high population densities, but we also have a public health system going for us.
Note, incidentally, that infectious mononucleosis probably was also devastating for human ancestors--very lethal and very easy to transmit. Today, it is a harmless disease only because of an odd quirk of the virus and the human immune system.
Sun will continue to screw up, because they don't compete, they complain and cry, and sue.
Did you even read what I wrote? That was basically my point.
you still think that Microsoft is a dominant evil
Of course I do--they are. The fact that Sun screwed up in this case and that Sun would behave just the same way if McNealy was smart enough to figure out how doesn't mean that Microsoft is a nice company. And for Microsoft to be a "dominant evil" doesn't imply intent or malice on their part. Disease epidemics are "dominant evils" but the causative agent isn't morally responsible.
Microsoft is the result of poor public policy, poor monopoly enforcement, poor copyright laws, and poor software liability laws. The people responsible for that are sitting in our government and are running our financial markets. Something like Microsoft shouldn't happen in an efficient market economy, and it is up to our government and legislators to figure out how to stop it.
Java was never supposed to run in a Browser or the Internet at all;
Sorry, but "never" is wrong. Java was advertised to run in a browser exactly at the point in time when Java was released to the public. That's why people started adopting it and that's why such a mediocre language managed to succeed. And that is what is at issue in this discussion. What happened before that internally at Sun is not relevant to why or how Java succeeded or failed.
Java was supposed to be a small, open platform for writing clients that are delivered through the web browser. Sun messed up on all of that: Java mushroomed to a size of many megabytes, its original toolkit was horrible, its original runtime was slow, its graphics support was lousy, and Sun renegged on their promise to make Java an international standard. Java also had some really serious design problems. And Sun was stupid by explicitly tweaking and taunting Microsoft.
Look at Flash and its success in comparison: Macromedia positioned it as harmless eye candy (so it didn't catch Microsoft's attention), didn't promise much of anything, had great graphics and animation support, and provided great authoring tools. Flash came in under the radar screen and didn't look like like a threat to Microsoft, and it picked a market and stuck to it (eye candy).
Sun could have succeeded with Java: they should have fixed severe technical problems with Java earlier and standardized it through a standards body. Sun should also have focussed on keeping Java small and on the client. Microsoft would likely have supported standard Java and added lots of proprietary libraries--just like what Apple is doing with Java, for example.
Today, Java is still a pretty decent programming environment with a very efficient runtime and capable libraries. I'd still recommend using it for many kinds of commercial applications. Java will likely continue to be a big deal for server side programming. For lightweight clients, Flash will continue to make inroads. For widespread adoption by the open source community, Java missed its window of opportunity for the most part--Sun's policies still don't make it a good platform.
But what Java is today is Sun's responsibility, not Microsoft's or anybody else. Companies like Macromedia and Adobe have shown that you can compete with Microsoft and that you can ship formats and software that cuts into Microsoft's markets. But if a company behaves as stupidly as Sun did, they will fail. And the fact that Sun has so thoroughly failed with their promises towards the open source community and has failed to keep Java suitable for its original purpose also means that I don't have that much sympathy for them.
There are plenty of compounds that "bind to HIV and keep it from entering cells". Most of them also bind to lots of other things or are poisonous. A few, carefully designed ones (fusion inhibitors) are in clinical trials and may help with drug treatment regimes.
However, since HIV is a retrovirus, it can stay dormant as DNA inside cells and re-appear spontaneously after years or decades even if it is killed off completely. Therefore, it is impossible for drugs to cure HIV; they can only control it and only if taken indefinitely. Only a "curative" vaccine could control HIV infection without drugs, but even in the best possible scenario, people would still remain asymptomatic carriers and they would probably still require regular boosters.
The long and short of it is: don't get infected with HIV. It's a nasty virus, it is intrinsically incurable (although it may be controllable eventually), and it is easy to avoid.
Read the story. ZeroConf or Rendezvous is basically a way of defining a little better how computers can "guess" an IP address for themselves and try it out. That doesn't open up any new security holes; rather, it brings some order and standardization into the things people already do more haphazardly. Windows XP, for example, already uses a mechanism like ZeroConf, but in a way that is more disruptive to networks.
(BTW, the English plural of "virus" is "viruses"; the Latin plural would be one of "viri" (pronounced "vee-ree"), "virorum", "viris", or "viros", depending on case.)
I don't see a GPL incompatibility. The author of the GPL'ed software gives you certain rights to the software. There may be lots of other restrictions on uses or distribution of GPL'ed software--you may, for example, not print it out and hit somebody over the head with it, or you may not export it because of export restrictions. Ultimately, you have to know what is legal and contractually permitted, and that depends on who you are, where you live, and where you got the software.
In any case, Thompson isn't even giving you a license to use the MP3 patents, they merely state their intentions. And their patents are valid in only a few countries anyway so that even if there were a conflict in the US and the GPL self-terminated in that case, there can still be lots of GPL'ed MP3 players (just like there are MP3 encoders available over the Internet from countries where the MP3 patents aren't valid). So, I really don't see what possible connection there could be between a software author putting a GPL on a piece of code and some statement of intent by Thompson on their web site.
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New materials are beginning to make fuel cells feasible. They will happen once everything falls into place.
Look at handhelds: the Palm was not the first by a long shot, nor technically the best, but Palm was lucky that when they came to market, all the pieces had fallen into place and they hit the right price point (and, yes, it was luck).
The idea itself is much older than that. It is just that we are slowly approaching feasibilty.
Is there any reason to believe that AltiVec is better than Intel's or AMD's vectorized instruction set? Maybe it's better on the G4 than its equivalent on the P4, but maybe it also has more silicon devoted to it there.
Oh, please, read a little bit about large scale solar energy before opining.
no 'friendly' energy. Just energy sources that are less destructive than others.
Nonsense. Energy sources do not have to be "destructive"--they can be sustainable and have a small, one-time impact on the environment.
"plant based fuels" means chemicals in the ground a la the mass argriculture we currently practice in growing food
Absolutely not. Unlike showy supermarket fruits, most plants grow without fertilizers or pesticides, and many plants are suitable for making fuel.
How exactly do you plan to recycle inert chemicals into useful batteries for the next generation of equipment?
Oh, come on, that's elementary chemistry. For example, for lead-acid batteries, you recover the remaining solid lead and melt it down. You recover the various lead compounds from the acid and reduce them back to metallic lead. And the acid itself, free of heavy metals, can be neutralized and the resulting salt disposed of harmlessly. The process doesn't even require much energy. Other batteries can be recycled similarly.
Except for the x86, Macintosh is already almost a PC: PCI, USB, IEEE1394, AGP, ATA, etc. Even their BIOS is not homegrown anymore. And the mainstream PC hardware architecture has gotten pretty powerful--it's unlikely that Apple can do any better. PC vendors also have started eliminating complex legacy stuff pretty aggressively--in another year or two, ISA, parallel ATA, and PS/2 will likely be history, and BIOSes (for better or worse) will be based around ACP.
Without AltiVec or MMX, the G4, AMD, and P4 seem to be roughly equivalent at the same clock speed. And not many applications are optimized for AltiVec--not many can be.
Overall, Apple might well benefit in terms of performance by going with x86, even if a tiny handful of hand-optimized applications possibly gets a little slower.
Whatever they do, Apple should probably go with a 64bit architecture, since 4Gbytes is getting a bit tight. Maybe Itanium is the answer?
Sorry, but from a UNIX perspective, I just don't see that much difference between NT and VMS: to me, they both embody roughly the same approach to OS design, an approach that I don't like. The fact that between the two, VMS is a much better and more mature OS doesn't change that opinion.
But obviously someone must like something about it, since a lot of people are paying a lot of money for both VMS and NT.
Sure there is. Solar power captured in deserts and converted into hydrogen would have much less impact on the environment than any current technology. Windpower and other technologies can also be put in place where they have very little impact. Plant-based fuels have no more impact than other agriculture (less, actually).
"Friendly" doesn't mean that there is absolutely no effect on the environment, it just means that the effects are much more limited and predictable than they are now, and that those methods are sustainable.
If you choose to ignore the batteries, yes. But even a small electric car is a rolling toxic waste dump with current battery technology.
None of that needs to be released into the environment for their operation, and all of it can be recycled.
Furthermore, once there is a demand, people will make incremental improvements and come up with cheaper, lighter, and better battery technologies.
No. The fissionable material put into in nuclear reactors both has a very long half life, is not very radioactive, and is contained in geologically stable formations and minerals. That's because it has been around for such a long time before being extracted for use in nuclear power plants: anything short-lived has already decayed long ago, anything that isn't tightly contained in its geological environment has been washed out long ago. All you get with natural radioactive minerals is very slow decay and very slow weathering over a huge area.
Once you refine this stuff and put it into a nuclear reactor, you convert it into something with a much shorter halflife (on a geological time scale, not a human time scale), and it is much more concentrated, much more chemically reactive, and much less geologically stable form.
After being "burned" in a power plant there's less of it than when you started, what with that pesky first law of thermodynamics and all.
There is a little bit less mass, but the resulting radioactive material is much more dangerous. Furthermore, you also end up contaminating huge amounts of previously non-radioactive materials with dangerous radioactive isotopes through neutron capture.
Then it's returned to the environment, typically in a more geologically stable place than where it came from.
Absolutely not. Apart from the fact that what we return to the environment is completely different from what we took from it, we have no idea how geologically stable specific sites are in the future or how our storage methods hold up over millenia. For natural radioactive minerals, since they have been where they are for so long, it's a good bet that they are going to stay there, up to slow processes like weathering.
Even if you could "recycle" the core materials very efficiently, you would still end up with enormous amounts of radioactive materials from the building materials and structural materials. And their half lives are all over the place.
It's the feel, not the commands, that are similar: non-uniform pathname notation, distinguished command/scripting language, pathname expansion by commands, an plethora of security bits, lots of special cases all over the place.
should have a go at VMS so they could see exactly how different an OS that's NOT UNIX really is.
Indeed. While details differ, VMS has many of the same complexities of other mainframe and minicomputer operating systems of yore. UNIX was explicitly created as a reaction to that style of design. I just don't get why people think systems like VMS were ever a good design.
The NT command interpreter is a full scripting language. There are command line equivalents for NT system management. Of course, NT comes with print queues. Command queues are a third party add-on.
Electricity can be produced by environmentally friendly means--we need neither oil, gas, or nuclear power. Furthermore, even oil and gas-powered plants can reduce emissions much more effectively than automobiles--they can use much better catalysts and filters, and they could even eliminate carbon dioxide emissions. They also avoid most of the pollution resulting from refining and transporting gasoline.
Another reason why electric cars are environmentally friendly is because they simply don't come in the kind of behemoths that gasoline powered cars come in. And they don't have to: if you want a lot of power in an SUV, you need a big engine and that's going to depress gas mileage. Electric motors give you a lot more flexibility.
Furthermore, even if there were currently an environmental disadvantage of pure EVs (which I don't believe there actually is if you work it all out), you wouldn't have to eliminate all coal and gas powered electric plants, you'd only have to replace a fraction of them with environmentally more friendly technologies, or upgrade a fraction of them to run more cleanly.
The real problem is that because the anti-nuke lobby has made it uneconomical to run nuclear power plants,
If only it were true. Nuclear energy is environmentally the most harmful energy source imaginable because it leaves behind waste that is both highly toxic and completely indestructible by chemical or biological means. We should eliminate it completely as soon as possible--we just don't need it.
The biggest problem was that it was very hard to get these things. Also, people don't want to commit to something if the company isn't going to stick with it.
Also, in the transition from Norway to the US, they should have (and could have) increased the range a little bit to match the longer distances in the US.
If this failure weren't adequately explained by the usual corporate incompetence, one might thing that Ford was deliberately trying to set Think up for failure.
And the relationship between VMS and UNIX is analogous to the relationship between Windows NT and Linux. VMS was indeed considered very secure--probably because it had lots of "security features". In real life, however, VMS systems were often a lot less secure than UNIX systems because it was nearly impossible to get all the security setting right. More generally, UNIX was built around a small number of simple ideas and paradigms, while VMS attempted to be the all-singing-all-dancing operating system.
So, if you want to get that "old VMS feeling", just fire up a Windows NT or XP machine and type at the command line--it's roughly the same.
Yes--and that's why people went out on a limb to push for the adoption of Java and why Java initially became successful. The fact that Sun has failed to do the right things to make that initial vision come true is a major letdown.
Today, Java is a capable server-side programming environment, but sandboxing and cross-platform support are much less important on the server. That's why .NET is a serious threat and why Sun lost so much marketshare to Flash and Microsoft.
We already have an effective vaccine for HIV: education. Nobody has to be afraid of catching HIV because whether they do or not is entirely under their own control (with a few exceptions like rape or malpractice). That doesn't mean that we shouldn't also look for treatments or invest in health care (people do all sorts of things voluntarily that result in disease or death, and we have an obligation to help them), but it does mean that nobody has to be afraid of HIV.
And, in fact, education and prevention are our only options. Treatment will never solve the crisis in Africa--the continent is so poor that people can't even afford aspirin or childhood vaccinations--long term treatment for a complex illness like HIV simply is not going to reach most people.
More importantly, however, my point is that we will have epidemics with 90% mortality sooner or later. It has happened before (to other species) and it will inevitably happen to humans at some point. That's just the way biology works. There is no point in being "scared" of something that is basically inevitable. We can, however, reduce the impact of such an epidemic through better public health measures.
I don't see anything particularly scary about it: the fact that we have the data from chimps may well let us develop better drugs.
If the biologists are "scared" by the fact that 90% of a population may have been wiped out by a virus--well, welcome to the real world. Those things happen to real world species. Humans are particularly susceptible because of travel and high population densities, but we also have a public health system going for us.
Note, incidentally, that infectious mononucleosis probably was also devastating for human ancestors--very lethal and very easy to transmit. Today, it is a harmless disease only because of an odd quirk of the virus and the human immune system.
Did you even read what I wrote? That was basically my point.
you still think that Microsoft is a dominant evil
Of course I do--they are. The fact that Sun screwed up in this case and that Sun would behave just the same way if McNealy was smart enough to figure out how doesn't mean that Microsoft is a nice company. And for Microsoft to be a "dominant evil" doesn't imply intent or malice on their part. Disease epidemics are "dominant evils" but the causative agent isn't morally responsible.
Microsoft is the result of poor public policy, poor monopoly enforcement, poor copyright laws, and poor software liability laws. The people responsible for that are sitting in our government and are running our financial markets. Something like Microsoft shouldn't happen in an efficient market economy, and it is up to our government and legislators to figure out how to stop it.
Sorry, but "never" is wrong. Java was advertised to run in a browser exactly at the point in time when Java was released to the public. That's why people started adopting it and that's why such a mediocre language managed to succeed. And that is what is at issue in this discussion. What happened before that internally at Sun is not relevant to why or how Java succeeded or failed.
Look at Flash and its success in comparison: Macromedia positioned it as harmless eye candy (so it didn't catch Microsoft's attention), didn't promise much of anything, had great graphics and animation support, and provided great authoring tools. Flash came in under the radar screen and didn't look like like a threat to Microsoft, and it picked a market and stuck to it (eye candy).
Sun could have succeeded with Java: they should have fixed severe technical problems with Java earlier and standardized it through a standards body. Sun should also have focussed on keeping Java small and on the client. Microsoft would likely have supported standard Java and added lots of proprietary libraries--just like what Apple is doing with Java, for example.
Today, Java is still a pretty decent programming environment with a very efficient runtime and capable libraries. I'd still recommend using it for many kinds of commercial applications. Java will likely continue to be a big deal for server side programming. For lightweight clients, Flash will continue to make inroads. For widespread adoption by the open source community, Java missed its window of opportunity for the most part--Sun's policies still don't make it a good platform.
But what Java is today is Sun's responsibility, not Microsoft's or anybody else. Companies like Macromedia and Adobe have shown that you can compete with Microsoft and that you can ship formats and software that cuts into Microsoft's markets. But if a company behaves as stupidly as Sun did, they will fail. And the fact that Sun has so thoroughly failed with their promises towards the open source community and has failed to keep Java suitable for its original purpose also means that I don't have that much sympathy for them.
However, since HIV is a retrovirus, it can stay dormant as DNA inside cells and re-appear spontaneously after years or decades even if it is killed off completely. Therefore, it is impossible for drugs to cure HIV; they can only control it and only if taken indefinitely. Only a "curative" vaccine could control HIV infection without drugs, but even in the best possible scenario, people would still remain asymptomatic carriers and they would probably still require regular boosters.
The long and short of it is: don't get infected with HIV. It's a nasty virus, it is intrinsically incurable (although it may be controllable eventually), and it is easy to avoid.
(BTW, the English plural of "virus" is "viruses"; the Latin plural would be one of "viri" (pronounced "vee-ree"), "virorum", "viris", or "viros", depending on case.)
In any case, Thompson isn't even giving you a license to use the MP3 patents, they merely state their intentions. And their patents are valid in only a few countries anyway so that even if there were a conflict in the US and the GPL self-terminated in that case, there can still be lots of GPL'ed MP3 players (just like there are MP3 encoders available over the Internet from countries where the MP3 patents aren't valid). So, I really don't see what possible connection there could be between a software author putting a GPL on a piece of code and some statement of intent by Thompson on their web site.