People have missed the more interesting part of the
"confidential" agreement:
2. Use of Windows Media Files
a. LindowsOS version 4.0 and LindowsOS version 4.5 (now
renamed Linspire 4.5) include the following copyrighted files owned by
Microsoft: wma9dmod.dll, wmadmod.dll, wmspdmod.dll, wmv9dmod.dll, wmvdmod.dll
(collectively, the "Windows Media Files"). Within ninety (90) days of the
Effective Date of this Settlement Agreement, Lindows shall cease any further use
or distribution of the Windows Media Files in any product or by any method of
distribution. Lindows, its successors in interest, and present and future
subsidiaries agree to make no further use of the Windows Media Files in any
product at any time.
Of course Linspire were clearly copying something
which was copyright, and got rapped for it.
However, the bigger purpose behind this is
to stop Linspire playing WMAs out of the box,
thus furthering Microsoft's plans to tie
playback of media to Windows.
The article neglects to remember the killer app for the Pentium - namely Quake 1. It was specifically optimized for the Pentium 1, and I remember it ran much much faster on a 66 MHz Pentium than on a 100 MHz 486 DX-4.
Fourth, patent times should be altered to different running times in different field. 20 years makes sense in the medical field, in software nothing makes sense more than five years.
The same change would also make sense with copyrights. eg. It seems fairly clear to me that a useful period for software copyright would be around 10 years max. (Of course this wouldn't mean that MS Word would be public domain, just the 10 year old version, ie. MS Word 6).
$ time java -jar g:/usr/local/lib/jakarta-tomcat-3.2.3/lib/ant.jar Searching for build.xml... Could not locate a build file!
OK, a little bit of an unfair test because 'build.xml' doesn't exist, so presumably ant
doesn't get very far.
Unfortunately (actually, fortunately for me) I've
ditched any Java stuff I once had. Indeed I
ditched the Java job I once had:-)
So I can't do a timed test any more. But when
I worked at Red Hat (on their Java CMS stuff -
used to be ArsDigita), they had big complex
automagically generated build.xml files that
would seriously take seconds to read in. It
made the build cycle more painful than it needs
to be.
Nowadays I use make + ocamlc/ocamlopt and a
complete rebuild of our website doesn't take
more than a few seconds.
In fact (goes off the check...)
real 0m6.157s user 0m4.728s sys 0m0.587s
That's the time for a complete rebuild of the
website that I'm working on (35 separate
OCaml files). This is on a slow Mini-ITX
machine - not exactly top of the line.
Where does the Java VM come from? It certainly
doesn't ship with any of the Linux systems I
use, and on them it involves a large download
and a tedious installation process which doesn't
use the existing package management tools and
therefore cannot be automatically managed and
upgraded along with the other packages.
Did I mention that it isn't even Free software
anyway. No thanks. I'll stick with my
fast, powerful and lightweight Objective CAML programs.
[I'll reply to this comment - but the reply applies
to some of the others below too]
If you RTFA
you'll see that it is in Google's and Google's users' interests
to rank XHTML pages higher.
To quote:
Why would it be in Google's interests to do this?
Because Google wants the best experience for its users. And the best
experience for users will be to get an XHTML valid webpage which works
across any browser, is accessible for the blind and partially-sighted,
and works on devices like mobile phones and PDAs.
I've started a petition to get Google to rank
XHTML-valid websites higher than others. This
would be one way that Google could influence
the future of web standards for the better, and
head off Longhorn at the pass, while delivering
better results to Google's users.
http://www.petitiononline.com/googhtml/petition.ht ml
Rich.
I'm sorry, but once you've used GNU/Linux, you'll find Solaris
sucks very badly.
Where are all the useful tools? You have to download them from
some unofficial site called Sunfreeware. Oh now, apparently you get
some ancient GNU software compiled on an extra CD these days - great
leap forward guys!
No command-line editing anywhere in sight! I once saw a Solaris
consultant configuring a box, and using the mouse to cut and paste
command lines every two seconds. Man I felt sorry for him.
The pkg format sucks. Erm, dependencies? Package repositories?
This is not 1990 you know. What's going on with this 'pkg_add -d.'
crap, defaulting to reading off the tape drive or some shit? Give me
'apt-get install <latest-cool-toy>' any day.
How do I keep Solaris up to date? By constantly manually
checking for patches from some obscure place on Sun's site, and
installing them using a laborious manual process. No thanks.
The installer is slow and horribly interactive. It's pretty much
about the same level as when I installed my first ever Slackware (in
1992/93?)
It's sllloooowwwwww too. I had a Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris 9
for a while. When I replaced it with Debian, I swear it felt twice as
fast. And Solaris never worked out how to put the display into 16-bit
colour depth. I never even knew it was possible until the Debian
installer did it for me.
The default desktop system is Motif + CDE, which is a great leap
forward... for 1992.
Basically they can make Solaris Free under a GPL license for all I
care, and I still wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole, even on Sun
hardware.
This is why these suggestions about polluting the subject line with ADV or SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT or whatever are misguided.
There are these other things called "headers" in email messages, which are much more suited to this. The FTC might have mandated a machine-readable header, eg:
FTC-Content-Warning: explicit=0.9; fraudulent=0.7
Now we'll have to deal with spammers mispelling "SEXAULLY", or replacing characters with ISO-8859-1 near equivalents, etc. etc.
But hey, the law was made by politicians, not technical people, so what do you expect?
I've been an AdSense "web publisher" for only a few months now, and I must say that the image based ads go against one of the reasons why I choose Google's program to begin with. Image based ads are gaudy, for one. They don't necessarily fit in with the color scheme of my pages. With the text-based ads I maintain aesthetic control, and can assure that the ads displayed don't draw too much attention away from my content.
I don't know if I've been picked out specially or
something, but Google have been running image
adverts on my site for about a month now. At the
moment it's confined to just the public service
adverts - I see this quite a lot because I have a
private test version of the site which isn't accessible
from the Internet, so Google can't get to it,
so it always runs public service adverts.
There is one public service advert occupying
the whole "skyscraper"... at first I didn't
believe it was an image, it looked like large
text.
The public service adverts I've seen have the
same/similar colour scheme to the text adverts.
I doubt that paying advertisers will do this
however...
"Fewer than 1% of all computer games, for instance, work on Linux."
All computer games eh? How does he do this kind of extensive testing and still manage to write such informative articles?!
You have a point. "All computer games" includes
stuff like Spectrum and C64 games, arcade games, console games, etc. Many of those do run
very nicely on Linux using an emulator. In fact I'm having a hard time thinking of a console released more than 4 years ago which can't be
emulated by Linux (perhaps PS1?).
.NET is good because it takes the best from languages that are already in existence. It's not like there is anything revolutionary in C# that isn't in any other language out there.
Go away and learn a REAL language, like Lisp or ML,
then come back and tell me that statement isn't
one of the stupidest things said round here for a long time.
Robert Heinlein mentions advertising a soft drink on the surface of the moon, in a book dating back to the 1950s. Don't have
the name of the book to hand but I could certainly
find it.
Luckily for this patent holder, the patent isn't on the
idea of advertising in space (which is very very
obvious), it's on a way to do it.
At my company we've been working on a range of software to make OCaml practical for web app writers. If you're used to Perl for development, you'll find mod_caml very familiar. And we have a DBI-like database layer. And for good measure you can reuse all your Perl code and libraries during the transition.
until someone comes out with a code morphing solution that turns the crusoe into a sparc/alpha/(insert favourite processor here).
It's likely to be quite hard. Firstly you've got to
work out how to do code morphing. Remember it
took Transmeta 2 years or so to develop the
hardware and software.
Secondly, and more importantly, the TMS5xxx
has an architecture which is very closely
tied to the x86 architecture. eg - there is
a common mapping of registers, and certain
instructions in TMS are designed to make it
easy to run specifically x86 code.
Consider how hard it would be to run 64 bit
big endian[1]
code, for instance, on a processor designed
primarily to run 32 bit little endian code.
That's only the start of your problems...
There are some quite interesting applications
if this could be done... eg: perhaps have
multiple architecture OSes running at the
same time? Have multiple processes running
in a single OS which were compiled for
different architectures?
Rich.
[1] Hope I got my endianness the right way round...
He also states that CMS appears to have been compiled with a hacked up version of gcc and binutils. Isn't failure to release modifications to GPLed code against the license, or am I missing something?
No, not unless they started distributing the binary of the modified gcc outside transmeta.
After we pour money into R&D to find (for example) a better catalyst for a particular set of reactions, or perhaps better reaction conditions for a particular catalyst, we don't particularly want the guy down the road being able to just use the same process without having to pay us a bit to license it. It's only fair; we are the ones who figured it out.
Why? If it's such a big deal, why not just keep
it a secret? If it's not a big deal then
everyone benefits when you share the technique
for free.
...instead of the flaming and crude jokes that I know are going to happen anyway, is a serious discussion of exactly what Bill Gates has done to earn an honor of this magnitude.
Well, he has given away a very substantial amount of
money to worthy causes through his and his wife's
foundation.
Is this a good thing? Of course. Sort of. Where
did the money come from? Basically from a
sort of involuntary tax extracted from millions
upon millions of PC users around the world. So
it's good that the money is going to a good
cause, just bad that progress and innovation
had to be retarded to make that happen.
The real reason why he's getting a knighthood,
however, has nothing to do with his gifts to
good causes. It's a powerplay between the
Prime Minister Mr. Blair and his Chancellor
Gordon Brown. Mr. Blair is in serious political
trouble at the moment, what with the 45 minute
claim, the missing WMDs, the ongoing
situation in Iraq and various political issues
at home (tuition fees for Universities). By
coincidence, Mr. Brown who fancies being PM
one day is having all his friends in business
over for a conference - flexing his muscles and
making it known that he has "important" friends
too. By all accounts Mr. Blair didn't even know
about this conference until 2 weeks ago!
I'm a director of an entrepreneurial company
in the UK (well, I like to think so anyway:-)
and we tried to get to go to this conference,
but we're firmly not invited. It's only for
those "innovators" in big business, see. This
makes me quite bitter because big business only
accounts for about 20% of the UK economy, making
them fairly irrelevant as far as growth and
innovation are concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.petitiononline.com/googhtml/
Rich.
However, the bigger purpose behind this is to stop Linspire playing WMAs out of the box, thus furthering Microsoft's plans to tie playback of media to Windows.
Rich.
Rich.
Fourth, patent times should be altered to different running times in different field. 20 years makes sense in the medical field, in software nothing makes sense more than five years.
The same change would also make sense with copyrights. eg. It seems fairly clear to me that a useful period for software copyright would be around 10 years max. (Of course this wouldn't mean that MS Word would be public domain, just the 10 year old version, ie. MS Word 6).
Rich.
Unfortunately (actually, fortunately for me) I've ditched any Java stuff I once had. Indeed I ditched the Java job I once had :-)
So I can't do a timed test any more. But when
I worked at Red Hat (on their Java CMS stuff -
used to be ArsDigita), they had big complex
automagically generated build.xml files that
would seriously take seconds to read in. It
made the build cycle more painful than it needs
to be.
Nowadays I use make + ocamlc/ocamlopt and a complete rebuild of our website doesn't take more than a few seconds.
In fact (goes off the check ...)
That's the time for a complete rebuild of the website that I'm working on (35 separate OCaml files). This is on a slow Mini-ITX machine - not exactly top of the line.
Rich.
Rich.
Rich.
Too bad Java programs nearly always insist on a GUI. I for one would love to try out some Java command line programs.
So you can sit around waiting for 5 seconds after you type the command, and need 256 MB of RAM and a huge download to do the simplest thing?
Rich.
If you RTFA you'll see that it is in Google's and Google's users' interests to rank XHTML pages higher.
To quote:
Rich.
http://www.petitiononline.com/googhtml/petition.ht ml
I've started a petition to get Google to rank XHTML-valid websites higher than others. This would be one way that Google could influence the future of web standards for the better, and head off Longhorn at the pass, while delivering better results to Google's users.t ml
http://www.petitiononline.com/googhtml/petition.h
Rich.
I'm sorry, but once you've used GNU/Linux, you'll find Solaris sucks very badly.
Basically they can make Solaris Free under a GPL license for all I care, and I still wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole, even on Sun hardware.
This is why these suggestions about polluting the subject line with ADV or SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT or whatever are misguided.
There are these other things called "headers" in email messages, which are much more suited to this. The FTC might have mandated a machine-readable header, eg:
FTC-Content-Warning: explicit=0.9; fraudulent=0.7
Now we'll have to deal with spammers mispelling "SEXAULLY", or replacing characters with ISO-8859-1 near equivalents, etc. etc.
But hey, the law was made by politicians, not technical people, so what do you expect?
Rich.
I don't know if I've been picked out specially or something, but Google have been running image adverts on my site for about a month now. At the moment it's confined to just the public service adverts - I see this quite a lot because I have a private test version of the site which isn't accessible from the Internet, so Google can't get to it, so it always runs public service adverts.
There is one public service advert occupying the whole "skyscraper" ... at first I didn't
believe it was an image, it looked like large
text.
The public service adverts I've seen have the same/similar colour scheme to the text adverts. I doubt that paying advertisers will do this however ...
Rich.
You have a point. "All computer games" includes stuff like Spectrum and C64 games, arcade games, console games, etc. Many of those do run very nicely on Linux using an emulator. In fact I'm having a hard time thinking of a console released more than 4 years ago which can't be emulated by Linux (perhaps PS1?).
Rich.
mod_caml
Rich.
Go away and learn a REAL language, like Lisp or ML, then come back and tell me that statement isn't one of the stupidest things said round here for a long time.
Rich.
Luckily for this patent holder, the patent isn't on the idea of advertising in space (which is very very obvious), it's on a way to do it.
Rich.
http://www.merjis.com/developers/
Rich.
until someone comes out with a code morphing solution that turns the crusoe into a sparc/alpha/(insert favourite processor here).
It's likely to be quite hard. Firstly you've got to work out how to do code morphing. Remember it took Transmeta 2 years or so to develop the hardware and software.
Secondly, and more importantly, the TMS5xxx has an architecture which is very closely tied to the x86 architecture. eg - there is a common mapping of registers, and certain instructions in TMS are designed to make it easy to run specifically x86 code. Consider how hard it would be to run 64 bit big endian[1] code, for instance, on a processor designed primarily to run 32 bit little endian code. That's only the start of your problems ...
There are some quite interesting applications if this could be done ... eg: perhaps have
multiple architecture OSes running at the
same time? Have multiple processes running
in a single OS which were compiled for
different architectures?
Rich.
[1] Hope I got my endianness the right way round ...
He also states that CMS appears to have been compiled with a hacked up version of gcc and binutils. Isn't failure to release modifications to GPLed code against the license, or am I missing something?
No, not unless they started distributing the binary of the modified gcc outside transmeta.
Rich.
I don't know, but I'm willing to give it a try!
Rich.
After we pour money into R&D to find (for example) a better catalyst for a particular set of reactions, or perhaps better reaction conditions for a particular catalyst, we don't particularly want the guy down the road being able to just use the same process without having to pay us a bit to license it. It's only fair; we are the ones who figured it out.
Why? If it's such a big deal, why not just keep it a secret? If it's not a big deal then everyone benefits when you share the technique for free.
Rich.Well, he has given away a very substantial amount of money to worthy causes through his and his wife's foundation.
Is this a good thing? Of course. Sort of. Where did the money come from? Basically from a sort of involuntary tax extracted from millions upon millions of PC users around the world. So it's good that the money is going to a good cause, just bad that progress and innovation had to be retarded to make that happen.
The real reason why he's getting a knighthood, however, has nothing to do with his gifts to good causes. It's a powerplay between the Prime Minister Mr. Blair and his Chancellor Gordon Brown. Mr. Blair is in serious political trouble at the moment, what with the 45 minute claim, the missing WMDs, the ongoing situation in Iraq and various political issues at home (tuition fees for Universities). By coincidence, Mr. Brown who fancies being PM one day is having all his friends in business over for a conference - flexing his muscles and making it known that he has "important" friends too. By all accounts Mr. Blair didn't even know about this conference until 2 weeks ago!
I'm a director of an entrepreneurial company in the UK (well, I like to think so anyway :-)
and we tried to get to go to this conference,
but we're firmly not invited. It's only for
those "innovators" in big business, see. This
makes me quite bitter because big business only
accounts for about 20% of the UK economy, making
them fairly irrelevant as far as growth and
innovation are concerned.
Rich.