My little experience in this domain is that, whenever you want to use CC copyrighted stuff, the easiest way is to contact the author, and try to obtain dual-licensing. GPL & CC. It is often not a problem for many artists will choose CC just because it sounds more appropriated for artwork than a plain GPL, but are not fondamentaly opposed to the terms of the GPL. Having their work travel along free software projects but remain GPL'ed scares them a lot less than being used by Vice Corp., famous company backed by the RIAA.
As a side note, the other problem with CC is that there are IMHO too many CC flavors, so saying "this is CC" is not of great information, you need the exact licence, they can be really different.
As a conclusion -> yes, I confirm, the hot stuff in games is the artwork, you'll always find a fool to code nearly any game engine.
I used to be one of those, started at age 11 with Basic, was playing with assembly at age 13.
IMHO at that age you need things to be fun - it might be true at any age but a young teenager will just ignore something too boring - so choose whatever language you want, but make sure the kids get to actually code something that *does* things. Writing abstract stuff on paper is no good when you're young, CS gives the amazing opportunity to actually build real world things through a simple keyboard, once you've got this, rare are those that can resist the appeal of being a local virtual God who can rule and command its own little world. A good example of working programs that *do* things are small casual games, any old-school cheap cellular phone game fits. Technology does not really matter, wether you hack in it JavaScript, Python+SDL, Java, C++, whatever, will not make any difference.
In low-level imperative programming (C language for instance) what you say is perfectly true but a more advanced programming language which features, for instance, closures (any functional language such as Lisp, but Perl and others can fit too), allows you to manipulate statefull functions. You get to work on a function which is bound to a given set of data. This is, I admit, different from the usual OO model: a set of data with functions^Wmethods bounds to it. But I wouldn't claim those models are absolute opposites;)
A lawyer friend of mine has good reasons to believe SCO has the response to this question. Unfortunately he can't show off the meat, but it is certainly older than any other piece of code.
And last time I checked, all of that stuff is still written in C or C++, not in any VM.
Not totally true. It's true that most of the *core* of these software is written in C/C++, but most of the time they end up using scripts. Take Mozilla for instance, you might think it's C/C++, but in fact running Mozilla you're very often running JavaScript code over XUL interfaces. So the design for these is rather logical: build up a core in the "as fast as possible language" (that is, C), then run scripts on top of it, in a very VM-like fashion. Of course you could build the core engine over Java, but then you would "sandbox" stuff twice. Once running a Java VM, then on top of it an XPFE (XUL+JavaScript and the rest) engine, then your application scripts, that is, Mozilla itself, which in turns interprets a third-party code (the HTML+JavaScript you actually want to read). That's a lot of software layers...
Same thing for Apache, on any server I've seen in production, most of the CPU time is eaten in mod_php or mod_perl, that is, executing scripts.
I don't think it's such a necessary move to use Java, as long as your program is complex enough to justify the creation of your own virtual & scriptable environnement. Java is of course an option, but using Python/Perl/Lua/Lisp/Ruby/... bindings is equally efficient.
After all, she might as well sue DARPA, for being responsible for this whole Internet thingy. Or maybe she could sue the descendants of Thomas Edison, or maybe those of Alan Turing (but for this, she'd first need to find them out, which might prove quite difficult). Anyway, there must be someone to sue, someone has to be responsible, or else how could we make money???
Your mileage may vary, however, beware that there's an upcoming Web 2008 coming soon, which will completely change the way people think the Internet, while providing a unique experience to the whole family. With Web 2008 (tm), businesses will be able to reach their customers so easily that setting up online services will be as easy as picking your phone up. Of course, Web 2008 (tm) will enforce all Internet users privacy, letting them protect their confidential data. Web 2008 (tm) will be more than a simple new web usage, as Web 2.0 was, it will be the convergence of all network media and devices, the unification of mobile, networked, corporate and personnal computing.
I bet the same people who are not even able to figure out that advertising for something is the key to enter my "never by from them" list won't be able to imagine what my tastes are either. I mean, I regularly repeat on various forums that I hate advertising, mass marketting, TV, and more, and well, they keep on going. People establishing customers lists need to claim that their lists are valuable, but honestly, I do not think it's so valuable. It's the same old story of that guy buying a 100 million emails list, full of garbage and of innocent people who never asked to be listed on it. These practices will maybe generate a few more million dollars and annoy web users, but as long as privacy is concerned, I think they do not have the manpower nor knowledge to data-mine all the informations they have, not to mention that these informations can be bogus. I usually use a special profile to connect on sites that require authentication and most organizations still did not figure that I'm a super heroe, see http://www.superdebile.com/ . IMHO the best way to protect our privacy is to fill those files with lots of junk. I regularly claim that I'm 50 years old, then 15, then I'm a woman, it's easy to mess up all these databases. I even used to have a Ben Laden related signature in my emails, just to "add noise".
To prevent others from seeing you, you can try and become the invisible man, but another option is just to spray fog all arround. I think the latter is easier to achieve, and almost as efficient.
Point is UNIX vendors not even lost the "workstation fight" (which I agree never quite occured, as far as proprietary unices are concerned), but also lost the "server fight". Many applications that could run on UNIX now run on Windows NT/2000/XP/... Well, Microsoft does exist on the server side. There the high price and the "we're targeted at high-end consumers only, those that can affort paying $100 000 for a server" attitude simply killed them. The situation where the cheapest is a Free Software project with zero licence cost, then comes Microsoft, then comes others which are supposed to be "more performant and adapted", is very common. It's true for Windows being cheaper than AIX/Solaris/IRIX/... (OpenSolaris -> too late!), for SQL server being cheaper than Oracle, and so on. Point is many people go for the cheapest, but fear the "O$ licence". The same thing killed SGI, whose graphical workstations are now pretty much behind commidity PCs with standard "low-end" GPUs, both in term of market share and absolute power (coming soon 8-P). Apart from Free Software solutions, Microsoft is almost systematically the cheapest solution.
I'd say that UNIX incompatibilities helped solutions like Java to exist, I mean solutions to issue portability problems makes sense when... portability is tricky. Else, I think simply the price of proprietary UNIX solutions, and the arrogance of their vendors, could justify their death.
Believe me or not, but Doom I, when it came out, was actually an independant game. Think of it, ID decided to go the shareware route, and offering episode I for free was sort of surprising in 1993. This decision was certainly motivated by the fact that well, ID wasn't so great a company at that time, and needed to get as much audience/buyers as possible, without having the marketting powers of biggest gaming companies. The success it had was orders of magnitude higher than the investments (speaking of money) in it. Does not mean the game wasn't of professionnal quality. Of course it kicked the ass of any other shoot'em up at that time. For sure. But Doom I didn't licence any movie's super-heroe to handle that shotgun. Nope. Just plain old custom-made artwork. After that, the engine/game has been licenced/imitated by many other game publishers, who wrote mods or clones, but well, from where came the innovation and the fun? Certainly not from mainstrean actors.
The point is: that was 1993, what about today? Well, that kind of miracle does not happen very often you know...
Comparing it to films. Well, if you happen to compare the whole software industry and the whole movie industry, you'll find out that there are still small software companies which are able to get out of the pool, do real cool stuff, and get money for it. Then still comparing to movies, well there are many successfull movies which have a public, but are never seen in those hudge cinemas, and you won't be able to buy the DVD at your local super store.
Now why is that that some indie movies can raise millions whereas indie games seem not to be able to do it? I mean, now. Remember Doom I, we have a good example that it can (could) happen. Maybe this (successfull indie games) does not happen because they are simply different and a business model adapted for activity A might not be adapted for activity B. There are many differences between games and movies. The age of the industry, the fact that you play a game several times while by default, you see a movie once, the fact that games or not *only* artistic stuff, there's also technical wizardry behind them (generally speaking, I mean, you can make a movie without Pixar's technology), the fact that a movie can hit your grandmother as well as you, which is not quite true for games, and so on... Now guessing which factor makes it so different is IMHO simply impossible to find, if it makes sense at all.
But basically, what you need to make a successfull indie game is John Carmack's talent + hard work + a good idea + the right context. That's hard.
Whatever time you may gain by flying at supersonic speeds, you'll lose it at the customs because this flight is so highly controlled that one needs to really check that your best friend is not likely to have a relative which has spent 3 days in Irak 20 years ago...
You'll loose 3 hours in traffic jams on both sides of your trip, not even gaining them back on flight.
Talking about comfort? 15 hours trips not being comfortable? Well, at this speed, you spend so much fuel that using the same fuel, at the same price, you could fly at a "standard" speed but using more space in the plane. Enough space to have a comfortable sit, be able to put your kids in a real bed, and so on. You know, all the prototypes Boeing and Airbus show you before the planes ship, and which are never used by companies because noone will ever pay 3000$ instead of 1000$ just to be more comfortable, except people who don't pay for it (their companies do). Get serious.
The only real interest would be for workers who really need to cross oceans quickly. I bet their employers would save a bunch of money learning how to use remote conference tools efficiently. You can decide to build a factory 10 000 miles from the physical place it will be built on. This is called progress, evolution. No need to move the body of the bright guy who makes decisions.
Get serious, civil supersonic flight might be cool, thrilling for its passengers and rewarding for the engineers involved in it, but it's pointless.
> "Until now the wheel had been considered in the public domain in the US, and therefore free for anyone to use. General Motors spokesman Mr Foo told the Los Angeles Times that it had not moved to register the trademark until Mr Bar had threatened to do so."
It's always the same debate "hey I swear I didn't want to patent/copyright/trademark this, I'm a nice company, but you know, this evil guy over there is trying to do it, and well, I must protect my business". This is totally unproductive and in the long run, businesses who go this "try and sue me" route will get killed by those who, instead of paying lawyers for bullshit, will find ways to innovate, produce goods, and solve problems. This is all pathetic 8-)
The problem, exactly, is that SUN only implements its JDK on the platforms it judges as "interesting enough". Running a non-mainstream OS on some non-i386 hardware will always end up with you unable to run any SUN JDK -> simply doesn't exist. Well, Blackdown can help and hacking and going all sort of self-punishment you might end up in getting it to work, but well, compare the number of platforms GCC or Perl run on, and compare the number of platforms supported by SUN JAVA, and well, you'll see that SUN JAVA's portability is purely theorical. Now the usual answer "but nobody does this!". Some vendors, and SUN is no exception, are very smart at knowing what people want, without even asking them. Should you want to do something they didn't plan, you cease to exist.
Now it's perfectly true people have the specs, people are free to implement. Look at the efforts made by GCJ and Classpath and you'll see that even with many talented developpers involved, it's hard to catch up with SUN.
What could SUN benefit? Obviously, get many free software developpers to get interested in Java at all. Many software developped in C++ could have gone the Java way, if there had been a way to run Java programs freely, using the *latest* JDK. For now, people have to beg SUN (and possibly IBM) to port the JDK to this or that platform to get a chance to run their Java 1.5 program on *any* platform. Not to mention the fact that some people care about freedom and the right to know what they are running on their computers...
IMHO, SUN will publish Java under a Free (as in freedom) and/or Open Source licence the day the concurrent implementations (GCJ,Kaffe,Classpath...) will catch up. On that day SUN's JVM will have absolutely no added value but the stamp "this is SUN software" (which is what counts more for many). Think of Motif, it got free the day GTK and Qt/KDE where ahead of it. Same for OpenSolaris which comes at a time the Linux kernel is pretty advanced in term of features and is obviously (even if not technically fully equivalent) taking significant market shares so that, well, Solaris is dead.
Sun will "Open Source" Java the day it's dead, because another "Open Source" project took the lead. So if SUN ever publishes a free software JDK, you could interpret this as a signal that means something like "GCJ+Classpath is ready for production use".
> The Redmond company believes that catching the students early on will turn them into life-long users of Windows Live.
And the Redmond company is just so right. Just see how many students who discovered computing at home, using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Windows, became skilled at using these softs, and how hard it is to market OpenOffice.org to one of those, despite it does everything they need. Capturing the users very early is one of the basics of marketting, my banker knows it. Make a nice offer to the student which promises to become a good'ol' father with many kids consumming lots of foo bar, is the recipe for success.
> No other country in the world is as repressive in this regard.
Maybe because no other country in the world makes so much money from activities related to so-called "intellectual property"...
Not a hard drive expert, but I guess the debate about RPM is a lot about access time. I mean you access file a, then file b. It happens file a is not physically on the same part of the disk than file b. You'll spend some time having the disk controller switch from file-a-area to file-b-area. One way to fix this is to have a big, and well used, cache. But you'll never get "7200RPM x 8". Maybe reading a 1Gb file you'll go faster, but well, if you think about it, when a disk gets slow and cripples you system, it's usually because you fired that complex "find | grep" that reads about every single file, or when you swap and by definition you are reading/writing in many different places all at the same time.
So there might be a slight gain in how fast you'll read your 3Mb file, but well, FTA: Seek time information has not been released yet, which has traditionally been considered the problem area for perpendicular recording devices.. To some extent, wether it has 16Mb or 8Mb of cache will probably not change that fact: this disk won't be a very good performer when it comes to read many random files.
But well, it's good it's here, I wouldn't be against having one to store all my old CDs once for all, frighten birds with them and have all pictures and musics at hand. And yes, it will make 250Gb disks cheaper 8-) That disk is probably a good choice for a hundred of thousands of MP3s, but for performance you'd better put your system on a cheap & fast 18Gb SCSI drive.
Note that today I do not really care of increased performances on 3'5 disks. I'd rather seek and expect improvements in the laptop area. 1Tb laptops would be freakin' cool 8-)
> WHY NOT JUST WRITE A FRICKIN' RPM????
'cause here at IBM/Oracle/Microsoft/ViceCorp we know what is best for you, and we know that we're the standard and that noone is interested by having a standard way to install many software from different vendors on a given system. It's much more convenient for users to have each vendor have its own way to package things. Here at Microsoft we have graphical installers and store configuration in registry, this is our best practice, we don't give a glance at the obvious fact that this cripples any software that could have the ambition of going multiplatform. Here at SUN, we believe everyone has Java (tm) and will be happy with our lightweight SWING platform which is so standard it's been ported to linux-i386 (wow, that's dversity!!!), and we also know people will love the look'n'feel of our applications because it's the standard, and it's the same on old platforms. Here at IBM, we swear the universal application platform is Eclipse, and anyways every single app in the world will end up as an Eclipse plugin, so who cares about the rest? Here at Oracle we believe the RDBMS is the center of any entreprise-ready application, there's not one single app out there which does not need to be powered by the most complicated^Wpowerfull software in the world and grid computing is for the masses.
This is called: vendor lock-in. At least it's a form of it. Because you're strong and people need your software badly, you do whatever you want, if it's different from what others do, it will give you a decisive advantage in case others can't catch up fast enough with your technology.
As a side effect, you might even be able to charge for special learning sessions
where you'll share all your valuable knowledge about your very specific processes,
which are the fruit of so many years of expertise in that domain. Note that.rpm and.deb
zealots certainly do not have any clue on what packaging is, a good'ol myapp.bin
is much more portable and efficient, we'll teach you that for $3000 a weak...
Obviously what we need is standard packaging for these products. But this is not what we'll have. Not until they feel weak and start thinking that going open might help save their businesses from total wreckage.
> In-game ads have been slowly creeping up on us for ages.
Yes, I totally agree. I'd even add that games are themselves marketting objects. I mean, whenever you buy a "Harry Potter" game, who's making advertisement? Is the brand "Harry Potter" used to sell the game, or is the game a way to help selling the book? Both in fact.
> Video Games Are the Next Frontier for Advertisers
Great. So video games are the next victims of those "I mess up with everything I touch" specialists. They'll cash in for some years then every one will be fed up with it, add will have no more effects than a light cigarette on a hard-drugs addict, and well, everything will be rotten as hell, including the advertising business itself (if it's not done yet...).
Note that it's a general tendency to put advertisements everywhere trying to divert citizens so that they don't expect it to be advertisements.
Yes, I acknowledge my precedent post was sort of topic since refering to virtualization in general and not the kind of virtualization proposed by OpenVZ, which is after all, the subject 8-) Indeed OpenVZ fits those users who want to heavily test out zillion distros and sandboxing junkies.
Point is for most cross-distrib testing, chrooting is usually very convenient and lightweight. Not as nice as true virtualization, you still have to share ip ports and hardware and mess arround with/proc, you can't really play a true boot sequence, only try and simulate it, but to test out wether program A runs with glibc-2.2.1patchLevelXYBZ-my-special-release-nobod y-else-has, it does the job.
Well, the question is, why virtualization? While it can be very usefull from my developper's point of view, getting rid of headaches installing a bazillions OSes on a single computer to test out your program with Win98, WinXP, Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, FreeBSD, and possibly OS/X, I see little gain from my software end user's point of view.
My primary OS is GNU/Linux, I have pretty much all the applications I want on it, and never really feel the need to use a specific, dedicated Windows application. Now *some* applications really need Windows and/or OS/X, most of them being linked to hardware. I mean, WIFI does not work on my linux-ppc laptop. Well, what would I gain with virtualization? Running OS/X on top of a Linux kernel won't help, for OS/X won't access the hardware directly, after all, that's what virtualization is about, isn't it? The other solution is to run OS/X as a primary OS and use a Linux kernel on top of it. But then, well, unless the virtualization is absolutely perfect and runs at 100% and costs 0 byte of RAM, I'll loose some performance using 99% of my applications. Not acceptable either.
My conclusion is that while virtualization is very usefull in a corporate context, eg you want to separate environnements, ease up backups, increase security, have 10 different OSes installed on one server for testing purposes, whatever, it fails to fully replace double boot. The main reason is that the role of a kernel is not only to launch programs, but also to provide programs some form of access to the hardware. And virtualization is just about denying direct access to the hardware.
"It's so hard to write a complete UNIX system, that open-sourcing it would not help," said Foo Bar, [HP-UX|Solaris|AIX|IRIX|SCO|your_favorite_propriet ary_unix_system_here]'s software product manager. In addition, customers aren't asking for an open-source system, he said.
I guess many countries have such founding principles but most of them simply do not have the means to enforce them. I mean, if you are country A and you disagree with country B which is 100 times more powerfull than you, well you just forget your "I do whatever I want when I'm home" concept and decide to agree with country B.
A good example is that in a country like France, for instance, any legal text whatsoever has to be written in French. Documents in any other language, including English, are pretended to have no (legal) value. For this reason, some claim that the GNU GPL has no legal value in France. Of course this is mostly bullshit, since many documents, which are not written in French, are taken in account in France, in practice. This includes almost any software EULA, but it's of course not limited to the software domain. Point is France does not have the means to make its dream of being the center of the world a reality. In that case France is country A. It has great ambitions for autonomy and self management, but it fails to achieve it because it does not even represent one single percent of the world.
I guess Louis Feraud'd better find a way to convince people out there that his point of view is good for America, or else, well, Free Speech 8-)
There's one good reason, the same old reason which makes me run GNU/Linux on PPC hardware: Apple makes very good hardware. Not necessarly the most powerfull, but it's robust, good looking, period. So that's a good reason to buy Apple hardware. Note that it's a matter of taste, some might prefer many other laptops to my good old G4 12", but I just appreciate this hardware, to type mails and program, it fits perfectly. What I want is something solid and reliable that I can put in my bag and that I enjoy typing on.
Then why run GNU/Linux? Well, for me the answer is easy, besides its freedom, that's the system I know best, and whatever hardware I have I might be able to run it. I use a PPC the way I'd use an i386. Note that in the case of a recent Intel-based Mac, this is not relevant since it's the same processor than many other laptops. But then, why run a Linux kernel in the first place? Why use it at all? I guess the reasons that make it interesting to run a Linux kernel on hardware X are still accurate when one asks onself this question "why would I run a Linux kernel on my MacBookPro?".
Slashdot Mirror
My little experience in this domain is that, whenever you want to use CC copyrighted stuff, the easiest way is to contact the author, and try to obtain dual-licensing. GPL & CC. It is often not a problem for many artists will choose CC just because it sounds more appropriated for artwork than a plain GPL, but are not fondamentaly opposed to the terms of the GPL. Having their work travel along free software projects but remain GPL'ed scares them a lot less than being used by Vice Corp., famous company backed by the RIAA. As a side note, the other problem with CC is that there are IMHO too many CC flavors, so saying "this is CC" is not of great information, you need the exact licence, they can be really different. As a conclusion -> yes, I confirm, the hot stuff in games is the artwork, you'll always find a fool to code nearly any game engine.
I used to be one of those, started at age 11 with Basic, was playing with assembly at age 13. IMHO at that age you need things to be fun - it might be true at any age but a young teenager will just ignore something too boring - so choose whatever language you want, but make sure the kids get to actually code something that *does* things. Writing abstract stuff on paper is no good when you're young, CS gives the amazing opportunity to actually build real world things through a simple keyboard, once you've got this, rare are those that can resist the appeal of being a local virtual God who can rule and command its own little world. A good example of working programs that *do* things are small casual games, any old-school cheap cellular phone game fits. Technology does not really matter, wether you hack in it JavaScript, Python+SDL, Java, C++, whatever, will not make any difference.
In low-level imperative programming (C language for instance) what you say is perfectly true but a more advanced programming language which features, for instance, closures (any functional language such as Lisp, but Perl and others can fit too), allows you to manipulate statefull functions. You get to work on a function which is bound to a given set of data. This is, I admit, different from the usual OO model: a set of data with functions^Wmethods bounds to it. But I wouldn't claim those models are absolute opposites ;)
A lawyer friend of mine has good reasons to believe SCO has the response to this question. Unfortunately he can't show off the meat, but it is certainly older than any other piece of code.
Not totally true. It's true that most of the *core* of these software is written in C/C++, but most of the time they end up using scripts. Take Mozilla for instance, you might think it's C/C++, but in fact running Mozilla you're very often running JavaScript code over XUL interfaces. So the design for these is rather logical: build up a core in the "as fast as possible language" (that is, C), then run scripts on top of it, in a very VM-like fashion. Of course you could build the core engine over Java, but then you would "sandbox" stuff twice. Once running a Java VM, then on top of it an XPFE (XUL+JavaScript and the rest) engine, then your application scripts, that is, Mozilla itself, which in turns interprets a third-party code (the HTML+JavaScript you actually want to read). That's a lot of software layers...
Same thing for Apache, on any server I've seen in production, most of the CPU time is eaten in mod_php or mod_perl, that is, executing scripts.
I don't think it's such a necessary move to use Java, as long as your program is complex enough to justify the creation of your own virtual & scriptable environnement. Java is of course an option, but using Python/Perl/Lua/Lisp/Ruby/... bindings is equally efficient.
After all, she might as well sue DARPA, for being responsible for this whole Internet thingy. Or maybe she could sue the descendants of Thomas Edison, or maybe those of Alan Turing (but for this, she'd first need to find them out, which might prove quite difficult). Anyway, there must be someone to sue, someone has to be responsible, or else how could we make money???
Your mileage may vary, however, beware that there's an upcoming Web 2008 coming soon, which will completely change the way people think the Internet, while providing a unique experience to the whole family. With Web 2008 (tm), businesses will be able to reach their customers so easily that setting up online services will be as easy as picking your phone up. Of course, Web 2008 (tm) will enforce all Internet users privacy, letting them protect their confidential data. Web 2008 (tm) will be more than a simple new web usage, as Web 2.0 was, it will be the convergence of all network media and devices, the unification of mobile, networked, corporate and personnal computing.
Hey wait, it's done!!!
I bet the same people who are not even able to figure out that advertising for something is the key to enter my "never by from them" list won't be able to imagine what my tastes are either. I mean, I regularly repeat on various forums that I hate advertising, mass marketting, TV, and more, and well, they keep on going. People establishing customers lists need to claim that their lists are valuable, but honestly, I do not think it's so valuable. It's the same old story of that guy buying a 100 million emails list, full of garbage and of innocent people who never asked to be listed on it. These practices will maybe generate a few more million dollars and annoy web users, but as long as privacy is concerned, I think they do not have the manpower nor knowledge to data-mine all the informations they have, not to mention that these informations can be bogus. I usually use a special profile to connect on sites that require authentication and most organizations still did not figure that I'm a super heroe, see http://www.superdebile.com/ . IMHO the best way to protect our privacy is to fill those files with lots of junk. I regularly claim that I'm 50 years old, then 15, then I'm a woman, it's easy to mess up all these databases. I even used to have a Ben Laden related signature in my emails, just to "add noise".
To prevent others from seeing you, you can try and become the invisible man, but another option is just to spray fog all arround. I think the latter is easier to achieve, and almost as efficient.
Point is UNIX vendors not even lost the "workstation fight" (which I agree never quite occured, as far as proprietary unices are concerned), but also lost the "server fight". Many applications that could run on UNIX now run on Windows NT/2000/XP/... Well, Microsoft does exist on the server side. There the high price and the "we're targeted at high-end consumers only, those that can affort paying $100 000 for a server" attitude simply killed them. The situation where the cheapest is a Free Software project with zero licence cost, then comes Microsoft, then comes others which are supposed to be "more performant and adapted", is very common. It's true for Windows being cheaper than AIX/Solaris/IRIX/... (OpenSolaris -> too late!), for SQL server being cheaper than Oracle, and so on. Point is many people go for the cheapest, but fear the "O$ licence". The same thing killed SGI, whose graphical workstations are now pretty much behind commidity PCs with standard "low-end" GPUs, both in term of market share and absolute power (coming soon 8-P). Apart from Free Software solutions, Microsoft is almost systematically the cheapest solution.
I'd say that UNIX incompatibilities helped solutions like Java to exist, I mean solutions to issue portability problems makes sense when... portability is tricky. Else, I think simply the price of proprietary UNIX solutions, and the arrogance of their vendors, could justify their death.
- 10 is the major release version
- 2 is the minor release version
Now what the hell is that "0 dot 1" for?Believe me or not, but Doom I, when it came out, was actually an independant game. Think of it, ID decided to go the shareware route, and offering episode I for free was sort of surprising in 1993. This decision was certainly motivated by the fact that well, ID wasn't so great a company at that time, and needed to get as much audience/buyers as possible, without having the marketting powers of biggest gaming companies. The success it had was orders of magnitude higher than the investments (speaking of money) in it. Does not mean the game wasn't of professionnal quality. Of course it kicked the ass of any other shoot'em up at that time. For sure. But Doom I didn't licence any movie's super-heroe to handle that shotgun. Nope. Just plain old custom-made artwork. After that, the engine/game has been licenced/imitated by many other game publishers, who wrote mods or clones, but well, from where came the innovation and the fun? Certainly not from mainstrean actors.
The point is: that was 1993, what about today? Well, that kind of miracle does not happen very often you know...
Comparing it to films. Well, if you happen to compare the whole software industry and the whole movie industry, you'll find out that there are still small software companies which are able to get out of the pool, do real cool stuff, and get money for it. Then still comparing to movies, well there are many successfull movies which have a public, but are never seen in those hudge cinemas, and you won't be able to buy the DVD at your local super store.
Now why is that that some indie movies can raise millions whereas indie games seem not to be able to do it? I mean, now. Remember Doom I, we have a good example that it can (could) happen. Maybe this (successfull indie games) does not happen because they are simply different and a business model adapted for activity A might not be adapted for activity B. There are many differences between games and movies. The age of the industry, the fact that you play a game several times while by default, you see a movie once, the fact that games or not *only* artistic stuff, there's also technical wizardry behind them (generally speaking, I mean, you can make a movie without Pixar's technology), the fact that a movie can hit your grandmother as well as you, which is not quite true for games, and so on... Now guessing which factor makes it so different is IMHO simply impossible to find, if it makes sense at all.
But basically, what you need to make a successfull indie game is John Carmack's talent + hard work + a good idea + the right context. That's hard.
Whatever time you may gain by flying at supersonic speeds, you'll lose it at the customs because this flight is so highly controlled that one needs to really check that your best friend is not likely to have a relative which has spent 3 days in Irak 20 years ago...
You'll loose 3 hours in traffic jams on both sides of your trip, not even gaining them back on flight.
Talking about comfort? 15 hours trips not being comfortable? Well, at this speed, you spend so much fuel that using the same fuel, at the same price, you could fly at a "standard" speed but using more space in the plane. Enough space to have a comfortable sit, be able to put your kids in a real bed, and so on. You know, all the prototypes Boeing and Airbus show you before the planes ship, and which are never used by companies because noone will ever pay 3000$ instead of 1000$ just to be more comfortable, except people who don't pay for it (their companies do). Get serious.
The only real interest would be for workers who really need to cross oceans quickly. I bet their employers would save a bunch of money learning how to use remote conference tools efficiently. You can decide to build a factory 10 000 miles from the physical place it will be built on. This is called progress, evolution. No need to move the body of the bright guy who makes decisions.
Get serious, civil supersonic flight might be cool, thrilling for its passengers and rewarding for the engineers involved in it, but it's pointless.
It's always the same debate "hey I swear I didn't want to patent/copyright/trademark this, I'm a nice company, but you know, this evil guy over there is trying to do it, and well, I must protect my business". This is totally unproductive and in the long run, businesses who go this "try and sue me" route will get killed by those who, instead of paying lawyers for bullshit, will find ways to innovate, produce goods, and solve problems. This is all pathetic 8-)
The problem, exactly, is that SUN only implements its JDK on the platforms it judges as "interesting enough". Running a non-mainstream OS on some non-i386 hardware will always end up with you unable to run any SUN JDK -> simply doesn't exist. Well, Blackdown can help and hacking and going all sort of self-punishment you might end up in getting it to work, but well, compare the number of platforms GCC or Perl run on, and compare the number of platforms supported by SUN JAVA, and well, you'll see that SUN JAVA's portability is purely theorical. Now the usual answer "but nobody does this!". Some vendors, and SUN is no exception, are very smart at knowing what people want, without even asking them. Should you want to do something they didn't plan, you cease to exist.
Now it's perfectly true people have the specs, people are free to implement. Look at the efforts made by GCJ and Classpath and you'll see that even with many talented developpers involved, it's hard to catch up with SUN.
What could SUN benefit? Obviously, get many free software developpers to get interested in Java at all. Many software developped in C++ could have gone the Java way, if there had been a way to run Java programs freely, using the *latest* JDK. For now, people have to beg SUN (and possibly IBM) to port the JDK to this or that platform to get a chance to run their Java 1.5 program on *any* platform. Not to mention the fact that some people care about freedom and the right to know what they are running on their computers...
IMHO, SUN will publish Java under a Free (as in freedom) and/or Open Source licence the day the concurrent implementations (GCJ,Kaffe,Classpath...) will catch up. On that day SUN's JVM will have absolutely no added value but the stamp "this is SUN software" (which is what counts more for many). Think of Motif, it got free the day GTK and Qt/KDE where ahead of it. Same for OpenSolaris which comes at a time the Linux kernel is pretty advanced in term of features and is obviously (even if not technically fully equivalent) taking significant market shares so that, well, Solaris is dead.
Sun will "Open Source" Java the day it's dead, because another "Open Source" project took the lead. So if SUN ever publishes a free software JDK, you could interpret this as a signal that means something like "GCJ+Classpath is ready for production use".
> The Redmond company believes that catching the students early on will turn them into life-long users of Windows Live.
And the Redmond company is just so right. Just see how many students who discovered computing at home, using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Windows, became skilled at using these softs, and how hard it is to market OpenOffice.org to one of those, despite it does everything they need. Capturing the users very early is one of the basics of marketting, my banker knows it. Make a nice offer to the student which promises to become a good'ol' father with many kids consumming lots of foo bar, is the recipe for success.
> No other country in the world is as repressive in this regard.
Maybe because no other country in the world makes so much money from activities related to so-called "intellectual property"...
Not a hard drive expert, but I guess the debate about RPM is a lot about access time. I mean you access file a, then file b. It happens file a is not physically on the same part of the disk than file b. You'll spend some time having the disk controller switch from file-a-area to file-b-area. One way to fix this is to have a big, and well used, cache. But you'll never get "7200RPM x 8". Maybe reading a 1Gb file you'll go faster, but well, if you think about it, when a disk gets slow and cripples you system, it's usually because you fired that complex "find | grep" that reads about every single file, or when you swap and by definition you are reading/writing in many different places all at the same time.
So there might be a slight gain in how fast you'll read your 3Mb file, but well, FTA: Seek time information has not been released yet, which has traditionally been considered the problem area for perpendicular recording devices.. To some extent, wether it has 16Mb or 8Mb of cache will probably not change that fact: this disk won't be a very good performer when it comes to read many random files.
But well, it's good it's here, I wouldn't be against having one to store all my old CDs once for all, frighten birds with them and have all pictures and musics at hand. And yes, it will make 250Gb disks cheaper 8-) That disk is probably a good choice for a hundred of thousands of MP3s, but for performance you'd better put your system on a cheap & fast 18Gb SCSI drive.
Note that today I do not really care of increased performances on 3'5 disks. I'd rather seek and expect improvements in the laptop area. 1Tb laptops would be freakin' cool 8-)
> WHY NOT JUST WRITE A FRICKIN' RPM????
'cause here at IBM/Oracle/Microsoft/ViceCorp we know what is best for you, and we know that we're the standard and that noone is interested by having a standard way to install many software from different vendors on a given system. It's much more convenient for users to have each vendor have its own way to package things. Here at Microsoft we have graphical installers and store configuration in registry, this is our best practice, we don't give a glance at the obvious fact that this cripples any software that could have the ambition of going multiplatform. Here at SUN, we believe everyone has Java (tm) and will be happy with our lightweight SWING platform which is so standard it's been ported to linux-i386 (wow, that's dversity!!!), and we also know people will love the look'n'feel of our applications because it's the standard, and it's the same on old platforms. Here at IBM, we swear the universal application platform is Eclipse, and anyways every single app in the world will end up as an Eclipse plugin, so who cares about the rest? Here at Oracle we believe the RDBMS is the center of any entreprise-ready application, there's not one single app out there which does not need to be powered by the most complicated^Wpowerfull software in the world and grid computing is for the masses.
This is called: vendor lock-in. At least it's a form of it. Because you're strong and people need your software badly, you do whatever you want, if it's different from what others do, it will give you a decisive advantage in case others can't catch up fast enough with your technology. As a side effect, you might even be able to charge for special learning sessions where you'll share all your valuable knowledge about your very specific processes, which are the fruit of so many years of expertise in that domain. Note that .rpm and .deb
zealots certainly do not have any clue on what packaging is, a good'ol myapp.bin
is much more portable and efficient, we'll teach you that for $3000 a weak...
Obviously what we need is standard packaging for these products. But this is not what we'll have. Not until they feel weak and start thinking that going open might help save their businesses from total wreckage.
> In-game ads have been slowly creeping up on us for ages.
Yes, I totally agree. I'd even add that games are themselves marketting objects. I mean, whenever you buy a "Harry Potter" game, who's making advertisement? Is the brand "Harry Potter" used to sell the game, or is the game a way to help selling the book? Both in fact.
> Video Games Are the Next Frontier for Advertisers
Great. So video games are the next victims of those "I mess up with everything I touch" specialists. They'll cash in for some years then every one will be fed up with it, add will have no more effects than a light cigarette on a hard-drugs addict, and well, everything will be rotten as hell, including the advertising business itself (if it's not done yet...).
Note that it's a general tendency to put advertisements everywhere trying to divert citizens so that they don't expect it to be advertisements.
Yes, I acknowledge my precedent post was sort of topic since refering to virtualization in general and not the kind of virtualization proposed by OpenVZ, which is after all, the subject 8-) Indeed OpenVZ fits those users who want to heavily test out zillion distros and sandboxing junkies.
/proc, you can't really play a true boot sequence, only try and simulate it, but to test out wether program A runs with glibc-2.2.1patchLevelXYBZ-my-special-release-nobod y-else-has, it does the job.
Point is for most cross-distrib testing, chrooting is usually very convenient and lightweight. Not as nice as true virtualization, you still have to share ip ports and hardware and mess arround with
Well, the question is, why virtualization? While it can be very usefull from my developper's point of view, getting rid of headaches installing a bazillions OSes on a single computer to test out your program with Win98, WinXP, Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, FreeBSD, and possibly OS/X, I see little gain from my software end user's point of view.
My primary OS is GNU/Linux, I have pretty much all the applications I want on it, and never really feel the need to use a specific, dedicated Windows application. Now *some* applications really need Windows and/or OS/X, most of them being linked to hardware. I mean, WIFI does not work on my linux-ppc laptop. Well, what would I gain with virtualization? Running OS/X on top of a Linux kernel won't help, for OS/X won't access the hardware directly, after all, that's what virtualization is about, isn't it? The other solution is to run OS/X as a primary OS and use a Linux kernel on top of it. But then, well, unless the virtualization is absolutely perfect and runs at 100% and costs 0 byte of RAM, I'll loose some performance using 99% of my applications. Not acceptable either.
My conclusion is that while virtualization is very usefull in a corporate context, eg you want to separate environnements, ease up backups, increase security, have 10 different OSes installed on one server for testing purposes, whatever, it fails to fully replace double boot. The main reason is that the role of a kernel is not only to launch programs, but also to provide programs some form of access to the hardware. And virtualization is just about denying direct access to the hardware.
Double/triple booting is far from disappearing...
"It's so hard to write a complete UNIX system, that open-sourcing it would not help," said Foo Bar, [HP-UX|Solaris|AIX|IRIX|SCO|your_favorite_propriet ary_unix_system_here]'s software product manager. In addition, customers aren't asking for an open-source system, he said.
I guess many countries have such founding principles but most of them simply do not have the means to enforce them. I mean, if you are country A and you disagree with country B which is 100 times more powerfull than you, well you just forget your "I do whatever I want when I'm home" concept and decide to agree with country B.
A good example is that in a country like France, for instance, any legal text whatsoever has to be written in French. Documents in any other language, including English, are pretended to have no (legal) value. For this reason, some claim that the GNU GPL has no legal value in France. Of course this is mostly bullshit, since many documents, which are not written in French, are taken in account in France, in practice. This includes almost any software EULA, but it's of course not limited to the software domain. Point is France does not have the means to make its dream of being the center of the world a reality. In that case France is country A. It has great ambitions for autonomy and self management, but it fails to achieve it because it does not even represent one single percent of the world.
I guess Louis Feraud'd better find a way to convince people out there that his point of view is good for America, or else, well, Free Speech 8-)
There's one good reason, the same old reason which makes me run GNU/Linux on PPC hardware: Apple makes very good hardware. Not necessarly the most powerfull, but it's robust, good looking, period. So that's a good reason to buy Apple hardware. Note that it's a matter of taste, some might prefer many other laptops to my good old G4 12", but I just appreciate this hardware, to type mails and program, it fits perfectly. What I want is something solid and reliable that I can put in my bag and that I enjoy typing on.
Then why run GNU/Linux? Well, for me the answer is easy, besides its freedom, that's the system I know best, and whatever hardware I have I might be able to run it. I use a PPC the way I'd use an i386. Note that in the case of a recent Intel-based Mac, this is not relevant since it's the same processor than many other laptops. But then, why run a Linux kernel in the first place? Why use it at all? I guess the reasons that make it interesting to run a Linux kernel on hardware X are still accurate when one asks onself this question "why would I run a Linux kernel on my MacBookPro?".