As a geek, I'm convinced Open Source will eventually vindicate over Closed Source -- no matter what. Whatever argument Microsoft could come up with, there'll always be a better counter argument. IMHO, the only thing their $50 billion could buy is better software, and this will work only on the short term. But I'm prejudiced...
So my question is: Would it be possible for Microsoft to kill Open Source solely through a media campaign?
This is a fairly major revelation from Microsoft, and if it happens, it may be one of the biggest wins yet for open-source software: what do you know -- competition works!"
Sigh. Since when was lowering Microsoft's prices a major objective of OSS?
This is *not* a big win. Contrary: it reduces the perceived difference between OSS and MS from a consumer's perspective and may even force Linux vendors to lower their prices and thus reduce their revenues.
...Now if Microsoft interpreted the OSS threat the way they should and decided to counter it by open sourcing their stuff... THAT would be a major win for the OSS (by definition)!
Isn't functional programming (Miranda, Haskell, Gopher, ML, LISP, Scheme, Bla) a KIND of declarative programming? As is logical programming (Prolog, deductive databases).
Well anyway, I'd like to point out that some of the most powerfull features of declarative programming and object orientation come together in Hassan Ait-Kaci's WildLIFE. It features strong typed structured datatypes with inheritance, lambda terms, unification, resolution, backtracking,... you name it.
It may be outdated, but it's definitely worth investigating if you're into perversely powerful programming languages and like the declarative methodology.
Although techniques like these have probably been around for some time (it's not even fundamentally different than credit-card) I must say I'm truly amazed by the simplicity of this concept. It seems pretty solid. Even though the system is completely open to hackers/crackers, I can't see a way that privacy information gets anywhere but with Centipaid.
Now whether or not Centipaid is more trustworthy than Microsoft's Passport system, only time will tell. But I'm very optimistic. Great job guys!
-- Money is the root of all evil (Send $30 for more info)
Obelix vs. Mobilix, Windows vs. Lindows,... I guess we can expect cases like Equator vs. Equador now. (Or New York vs. York, Slovenia vs. Slovakia, Washington state vs. Washington DC, Indians vs. Indians,...)
Yep, they did in the 50s, 60s and early seventies. I got one of these antique core memory modules at home. It features 2000 tiny magnetic cores (2-3mm), connected by a grid of copper wires, to provide a massive 400 words (4 bits + parity). It's definitely hand-crafted, probably by some poor kid in an Asian sweat shop.
The module is 20 x 30 cm, weighs a lot and produces a lot of heat, and apparently is very slow. Not exactly what you would consider the future of fast memories. But I wonder what contemporary production techniques and future nanotech (and probably an expired patent) can do to revive this technology. I'm sure that as with any "novel" memory technique it will take a few decades before it will pay off, else why would we still use magnetic hard disks for fast mass storage and not optical (or opto-magnetic) stuff?
-- The human brain is a wonderful thing: It starts working the moment you are born, and never stops until you stand up to speak in public -- Sir George Jessel
True. The same holds for C and assembly: Development in a "higher level language" is faster but may lead to less efficient code compared to a "lower level language" on an elementary level. Allegedly, holding on to assembly is what (almost) caused WordPerfect's death, while Microsoft's usage of C definitely gave them a head start with the development of new features in Word.
(Concerning C/ass I'm not sure about robustness. With Python/Java this issue is more evident, since robustness was one of Java's design goals.)
I guess the're just doing "the descent thing" (releasing the source) because they know that the OSS community will copy & improve it anyway if they don't. Also, it will help them gain market share, mainly as a result of the community porting their stuff to other (hardware) platforms.
I'm not sure but you might find some interesting stuff and people that can help you at Wireless Leiden; a group of WiFi enthousiasts trying to set up a city-wide ammateur network.
The division between public and commercial organizations isn't that clear. There's no law against opening your access point in exchange for access to other peoples'. As many initiatives have already proven, it's not even an obstacle to have a non-profit / commercial organization to administer these voluntary access points. I.e. it may not be likely that the traditional telcos eat up the 2.4 GHz frequency, but there may be other groups / organizations that will.
Note however, that legally speaking you're free to use "amateur" frequencies only without effectively blocking it from others (though in this case, law may not concur with simple physics).
UMTS is already dead and buried [...] The system discussed in the article won't change the picture that much
This is all true, but at some point it was unclear whether phone companies like Erikson, Motorola, Siemens and Nokia were going to support WLAN rather than (or as well as) GPRS, 3G,... And this story clearly shows they're not going to stay married to telcos 'til-death-parts.
Main reason is that it turned out that people at large are quite happy with just calling and sending short messages and are not interested in paying lots of money for fancy phones and then for multimedia content.
While true for the majority of users, I believe there are some fringe cultures and businesses for which relaying data is tentatively gaining. Phones with CCD cameras (MMS) appear to be a mild sales success and there's some innovative stuff going on in logistics and distribution companies that will rely on wireless communication with 99% coverage. This doesn't (yet) concern high bandwidth, but ultimately having WLAN eating the most profitable areas will slow down the spread of UMTS networks even more. But sure, its no secret that UMTS is never going to be profitable.
Hmm. Yeah, but having WLAN in the 10% area which generates 80% of data traffic leaves telco's with the responsibility to cover the 90% that generate the remaining 20% of traffic. Thus, for telcos, costs stay roughly the same while profits dive down.
Remember that even when 3G, GPRS or UMTS are available as an alternative to WLAN, no one will use it because WLAN is much faster, and probably cheaper too.
I'm sure this is what telcos have seen coming and have been scared shitless of. This will prevent them from ever making UMTS into a commercial success, especially taking into account they payed far to much for licensing the (yet-to-be-used) UMTS frequencies.
I guess VoIP over WLAN won't do much to their current markets, since high bandwidth isn't an issue for voice. But it seems they've lost the battle for data even before it's started...
Irony indeed: obviously, asking $96/cpu is not a clear gesture of phylantropy, and judging from other reactions on this story, SCO did not completely succee in getting *positive* attention.
...Or am I being the fool here - was your post meant to be ironic?!?
Will it be possible to disable <insert DRM feature> with absolute transparancy to essentially all of the networked community and services on future motherboards which will implement DRM techniques ?
Obviously, the answer is no, if "the networked community and services" are to include future trusted parties enabled. Therefore, AMI is fundamentally supporting Palladium, thus Microsoft, to dominate future web contents and infrastructure.
SCO can't be serious about this philanthropic gesture. ' Guess they're just karma whoring with the Linux community.
-- The human brain is a wonderful thing: It starts working the moment you are born, and never stops until you stand up to speak in public -- Sir George Jessel
True neither of the three are obviously innovative.
I like Stroustrup for being modestly innovative but also keeping a pragmatic eye on what application developers are used to, or want.
Wall, for just throwing in anything a programmer migth need, and in doing so creating a soup polymorphous and rich syntax, with its own poetry.
Wrt. De Icaza -- the same could be said about Torvalds, Stallman, Gates or Jobs. Admitted: they aren't great in the problem's they've tackled, or the way they did it. De Icaza (or Havoc Pennington, Torvalds, Raymond, Stallman and of course many others) is great in the huge amount of work he did, while sticking to and advertising a phylosophy I greatly admire. To great extent Open Source isn't innovative, it's just dull copying, improving and releasing it under a license it should have had from the beginning.
De Icaza is innovative in what he believes good software development should look like.
(And then again, its just my 2 cents. I might just as easily have put in Russell, Turing, for their fundamental thoughts on computability, Saul Kripke for his stimulating thoughts on epistemology or Noam Chomsky, for instigating Computational Linguistics.)
Minter was in the news yesterday,as a sidenote. Check out: gridrunner++ if you're looking something un-commodorish.
I saw people posting John Carmack. I agree he's a great hacker and deserves the credits, but his great abilities are focussed on great graphics, not gameplay. IMHO Jeff is truly innovative in combining art, psychadelics and a crazy sense of humor with his coding skills. It's not just how much his code changed the masses. Hmmkay. guess he's just one of my personal favorites...
Before Open Source Software became a mainstream notion (say 1990), "Open" as in "Open Standards" used to imply that a company supplied descent documentation with it's API. That's about as open as SUN's OpenLook.
MPEG is "open" in that the standard was developed by a consortium of companies and other institutions. Therefore, it is propriety, patented, copyrighted and whatever... but these rights are not owned by a single company that's reluctant to reveal the ins and outs of its "standard". MPEG is open in that it openly discussed MPEG4's features before it hit the market.
So, although MPEG indeed extorts consumers for using their stuff just like any company, a consortium is a much healthier construction viewed from other company's perspectieves. And therefore ultimately (due to competition) also to customers.
So yes. It is confusing. (And I agree with the majority of posts that only a fully open standard, like Ogg Theora will settle this matter.)
-- The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Jeff Minter E.W. Dijkstra Donald Knuth Niclaus Wirth Richard Stallman Bjarne Stroustrup Linus Torvalds Miquel d'Icaza Wouter van Oortmerssen Larry Wall
I'm not clear about this, but I think with IE and/or Media player it is possible to exploit stack overflows in text labels or use "spyware features" to gain control. I believe this applies primarily to mpeg (both audio and video) but in principle formats like jpeg, gif,... should be able to similarly trick any program that skips string-length checking or the likes.
-- Programming is like sex... make one mistake, and support it the rest of your life
I'm amazed there are still countries that have analog cell phone networks at all. I never had the opportunity to buy one -- ave to actually using it. Is this a third world country we're talking about?
-- I haven't lost my mind; I know exactly where I left it
.. And on top of that, it's probably the first major product with "hardware DRM". Can anyone tell me why I would want to spend several k$ on a machine that doesn't even run Linux (yet)?
Well. This may be junk, but at least it's very expensive junk.
-- The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Remove Analogue Digital Converter, pay $250 extra
on
DVI Flat Panels?
·
· Score: 2
My best bet so far is probably the NEC MultiSync 1550XBK (I've heard good things about its picture quality, and I'm not a gamer, so update times are irrelevant to me), but I've noticed that for about the same cost (~$600), I could buy a 17" Samsung LCD with that TV and video input thingy, but it only has analog VGA input (no DVI).
I totally agree. I understand all about market value and supply and demand but isn't it outrageous to pay 250.- just for the manufacturer to take out the expensive AD converter and replace it with a cheap digital plug? I mean, appart from that, some relatively simple chips and a lot of patents, there isn't a real difference, right?
-- Money is the root of all evil (Send $30 for more info)
Slashdot Mirror
As a geek, I'm convinced Open Source will eventually vindicate over Closed Source -- no matter what. Whatever argument Microsoft could come up with, there'll always be a better counter argument. IMHO, the only thing their $50 billion could buy is better software, and this will work only on the short term. But I'm prejudiced...
So my question is: Would it be possible for Microsoft to kill Open Source solely through a media campaign?
This is a fairly major revelation from Microsoft, and if it happens, it may be one of the biggest wins yet for open-source software: what do you know -- competition works!"
...Now if Microsoft interpreted the OSS threat the way they should and decided to counter it by open sourcing their stuff... THAT would be a major win for the OSS (by definition)!
Sigh. Since when was lowering Microsoft's prices a major objective of OSS?
This is *not* a big win. Contrary: it reduces the perceived difference between OSS and MS from a consumer's perspective and may even force Linux vendors to lower their prices and thus reduce their revenues.
Isn't functional programming (Miranda, Haskell, Gopher, ML, LISP, Scheme, Bla) a KIND of declarative programming? As is logical programming (Prolog, deductive databases).
Well anyway, I'd like to point out that some of the most powerfull features of declarative programming and object orientation come together in Hassan Ait-Kaci's
WildLIFE.
It features strong typed structured datatypes with inheritance, lambda terms, unification, resolution, backtracking,... you name it.
It may be outdated, but it's definitely worth investigating if you're into perversely powerful programming languages and like the declarative methodology.
Although techniques like these have probably been around for some time (it's not even fundamentally different than credit-card) I must say I'm truly amazed by the simplicity of this concept. It seems pretty solid. Even though the system is completely open to hackers/crackers, I can't see a way that privacy information gets anywhere but with Centipaid.
Now whether or not Centipaid is more trustworthy than Microsoft's Passport system, only time will tell. But I'm very optimistic. Great job guys!
--
Money is the root of all evil (Send $30 for more info)
Obelix vs. Mobilix, Windows vs. Lindows, ... I guess we can expect cases like Equator vs. Equador now. (Or New York vs. York, Slovenia vs. Slovakia, Washington state vs. Washington DC, Indians vs. Indians, ...)
Whatever, why not?
Yep, they did in the 50s, 60s and early seventies. I got one of these antique core memory modules at home. It features 2000 tiny magnetic cores (2-3mm), connected by a grid of copper wires, to provide a massive 400 words (4 bits + parity). It's definitely hand-crafted, probably by some poor kid in an Asian sweat shop.
The module is 20 x 30 cm, weighs a lot and produces a lot of heat, and apparently is very slow. Not exactly what you would consider the future of fast memories. But I wonder what contemporary production techniques and future nanotech (and probably an expired patent) can do to revive this technology. I'm sure that as with any "novel" memory technique it will take a few decades before it will pay off, else why would we still use magnetic hard disks for fast mass storage and not optical (or opto-magnetic) stuff?
--
The human brain is a wonderful thing: It starts working the moment you are born, and never stops until you stand up to speak in public -- Sir George Jessel
True. The same holds for C and assembly: Development in a "higher level language" is faster but may lead to less efficient code compared to a "lower level language" on an elementary level. Allegedly, holding on to assembly is what (almost) caused WordPerfect's death, while Microsoft's usage of C definitely gave them a head start with the development of new features in Word.
(Concerning C/ass I'm not sure about robustness. With Python/Java this issue is more evident, since robustness was one of Java's design goals.)
I guess the're just doing "the descent thing" (releasing the source) because they know that the OSS community will copy & improve it anyway if they don't. Also, it will help them gain market share, mainly as a result of the community porting their stuff to other (hardware) platforms.
I'm not sure but you might find some interesting stuff and people that can help you at Wireless Leiden; a group of WiFi enthousiasts trying to set up a city-wide ammateur network.
The division between public and commercial organizations isn't that clear. There's no law against opening your access point in exchange for access to other peoples'. As many initiatives have already proven, it's not even an obstacle to have a non-profit / commercial organization to administer these voluntary access points. I.e. it may not be likely that the traditional telcos eat up the 2.4 GHz frequency, but there may be other groups / organizations that will.
Note however, that legally speaking you're free to use "amateur" frequencies only without effectively blocking it from others (though in this case, law may not concur with simple physics).
UMTS is already dead and buried [...] The system discussed in the article won't change the picture that much
This is all true, but at some point it was unclear whether phone companies like Erikson, Motorola, Siemens and Nokia were going to support WLAN rather than (or as well as) GPRS, 3G,... And this story clearly shows they're not going to stay married to telcos 'til-death-parts.
Main reason is that it turned out that people at large are quite happy with just calling and sending short messages and are not interested in paying lots of money for fancy phones and then for multimedia content.
While true for the majority of users, I believe there are some fringe cultures and businesses for which relaying data is tentatively gaining. Phones with CCD cameras (MMS) appear to be a mild sales success and there's some innovative stuff going on in logistics and distribution companies that will rely on wireless communication with 99% coverage. This doesn't (yet) concern high bandwidth, but ultimately having WLAN eating the most profitable areas will slow down the spread of UMTS networks even more. But sure, its no secret that UMTS is never going to be profitable.
Hmm. Yeah, but having WLAN in the 10% area which generates 80% of data traffic leaves telco's with the responsibility to cover the 90% that generate the remaining 20% of traffic. Thus, for telcos, costs stay roughly the same while profits dive down.
Remember that even when 3G, GPRS or UMTS are available as an alternative to WLAN, no one will use it because WLAN is much faster, and probably cheaper too.
I'm sure this is what telcos have seen coming and have been scared shitless of. This will prevent them from ever making UMTS into a commercial success, especially taking into account they payed far to much for licensing the (yet-to-be-used) UMTS frequencies.
I guess VoIP over WLAN won't do much to their current markets, since high bandwidth isn't an issue for voice. But it seems they've lost the battle for data even before it's started...
Or can commercial UMTS and open WLAN coexist?
Irony indeed: obviously, asking $96/cpu is not a clear gesture of phylantropy, and judging from other reactions on this story, SCO did not completely succee in getting *positive* attention.
...Or am I being the fool here - was your post meant to be ironic?!?
Erm. Restate/elaborate that as:
Will it be possible to disable <insert DRM feature> with absolute transparancy to essentially all of the networked community and services on future motherboards which will implement DRM techniques ?
Obviously, the answer is no, if "the networked community and services" are to include future trusted parties enabled. Therefore, AMI is fundamentally supporting Palladium, thus Microsoft, to dominate future web contents and infrastructure.
Period.
SCO can't be serious about this philanthropic gesture. ' Guess they're just karma whoring with the Linux community.
--
The human brain is a wonderful thing: It starts working the moment you are born, and never stops until you stand up to speak in public -- Sir George Jessel
True neither of the three are obviously innovative.
I like Stroustrup for being modestly innovative but also keeping a pragmatic eye on what application developers are used to, or want.
Wall, for just throwing in anything a programmer migth need, and in doing so creating a soup polymorphous and rich syntax, with its own poetry.
Wrt. De Icaza -- the same could be said about Torvalds, Stallman, Gates or Jobs. Admitted: they aren't great in the problem's they've tackled, or the way they did it. De Icaza (or Havoc Pennington, Torvalds, Raymond, Stallman and of course many others) is great in the huge amount of work he did, while sticking to and advertising a phylosophy I greatly admire. To great extent Open Source isn't innovative, it's just dull copying, improving and releasing it under a license it should have had from the beginning.
De Icaza is innovative in what he believes good software development should look like.
(And then again, its just my 2 cents. I might just as easily have put in Russell, Turing, for their fundamental thoughts on computability, Saul Kripke for his stimulating thoughts on epistemology or Noam Chomsky, for instigating Computational Linguistics.)
Minter was in the news yesterday ,as a sidenote. Check out: gridrunner++ if you're looking something un-commodorish.
I saw people posting John Carmack. I agree he's a great hacker and deserves the credits, but his great abilities are focussed on great graphics, not gameplay. IMHO Jeff is truly innovative in combining art, psychadelics and a crazy sense of humor with his coding skills. It's not just how much his code changed the masses. Hmmkay. guess he's just one of my personal favorites...
Before Open Source Software became a mainstream notion (say 1990), "Open" as in "Open Standards" used to imply that a company supplied descent documentation with it's API. That's about as open as SUN's OpenLook.
MPEG is "open" in that the standard was developed by a consortium of companies and other institutions. Therefore, it is propriety, patented, copyrighted and whatever... but these rights are not owned by a single company that's reluctant to reveal the ins and outs of its "standard". MPEG is open in that it openly discussed MPEG4's features before it hit the market.
So, although MPEG indeed extorts consumers for using their stuff just like any company, a consortium is a much healthier construction viewed from other company's perspectieves. And therefore ultimately (due to competition) also to customers.
So yes. It is confusing. (And I agree with the majority of posts that only a fully open standard, like Ogg Theora will settle this matter.)
--
The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
' Guess Coppola's Dracula movie should be renamed to "Bram Stroker's Dracula".
--
Smoking kills; if you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life -- Brooke Shields
My favorites:
Jeff Minter
E.W. Dijkstra
Donald Knuth
Niclaus Wirth
Richard Stallman
Bjarne Stroustrup
Linus Torvalds
Miquel d'Icaza
Wouter van Oortmerssen
Larry Wall
I'm not clear about this, but I think with IE and/or Media player it is possible to exploit stack overflows in text labels or use "spyware features" to gain control. I believe this applies primarily to mpeg (both audio and video) but in principle formats like jpeg, gif, ... should be able to similarly trick any program that skips string-length checking or the likes.
--
Programming is like sex... make one mistake, and support it the rest of your life
I'm amazed there are still countries that have analog cell phone networks at all. I never had the opportunity to buy one -- ave to actually using it. Is this a third world country we're talking about?
--
I haven't lost my mind; I know exactly where I left it
.. And on top of that, it's probably the first major product with "hardware DRM". Can anyone tell me why I would want to spend several k$ on a machine that doesn't even run Linux (yet)?
Well. This may be junk, but at least it's very expensive junk.
--
The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
My best bet so far is probably the NEC MultiSync 1550XBK (I've heard good things about its picture quality, and I'm not a gamer, so update times are irrelevant to me), but I've noticed that for about the same cost (~$600), I could buy a 17" Samsung LCD with that TV and video input thingy, but it only has analog VGA input (no DVI).
I totally agree. I understand all about market value and supply and demand but isn't it outrageous to pay 250.- just for the manufacturer to take out the expensive AD converter and replace it with a cheap digital plug? I mean, appart from that, some relatively simple chips and a lot of patents, there isn't a real difference, right?
--
Money is the root of all evil (Send $30 for more info)