>.. except that Oracle might pull a 'MySQL' on MySQL themselves and kindly inform them that if
> they intend to use InnoDB for commercial purposes they'll have to pay up. IOW, Oracle might
> require licensing for every commercial (no-GPL) version of MySQL sold.
And you think Innobase doesn't require licensing for non-GPL versions today? It is a for-profit company - not a charity. They probably make money on licensing revenues from non-GPL versions and from support contracts. The following statement from the Innodb website seems to bear me out.
"If you want to combine MySQL and InnoDB to a product which you distribute, and which is not open source, or for which the user has to pay a fee to you, you have to purchase a commercial license from MySQL AB."
I'm sure some of the money that you are paying for a commercial MySQL license is going to Innobase.
I am an Indian living in the US. My parents are both doctors - working in one of the hospitals mentioned in the article. Here is their take on the entire Indian medical system.
The very best Indian doctors and hospitals are, for all practical purposes, as good as any in the West. Unless you are looking for technologies and treatments that are on the very bleeding edge, chances are that it is available in India for a lot less than you would pay here.
The average Indian doctor and hospital are, however, a lot worse than what you get here. Over here, I can walk into any doctor's office, any hospital, and can be assured of a fairly decent standard of treatment. That is not so in India. Outside of the few top hospitals (most of which are located in the major urban areas), it is a total crapshoot. You may get a good doctor but it is equally likely that you will get a complete incompetent who would have had his license revoked many times over in the West.
I lost an uncle of mine to such a quack - in Bangalore of all places (where you would expect a decent level of medical expertise). He was hit by a truck and the idiot doctor who attended to him did not realize that while he didn't look too bad externally, he could be bleeding fairly severely on the inside. So they just sat and watched him bleed to death over the space of several hours.
As far as the cost advantage is concerned, it is there but will slowly get less over time. Medical treatment in India is getting dramatically more expensive each year... and Indians are taking a cue from the US and filing malpractice lawsuits in increasing numbers. So, if you are looking to India for cheap medical treatment, better go there quickly. It isn't going to remain that way for a whole lot longer!
We can accuse Crick and Watson of not being generous in giving Rosalind Franklin the credit she deserved but the credit for the discovery belongs to them alone. Either Franlin did not make the deductions they did or she did but was slow to publish them (which in the world of science is basically the same thing).
That said, Franklin would have probably gotten the Nobel prize had she lived long enough. The Nobel prize is never awarded posthumously - and she died four years before the prize was awarded.
The real injustice in all of this is that Maurice Wilkins shared Nobel prize for his x-ray crystallography work. Most of the x-ray crystallography work that Crick and Watson had based their deductions on had been done by Rosalind Franklin. Wilkins was neither responsible for the data used to make the deductions nor for the deductions themselves.
- HCE
First of all, it is unfair to dismiss Sigma as a "manufacturer of low-quality aftermarket lenses". Sigma does make many such lenses but it also has a high-end EX series which is, from what I have read, on a par with the best lenses of Canon, Nikon et al.
Secondly, I doubt it Mead "picked" Sigma. This is the first generation of a new technology and I don't think any of the big guys would want to try the technology until it matures. A manufacturer like Sigma that is trying to break into the market has the least to lose and the most to gain by taking a chance on this technology. As reviews have shown, this technology has a lot of promise but is not without its problems.
Finally, for what it's worth, there are rumors going round that a major manufacturer is going to announce a DSLR based on a 10MP full-frame version of the X3 sensor at the PMA show in March this year. Right now, the three major candidates are (in no particular order) Contax, Nikon and Pentax.
Mind telling me how one can put an Atmos on one's wrist? As you say, the Atmos has been around 80 years. Did it occur to you that there is a reason why in all that time, no one made a wristwatch based on similar principles.
The fact is that they cannot. The atmos has a chamber filled with gas - the expansion and contraction of which winds the mainspring. There is no way such a chamber could be made small enough to fit inside a wristwatch.
This patent uses a completely different mechanism to achieve the same effect. He did not "miniaturize" the atmos technology. Even if he did, it would be a remarkable achievement - a small-time watchmaker being able to do what one of the world's premier mechanical watch companies could not do for 80 years.
Wait a few years and this invention might be *in* a Rolex. Steven Phillips is actively shopping his invention around to various big watch companies. If one of them bites then you'll see $3K watches with this technology in it.
An atoms clock is kinda large and uses a sealed gas chamber that expands or contracts and thus winds the mainspring. You cannot put one of those on someone's wrist. The challenge was to produce something compact enough to replace the gas chamber of the atmos clock.
There is a much more detailed write-up on this in International Wrist Watch magazine (they have a website but the article is not there). Imagine an automatic wristwatch that does not even have to be wound but stays running all the time!
What's more, a "side-effect" of this is that the watch has become vastly more accurate. The rate at which mechanical watches run is dependent on the tension in the mainspring - and since that isn't constant (even in regularly worn automatic watches) mechanical watches (even the most accurate ones) tend to lose or gain a few seconds a day.
The "eternal winding" mechanism somehow manages to keep the tension in the mainspring fairly constant - so the watch's rate varies a lot less and it ends up being about as accurate as a quartz watch!
The ridiculous price is only because these are a limited edition set of watches made by the inventor. According to the article, he intends to sell his patent to a bug watch manufacturer. If Rolex or Omega, for instance, gets hold of it, they will probably incorporate these in their regular watches and the price will, in time, come down to the same as regular Rolex/Omega prices (which aren't exactly cheap but not this expensive either).
Slashdot Mirror
> .. except that Oracle might pull a 'MySQL' on MySQL themselves and kindly inform them that if
> they intend to use InnoDB for commercial purposes they'll have to pay up. IOW, Oracle might
> require licensing for every commercial (no-GPL) version of MySQL sold.
And you think Innobase doesn't require licensing for non-GPL versions today? It is a for-profit company - not a charity. They probably make money on licensing revenues from non-GPL versions and from support contracts. The following statement from the Innodb website seems to bear me out.
"If you want to combine MySQL and InnoDB to a product which you distribute, and which is not open source, or for which the user has to pay a fee to you, you have to purchase a commercial license from MySQL AB."
I'm sure some of the money that you are paying for a commercial MySQL license is going to Innobase.
- HCE
I am an Indian living in the US. My parents are both doctors - working in one of the hospitals mentioned in the article. Here is their take on the entire Indian medical system.
... and Indians are taking a cue from the US and filing malpractice lawsuits in increasing numbers. So, if you are looking to India for cheap medical treatment, better go there quickly. It isn't going to remain that way for a whole lot longer!
The very best Indian doctors and hospitals are, for all practical purposes, as good as any in the West. Unless you are looking for technologies and treatments that are on the very bleeding edge, chances are that it is available in India for a lot less than you would pay here.
The average Indian doctor and hospital are, however, a lot worse than what you get here. Over here, I can walk into any doctor's office, any hospital, and can be assured of a fairly decent standard of treatment. That is not so in India. Outside of the few top hospitals (most of which are located in the major urban areas), it is a total crapshoot. You may get a good doctor but it is equally likely that you will get a complete incompetent who would have had his license revoked many times over in the West.
I lost an uncle of mine to such a quack - in Bangalore of all places (where you would expect a decent level of medical expertise). He was hit by a truck and the idiot doctor who attended to him did not realize that while he didn't look too bad externally, he could be bleeding fairly severely on the inside. So they just sat and watched him bleed to death over the space of several hours.
As far as the cost advantage is concerned, it is there but will slowly get less over time. Medical treatment in India is getting dramatically more expensive each year
- HCE
We can accuse Crick and Watson of not being generous in giving Rosalind Franklin the credit she deserved but the credit for the discovery belongs to them alone. Either Franlin did not make the deductions they did or she did but was slow to publish them (which in the world of science is basically the same thing). That said, Franklin would have probably gotten the Nobel prize had she lived long enough. The Nobel prize is never awarded posthumously - and she died four years before the prize was awarded. The real injustice in all of this is that Maurice Wilkins shared Nobel prize for his x-ray crystallography work. Most of the x-ray crystallography work that Crick and Watson had based their deductions on had been done by Rosalind Franklin. Wilkins was neither responsible for the data used to make the deductions nor for the deductions themselves. - HCE
First of all, it is unfair to dismiss Sigma as a "manufacturer of low-quality aftermarket lenses". Sigma does make many such lenses but it also has a high-end EX series which is, from what I have read, on a par with the best lenses of Canon, Nikon et al.
Secondly, I doubt it Mead "picked" Sigma. This is the first generation of a new technology and I don't think any of the big guys would want to try the technology until it matures. A manufacturer like Sigma that is trying to break into the market has the least to lose and the most to gain by taking a chance on this technology. As reviews have shown, this technology has a lot of promise but is not without its problems.
Finally, for what it's worth, there are rumors going round that a major manufacturer is going to announce a DSLR based on a 10MP full-frame version of the X3 sensor at the PMA show in March this year. Right now, the three major candidates are (in no particular order) Contax, Nikon and Pentax.
- HCE
Er - that slogan *is* about mechanical watches. AFAIK, that was first coined when there was no such thing as a quartz wristwatch. - HCE
Mind telling me how one can put an Atmos on one's wrist? As you say, the Atmos has been around 80 years. Did it occur to you that there is a reason why in all that time, no one made a wristwatch based on similar principles.
The fact is that they cannot. The atmos has a chamber filled with gas - the expansion and contraction of which winds the mainspring. There is no way such a chamber could be made small enough to fit inside a wristwatch.
This patent uses a completely different mechanism to achieve the same effect. He did not "miniaturize" the atmos technology. Even if he did, it would be a remarkable achievement - a small-time watchmaker being able to do what one of the world's premier mechanical watch companies could not do for 80 years.
- HCE
Wait a few years and this invention might be *in* a Rolex. Steven Phillips is actively shopping his invention around to various big watch companies. If one of them bites then you'll see $3K watches with this technology in it.
- HCE
An atoms clock is kinda large and uses a sealed gas chamber that expands or contracts and thus winds the mainspring. You cannot put one of those on someone's wrist. The challenge was to produce something compact enough to replace the gas chamber of the atmos clock.
- HCE
There is a much more detailed write-up on this in International Wrist Watch magazine (they have a website but the article is not there). Imagine an automatic wristwatch that does not even have to be wound but stays running all the time!
What's more, a "side-effect" of this is that the watch has become vastly more accurate. The rate at which mechanical watches run is dependent on the tension in the mainspring - and since that isn't constant (even in regularly worn automatic watches) mechanical watches (even the most accurate ones) tend to lose or gain a few seconds a day.
The "eternal winding" mechanism somehow manages to keep the tension in the mainspring fairly constant - so the watch's rate varies a lot less and it ends up being about as accurate as a quartz watch!
The ridiculous price is only because these are a limited edition set of watches made by the inventor. According to the article, he intends to sell his patent to a bug watch manufacturer. If Rolex or Omega, for instance, gets hold of it, they will probably incorporate these in their regular watches and the price will, in time, come down to the same as regular Rolex/Omega prices (which aren't exactly cheap but not this expensive either).
- HCE