They just have no interest in paying to produce free software. They're not in the business of giving stuff away. As much as it drives Oracle database sales, that's what they'll do and the connection has to be pretty direct and immediate.
Same with OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, MySQL, VirtualBox and all the others. Mr. Ellison has a pretty solid "row or get off the boat" philosophy. He didn't buy Sun for its freeware. He wanted it so he could play the bigger game.
The economy tanked and some legendary companies were put in distress. This is why prudent companies put aside a cash cushion - so that they can leverage distress and acquire cheaply valuable IP, assets, brilliance and brands. With the market lining up as a war between Cisco and HP for a converged solution including server, storage, network and software, Oracle looked across the vast swath of distressed companies and saw buying Sun as an opportunity to make it a three dog race.
Ellison has no intention of losing this race and has no problem casting out what he sees as ballast - in this case development costs that don't yield immediate profits he can use to get the rest of the pieces he needs to compete on this field. He'll keep Solaris and parts of VirtualBox that he can take proprietary because he needs an OS and a VM. He still needs a switch and router biz to make a go of it, so look for a big buy there.
It's time all hands got to forking - or at least mirroring.
What's more interesting to me is that Adobe is now under fire both from Microsoft, who has been trying to supplant all of their software with their own stack, and now Apple. It seems like the only friends Adobe has these days are Linux and Android.
So, hey, Adobe: have you started porting Photoshop yet?
This is patently unfair. Yes, there needs to be an education system that provides for the needs of students struggling with language, with disabilities and even schools that help the intellectually challenged achieve their potential. There's no question about this.
The proper way to do this is not to refuse to serve the students whose intellectual or artistic gifts become special needs for out-of-mainstream education. Neglecting our brightest students is not a good way to drive America to the fore in the new century. To turn an old saw: the world needs physicists, research chemists and brain surgeons too.
More likely they've got this widget sitting around with all the requisite engineers raring to go. But it's a wrench that fits no bolt - they need research scientists with the type of problems that this solves to put a load on it, define the scope of its use and put it to work so they can refine the toolchain and broaden the scope.
Straightening out exactly when a work is no longer covered is already nearly impossible - which would be a serious problem if any more works were expected to expire ever. Introducing different terms or other complexities just inserts opportunities for hair splitting legal practice and that's not in the public interest as it drives up the cost and risk of absolutely everything. So the date on the copyright notice should start the clock, and run to a set limit and no more. If an author wants to revise his own work while he lives, call that a new work and register it again, that should be fine - but on expiration day the original in its original form is public domain. I think people would pay for the newer version for as long as the author lived, though his authorship might convey less of a premium on revisions to expired versus new works - as it should to inspire him to get back to work.
Also we should be rid of anonymous copyright, automatic copyright, and free copyright. If you can't be bothered to put your name on it and upload it to the copyright office it ought not be considered protected in any way whatever. Keeping track of who owns what costs money - that's why you have to register your car and your real estate and pay the associated fees for recording and transfer, and copyright should be no different. The fees should cover the cost of storage, retrieval, transfer of title, maintenance and overhead not just of the material, but all of the various costs of all of the courts who have to handle this stuff - plus a tax to the general fund to cover enforcement if there's to be any. TANSTAAFL. No free lunch.
And on copyright expiration day the files should be moved over to the Library of Congress for public distribution. No exceptions. Because that's what we get for giving you a temporary monopoly - your contributions to our culture upon which to build our own creations as you built on the ones who went before you. Because that's the "progress of science and the useful arts" that the monopoly is supposed to promote.
I don't care if you won the Pulitzer for the photo. We're talking about 50 year old books. It's immoral to say that after 50 years the photographer that took the photo present on one page of a 300 page book, properly licensed at the time, is entitled to by his authorship of that one trivial photo prevent the collection of the library of the world's culture simply because of some subsequent legal interpretation of copyright law. It's absurd in a way only a lawyer can appreciate. If you're hanging your hopes on this, you're doomed because at least 99% of these rights are owned by faceless non-sympathetic resellers of rights.
Keep up your objections and - mark my words - the law will be changed to strip your rights in far more extensive ways than you envision. Copyright's purpose is to promote progress. Your objections are a perfect example of why copyright does not serve this purpose. Your every objection is an argument for the abolition of copyright.
Well, they'll probably abstract it into the current one-dimensional addressing scheme for memory. But these things aren't used just for memory - you can build logic with them. Instead of 400,000 x 400,000 = (1,600,000,000 or 1.6 billion) transistors, 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 x 10,000 = (10,000,000,000,000,000 or 10 quadrillion) transistors in one package. Some for memory, some for logic, some for special purposes. You know, skynet. It gives us another 24 years of Moore's Law - though it probably won't take that long. If this pans out it buys some elbow room to find the next stretch goal.
That should be almost enough processor power to play Crysis V on Windows 13 at a decent frame rate. By then my great grandson will be fragging me mercilessly.
The end of magnetomechanical media has been drawing nigh for quite a while. When this storage comes it will still be very expensive for quite a while for no better reason than they can get a lot for it.
SATA3 drives are here, as is SAS 6G. Both are 6Gbits/second theoretically. Lightpeak supposedly only starts at 10 - less overhead. This is new technology that's potentially much faster than that and there's no good reason to pretend it's a spinning disk when it's not. When we get the performance up, it's time to move to some much faster interconnect like PCIe. Some SSD vendors are already doing that, so this will just be a bump upgrade to their existing lineup.
Of course. I love that posts are persistent here on slashdot. It's an elegant solution to a lot of problems. I just don't think it's the only answer.
I like that things are done differently in other places too. Not everybody has to do everything the same way. Part of going to Groklaw is that you accept that PJ's moderation system is arbitrary and capricious. It has made for a good quality website, if not so full of hidden surprises of slashdot's "wild west" method, at least with less unpleasantness.
It's not 19 pages, but it's not 1000 either. You get a lot of book in 272 pages. And the book defines a language that can be used to compile itself (and hence, the book). You don't get that with Algol.
Why is noone asking to examine the C programming language, to adapt it to modern programming processes and methods? Why is noone speaking out to defend C as a useful language, to update the aged methods of Kernighan and Ritchie?
Look, you're being ground up by the wheels of Industry, it's true. But you weren't pushed in there, you inserted yourself deliberately and with great effort. When you find your work being praised by Maureen O'Gara it's time to take a step back and do a little self-evaluation.
I don't approve of software patents, nor the prevention of progress through hardware patents. I'm pretty vocal about this here. But this is not progress. You're not inventing something new. You're only implementing patented hardware in software - and probably poorly since the hardware the software is running on doesn't actually have the features that make the mainframe a valuable platform, the software just lies to the applications about having the features. Presumably this is so mainframe customers can migrate off of expensive mainframes to virtual mainframes running on the emulator, rather than migrating off the hideous proprietary or complex non-portable systems like they should, and so getting the least favorable path: all the lockin of the apps without the RAS of the mainframe or the inherent portability of industry standard architectures. And you intend to profit from their movement from IBM's proprietary platform to your emulation of it and so remaining locked into those hideous applications, or there'd be no company.
So no, you've actually found a strange corner case in all of IP protection that I actually don't care about. Congratulations! I didn't think there was one. Enjoy your time with the Nazgul. Their attention can be quite... memorable.
Do you really think they're browsing about the Internet up at the Library of Congress looking to archive the unmoderated drivel that is a slashdot, digg, 4chan or fark thread? Really?
<sigh> some days I wonder how some of you ACs managed to get your screensaver turned off so you can post this crap.
As PJ over on Groklaw says, the usual Microsoft spokesflacks leapt out in front of this story to promote Hercules' position when ordinarily they wouldn't even know about a subject this obscure. It's likely this is an attempt to turn the community against one of its biggest benefactors. Don't fall for it.
In the actual suit we can all be sure the oversight will be corrected and IBM will only use the 169 patents (plus a few more) that weren't in the pledge.
So you're saying that to continue to grow Apple will need to release a phenomenally popular and profitable new product that's a platform for people to attach further hardware, software and media purchases to, and so grow their earnings. I wonder it they'll be able to come up with something clever like that.
We're actually getting pretty close to the limit with silicon. Soon they'll be compelled to use Z. Silicon crystals have a lattice structure with a spacing of 0.5430710 nm so at 45 nm we're already talking about features that are less than 100 atoms across.
Yeah, but you can't buy shares in Linux. LNUX is actually geeknet, corporate overlord of slashdot. Canonical is not a public company - yet. I don't care for Apple products much either, but I've got to give them some respect for executing well in the marketplace.
The whole point of stock and capitalization is that investors (shareholders) give up their cash with the expectation of a return on their investment - the expectation is that the company they invest in will grow. Hopefully that's more than the rate of inflation. Short term gains and losses are one thing, but ten years is not a short term. It's definitely long enough to call it a trend.
The growth of a company, and the price of individual shares, tells you about whether the company is growing and whether it's a good investment for your retirement. Investment advisors say that because of dollar cost averaging you wouldn't necessarily drop a stock that didn't grow, or even shrank for a brief time. One would imagine that if you manage your portfolio at all you wouldn't remain invested in a stock that consistently shrank over the span of a decade. You only have so long before retirement to get your growth after all.
Slashdot Mirror
They just have no interest in paying to produce free software. They're not in the business of giving stuff away. As much as it drives Oracle database sales, that's what they'll do and the connection has to be pretty direct and immediate.
Same with OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, MySQL, VirtualBox and all the others. Mr. Ellison has a pretty solid "row or get off the boat" philosophy. He didn't buy Sun for its freeware. He wanted it so he could play the bigger game.
The economy tanked and some legendary companies were put in distress. This is why prudent companies put aside a cash cushion - so that they can leverage distress and acquire cheaply valuable IP, assets, brilliance and brands. With the market lining up as a war between Cisco and HP for a converged solution including server, storage, network and software, Oracle looked across the vast swath of distressed companies and saw buying Sun as an opportunity to make it a three dog race.
Ellison has no intention of losing this race and has no problem casting out what he sees as ballast - in this case development costs that don't yield immediate profits he can use to get the rest of the pieces he needs to compete on this field. He'll keep Solaris and parts of VirtualBox that he can take proprietary because he needs an OS and a VM. He still needs a switch and router biz to make a go of it, so look for a big buy there.
It's time all hands got to forking - or at least mirroring.
What's more interesting to me is that Adobe is now under fire both from Microsoft, who has been trying to supplant all of their software with their own stack, and now Apple. It seems like the only friends Adobe has these days are Linux and Android.
So, hey, Adobe: have you started porting Photoshop yet?
This is patently unfair. Yes, there needs to be an education system that provides for the needs of students struggling with language, with disabilities and even schools that help the intellectually challenged achieve their potential. There's no question about this.
The proper way to do this is not to refuse to serve the students whose intellectual or artistic gifts become special needs for out-of-mainstream education. Neglecting our brightest students is not a good way to drive America to the fore in the new century. To turn an old saw: the world needs physicists, research chemists and brain surgeons too.
More likely they've got this widget sitting around with all the requisite engineers raring to go. But it's a wrench that fits no bolt - they need research scientists with the type of problems that this solves to put a load on it, define the scope of its use and put it to work so they can refine the toolchain and broaden the scope.
We go over 2 to the power of 21 on UIDs maybe? That would be 2,097,152. Seen some pretty high ones lately.
Straightening out exactly when a work is no longer covered is already nearly impossible - which would be a serious problem if any more works were expected to expire ever. Introducing different terms or other complexities just inserts opportunities for hair splitting legal practice and that's not in the public interest as it drives up the cost and risk of absolutely everything. So the date on the copyright notice should start the clock, and run to a set limit and no more. If an author wants to revise his own work while he lives, call that a new work and register it again, that should be fine - but on expiration day the original in its original form is public domain. I think people would pay for the newer version for as long as the author lived, though his authorship might convey less of a premium on revisions to expired versus new works - as it should to inspire him to get back to work.
Also we should be rid of anonymous copyright, automatic copyright, and free copyright. If you can't be bothered to put your name on it and upload it to the copyright office it ought not be considered protected in any way whatever. Keeping track of who owns what costs money - that's why you have to register your car and your real estate and pay the associated fees for recording and transfer, and copyright should be no different. The fees should cover the cost of storage, retrieval, transfer of title, maintenance and overhead not just of the material, but all of the various costs of all of the courts who have to handle this stuff - plus a tax to the general fund to cover enforcement if there's to be any. TANSTAAFL. No free lunch.
And on copyright expiration day the files should be moved over to the Library of Congress for public distribution. No exceptions. Because that's what we get for giving you a temporary monopoly - your contributions to our culture upon which to build our own creations as you built on the ones who went before you. Because that's the "progress of science and the useful arts" that the monopoly is supposed to promote.
A return to the 28-year copyrights of the Statute of Anne would be in many ways arbitrary, but not unreasonable.
It has been reported that 14 years is closer to optimal.
Maybe reasonable would be 7 years, or two.
And of course these speaches on copyright make a good primer on what to expect when the copyright law is percieved to be unfair.
I don't care if you won the Pulitzer for the photo. We're talking about 50 year old books. It's immoral to say that after 50 years the photographer that took the photo present on one page of a 300 page book, properly licensed at the time, is entitled to by his authorship of that one trivial photo prevent the collection of the library of the world's culture simply because of some subsequent legal interpretation of copyright law. It's absurd in a way only a lawyer can appreciate. If you're hanging your hopes on this, you're doomed because at least 99% of these rights are owned by faceless non-sympathetic resellers of rights.
Keep up your objections and - mark my words - the law will be changed to strip your rights in far more extensive ways than you envision. Copyright's purpose is to promote progress. Your objections are a perfect example of why copyright does not serve this purpose. Your every objection is an argument for the abolition of copyright.
Well, they'll probably abstract it into the current one-dimensional addressing scheme for memory. But these things aren't used just for memory - you can build logic with them. Instead of 400,000 x 400,000 = (1,600,000,000 or 1.6 billion) transistors, 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 x 10,000 = (10,000,000,000,000,000 or 10 quadrillion) transistors in one package. Some for memory, some for logic, some for special purposes. You know, skynet. It gives us another 24 years of Moore's Law - though it probably won't take that long. If this pans out it buys some elbow room to find the next stretch goal.
That should be almost enough processor power to play Crysis V on Windows 13 at a decent frame rate. By then my great grandson will be fragging me mercilessly.
The end of magnetomechanical media has been drawing nigh for quite a while. When this storage comes it will still be very expensive for quite a while for no better reason than they can get a lot for it. SATA3 drives are here, as is SAS 6G. Both are 6Gbits/second theoretically. Lightpeak supposedly only starts at 10 - less overhead. This is new technology that's potentially much faster than that and there's no good reason to pretend it's a spinning disk when it's not. When we get the performance up, it's time to move to some much faster interconnect like PCIe. Some SSD vendors are already doing that, so this will just be a bump upgrade to their existing lineup.
But the really exciting thing is accessing that third dimension.
Of course. I love that posts are persistent here on slashdot. It's an elegant solution to a lot of problems. I just don't think it's the only answer.
I like that things are done differently in other places too. Not everybody has to do everything the same way. Part of going to Groklaw is that you accept that PJ's moderation system is arbitrary and capricious. It has made for a good quality website, if not so full of hidden surprises of slashdot's "wild west" method, at least with less unpleasantness.
It's not 19 pages, but it's not 1000 either. You get a lot of book in 272 pages. And the book defines a language that can be used to compile itself (and hence, the book). You don't get that with Algol.
I see it.
Ok, maybe this dumb joke will play better in this thread than the first one I posted it in.
Why is noone asking to examine the C programming language, to adapt it to modern programming processes and methods? Why is noone speaking out to defend C as a useful language, to update the aged methods of Kernighan and Ritchie?
Oh, wait. Never mind. That was a stupid question.
Look, you're being ground up by the wheels of Industry, it's true. But you weren't pushed in there, you inserted yourself deliberately and with great effort. When you find your work being praised by Maureen O'Gara it's time to take a step back and do a little self-evaluation.
I don't approve of software patents, nor the prevention of progress through hardware patents. I'm pretty vocal about this here. But this is not progress. You're not inventing something new. You're only implementing patented hardware in software - and probably poorly since the hardware the software is running on doesn't actually have the features that make the mainframe a valuable platform, the software just lies to the applications about having the features. Presumably this is so mainframe customers can migrate off of expensive mainframes to virtual mainframes running on the emulator, rather than migrating off the hideous proprietary or complex non-portable systems like they should, and so getting the least favorable path: all the lockin of the apps without the RAS of the mainframe or the inherent portability of industry standard architectures. And you intend to profit from their movement from IBM's proprietary platform to your emulation of it and so remaining locked into those hideous applications, or there'd be no company.
So no, you've actually found a strange corner case in all of IP protection that I actually don't care about. Congratulations! I didn't think there was one. Enjoy your time with the Nazgul. Their attention can be quite... memorable.
Do you really think they're browsing about the Internet up at the Library of Congress looking to archive the unmoderated drivel that is a slashdot, digg, 4chan or fark thread? Really?
<sigh> some days I wonder how some of you ACs managed to get your screensaver turned off so you can post this crap.
As PJ over on Groklaw says, the usual Microsoft spokesflacks leapt out in front of this story to promote Hercules' position when ordinarily they wouldn't even know about a subject this obscure. It's likely this is an attempt to turn the community against one of its biggest benefactors. Don't fall for it.
In the actual suit we can all be sure the oversight will be corrected and IBM will only use the 169 patents (plus a few more) that weren't in the pledge.
So you're saying that to continue to grow Apple will need to release a phenomenally popular and profitable new product that's a platform for people to attach further hardware, software and media purchases to, and so grow their earnings. I wonder it they'll be able to come up with something clever like that.
We're actually getting pretty close to the limit with silicon. Soon they'll be compelled to use Z. Silicon crystals have a lattice structure with a spacing of 0.5430710 nm so at 45 nm we're already talking about features that are less than 100 atoms across.
Yeah, but you can't buy shares in Linux. LNUX is actually geeknet, corporate overlord of slashdot. Canonical is not a public company - yet. I don't care for Apple products much either, but I've got to give them some respect for executing well in the marketplace.
The whole point of stock and capitalization is that investors (shareholders) give up their cash with the expectation of a return on their investment - the expectation is that the company they invest in will grow. Hopefully that's more than the rate of inflation. Short term gains and losses are one thing, but ten years is not a short term. It's definitely long enough to call it a trend.
Didn't IBM used to be a hardware company?
The growth of a company, and the price of individual shares, tells you about whether the company is growing and whether it's a good investment for your retirement. Investment advisors say that because of dollar cost averaging you wouldn't necessarily drop a stock that didn't grow, or even shrank for a brief time. One would imagine that if you manage your portfolio at all you wouldn't remain invested in a stock that consistently shrank over the span of a decade. You only have so long before retirement to get your growth after all.
It's not a matter of if Apple will pass Microsoft now, but when. Google's also making a run at it, but they've got a lot further to go.