ITU-T standards are open standards per the traditionally applied definitions (which are not new). IMO we should not engage in revisionism, like the software patents people do, if we want to use an expression for it, call it free standards. At least it is different.
Sounds like FUD to me. Consider for how long JPEG and GIF were used, until some company tried to assert their patents on it, without being an original file format author. Then you can see that the possibility of a patent troll to serve a lawsuit on H.264 is definitively larger than zero.
The problem with Common Lisp is the spec is huge. Hard to implement it all. Also the interfaces with system libraries, say for doing a GUI application, are somewhat horrible. Then there is the syntax. The syntax is a huge barrier. Not just for people used to program in C. For people who are used to human languages as well. C at least resembles pseudocode somewhat more than Lisp even if it is not quite Pascal or BASIC.
Which is why in practice people like Python a lot. It mostly takes care of these problems.
Cobalt was bought by Sun which was bought by Oracle IIRC. Also Cobalt delved into X86 processors later in their design cycle. MIPS was not cheap enough.
AFAIK there are some Chinese CPUs which are MIPS compatible (Loongson) and Tilera's design is also MIPS like.
I guess they never could license it properly, or the licensees lack volume. Also MIPS R&D was usually done by SGI. Well SGI was never exactly interested neither in low power, nor in being cheap. I guess that matters.
That used to be true when transistors were expensive and memory was fast. The choice used to be between more CPU registers with less instructions (RISC) or less CPU registers and more instructions (CISC). Today transistors are cheap and memory is slow, so the more things you put on die (within reason) the better. It used to be that multiplication was considered too expensive to put in the ALU of a RISC processor, or barrel shifters, today this is simply not true. In fact even RISC processors have multiply-add instructions today (e.g. Power), more complex than what you see in even a CISC like x86.
Manufacturing tritium is easy. If you do DT fusion you get a lot of neutrons out which you can use to breed more tritium. The problem is the neutrons irradiate and weaken the materials used to actually built the reactor.
I suspect doing lasers and optics which can cycle rapidly enough would not be an insurmountable task. If you read about things like the history of the Gatling gun, Maxim gun, you would realize you can either use a fancy cooling system or have multiple duplicate units which alternately work in a series so one can cool down while the other is firing.
Cooling things to 20 K has been a lot easier ever since cryocoolers were invented.
HTC makes the best Windows Mobile phones (e.g. HD2). They made handsets with new hardware when few people would touch WinMo 6.5 with a ten foot pole. So of course Microsoft is interested in them remaining as a viable entity. Even if they sell Android handsets, anything that can take mindshare away from Apple is for them a good thing.
Actually the best way is to compete with yourself. Like a former Intel CEO used to say only the paranoid survive. Europe managed to gain preeminence in the world precisely because it had a set of conditions which enabled competition between different nations at several speeds. Nations with less competition eventually atrophy. Our present ban on nuclear technology development is especially worrisome to me in this perspective. Sure the Chinese had a highly evolved porcelain industry. Did any of the people with high caliber guns and blue water navies care?
There was gold in Europe, yet it was still profitable enough to invade the Americas to get it. Elements high up in the periodic table were built in supernovas. I doubt the energy requirements for making more from scratch, even if have advanced technology, are that cheap. For that matter, it could be that there is some unknown resource that we do not know how to explore yet that is interesting enough for them.
Depends. They could have really cheap interstellar travel, while having a low technology base in biotechnology or robotics. One example would be the Mongol invasions. The Mongols depended on horses a lot more than other people, they invaded 1/3 of the planetary surface building the largest empire in history, yet had a low technological base. Heck the Chinese had gunpowder and they did not. So you could imagine a civilization which exploits non-sentient interstellar traveling life, or scavenged technology from someone else.
Their ideological reason could also be similar to that of Hitler and Lebensraum. In that case they would not want slaves, just the total eradication of life different than their own.
Yes AFAIK it is a licensing issue. Ever noticed when you use Google Maps it says "Copyright" by someone which is not Google? These people also sell map data to the GPS handset manufacturers and would much prefer to keep their royalties, thank you. Nokia is like the one exception in that they bundle Ovi Maps with their cellphones by default. I would hope this eventually gets standard, rather than relying on a web connection for navigation.
That's a compiler, debugger, linker, and parts of the web browser. That is not even half the code. Where is the kernel, or drivers, or the GUI, or everything else. I also find it interesting that the license for everything but the linker is GPL/LGPL. Which means Apple did not begin the development, or probably even did most development.
The thing is HTML 5 is no Flash replacement. HTML 5's big feature is support for the video tag. Nice if you want Youtube. However if you want to program a game this is probably not your #1 requirement. Several things have been bandied around as Flash killers in the past including SVG with Javascript. However the fact remains that Flash still is commonly used.
Yes, he is pretty much being an idiot. There are no other good implementations of Flash yet (although there are some partial implementations such as Gnash). However anyone can implement royalty free and the spec is available for free as well. Hard to get more open than that. It used to be there was poor third-party support for PDF as well in the past, but now a lot of other implementations exist. I suspect the same thing will eventually happen with Flash or WebKit getting their own implementations of Flash.
Cocoa is an Objective-C framework. You couldn't mix C++ and Objective-C code in the early tools. Apple only released Objective-C++ years later. Not much later Apple ported Photoshop.
Hah. Like MacOS design was not convoluted either. Windows NT was a pretty decent base OS design. Windows 2000 added easy to configure hardware via PnP to it. Windows 7 is a perfectly reasonable OS.
If Windows lacks something is a centralized update system for all applications like a Linux distro. Which I suspect MS will eventually add, once they start working into application stores which are not restricted to their own hardware devices. Oh and a decent browser.
The Chinese are interested in going to the Moon. However they are following a Korolev/von Braun like development model (before the rush) where a space station is used as an intermediate step for manned lunar exploration. Of course they predict to do this in like 20 years. They are in it for the long term.
I bet my own money on Sun/Oracle doing so. We've just invested about 100.000 Euros into a software that requires OpenSolaris.
Why? I certainly hope you do not intend to use this platform long term. I can tell you one thing. If I was Larry Ellison I would axe OpenSolaris and keep Solaris. Knowing good old Larry he will probably just axe both.
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ITU-T standards are open standards per the traditionally applied definitions (which are not new). IMO we should not engage in revisionism, like the software patents people do, if we want to use an expression for it, call it free standards. At least it is different.
Sounds like FUD to me. Consider for how long JPEG and GIF were used, until some company tried to assert their patents on it, without being an original file format author. Then you can see that the possibility of a patent troll to serve a lawsuit on H.264 is definitively larger than zero.
Anything "might" be patented by someone else.
Actually Moore's law is kind of in danger at the moment. Try reading about EUV lithography and you will see what I mean.
The problem with Common Lisp is the spec is huge. Hard to implement it all. Also the interfaces with system libraries, say for doing a GUI application, are somewhat horrible. Then there is the syntax. The syntax is a huge barrier. Not just for people used to program in C. For people who are used to human languages as well. C at least resembles pseudocode somewhat more than Lisp even if it is not quite Pascal or BASIC.
Which is why in practice people like Python a lot. It mostly takes care of these problems.
Cobalt was bought by Sun which was bought by Oracle IIRC. Also Cobalt delved into X86 processors later in their design cycle. MIPS was not cheap enough.
AFAIK there are some Chinese CPUs which are MIPS compatible (Loongson) and Tilera's design is also MIPS like.
I guess they never could license it properly, or the licensees lack volume. Also MIPS R&D was usually done by SGI. Well SGI was never exactly interested neither in low power, nor in being cheap. I guess that matters.
That used to be true when transistors were expensive and memory was fast. The choice used to be between more CPU registers with less instructions (RISC) or less CPU registers and more instructions (CISC). Today transistors are cheap and memory is slow, so the more things you put on die (within reason) the better. It used to be that multiplication was considered too expensive to put in the ALU of a RISC processor, or barrel shifters, today this is simply not true. In fact even RISC processors have multiply-add instructions today (e.g. Power), more complex than what you see in even a CISC like x86.
How much die space do Thumb and Thumb-2 add? Precisely. Compact instruction encoding is important.
Is this floating point multiplication? ARM processors are known for their usually horrible FP support.
Manufacturing tritium is easy. If you do DT fusion you get a lot of neutrons out which you can use to breed more tritium. The problem is the neutrons irradiate and weaken the materials used to actually built the reactor.
I suspect doing lasers and optics which can cycle rapidly enough would not be an insurmountable task. If you read about things like the history of the Gatling gun, Maxim gun, you would realize you can either use a fancy cooling system or have multiple duplicate units which alternately work in a series so one can cool down while the other is firing.
Cooling things to 20 K has been a lot easier ever since cryocoolers were invented.
HTC makes the best Windows Mobile phones (e.g. HD2). They made handsets with new hardware when few people would touch WinMo 6.5 with a ten foot pole. So of course Microsoft is interested in them remaining as a viable entity. Even if they sell Android handsets, anything that can take mindshare away from Apple is for them a good thing.
Actually the best way is to compete with yourself. Like a former Intel CEO used to say only the paranoid survive. Europe managed to gain preeminence in the world precisely because it had a set of conditions which enabled competition between different nations at several speeds. Nations with less competition eventually atrophy. Our present ban on nuclear technology development is especially worrisome to me in this perspective. Sure the Chinese had a highly evolved porcelain industry. Did any of the people with high caliber guns and blue water navies care?
There was gold in Europe, yet it was still profitable enough to invade the Americas to get it. Elements high up in the periodic table were built in supernovas. I doubt the energy requirements for making more from scratch, even if have advanced technology, are that cheap. For that matter, it could be that there is some unknown resource that we do not know how to explore yet that is interesting enough for them.
Depends. They could have really cheap interstellar travel, while having a low technology base in biotechnology or robotics. One example would be the Mongol invasions. The Mongols depended on horses a lot more than other people, they invaded 1/3 of the planetary surface building the largest empire in history, yet had a low technological base. Heck the Chinese had gunpowder and they did not. So you could imagine a civilization which exploits non-sentient interstellar traveling life, or scavenged technology from someone else.
Their ideological reason could also be similar to that of Hitler and Lebensraum. In that case they would not want slaves, just the total eradication of life different than their own.
Yes AFAIK it is a licensing issue. Ever noticed when you use Google Maps it says "Copyright" by someone which is not Google? These people also sell map data to the GPS handset manufacturers and would much prefer to keep their royalties, thank you. Nokia is like the one exception in that they bundle Ovi Maps with their cellphones by default. I would hope this eventually gets standard, rather than relying on a web connection for navigation.
That's a compiler, debugger, linker, and parts of the web browser. That is not even half the code. Where is the kernel, or drivers, or the GUI, or everything else. I also find it interesting that the license for everything but the linker is GPL/LGPL. Which means Apple did not begin the development, or probably even did most development.
Flash supports other codecs than H.264. Apple seems to think H.264 is the one true codec to rule them all.
The thing is HTML 5 is no Flash replacement. HTML 5's big feature is support for the video tag. Nice if you want Youtube. However if you want to program a game this is probably not your #1 requirement. Several things have been bandied around as Flash killers in the past including SVG with Javascript. However the fact remains that Flash still is commonly used.
Yes, he is pretty much being an idiot. There are no other good implementations of Flash yet (although there are some partial implementations such as Gnash). However anyone can implement royalty free and the spec is available for free as well. Hard to get more open than that. It used to be there was poor third-party support for PDF as well in the past, but now a lot of other implementations exist. I suspect the same thing will eventually happen with Flash or WebKit getting their own implementations of Flash.
Cocoa is an Objective-C framework. You couldn't mix C++ and Objective-C code in the early tools. Apple only released Objective-C++ years later. Not much later Apple ported Photoshop.
Hah. Like MacOS design was not convoluted either. Windows NT was a pretty decent base OS design. Windows 2000 added easy to configure hardware via PnP to it. Windows 7 is a perfectly reasonable OS.
If Windows lacks something is a centralized update system for all applications like a Linux distro. Which I suspect MS will eventually add, once they start working into application stores which are not restricted to their own hardware devices. Oh and a decent browser.
This "dream" only works for the MPAA if the receiver has a quantum decrypter in the brain. Anything the human eye can see can be recorded as well.
The Chinese are interested in going to the Moon. However they are following a Korolev/von Braun like development model (before the rush) where a space station is used as an intermediate step for manned lunar exploration. Of course they predict to do this in like 20 years. They are in it for the long term.
Don't worry. Pretty soon Google Docs will do everything you need from an Office suite. Muhahaha. :-)
As for MySQL Oracle may try to kill it but a thousand clones will spring up.
Why? I certainly hope you do not intend to use this platform long term. I can tell you one thing. If I was Larry Ellison I would axe OpenSolaris and keep Solaris. Knowing good old Larry he will probably just axe both.