I agree that the spam laws are generally pretty worthless to anyone except the large ISPs (big surprise there - a law that only benefits large corporations).
That being the case, why is it so "neat" that these laws are being passed? To my eyes, it is an example of politicians currying favor with voters by appearing to be taking a strong stance on something that they :
know little to nothing about (outside of the prepped bs their staff hands them)
see in the press and thus conclude that it might be something the voters care about.
Okay, I'm a cynic, I know. But would someone please explain why these laws are truly "neat" and not just a waste of taxpayer time and money?
I've always been puzzled why Sony sued in the first place. All the software did was broaden the audience for Sony's games - you weren't bound to purchasing $100 just for the capability - if you'd already bought a computer, you were fine. Sony doesn't make money on the consoles. They make it on licensing the games.
Perhaps they were concerned that someone offering the software could add extensions to games, much as Microsoft added its own extensions to HTML, Java, whatever. The old "embrace and extend" model of assimilation. This, however, seems like much less of a concern when there are millions and millions of players on the market before the software was released. Of course, Netscape had millions of browsers out when Microsoft started too.
(1) Library acquisitions are and must be governed by local community standards.
(2) There are no local community standards on the internet.
(3) Therefore, if libraries are going to make use of the internet, they will have to find a way to impose local standards on it, EVEN if that means much desirable content is lost.
Premise 1 is not quite accurate. Library acquisitions are governed by library staff. Public library staff may or may not follow some sort of government guidelines. While the guidelines may qualify as some sort of prior restraint, "community standards" have always been the standard for determining obscenity, which is the one of three forms of speech not protected by the first amendment of the US Constitution. The other two are slander/libel, and inciting criminal acts or major disturbances (e.g., shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater).
As a semi-public environment (like a restaurant or a store), a library is subject to more potential restrictions than a private venue. That doesn't change the fact that the only thing a government might legally restrict at all is one of the three unprotected forms of speech. I.e., it is not legal to block playboy.com, or even hustlermag.com.
Premise 2 is not strictly true either, unless you consider the Internet to be one single location. Lots of mailing lists and news groups have "community standards" as to what is permissible speech and what is not (and as these are not government-imposed forms of restraint, they aren't covered by the First Amendment).
Even if Premises 1 and 2 were correct, Premise 3 does not strictly follow. If you're on the Internet, you are at least participating in a different community (even if you don't want to allow that you are actually in a different community in the locational sense). The library applies the correct local standards, that of the Internet, and so filtering is no longer appropriate.
Of course, in one sense you're right, in that people (or at least, politicians) will swallow Premise 3 as stated every time "to protect the children" (or at least appear to voters that they are). This reminds me of Eric Raymond's observation on the failure of democracy, where he observes that Pre-WWII Germany overwhelmingly elected Hitler, knowing full well what kind of regime he was planning.
This is why I'm an anarchist, too (at least, when I'm optimistic about human nature) - government is fundamentally broken.
Sometimes it seems to me that we leap to conclusions that large corporations are necessarily evil.
They're out for their own interests. For some, that's evil, but that's what most people do, so why should corporations do any better? In the case of content businesses (like movies and music) they have a clear existing interest: their present revenue stream. You'd fight to keep your job if you were unsure there was anything else and your present job paid well - that's exactly what these corporations are doing.
Yeah, large corporations (and large people, large governments, etc.) sometimes squash the little guy. This is called capitalism (or, if you prefer, Darwinian selection). It can lead to abuses. Name a system that can't.
Now before we get into a political flamewar, let me point out a few things about the VAIO Music Clip and its accompanying service:
As noted, pricing for CDs in Japan is vastly different. You can bet Sony Music in the US is not going to be pricing songs at $3 per. Sold songs in the US presently seem to be $1 per, and many songs are being released for free as promotion. Sony Music execs know this, and won't be stupid enough not to at least remain competitive.
ATRAC3 is what is used in the Music Clip. It is not the same as ATRAC, which is used in a minidisc player and in SDDS movie theater sound. ATRAC3 is a derivative of ATRAC. There was an ATRAC2, but it never really saw the light of day. And you can believe that ATRAC3 is covered extensively by patents. Sony makes lots of money from CD patent royalties. Sony in Tokyo is particularly enthusiastic about being able to create new formats. However, Sony is not ignorant of open source - the PlayStation 2 development platform runs Linux. And they recognize the value of freely available playback et al in getting a format adopted.
Japan will almost certainly go for the player and the service in a fairly big way. In Japan, if its new, it is popular. If it is Sony, it is popular. Put the two together, and it is hard to fail. In Japan. Sony Corporation of America absolutely understands that the US market is different. They know a service like the Japan one would flop in the US. They won't market such a beast here.
The music industry knows they looked bad with the SDMI announcement coming out just after MP3 really hit the hype wave. It wasn't as reactionary as it looked, though. The music industry has been worrying about all things digital for years. Had the SDMI announcement come out a year earlier, we might have been saying "Cool! The industry is getting behind digital music!" How many of us have DVD players? Even if we don't like regional encoding?
It may look depressing at times. But if you think Sony's attitudes seem benighted now, well, two years ago, it was much worse. SDMI may not be what we want, but it took Sony two years to get to that point. They're moving in the right direction.
ObDisclaimer: I used to work for Sony. I personally know some of the decision-makers involved in these things - I saw them wrestle with the many issues involved, and in some cases, helped them understand them. But I don't work for Sony any more and don't have any stock or any financial interest in Sony doing well going forward.
XFree, being an implementation of an X server, has pretty much nothing to do with OpenGL. There are two limited ways they deal with each other:
They both draw stuff to the framebuffer, and...
GL can cooperate with an X server by using the GLX extension to X. GLX basically moderates contention for the graphics hardware between X and GL.
Mesa is an implementation of the OpenGL API. So is SGI's OpenGL® Sample Implementation. In fact, the reason SGI first started calling it "Open" (instead of simply "GL" for "Graphics Library") was because they cleaned up and published the API, then gave people permission to implement it.
As has been posted elsewhere on this thread, SGI is making vague noises about OpenGL and Mesa merging. This would be a wonderful example of how open source licenses actively discourage forking (as discussed in the context of the GPL in Linuxcare back in November).
If you want to know more about the hoary guts of OpenGL, and not just the API, I'd suggest looking up some of Akeley's articles on the hardware from prior SIGGRAPH proceedings.
Both Inventor and Performer are toolkits developed by SGI to run on top of OpenGL and simplify application development. Inventor is targeted more at interactive applications, like modelers (I wrote one in Inventor before it was released in less than five days, having never seen the library before - see Paul Strauss's and Rikk Carey's SIGGRAPH paper). Performer is targeted more at walkthroughs, flight simulators, and the like.
For years, SGI has treated GL and then OpenGL as one of the crown jewels. Even the API exposed a lot of their hardware architecture. The source of OpenGL was what made those amazing framebuffers go. Now, to see Kurt Akeley going on about open source and releasing source to Open GL....
As far as I'm concerned, this is definitive proof that SGI has become as much an open source company as Red Hat or VA Linux.
Distributing a GPLd application that depends on a GPL-incompatible software is illegal.
What are you talking about? If that was the case, then GPL'd software would only be legal on a GPL'd operating system. Last I checked, most GPL'd software ran on various Unices that were quite far from being GPL'd - Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, etc. etc.
Here's the relevant part of the GPL:
If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works.
This seems pretty clear-cut. Separate components don't have to be GPL'd. I.e., the source can link with another library that isn't GPL'd. Like, oh, Solaris libc.
What you might be thinking of is the next sentence in the GPL:
But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
But this is about derivative work, not separate components. I.e., if I make modifications to GPL'd software, the mods are GPL'd. But if I link the same software with a proprietary lib, that same GPL'd software is still fine, and no law has been broken. Even if I modify the GPL'd software to enable the linking to work correctly, it is still legal - the modifications are covered by the GPL, even if the library is not.
R.I.P.'s article (and yes, I read it all) strikes me as less of an article about the future of console gaming than a rant about what he thinks is wrong with the game industry today. There's an inferred suggestion of where he'd like the industry to go, but nothing about where it actually will go.
Yes, publishers hold a lot of power, and seek to keep that power by minimizing the role of the developer (just like music until about forty years ago, when the Beatles hit, and the standard contract gave everything to the label). Yes, a lot of publishers release a "new" game by using the same engine and new graphics (but criticizing this strikes me as a bit like complaining that not every movie developed a new camera or lens or special effect during production). And yes, the industry has been dominated by the "adolescent male" segment (though, in PC games particularly, that is starting to change - I don't think 16yo boys are playing all those copies of "Trophy Bass Hunter").
But none of that says anything about the future of console gaming!
So, let me put my money where my mouth is.
During the next year or two, clearly, the landmark event will be the introduction of the PlayStation 2 (and, having been privileged enough to see this beast in action in person, I can safely say, it is a landmark). How is that going to change gaming?
First off, there will be a predictable slew of sequels and stuff that are only "better" because they have better graphics. No points for that prediction - that one's easy.
The market for consumer electronics is going to take a hit. A big one. The PS2 will play just about anything in a physical CD form factor - DVDs, CDs, games, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if it played MP3-only CDs too. How is this going to bonk CE sales? The PS2 will be cheaper than any remotely comparable device. Maybe not at launch, but before too long it will, because SCE doesn't make money on the box - they make money on the games. Phillips, even Sony itself, will have a tough time selling DVD players at $150 when there's a PS2 that does more at $100.
Kutaragi himself has said he sees the PS2 as the gateway into the home. That means SCE is definitely planning on encouraging development of content outside the adolescent male demographic (and they have said as much, referring to interactive DVDs). Grandma will get her "Sim Country Garden" before too long, and it will be photorealistic.
The PS2 development platform is a Linux box (i.e., comparatively inexpensive). While at first, SCE is only releasing them to established game developers, that won't last forever. When the development platform is more available, and with widespread digital video editing, etc., you can better believe we'll start seeing indie content, and probably porn, too.
Just my quick thoughts about where the future is really going, and not just complaints about what's wrong today.
I'm not sure if these comments will help as much as we might like. Federal bureaus establish guidelines as a practical way to put Federal laws into effect. The court would only pay attention to those rules if they had been in place long enough to constitute "common practice." And even then, the court could rule either that the law was bogus, or that the rules were.
Bureacratic guidelines are not law.
Since the Copyright Office hasn't even established the guidelines, they should not affect the judge's ruling. The judge might pay attention to strong public sentiment, but I believe the judge would be more likely to feel that, if the public wants the law changed (and the judge thinks the existing law is fine), then the public should vote for new representation.
The only way the comments would help is as evidence the EFF could use in court that DeCSS's intent is not piracy, but playback of legitimate content.
Having been in a meeting with some of Sony Pictures corporate types just yesterday, I can tell you they haven't appeared to have read ESR's blurb on the positions of the open source community.
The movie industry is rightfully worried - they make money off of home video, and don't want to see it disappear. They saw all the trouble the record industry had (and is having) with the whole MP3 debacle. They don't want a repeat, and they see DeCSS as something akin to a CD ripper. They don't see DVD on a hard disk as harmless - even if it is prohibitive to download several gigs today, they know it won't be in a few years. And they don't want all their movies out in the clear when that happens.
Thing is, if what's-their-name had just encrypted their key in the first place, this crack never would have appeared. Kind of like NASA mixing up English and metric.
Like some other readers, I found this interview to be lacking in meaningful content.
However, let's keep in mind what we're seeing here. Cowpland is the head of a commercial venture of some size. Most likely, his answers were checked by both his legal department and his corporate communications department. Anything truly substantial about strategic directions will be filtered out by those groups, and saved for venues where the companies can truly control what is said and how it is presented. Typically, this means a press release or a major keynote at a conference (remember, Apple doesn't announce new initiatives in interviews, but at Macworld keynotes).
The real content here is between the lines. Cowpland shows a sensitivity both to the needs of the open source community and to his responsibility to his company and his investors. Many companies want to make money in open source (and after the Red Hat IPO, you can bet that number increased dramatically), but Corel is evidently thinking logically and rationally about how to make money without damaging the energy and vitality of the community.
Sure, they may have bungled a few things, but they're learning. If more companies think about open source as well as Corel appears to have, we'll have a strong, revitalized industry on our hands.
Then we really will be able to tackle corporate and govenrmental behemoths.
I'd heard some info about what Transmeta's chips were doing ahead of time (under non-disclosure, of course), but never had enough information to figure out what they were doing that was all that different from microcode, which of course has been around for years and years.
Props to Ars for such a clear write-up.
And props to Transmeta for rethinking the problem.
No, the manufacturers are making money on the bounties the telcos give them. Nokia gets good bounties because they're the leading manufacturer now, and people know the name and like the goofy colors.
So the manufacturers are not getting money for their ideas, for their patents. They're getting money for enabling someone else's service.
Gemstar has been doing this kind of crap for years. They get the bulk of their revenue from patent licenses. Diva and other video on demand companies (like Intertainer) have been trying to dance around Gemstar by using circular, pie-shaped menus instead of grids (Gemstar's patents cover pretty much anything with time on one axis and channels on another).
Consumer electronics companies (like the one that I work for, at least for the next few days) have been trying to design around Gemstar for years as well, and so far have not been successful. Believe me, with how much Gemstar charges and how thin the margins are on VCRs, this means big money. CE manufacturers have spent lots of time and resources on this - even Diva and Intertainer and such, I think, are just on the hairy edge of Gemstar's domain.
Of course, Gemstar's patents are ridiculously broad, and no sane patent system would consider their patents to be something that "a competent practitioner would not find obvious". So what you have here is the classic legal situation of "How much will it cost to make this problem go away?" Will it cost more to pay the lawyers or to pay off the settlement, license fees, what have you.
Bleah.
"He tells me some worlds 'as gots rats as large as folks!" - Nell
Device makers are already getting screwed - margins on devices are ultra-thin, and with wireless phones, often negative. Any way you slice it though, it is coming out of the consumer's hide.
JonKatz, you post reactionary stuff like this on/. and you wonder why all these/.ers are flaming you all the time?
But seriously, and on topic, now. The gender skew of discussion sites has, I think, little to do with it being online and everything to do with how society in general treats women and men in discussion settings. Of course, I have the greatest experience with American society, but from what I've seen (e.g., Japanese, French, Egyptian, Italian), this is not a particularly American phenomenon. In a mixed gender crowd, men typically dominate the conversation. To pursue a stereotype we all know and love/hate, women are raised to listen and men are raised to take initiative.
As I recall, there've been studies to this effect, showing that, despite their assertions to the contrary, teachers called on boys in class more than girls. Girls are socialized around relationships and nurturing, while boys are socialized around competition. I'm trying to cope with this raising my own daughter, so that she can grow up to be strong and secure, but everything around me fights this.
(Before we get into some sort of nature/nurture debate, let's just nip that in the bud and say "it's probably a little of both, and arguing it is a waste.")
In short, Mr. Katz, all you've done is recognize that men, as a category, are the same assholes online as they are off. Sit in a meeting (ugh) and you'll see that - the men interrupt each other constantly, while the women stand by and listen. Generalizations, all of this, to be sure, but so's Katz's spiel.
How's that (off-color) joke go? Oh yeah....
Q: What's PMS?
A: A time once a month where women act the way men do all the time.
Yes, it is elegant to use the check to raise money for charity, and also showy.
What I can't recall is why this guy did it in the first place. Did he just want to make Microsoft look stupid? Microsoft seems to do that themselves often enough (and it seems dubious to "sabotage" Microsoft by fixing their stuff - better simply to point out the problems).
Was he a user of passport.com that just wanted things fixed ASAP? As a reader of/., I'd be somewhat surprised if he was using hotmail - everything I have heard about it is that it sucks.
Of course, that's never stopped people from using Microsoft software before.:-)
I'm surprised no one seems to really be talking about university positions. From what I've seen, most universities are rather in favor of open source (to a point - they also recognize the value of patent licensing). You could go for a staff position, or a research position, or (if you are so qualified) some kind of faculty position.
Staff: Universities often have need for support for economical solutions (i.e., free) to interesting problems. One staff member I knew at Brown had developing an open source project as a major part of his job description - he developed Xmx - the X multiplexer. It snagged the X traffic from one workstation and rebroadcast it to a gazillon others (used in a classroom setting). I myself worked on educational software and research software, both of which were released open source.
Research Staff: Work on research problems is by necessity work on fairly interesting problems:-) Remember what the "B" stands for in BSD? Or the original domain for gnu (prep.ai.mit.edu)? You can find research labs around the world working on pretty much anything you're interested in.
Faculty: While it helps to have a Ph. D. to get a position as a professor, a position as a lecturer requires less in the way of teching credentials. You even have a cadre of slaves, er, students, to work on your open source project.
I realize these won't be right for everyone, but they are alternatives, especially for people that aren't in Silicon Valley. Check out your nearby colleges and universities and see what's in the offering.
True, the release doesn't explicitly say "open source", and with the hype on those two little words, you'd expect them to say it if it applies.
I see two possibilities:
The three companies plan to open source it, but can't agree on a license.
SGI doesn't want to open source one of the few real "assets" it has left, i.e., the OpenGL implementation.
If we're lucky, their lawyers are just dicking around with which license to use. VA Linux would probably want GPL or LPGL, while SGI and NVidia would want something more restrictive.
However, I'm more apt to believe the latter - SGI doesn't want to open source OpenGL until it absolutely has to. Once OpenGL is source-available, SGI has very little IP left of any value. At least, that's how the corporate lawyers will think.
This may seem like a Bad Thing®. However, functionally, I don't think it will matter as much as we might think. The runtime will have to be free (albeit not open), and the APIs are essentially free, as they're widely published and SGI wants you to write to their code. With dynamic linking, you're free to choose either this (closed) OpenGL (cue rimshot) or Mesa. You'll use whichever one is better. And that will drive the other to improve. "Free Market, Baby! Yeaahhh!"
I suspect that eventually, it will end up being open source, if only because demand will be so great.
While the rates quoted are quite impressive, what I find more significant is the all-optical nature of this router. A router is not that far from a general-purpose computer. So what could this mean for an all-optical computer?
Jack it directly into the phone trunk, and surf the datastream. While using the same computer to run the fastest single SETI-at-home on the planet.
If Lucent can produce these things in serious volume, I predict we'll start seeing all-optical supercomputers living on terabit LANs with data warehouses nearby.
...and non-projection widescreens as well. Sony sells a direct-view (i.e., CRT), 32-inch, wide-screen, DTV-ready monitor. It's got the Wega flat CRT thing, and looks just stunning. A line-doubler and whatnot lets you zoom in on your widescreen DVDs and get something that looks quite nice. And of course, some over-the-air broadcasters are broadcasting in HD now.
Another alternative is Sony's 24" two-page monitor. It's also got the Wega flat CRT thing, and would make Quake look really nice, too.:-) While I don't know about Linux drivers, there is a PCI DTV tuner card.
In the interest of full disclosure, I work for Sony. However, I work at the corporate level - my paycheck has nothing to do with sales of TVs of any sort. And of course I'm speaking for myself, not my employers.
I think using XML makes a fair amount of sense. It can be relatively human-readable, even in raw character form (a trait shared with HTML that focuses more on semantic mark-up and less on graphical design). And perhaps the best part about it is that you don't have to write a new parser, unless you really really want to. Lots of them exist already in a wide variety of languages. All you have to do is agree on a DTD.
Furthermore, it has the potential to support a variety of useful tools, such as the following:
automatic construction of build instructions,
informative directions on how to fix your system if you don't have everything you need (or even an ability to automatically download what is needed), and
automatic correction for newer package versions.
As there are compiled versions of XML tools out there, and XML is sufficiently high-level that programs that manipulate XML are readily written in commonly compiled languages, the XML tools stand a good chance of being faster and more efficient than the present interpreted tools. And if you don't want to build the XML tools, there are script-based XML tools as well.
In the past, SGI has treated GL and products based on it like the Crown Jewels. The fact that, not only do they talk the talk, but they walk the walk in supporting Linux for such strategic products speaks volumes about SGI's strategy and its intent to follow through on that strategy.
I try to keep an open mind about the Evil Empire, but they just keep letting me down.
When the rumors first circulated that the Seattle Borg had been running propaganda under someone else's banner, I said to myself, "Self, this would not surprise me one little bit if it were true, but remember, it's just a rumor."
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the spam laws are generally pretty worthless to anyone except the large ISPs (big surprise there - a law that only benefits large corporations).
That being the case, why is it so "neat" that these laws are being passed? To my eyes, it is an example of politicians currying favor with voters by appearing to be taking a strong stance on something that they :
Okay, I'm a cynic, I know. But would someone please explain why these laws are truly "neat" and not just a waste of taxpayer time and money?
I've always been puzzled why Sony sued in the first place. All the software did was broaden the audience for Sony's games - you weren't bound to purchasing $100 just for the capability - if you'd already bought a computer, you were fine. Sony doesn't make money on the consoles. They make it on licensing the games.
Perhaps they were concerned that someone offering the software could add extensions to games, much as Microsoft added its own extensions to HTML, Java, whatever. The old "embrace and extend" model of assimilation. This, however, seems like much less of a concern when there are millions and millions of players on the market before the software was released. Of course, Netscape had millions of browsers out when Microsoft started too.
Of course, we know how they did that....
Premise 1 is not quite accurate. Library acquisitions are governed by library staff. Public library staff may or may not follow some sort of government guidelines. While the guidelines may qualify as some sort of prior restraint, "community standards" have always been the standard for determining obscenity, which is the one of three forms of speech not protected by the first amendment of the US Constitution. The other two are slander/libel, and inciting criminal acts or major disturbances (e.g., shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater).
As a semi-public environment (like a restaurant or a store), a library is subject to more potential restrictions than a private venue. That doesn't change the fact that the only thing a government might legally restrict at all is one of the three unprotected forms of speech. I.e., it is not legal to block playboy.com, or even hustlermag.com.
Premise 2 is not strictly true either, unless you consider the Internet to be one single location. Lots of mailing lists and news groups have "community standards" as to what is permissible speech and what is not (and as these are not government-imposed forms of restraint, they aren't covered by the First Amendment).
Even if Premises 1 and 2 were correct, Premise 3 does not strictly follow. If you're on the Internet, you are at least participating in a different community (even if you don't want to allow that you are actually in a different community in the locational sense). The library applies the correct local standards, that of the Internet, and so filtering is no longer appropriate.
Of course, in one sense you're right, in that people (or at least, politicians) will swallow Premise 3 as stated every time "to protect the children" (or at least appear to voters that they are). This reminds me of Eric Raymond's observation on the failure of democracy, where he observes that Pre-WWII Germany overwhelmingly elected Hitler, knowing full well what kind of regime he was planning.
This is why I'm an anarchist, too (at least, when I'm optimistic about human nature) - government is fundamentally broken.
Sometimes it seems to me that we leap to conclusions that large corporations are necessarily evil.
They're out for their own interests. For some, that's evil, but that's what most people do, so why should corporations do any better? In the case of content businesses (like movies and music) they have a clear existing interest: their present revenue stream. You'd fight to keep your job if you were unsure there was anything else and your present job paid well - that's exactly what these corporations are doing.
Yeah, large corporations (and large people, large governments, etc.) sometimes squash the little guy. This is called capitalism (or, if you prefer, Darwinian selection). It can lead to abuses. Name a system that can't.
Now before we get into a political flamewar, let me point out a few things about the VAIO Music Clip and its accompanying service:
The music industry knows they looked bad with the SDMI announcement coming out just after MP3 really hit the hype wave. It wasn't as reactionary as it looked, though. The music industry has been worrying about all things digital for years. Had the SDMI announcement come out a year earlier, we might have been saying "Cool! The industry is getting behind digital music!" How many of us have DVD players? Even if we don't like regional encoding?
It may look depressing at times. But if you think Sony's attitudes seem benighted now, well, two years ago, it was much worse. SDMI may not be what we want, but it took Sony two years to get to that point. They're moving in the right direction.
ObDisclaimer: I used to work for Sony. I personally know some of the decision-makers involved in these things - I saw them wrestle with the many issues involved, and in some cases, helped them understand them. But I don't work for Sony any more and don't have any stock or any financial interest in Sony doing well going forward.
XFree, being an implementation of an X server, has pretty much nothing to do with OpenGL. There are two limited ways they deal with each other:
Mesa is an implementation of the OpenGL API. So is SGI's OpenGL® Sample Implementation. In fact, the reason SGI first started calling it "Open" (instead of simply "GL" for "Graphics Library") was because they cleaned up and published the API, then gave people permission to implement it.
As has been posted elsewhere on this thread, SGI is making vague noises about OpenGL and Mesa merging. This would be a wonderful example of how open source licenses actively discourage forking (as discussed in the context of the GPL in Linuxcare back in November).
If you want to know more about the hoary guts of OpenGL, and not just the API, I'd suggest looking up some of Akeley's articles on the hardware from prior SIGGRAPH proceedings.
Both Inventor and Performer are toolkits developed by SGI to run on top of OpenGL and simplify application development. Inventor is targeted more at interactive applications, like modelers (I wrote one in Inventor before it was released in less than five days, having never seen the library before - see Paul Strauss's and Rikk Carey's SIGGRAPH paper). Performer is targeted more at walkthroughs, flight simulators, and the like.
I'm amazed.
That's all there is to it.
For years, SGI has treated GL and then OpenGL as one of the crown jewels. Even the API exposed a lot of their hardware architecture. The source of OpenGL was what made those amazing framebuffers go. Now, to see Kurt Akeley going on about open source and releasing source to Open GL....
As far as I'm concerned, this is definitive proof that SGI has become as much an open source company as Red Hat or VA Linux.
What are you talking about? If that was the case, then GPL'd software would only be legal on a GPL'd operating system. Last I checked, most GPL'd software ran on various Unices that were quite far from being GPL'd - Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, etc. etc.
Here's the relevant part of the GPL:
This seems pretty clear-cut. Separate components don't have to be GPL'd. I.e., the source can link with another library that isn't GPL'd. Like, oh, Solaris libc.
What you might be thinking of is the next sentence in the GPL:
But this is about derivative work, not separate components. I.e., if I make modifications to GPL'd software, the mods are GPL'd. But if I link the same software with a proprietary lib, that same GPL'd software is still fine, and no law has been broken. Even if I modify the GPL'd software to enable the linking to work correctly, it is still legal - the modifications are covered by the GPL, even if the library is not.
R.I.P.'s article (and yes, I read it all) strikes me as less of an article about the future of console gaming than a rant about what he thinks is wrong with the game industry today. There's an inferred suggestion of where he'd like the industry to go, but nothing about where it actually will go.
Yes, publishers hold a lot of power, and seek to keep that power by minimizing the role of the developer (just like music until about forty years ago, when the Beatles hit, and the standard contract gave everything to the label). Yes, a lot of publishers release a "new" game by using the same engine and new graphics (but criticizing this strikes me as a bit like complaining that not every movie developed a new camera or lens or special effect during production). And yes, the industry has been dominated by the "adolescent male" segment (though, in PC games particularly, that is starting to change - I don't think 16yo boys are playing all those copies of "Trophy Bass Hunter").
But none of that says anything about the future of console gaming!
So, let me put my money where my mouth is.
During the next year or two, clearly, the landmark event will be the introduction of the PlayStation 2 (and, having been privileged enough to see this beast in action in person, I can safely say, it is a landmark). How is that going to change gaming?
Just my quick thoughts about where the future is really going, and not just complaints about what's wrong today.
I'm not sure if these comments will help as much as we might like. Federal bureaus establish guidelines as a practical way to put Federal laws into effect. The court would only pay attention to those rules if they had been in place long enough to constitute "common practice." And even then, the court could rule either that the law was bogus, or that the rules were.
Bureacratic guidelines are not law.
Since the Copyright Office hasn't even established the guidelines, they should not affect the judge's ruling. The judge might pay attention to strong public sentiment, but I believe the judge would be more likely to feel that, if the public wants the law changed (and the judge thinks the existing law is fine), then the public should vote for new representation.
The only way the comments would help is as evidence the EFF could use in court that DeCSS's intent is not piracy, but playback of legitimate content.
Having been in a meeting with some of Sony Pictures corporate types just yesterday, I can tell you they haven't appeared to have read ESR's blurb on the positions of the open source community.
The movie industry is rightfully worried - they make money off of home video, and don't want to see it disappear. They saw all the trouble the record industry had (and is having) with the whole MP3 debacle. They don't want a repeat, and they see DeCSS as something akin to a CD ripper. They don't see DVD on a hard disk as harmless - even if it is prohibitive to download several gigs today, they know it won't be in a few years. And they don't want all their movies out in the clear when that happens.
Thing is, if what's-their-name had just encrypted their key in the first place, this crack never would have appeared. Kind of like NASA mixing up English and metric.
Like some other readers, I found this interview to be lacking in meaningful content.
However, let's keep in mind what we're seeing here. Cowpland is the head of a commercial venture of some size. Most likely, his answers were checked by both his legal department and his corporate communications department. Anything truly substantial about strategic directions will be filtered out by those groups, and saved for venues where the companies can truly control what is said and how it is presented. Typically, this means a press release or a major keynote at a conference (remember, Apple doesn't announce new initiatives in interviews, but at Macworld keynotes).
The real content here is between the lines. Cowpland shows a sensitivity both to the needs of the open source community and to his responsibility to his company and his investors. Many companies want to make money in open source (and after the Red Hat IPO, you can bet that number increased dramatically), but Corel is evidently thinking logically and rationally about how to make money without damaging the energy and vitality of the community.
Sure, they may have bungled a few things, but they're learning. If more companies think about open source as well as Corel appears to have, we'll have a strong, revitalized industry on our hands.
Then we really will be able to tackle corporate and govenrmental behemoths.
I'd heard some info about what Transmeta's chips were doing ahead of time (under non-disclosure, of course), but never had enough information to figure out what they were doing that was all that different from microcode, which of course has been around for years and years.
Props to Ars for such a clear write-up.
And props to Transmeta for rethinking the problem.
No, the manufacturers are making money on the bounties the telcos give them. Nokia gets good bounties because they're the leading manufacturer now, and people know the name and like the goofy colors.
So the manufacturers are not getting money for their ideas, for their patents. They're getting money for enabling someone else's service.
Which is the way it should be.
Gemstar has been doing this kind of crap for years. They get the bulk of their revenue from patent licenses. Diva and other video on demand companies (like Intertainer) have been trying to dance around Gemstar by using circular, pie-shaped menus instead of grids (Gemstar's patents cover pretty much anything with time on one axis and channels on another).
Consumer electronics companies (like the one that I work for, at least for the next few days) have been trying to design around Gemstar for years as well, and so far have not been successful. Believe me, with how much Gemstar charges and how thin the margins are on VCRs, this means big money. CE manufacturers have spent lots of time and resources on this - even Diva and Intertainer and such, I think, are just on the hairy edge of Gemstar's domain.
Of course, Gemstar's patents are ridiculously broad, and no sane patent system would consider their patents to be something that "a competent practitioner would not find obvious". So what you have here is the classic legal situation of "How much will it cost to make this problem go away?" Will it cost more to pay the lawyers or to pay off the settlement, license fees, what have you.
Bleah.
"He tells me some worlds 'as gots rats as large as folks!" - Nell
"Yeah, they're called lawyers!" - Harry Fairfax.
Device makers are already getting screwed - margins on devices are ultra-thin, and with wireless phones, often negative. Any way you slice it though, it is coming out of the consumer's hide.
I say, pay for service, not ideas.
Oh no, no, no, no, no!
spyglass.exe is Microsoft software.
It's the part of Windows that makes sure Spyglass's browser runs poorly.
I'm sure there's a netscape.exe, corel.exe, adobe.exe, and many others!
Oh, and :-) for the humor-impaired.
JonKatz, you post reactionary stuff like this on /. and you wonder why all these /.ers are flaming you all the time?
But seriously, and on topic, now. The gender skew of discussion sites has, I think, little to do with it being online and everything to do with how society in general treats women and men in discussion settings. Of course, I have the greatest experience with American society, but from what I've seen (e.g., Japanese, French, Egyptian, Italian), this is not a particularly American phenomenon. In a mixed gender crowd, men typically dominate the conversation. To pursue a stereotype we all know and love/hate, women are raised to listen and men are raised to take initiative.
As I recall, there've been studies to this effect, showing that, despite their assertions to the contrary, teachers called on boys in class more than girls. Girls are socialized around relationships and nurturing, while boys are socialized around competition. I'm trying to cope with this raising my own daughter, so that she can grow up to be strong and secure, but everything around me fights this.
(Before we get into some sort of nature/nurture debate, let's just nip that in the bud and say "it's probably a little of both, and arguing it is a waste.")
In short, Mr. Katz, all you've done is recognize that men, as a category, are the same assholes online as they are off. Sit in a meeting (ugh) and you'll see that - the men interrupt each other constantly, while the women stand by and listen. Generalizations, all of this, to be sure, but so's Katz's spiel.
How's that (off-color) joke go? Oh yeah....
Q: What's PMS?
A: A time once a month where women act the way men do all the time.
Yes, it is elegant to use the check to raise money for charity, and also showy.
What I can't recall is why this guy did it in the first place. Did he just want to make Microsoft look stupid? Microsoft seems to do that themselves often enough (and it seems dubious to "sabotage" Microsoft by fixing their stuff - better simply to point out the problems).
Was he a user of passport.com that just wanted things fixed ASAP? As a reader of /., I'd be somewhat surprised if he was using hotmail - everything I have heard about it is that it sucks.
Of course, that's never stopped people from using Microsoft software before. :-)
I'm surprised no one seems to really be talking about university positions. From what I've seen, most universities are rather in favor of open source (to a point - they also recognize the value of patent licensing). You could go for a staff position, or a research position, or (if you are so qualified) some kind of faculty position.
I realize these won't be right for everyone, but they are alternatives, especially for people that aren't in Silicon Valley. Check out your nearby colleges and universities and see what's in the offering.
True, the release doesn't explicitly say "open source", and with the hype on those two little words, you'd expect them to say it if it applies.
I see two possibilities:
If we're lucky, their lawyers are just dicking around with which license to use. VA Linux would probably want GPL or LPGL, while SGI and NVidia would want something more restrictive.
However, I'm more apt to believe the latter - SGI doesn't want to open source OpenGL until it absolutely has to. Once OpenGL is source-available, SGI has very little IP left of any value. At least, that's how the corporate lawyers will think.
This may seem like a Bad Thing®. However, functionally, I don't think it will matter as much as we might think. The runtime will have to be free (albeit not open), and the APIs are essentially free, as they're widely published and SGI wants you to write to their code. With dynamic linking, you're free to choose either this (closed) OpenGL (cue rimshot) or Mesa. You'll use whichever one is better. And that will drive the other to improve. "Free Market, Baby! Yeaahhh!"
I suspect that eventually, it will end up being open source, if only because demand will be so great.
While the rates quoted are quite impressive, what I find more significant is the all-optical nature of this router. A router is not that far from a general-purpose computer. So what could this mean for an all-optical computer?
Jack it directly into the phone trunk, and surf the datastream. While using the same computer to run the fastest single SETI-at-home on the planet.
If Lucent can produce these things in serious volume, I predict we'll start seeing all-optical supercomputers living on terabit LANs with data warehouses nearby.
Another alternative is Sony's 24" two-page monitor. It's also got the Wega flat CRT thing, and would make Quake look really nice, too. :-) While I don't know about Linux drivers, there is a PCI DTV tuner card.
In the interest of full disclosure, I work for Sony. However, I work at the corporate level - my paycheck has nothing to do with sales of TVs of any sort. And of course I'm speaking for myself, not my employers.
Brook
--------------------------------
I think using XML makes a fair amount of sense. It can be relatively human-readable, even in raw character form (a trait shared with HTML that focuses more on semantic mark-up and less on graphical design). And perhaps the best part about it is that you don't have to write a new parser, unless you really really want to. Lots of them exist already in a wide variety of languages. All you have to do is agree on a DTD.
Furthermore, it has the potential to support a variety of useful tools, such as the following:
As there are compiled versions of XML tools out there, and XML is sufficiently high-level that programs that manipulate XML are readily written in commonly compiled languages, the XML tools stand a good chance of being faster and more efficient than the present interpreted tools. And if you don't want to build the XML tools, there are script-based XML tools as well.
Um, but it is of interest to SGI people.
In the past, SGI has treated GL and products based on it like the Crown Jewels. The fact that, not only do they talk the talk, but they walk the walk in supporting Linux for such strategic products speaks volumes about SGI's strategy and its intent to follow through on that strategy.
I try to keep an open mind about the Evil Empire, but they just keep letting me down.
When the rumors first circulated that the Seattle Borg had been running propaganda under someone else's banner, I said to myself, "Self, this would not surprise me one little bit if it were true, but remember, it's just a rumor."
Except of course, it's not.
Big surprise.