The rise of the stock price reflects some interesting behavior of the financial markets. When Linux, Open Source, and especially Apache started to unfold as an important development in the software world, the financial markets reacted by pushing RedHat and VALinux through the roof. The jewels of the Open Source movement were getting the kind of press that money could rarely buy - it was clearly new, clearly something that was going to be around, and clearly something that you would want to invest in, if you could just find a place to do so.
Turn the clock forward to 2003 or 2004 and you see a lot of press generated once again about the fate of Linux, Open Source, and the GPL. It's still critically important software and still an elusive one to invest in directly. With all the SCO press, there's no question that SCO attracts investor interest not through the rightness of what they're saying, but because it looks like a good place to put down a bet. If SCO prevails, then they'll collect big bucks and you win. If IBM or some other major finally just gets pissed off at wasting time on legal wrangling, then they'll likely make some sort of licensing agreement with SCO and again you win. The only way that you lose is if it really goes the legal route and SCO loses. Then you get wiped, but the chances of it really going that way are probably pretty low given the way that SCO has positioned themselves.
You know the punchline of this old joke "We already know what you are; now we're just haggling about the price." I think this is the expectation of the financial community - at some point, IBM or a consortium of Linux companies will probably make a one shot payment to SCO and it will all be over. It's just a question of what the dollar amount and final agreement look like, and it's done.
I think what's happening here is that Sun as a brandname hasn't had much good news lately. There was a time when Sun = innovation; there was a time when RISC as an architecture looked forward-thinking and the next big wave, and I think Sun rode that pretty well. Then Sun = enterprise; even before the dot-com boom, the solution to your horsepower and uptime needs was Sun servers. Now, both these past branding successes are pretty tarnished or pointless.
Java has been their last big brand name. There was a time when java was "cool", but now it's really about being forward facing and not-Microsoft.
Sun as a company is doing very, very poorly. The proprietary processor plan is getting nuked by both Intel and AMD. Solaris is getting killed by Linux, largely because of Sun's reticence to let it roam free from the proprietary hardware.
The hardware story may possibly be beyond being saved. Sun will try the x86 route, but who knows whether there's any real opportunity there. If that happens, it's a software game, and I think they're already trying to hitch everything they've got up to Java, whether it's really associated or not.
Sun has done this before (sure, it's ECMAScript *now*, but you still call it Javascript, don't you?), so it shouldn't be that suprising. And even if it's stupidly named, that should affect whether the product is good or not or where it goes in the future.
Re:There's nothing wrong with SCO's request.
on
SCOrched Earth
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· Score: 2, Funny
Hilarious!
Hey, I think IBM should give it to them. SCO does have a 9-track tape reader set up, right? No? Well, IBM will gladly send the source over on floppies. 5-1/4" ones.:-)
I *never* want that to happen. That's why I run my computer on a 3000VA UPS.
And I never accidentally make a CD coaster. Even when the UPS goes active to top off it's charge and flips the breaker for the rest of the building.:-)
I've been an intermittent ACM member over the years, and I think it can be very beneficial depending on how you want to use the membership. You get the general journal (Communications of the ACM) which has articles of broad interest across the entire scope of computing. That's the nice way to put it - what it often means is that, even as an accomplished professional in your field, you won't have the slightest idea about what 80% of the articles are about. The CACM often has "theme" issues which are a lot more interesting generally, since the articles are more tutorial.
You will get a much bigger bang from the special interest groups. Sign up for the ones that are your field of specialty or interest, and you'll get a more focused journal that will show you the leading edge issues of the field, as well as giving you visibility into who some of the academic and corporate players are. Most of the SIGs are relatively small, so the journal may only be quarterly and not a fancy production. Some of the big ones - SIGGraph for graphics or SIGChi for human interaction are big fancy productions and can be very engaging.
For most people, there will also be local chapters who have occasional meetings. I live in the Silicon Valley, so you can network with a lot of interesting people and see what different companies and universities are up to. I found this very interesting, and (for/.ers) entertaining when the discussion turned to ripping somebody else's work.
I used to do a lot of work in computer graphics and found that SIGGraph was really useful to me in terms of keeping abreast of what was new. I've largely switched into a different area over the past years (embedded systems mostly) and found that I haven't had time to keep up with the graphics world, so I let my membership lapse. I guess I should join the IEEE which has a lot of the same material in my current area.
If you're out of academia, the need to be up to date on the latest battles in your field may be unnecessary, but if you dig this stuff, this is an excellent way to get engaged.
That's good, but even better is the simpler and cleaner "Amerika Online".
OK, how do you say "You've got mail" in German? Babelfish says "Sie haben Post", but it probably says a lot of stupid things in other languages. I for one know that every phrase that is machine-translated to German should start with "Achtung".
Danke...
It's not suprising that SCO would subpoena Stallman at all.
I'm sure an important part of their argument will be that the free software community are anarchists that will refuse to honor legally obtained copyrights, patents, and other IP protection. Stallman isn't in that category at all himself, but can easily be made to seem that way if they bait his zealotry about the movement and it's goals. I'm certainly a believer, but I have to admit that I think some of his writings seem pretty out there to me (less so lately).
There was a big todo in the late 1980's when a fairly complete set of Apple Macintosh source code escaped into the wild. I worked at Apple at the time, and parts of my QuickDraw code were used as evidence of the source of the leak. Outside of the technical consulting, I didn't follow what happened, but I seem to remember that Apple was pointing at Stallman and his writings about how software should be free as being suspect. It doesn't seem like anything came of this (I don't remember hearing any resolution at all in the long term). But this is the sort of thing that will they will try to pin on Open Source, with Stallman and Linus as poster children.
I'm glad I'm not on the receiving end of the IBM legal machine. As a bystander I must admit that it's quite entertaining:
"Either SCO has evidence to support its accusations or it does not. If it does, IBM is entitled to see it now; "
= "shit"
"if it does not, IBM will be entitled to dismissal of this case."
="or get off the pot"
At this point, Darl's lawyer turns to him and says, "You don't think IBM has run diffs on the source tree yet, do you? Because if they have and are ready to respond, we're probably pretty much screwed".
I pity the legal associates for IBM who have had to trace the provenance of every line in the source, but their pain will be worth it when SCO releases their first specifics and are nailed to the wall.
In an age before "PC vs. Mac" there was "HP and TI". Geez, such an apt comparison - HP guys really paid the big bucks but the plastics, the heft, the buttons were all just awesome. TIs were cheap, ugly, and the "software" sucked, but for some reason everybody wanted to use that darn "=" key.
The only thing bad about this analogy is that there's not a "Linux" calculator. What would it be like?
I don't know if I believe that MS is quite as evil as Locutus does, but I don't think he's too far off the mark either.
MS supports ethernet because it was established long before MS was a monopoly force in software. Now, ethernet didn't take off until people wanted to start assembling [MS-DOS and then Windows] networks out of PCs, but the early leader in that territory was Novell, not Microsoft. Back in those pre-Windows days, Novell supported a number of less expensive alternate network technologies, but their own gold standard was a platform-spanning network built with Novell ethernet cards. Novell, and the minor software players in their universe, were really driving these early PC networks, even though those NICs cost $900 a machine back then (not to mention that fat 10Base2 cables).
I think MS grabbed onto that open ethernet standard to take the leap over Novell in networking. Novell had more features in their network environment, more shared services etc., but MS jumped in there and had a sufficient product when the prices on NICs started to fall from the stratospheric heights. Novell tried to hang in there with their expensive stuff and got blown away, at first by low-cost NIC lines from 3COM, then everybody and their brother in no-name Asian cards.
You can point to the membership in the Bluetooth SIG, but frankly, I suspect that the real motive there is that their presence there allows in-depth and unrestricted spying on the activities of that community, which is priceless in terms of fashioning their own flavor of the standards. You see it elsewhere in things like XML bodies and the web services stuff. No question that Office 2003 generates XML - the only question is whether that XML generated is good for the overall XML community or a MS attempt to co-opt their efforts.
It must be weird to have MS participation in the standards bodies developing XML schema for productivity apps - open source Office equivalents. You know you want to talk about how this open schema can deliver advantages over the closed MS formats, but the MS guy is sitting right there in the room. You know when you make the proposal, it will go back to Redmond for analysis.
I don't think it's all an evil plot, but that doesn't mean that some of the participation is really exactly the kind of evil efforts that derail good intentions as well.
Actually, what I worry about (and this is completely conjecture) is that the reason that SunComm released strong protection that is easily bypassed is that the current concerns about copy protection of music forced it out into the world early.
What's it waiting for? Well, my fear is that it's waiting for a later DRM-enhanced version of Windows from Microsoft. MS has definitely said that DRM will play a bigger part of future products (isn't Office 2003 the first appearance of things like Word documents that you can read but not print and Outlook messages that you can receive but not forward?).
In a DRM-enhanced Windows OS, it's not hard to imagine that the presence of some hidden status word on a SunComm-type music CD would disable the feature that lets Shift bypass autorun. You'd still have full control to do that on the Toyota demo disc you just got in the mail, or if you don't want to load the DVD feature viewer when you put a DVD on your computer. But,under command of compliant media, you might lose the ability to defeat automatic installation.
Doing something like this (or, of course, more sophisticated) seems exactly in line with what MS has been doing lately. Perhaps the SunnComm protection is trying to use that other bit but MS hasn't snuck the DRM code into a service pack yet. Sigh...
Defeating a system like this would be a signficant effort and certainly one that would be a DMCA violation.
Maybe I'm overly paranoid (when I wrote "In a DRM-enhanced Windows OS" above it was hard not to write "In Soviet Russia"!), but I think it's hard to believe that anybody that would put the effort into a protection scheme would miss a barn-door sized boner like this.
I mostly agree with Leffe... X *is* mature and popular. If Y got any traction at all, I would be suprised that the major distributions wouldn't pick it up side-by-side with X, though. I guess this becomes a question of how cleanly Y implements the X API set for old apps.
Adding alpha blending and antialiasing? Maybe I haven't spent enough time on Jaguar (very little, myself), but this is the kind of stuff that I specifically would avoid personally. When my display is 160 dpi instead of 80dpi then I'm definitely on the antialiasing boat. Until then, you may keep your blurry letters.
Alpha blending is more obtrusive. If you don't take advantage of being able to "see through" screen objects, then it's totally gratuituous. If you do extend the human interaction to use transparency, then there won't be alternative presentations of the human interface. Sigh. Technically, doing all drawing off screen and double buffered is sort of appealing - even without blending, you can build a flicker-less interface. Maybe I just need a little more Mac time.
Well, maybe it's just me, but I think the psychology here is along the lines of:
1) SCO asked for the moon, didn't get it but their nuts haven't been blown off yet, so maybe there's something to their claims.
2) A couple of big companies, Microsoft and HP, are willing to pay some bucks to make this problem go away.
3) IBM could grind 'em into the ground, but it's probably more likely that they'll just pay in some bucks too to make this go away.
If #3 follows from #1 and #2, then an investor might buy SCO on the hopes that they either get a license payment from IBM or IBM just goes ahead and buys SCO.
I think a lot of the mind game here is not based on merit but on how the big game is played (actually, that's sort of what you were saying).
As Perens and others have said, there are lots of people who have both sets of source code and know how serious the infraction is. The Linux community can solve the violation via rewrite, but I'm not sure that even that makes SCO's claims of damages go away for the guys who made revenue selling Linux systems.
I'm in agreement with your posting, and I wonder if the market reaction is sort of like the classic hooker joke - you already know what's going to happen and this is just the way to bicker on the price.
If I had points, I'd mod you up...
When the big MS antitrust case was running, at the very beginning, I believe MS was trying to make a very specific point about the relationship of IE to Windows. MS was saying that their HTML rendering engine was a component of Windows (much like Gecko was the rendering component of Netscape) and that IE was a thin application shell that wrapped around that engine to create the behavior of a browser like Netscape. Other Windows applications can use that rendering engine, such as their help. So they could construct help files like web pages, but the app that you see them in is a help tool, not a browser.
That architecture is different than Netscape who carried their own rendering engine along with many other components as a bundle in their app. That difference in architecture is where the rathole regarding "taking IE out of Windows" comes from - removing the shell (as the CMU prof demonstrated) is relatively trivial, but if you object to the presence of the rendering engine, then the removal of that is not only painful but breaks other parts of Windows such as help.
Of course, it doesn't help that MS was also being an ass about this all.
Netscape (actually, I think it's other plantiffs such as Sun's Java) would complain that their ability to interact with the interfaces of these internal components was disadvantageous vs. Microsoft's own access and ability to enact change in the interfaces.
The remedy to this solution would have been hard to implement I think - you have to force Microsoft to publish and commit to a set of public interfaces and functionality, make them available to all comers, and create some mechanism through which MS can't have back-door entry. In practice, quite difficult to do, especially in areas like this, subject to significant evolution.
Once again, it doesn't help that MS was being an ass about this too.
OK, now flash forward to Eolas. For competitive reasons, MS got pulled into having plug-in interfaces. Later, they took the ball and moved it beyond where Netscape had already set it. Today, those public plug-in interfaces are the way that Real audio can be a pluggable replacement to Windows Media, or that Macromedia in some future Flash will become yet another option. Again, to a lesser extent, these kinds of plug in interfaces are what allows Sun to build a pluggable JVM (although I believe this is a pretty different mechanism).
So, if MS decides to lose the EOLAS case, that pretty much gives them carte blanche to slam the doors through the existing public interfaces shut and switch back to proprietary interfaces of their own, and their own control.
In Soviet Russia, you don't plug into the brower, it plugs in to you (sorry, couldn't help it)! In a post-EOLAS world, poor Microsoft can't publish an API that allows Quicktime or Flash or RealMedia to appear in a window because they can't afford the license. But that won't stop them from doing a non-infringing implementation of Windows Media will it?
I think this is definitely NOT a case where the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Hard to ignore the "Erotic Networks" thread and I'm trying hard not to make a joke...
But more seriously, I'm curious - next week is the start of the Fall TV season for most of the networks. Is a failure like this going to affect it? Aren't these the satellites used to downlink the new TV shows to the stations?
If there's a traffic increase during the seasonal launch, I wonder if this failure was caused by getting ready? Or perhaps a hack?
Yes, that is obvious, and in fact apps like Painter use it in exactly that way. But it doesn't actually feel particularly useful when you try that sort of feature out. Even on a very fast computer, there's a noticeable lag between your motion and the rendition of it on the screen which makes the feedback for this sort of thing out of whack.
Of course, I'm not an artist, so the real painting tool probably wouldn't feel right to me either.
Arrgh! You're the closest one yet, but not quite...
Doug Englebart worked at the Stanford Research Institute which is located in Menlo Park, the next town over from Stanford University(which is in Stanford, CA, not Palo Alto!).
When he was working on the mouse in the 1960s, there was no Xerox PARC yet. But when it did show up in the 1970's, that's when Dan Ingalls and Ted Kaehler (at PARC) was driven to write Smalltalk by Alan Kay (also at PARC). Kay is a visionary and excellent at focusing something like PARC, but if you want something amazing to actually get written, you need a first class geek like Ingalls to make it happen.
SRI is completely independent from Stanford University now (and for more than 10 years, I'm sure), but I don't think they were completely separate back in the 1960's. SRI does technical consulting work for hire. These days, a university would do that, but back then, SRI appeared to allow a commercial focus independent of the academic setting. I could be wrong on that as it predates my time at Stanford.
There are certainly good things about pads/digitizers vs. mice, but I'm definitely a mouse man. The weird thing about using a digitizing pad is that there's that odd extra state of the pointing device - when it's out of range. The mouse relative position is always valid, but when you write software, I personally found that it was an extra effort to handle the out of range case - sort of "what should the feedback be now?"
The other thing that mice are really great compared to digitizers is that cursor acceleration can be implemented in a very transparent manner. On a pad, you generally want a more linear tracking function, for those people and apps that actually involve looking at where the device is (for tracing or entering points). I guess you could have a sort of relative pointing mode on the tablet for mouse simulation if you really wanted to.
Certainly the sophistication of what you can do with a modern tablet like a Wacom is pretty amazing. The latest ones detect and transmit pressure at the tip, it can independently track both ends of the stylus (so you can have "ink" on one end and an "eraser" on the other in your favorite paint program). With the ability to track both ends, there are some tricky apps that even read the slant of the pen and take action based on that - not that I've ever been able to do anything useful with that function.
If you saw that result, I guess I won't argue, but the odd thing is that one level of the standard modem protocols (v.42, I believe, but it's been a while) is Huffman coding, so it's suprising that any preprocessing of text on the server buys you anything that you wouldn't have had anyway.
Those old compression protocols definitely mattered in a BBS-type world, and maybe less so in the modern TCP world.
... until IBM *really* starts beating the crap out of them. Right now, they're complaining that the big kid is telling the little kids to slap SCO around and they're waiting for a big punch from the big kid.
What they don't realize is that strait-laced IBM may look all nice and respectable on the outside, but their legal department is fully capable of acting like Leatherface on a bad day. I don't know whether this will ever reach a point where IBM unleashes the dogs (and it most certainly will if they see actual signs of this SCO noise impacting their business), but it's isn't a slap or tap that IBM is going to deliver - they're going to nail SCO down to the ground, then get "medieval on their asses".
I originally felt that McBride was opportunistic. But when you see self-defeating quotes like they ones he's giving now, and see them bragging about "all the important press they've gotten", I realize that you guys were right all along - he's just an asswipe.
I can just see the next action in Darl McBride's plan: "Kill Napster's dead body - again".
Or perhaps they're working on a virus that kills off copies of Linux that haven't paid for a SCO license. They would have released it already, but every time they tested it in the lab, it killed all their own computers.
Of course, we'll all enjoy it when Steve Jobs starts revolutionizing open source by selling SCO Linux for 99 cents a copy.
Slashdot Mirror
The rise of the stock price reflects some interesting behavior of the financial markets. When Linux, Open Source, and especially Apache started to unfold as an important development in the software world, the financial markets reacted by pushing RedHat and VALinux through the roof. The jewels of the Open Source movement were getting the kind of press that money could rarely buy - it was clearly new, clearly something that was going to be around, and clearly something that you would want to invest in, if you could just find a place to do so.
Turn the clock forward to 2003 or 2004 and you see a lot of press generated once again about the fate of Linux, Open Source, and the GPL. It's still critically important software and still an elusive one to invest in directly. With all the SCO press, there's no question that SCO attracts investor interest not through the rightness of what they're saying, but because it looks like a good place to put down a bet. If SCO prevails, then they'll collect big bucks and you win. If IBM or some other major finally just gets pissed off at wasting time on legal wrangling, then they'll likely make some sort of licensing agreement with SCO and again you win. The only way that you lose is if it really goes the legal route and SCO loses. Then you get wiped, but the chances of it really going that way are probably pretty low given the way that SCO has positioned themselves.
You know the punchline of this old joke "We already know what you are; now we're just haggling about the price." I think this is the expectation of the financial community - at some point, IBM or a consortium of Linux companies will probably make a one shot payment to SCO and it will all be over. It's just a question of what the dollar amount and final agreement look like, and it's done.
I don't particularly disagree with anything you said, but I believe that Cornice is more likely to be bending over *forward* than back. :-)
I think what's happening here is that Sun as a brandname hasn't had much good news lately. There was a time when Sun = innovation; there was a time when RISC as an architecture looked forward-thinking and the next big wave, and I think Sun rode that pretty well. Then Sun = enterprise; even before the dot-com boom, the solution to your horsepower and uptime needs was Sun servers. Now, both these past branding successes are pretty tarnished or pointless.
Java has been their last big brand name. There was a time when java was "cool", but now it's really about being forward facing and not-Microsoft.
Sun as a company is doing very, very poorly. The proprietary processor plan is getting nuked by both Intel and AMD. Solaris is getting killed by Linux, largely because of Sun's reticence to let it roam free from the proprietary hardware.
The hardware story may possibly be beyond being saved. Sun will try the x86 route, but who knows whether there's any real opportunity there. If that happens, it's a software game, and I think they're already trying to hitch everything they've got up to Java, whether it's really associated or not.
Sun has done this before (sure, it's ECMAScript *now*, but you still call it Javascript, don't you?), so it shouldn't be that suprising. And even if it's stupidly named, that should affect whether the product is good or not or where it goes in the future.
Hilarious!
:-)
Hey, I think IBM should give it to them. SCO does have a 9-track tape reader set up, right? No? Well, IBM will gladly send the source over on floppies. 5-1/4" ones.
I *never* want that to happen. That's why I run my computer on a 3000VA UPS.
:-)
And I never accidentally make a CD coaster. Even when the UPS goes active to top off it's charge and flips the breaker for the rest of the building.
I've been an intermittent ACM member over the years, and I think it can be very beneficial depending on how you want to use the membership. You get the general journal (Communications of the ACM) which has articles of broad interest across the entire scope of computing. That's the nice way to put it - what it often means is that, even as an accomplished professional in your field, you won't have the slightest idea about what 80% of the articles are about. The CACM often has "theme" issues which are a lot more interesting generally, since the articles are more tutorial.
/.ers) entertaining when the discussion turned to ripping somebody else's work.
You will get a much bigger bang from the special interest groups. Sign up for the ones that are your field of specialty or interest, and you'll get a more focused journal that will show you the leading edge issues of the field, as well as giving you visibility into who some of the academic and corporate players are. Most of the SIGs are relatively small, so the journal may only be quarterly and not a fancy production. Some of the big ones - SIGGraph for graphics or SIGChi for human interaction are big fancy productions and can be very engaging.
For most people, there will also be local chapters who have occasional meetings. I live in the Silicon Valley, so you can network with a lot of interesting people and see what different companies and universities are up to. I found this very interesting, and (for
I used to do a lot of work in computer graphics and found that SIGGraph was really useful to me in terms of keeping abreast of what was new. I've largely switched into a different area over the past years (embedded systems mostly) and found that I haven't had time to keep up with the graphics world, so I let my membership lapse. I guess I should join the IEEE which has a lot of the same material in my current area.
If you're out of academia, the need to be up to date on the latest battles in your field may be unnecessary, but if you dig this stuff, this is an excellent way to get engaged.
That's good, but even better is the simpler and cleaner "Amerika Online". OK, how do you say "You've got mail" in German? Babelfish says "Sie haben Post", but it probably says a lot of stupid things in other languages. I for one know that every phrase that is machine-translated to German should start with "Achtung". Danke...
It's not suprising that SCO would subpoena Stallman at all.
I'm sure an important part of their argument will be that the free software community are anarchists that will refuse to honor legally obtained copyrights, patents, and other IP protection. Stallman isn't in that category at all himself, but can easily be made to seem that way if they bait his zealotry about the movement and it's goals. I'm certainly a believer, but I have to admit that I think some of his writings seem pretty out there to me (less so lately).
There was a big todo in the late 1980's when a fairly complete set of Apple Macintosh source code escaped into the wild. I worked at Apple at the time, and parts of my QuickDraw code were used as evidence of the source of the leak. Outside of the technical consulting, I didn't follow what happened, but I seem to remember that Apple was pointing at Stallman and his writings about how software should be free as being suspect. It doesn't seem like anything came of this (I don't remember hearing any resolution at all in the long term). But this is the sort of thing that will they will try to pin on Open Source, with Stallman and Linus as poster children.
At this point, Darl's lawyer turns to him and says, "You don't think IBM has run diffs on the source tree yet, do you? Because if they have and are ready to respond, we're probably pretty much screwed".
I pity the legal associates for IBM who have had to trace the provenance of every line in the source, but their pain will be worth it when SCO releases their first specifics and are nailed to the wall.
Absolutely. Count me as #1, only 999,999 to go.
In an age before "PC vs. Mac" there was "HP and TI". Geez, such an apt comparison - HP guys really paid the big bucks but the plastics, the heft, the buttons were all just awesome. TIs were cheap, ugly, and the "software" sucked, but for some reason everybody wanted to use that darn "=" key.
The only thing bad about this analogy is that there's not a "Linux" calculator. What would it be like?
I don't know if I believe that MS is quite as evil as Locutus does, but I don't think he's too far off the mark either.
MS supports ethernet because it was established long before MS was a monopoly force in software. Now, ethernet didn't take off until people wanted to start assembling [MS-DOS and then Windows] networks out of PCs, but the early leader in that territory was Novell, not Microsoft. Back in those pre-Windows days, Novell supported a number of less expensive alternate network technologies, but their own gold standard was a platform-spanning network built with Novell ethernet cards. Novell, and the minor software players in their universe, were really driving these early PC networks, even though those NICs cost $900 a machine back then (not to mention that fat 10Base2 cables).
I think MS grabbed onto that open ethernet standard to take the leap over Novell in networking. Novell had more features in their network environment, more shared services etc., but MS jumped in there and had a sufficient product when the prices on NICs started to fall from the stratospheric heights. Novell tried to hang in there with their expensive stuff and got blown away, at first by low-cost NIC lines from 3COM, then everybody and their brother in no-name Asian cards.
You can point to the membership in the Bluetooth SIG, but frankly, I suspect that the real motive there is that their presence there allows in-depth and unrestricted spying on the activities of that community, which is priceless in terms of fashioning their own flavor of the standards. You see it elsewhere in things like XML bodies and the web services stuff. No question that Office 2003 generates XML - the only question is whether that XML generated is good for the overall XML community or a MS attempt to co-opt their efforts.
It must be weird to have MS participation in the standards bodies developing XML schema for productivity apps - open source Office equivalents. You know you want to talk about how this open schema can deliver advantages over the closed MS formats, but the MS guy is sitting right there in the room. You know when you make the proposal, it will go back to Redmond for analysis.
I don't think it's all an evil plot, but that doesn't mean that some of the participation is really exactly the kind of evil efforts that derail good intentions as well.
I think that's a very good point.
Actually, what I worry about (and this is completely conjecture) is that the reason that SunComm released strong protection that is easily bypassed is that the current concerns about copy protection of music forced it out into the world early.
What's it waiting for? Well, my fear is that it's waiting for a later DRM-enhanced version of Windows from Microsoft. MS has definitely said that DRM will play a bigger part of future products (isn't Office 2003 the first appearance of things like Word documents that you can read but not print and Outlook messages that you can receive but not forward?).
In a DRM-enhanced Windows OS, it's not hard to imagine that the presence of some hidden status word on a SunComm-type music CD would disable the feature that lets Shift bypass autorun. You'd still have full control to do that on the Toyota demo disc you just got in the mail, or if you don't want to load the DVD feature viewer when you put a DVD on your computer. But,under command of compliant media, you might lose the ability to defeat automatic installation.
Doing something like this (or, of course, more sophisticated) seems exactly in line with what MS has been doing lately. Perhaps the SunnComm protection is trying to use that other bit but MS hasn't snuck the DRM code into a service pack yet. Sigh...
Defeating a system like this would be a signficant effort and certainly one that would be a DMCA violation.
Maybe I'm overly paranoid (when I wrote "In a DRM-enhanced Windows OS" above it was hard not to write "In Soviet Russia"!), but I think it's hard to believe that anybody that would put the effort into a protection scheme would miss a barn-door sized boner like this.
I mostly agree with Leffe... X *is* mature and popular. If Y got any traction at all, I would be suprised that the major distributions wouldn't pick it up side-by-side with X, though. I guess this becomes a question of how cleanly Y implements the X API set for old apps.
Adding alpha blending and antialiasing? Maybe I haven't spent enough time on Jaguar (very little, myself), but this is the kind of stuff that I specifically would avoid personally. When my display is 160 dpi instead of 80dpi then I'm definitely on the antialiasing boat. Until then, you may keep your blurry letters.
Alpha blending is more obtrusive. If you don't take advantage of being able to "see through" screen objects, then it's totally gratuituous. If you do extend the human interaction to use transparency, then there won't be alternative presentations of the human interface. Sigh. Technically, doing all drawing off screen and double buffered is sort of appealing - even without blending, you can build a flicker-less interface. Maybe I just need a little more Mac time.
Well, maybe it's just me, but I think the psychology here is along the lines of:
1) SCO asked for the moon, didn't get it but their nuts haven't been blown off yet, so maybe there's something to their claims.
2) A couple of big companies, Microsoft and HP, are willing to pay some bucks to make this problem go away.
3) IBM could grind 'em into the ground, but it's probably more likely that they'll just pay in some bucks too to make this go away.
If #3 follows from #1 and #2, then an investor might buy SCO on the hopes that they either get a license payment from IBM or IBM just goes ahead and buys SCO.
I think a lot of the mind game here is not based on merit but on how the big game is played (actually, that's sort of what you were saying).
As Perens and others have said, there are lots of people who have both sets of source code and know how serious the infraction is. The Linux community can solve the violation via rewrite, but I'm not sure that even that makes SCO's claims of damages go away for the guys who made revenue selling Linux systems.
I'm in agreement with your posting, and I wonder if the market reaction is sort of like the classic hooker joke - you already know what's going to happen and this is just the way to bicker on the price.
That architecture is different than Netscape who carried their own rendering engine along with many other components as a bundle in their app. That difference in architecture is where the rathole regarding "taking IE out of Windows" comes from - removing the shell (as the CMU prof demonstrated) is relatively trivial, but if you object to the presence of the rendering engine, then the removal of that is not only painful but breaks other parts of Windows such as help.
Of course, it doesn't help that MS was also being an ass about this all.
Netscape (actually, I think it's other plantiffs such as Sun's Java) would complain that their ability to interact with the interfaces of these internal components was disadvantageous vs. Microsoft's own access and ability to enact change in the interfaces.
The remedy to this solution would have been hard to implement I think - you have to force Microsoft to publish and commit to a set of public interfaces and functionality, make them available to all comers, and create some mechanism through which MS can't have back-door entry. In practice, quite difficult to do, especially in areas like this, subject to significant evolution.
Once again, it doesn't help that MS was being an ass about this too.
OK, now flash forward to Eolas. For competitive reasons, MS got pulled into having plug-in interfaces. Later, they took the ball and moved it beyond where Netscape had already set it. Today, those public plug-in interfaces are the way that Real audio can be a pluggable replacement to Windows Media, or that Macromedia in some future Flash will become yet another option. Again, to a lesser extent, these kinds of plug in interfaces are what allows Sun to build a pluggable JVM (although I believe this is a pretty different mechanism).
So, if MS decides to lose the EOLAS case, that pretty much gives them carte blanche to slam the doors through the existing public interfaces shut and switch back to proprietary interfaces of their own, and their own control. In Soviet Russia, you don't plug into the brower, it plugs in to you (sorry, couldn't help it)! In a post-EOLAS world, poor Microsoft can't publish an API that allows Quicktime or Flash or RealMedia to appear in a window because they can't afford the license. But that won't stop them from doing a non-infringing implementation of Windows Media will it?
I think this is definitely NOT a case where the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Hard to ignore the "Erotic Networks" thread and I'm trying hard not to make a joke...
But more seriously, I'm curious - next week is the start of the Fall TV season for most of the networks. Is a failure like this going to affect it? Aren't these the satellites used to downlink the new TV shows to the stations?
If there's a traffic increase during the seasonal launch, I wonder if this failure was caused by getting ready? Or perhaps a hack?
Heck, probably SCO trying to scam some porn...
Yes, that is obvious, and in fact apps like Painter use it in exactly that way. But it doesn't actually feel particularly useful when you try that sort of feature out. Even on a very fast computer, there's a noticeable lag between your motion and the rendition of it on the screen which makes the feedback for this sort of thing out of whack.
Of course, I'm not an artist, so the real painting tool probably wouldn't feel right to me either.
Arrgh! You're the closest one yet, but not quite...
Doug Englebart worked at the Stanford Research Institute which is located in Menlo Park, the next town over from Stanford University(which is in Stanford, CA, not Palo Alto!).
When he was working on the mouse in the 1960s, there was no Xerox PARC yet. But when it did show up in the 1970's, that's when Dan Ingalls and Ted Kaehler (at PARC) was driven to write Smalltalk by Alan Kay (also at PARC). Kay is a visionary and excellent at focusing something like PARC, but if you want something amazing to actually get written, you need a first class geek like Ingalls to make it happen.
SRI is completely independent from Stanford University now (and for more than 10 years, I'm sure), but I don't think they were completely separate back in the 1960's. SRI does technical consulting work for hire. These days, a university would do that, but back then, SRI appeared to allow a commercial focus independent of the academic setting. I could be wrong on that as it predates my time at Stanford.
There are certainly good things about pads/digitizers vs. mice, but I'm definitely a mouse man. The weird thing about using a digitizing pad is that there's that odd extra state of the pointing device - when it's out of range. The mouse relative position is always valid, but when you write software, I personally found that it was an extra effort to handle the out of range case - sort of "what should the feedback be now?"
The other thing that mice are really great compared to digitizers is that cursor acceleration can be implemented in a very transparent manner. On a pad, you generally want a more linear tracking function, for those people and apps that actually involve looking at where the device is (for tracing or entering points). I guess you could have a sort of relative pointing mode on the tablet for mouse simulation if you really wanted to.
Certainly the sophistication of what you can do with a modern tablet like a Wacom is pretty amazing. The latest ones detect and transmit pressure at the tip, it can independently track both ends of the stylus (so you can have "ink" on one end and an "eraser" on the other in your favorite paint program). With the ability to track both ends, there are some tricky apps that even read the slant of the pen and take action based on that - not that I've ever been able to do anything useful with that function.
I absolutely agree...
:-)
OK, who's going to pay for the survey that shows the "most attacked" desktop OS? What? MS doesn't want to pay for that?
If you saw that result, I guess I won't argue, but the odd thing is that one level of the standard modem protocols (v.42, I believe, but it's been a while) is Huffman coding, so it's suprising that any preprocessing of text on the server buys you anything that you wouldn't have had anyway.
Those old compression protocols definitely mattered in a BBS-type world, and maybe less so in the modern TCP world.
I can't believe I can't get these on ThinkGeek yet. Come on now, how hard can it be to find 52 enemies of open source?
:-)
Critical questions:
1) Is Darl McBride the Ace of Spades or is it Bill Gates? Or is it CowboyBob?
2) Is rms *in* the deck or not?
Next up, "Heroes of Linux" embossed foil trading cards. Followed by "The Women of cvs".
OK, sounds like I better shut up now.
... until IBM *really* starts beating the crap out of them. Right now, they're complaining that the big kid is telling the little kids to slap SCO around and they're waiting for a big punch from the big kid.
What they don't realize is that strait-laced IBM may look all nice and respectable on the outside, but their legal department is fully capable of acting like Leatherface on a bad day. I don't know whether this will ever reach a point where IBM unleashes the dogs (and it most certainly will if they see actual signs of this SCO noise impacting their business), but it's isn't a slap or tap that IBM is going to deliver - they're going to nail SCO down to the ground, then get "medieval on their asses".
I originally felt that McBride was opportunistic. But when you see self-defeating quotes like they ones he's giving now, and see them bragging about "all the important press they've gotten", I realize that you guys were right all along - he's just an asswipe.
I can just see the next action in Darl McBride's plan: "Kill Napster's dead body - again".
Or perhaps they're working on a virus that kills off copies of Linux that haven't paid for a SCO license. They would have released it already, but every time they tested it in the lab, it killed all their own computers.
Of course, we'll all enjoy it when Steve Jobs starts revolutionizing open source by selling SCO Linux for 99 cents a copy.
Hilarious!
It was worth frying fueledbyramen just so I could read this.