Open source implementations of Java are on the horizon.
It is unclear, however, whether those violate Sun intellectual property. If you check the USPTO web site, you'll see that Sun has numerous patents on key Java technologies, including the basic type verification algorithm.
Furthermore, even when you just download the documentation from Sun's web site, you accept a license that prohibits you from distributing any implementation of the code that has not passed Sun's conformance tests, and it imposes other restrictions on you (probably incompatible with the GPL).
So, while people are working on open source implementations of the Java platform, the more compatible they become with Sun Java, the more they risk annoying Sun sufficiently into shutting them down.
Today, commercial Java runtimes are available from multiple vendors, so you are not likely to have one single vendor treat you badly.
I'm less concerned about a vendor treating me badly and more about the future of the Java platform. From a practical point of view, as long as other vendors base their implementations on Sun's, they will tend to incorporate Sun's technical mistakes into their own implementations. Sun's latest screw-up is to try to implement Java2D on top of OpenGL--that's just a substandard approach and simply will not work well on Linux.
From a legal point of view, between the extensive and intricate "community licenses" (which define just about anything as a "derived work"), Sun's extensive patent portfolio, and Sun's contractual agreements with Apple and IBM, the possibility of a free and clear Java implementation seems extremely remote.
Unless Sun actually changes their licenses, I don't think there will ever be an open source Java implementation without a legal shadow over it. At best, Sun may tolerate open source Java implementations--but perhaps only until they hit hard times and their management changes.
As a rule of thumb, don't get carried away with trying to organize things; instead, learn to use commands for searching efficiently.
For example, to find all the TeX files containing a certain keyword, use:
find . -name '*.tex' | xargs grep -l keyword
Or
locate.tex | fgrep $HOME | xargs grep -l keyword
For mail in particular, I find a good organization is to keep mail and junk mail in separate folders and move them to a separate archive folder annually. All other "organization" can be done easily when needed using searching, sorting, saved searches ("virtual folders"), highlighting, and features like that. (Incidentally, sorting is very powerful for organization in mailers and other places: select an example of the message you want and then "sort by" something like author or subject to find related messages in the index.)
Many domains already have conventions or tools. For example, software source trees are organized in particular ways. And things like address and customer data are commonly stored in databases (on top of the file system).
Just don't believe anyone telling you that there is a magic bullet for this. Some OS vendors have rediscovered attributed file systems and databases-as-file-systems, but those create more problems than they solve. Ultimately, data organization is a conceptual problem, not a technological one, and throwing more features at it doesn't solve it.
These kinds of systems are measured by false positive and false negative rates. A 40% false negative rate with a 0.01% false positive rate would be quite useful for law enforcement: you catch more than half the fugitives walking past the camera (when currently you catch none), and you only inconvenience 1:10000 travelers. A 40% false negative rate with a 10% false positive rate would be unusable because security would spend way too much time trying to check whether every 10th traveler is a fugitive.
My experience has been similar to yours. Digital video is a pain to deal with on any platform and I was hoping OS X would help, but it didn't. iMovie was too limited to be useful and required far too much clicking around to get anything done and I couldn't get standard UNIX tools like dvgrab to work. And iMovie seemed to want to turn everything into some oddball formats.
I just ended up installing Linux--it gives me far more video software, more powerful video software, and you can't beat the price.
iMovie is for consumers trying to deal with simple home video at default settings. It's really good at that, but not much else. And I found OS X overall to be a disappointment. It looks great, though.
because so-called "web standards" are specifications of policy, not technical merit or need.
I agree that many W3C standards are not well designed and are often for things nobody wants. But Microsoft is a participant in the W3C. That means Microsoft is partly responsible for the bloat and redundancy of those standards.
If Microsoft realizes the problems with W3C standards, they should (and could) throw their weight around to change things. For Microsoft to encourage the development of bad standards on the part of the W3C and then not implement it themselves amounts to sabotage.
As to your assertion that the Open Source system management tools are good, compare them to enterprise functionality as offered by some of the proprietary companies. The bottom line is delivered by a flexible integrated system where a few good man can reliably MANAGE many servers in a WAN network with thousands of people working in many locations.
And people did this long before Tivoli or Novell were around.
IBM's Tivoli uses bash, perl in a major way.
Tivoli's value is in "standardization" (to the degree that a proprietary set of scripts can be a standard) and documentation; functionally, it seems to offer little you don't get out of the box with any decent Linux distribution.
As far as I am aware there are great OSS tools but the integration required is not there (yet).
The OSS tools for system management work great together; there isn't going to be any more "integration" because there is no more integration needed.
What you want is a benign dictator telling you exactly which combination of tools to pick and choose. But OSS won't get that because people who use OSS don't want it. If you do, go pay IBM or Novell. But that does not make their tools functionally or technically better.
By the way, GUI tools can be very effective a picture paints a thousand words, certainly in the hands of a few good man.
You're confusing visualization and GUIs. Visualization is very useful, and there are plenty of OSS tools available for that. GUIs are means of issuing commands with a combination of the mouse and keyboard, and they are not very effective for administering large systems.
When Linux is to be ready for the desktop, it must be easy to adjust 20.000 systems with patches and/or policy changes.
Fortunately, that is actually Linux's strength. It is Microsoft Windows that fails badly in the area of managing large numbers of installations easily.
As Linux exists in its distributions, only the distribution with the best implemented system management tools will survive in a corporate setting.
If by "system management tools" you mean clones of the GUI tools that Microsoft ships, it's not going to happen (well, some confused company may try to clone it, but it won't catch on). Microsoft's system management tools are using the wrong approach. For managing lots of machines, scripting, text-based interfaces, and the command line are the only way to go, and Linux is lightyears ahead of Windows there.
Your story that Wine changed from LGPL to GPL is bogus. Wine is under the LGPL license today (see here). And the LGPL license is all that is needed to prevent people from "taking without giving back".
Putting Wine under the GPL would make it seriously less useful because one of the main purposes of Wine is to let people move commercial Windows applications to Linux, and that may involve linking with it.
For creating mobile applications, scripting represents Park's secret weapon. "It sounds like an odd thing to do on small wireless devices, but I actually use a simple scripting engine," he says.
People have been using scripting on small devices forever. Perhaps people still remember Microsoft Basic running on the Apple II, a 48kbyte, 8bit machine? Forth and Basic have been two of the most popular interpreted languages. And, in fact, scripts often reduce size and memory usage of programs.
Oh, and in other news, the Pope is Catholic, and breathing air tends to keep you alive longer.
I think regulation is the wrong solution. A better solution is to hold companies responsible for security breaches.
Everybody keeps passing the buck: businesses blame the software company, software companies blame hackers, and ultimately the taxpayer and customer ends up paying for the incompetence and poor choices of the businesses.
Businesses should be primarily responsible for the harm that arises from the software they choose. If they want to pass on the risk of their choice to the software company, that should require an explicit contractual agreement.
And the government should get out of trying to regulate how software is written, and the government should get out of trying to catch "hackers".
AMTP seems like a solution in search of a problem. Unless most of the Internet switches, there will still be open relays. Spammers that don't use open relays and operate through existing ISPs will continue to be able to do so.
Also, to accomplish what AMTP apparently wants to accomplish, it's not necessary to involve a central, costly certificate authority--anybody who wants to talk safely to sites they know and trust can exchange keys with them.
AMTP looks like it's mostly going to be a boon to the bottom line of certificate authorities, and an erosion of privacy for "the little guy". I don't believe it will make a big dent in spam.
Perhaps, perhaps not. There doesn't seem to be a lot of spam on IRC either. In fact, because of instant feedback from users, killing IM spam (collaboratively) would seem to be considerably easier than killing E-mail spam.
Furthermore, even if centralization is the reason for less spam, handing that level of control to a few big companies in order to avoid spam seems like a bad tradeoff. We have had large, centralized E-mail systems in the past and they were stifling and expensive.
If you want a simple upgrade for Linux, you can wait for the RedHat CD or for the new kernel package to make it into Debian/Stable.
However, you have to see the whole idea of needing a step-by-step upgrade guide with screen shots, etc is exactly why Bill still owns huge percentages of the market.
No, the reason why Bill still owns huge percentages of the market is because there are morons like you around. You badmouth Linux because you choose to install pre-release versions of the kernel and then can't deal with the consequences of your own choices.
If you have a need to look at 3D images on the computer regularly, just learn to cross your eyes; it doesn't take long. Here ">Here is one of many howto's.
While it's a cute novelty, any laptop-sized 3D display is going to be somewhat disappointing in the long run. Essentially, you get roughly the same 3D effect as you would by arranging objects inside a shoebox. Furthermore, objects will seem to move relative to one another as you move your head, which is decidedly unnatural and no good for games anyway.
"Running an (IM) network is expensive," said Lisa Gurry, group product manager for MSN at Microsoft.
Well, so why do they create such a centralized network in the first place? Microsoft doesn't run a centralized mailer for every Microsoft software user, so why should they run a centralized IM server for everybody?
The centralized IM infrastructure is an aberration. The sooner companies like Microsoft and AOL give up their stranglehold and the sooner it gets replaced with a distributed system based on open protocols (kind of like IRC), the better.
But the fact is that the IM providers actually like the control. Each of them hopes that they'll own it all sooner or later, kind of like the phone company used to be.
So, Microsoft, if you don't like the expense of running Microsoft IM services, just don't, and put client and server software based on open protocols into Windows. Problem solved, expense gone.
You can make the same argument for floating point instructions at all 10 years ago
We already knew ten years ago that built-in floating point support was good for desktop machines because pretty much all architectures other than x86 had them. x86 just finally caught up with the rest of the world.
Vector processors, on the other hand, have been around for decades and, if anything, they have become less popular. That's because most CPU vendors have figured out how to let people achieve the same kind of performance with regular instruction sets.
I think 5 years from now we'll see tons of code that won't run on the G3 that takes advantage of altivec and in terms of custom code lots exists today.
I think 5 years from now, IBM will either have figured out how to get full speed out of their FPUs without special AltiVec instructions, or the whole PPC architecture will end up in the dustbin of history.
As for the $2k comparison, I'd like to see where you get an under $1000 machine with: PCI-X, high end video, DVD-R, AGP 8X....
Who cares? We are talking about compute clusters; the machines don't need DVD-R or high-end video. The fact that the G5s only come in gold-plated, fashionable Apple desktop boxes is another problem with them for scientific computing.
even when they are asserted against an unpleasant character like Microsoft. Here is burst.com's own description of their technology (from here):
The Faster-Than-Real-Time(TM) process delivers video in large advance bursts, saving it in a configurable local buffer, isolating the viewing experience from network noise and freeing up bandwidth to serve more users. burst.com has a comprehensive intellectual property portfolio including 9 U.S. patents and 34 international patents covering bursting, video delivery scheduling, rapid casting, multi-casting, video-on-demand, a range of set-top box applications, as well as many others.
it offers possibilities to take advantage of and adapt to the available hardware. (server knows if the screen is only a 4" PDA screen, or a 30" 3D display - the application shouldn't have to know these things)
But the application has to know--scaling applications down to a PDA screen requires some hard choices to be made in terms of what is displayed. Merely scaling down the display won't help, and the server simply doesn't know enough about the application to do it automatically
- it's bandwith friendly if you're only transferring high-level info to/from the servers.
That is far from clear. Think of a grid bound to a large database table--does transferring all that data make sense? I don't think so. Not even on demand. In fact, even X11 may be too high-level in terms of bandwidth: VNC actually is often better in terms of bandwidth (but it is too low-level to be useful as a replacement for X11).
- you don't get different apps using different policies on the same server.
You get that on Windows and OS X. And Berlin were to catch on, people would port FLTK, Swing, wxWindows, and all those other toolkits to it as well.
The X11/toolkit/UI layering is completely standard and analogous to GDI/MFC/Explorer and Quartz/Cocoa/Aqua. The only difference is that X11 is well-designed and mature enough that there are, in fact, multiple commonly used toolkits and that those toolkits can even somewhat interoperate. That's a good thing.
Neither Windows nor MacOS got support for anything close to the PostScript imaging model until fairly recently, and very few applications take advantage of it.
And did the Windows or MacOS GUIs get significant functional changes as a result? Not really: it's still the same old menus, the same old dialog boxes, the same old title bars, etc. They just look a little prettier, and transparency and fading give people some slight additional visual cues. Nice, but not exactly a revolution.
Perhaps a tad pedantic, but X11 is the protocol and hasn't evolved. XFree is, what I think, you are referring to.
I view the Render extension as part of the X11 protocol family now, and Cairo as a portable client-library for it. So, in that sense, I do view this as a part of X11 now, not just some XFree86-specific hack. I believe some commercial vendors of X11 server implementations have already been tracking Render. I would hope that HP, Sun, and IBM will start supporting Render quickly.
Maybe I had better just stay completely away from DotGNU. Stick with Apache and various Java tools instead.
The Apache license is fine, but Java doesn't look like a big win to me. While Sun keeps proclaiming that the platform is open, in reality, large parts of the platform only exist as Sun proprietary code. Even if someone managed to reimplement them, Sun controls the compatibility tests and they can shoot down any implementation they don't like.
At this point, I'd not get involved with any of Java, PNET, or.NET--the one thing all of them seem to agree on is that they want to entangle users in a web of intellectual property. Well, actually there is another thing that they seem to agree on: all of them want to run your code in a bloated runtime that's slow to start up. Mono seems to have the most straightforward license of the bunch, but even Mono is at risk of patent infringement claims from Microsoft.
Just wait for the dust to settle and for Sun and Microsoft to come to their senses with their outrageous intellectual property claims. Until then, you have plenty of other options--there is nothing technically new in any of those platforms.
Altivec. Certain types of vector code when compiled to only run on a G4 outperform a pentium even at 3+x the ghz range (i.e. a 800 mhz G4 beating a 3ghz PIV).
If that is true, then the G4 and G5 are not very good engineering tradeoffs. Think about it: if the FPUs can only be kept busy by writing very specialized code that 99% of the applications aren't using, then too silicon has been devoted to the FPU relative to the rest of the processor.
And, of course, it doesn't even matter whether some processor outperforms another, what matters is bang-for-the-buck. A single processor G5 machine starts at $2000, more than twice of what you pay for a P4 running at 3GHz.
Slashdot Mirror
Open source implementations of Java are on the horizon.
It is unclear, however, whether those violate Sun intellectual property. If you check the USPTO web site, you'll see that Sun has numerous patents on key Java technologies, including the basic type verification algorithm.
Furthermore, even when you just download the documentation from Sun's web site, you accept a license that prohibits you from distributing any implementation of the code that has not passed Sun's conformance tests, and it imposes other restrictions on you (probably incompatible with the GPL).
So, while people are working on open source implementations of the Java platform, the more compatible they become with Sun Java, the more they risk annoying Sun sufficiently into shutting them down.
Today, commercial Java runtimes are available from multiple vendors, so you are not likely to have one single vendor treat you badly.
I'm less concerned about a vendor treating me badly and more about the future of the Java platform. From a practical point of view, as long as other vendors base their implementations on Sun's, they will tend to incorporate Sun's technical mistakes into their own implementations. Sun's latest screw-up is to try to implement Java2D on top of OpenGL--that's just a substandard approach and simply will not work well on Linux.
From a legal point of view, between the extensive and intricate "community licenses" (which define just about anything as a "derived work"), Sun's extensive patent portfolio, and Sun's contractual agreements with Apple and IBM, the possibility of a free and clear Java implementation seems extremely remote.
Unless Sun actually changes their licenses, I don't think there will ever be an open source Java implementation without a legal shadow over it. At best, Sun may tolerate open source Java implementations--but perhaps only until they hit hard times and their management changes.
For example, to find all the TeX files containing a certain keyword, use:OrFor mail in particular, I find a good organization is to keep mail and junk mail in separate folders and move them to a separate archive folder annually. All other "organization" can be done easily when needed using searching, sorting, saved searches ("virtual folders"), highlighting, and features like that. (Incidentally, sorting is very powerful for organization in mailers and other places: select an example of the message you want and then "sort by" something like author or subject to find related messages in the index.)
Many domains already have conventions or tools. For example, software source trees are organized in particular ways. And things like address and customer data are commonly stored in databases (on top of the file system).
Just don't believe anyone telling you that there is a magic bullet for this. Some OS vendors have rediscovered attributed file systems and databases-as-file-systems, but those create more problems than they solve. Ultimately, data organization is a conceptual problem, not a technological one, and throwing more features at it doesn't solve it.
These kinds of systems are measured by false positive and false negative rates. A 40% false negative rate with a 0.01% false positive rate would be quite useful for law enforcement: you catch more than half the fugitives walking past the camera (when currently you catch none), and you only inconvenience 1:10000 travelers. A 40% false negative rate with a 10% false positive rate would be unusable because security would spend way too much time trying to check whether every 10th traveler is a fugitive.
My experience has been similar to yours. Digital video is a pain to deal with on any platform and I was hoping OS X would help, but it didn't. iMovie was too limited to be useful and required far too much clicking around to get anything done and I couldn't get standard UNIX tools like dvgrab to work. And iMovie seemed to want to turn everything into some oddball formats.
I just ended up installing Linux--it gives me far more video software, more powerful video software, and you can't beat the price.
iMovie is for consumers trying to deal with simple home video at default settings. It's really good at that, but not much else. And I found OS X overall to be a disappointment. It looks great, though.
because so-called "web standards" are specifications of policy, not technical merit or need.
I agree that many W3C standards are not well designed and are often for things nobody wants. But Microsoft is a participant in the W3C. That means Microsoft is partly responsible for the bloat and redundancy of those standards.
If Microsoft realizes the problems with W3C standards, they should (and could) throw their weight around to change things. For Microsoft to encourage the development of bad standards on the part of the W3C and then not implement it themselves amounts to sabotage.
As to your assertion that the Open Source system management tools are good, compare them to enterprise functionality as offered by some of the proprietary companies. The bottom line is delivered by a flexible integrated system where a few good man can reliably MANAGE many servers in a WAN network with thousands of people working in many locations.
And people did this long before Tivoli or Novell were around.
IBM's Tivoli uses bash, perl in a major way.
Tivoli's value is in "standardization" (to the degree that a proprietary set of scripts can be a standard) and documentation; functionally, it seems to offer little you don't get out of the box with any decent Linux distribution.
As far as I am aware there are great OSS tools but the integration required is not there (yet).
The OSS tools for system management work great together; there isn't going to be any more "integration" because there is no more integration needed.
What you want is a benign dictator telling you exactly which combination of tools to pick and choose. But OSS won't get that because people who use OSS don't want it. If you do, go pay IBM or Novell. But that does not make their tools functionally or technically better.
By the way, GUI tools can be very effective a picture paints a thousand words, certainly in the hands of a few good man.
You're confusing visualization and GUIs. Visualization is very useful, and there are plenty of OSS tools available for that. GUIs are means of issuing commands with a combination of the mouse and keyboard, and they are not very effective for administering large systems.
That doesn't sound that different from existing piezo-electric motors like this one.
When Linux is to be ready for the desktop, it must be easy to adjust 20.000 systems with patches and/or policy changes.
Fortunately, that is actually Linux's strength. It is Microsoft Windows that fails badly in the area of managing large numbers of installations easily.
As Linux exists in its distributions, only the distribution with the best implemented system management tools will survive in a corporate setting.
If by "system management tools" you mean clones of the GUI tools that Microsoft ships, it's not going to happen (well, some confused company may try to clone it, but it won't catch on). Microsoft's system management tools are using the wrong approach. For managing lots of machines, scripting, text-based interfaces, and the command line are the only way to go, and Linux is lightyears ahead of Windows there.
Your story that Wine changed from LGPL to GPL is bogus. Wine is under the LGPL license today (see here). And the LGPL license is all that is needed to prevent people from "taking without giving back".
Putting Wine under the GPL would make it seriously less useful because one of the main purposes of Wine is to let people move commercial Windows applications to Linux, and that may involve linking with it.
For creating mobile applications, scripting represents Park's secret weapon. "It sounds like an odd thing to do on small wireless devices, but I actually use a simple scripting engine," he says.
People have been using scripting on small devices forever. Perhaps people still remember Microsoft Basic running on the Apple II, a 48kbyte, 8bit machine? Forth and Basic have been two of the most popular interpreted languages. And, in fact, scripts often reduce size and memory usage of programs.
Oh, and in other news, the Pope is Catholic, and breathing air tends to keep you alive longer.
I think regulation is the wrong solution. A better solution is to hold companies responsible for security breaches.
Everybody keeps passing the buck: businesses blame the software company, software companies blame hackers, and ultimately the taxpayer and customer ends up paying for the incompetence and poor choices of the businesses.
Businesses should be primarily responsible for the harm that arises from the software they choose. If they want to pass on the risk of their choice to the software company, that should require an explicit contractual agreement.
And the government should get out of trying to regulate how software is written, and the government should get out of trying to catch "hackers".
AMTP seems like a solution in search of a problem. Unless most of the Internet switches, there will still be open relays. Spammers that don't use open relays and operate through existing ISPs will continue to be able to do so.
Also, to accomplish what AMTP apparently wants to accomplish, it's not necessary to involve a central, costly certificate authority--anybody who wants to talk safely to sites they know and trust can exchange keys with them.
AMTP looks like it's mostly going to be a boon to the bottom line of certificate authorities, and an erosion of privacy for "the little guy". I don't believe it will make a big dent in spam.
We're geeks; it's because we can, and we'll do it with geek style while we're at it.
"Geek style" means using one's ingenuity to create things, not spending lots of money on expensive toys.
Perhaps, perhaps not. There doesn't seem to be a lot of spam on IRC either. In fact, because of instant feedback from users, killing IM spam (collaboratively) would seem to be considerably easier than killing E-mail spam.
Furthermore, even if centralization is the reason for less spam, handing that level of control to a few big companies in order to avoid spam seems like a bad tradeoff. We have had large, centralized E-mail systems in the past and they were stifling and expensive.
Windows upgrades: Insert CD.
If you want a simple upgrade for Linux, you can wait for the RedHat CD or for the new kernel package to make it into Debian/Stable.
However, you have to see the whole idea of needing a step-by-step upgrade guide with screen shots, etc is exactly why Bill still owns huge percentages of the market.
No, the reason why Bill still owns huge percentages of the market is because there are morons like you around. You badmouth Linux because you choose to install pre-release versions of the kernel and then can't deal with the consequences of your own choices.
If you have a need to look at 3D images on the computer regularly, just learn to cross your eyes; it doesn't take long. Here
">Here is one of many howto's.
While it's a cute novelty, any laptop-sized 3D display is going to be somewhat disappointing in the long run. Essentially, you get roughly the same 3D effect as you would by arranging objects inside a shoebox. Furthermore, objects will seem to move relative to one another as you move your head, which is decidedly unnatural and no good for games anyway.
"Running an (IM) network is expensive," said Lisa Gurry, group product manager for MSN at Microsoft.
Well, so why do they create such a centralized network in the first place? Microsoft doesn't run a centralized mailer for every Microsoft software user, so why should they run a centralized IM server for everybody?
The centralized IM infrastructure is an aberration. The sooner companies like Microsoft and AOL give up their stranglehold and the sooner it gets replaced with a distributed system based on open protocols (kind of like IRC), the better.
But the fact is that the IM providers actually like the control. Each of them hopes that they'll own it all sooner or later, kind of like the phone company used to be.
So, Microsoft, if you don't like the expense of running Microsoft IM services, just don't, and put client and server software based on open protocols into Windows. Problem solved, expense gone.
You can make the same argument for floating point instructions at all 10 years ago
We already knew ten years ago that built-in floating point support was good for desktop machines because pretty much all architectures other than x86 had them. x86 just finally caught up with the rest of the world.
Vector processors, on the other hand, have been around for decades and, if anything, they have become less popular. That's because most CPU vendors have figured out how to let people achieve the same kind of performance with regular instruction sets.
I think 5 years from now we'll see tons of code that won't run on the G3 that takes advantage of altivec and in terms of custom code lots exists today.
I think 5 years from now, IBM will either have figured out how to get full speed out of their FPUs without special AltiVec instructions, or the whole PPC architecture will end up in the dustbin of history.
As for the $2k comparison, I'd like to see where you get an under $1000 machine with: PCI-X, high end video, DVD-R, AGP 8X....
Who cares? We are talking about compute clusters; the machines don't need DVD-R or high-end video. The fact that the G5s only come in gold-plated, fashionable Apple desktop boxes is another problem with them for scientific computing.
it offers possibilities to take advantage of and adapt to the available hardware. (server knows if the screen is only a 4" PDA screen, or a 30" 3D display - the application shouldn't have to know these things)
But the application has to know--scaling applications down to a PDA screen requires some hard choices to be made in terms of what is displayed. Merely scaling down the display won't help, and the server simply doesn't know enough about the application to do it automatically
- it's bandwith friendly if you're only transferring high-level info to/from the servers.
That is far from clear. Think of a grid bound to a large database table--does transferring all that data make sense? I don't think so. Not even on demand. In fact, even X11 may be too high-level in terms of bandwidth: VNC actually is often better in terms of bandwidth (but it is too low-level to be useful as a replacement for X11).
- you don't get different apps using different policies on the same server.
You get that on Windows and OS X. And Berlin were to catch on, people would port FLTK, Swing, wxWindows, and all those other toolkits to it as well.
The X11/toolkit/UI layering is completely standard and analogous to GDI/MFC/Explorer and Quartz/Cocoa/Aqua. The only difference is that X11 is well-designed and mature enough that there are, in fact, multiple commonly used toolkits and that those toolkits can even somewhat interoperate. That's a good thing.
Neither Windows nor MacOS got support for anything close to the PostScript imaging model until fairly recently, and very few applications take advantage of it.
And did the Windows or MacOS GUIs get significant functional changes as a result? Not really: it's still the same old menus, the same old dialog boxes, the same old title bars, etc. They just look a little prettier, and transparency and fading give people some slight additional visual cues. Nice, but not exactly a revolution.
Perhaps a tad pedantic, but X11 is the protocol and hasn't evolved. XFree is, what I think, you are referring to.
I view the Render extension as part of the X11 protocol family now, and Cairo as a portable client-library for it. So, in that sense, I do view this as a part of X11 now, not just some XFree86-specific hack. I believe some commercial vendors of X11 server implementations have already been tracking Render. I would hope that HP, Sun, and IBM will start supporting Render quickly.
Maybe I had better just stay completely away from DotGNU. Stick with Apache and various Java tools instead.
.NET--the one thing all of them seem to agree on is that they want to entangle users in a web of intellectual property. Well, actually there is another thing that they seem to agree on: all of them want to run your code in a bloated runtime that's slow to start up. Mono seems to have the most straightforward license of the bunch, but even Mono is at risk of patent infringement claims from Microsoft.
The Apache license is fine, but Java doesn't look like a big win to me. While Sun keeps proclaiming that the platform is open, in reality, large parts of the platform only exist as Sun proprietary code. Even if someone managed to reimplement them, Sun controls the compatibility tests and they can shoot down any implementation they don't like.
At this point, I'd not get involved with any of Java, PNET, or
Just wait for the dust to settle and for Sun and Microsoft to come to their senses with their outrageous intellectual property claims. Until then, you have plenty of other options--there is nothing technically new in any of those platforms.
Altivec. Certain types of vector code when compiled to only run on a G4 outperform a pentium even at 3+x the ghz range (i.e. a 800 mhz G4 beating a 3ghz PIV).
If that is true, then the G4 and G5 are not very good engineering tradeoffs. Think about it: if the FPUs can only be kept busy by writing very specialized code that 99% of the applications aren't using, then too silicon has been devoted to the FPU relative to the rest of the processor.
And, of course, it doesn't even matter whether some processor outperforms another, what matters is bang-for-the-buck. A single processor G5 machine starts at $2000, more than twice of what you pay for a P4 running at 3GHz.