According to its official site, Helios used both regenerative and non-regenerative fuel cells. This uses only regenerative power sources (solar charged batteries).
Linux has almost no penetration desktop, non-server applications. Evidence? Coming right up. Note Google's usage breakdown.
Maybe, maybe not. Google numbers are likely biased strongly towards home users. But Linux is moving onto corporat desktops first. Home users will be the last to adopt it.
Why do geeks take pride on how austere a user interface they can tolerate?
I dunno--why do Windows and Mac users take pride in how many useless and tedious dialog boxes, buttons, and mouse clicks they can tolerate?
If Gates wanted to, he could by up every Linux company with pocket change
I hope he does because it would be wonderful for open source--it would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars of donations to the open source community. After those companies have gotten bought out, their owners can turn around right away and start new open source companies.
Free is pretty good, but Sun seems to be making money off of "reasonably priced."
Sun is making money? Off their low end? I don't think so. When they are making money, which seems rare enough these days, it's probably off their high-end servers.
How many fanboys said the Opteron would crush the G5? It didn't so,
Sure it does: the Opteron is slightly faster and systems based on it are a lot cheaper.
It is amazing how bent out of shape PC users get when it is merely suggested that Mac could possibly be as fast as a PC.
Does the Macintosh GUI impair the ability of Apple users to read? I said the G5 is about as fast as the Opteron.
What is becoming clear from all of the comparisons to the G5 that I've seen is that Macs are extremely competitive again, and no platform mops the floor with the other.
"Competitive" implies good price/performance ratio. G5-based systems still don't have that. But at least you can buy a fast Mac at some price. That's already an improvement over last year, when even the fastest Mac was way behind x86.
Seek therapy NOW! Because if you're pissed now, just wait until the 980 is out at 3+ GHz in 2004 at ~40% better performance (reportedly) at the same clock speed as the 970.
I'm not "pissed" at all that the PPC gets faster; maybe eventually PPC-based systems will even come out at competitive prices. Maybe eventually we'll even see attractively priced generic boxes that don't make me pay for an operating system I don't need.
Right now, a dual G5 at 2GHz is too expensive compared to a comparable dual Opteron, not to mention that you can't even get the G5 in a 1U enclosure.
Re:Let the conspiracy theories begin...
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So if you want to have an open source business "selling software", then tough, you can't.
Of course, you can't. You never could. Open source thrived for decades without that "business model" and it will continue to thrive long after those nuts are gone.
The parent's point is that this is not an open source busines model. Pretty much any commercial company uses open source tools these days. They may even base their entire development process around them, because as you say they are cheaper (and often better).
And my point is that the parent is wrong: it is a business model, or rather part of it. If you are an ISP or Internet services company, the use of Linux or BSD (as opposed to Windows) may make all the difference between profitability and bankruptcy; open source software is an integral part of your business model, and you will be willing to invest in improving it if that helps you stay alive.
And it is those commercial users that pay their developers to fix bugs and add features. And a small fraction of those get back into the open source software, enough to make the whole thing work.
The least hassle in my experience is analog video to DV "bridges". You plug them into your computer's FireWire port. They make analog video look like it comes from a digital camcorder. There are several manufacturers and they all output standard digital video that Linux, Windows, and Macintosh understand. It's a format that video editors generally understand. It's not as highly compressed as MPEG2, which may be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on your application.
We've had benchmarks for months, actually meaningful benchmarks. They show that the G5 is a nice, competitive chip, but it's merely keeping up with AMD performance-wise. And G5 systems are behind Opteron systems in terms of bang-for-the-buck and features.
If you check the published SPEC benchmarks for the Opteron 148 against Apple's claimed SPEC results for the G5, you'll see that a dual G5 is not faster than the Opteron. It is pretty telling, incidentally, that Apple still has not actually submitted official SPEC results for the G5's--they really don't seem comfortable with the comparison on a real benchmark.
Of course, a dual Opteron will have other advantages for many users: you can get it in 1U rack mounts, it runs a lot more application software, and it's cheaper.
Running five application programs does not constitute a meaningful benchmark of the CPU. We don't know how those applications are written, what CPUs they are compiled for, what compilers they used, etc. Most likely, none of those applications have been tuned for Opteron, wherease they have received extensive tuning for PPC and AltiVec over the years. The differences may be something as trivial as cache conflicts. All those "benchmarks" tell you is that if you must run the current version of Bryce and AfterEffects, you may get more bang (but not necessarily more bang-for-the-buck) out of a G5 for the time being.
Re:Let the conspiracy theories begin...
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That says a lot about the "open source" business model, doesn't it?
There are countless open source business models. What this says is that this particular open source business model sucked. Just about anybody could have told him that, and apparently just about anybody did.
Now the nuts can come out of the virtual woodwork and start screeching about the one true religion of open source, but he fact is that not one in a hundred thousand of them has successfully started a major corporation that develops and sells open source software. So if you want to claim that all of those venture capitalists, along with Eric Sink, the developer of Abiword and the founder of SourceGear, are wrong, please include your business credentials when you reply to this.
The VCs were quite right about Sink's business model. But that doesn't mean that open source is doomed. Most open source development happens as part of day-to-day computer jobs. Evidently, that's working out both for the employees and for the employers. That is the real open source business model, and it doesn't involve VCs or get-rich-quick schemes. It just involves getting work done more cheaply than using commercial tools.
You are quite right that current JVM implementations will outperform CLR implementations on comparable code. That's not surprising since JVMs are far more mature.
But that is only true for comparable code. If you write C# code using value classes and do an idiomatic translation into Java, the Java code will run very slowly because you cannot express something like a value class efficiently in Java. It doesn't matter how good the Java JIT is, it just can't optimize things that the JVM doesn't let programmers write down.
And the advantage that JVM JITs have on the more limited functionality they offer is likely short-lived: give CLR implementations another year and they will equal the JVM on their common subset of instructions, and they will still have the advantage of their additional primitives.
Note that Sun is not talking about extending the JVM anyway; this sounds like it's going to be a new and incompatible virtual machine from Sun.
The CLR is not an open standard. It is run by Microsoft. Parts ofr the C# language are open but not everything.
The entire C# language and runtime are standardized as ECMA documents. The standardization process is run by ECMA, not Microsoft. The intellectual property rules for ECMA standards are defined by ECMA and are clear.
Until then a window's only runtime is definitely not an open standard.
ECMA C# is a standard; a standard is a document--it doesn't run on anything nor will it ever run on anything. Implementations of ECMA C# may run on many platforms; they already run on Linux, OS X, and Windows (perhaps others).
And if it is no more risk than the others, I'll stick with the one that does run on all those paltforms...
If by "the one" you mean "Java", you are going the wrong direction. Unlike C#, Java really does not have an open standard. The Java specifications are not freely redistributable or open and the Java standardization is run by a private consortium rather than a recognized standards body.
You may not like that ECMA C# came from Microsoft. But the legal and political situation surrounding Sun Java is worse in pretty much every respect. If you worry about C# you have to worry about Java even more.
But what better way to cut down on development cost and time while keeping all the rights to the code?
I can think of lots of better ways.
And replace GPL code with your own later, say, with service pack 1, when the product is already deployed three weeks before the competition could do it, when you already have the money, paid your debts and can take your time to "clean up" your code.
Commercial software development doesn't usually work out that way. If a company can casually replace GPL'ed code with something proprietary by SP1, good for them: they probably didn't need the GPL'ed code in the first place.
And if anything goes wrong - it's the programmers' fault, you never knew it, they get fired and your hands are clean.
If an employee incorporates GPL'ed code into a product, the company is responsible. If management claims they didn't know it just means that management violated their duty to know what's going on. Firing the employee will not shield the company from liability.
Of course if the source was to be ever revealed, that is some serious risk, but if the company plans to keep it always secret - why not?
Because GPL violations are not too hard to detect even without source code. And even if they were hard to detect, any company that does this would be at serious risk from a disgruntled employee. What better way to get back at your company than to get them in trouble for massive copyright violations of open source projects? Not only will their products be in jeopardy, they'll also be widely hated.
Obviously, a sufficient fraction of those companies are "giving back" for there to exist a lively and productive open source community. And even "mere users" are useful for open source projects: they make feature requests and report bugs.
Your definition of a "scripting" language is moot. Java is no more or less a "scripting" language than Python. C# no more or less than Ruby.
Java and C# are statically typed languages, designed to allow type-safe, efficient separate compilation. Python is a dynamically typed language with a flexible but inefficient object model. Sometimes, the distinctions between scripting and non-scripting programming languages are blurry, but in the case of Java and Python, there is little question which is which.
You also bring up C... lest we forget, C is one of the thinnest layers on top of assembly that you can create.
That may have been true for the PDP-11 and K&R C, it is wrong for modern machines and ANSI C: ANSI C semantics and machine semantics have become very different.
Lets talk about real language features, not this psuedo-distinction which is used to dismiss languages with more peasant roots than those you might prefer.
Yes, let's: Parrot is designed for the execution of dynamically typed code with a highly dynamic object model. Parrot seems to have no features to indicate properties like absence of aliasing, vectorization, detailed control of floating point computations, or value classes. Parrot will be a nice VM for many applications, but high performance numerical computing doesn't look like it's going to be one of them (at least not in the Fortran sense; of course, Parrot will be suitable for Matlab-like scripting and interaction).
But your previous note made it sound like that level was not very high: you referred to them as "benign" and "lumbering"!
I referred to the companies (IBM and AT&T) as being "benign" and "lumbering" today, not their research labs. Microsoft Corporation will inevitably go down the same path.
As for the research labs, IBM research is still excellent and going strong, while AT&T's research labs have pretty much disintegrated.
The day when it matter if Microsoft Research 'proves itself' to some Penguin-named pundit on Slashdot will never come.
Silly you. They don't have to prove themselves to me, they have to prove themselves to history.
What a crock. Any evidence, even anecdotal, to back this up?
Are you kidding? It's elementary economics: governments exist for creating public goods. In fact, it's probably the only thing they are really good for.
And in practice, how do you think technologies like the Internet were developed? Through public financing. Same for the space program, most medical advances, and most of the rest of science.
It's not "wrong" for Sun to do this. But neither is anybody obligated to use it or support Sun in this effort. Given Sun's history with Java, any open source developer supporting Sun in this effort would be a fool in my opinion.
Mono guys seem to have a lot of plans.
Yes, and they are delivering. Eclipse, for example, already runs under Mono. The Mono project seems technically far more effective and quick than Sun's Java platfom team.
How many times does a company have to be convicted of anti-trust behavior before one stops trusting them?
I wouldn't trust Microsoft and I'm not asking anybody else to trust Microsoft. We don't have to trust Microsoft on the CLR because it's an ECMA standard. That doesn't make the CLR completely risk-free--Microsoft or anybody else might still claim patents even if that violates their ECMA agreements--but it reduces the risk to that of any other open standard; there is no a priori reason to assume that C# or the CLR are encumbered by anything.
Furthermore, Microsoft's violations are anti-trust violations, not lies related to standardization. Sun misdeeds, on the other hand, are directly relevant: Sun claimed they would put Java through a standardization process and then pulled out, twice. That means we won't have to guess about whether Sun is capable or willing to lie about whether a project they do will become a public, open standard: they have already lied about it once.
Would you, as a Microsoft competitor, bank your new and emerging technologies on standards that Microsoft has copyrights and patents on?
Microsoft claims a patent on the.NET APIs as a whole. But what "copyrights and patents" does Microsoft have on ECMA C#/CLR? You can get the ECMA C#/CLR standards from ECMA with no strings from Microsoft.
On the other hand, you cannot obtain Java specifications without agreeing to licensing agreements with Sun or the JCP organization, and Sun claims both copyrights and patents on even core aspects of Java, including the JVM. And we don't have to guess what Sun will do because they have already done it: they claimed they would make Java an open standard and then they withdrew not from one, but from two standardization processes.
You don't trust Sun, so you're recommending... Microsoft???? Ohh-kayyy..., next post please.
The difference is that with the CLR, I don't have to trust Microsoft: it already is an open standard. That doesn't mean it's risk-free, but it means it's no more risky than many other standards.
All we have for this new IL is Sun's promises to make it an "open" standard. Even without Sun's history on Java, that would be much weaker.
I don't see how Sun is even relevant or why it matters who they "invite". They had their chance with Java and they blew it. I doubt the numerical community is going to give them another chance after what they have been through with Sun over the last decade.
I suspect the next intermediate language for high-performance numerical computing is either going to be the CLR, some extension of the CLR, or something entirely different, developed in academia.
Parrot looks like it will be a nice intermediate language for languages like Python, Perl, and Java. But Parrot lack the right primitives for an intermediate language for high-performance numerical computing.
Right now the only widely used intermediate language that comes close to being suitable for high-performance numerical computing is Microsoft's CLR (JVM actually still has better implementations, but it lacks important primitives like value classes).
The effort is part of a government-sponsored program under which the three companies are competing to design a petascale-class computer by 2010.
We already have such a runtime: it's called "CLR". The CLR is roughly like the JVM but with features required for high performance computing added (foremost, value classes).
Sun wants the so-called Portable Intermediate Language and Run-Time Environment to become an open industry standard.
I hope people won't fall for that again. Sun promised that Java would be an "open industry standard", but they withdrew from two open standards institutions and then turned Java over to a privately run consortium, with specifications only available under restrictive licenses.
Sun's goal is to apply its expertise in Java to defining an architecture-independent, low-level software standard - like Java bytecodes - that a language could present to any computer's run-time environment.
Sun's "expertise" in this area is not a recommendation: the JVM has a number of serious design problems (e.g., conformant array types, arithmetic requirements, lack of multidimensional arrays) that attest to Sun's lack of expertise and competence in this area.
What this amounts to is Sun conceding that Java simply isn't suitable as a high-performance numerical platform and that it will never get fixed (another broken promise from Sun). But because the CLR actually has many of the features needed for a high-performance numerical platform, Sun is worried about their marketshare.
The question for potential users is: why wait until 2010 when the CLR is already here? And why trust Sun after they have disappointed the community so thoroughly, both in terms of broken promises on an open Java standard and in terms of technology?
Maybe we will be using a portable high-performance runtime other than the CLR by 2010, but I sure hope Sun will have nothing to do with it. (In fact, I think there is a good chance Sun won't even be around then anymore.)
How is me pointing out that the article speaks of a published paper insult MSR?
It's patronizing. MSR doesn't have just one journal publication to their credit, they have had a sustained output of quality publications over years. There shouldn't be any question in anybody's mind whether MSR is an innovative and high-quality research lab: it clearly is. They are among the top-rated research labs in computer science, both in general and in specific areas.
I was hoping to FP to dispel the people who are naturally going to post out how MSFT is not innovative.
What you are missing is that whether MSR publishes nice papers or not has nothing to do with whether Microsoft "is innovative", i.e., whether the company produces innovative products. MSR is innovative, but Microsoft products are not. That disconnect is common among large companies and their research labs.
You seem to be agreeing with me while arguing against my post!!!
You are engaging in the usual confusion between research labs and corporate products. The only thing I can't tell is whether it's out of ignorance or whether you are doing it deliberately (PR departments often like to use releases about interesting research results to cover up inadequacies in a company's product line).
And we all know that nothing good came out of AT&T, Bell Labs, or IBM.....
Well, I for one, know that plenty of good things came out of those labs, which is why I mentioned them. It remains to be seen whether MSR will be as good as those labs. So far, MSR hasn't proven themselves.
I'd say that these are fair trades for what you say is monopoly.
"What I say?" You make it sound like I'm passing judgement based on some kind of silly assumptions. AT&T was a monopoly by design. IBM was under investigation for anti-trust violations for decades and finally settled, accepting close scrutiny and regulation of their business practices.
Not all monopoly is bad.
What's a good monopoly and what's a bad monopoly is decided by governments and voters. Funding for scientific research rarely is a consideration (although it may have some PR value).
As a public good, research is arguably best financed by a monopoly designed for supporting public goods: the government itself. So, rather than create an inefficient telecommunications giant and give tax breaks to the biggest corporations for research, put that money into publicly funded research. Publicly funded research is still by far the most efficient, stable, and productive way of advancing the sciences.
but I don't think it's fair to equate AT&T and IBM's research arms in this fashion. AT&T's research has declined considerably in recent years as its (pseudo-)monopoly in long distance has dried up,
I didn't "equate" them. I pointed out that it will take decades to determine whether MSR is mainly a short-lived accumulation of good researchers, or whether they will be able to rise to the same level of achievement as Bell Labs and IBM research.
Slashdot Mirror
According to its official site, Helios used both regenerative and non-regenerative fuel cells. This uses only regenerative power sources (solar charged batteries).
Linux has almost no penetration desktop, non-server applications. Evidence? Coming right up. Note Google's usage breakdown.
Maybe, maybe not. Google numbers are likely biased strongly towards home users. But Linux is moving onto corporat desktops first. Home users will be the last to adopt it.
Why do geeks take pride on how austere a user interface they can tolerate?
I dunno--why do Windows and Mac users take pride in how many useless and tedious dialog boxes, buttons, and mouse clicks they can tolerate?
If Gates wanted to, he could by up every Linux company with pocket change
I hope he does because it would be wonderful for open source--it would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars of donations to the open source community. After those companies have gotten bought out, their owners can turn around right away and start new open source companies.
Free is pretty good, but Sun seems to be making money off of "reasonably priced."
Sun is making money? Off their low end? I don't think so. When they are making money, which seems rare enough these days, it's probably off their high-end servers.
How many fanboys said the Opteron would crush the G5? It didn't so,
Sure it does: the Opteron is slightly faster and systems based on it are a lot cheaper.
It is amazing how bent out of shape PC users get when it is merely suggested that Mac could possibly be as fast as a PC.
Does the Macintosh GUI impair the ability of Apple users to read? I said the G5 is about as fast as the Opteron.
What is becoming clear from all of the comparisons to the G5 that I've seen is that Macs are extremely competitive again, and no platform mops the floor with the other.
"Competitive" implies good price/performance ratio. G5-based systems still don't have that. But at least you can buy a fast Mac at some price. That's already an improvement over last year, when even the fastest Mac was way behind x86.
Seek therapy NOW! Because if you're pissed now, just wait until the 980 is out at 3+ GHz in 2004 at ~40% better performance (reportedly) at the same clock speed as the 970.
I'm not "pissed" at all that the PPC gets faster; maybe eventually PPC-based systems will even come out at competitive prices. Maybe eventually we'll even see attractively priced generic boxes that don't make me pay for an operating system I don't need.
Right now, a dual G5 at 2GHz is too expensive compared to a comparable dual Opteron, not to mention that you can't even get the G5 in a 1U enclosure.
So if you want to have an open source business "selling software", then tough, you can't.
Of course, you can't. You never could. Open source thrived for decades without that "business model" and it will continue to thrive long after those nuts are gone.
The parent's point is that this is not an open source busines model. Pretty much any commercial company uses open source tools these days. They may even base their entire development process around them, because as you say they are cheaper (and often better).
And my point is that the parent is wrong: it is a business model, or rather part of it. If you are an ISP or Internet services company, the use of Linux or BSD (as opposed to Windows) may make all the difference between profitability and bankruptcy; open source software is an integral part of your business model, and you will be willing to invest in improving it if that helps you stay alive.
And it is those commercial users that pay their developers to fix bugs and add features. And a small fraction of those get back into the open source software, enough to make the whole thing work.
The least hassle in my experience is analog video to DV "bridges". You plug them into your computer's FireWire port. They make analog video look like it comes from a digital camcorder. There are several manufacturers and they all output standard digital video that Linux, Windows, and Macintosh understand. It's a format that video editors generally understand. It's not as highly compressed as MPEG2, which may be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on your application.
We've had benchmarks for months, actually meaningful benchmarks. They show that the G5 is a nice, competitive chip, but it's merely keeping up with AMD performance-wise. And G5 systems are behind Opteron systems in terms of bang-for-the-buck and features.
If you check the published SPEC benchmarks for the Opteron 148 against Apple's claimed SPEC results for the G5, you'll see that a dual G5 is not faster than the Opteron. It is pretty telling, incidentally, that Apple still has not actually submitted official SPEC results for the G5's--they really don't seem comfortable with the comparison on a real benchmark.
Of course, a dual Opteron will have other advantages for many users: you can get it in 1U rack mounts, it runs a lot more application software, and it's cheaper.
Running five application programs does not constitute a meaningful benchmark of the CPU. We don't know how those applications are written, what CPUs they are compiled for, what compilers they used, etc. Most likely, none of those applications have been tuned for Opteron, wherease they have received extensive tuning for PPC and AltiVec over the years. The differences may be something as trivial as cache conflicts. All those "benchmarks" tell you is that if you must run the current version of Bryce and AfterEffects, you may get more bang (but not necessarily more bang-for-the-buck) out of a G5 for the time being.
That says a lot about the "open source" business model, doesn't it?
There are countless open source business models. What this says is that this particular open source business model sucked. Just about anybody could have told him that, and apparently just about anybody did.
Now the nuts can come out of the virtual woodwork and start screeching about the one true religion of open source, but he fact is that not one in a hundred thousand of them has successfully started a major corporation that develops and sells open source software. So if you want to claim that all of those venture capitalists, along with Eric Sink, the developer of Abiword and the founder of SourceGear, are wrong, please include your business credentials when you reply to this.
The VCs were quite right about Sink's business model. But that doesn't mean that open source is doomed. Most open source development happens as part of day-to-day computer jobs. Evidently, that's working out both for the employees and for the employers. That is the real open source business model, and it doesn't involve VCs or get-rich-quick schemes. It just involves getting work done more cheaply than using commercial tools.
You are quite right that current JVM implementations will outperform CLR implementations on comparable code. That's not surprising since JVMs are far more mature.
But that is only true for comparable code. If you write C# code using value classes and do an idiomatic translation into Java, the Java code will run very slowly because you cannot express something like a value class efficiently in Java. It doesn't matter how good the Java JIT is, it just can't optimize things that the JVM doesn't let programmers write down.
And the advantage that JVM JITs have on the more limited functionality they offer is likely short-lived: give CLR implementations another year and they will equal the JVM on their common subset of instructions, and they will still have the advantage of their additional primitives.
Note that Sun is not talking about extending the JVM anyway; this sounds like it's going to be a new and incompatible virtual machine from Sun.
The CLR is not an open standard. It is run by Microsoft. Parts ofr the C# language are open but not everything.
The entire C# language and runtime are standardized as ECMA documents. The standardization process is run by ECMA, not Microsoft. The intellectual property rules for ECMA standards are defined by ECMA and are clear.
Until then a window's only runtime is definitely not an open standard.
ECMA C# is a standard; a standard is a document--it doesn't run on anything nor will it ever run on anything. Implementations of ECMA C# may run on many platforms; they already run on Linux, OS X, and Windows (perhaps others).
And if it is no more risk than the others, I'll stick with the one that does run on all those paltforms...
If by "the one" you mean "Java", you are going the wrong direction. Unlike C#, Java really does not have an open standard. The Java specifications are not freely redistributable or open and the Java standardization is run by a private consortium rather than a recognized standards body.
You may not like that ECMA C# came from Microsoft. But the legal and political situation surrounding Sun Java is worse in pretty much every respect. If you worry about C# you have to worry about Java even more.
But what better way to cut down on development cost and time while keeping all the rights to the code?
I can think of lots of better ways.
And replace GPL code with your own later, say, with service pack 1, when the product is already deployed three weeks before the competition could do it, when you already have the money, paid your debts and can take your time to "clean up" your code.
Commercial software development doesn't usually work out that way. If a company can casually replace GPL'ed code with something proprietary by SP1, good for them: they probably didn't need the GPL'ed code in the first place.
And if anything goes wrong - it's the programmers' fault, you never knew it, they get fired and your hands are clean.
If an employee incorporates GPL'ed code into a product, the company is responsible. If management claims they didn't know it just means that management violated their duty to know what's going on. Firing the employee will not shield the company from liability.
Of course if the source was to be ever revealed, that is some serious risk, but if the company plans to keep it always secret - why not?
Because GPL violations are not too hard to detect even without source code. And even if they were hard to detect, any company that does this would be at serious risk from a disgruntled employee. What better way to get back at your company than to get them in trouble for massive copyright violations of open source projects? Not only will their products be in jeopardy, they'll also be widely hated.
Obviously, a sufficient fraction of those companies are "giving back" for there to exist a lively and productive open source community. And even "mere users" are useful for open source projects: they make feature requests and report bugs.
Your definition of a "scripting" language is moot. Java is no more or less a "scripting" language than Python. C# no more or less than Ruby.
Java and C# are statically typed languages, designed to allow type-safe, efficient separate compilation. Python is a dynamically typed language with a flexible but inefficient object model. Sometimes, the distinctions between scripting and non-scripting programming languages are blurry, but in the case of Java and Python, there is little question which is which.
You also bring up C... lest we forget, C is one of the thinnest layers on top of assembly that you
can create.
That may have been true for the PDP-11 and K&R C, it is wrong for modern machines and ANSI C: ANSI C semantics and machine semantics have become very different.
Lets talk about real language features, not this psuedo-distinction which is used to dismiss languages with more peasant roots than those you might prefer.
Yes, let's: Parrot is designed for the execution of dynamically typed code with a highly dynamic object model. Parrot seems to have no features to indicate properties like absence of aliasing, vectorization, detailed control of floating point computations, or value classes. Parrot will be a nice VM for many applications, but high performance numerical computing doesn't look like it's going to be one of them (at least not in the Fortran sense; of course, Parrot will be suitable for Matlab-like scripting and interaction).
But your previous note made it sound like that level was not very high: you referred to them as "benign" and "lumbering"!
I referred to the companies (IBM and AT&T) as being "benign" and "lumbering" today, not their research labs. Microsoft Corporation will inevitably go down the same path.
As for the research labs, IBM research is still excellent and going strong, while AT&T's research labs have pretty much disintegrated.
The day when it matter if Microsoft Research 'proves itself' to some Penguin-named pundit on Slashdot will never come.
Silly you. They don't have to prove themselves to me, they have to prove themselves to history.
What a crock. Any evidence, even anecdotal, to back this up?
Are you kidding? It's elementary economics: governments exist for creating public goods. In fact, it's probably the only thing they are really good for.
And in practice, how do you think technologies like the Internet were developed? Through public financing. Same for the space program, most medical advances, and most of the rest of science.
And this is wrong... how???
.NET APIs as a whole. But what "copyrights and patents" does Microsoft have on ECMA C#/CLR? You can get the ECMA C#/CLR standards from ECMA with no strings from Microsoft.
It's not "wrong" for Sun to do this. But neither is anybody obligated to use it or support Sun in this effort. Given Sun's history with Java, any open source developer supporting Sun in this effort would be a fool in my opinion.
Mono guys seem to have a lot of plans.
Yes, and they are delivering. Eclipse, for example, already runs under Mono. The Mono project seems technically far more effective and quick than Sun's Java platfom team.
How many times does a company have to be convicted of anti-trust behavior before one stops trusting them?
I wouldn't trust Microsoft and I'm not asking anybody else to trust Microsoft. We don't have to trust Microsoft on the CLR because it's an ECMA standard. That doesn't make the CLR completely risk-free--Microsoft or anybody else might still claim patents even if that violates their ECMA agreements--but it reduces the risk to that of any other open standard; there is no a priori reason to assume that C# or the CLR are encumbered by anything.
Furthermore, Microsoft's violations are anti-trust violations, not lies related to standardization. Sun misdeeds, on the other hand, are directly relevant: Sun claimed they would put Java through a standardization process and then pulled out, twice. That means we won't have to guess about whether Sun is capable or willing to lie about whether a project they do will become a public, open standard: they have already lied about it once.
Would you, as a Microsoft competitor, bank your new and emerging technologies on standards that Microsoft has copyrights and patents on?
Microsoft claims a patent on the
On the other hand, you cannot obtain Java specifications without agreeing to licensing agreements with Sun or the JCP organization, and Sun claims both copyrights and patents on even core aspects of Java, including the JVM. And we don't have to guess what Sun will do because they have already done it: they claimed they would make Java an open standard and then they withdrew not from one, but from two standardization processes.
You don't trust Sun, so you're recommending... Microsoft???? Ohh-kayyy..., next post please.
The difference is that with the CLR, I don't have to trust Microsoft: it already is an open standard. That doesn't mean it's risk-free, but it means it's no more risky than many other standards.
All we have for this new IL is Sun's promises to make it an "open" standard. Even without Sun's history on Java, that would be much weaker.
I don't see how Sun is even relevant or why it matters who they "invite". They had their chance with Java and they blew it. I doubt the numerical community is going to give them another chance after what they have been through with Sun over the last decade.
I suspect the next intermediate language for high-performance numerical computing is either going to be the CLR, some extension of the CLR, or something entirely different, developed in academia.
Parrot looks like it will be a nice intermediate language for languages like Python, Perl, and Java. But Parrot lack the right primitives for an intermediate language for high-performance numerical computing.
Right now the only widely used intermediate language that comes close to being suitable for high-performance numerical computing is Microsoft's CLR (JVM actually still has better implementations, but it lacks important primitives like value classes).
The effort is part of a government-sponsored program under which the three companies are competing to design a petascale-class computer by 2010.
We already have such a runtime: it's called "CLR". The CLR is roughly like the JVM but with features required for high performance computing added (foremost, value classes).
Sun wants the so-called Portable Intermediate Language and Run-Time Environment to become an open industry standard.
I hope people won't fall for that again. Sun promised that Java would be an "open industry standard", but they withdrew from two open standards institutions and then turned Java over to a privately run consortium, with specifications only available under restrictive licenses.
Sun's goal is to apply its expertise in Java to defining an architecture-independent, low-level software standard - like Java bytecodes - that a language could present to any computer's run-time environment.
Sun's "expertise" in this area is not a recommendation: the JVM has a number of serious design problems (e.g., conformant array types, arithmetic requirements, lack of multidimensional arrays) that attest to Sun's lack of expertise and competence in this area.
What this amounts to is Sun conceding that Java simply isn't suitable as a high-performance numerical platform and that it will never get fixed (another broken promise from Sun). But because the CLR actually has many of the features needed for a high-performance numerical platform, Sun is worried about their marketshare.
The question for potential users is: why wait until 2010 when the CLR is already here? And why trust Sun after they have disappointed the community so thoroughly, both in terms of broken promises on an open Java standard and in terms of technology?
Maybe we will be using a portable high-performance runtime other than the CLR by 2010, but I sure hope Sun will have nothing to do with it. (In fact, I think there is a good chance Sun won't even be around then anymore.)
How is me pointing out that the article speaks of a published paper insult MSR?
It's patronizing. MSR doesn't have just one journal publication to their credit, they have had a sustained output of quality publications over years. There shouldn't be any question in anybody's mind whether MSR is an innovative and high-quality research lab: it clearly is. They are among the top-rated research labs in computer science, both in general and in specific areas.
I was hoping to FP to dispel the people who are naturally going to post out how MSFT is not innovative.
What you are missing is that whether MSR publishes nice papers or not has nothing to do with whether Microsoft "is innovative", i.e., whether the company produces innovative products. MSR is innovative, but Microsoft products are not. That disconnect is common among large companies and their research labs.
You seem to be agreeing with me while arguing against my post!!!
You are engaging in the usual confusion between research labs and corporate products. The only thing I can't tell is whether it's out of ignorance or whether you are doing it deliberately (PR departments often like to use releases about interesting research results to cover up inadequacies in a company's product line).
And we all know that nothing good came out of AT&T, Bell Labs, or IBM.....
Well, I for one, know that plenty of good things came out of those labs, which is why I mentioned them. It remains to be seen whether MSR will be as good as those labs. So far, MSR hasn't proven themselves.
I'd say that these are fair trades for what you say is monopoly.
"What I say?" You make it sound like I'm passing judgement based on some kind of silly assumptions. AT&T was a monopoly by design. IBM was under investigation for anti-trust violations for decades and finally settled, accepting close scrutiny and regulation of their business practices.
Not all monopoly is bad.
What's a good monopoly and what's a bad monopoly is decided by governments and voters. Funding for scientific research rarely is a consideration (although it may have some PR value).
As a public good, research is arguably best financed by a monopoly designed for supporting public goods: the government itself. So, rather than create an inefficient telecommunications giant and give tax breaks to the biggest corporations for research, put that money into publicly funded research. Publicly funded research is still by far the most efficient, stable, and productive way of advancing the sciences.
but I don't think it's fair to equate AT&T and IBM's research arms in this fashion. AT&T's research has declined considerably in recent years as its (pseudo-)monopoly in long distance has dried up,
I didn't "equate" them. I pointed out that it will take decades to determine whether MSR is mainly a short-lived accumulation of good researchers, or whether they will be able to rise to the same level of achievement as Bell Labs and IBM research.