IBM has done nothing more than give a fair warning here. Admittedly their language is vague, but its not IBM but the courts who would get to decide what constituted 'reasonably available' or a real change of an IP suit against them. In terms of the products concerned the chances of such a thing happening are almost nil.
Consider what would happen if a GPL'd product were found to violate some patent - the courts would insist of the deletion of all copies (or the payment of royalties) there as well.
There is a legal world beyond what it says in the license. Just because the GPL doesn't say anything about what would happen in the case of patent infringement doesn't mean it won't
Java is not just a language, it is also an object orriented virtual machine and a set of class libraries, that is why Sun refer to the whole thing as a 'technology'. A GCC frontend would (does) produce fine binaries, but the result is then not portable.
This is old new. The technology has worked with eMates for about four years now - the Newton range are very good at dealing with crappy power supplies, and the ARM7 based versions especially use very little power. Tom (?) Baliss (the guy who invented the radios) and someone from Apple knocked up the prototype at a conference when they first met.
Since then the main obstacle has been storing more power in the spring. It looks like they have not met with much success and are looking for more venture capital. I reckon we might one day see palmtops powered like this (and I would use one), but I doubt they'll ever hold enough power to power a laptop.
4 years is a godforsaken eternity. Four years ago Linux couldn't run X, let alone a desktop. I think you are wrong anyway - one side or the other (probably Gnome, but whoe knows ?) will end up attracting more mindshare and making a better product. At that point the other will die.
Uhm KDE had CORBA first and was voted #1 in LJ...
on
GNOME 1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
What KDE has in CVS and in beta is irrelevant. Neither KDE 1.0 or 1.1 use CORBA at all, and KOffice is unfit for human consumption as it stands.
I can make a software simulation of a 256-bit processor running at a simulated 1.2 terahertz, does us no good though, does it? MAKE the god damn thing, THEN post the public affairs fluff.
I'd be amazed if you could. They have an RTL level description of the CPU in Verilog. Thats the lowest level description that can be produced by hand, and specifies the datapaths and the degree of parallelism precisely. This is then fed into a synthesis/place/route flow to produce the GDSII that is sent to the fab. That process in largely automatic, although complex designs like CPUs require some manual intervention, and it can take a few hundred man years (six months or so for a CPU design team) to complete.
You may be able to write a high level C simulation of CPU at 1.2THz, but RTL Verilog is a whole different matter.
It makes perfect sense. You can have RTL and even transistor level layouts for a great architecture after spending a few million dollars (less if all your employees are Russian), but to manufacture it you need a modern fab, which costs many billions of dollars. Not everyone has access to that kind of capital, and that is no reflection on their skills as designers.
You're a C++ programmer aren't you ? They are the only half educated people who think reference counting is good. It has terribly unreliable performance characteristics, it breaks when confronted with circular references, and its demonstrably slower than real GC.
The man is partly right. Linux is not going to kill Microsoft. A combination of Linux, Java, a general movement towards open-source, and shifts in the market might do.
He is also right that noone should spend 50000 on Linux just to be on the bandwagon. It has to be part of a coherent strategy. You can say just the same for any OS. First find out what you want, then decide what to buy.
I find the total fanaticism of some Linux users both disturbing, and embarassing when I have to tell other people what I use.
I'm not a massive clearcase fan, but at least this might let us stop using the evil NT port. It really sucks.
Why are they porting to "Red Hat" Linux??
on
ClearCase for Linux
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· Score: 1
Because they have to know what system configurations they are supporting. That is why LSB is important. Its very naive of those who do not want a single company to dominate to oppose it.
Is there really a chance of a major binary vendor not following the LSB ? I mean, we're probably not talking about anything more than the file system standard and C library and kernel versions here. Either the author of the article is indulging in angst for no good reason, or he knows something I do not.
Richness my ****. They added methods to the java.* classes. I have Visual J++ on my machine here in front of me and I am looking at it right now... There are extra methods in the java.* hierarchy. Thats the problem, and it is *one* of the breaches of their license agreement with Sun (the others being not implementing the entire platform spec and modifying the core language).
The Vaporware Public License AOL conspiracy
on
New Mozilla License
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· Score: 1
You know this really isn't funny. Someone was telling me the other day how annoying they find free software advocates. When I read paranoid rantings like this directed at people who have not only done you no harm, but done their best to do the right thing, I can see why.
Since when do intelligent agents rip apart HTML documents ? Come to think of it, what does the reviewer think intelligent agents are ?
My experience is that 'agent' tends to refer to programs given an 'AI-type' task by a user, which they then perform, possibly by moving themselves over the network.
I think the whole idea is a bit naff - thats probably why it is hard to define, but I certianly don't think code examples in C++ or Perl are a good idea. They are hard to read, hard to translate into other languages and non-portable.
So if you want to read MEEPT being an ****, go ahead and read at -100 or whatever. Personally I have not desire to have some 14-year-old's ego thrust in my face. The scoring system/. uses is a good way of controling discussion without actually censoring them. The only thing Rob could do which he does not is give an idea of what will end up at different scoring levels.
java innovation blocked, this is the result
on
Microsoft's COOL
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· Score: 1
Sun got the court to rewrite Microsoft's Java contract (read the contract if you don't believe me). The result is that Microsoft cannot innovate in the Java space. So what are they to do? Invent a new language, that's what.
I've read the contract I disagree with you. In fact I cannot see how you can support Microsoft, unless you are just a troll. They both omitted parts of the platform, and added methods to java.* classes. They are both forbidden by the contract. They claim the result passed the compatibility tests. I have not seen those, so I don't know, but if it did the tests were wrong, and they were still in breach of the contract.
You people bitch and moan about a lack of innovation from Microsoft. But when they try to innovate, you bitch and moan again. You cannot have it both ways.
I do not care whether they innovate or not. They're historically very bad at it, anyway. The 'innovation' in this case is just a gratuitout attempt to introduce incompatible versions of a standard, and then lure people away from the real standard to the incompatible version. If you read the halloween document, they admit to doing as much in other cases.
I do not have any conclusive refutation for the conclusions (that Linux will die of instability, be embraced-and-extended by MS, or problems increasing market share), but I can pick a hell of a lot of holes in Todd Lewis' reasoning.
Firstly it is a more-or-less established fact that the OS market is not friction-free. Any OS provider experiences increasing returns as support from hardware OEMs and ISVs comes on line. This is roughly were Linux is now.
Secondly he seems to be comparing apples with oranges in trying to calculate the defect density. He says Linux has only 1.2million lines of code. This is the figure for the kernel. But he takes the defect rate for the *entire*system* including the bundled utilties, and compares it to the (probably correctly calculated) defect density for some (unnamed) commercial Unix. He goes on to say that all one-off figures are suspect, but supposes that this somehow casts doubt on Linux' reliability.
His list of features missing from Linux is truly pathetic. Linux (or rather XFree86) has video card support second only to Windows 98, and anyway this is an irrelevance on a server platform. Same goes for productivity software. Show me a wireless LAN worth using and I will believe the last point. Hw goes on to say that the addition of these feature will destabilise the system. How, exactly ? These are pifflingly small additions compared with the work already done.
He goes on to make some dubious comparisons between the Linux and Apache core team sizes and those of the competing teams in Microsoft. He does not seem to know that there is no general correlation between team size and productivity or stability of the resulting software, and willfully ignores the fact that the core teams are only a small part of the development effort and an even smaller part of the debugging effort.
He quotes the suspect statistics from the halloween document showing a decline in mail list traffic on the Mozilla groups (proves nothing), and the equally suspect statistic that IIS is faster than Apache (yes, but only on Win32, beyond 12 users or so any Linux platfrom running apache thrashes IIS on NT into the ground).
He believes that Linux is 'just Unix' and Unix is losing market share to NT. I think this misses the salient point. People want to use Intel hardware because it is cheap - they very much do not want to use MS operating systems. Linux runs better on Intel hardware than any other OS - therefore it is primarily competing with NT as a low cost OS, not with Unix as a Unix.
Finally he seems to beleive that Linux is vulnerable to embrace and extend, but he does not say how. Any attempt by Microsoft or anyone else to do so would face onrunning competition from the open source community and an obligation to release any modifications to the core system. That would make Linux a harder target to beat than, say, Netscape. Phew, that was long...
It seems to me that the only leg Nintendo has to stand on is the idea that these guys must have bypassed its security chip. It seems to me that this is a pathetic excuse to drag this though the courts - or am I missing something ? would it really be necessary to bypass the security ? In general emulators can be written with the same information game and compiler writers would use.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM has done nothing more than give a fair warning here. Admittedly their language is vague, but its not IBM but the courts who would get to decide what constituted 'reasonably available' or a real change of an IP suit against them. In terms of the products concerned the chances of such a thing happening are almost nil.
Consider what would happen if a GPL'd product were found to violate some patent - the courts would insist of the deletion of all copies (or the payment of royalties) there as well.
There is a legal world beyond what it says in the license. Just because the GPL doesn't say anything about what would happen in the case of patent infringement doesn't mean it won't
Java is not just a language, it is also an
object orriented virtual machine and a set of
class libraries, that is why Sun refer to the
whole thing as a 'technology'. A GCC frontend
would (does) produce fine binaries, but the
result is then not portable.
This is old new. The technology has worked with eMates for about four years now - the Newton range are very good at dealing with crappy power supplies, and the ARM7 based versions especially use very little power. Tom (?) Baliss (the guy who invented the radios) and someone from Apple knocked up the prototype at a conference when they first met.
Since then the main obstacle has been storing more power in the spring. It looks like they have not met with much success and are looking for more venture capital. I reckon we might one day see palmtops powered like this (and I would use one), but I doubt they'll ever hold enough power to power a laptop.
On a 486/66 ? You must be kidding ! It brings a P100 to its knees. Oh, and the word filters suck quite badly - not that thats SD's fault.
like a hole in the head
It was SW Uganda, near the Rwandan border, and I hope you are not suggesting that being hacked to death is a desirable fate for anyone.
4 years is a godforsaken eternity. Four years ago Linux couldn't run X, let alone a desktop. I think you are wrong anyway - one side or the other (probably Gnome, but whoe knows ?) will end up attracting more mindshare and making a better product. At that point the other will die.
What KDE has in CVS and in beta is irrelevant. Neither KDE 1.0 or 1.1 use CORBA at all, and KOffice is unfit for human consumption as it stands.
*PLONK*
Troll
I can make a software simulation of a 256-bit processor running at a simulated 1.2 terahertz, does us no good though, does it? MAKE the god damn thing, THEN post the public affairs fluff.
I'd be amazed if you could. They have an RTL level description of the CPU in Verilog. Thats the lowest level description that can be produced by hand, and specifies the datapaths and the degree of parallelism precisely. This is then fed into a synthesis/place/route flow to produce the GDSII that is sent to the fab. That process in largely automatic, although complex designs like CPUs require some manual intervention, and it can take a few hundred man years (six months or so for a CPU design team) to complete.
You may be able to write a high level C simulation of CPU at 1.2THz, but RTL Verilog is a whole different matter.
Since when are there export restrictions on CPUs ?
It makes perfect sense. You can have RTL and even transistor level layouts for a great architecture after spending a few million dollars (less if all your employees are Russian), but to manufacture it you need a modern fab, which costs many billions of dollars. Not everyone has access to that kind of capital, and that is no reflection on their skills as designers.
You're a C++ programmer aren't you ? They are the only half educated people who think reference counting is good. It has terribly unreliable performance characteristics, it breaks when confronted with circular references, and its demonstrably slower than real GC.
The man is partly right. Linux is not going to kill Microsoft. A combination of Linux, Java, a general movement towards open-source, and shifts in the market might do.
He is also right that noone should spend 50000 on Linux just to be on the bandwagon. It has to be part of a coherent strategy. You can say just the same for any OS. First find out what you want, then decide what to buy.
I find the total fanaticism of some Linux users both disturbing, and embarassing when I have to tell other people what I use.
I'm not a massive clearcase fan, but at least this might let us stop using the evil NT port. It really sucks.
Because they have to know what system configurations they are supporting. That is why LSB is important. Its very naive of those who do not want a single company to dominate to oppose it.
Is there really a chance of a major binary vendor not following the LSB ? I mean, we're probably not talking about anything more than the file system standard and C library and kernel versions here. Either the author of the article is indulging in angst for no good reason, or he knows something I do not.
Richness my ****. They added methods to the java.* classes. I have Visual J++ on my machine here in front of me and I am looking at it right now ... There are extra methods in the java.* hierarchy. Thats the problem, and it is *one* of the breaches of their license agreement with Sun (the others being not implementing the entire platform spec and modifying the core language).
You know this really isn't funny. Someone was telling me the other day how annoying they find free software advocates. When I read paranoid rantings like this directed at people who have not only done you no harm, but done their best to do the right thing, I can see why.
Since when do intelligent agents rip apart HTML documents ? Come to think of it, what does the reviewer think intelligent agents are ?
My experience is that 'agent' tends to refer to programs given an 'AI-type' task by a user, which they then perform, possibly by moving themselves over the network.
I think the whole idea is a bit naff - thats probably why it is hard to define, but I certianly don't think code examples in C++ or Perl are a good idea. They are hard to read, hard to translate into other languages and non-portable.
PS. Smalltalk is cool
So if you want to read MEEPT being an ****, go ahead and read at -100 or whatever. Personally I have not desire to have some 14-year-old's ego thrust in my face. The scoring system /. uses is a good way of controling discussion without actually censoring them. The only thing Rob could do which he does not is give an idea of what will end up at different scoring levels.
Sun got the court to rewrite Microsoft's Java contract (read the contract if you don't believe me). The result is that Microsoft cannot innovate in the Java space. So what are they to do? Invent a new language, that's what.
I've read the contract I disagree with you. In fact I cannot see how you can support Microsoft, unless you are just a troll. They both omitted parts of the platform, and added methods to java.* classes. They are both forbidden by the contract. They claim the result passed the compatibility tests. I have not seen those, so I don't know, but if it did the tests were wrong, and they were still in breach of the contract.
You people bitch and moan about a lack of innovation from Microsoft. But when they try to innovate, you bitch and moan again. You cannot have it both ways.
I do not care whether they innovate or not. They're historically very bad at it, anyway. The 'innovation' in this case is just a gratuitout attempt to introduce incompatible versions of a standard, and then lure people away from the real standard to the incompatible version. If you read the halloween document, they admit to doing as much in other cases.
Anyone remember 'Blackbird' ? This is just step 3 in the classic Microsoft playbook.
The only difference is this time Sun have forced them to backtrack.
I do not have any conclusive refutation for the conclusions (that Linux will die of instability, be embraced-and-extended by MS, or problems increasing market share), but I can pick a hell of a lot of holes in Todd Lewis' reasoning.
Firstly it is a more-or-less established fact that the OS market is not friction-free. Any OS provider experiences increasing returns as support from hardware OEMs and ISVs comes on line. This is roughly were Linux is now.
Secondly he seems to be comparing apples with oranges in trying to calculate the defect density. He says Linux has only 1.2million lines of code. This is the figure for the kernel. But he takes the defect rate for the *entire*system* including the bundled utilties, and compares it to the (probably correctly calculated) defect density for some (unnamed) commercial Unix. He goes on to say that all one-off figures are suspect, but supposes that this somehow casts doubt on Linux' reliability.
His list of features missing from Linux is truly pathetic. Linux (or rather XFree86) has video card support second only to Windows 98, and anyway this is an irrelevance on a server platform. Same goes for productivity software. Show me a wireless LAN worth using and I will believe the last point. Hw goes on to say that the addition of these feature will destabilise the system. How, exactly ? These are pifflingly small additions compared with the work already done.
He goes on to make some dubious comparisons between the Linux and Apache core team sizes and those of the competing teams in Microsoft. He does not seem to know that there is no general correlation between team size and productivity or stability of the resulting software, and willfully ignores the fact that the core teams are only a small part of the development effort and an even smaller part of the debugging effort.
He quotes the suspect statistics from the halloween document showing a decline in mail list traffic on the Mozilla groups (proves nothing), and the equally suspect statistic that IIS is faster than Apache (yes, but only on Win32, beyond 12 users or so any Linux platfrom running apache thrashes IIS on NT into the ground).
He believes that Linux is 'just Unix' and Unix is losing market share to NT. I think this misses the salient point. People want to use Intel hardware because it is cheap - they very much do not want to use MS operating systems. Linux runs better on Intel hardware than any other OS - therefore it is primarily competing with NT as a low cost OS, not with Unix as a Unix.
Finally he seems to beleive that Linux is vulnerable to embrace and extend, but he does not say how. Any attempt by Microsoft or anyone else to do so would face onrunning competition from the open source community and an obligation to release any modifications to the core system. That would make Linux a harder target to beat than, say, Netscape. Phew, that was long ...
It seems to me that the only leg Nintendo has to stand on is the idea that these guys must have bypassed its security chip. It seems to me that this is a pathetic excuse to drag this though the courts - or am I missing something ? would it really be necessary to bypass the security ? In general emulators can be written with the same information game and compiler writers would use.