Microsoft's patent is on the.NET platform, not on the ECMA standard, and certainly not on libraries like Gtk#, so the question of how it is licensed shouldn't make any difference. Microsoft has also stated that people can implement ECMA C# royalty-free.
None of that is an iron-clad guarantee, but those don't exist for any language or library standard. Sun or some other company we have never heard about could, after all, claim that ECMA C# violates some of their patents. Given that Mono has been out for a while and Gtk+ has been out for a long time, that seems increasingly unlikely, however, and there probably would be workarounds.
The only place where Microsoft's patent comes in is for things like ASP.NET. Microsoft believes they own some of those APIs. Whether they actually do remains to be seen.
Re:Real-world examples of tangible benefits
on
Mono Beta 2 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I would love to see an example of what this has enabled that can't be done with Microsoft's tools, even if it's just doing it for cheaper.
You can deploy your ASP.NET applications, developed with Microsoft tools, on cheap Linux server farms.
Look at the DOC format and how even slight inconsistencies can prevent other technologies from getting past.5% market share.
Problems with DOC compatibility are a network problem: you aren't there when the recipient's attempt to open your DOC file fails. However, even if Mono.NET isn't 100% compatible, since all the development is happening in house, you can fix it pretty easily.
If this just enhances the Linux platform or turns into a platform itself, it may have a chance.
Mono is that, too. In fact, Mono is two things: an entire environment for writing Gnome and Linux applications in C#, and an implementation of Microsoft's.NET platform. The two things are pretty much completely independent. One, or the other, or both may catch on.
Gnome desparately needs a better programming platform than C/C++, and Mono provides it.
However, once it becomes a platform, if you think MS won't try to demolish it the way it has done to every other platform, you are mistaken, especially since the project has shown no leadership and is essentially a clone of what MS is doing
Currently, Linux apps written in C/C++ are competing with Microsoft apps in C/C++, and Microsoft does whatever they do to compete. With Mono, Linux apps written in C# are competing with Microsoft apps written in C#, and Microsoft will still do whatever they do to compete, so nothing much changes.
One thing is for certain, howver: Linux apps written in C# are much more competitive with Microsoft apps written in C# than Linux apps written in C/C++. Developing apps in C/C++ is just way too much of a drag on any group of developers. Microsoft saw the light and moved on to something better, and it is high time that Linux developers do the same thing.
It beggars belief that outsourcing have even been given a chance past its infancy to ruin so many corporations reputation.
Since when is there anything disreputable about offering good quality at the lowest prices? And since when is there anything disreputable about contributing to the economic development of some of the neediest nations in the world?
Maybe the independant Japanese animator could try to find a business model similar to that of the RIAA?
You mean, a business model like extortion, press releases, and whining to Congress?
If, instead, you mean that artists should sell directly to consumers, that is a model that the RIAA dreads because they are the middlemen that are to be cut out.
Note that it is not a matter of complexity, but of metabolism. Elephants are complex, but their cell replacement rate is relatively slow.
That statement amounts to saying that there is a roughly constant number of "cell replacements" possible across species and that the longer-lived ones just replace less frequently. That's wrong. The number of "replacements" (divisions) is called the "Hayflick limit", and it varies widely across species.
As I was saying, there is no indication that there is a simple biochemical mechanism or constraint responsible for aging, and it certainly isn't "entropy" in any interesting sense. If it was biologically advantageous, we could probably have evolved to live to be hundreds of years old with only subtle and minor changes to our biology.
I find this odd reasoning. There would be enough people who survived being eaten by lions etc to put evolutionary pressure to go past 40. If it was not for aging, at least about 5 percent or so would live on, spreading their sperm/eggs.
As you may have noticed, we do go past 40. We just don't go past about 80 very much. And after around 40, the pressure to keep things going decreases rapidly.
But maximum reproductive rates do not translate into maimum fitness, and the situation in humans is more complex because humans have evolved a mechanism by which women cannot have children past the age of 40.
From my perspective, if someone breaks into my account, it's a hassle, but not a huge deal: My account is insured, and I get my money back. I'd rather deal with the inconvenince of this happening once or twice in my lifetime than having to deal with carrying and using a password generator for my entire life.
It's happened to me, because the bank picked an obvious initial password on my account and assigned guessable numbers for the debit card. Thieves took out money up to my credit line before I even got the sign-up info and password in the mail.
If you think that that is not a "big deal", think again. The bank's first response was: "it's your fault, you didn't protect your password, so we aren't responsible". It took a year to fix it. I had to dispute every single charge in writing, one letter at a time. I couldn't close the account until all the disputes were resolved, and I had to dispute the charges that followed from having the account open and from the overdrafts separately. I was lucky it didn't wreck my credit rating, but it has become much more of a hassle for me to get a new credit card now. This sort of thing is not a minor inconvenience, it's a major problem, and it can become a devastating problem. You don't want this to happen to you, even if you don't have any money in your account.
One-time passwords are trivial and cheap to implement. Banks at least should give their customers the choice.
I guess it was only a matter of time before more commercialized security practices made it to the general public.
Banks in Europe have been doing this for as long as they have offered on-line banking.
The real question is why US banks in particular are so willing to put their customers at risk for a little convenience and don't even give them a choice.
As far as "messages in mid-air" are concerned, I would find SMS messaging in airplanes a lot more useful than adding a disco light effect from the 1980's to mobile phones.
X11's selection mechanism is marvelously efficient and it's a shame that other systems don't use it more. However, if you aren't used to it, it may be somewhat confusing to you and you may not take good advantage of it.
The selection mechanism is actually separate from the clipboard--it just is a way in which one application can communicate to another that it would like to get the data that is "currently selected" in that application. It's like dragging and dropping data between applications, only it's actually easier to do because you can rearrange windows in between.
The confusion really started when programmers coming from Macintosh and Windows only supported the cut-and-paste they knew and felt comfortable with. X11 has become less consistent because Macintosh and Windows developers tried to make it more consistent--with their understanding of the world.
In any case, there isn't much that can be done about it: X11 applications that ignore X11 conventions and mechanisms are now more common than correctly behaving ones. If you find yourself using the X11 selection mechanism accidentally, you can just remap it to something you are less likely to do; many applications that use selections will also have the good sense to use X11's traditional resource system.
Furthermore, there are a number of clipboard applications (e.g., xclipboard) that let you keep multiple clipboards and convert between selections and cut-and-paste.
Fortunately for you, unfortunately for traditional X11 users, X11 GUIs will probably sink to the lowest common denominator created by Windows and Macintosh. That way, the computing masses will be happy with their standardized, uniform, centrally planned user interface and all that unruly diversity will be quashed. The only difference will be whether windows are slightly transparent and where the menu bar goes, and people can endlessly debate the usability merits of the "Aqua" theme on Macintosh vs. the "XP" theme on Windows.
Aging is a response to mutations which naturally build up over time. Most aging is the slowing down of metabolism so as the reduce cell activity in order to reduce mutations.
There is no indication whatsoever that this is the root cause of aging. In fact, there are complex organisms that live two to three times as long as humans do.
Most likely, there is no simple mechanism that limits how long humans live, it's just lots of different things failing in different ways. And the reason why they are failing is that, historically, people were killed by the age of 35 or 40, so there wasn't any evolutionary pressure on them to evolve organs that would last longer. Things work well with high probability until about 35 or 40, and after that, they slowly but steadily start failing, for different reasons and in different ways.
By analogy, the transmission and motor in your car are probably not designed specifically to last 500000 miles because rust and obsolescence get most cars off the road much earlier. In fact, your car's components are probably only designed not to fail too much within the warranty period, and that happens to give most cars maybe 2-3 times the warranty period as their total lifespan.
will still struggle, at the end of their lives, to hold on to whatever years or months or even days of life they have left.
I have had a number of relatives in their 70s and 80s, reasonably healthy and self-sufficient, die over the years, and they did not "struggle". Many people do, in fact, face death with composure and without struggle.
But of course people don't do this, because it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live.
No, it is not. Almost all the cells in your body "want" to die. Many cells in your body die every day as part of regular bodily functions--if they didn't, you would die as an organism. Simple examples are the cells that give risk to skin, nails, hair, and your intestinal linings. Many different cells in your body died as part of your development from a fertilized egg to a baby. It is when cells in a higher organism become "immortal" that things start going seriously wrong, often turning into tumors.
So, for those of you who think this kind of research is a terrible thing, an affront to God and man -- please go off somewhere to die quietly. And those of us who choose to live will drink a toast on your graves.
I shudder to think what the world would be like if the subset of people who actually want to live 1000 years got their choice; I imagine the consequences for societies would be somewhat analogous to the consequences of immortal cells on the human body. Fortunately, I won't be around to have to see that happen.
Sun promised to make Java an open standard, meaning a standard created by an independent standards body like ANSI, ISO, or ECMA standard and freely implementable and changeable by anybody. But Sun has hidden behind the bugaboo of "incompatible versions" and used that as a pretense to create a system that is more proprietary than even Windows: Sun owns all the Java specs and if you as much as look at them, Sun owns you. This is no accident or oversight on the part of Sun, it's long-range planning and deception.
Now, Schwartz is apparently trying to pull the same stunt with the term "open source":
But one problem that Schwartz wants to avoid is having Solaris splintered into different distributions like Linux, which he said creates application incompatibilities. Going the way of Linux-type licensing, he suggested, creates open source but not open standards.
What does this mean? It means that Schwartz wants to put in compatibility testing requirements for Solaris derivatives that you create from Sun source, just like they have for Java. And that translates into something that is intrinsically incompatible with the open source definition.
With Java, Sun's betrayal actually mattered until a few years ago: Java could have been really important as an open standard. And since there was nobody out there to protect the meaning of the term "open standard", Schwartz's double-speak actually did considerable damage. But with Solaris, it doesn't matter: Solaris is already irrelevant. Furthermore, Sun won't be able to damage the term "open source" because the open source community is going to protect the meaning of the term "open source" vigorously.
Sun is pretty much doomed and they have nothing of interest to anyone anymore. The best thing for the OSS community is just to stay away from them as far as possible: the death throes of dinosaurs can hurt bystanders badly.
Even if it were to hold up, the patent is useless. Spam filtering is a trivial application of text classification: given a piece of text, you classify it as belong to the "spam" class or the "non-spam" class. People have been doing text classification for decades and there are hundreds of methods for doing it. The kinds of naive Bayesian filters used by current anti-spam software are actually some of the worst text classifiers around (they aren't called "naive" for nothing). The fact that they work so well on spam shows you how easy the text classification problem actually is in this case.
If you want to see lots of other approaches, look on Google for "decision tree spam filtering", "svm spam filtering", "neural network spam filtering", "latent semantic indexing spam filtering", "boosting spam filtering", and "vector space spam filtering", to name just a few approaches. All of those methods are published, and NAI's patent doesn't read on them.
As for NAI's patent, I suspect it is actually fraudulent: the widespread use of naive Bayesian classifiers for spam detection, in place of better text classification methods, was a historical accident, and the fact that they patented this rather than any kind of better method strongly suggests to me that Bryson and Ekle didn't actually "invent" this, but that they applied for the patent after observing that the method was becoming popular.
Don't underestimate these people. Their interpretation of the facts may differ (they may see this as a minor and irrelevant point point and therefore not worth mentioning), but they know the facts. Just like Microsoft knows exactly what they are doing in the market.
THey do so because they can not aford to pay for a house or car in cash.
Not necessarily. For example, with tax breaks, buying a house with a mortgage and investing the money you keep may well be a significant win.
A reason for leasing a car is that it lowers your risk and transaction costs if you like driving new cars: you don't have to worry about dealing with used car dealers, and you know ahead of time how much it is going to cost you to drive this car for three years.
People and businesses can pay for a newer computer or server in cash.
No. Businesses often like lease arrangements for tax reasons, because they don't want to own an expensive illiquid piece of hardware, and because it spreads out expenses. It also may give them more flexibility to respond to market demands.
Renting a home also is considerably cheaper than buying it during extended periods, depending on the history of mortgage rates.
Buying something makes sense if you know you are going to keep it for the long term and if the alternatives don't have tax advantages. But renting and/or leasing often is a financially more prudent choice.
That's not necessarily bad. Right now, Microsoft can change things incompatibly and if they don't work, they just release a patch or tell you to upgrade to the latest version.
If there are millions of devices out there, all running different versions of the OS, it could force them to (1) be more careful with what they release and (2) pick simpler standards for their data.
Reuters quotes Schwartz: 'In our world, you will subscribe to the software and the hardware is free.'
Note that you subscribe "to the software", not maintenance or documentation or training.
I think this tells you pretty much what Sun thinks about open source software and how they are using it. As if you needed any other indication after they went back on their promise of ANSI/ISO standardization of Java, hijacked the Gnome desktop with proprietary components, and are generally badmouthing Linux and open source to their customers. And keep in mind that this is the company that started out by turning BSD UNIX into a highly proprietary system.
I'm not saying that the US should "let" OPEC raise prices, I'm saying that the US should actively work towards higher consumer prices, whether through taxes or higher crude prices.
Skyrocketing oil prices are inevitable anyway: with the increasing demand from China and India and decreasing production capacities, prices will increase severalfold over the next decade or two. US politicians and voters can scream all they want, economics and geology are not to be argued with.
So, $10/gal is going to come. The only question is whether we put it off by a couple of years and wreck the planet or not. Getting to that point a few years earlier would actually give us a competitive advantage.
And, no, nuclear power is not the way out. We couldn't even site nuclear power plants fast enough.
A year or two ago, Sony was responsible for a substantial part of the growth and innovation in this space.
Yes, and they probably found that PalmOS was too limiting for them. When you look at their PalmOS 5 models, it is clear that they wanted to pack in a lot of functionality there but were running into limitations with PalmOS everywhere.
They had a tendency to keep certain APIs (like their camera API) private,
What choice did they have? They didn't want to have to support those APIs in perpetuity. PalmOS should have had built-in standard APIs for that kind of functionality, then Sony could have provided the hardware.
I don't think a simulator for the TH55 was ever released.
See, another indication that there is something fundamentally broken with PalmOS. I mean, do you need a "simulator" for every PC that you are going to run Windows or Linux on? No. You write software that conforms to the OS APIs and then it works on pretty much every machine that the OS runs on.
But despite the problems, I'm sorry to see them go. Sony injected an energy into the Palm handheld market that I don't think can be matched by the other manufacturers.
It's a big blow for Palm, but it's a self-inflicted one. Palm had nearly a decade to put together a future-proof, solid operating system, and they have failed. Sony apparently finally lost patience. Compared to the amount of effort Sony must have put into dealing with Palm and PalmOS, writing a new OS from scratch must be less work, and Sony probably realized that.
I have owned a number of Clies and still use one as my handheld. Sony has done a spectacular job with the hardware on many of them. They also tried really hard with the software, but ultimately, they ran into too many limitations with PalmOS.
For example, Clies ship with PicselViewer, an image and PDF viewer that lets you read and view normal image and PDF files off memory sticks, and it's actually pretty fast. Clies also ship with applications that let you back up your data to external flash memory, that let you manage your files. In the latest version, they tried to revamp the aging and somewhat limited Palm PIM applications.
But doing any of this under PalmOS is really hard. PalmOS is essentially still a single-tasking OS with a quirky window system, severe limitations on memory management, little protection of applications from one another, and a lousy desktop synchronization architecture.
And things keep changing even between minor PalmOS versions in weird ways: Bluetooth support, configuration applications, datebook record formats, etc. And Sony always ended up behind Palm--for example, the T3 ships with a lot of nice functionality that didn't make it into the TH-55. It must have been a nightmare for Sony.
Ultimately, I suspect Palm was just too much of a pain for them and they didn't like playing second fiddle to Palm. I don't expect Sony to get out of the handheld market long-term, I think they'll just switch to some other platform--PocketPC, Linux, or Symbian, maybe.
I think Europe just wants a complete complement of space technologies at their disposal; they don't want to depend on either the Americans or the Chinese to provide it for them, neither for research satellites nor for military ones.
but there are actually businesses that will wash and iron your shirts for you, and they will even fold them (imagine that!). If you need an "emergency shirt" that you can just wash yourself, you can get a no-iron shirt, too.
And for vacuuming, you could always hire someone (but, unlike a robot, a cleaner will raise eyebrows at leftover pizzas and Playboy magazines).
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Microsoft's patent is on the .NET platform, not on the ECMA standard, and certainly not on libraries like Gtk#, so the question of how it is licensed shouldn't make any difference. Microsoft has also stated that people can implement ECMA C# royalty-free.
None of that is an iron-clad guarantee, but those don't exist for any language or library standard. Sun or some other company we have never heard about could, after all, claim that ECMA C# violates some of their patents. Given that Mono has been out for a while and Gtk+ has been out for a long time, that seems increasingly unlikely, however, and there probably would be workarounds.
The only place where Microsoft's patent comes in is for things like ASP.NET. Microsoft believes they own some of those APIs. Whether they actually do remains to be seen.
I would love to see an example of what this has enabled that can't be done with Microsoft's tools, even if it's just doing it for cheaper.
.5% market share.
.NET platform. The two things are pretty much completely independent. One, or the other, or both may catch on.
You can deploy your ASP.NET applications, developed with Microsoft tools, on cheap Linux server farms.
Look at the DOC format and how even slight inconsistencies can prevent other technologies from getting past
Problems with DOC compatibility are a network problem: you aren't there when the recipient's attempt to open your DOC file fails. However, even if Mono.NET isn't 100% compatible, since all the development is happening in house, you can fix it pretty easily.
If this just enhances the Linux platform or turns into a platform itself, it may have a chance.
Mono is that, too. In fact, Mono is two things: an entire environment for writing Gnome and Linux applications in C#, and an implementation of Microsoft's
Gnome desparately needs a better programming platform than C/C++, and Mono provides it.
However, once it becomes a platform, if you think MS won't try to demolish it the way it has done to every other platform, you are mistaken, especially since the project has shown no leadership and is essentially a clone of what MS is doing
Currently, Linux apps written in C/C++ are competing with Microsoft apps in C/C++, and Microsoft does whatever they do to compete. With Mono, Linux apps written in C# are competing with Microsoft apps written in C#, and Microsoft will still do whatever they do to compete, so nothing much changes.
One thing is for certain, howver: Linux apps written in C# are much more competitive with Microsoft apps written in C# than Linux apps written in C/C++. Developing apps in C/C++ is just way too much of a drag on any group of developers. Microsoft saw the light and moved on to something better, and it is high time that Linux developers do the same thing.
is worth something after all.
It beggars belief that outsourcing have even been given a chance past its infancy to ruin so many corporations reputation.
Since when is there anything disreputable about offering good quality at the lowest prices? And since when is there anything disreputable about contributing to the economic development of some of the neediest nations in the world?
Maybe the independant Japanese animator could try to find a business model similar to that of the RIAA?
You mean, a business model like extortion, press releases, and whining to Congress?
If, instead, you mean that artists should sell directly to consumers, that is a model that the RIAA dreads because they are the middlemen that are to be cut out.
Note that it is not a matter of complexity, but of metabolism. Elephants are complex, but their cell replacement rate is relatively slow.
That statement amounts to saying that there is a roughly constant number of "cell replacements" possible across species and that the longer-lived ones just replace less frequently. That's wrong. The number of "replacements" (divisions) is called the "Hayflick limit", and it varies widely across species.
As I was saying, there is no indication that there is a simple biochemical mechanism or constraint responsible for aging, and it certainly isn't "entropy" in any interesting sense. If it was biologically advantageous, we could probably have evolved to live to be hundreds of years old with only subtle and minor changes to our biology.
I find this odd reasoning. There would be enough people who survived being eaten by lions etc to put evolutionary pressure to go past 40. If it was not for aging, at least about 5 percent or so would live on, spreading their sperm/eggs.
As you may have noticed, we do go past 40. We just don't go past about 80 very much. And after around 40, the pressure to keep things going decreases rapidly.
But maximum reproductive rates do not translate into maimum fitness, and the situation in humans is more complex because humans have evolved a mechanism by which women cannot have children past the age of 40.
Here is a good set of summary slides.
when the same story is pushed twice within a short time frame, like this one?
From my perspective, if someone breaks into my account, it's a hassle, but not a huge deal: My account is insured, and I get my money back. I'd rather deal with the inconvenince of this happening once or twice in my lifetime than having to deal with carrying and using a password generator for my entire life.
It's happened to me, because the bank picked an obvious initial password on my account and assigned guessable numbers for the debit card. Thieves took out money up to my credit line before I even got the sign-up info and password in the mail.
If you think that that is not a "big deal", think again. The bank's first response was: "it's your fault, you didn't protect your password, so we aren't responsible". It took a year to fix it. I had to dispute every single charge in writing, one letter at a time. I couldn't close the account until all the disputes were resolved, and I had to dispute the charges that followed from having the account open and from the overdrafts separately. I was lucky it didn't wreck my credit rating, but it has become much more of a hassle for me to get a new credit card now. This sort of thing is not a minor inconvenience, it's a major problem, and it can become a devastating problem. You don't want this to happen to you, even if you don't have any money in your account.
One-time passwords are trivial and cheap to implement. Banks at least should give their customers the choice.
I guess it was only a matter of time before more commercialized security practices made it to the general public.
Banks in Europe have been doing this for as long as they have offered on-line banking.
The real question is why US banks in particular are so willing to put their customers at risk for a little convenience and don't even give them a choice.
As far as "messages in mid-air" are concerned, I would find SMS messaging in airplanes a lot more useful than adding a disco light effect from the 1980's to mobile phones.
X11's selection mechanism is marvelously efficient and it's a shame that other systems don't use it more. However, if you aren't used to it, it may be somewhat confusing to you and you may not take good advantage of it.
The selection mechanism is actually separate from the clipboard--it just is a way in which one application can communicate to another that it would like to get the data that is "currently selected" in that application. It's like dragging and dropping data between applications, only it's actually easier to do because you can rearrange windows in between.
The confusion really started when programmers coming from Macintosh and Windows only supported the cut-and-paste they knew and felt comfortable with. X11 has become less consistent because Macintosh and Windows developers tried to make it more consistent--with their understanding of the world.
In any case, there isn't much that can be done about it: X11 applications that ignore X11 conventions and mechanisms are now more common than correctly behaving ones. If you find yourself using the X11 selection mechanism accidentally, you can just remap it to something you are less likely to do; many applications that use selections will also have the good sense to use X11's traditional resource system.
Furthermore, there are a number of clipboard applications (e.g., xclipboard) that let you keep multiple clipboards and convert between selections and cut-and-paste.
Fortunately for you, unfortunately for traditional X11 users, X11 GUIs will probably sink to the lowest common denominator created by Windows and Macintosh. That way, the computing masses will be happy with their standardized, uniform, centrally planned user interface and all that unruly diversity will be quashed. The only difference will be whether windows are slightly transparent and where the menu bar goes, and people can endlessly debate the usability merits of the "Aqua" theme on Macintosh vs. the "XP" theme on Windows.
Aging is a response to mutations which naturally build up over time. Most aging is the slowing down of metabolism so as the reduce cell activity in order to reduce mutations.
There is no indication whatsoever that this is the root cause of aging. In fact, there are complex organisms that live two to three times as long as humans do.
Most likely, there is no simple mechanism that limits how long humans live, it's just lots of different things failing in different ways. And the reason why they are failing is that, historically, people were killed by the age of 35 or 40, so there wasn't any evolutionary pressure on them to evolve organs that would last longer. Things work well with high probability until about 35 or 40, and after that, they slowly but steadily start failing, for different reasons and in different ways.
By analogy, the transmission and motor in your car are probably not designed specifically to last 500000 miles because rust and obsolescence get most cars off the road much earlier. In fact, your car's components are probably only designed not to fail too much within the warranty period, and that happens to give most cars maybe 2-3 times the warranty period as their total lifespan.
will still struggle, at the end of their lives, to hold on to whatever years or months or even days of life they have left.
I have had a number of relatives in their 70s and 80s, reasonably healthy and self-sufficient, die over the years, and they did not "struggle". Many people do, in fact, face death with composure and without struggle.
But of course people don't do this, because it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live.
No, it is not. Almost all the cells in your body "want" to die. Many cells in your body die every day as part of regular bodily functions--if they didn't, you would die as an organism. Simple examples are the cells that give risk to skin, nails, hair, and your intestinal linings. Many different cells in your body died as part of your development from a fertilized egg to a baby. It is when cells in a higher organism become "immortal" that things start going seriously wrong, often turning into tumors.
So, for those of you who think this kind of research is a terrible thing, an affront to God and man -- please go off somewhere to die quietly. And those of us who choose to live will drink a toast on your graves.
I shudder to think what the world would be like if the subset of people who actually want to live 1000 years got their choice; I imagine the consequences for societies would be somewhat analogous to the consequences of immortal cells on the human body. Fortunately, I won't be around to have to see that happen.
Now, Schwartz is apparently trying to pull the same stunt with the term "open source":
What does this mean? It means that Schwartz wants to put in compatibility testing requirements for Solaris derivatives that you create from Sun source, just like they have for Java. And that translates into something that is intrinsically incompatible with the open source definition.
With Java, Sun's betrayal actually mattered until a few years ago: Java could have been really important as an open standard. And since there was nobody out there to protect the meaning of the term "open standard", Schwartz's double-speak actually did considerable damage. But with Solaris, it doesn't matter: Solaris is already irrelevant. Furthermore, Sun won't be able to damage the term "open source" because the open source community is going to protect the meaning of the term "open source" vigorously.
Sun is pretty much doomed and they have nothing of interest to anyone anymore. The best thing for the OSS community is just to stay away from them as far as possible: the death throes of dinosaurs can hurt bystanders badly.
Even if it were to hold up, the patent is useless. Spam filtering is a trivial application of text classification: given a piece of text, you classify it as belong to the "spam" class or the "non-spam" class. People have been doing text classification for decades and there are hundreds of methods for doing it. The kinds of naive Bayesian filters used by current anti-spam software are actually some of the worst text classifiers around (they aren't called "naive" for nothing). The fact that they work so well on spam shows you how easy the text classification problem actually is in this case.
If you want to see lots of other approaches, look on Google for "decision tree spam filtering", "svm spam filtering", "neural network spam filtering", "latent semantic indexing spam filtering", "boosting spam filtering", and "vector space spam filtering", to name just a few approaches. All of those methods are published, and NAI's patent doesn't read on them.
As for NAI's patent, I suspect it is actually fraudulent: the widespread use of naive Bayesian classifiers for spam detection, in place of better text classification methods, was a historical accident, and the fact that they patented this rather than any kind of better method strongly suggests to me that Bryson and Ekle didn't actually "invent" this, but that they applied for the patent after observing that the method was becoming popular.
Don't underestimate these people. Their interpretation of the facts may differ (they may see this as a minor and irrelevant point point and therefore not worth mentioning), but they know the facts. Just like Microsoft knows exactly what they are doing in the market.
THey do so because they can not aford to pay for a house or car in cash.
Not necessarily. For example, with tax breaks, buying a house with a mortgage and investing the money you keep may well be a significant win.
A reason for leasing a car is that it lowers your risk and transaction costs if you like driving new cars: you don't have to worry about dealing with used car dealers, and you know ahead of time how much it is going to cost you to drive this car for three years.
People and businesses can pay for a newer computer or server in cash.
No. Businesses often like lease arrangements for tax reasons, because they don't want to own an expensive illiquid piece of hardware, and because it spreads out expenses. It also may give them more flexibility to respond to market demands.
Renting a home also is considerably cheaper than buying it during extended periods, depending on the history of mortgage rates.
Buying something makes sense if you know you are going to keep it for the long term and if the alternatives don't have tax advantages. But renting and/or leasing often is a financially more prudent choice.
I consider this the "consolization" of the PC.
That's not necessarily bad. Right now, Microsoft can change things incompatibly and if they don't work, they just release a patch or tell you to upgrade to the latest version.
If there are millions of devices out there, all running different versions of the OS, it could force them to (1) be more careful with what they release and (2) pick simpler standards for their data.
But if you want to develop for Windows CE / Pocket PC / Windows Mobile / whatever, yes, you do need a simulator.
But not a different one for different devices. The poster was complaining that there was no TH-55 emulator yet.
And if you're developing Java apps for Symbian, they run inside a Java environment, which really is a "virtual machine," not a native environment.
What's your point?
Reuters quotes Schwartz: 'In our world, you will subscribe to the software and the hardware is free.'
Note that you subscribe "to the software", not maintenance or documentation or training.
I think this tells you pretty much what Sun thinks about open source software and how they are using it. As if you needed any other indication after they went back on their promise of ANSI/ISO standardization of Java, hijacked the Gnome desktop with proprietary components, and are generally badmouthing Linux and open source to their customers. And keep in mind that this is the company that started out by turning BSD UNIX into a highly proprietary system.
I'm not saying that the US should "let" OPEC raise prices, I'm saying that the US should actively work towards higher consumer prices, whether through taxes or higher crude prices.
Skyrocketing oil prices are inevitable anyway: with the increasing demand from China and India and decreasing production capacities, prices will increase severalfold over the next decade or two. US politicians and voters can scream all they want, economics and geology are not to be argued with.
So, $10/gal is going to come. The only question is whether we put it off by a couple of years and wreck the planet or not. Getting to that point a few years earlier would actually give us a competitive advantage.
And, no, nuclear power is not the way out. We couldn't even site nuclear power plants fast enough.
A year or two ago, Sony was responsible for a substantial part of the growth and innovation in this space.
Yes, and they probably found that PalmOS was too limiting for them. When you look at their PalmOS 5 models, it is clear that they wanted to pack in a lot of functionality there but were running into limitations with PalmOS everywhere.
They had a tendency to keep certain APIs (like their camera API) private,
What choice did they have? They didn't want to have to support those APIs in perpetuity. PalmOS should have had built-in standard APIs for that kind of functionality, then Sony could have provided the hardware.
I don't think a simulator for the TH55 was ever released.
See, another indication that there is something fundamentally broken with PalmOS. I mean, do you need a "simulator" for every PC that you are going to run Windows or Linux on? No. You write software that conforms to the OS APIs and then it works on pretty much every machine that the OS runs on.
But despite the problems, I'm sorry to see them go. Sony injected an energy into the Palm handheld market that I don't think can be matched by the other manufacturers.
It's a big blow for Palm, but it's a self-inflicted one. Palm had nearly a decade to put together a future-proof, solid operating system, and they have failed. Sony apparently finally lost patience. Compared to the amount of effort Sony must have put into dealing with Palm and PalmOS, writing a new OS from scratch must be less work, and Sony probably realized that.
I have owned a number of Clies and still use one as my handheld. Sony has done a spectacular job with the hardware on many of them. They also tried really hard with the software, but ultimately, they ran into too many limitations with PalmOS.
For example, Clies ship with PicselViewer, an image and PDF viewer that lets you read and view normal image and PDF files off memory sticks, and it's actually pretty fast. Clies also ship with applications that let you back up your data to external flash memory, that let you manage your files. In the latest version, they tried to revamp the aging and somewhat limited Palm PIM applications.
But doing any of this under PalmOS is really hard. PalmOS is essentially still a single-tasking OS with a quirky window system, severe limitations on memory management, little protection of applications from one another, and a lousy desktop synchronization architecture.
And things keep changing even between minor PalmOS versions in weird ways: Bluetooth support, configuration applications, datebook record formats, etc. And Sony always ended up behind Palm--for example, the T3 ships with a lot of nice functionality that didn't make it into the TH-55. It must have been a nightmare for Sony.
Ultimately, I suspect Palm was just too much of a pain for them and they didn't like playing second fiddle to Palm. I don't expect Sony to get out of the handheld market long-term, I think they'll just switch to some other platform--PocketPC, Linux, or Symbian, maybe.
I think Europe just wants a complete complement of space technologies at their disposal; they don't want to depend on either the Americans or the Chinese to provide it for them, neither for research satellites nor for military ones.
but there are actually businesses that will wash and iron your shirts for you, and they will even fold them (imagine that!). If you need an "emergency shirt" that you can just wash yourself, you can get a no-iron shirt, too.
And for vacuuming, you could always hire someone (but, unlike a robot, a cleaner will raise eyebrows at leftover pizzas and Playboy magazines).