Well I slammed Anandtech for selling Microsoft a link to every time the word "business", "technology", or "applications" shows up even when it is in a direct quote from the CEOs they are interviewing. Let's get a quick recap!
4 questions about the economy (it's getting a little better but not stellar)
2 questions about future goals (market consolidation and cost pressures will continue, so we'll play it smart)
1 question on China (it's cheaper there)
2 questions blindsided by simultaneous press releases
1 interesting (but not earthshattering) question about predominance of graphics chipset manufacturers. Unfortunately they all answered differently so no followup except a note about ATI's deal with Intel.
On second thought Anandtech's problem with ethical advertising is perhaps moot since they hardly made the success this article is portrayed to be. Lukewarm answers with little relevance to most Slashdot readers.
Think of the questions they could have asked! I thought maybe they would pull a fast one by getting grassroots support for NVIDIA onboard but nope. Sony (who have just announced they will use their own chips in the future) has experimented with manufacturing based on user requests. And there ought to be quite a lot of competition if 20 companies are involved. How come there is no attempt to laser in on how to make use of this competition by announcing plans for exciting technology, modularity, form factors, even information most people don't know about, like how many motherboards you have to buy before you can ask them for custom designs? Are we just reading about cloneheads or are we reading about the killers of the Onyx? Come on!
Here is an example. I recently saw the Grape supercomputer chip which was built in Japan for astronomical calculations being used for simulation of molecules (van der waals and other forces) for bioinformatics. The thing ran off a linux box. Now these chips are maybe a bit hairy and custom, certainly only a handful around. But Apple's Altivec vector processor has proven to be one of the reasons people are using their machines in the bioinfo industry (one of the few growing ones right now).
I mean geez, not even any information about on-board digital video encoding support or things which might even have some impact on say linux pvrs or consumer demand. What about onboard support for high speed communications like GB ethernet, 802.11g, 3G/4G, firewire?
How about some information about motherboard manufacturers offering some juicy performance or (shudder) some words on maybe reversing the trend toward planned obsolescense? Would you not pay a little more for a motherboard that could stick with the next generation of chips without having to be thrown in the closet?
Interesting how AnandTech has no qualms about putting words into the mouths of their interviewees, even when they are captains of industry. Anybody try to click on the orange links embedded in the text? Don't! They all go to an advertisement for Microsoft Business Solutions.
It is also not clear whether the replies from CEO#1 refers to the first CEO in the list at the top of the article, or if the order has purposely been scrambled to limit the fallout at a given company. When I clicked on the a link (the word "business" in CEO#2's reply, I thought I would find out what company he was from, instead it sends you to a big popup window for Microsoft.
If there is no direct attribution and the editors play so freely with mixing advertising into what the execs are supposedly saying, how do we even know this is all true? (I presume it is true on the other hand how do follow a thread of what a given CEO is saying, and was this even conducted in English or is this a translation from Chinese?) Personally this made me take AnandTech's "first ever CEO forum" with a big fat grain of salt even before getting into the main part of the article. I'd prefer they use big ads you can't miss than to attempt subversion of the text itself.
Well I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they have told each CEO what their number is so they can check the homepage for accuracy. But realistically this seems silly since with enough answers anybody knowledgeable ought to be able to figure out who is who, and I would be surprised if each CEO's employees are (if they heard of AnandTech) demanding to know which number he is. All this seems to contribute to the closed nature of the business which the leader explains. Usually when a company hosts a CEO Forum (like the Economist Conference I saw a couple days ago where the French CEO of Nissan Carlos Ghosn was present) you have them actually talking to each other and you can identify who is who. This cloak and dagger idiocy is a waste of the reader's time!
Boxed sets are the only/best way to get commercial software.. maybe not so important in the U.S. but in Japan for example where RH has the market share (though ibm only supports RH7 !!) you have to get the boxed set to get the front end processor (A.I. input tool) critical to Japanese input and good fonts. Currently I am using RH9 from the ftp site and I have to tell you it drives me nuts with its utterly brain dead kanji conversion (from roman letter phonetic spelling to the correct kanji combination).
I did tell a client to buy two year-long liscenses to RH network though.
If RH had an online store where I could buy all the commercial linux software I want as rpms for RH9 I would totally be there. Especially if it didn't have to be paid by credit card!!
A late response - it was not really PCI sort of like a forerunner to Nubus I think. Same kind of shape though. 16KB Language card is what it was called, it boosted the system from 48KB to 64KB, which gave enough memory to run Applesoft (floating point basic) or Pascal instead of just Integer Basic.
Some good comments-and one from a dtp programmer
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Scribus 1.0 Released
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My comments are made in light of the state of the bilingual printing industry in Japan, plus my experience in a DTP shop in the U.S.
Two really great points were made here, about fonts and trapping. The lack of good Mac-based fonts due to liscensing trouble nearly killed Mac DTP, and even now the choice of available fonts is critical. So if you already have fonts, or know what fonts are available at the output agency, the ability to use these predictably will be extremely useful. So perhaps a kerning table that matches commercial printers' fontsets will allow you to simulate printing with a certain font that you don't have.
The point about the need for trapping is also great. Trapping is basically an algorithm to control how differently colored areas overlap or don't. If you do it right you don't get wierd intersection effects, but it is hard to get a computer to do it right every time. Get some professional DTP people to try the software and send feedback about it - tough love maybe but it will make for better software for all users.
There was a question about resolution - usually people talk about lines per inch not dots per inch, and even then you choose a printer by seeing how well the cheapest version will output the file you have. For example you can get away with a cheap printer if it is just black and white laser of a document, but you other printers will give you much finer halftone screens or will be more economical at higher print volumes. I have not used PDF at say 1200 dpi but would be interested to see how well you can print color photos with the current system they are using.
Also I mentioned in the past that I had ported specialized DTP software (like a cross between Quark and Illustrator) for traditional printing presses in Japan from Mac to Windows, now used by 1500 companies. It is used for example to print national exams. Font handling precision was important so I used Quicktime. Import and export of file formats was important, and there were a large number of functions for finicky manipulations, some of which seemed unique to the way ads were printed on these machines, mimicking the way it used to be done by hand.
So it just seems that if the authors take a single very specific problem domain (say a small to medium size company printing camera-ready advertisements for a magazine, or perhaps printing a sales brochure) and actually trying this with real users they will get excellent feedback and the word will get around. But even a small DTP (design) shop wants to use tools that are going to allow quick import and creation of line art and photos, and provide the basic tools (thinking of fonts and illustrator-like drawing functions) to get as much high quality work done in as short a time as possible. $1000 bucks is nothing. The question is can a better, cheaper system be provided for any users.
Anyway this sounds like a great attempt and I'll certainly look forward to using it. If I could I'd like to make a PDF for a Japanese product brochure with it, but this may be pushing it too much. Good luck to the authors.
Finally, this is not the only DTP software for Linux, if you count LyX (the word-processor frontend to LaTeX). Though it is not exactly easy to use, and not exactly WYSIWIG perhaps.. but you can do mathematical typesetting and manuals (or man pages) pretty well with it. I wonder if Scribus can import LyX or other postscript files. Would Scribus be a good alternative for scientific researchers to write up and publish research papers? Perhaps some templates that made it easy to print a two-column article with a bibliography would be useful there. There is some interesting information about why arxiv.org does not want you to send PDFs (they prefer TeX source since it maintains context). Can Scribus import TeX? What about EPS? How much interoperation with GIMP or other software on linux or other platfo
First I thought hmm, sounds like some scripts I put on my suse (now redhat unfortunately) laptop. But I see where they're coming from. Now it sounds just like my Palm, it has similar settings and a location manager too. Of course there are Apple people in there.. You have to go back before location manager to the Selector when you could switch between ports graphically back on the mac classic.
I very much would like to know how Premiere (or FCP though I haven't used it) stacks up against heroinewarrior's Cinelerra (used to be Broadcast2000) which just got a new version last month.
What are you smoking? Apple *sold* microsoft the sound technology that's in there, anything else is hardware and there's not likely to be anything serious on the motherboard due to 1) price 2) noise. Now if there was a shielded tube amp pci card I'd be there!
Why not check this out. I just now found this windows version of a beautiful browser that even now is quite nice to use and far more satisfying than the others out there (well lynx I like too).
Also it seems to limit the amount of information you can absorb at a time which is a good thing! And 99.999% of the ads are gone too!
Of course this is 5-6 years ago..
There is plenty of room for rethinking applications, especially in the area of semantic content and broadband access. SGI's Onyx had a neat little demo where you go through 3D aimated hyperspace portals to get to different 3D worlds or applications, I remember one that was a flyover of the Matterhorn and ended up with a Nintendo chip deep inside it (on their Infinite Reality). Most people are finding and publishing content in a 2D, static format for now, but nobody has set anything in stone. If you have cheap connectivity something completely different for audio and video may be useful to people.
At the moment Asia seems to be a bit ahead of the U.S. in connectivity, Yahoo BB (broadband) has been stalking people in front of your local train station and attempting to give free IP phones to everyone in site. As I hold back they have kept getting cheaper, the last one I saw somehow got Snoopy on it. These people also need a good networked application.
Another possibility is the Cavern system from U Indiana. A Cave is a room with 2d/3d video on the walls/floors etc., a Cavern built on the open library can connect two or more caves together. These have also been around for some years now, but there is no reason why there cannot be more creative thinking going on, the only reason I see for Mr. Andreesen's perception is that a lot of the people who could do something about it also have to make a living and it is harder to do both these days. A collaboration space to do this might be a good test bed for the applications themselves. The current Web is plenty fertile for people who want to develop new software, but new hardware makes it easier to get the software into people's hands and get funding to build it.
Anyway Mr. Andreesen is not just a whiner, he's also mega-rich. He could make a foundation which would select and sponsor research projects in this area, specifically to fund groups or producers who can coordinate media artists and engineers. The dotcom investment bubble is over, but nobody has died and fallen off the earth. If he doesn't know anyone I'd be glad to help.
I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I graduated from weekend courses on a fortran keypunch machine at a nearby highschool to my own Apple II. It had one color and could only handle integers, until I got a PCI card for another 16 KB to give me applesoft fp basic and pascal. A new screen made for two colors (purple and green), plus white. Then I thought I was a genius with a hack that doubled the resolution and the number of colors to four, though you could only use two on the even columns and two on the odd ones.
Compared to the teletype and imsai toggle switch machines I had in the basement I thought I was really cooking at the time. Kids today have it so much better.
For some time I was scouring boards (on my 300 baud Hayes Micromodem) for information on how to find this "internet" I heard rumors about, now kids can spend all that time and build real software just by digesting the amazingly ubiquitous documentation and free software. When I got on a network it was ascii (the Source, a Prime computer at Compuserve which was pretty expensive, I was lucky).
If there is anything I'd recommend get your kid an internet connection and as many books as they want.
It might just be me having a bad day, but a usual I react with a vaulting wave of sheer loathing upon hearing the phrase "Best Practices". Desensitized? Try Over-Sensitized!
In my experience the only people who use such terms are mediocre Sales & Marketing managers who are supreme bullshitters and such phrases are the way they get this bullshit propogated. Then since they really do not have a clue about things like security, reliability, robustness, risk management, or engineering, nor real success at their own field, they use such terms to get software engineers to defend their decisions ad nauseum.
You are not going to get an entry-level scripter to become a master programmer by getting him to read a book on "Best Practices", you will not save time, money, or personnel, and you will alienate the true professionals on the team. But, you will be able to attempt closing a large account by using these buzzwords.
Certainly it is important to base operations on objective reality but this is not the way. What constitutes the best practice must by definition change with time, business requirements, team abilities, and so on. You need not a blind committment to a list of best practices, you need rather a cadre of live human beings who are capable of making a decision about what practice (we call that operational strategy in the real world) will be appropriate. The client is most likely not able to make this decision, they are depending on you to do it and usually want to believe that you have a sincere philosophy based on doing a good job and making them happy.
In particular "Best Practices" like I suppose J2EE, Weblogic, Oracle, or Sun are usually death to most web-based midsize projects in this economic environment, if the same result can be accomplished with more speed, safety, and cost performance using systems like perl/jsp, mysql/postgres, bsd/linux. Although perhaps J2EE has gotten more economical, if so I've missed it for the past year. The times you really need the high-power products are not going to be discovered with a beginners' book like this one. Although it might be useful for independent developers to read and understand the Language of the Enemy (LotE). It can help you eat their lunch.
Of course, I haven't read the book and I ought to give them the benefit of the doubt, after all I like O'Reilly a lot. Luckily this book sounds too technical for marketing types so it is probably not a valid target for accusations of pandering. It sounds like there is a lot of good information in there, and the "best practices" term is from the reviewer (after all, who wants to be against "best practices"?) Usually when I hear the term it means anathema to explaining clearly and concisely what kinds of knowledge, decision-making talents, experience, policies and operations are going to promote reliability/security/robustness. Personally, if I must use market speak (almost never I think unless competing against someone who does) I will qualify each word carefully so as to help the client understand that it is about professionalism and committment, not about a power sales technique. Of course if they don't want to think about it I'll still do my best but when somebody else comes along they will have only themselves to blame! Well no point in ranting perhaps.
Terms like "Best Practices" are still around because some people don't want to think seriously about IT, and those who are serious do not have the conceptual tools to do so. This gives cynical managers tools to leverage fear and uncertainty.
Where I come from, the best practice is to work very hard at doing The Right Thing but to also consider what the right technical strategy is on a case by case basis, in order to deliver the best cost efficiency and performance. In other words, think about the customer. They want to trust you that you know your business and will do a professional job. They do not (unless they are gullible, which explains a lot about this industry) want to hear buzzwords from marketdroids who
An associate of mine runs a small factory in Japan where they make 3d-printers, much of the technology is from Texas-based DTM. Can't find their homepage, I think they might be owned or were by BFGoodrich. Many companies use their Sinterstation, which uses a laser to fuse nylon or metal powder deposited in thin layers inside the production bay.
The machines are I believe in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each but they are used to make prototypes like mobile phone shells, or molds as for experimental automotive parts.
Anyway nylon is easy, but they also have a rapidsteel process and the holy grail I understand is titanium, which would allow you to create surgical implants like joint replacements.
As you can see in the link above, you can already pretty easily produce a 3d model of your skull from Cat-scan tomography. I've only seen plastic versions, though they might be more appropriate to trying to mimic x-ray backscatter from bone, and much cheaper than going through the trouble of making a mold, pouring metal, and finishing it.
Hospitals are probably a lot easier to penetrate than these biometric systems. Come to think of it, you could skip the biometric penetration and just use anthropological techniques to build a face over the skull based on known data about skin depth at different parts of the skull. Painting surface features based on a pictures taken with a telephoto lens would also be cheap compared to the price tag mentioned in this thread for biometric analysis equipment.
Lots of interesting kneejerk respo^H^H^H posts from the military!
It does seem the military could become the prime funder of open source with very little effort, as it is most likely heavily used already. All that is needed is a few more trolls, I mean ask slashdots, like this one and my company, er I mean the open source community, will quickly accumulate a critical mass of information about U.S. Army procurement procedure to swiftly overtake Bill / make so much money it needs scientific notation / significantly improve oss / hire some professional documentation writers (pick one or more).
This has got to be one of the most intersting threads to get posts from people in the military, really. Maybe someone with some experience could provide more concrete information how to get oss' foot in the door, i.e. books/sites to study, areas of need, specific cases where oss is already used, etc. From the outside one would think that the military's gung-ho/can-do spirit would embrace superior options if they should exist, do not cost too much to introduce, and are well supported. How does OSS get into the next procurement cycle and grab a piece of the next half-bil or whatever is invested? Open Source does run on Windows you know, and it doesn't *have* to suck.
Ho, ho, ho that is so funny I'm in stitches! I mean, how are they going to test this thing? This power broker is going to get such a tushy-slapping from his wife when he gets home!
Hatch (as in booby-hatch) finally opened his mouth once too much and now everyone realizes the sad truth: The Senator is unfortunately quite insane!
Obviously any big downloaders will disable this hardware feature with a patch that is released instantaneously, but on the other hand (and considering all the evil closed source software on everyone's pcs these days) this law will make payback^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfeedback to RIAA, Senators, and friends a slowly savored delight. Certainly nobody in Mr. Hatch's family, or office would have any improperly liscensed materials on their machines.. And if they are behind a router why then the router will have to be trashed as well!
This is the best thing that's happened yet, history will no doubt place Sen. Hatch on the pinnacle of gross, power hungry, inane fanatics when the subject of the decline of the U.S. in the eyes of the world at the beginning of the 21st century is discussed. How quaint! Just makes me nostalgic for the 90's don't you just know it.
I discussed this with the guy in charge of i-Mode at DoCoMo in Tokyo recently. And a recet presentation I saw given by the president of DoCoMo was very similar.
Take it with a grain of salt, but they say they aren't worried. Their take on it is that since packet-based communications are cheaper with FOMA (3G) that people will switch to it. Some people apparently pay about 10,000 yen (US$85) a month for i-Mode and that is perhaps the crossover point.
Also they say they will be coming out with new services that should require more data and hence draw more 3G users. Personally I don't think it is fast enough! The videophone function will be much more compelling at 4G speeds, the FOMA handset has a zoom video camera lens, and the 505 series that came out this week has a megapixel camera in it, (Macromedia) Flash, and you can swivel so you just see the screen and no buttons. Game companies Square and Bandai also liscense content. I'm worried about the price of the handset, in one recent iteration the Sony phones were like way over $500 I think with memory stick.
Latest news, NTT announced wireless service at optical fiber speeds (100Mbps). I want it, but I don't want to put that antenna next to my brain!
The film Dune does put Jihad (Holy War) in a positive light, and the desert world of Arrakis certainly came to mind during the War in Iraq.
While assassination has been glamorized in movies I don't think terrorism per se is there yet. Though I don't know what's playing in Palestine this week..
I mentioned this in the last thread about Roomba, nevertheless Slashdot must decide that if a U.S. launch comes later the originator of a product idea must be playing catch-up.
Anyway, October 2002 I showed the Trilobite actually working in a stylish living-room type setting, actually a lounge area we set up in the Swedish Embassy in Tokyo for a few weeks of events. Electrolux was a sponsor. It was made almost entirely by Electrolux, with some changes for the Japanese market provided by Toshiba (mainly electrical and marketing I believe).
Here is a page in Japanese showing the Trilobite on sale for 268,000 yen. Not cheap for sure.
The unit is astounding when you try it, it navigates around table legs and goes under sofas, and starts up and shuts down by itself (and docks itself too). One of the areas they wanted to improve was to make it quieter so that may have been done already. (the Japanese page says 65dB) It is kind of like an Aibo that actually does work for you. It also walks around you, not the other way around.
Someone above mentioned 31st magnitude is a trillion times dimmer than what the human eye can see. And someone else mentioned that the faintest star in the image was made with about 20,000 photons captured over 3.5 days.
Something seems strange. I remember hearing that the human eye can discern a single photon, as from radioactive breakdown in a wristwatch face. I found something to back that up here and here (actually apparently single photons are discarded as noise; 2 or three are better).
So by my calculations, if you pick a 31st magnitude star in the jpeg and look in the right direction for ten seconds, you will probably get a single photon from the star you picked. Of course you'll get lots of other photons too since your eye can only discern an angle of one arc minute and all those stars are in about 3 arcminutes square.
I just thought it was neat that while obviously the human eye can't beat the HST in most areas it does seem to be about 20,000 times more sensitive than the Hubble's CCDs by those calculations! Anybody know if the CCDs can actually trigger on single photons? What a fantastic picture. I want to pan across it all night.
Obviously highly secure systems, like cryptography, are relatively immune to software/network based attacks. This is why it was illegal for so long. But it is too late, the crypto cat has jumped out of the bag.
Now, the battle is not for keys but for control of the OS so that spying can take place before things get encrypted. The government seems to be saying their infowar capabilities depend on buffer overflows and script-kiddie-like activities in commonly used software which scares me! It makes me think the government has suddenly discovered that keeping the least common denominator very insecure and well identifiable (i.e. porous networks, weakened keys, GUIDs, 0wned operating systems, closed source security) will make it easier for them to catch enemy agents.
This means there is a danger that the U.S. government will also find it is in its best interests to subvert as much software as possible. Still feel safe with those RPMs? How about that up2date agent there? Is the Microsoft software update agent meant to keep users safe, or to enable surveillance?
The government seems to feel it is not in its interest to promote secure practices, lest it lock itself outside of the henhouse. I don't see how anyone can help but suspect duplicity to some degree when using commercial closed operating systems (MS Windows) given the government's current stated intent of removing all potential weapons and sharp corners from circulation.
The answer is that anyone can use open source software, not just terrorists, and the availability of high quality secure software is more important for maintaining freedom from persecution than is the need to protect against terrorists. There are constitutional problems with the current attempts by the U.S. to turn back the clock.
Sorry to be responding so late. Yes, rpm naming for the core packages could be easily handled. I am more worried about the naming of subprojects, potential chaos on the user's hard disk, confusion with security updates, and clashes in the real world with merchandise, print media, and people trying to make a living at open source.
I just posted the continuation of my correspondence with Mr. Asa Dotzler who seems to be the major figurehead for the Mozilla Firebird naming decision in today's new slashdot thread. (4/23/2003).
I posted in the first Firebird thread my email to Asa Dotzler and he has taken the time to provide detailed responses twice to many of my points, which cover most of the posts on this thread. I have to say I am completely on the side of IBPhoenix and find AOL/Mozilla acting unconscionably with the potential for real damage to the SQL project in the future, but that I am very grateful that Mr. Dotzler has responded in such detail. He said he would be following up and I am still hoping they will make an enlightened decision.
I will extremely briefly summarize Mr. Dotzler's answers in the hopes that this will reduce duplication of effort and help more people at AOL and on the Mozilla team understand the significant issues. This is in direct response to the enormous damage to Slashdot incurred by CmdrTaco once again with his completely slanted, juvenile take on what is essentially a major corporation's lawyers deciding an open source project is fair game.
My original post was 'Reasonable Reasons for Mozilla not to use "Firebird" name' and included ten points of argument.
This is a summary, though I have kept Mr. Dotzler's responses verbatim (quotes) where it seemed important. Any mistakes are probably mine.
1. Confusion during automatic update (rpm firebird-xxx.rpm/apt-get firebird) in future distros Dotzler: packaging confusion easy to solve and premature since pkg not yet made by moz team
2. Firebird DB not yet in popular distro despite advanced technology, so will be hurt by loss of logical package name Dotzler: "we'll name it something that won't be confused with other apps." And Firebird DB wasn't the first software project using the name.
3. Firebird DB team will have to invest energy into keeping people from being confused Dotzler: "I have yet to see any real confusion.. that's nothing a little website cross linking couldn't easily solve."
4. Plenty of confusion is possible, e.g. a) a db browser for firebird db, which could even be built with mozilla's XUL; b) mozilla might gain a data storage component that competes; c) what if Open Office wanted to use Mozilla and Firebird DB; d) as people use mysql for email db, how to explain to clients that a system uses the high power Firebird DB for email without meaning Mozilla email client which has inferior data store. Dotzler: 'People using Mozilla's products will call it "Mozilla" something. People using the Firebird RDBMS may, in certain rare situations have to clarify that they're talking about a database. Not a real problem'.
5. Firebird DB people have already fought plenty of battles (with Borland) and I was impressed with Ann Harisson when I met her at Open Source DB conference (I am not a user or biz partner of the DB). The name is a brand and also a tool for differentiation between Borland's Interbase and the superior Firebird codebase. And, Firebird as a browser name is a Synonym for a competing browser! Does Mozilla plan to rely on scorched earth tactics i.e. building browser empire on the "ashes" of other companies?
Dotzler: 'I think this is getting around to the "hurt feelings" that I mentioned above. No one seemed to get all emotional about the poor little BBS project that was wiped out of the Google search results when the database people decided that it was more important for them to consider the "feelings" of a pre-existing open source BBS project. How was mozilla to know that with many existing Firebird software projects all happily co-existing that many+1 would be considered "bullshit"?
6. There may be lots of companies using the "Firebird" name, but Mozilla and the Firebird DB are the two highest profile, most important open source projects, and there is danger of conflict in many areas, e.g. sourceforge site,.NET driver, spinoff projects, etc. At least firebird+linux search on google will be half as useful as it could be. Dotzler: Google results alone not a big dea
I have on my desk a recent magazine that discusses putting a swapfile on compact flash for the linux-based Zaurus (the pivoting clamshell one not available in U.S. yet, see sharp.co.jp).
The Zaurus has I believe 96MB of RAM, of which only 32MB are for the user (the rest is for decompressed OS image). Of course you could also fit an IBM HD on PCMCIA into it as well.
My letter to asa@mozilla.org - Reasonable Reasons submitted by mattr Thursday April 17th, 2003 06:27:26 AM Reply to this message I am posting a letter I sent to Asa Dotzler who I am worried may not be able to read or answer my letter due to the volume of mail and her lawyer's specious advice, in the hopes that this will help the Mozilla team to suck in some gut and make a brave choice to change to some other name not involving a flaming bird. May I also say right now congratulations and many thanks to BOTH teams. Little do they know it, but both teams might even benefit from using the other's code..
Subject: Reasonable Reasons for Mozilla not to use "Firebird" name
Hello,
Sorry to bug you, everyone else is too I'm sure. I would like to provide a few clear reasons why Mozilla really should *not* be called Firebird.
1. It will be very confusing to users and even developers who want to for example automatically update packages in popular distros.
2. Mozilla would be hurting Firebird DB badly since they are not yet in RedHat for example, even though some people think Firebird is far more advanced than say PostgreSql or MySql. What happens when someone tries "apt-get firebird"? Obviously they will most likely get Mozilla, which means that despite your arguments, you are effectively locking them out. Sure it is possible for one team or another to gracefully rename their project to perhaps something slightly different. But they were there first!
3. Firebird (DB) people will have to invest a lot of energy into keeping people from being confused.
4. Regarding the suggestion that "nobody will be confused", his is disingenuous. Obviously you can have a database browser (to browse contents of the DB). And Mozilla's XUL could even be used to build it. Needless to say it is not unlikely that Mozilla might have some more visible data component in it than it already has, along the lines of Open Office's embedded HTML browser and Database browser. What if OO wanted to use Mozilla for its browser, and Firebird DB for its main DB? Just for an example. And many people use MySql for their own email, for example. If they used Firebird instead, how could you explain easily to people that your system is using the high power Firebird Database for email, and not the Mozilla new email client named Firebird (which presumably has some kind of data storage mechanism far inferior to the Firebird DB)?
5. Firebird DB people have already fought plenty of battles (with Borland). I have met Ann Harisson on her trip to Japan recently and was very impressed with her and her team's experience and vision. They don't deserve this bullshit. The Firebird project name is also a brand the recognition of which is a necessary tool to get users to differentiate between the (older, less improved, and buggier) Interbase codebase. The Firebird/Phoenix logo in one way symbolizes their resurrection of the code and careers of the developers. Mozilla does not have the same history. *Not incidentally*, the Mozilla team's idea of using a SYNONYM for another company's browser name (i.e. choosing "Firebird" instead of "Phoenix") is utterly hateful. Not only that, the main company behind the Firebird database is in fact called IBPhoenix!!! Do you intend to build your browser empire on the *ashes* of other companies???
6. While there are lots of companies which use the Firebird/Phoenix/Thunderbird name, Mozilla and Firebird are the two highest profile, most important open source projects, and there is a great danger of conflicts in all sorts of areas, for example they have the sourceforge site, and they also have a.NET driver. At the very least when you search for firebird and linux on google the search will be half as useful as it could be!
7. The Mozilla team threatens all open source projects with unspecified costs (in energy, time, money, and psychological well-being) in having to try and protect themselves and possibly incurring costs of hiring trademark lawyers. If
Dumb. They will find that firebird.sourceforge.net has been taken already, Firebird is Interbase, the open source version of borland db which is run by real professionals who run a real db consulting business. And the next version is being built. They really don't need a raft of people making mistakes about their name. Pick your own!
Slashdot Mirror
- 4 questions about the economy (it's getting a little better but not stellar)
- 2 questions about future goals (market consolidation and cost pressures will continue, so we'll play it smart)
- 1 question on China (it's cheaper there)
- 2 questions blindsided by simultaneous press releases
- 1 interesting (but not earthshattering) question about predominance of graphics chipset manufacturers. Unfortunately they all answered differently so no followup except a note about ATI's deal with Intel.
On second thought Anandtech's problem with ethical advertising is perhaps moot since they hardly made the success this article is portrayed to be. Lukewarm answers with little relevance to most Slashdot readers.Think of the questions they could have asked! I thought maybe they would pull a fast one by getting grassroots support for NVIDIA onboard but nope. Sony (who have just announced they will use their own chips in the future) has experimented with manufacturing based on user requests. And there ought to be quite a lot of competition if 20 companies are involved. How come there is no attempt to laser in on how to make use of this competition by announcing plans for exciting technology, modularity, form factors, even information most people don't know about, like how many motherboards you have to buy before you can ask them for custom designs? Are we just reading about cloneheads or are we reading about the killers of the Onyx? Come on!
Here is an example. I recently saw the Grape supercomputer chip which was built in Japan for astronomical calculations being used for simulation of molecules (van der waals and other forces) for bioinformatics. The thing ran off a linux box. Now these chips are maybe a bit hairy and custom, certainly only a handful around. But Apple's Altivec vector processor has proven to be one of the reasons people are using their machines in the bioinfo industry (one of the few growing ones right now).
I mean geez, not even any information about on-board digital video encoding support or things which might even have some impact on say linux pvrs or consumer demand. What about onboard support for high speed communications like GB ethernet, 802.11g, 3G/4G, firewire?
How about some information about motherboard manufacturers offering some juicy performance or (shudder) some words on maybe reversing the trend toward planned obsolescense? Would you not pay a little more for a motherboard that could stick with the next generation of chips without having to be thrown in the closet?
It is also not clear whether the replies from CEO#1 refers to the first CEO in the list at the top of the article, or if the order has purposely been scrambled to limit the fallout at a given company. When I clicked on the a link (the word "business" in CEO#2's reply, I thought I would find out what company he was from, instead it sends you to a big popup window for Microsoft.
If there is no direct attribution and the editors play so freely with mixing advertising into what the execs are supposedly saying, how do we even know this is all true? (I presume it is true on the other hand how do follow a thread of what a given CEO is saying, and was this even conducted in English or is this a translation from Chinese?) Personally this made me take AnandTech's "first ever CEO forum" with a big fat grain of salt even before getting into the main part of the article. I'd prefer they use big ads you can't miss than to attempt subversion of the text itself.
Well I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they have told each CEO what their number is so they can check the homepage for accuracy. But realistically this seems silly since with enough answers anybody knowledgeable ought to be able to figure out who is who, and I would be surprised if each CEO's employees are (if they heard of AnandTech) demanding to know which number he is. All this seems to contribute to the closed nature of the business which the leader explains. Usually when a company hosts a CEO Forum (like the Economist Conference I saw a couple days ago where the French CEO of Nissan Carlos Ghosn was present) you have them actually talking to each other and you can identify who is who. This cloak and dagger idiocy is a waste of the reader's time!
Boxed sets are the only/best way to get commercial software.. maybe not so important in the U.S. but in Japan for example where RH has the market share (though ibm only supports RH7 !!) you have to get the boxed set to get the front end processor (A.I. input tool) critical to Japanese input and good fonts. Currently I am using RH9 from the ftp site and I have to tell you it drives me nuts with its utterly brain dead kanji conversion (from roman letter phonetic spelling to the correct kanji combination).
I did tell a client to buy two year-long liscenses to RH network though.
If RH had an online store where I could buy all the commercial linux software I want as rpms for RH9 I would totally be there. Especially if it didn't have to be paid by credit card!!
By the way you can see some impressive DTP from TeX here.
A late response - it was not really PCI sort of like a forerunner to Nubus I think. Same kind of shape though. 16KB Language card is what it was called, it boosted the system from 48KB to 64KB, which gave enough memory to run Applesoft (floating point basic) or Pascal instead of just Integer Basic.
My comments are made in light of the state of the bilingual printing industry in Japan, plus my experience in a DTP shop in the U.S.
Two really great points were made here, about fonts and trapping. The lack of good Mac-based fonts due to liscensing trouble nearly killed Mac DTP, and even now the choice of available fonts is critical. So if you already have fonts, or know what fonts are available at the output agency, the ability to use these predictably will be extremely useful. So perhaps a kerning table that matches commercial printers' fontsets will allow you to simulate printing with a certain font that you don't have.
The point about the need for trapping is also great. Trapping is basically an algorithm to control how differently colored areas overlap or don't. If you do it right you don't get wierd intersection effects, but it is hard to get a computer to do it right every time. Get some professional DTP people to try the software and send feedback about it - tough love maybe but it will make for better software for all users.
There was a question about resolution - usually people talk about lines per inch not dots per inch, and even then you choose a printer by seeing how well the cheapest version will output the file you have. For example you can get away with a cheap printer if it is just black and white laser of a document, but you other printers will give you much finer halftone screens or will be more economical at higher print volumes. I have not used PDF at say 1200 dpi but would be interested to see how well you can print color photos with the current system they are using.
Also I mentioned in the past that I had ported specialized DTP software (like a cross between Quark and Illustrator) for traditional printing presses in Japan from Mac to Windows, now used by
1500 companies. It is used for example to print national exams. Font handling precision was important so I used Quicktime. Import and export of file formats was important, and there were a large number of functions for finicky manipulations, some of which seemed unique to the way ads were printed on these machines, mimicking the way it used to be done by hand.
So it just seems that if the authors take a single very specific problem domain (say a small to medium size company printing camera-ready advertisements for a magazine, or perhaps printing a sales brochure) and actually trying this with real users they will get excellent feedback and the word will get around. But even a small DTP (design) shop wants to use tools that are going to allow quick import and creation of line art and photos, and provide the basic tools (thinking of fonts and illustrator-like drawing functions) to get as much high quality work done in as short a time as possible. $1000 bucks is nothing. The question is can a better, cheaper system be provided for any users.
Anyway this sounds like a great attempt and I'll certainly look forward to using it. If I could I'd like to make a PDF for a Japanese product brochure with it, but this may be pushing it too much. Good luck to the authors.
Finally, this is not the only DTP software for Linux, if you count LyX (the word-processor frontend to LaTeX). Though it is not exactly easy to use, and not exactly WYSIWIG perhaps.. but you can do mathematical typesetting and manuals (or man pages) pretty well with it. I wonder if Scribus can import LyX or other postscript files. Would Scribus be a good alternative for scientific researchers to write up and publish research papers? Perhaps some templates that made it easy to print a two-column article with a bibliography would be useful there. There is some interesting information about why arxiv.org does not want you to send PDFs (they prefer TeX source since it maintains context). Can Scribus import TeX? What about EPS? How much interoperation with GIMP or other software on linux or other platfo
First I thought hmm, sounds like some scripts I put on my suse (now redhat unfortunately) laptop. But I see where they're coming from.
Now it sounds just like my Palm, it has similar settings and a location manager too. Of course there are Apple people in there.. You have to go back before location manager to the Selector when you could switch between ports graphically back on the mac classic.
Has anyone tried both?
What are you smoking? Apple *sold* microsoft the sound technology that's in there, anything else is hardware and there's not likely to be anything serious on the motherboard due to 1) price 2) noise. Now if there was a shielded tube amp pci card I'd be there!
Why not check this out. I just now found this windows version of a beautiful browser that even now is quite nice to use and far more satisfying than the others out there (well lynx I like too).
Also it seems to limit the amount of information you can absorb at a time which is a good thing! And 99.999% of the ads are gone too!
Of course this is 5-6 years ago..
There is plenty of room for rethinking applications, especially in the area of semantic content and broadband access. SGI's Onyx had a neat little demo where you go through 3D aimated hyperspace portals to get to different 3D worlds or applications, I remember one that was a flyover of the Matterhorn and ended up with a Nintendo chip deep inside it (on their Infinite Reality). Most people are finding and publishing content in a 2D, static format for now, but nobody has set anything in stone. If you have cheap connectivity something completely different for audio and video may be useful to people.
At the moment Asia seems to be a bit ahead of the U.S. in connectivity, Yahoo BB (broadband) has been stalking people in front of your local train station and attempting to give free IP phones to everyone in site. As I hold back they have kept getting cheaper, the last one I saw somehow got Snoopy on it. These people also need a good networked application.
Another possibility is the Cavern system from U Indiana. A Cave is a room with 2d/3d video on the walls/floors etc., a Cavern built on the open library can connect two or more caves together. These have also been around for some years now, but there is no reason why there cannot be more creative thinking going on, the only reason I see for Mr. Andreesen's perception is that a lot of the people who could do something about it also have to make a living and it is harder to do both these days. A collaboration space to do this might be a good test bed for the applications themselves. The current Web is plenty fertile for people who want to develop new software, but new hardware makes it easier to get the software into people's hands and get funding to build it.
Anyway Mr. Andreesen is not just a whiner, he's also mega-rich. He could make a foundation which would select and sponsor research projects in this area, specifically to fund groups or producers who can coordinate media artists and engineers. The dotcom investment bubble is over, but nobody has died and fallen off the earth. If he doesn't know anyone I'd be glad to help.
Compared to the teletype and imsai toggle switch machines I had in the basement I thought I was really cooking at the time. Kids today have it so much better.
For some time I was scouring boards (on my 300 baud Hayes Micromodem) for information on how to find this "internet" I heard rumors about, now kids can spend all that time and build real software just by digesting the amazingly ubiquitous documentation and free software. When I got on a network it was ascii (the Source, a Prime computer at Compuserve which was pretty expensive, I was lucky).
If there is anything I'd recommend get your kid an internet connection and as many books as they want.
In my experience the only people who use such terms are mediocre Sales & Marketing managers who are supreme bullshitters and such phrases are the way they get this bullshit propogated. Then since they really do not have a clue about things like security, reliability, robustness, risk management, or engineering, nor real success at their own field, they use such terms to get software engineers to defend their decisions ad nauseum.
You are not going to get an entry-level scripter to become a master programmer by getting him to read a book on "Best Practices", you will not save time, money, or personnel, and you will alienate the true professionals on the team. But, you will be able to attempt closing a large account by using these buzzwords.
Certainly it is important to base operations on objective reality but this is not the way. What constitutes the best practice must by definition change with time, business requirements, team abilities, and so on. You need not a blind committment to a list of best practices, you need rather a cadre of live human beings who are capable of making a decision about what practice (we call that operational strategy in the real world) will be appropriate. The client is most likely not able to make this decision, they are depending on you to do it and usually want to believe that you have a sincere philosophy based on doing a good job and making them happy.
In particular "Best Practices" like I suppose J2EE, Weblogic, Oracle, or Sun are usually death to most web-based midsize projects in this economic environment, if the same result can be accomplished with more speed, safety, and cost performance using systems like perl/jsp, mysql/postgres, bsd/linux. Although perhaps J2EE has gotten more economical, if so I've missed it for the past year. The times you really need the high-power products are not going to be discovered with a beginners' book like this one. Although it might be useful for independent developers to read and understand the Language of the Enemy (LotE). It can help you eat their lunch.
Of course, I haven't read the book and I ought to give them the benefit of the doubt, after all I like O'Reilly a lot. Luckily this book sounds too technical for marketing types so it is probably not a valid target for accusations of pandering. It sounds like there is a lot of good information in there, and the "best practices" term is from the reviewer (after all, who wants to be against "best practices"?) Usually when I hear the term it means anathema to explaining clearly and concisely what kinds of knowledge, decision-making talents, experience, policies and operations are going to promote reliability/security/robustness. Personally, if I must use market speak (almost never I think unless competing against someone who does) I will qualify each word carefully so as to help the client understand that it is about professionalism and committment, not about a power sales technique. Of course if they don't want to think about it I'll still do my best but when somebody else comes along they will have only themselves to blame! Well no point in ranting perhaps.
Terms like "Best Practices" are still around because some people don't want to think seriously about IT, and those who are serious do not have the conceptual tools to do so. This gives cynical managers tools to leverage fear and uncertainty.
Where I come from, the best practice is to work very hard at doing The Right Thing but to also consider what the right technical strategy is on a case by case basis, in order to deliver the best cost efficiency and performance. In other words, think about the customer. They want to trust you that you know your business and will do a professional job. They do not (unless they are gullible, which explains a lot about this industry) want to hear buzzwords from marketdroids who
An associate of mine runs a small factory in Japan where they make 3d-printers, much of the technology is from Texas-based DTM. Can't find their homepage, I think they might be owned or were by BFGoodrich. Many companies use their Sinterstation, which uses a laser to fuse nylon or metal powder deposited in thin layers inside the production bay.
The machines are I believe in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each but they are used to make prototypes like mobile phone shells, or molds as for experimental automotive parts.
Anyway nylon is easy, but they also have a rapidsteel process and the holy grail I understand is titanium, which would allow you to create surgical implants like joint replacements. As you can see in the link above, you can already pretty easily produce a 3d model of your skull from Cat-scan tomography. I've only seen plastic versions, though they might be more appropriate to trying to mimic x-ray backscatter from bone, and much cheaper than going through the trouble of making a mold, pouring metal, and finishing it. Hospitals are probably a lot easier to penetrate than these biometric systems. Come to think of it, you could skip the biometric penetration and just use anthropological techniques to build a face over the skull based on known data about skin depth at different parts of the skull. Painting surface features based on a pictures taken with a telephoto lens would also be cheap compared to the price tag mentioned in this thread for biometric analysis equipment.
It does seem the military could become the prime funder of open source with very little effort, as it is most likely heavily used already. All that is needed is a few more trolls, I mean ask slashdots, like this one and my company, er I mean the open source community, will quickly accumulate a critical mass of information about U.S. Army procurement procedure to swiftly overtake Bill / make so much money it needs scientific notation / significantly improve oss / hire some professional documentation writers (pick one or more).
This has got to be one of the most intersting threads to get posts from people in the military, really. Maybe someone with some experience could provide more concrete information how to get oss' foot in the door, i.e. books/sites to study, areas of need, specific cases where oss is already used, etc. From the outside one would think that the military's gung-ho/can-do spirit would embrace superior options if they should exist, do not cost too much to introduce, and are well supported. How does OSS get into the next procurement cycle and grab a piece of the next half-bil or whatever is invested? Open Source does run on Windows you know, and it doesn't *have* to suck.
Hatch (as in booby-hatch) finally opened his mouth once too much and now everyone realizes the sad truth: The Senator is unfortunately quite insane!
Obviously any big downloaders will disable this hardware feature with a patch that is released instantaneously, but on the other hand (and considering all the evil closed source software on everyone's pcs these days) this law will make payback^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfeedback to RIAA, Senators, and friends a slowly savored delight. Certainly nobody in Mr. Hatch's family, or office would have any improperly liscensed materials on their machines.. And if they are behind a router why then the router will have to be trashed as well!
This is the best thing that's happened yet, history will no doubt place Sen. Hatch on the pinnacle of gross, power hungry, inane fanatics when the subject of the decline of the U.S. in the eyes of the world at the beginning of the 21st century is discussed. How quaint! Just makes me nostalgic for the 90's don't you just know it.
I discussed this with the guy in charge of i-Mode at DoCoMo in Tokyo recently. And a recet presentation I saw given by the president of DoCoMo was very similar.
Take it with a grain of salt, but they say they aren't worried. Their take on it is that since packet-based communications are cheaper with FOMA (3G) that people will switch to it. Some people apparently pay about 10,000 yen (US$85) a month for i-Mode and that is perhaps the crossover point.
Also they say they will be coming out with new services that should require more data and hence draw more 3G users. Personally I don't think it is fast enough! The videophone function will be much more compelling at 4G speeds, the FOMA handset has a zoom video camera lens, and the 505 series that came out this week has a megapixel camera in it, (Macromedia) Flash, and you can swivel so you just see the screen and no buttons. Game companies Square and Bandai also liscense content. I'm worried about the price of the handset, in one recent iteration the Sony phones were like way over $500 I think with memory stick.
Latest news, NTT announced wireless service at optical fiber speeds (100Mbps). I want it, but I don't want to put that antenna next to my brain!
While assassination has been glamorized in movies I don't think terrorism per se is there yet. Though I don't know what's playing in Palestine this week..
Anyway, October 2002 I showed the Trilobite actually working in a stylish living-room type setting, actually a lounge area we set up in the Swedish Embassy in Tokyo for a few weeks of events. Electrolux was a sponsor. It was made almost entirely by Electrolux, with some changes for the Japanese market provided by Toshiba (mainly electrical and marketing I believe).
Here is a page in Japanese showing the Trilobite on sale for 268,000 yen. Not cheap for sure.
The unit is astounding when you try it, it navigates around table legs and goes under sofas, and starts up and shuts down by itself (and docks itself too). One of the areas they wanted to improve was to make it quieter so that may have been done already. (the Japanese page says 65dB) It is kind of like an Aibo that actually does work for you. It also walks around you, not the other way around.
Something seems strange. I remember hearing that the human eye can discern a single photon, as from radioactive breakdown in a wristwatch face. I found something to back that up here and here (actually apparently single photons are discarded as noise; 2 or three are better).
So by my calculations, if you pick a 31st magnitude star in the jpeg and look in the right direction for ten seconds, you will probably get a single photon from the star you picked. Of course you'll get lots of other photons too since your eye can only discern an angle of one arc minute and all those stars are in about 3 arcminutes square.
I just thought it was neat that while obviously the human eye can't beat the HST in most areas it does seem to be about 20,000 times more sensitive than the Hubble's CCDs by those calculations! Anybody know if the CCDs can actually trigger on single photons? What a fantastic picture. I want to pan across it all night.
Obviously highly secure systems, like cryptography, are relatively immune to software/network based attacks. This is why it was illegal for so long. But it is too late, the crypto cat has jumped out of the bag.
Now, the battle is not for keys but for control of the OS so that spying can take place before things get encrypted. The government seems to be saying their infowar capabilities depend on buffer overflows and script-kiddie-like activities in commonly used software which scares me! It makes me think the government has suddenly discovered that keeping the least common denominator very insecure and well identifiable (i.e. porous networks, weakened keys, GUIDs, 0wned operating systems, closed source security) will make it easier for them to catch enemy agents.
This means there is a danger that the U.S. government will also find it is in its best interests to subvert as much software as possible. Still feel safe with those RPMs? How about that up2date agent there? Is the Microsoft software update agent meant to keep users safe, or to enable surveillance?
The government seems to feel it is not in its interest to promote secure practices, lest it lock itself outside of the henhouse. I don't see how anyone can help but suspect duplicity to some degree when using commercial closed operating systems (MS Windows) given the government's current stated intent of removing all potential weapons and sharp corners from circulation.
The answer is that anyone can use open source software, not just terrorists, and the availability of high quality secure software is more important for maintaining freedom from persecution than is the need to protect against terrorists. There are constitutional problems with the current attempts by the U.S. to turn back the clock.
Hello,
Sorry to be responding so late. Yes, rpm naming for the core packages could be easily handled. I am more worried about the naming of subprojects, potential chaos on the user's hard disk, confusion with security updates, and clashes in the real world with merchandise, print media, and people trying to make a living at open source.
I just posted the continuation of my correspondence with Mr. Asa Dotzler who seems to be the major figurehead for the Mozilla Firebird naming decision in today's new slashdot thread. (4/23/2003).
Thanks,
Matt
I posted in the first Firebird thread my email to Asa Dotzler and he has taken the time to provide detailed responses twice to many of my points, which cover most of the posts on this thread. I have to say I am completely on the side of IBPhoenix and find AOL/Mozilla acting unconscionably with the potential for real damage to the SQL project in the future, but that I am very grateful that Mr. Dotzler has responded in such detail. He said he would be following up and I am still hoping they will make an enlightened decision.
.NET driver, spinoff projects, etc.
I will extremely briefly summarize Mr. Dotzler's answers in the hopes that this will reduce duplication of effort and help more people at AOL and on the Mozilla team understand the significant issues. This is in direct response to the enormous damage to Slashdot incurred by CmdrTaco once again with his completely slanted, juvenile take on what is essentially a major corporation's lawyers deciding an open source project is fair game.
My original post was 'Reasonable Reasons for Mozilla not to use "Firebird" name' and included ten points of argument.
This is a summary, though I have kept Mr. Dotzler's responses verbatim (quotes) where it
seemed important. Any mistakes are probably mine.
1. Confusion during automatic update (rpm firebird-xxx.rpm/apt-get firebird) in future distros
Dotzler: packaging confusion easy to solve and premature since pkg not yet made by moz team
2. Firebird DB not yet in popular distro despite advanced technology, so will be hurt by loss of logical package name
Dotzler: "we'll name it something that won't be confused with other apps."
And Firebird DB wasn't the first software project using the name.
3. Firebird DB team will have to invest energy into keeping people from being confused
Dotzler: "I have yet to see any real confusion.. that's nothing a little website cross linking couldn't easily solve."
4. Plenty of confusion is possible, e.g.
a) a db browser for firebird db, which could even be built with mozilla's XUL;
b) mozilla might gain a data storage component that competes;
c) what if Open Office wanted to use Mozilla and Firebird DB;
d) as people use mysql for email db, how to explain to clients that a system uses
the high power Firebird DB for email without meaning Mozilla email client which
has inferior data store.
Dotzler: 'People using Mozilla's products will call it "Mozilla" something.
People using the Firebird RDBMS may, in certain rare situations have to clarify
that they're talking about a database. Not a real problem'.
5. Firebird DB people have already fought plenty of battles (with Borland) and
I was impressed with Ann Harisson when I met her at Open Source DB conference
(I am not a user or biz partner of the DB). The name is a brand and also a tool for
differentiation between Borland's Interbase and the superior Firebird codebase.
And, Firebird as a browser name is a Synonym for a competing browser!
Does Mozilla plan to rely on scorched earth tactics i.e. building browser empire
on the "ashes" of other companies?
Dotzler: 'I think this is getting around to the "hurt feelings" that I mentioned
above. No one seemed to get all emotional about the poor little BBS project that was
wiped out of the Google search results when the database people decided that it
was more important for them to consider the "feelings" of a pre-existing open source BBS
project. How was mozilla to know that with many existing Firebird software projects
all happily co-existing that many+1 would be considered "bullshit"?
6. There may be lots of companies using the "Firebird" name, but Mozilla and the
Firebird DB are the two highest profile, most important open source projects, and there
is danger of conflict in many areas, e.g. sourceforge site,
At least firebird+linux search on google will be half as useful as it could be.
Dotzler: Google results alone not a big dea
I have on my desk a recent magazine that discusses putting a swapfile on compact flash for the linux-based Zaurus (the pivoting clamshell one not available in U.S. yet, see sharp.co.jp).
The Zaurus has I believe 96MB of RAM, of which only 32MB are for the user (the rest is for decompressed OS image). Of course you could also fit an IBM HD on PCMCIA into it as well.
My letter to asa@mozilla.org - Reasonable Reasons
.NET driver. At the very least when you search for firebird and linux on google the search will be half as useful as it could be!
submitted by mattr
Thursday April 17th, 2003 06:27:26 AM
Reply to this message
I am posting a letter I sent to Asa Dotzler who I am worried may not be able to read or answer my letter due to the volume of mail and her lawyer's specious advice, in the hopes that this will help the Mozilla team to suck in some gut and make a brave choice to change to some other name not involving a flaming bird. May I also say right now congratulations and many thanks to BOTH teams. Little do they know it, but both teams might even benefit from using the other's code..
Subject: Reasonable Reasons for Mozilla not to use "Firebird" name
Hello,
Sorry to bug you, everyone else is too I'm sure. I would like to provide a few clear reasons why Mozilla really should *not* be called Firebird.
1. It will be very confusing to users and even developers who want to for example automatically update packages in popular distros.
2. Mozilla would be hurting Firebird DB badly since they are not yet in RedHat for example, even though some people think Firebird is far more advanced than say PostgreSql or MySql. What happens when someone tries "apt-get firebird"? Obviously they will most likely get Mozilla, which means that despite your arguments, you are effectively locking them out. Sure it is possible for one team or another to gracefully rename their project to perhaps something slightly different. But they were there first!
3. Firebird (DB) people will have to invest a lot of energy into keeping people from being confused.
4. Regarding the suggestion that "nobody will be confused", his is disingenuous. Obviously you can have a database browser (to browse contents of the DB). And Mozilla's XUL could even be used to build it. Needless to say it is not unlikely that Mozilla might have some more visible data component in it than it already has, along the lines of Open Office's embedded HTML browser and Database browser. What if OO wanted to use Mozilla for its browser, and Firebird DB for its main DB? Just for an example. And many people use MySql for their own email, for example. If they used Firebird instead, how could you explain easily to people that your system is using the high power Firebird Database for email, and not the Mozilla new email client named Firebird (which presumably has some kind of data storage mechanism far inferior to the Firebird DB)?
5. Firebird DB people have already fought plenty of battles (with Borland). I have met Ann Harisson on her trip to Japan recently and was very impressed with her and her team's experience and vision. They don't deserve this bullshit. The Firebird project name is also a brand the recognition of which is a necessary tool to get users to differentiate between the (older, less improved, and buggier) Interbase codebase. The Firebird/Phoenix logo in one way symbolizes their resurrection of the code and careers of the developers. Mozilla does not have the same history. *Not incidentally*, the Mozilla team's idea of using a SYNONYM for another company's browser name (i.e. choosing "Firebird" instead of "Phoenix") is utterly hateful. Not only that, the main company behind the Firebird database is in fact called IBPhoenix!!! Do you intend to build your browser empire on the *ashes* of other companies???
6. While there are lots of companies which use the Firebird/Phoenix/Thunderbird name, Mozilla and Firebird are the two highest profile, most important open source projects, and there is a great danger of conflicts in all sorts of areas, for example they have the sourceforge site, and they also have a
7. The Mozilla team threatens all open source projects with unspecified costs (in energy, time, money, and psychological well-being) in having to try and protect themselves and possibly incurring costs of hiring trademark lawyers. If
Dumb. They will find that firebird.sourceforge.net has been taken already, Firebird is Interbase, the open source version of borland db which is run by real professionals who run a real db consulting business. And the next version is being built. They really don't need a raft of people making mistakes about their name. Pick your own!