If I recall, (I can't find the specific patent right now) it's a patent on displaying a Windows app on an X machine by intercepting the Win32 display API calls and translating them into X API calls. Hardly "unobvious" and therefore not deserving of a patent if you ask me. The fact that GraphOn decided they deserved a patent for "displaying Windows apps on X" in the first place doesn't bode well for the ethics of the company.
Further, if you read GraphOn's press release, they claim to have, "a U.S. patent for the remote display of Microsoft Windows applications on UNIX® and Linux® desktops with X Windows® [...] remoted, or displayed, over a network or any other type of connection to any X Window system."
Doesn't sound like GraphOn wants anyone else to be able to display Windows apps on X no matter what the technology and is trying to make sure everyone believes they have a patent on everything that displays Windows apps on X. Like I said, it's hard for me to get excited about anything dealing with a company that likes to do business this way.
"According to Buddine, a WebTV employee acknowledged the existence of the security hole, and posted a warning to WebTV users not to visit the alt.discuss.webtv.hacking newsbgroup because it would cause erroneous messages to be sent to the WebTV abuse mailbox."
Patient: Doctor, Doctor, it hurts when I do like this! Doctor: Then don't do like that!
Now THAT's what I call an effective security fix. If you find a security hole, just tell your customers not to do anything that might take advantage of it! Piece of cake!
As of now, about 6:00pm EST, there's not a single "Beta" on that press release. It looks like someone did a "Search-and-delete" on the word "beta" and republished the page.
It sounds, from the wording of the press release and the comments of other users here, rather like they decided they couldn't make Interbase 6 into a commercial product so they're taking whatever they have lying around under the IB6 code tree and going to release it as open source rather than let the product line die. So maybe technically it is "Beta" but since there will never be a "final" they can just as realistically just call it "Interbase 6" as they seem to be doing now.
It's also interesting that they say "Open Source" but nothing about "free." Not that I am going to complain too much, it's they're code after all, but I wonder if they're going to still make this a commercial product, just one with source code as part of the package. I'd like to see it free, because I'd like to have a "high-end" database I can deploy in situations where MySQL or PostgreSQL just won't cut it but can't afford to spend the trillions of dollars it would cost to put Oracle in place.
You seem to be one of the most "purely" idealistic people in this industry. (i.e. RMS is idealistic in the sense he wants to push GNU, you are idealistic in that you just want to help kids get a leg up and generally be An All-Around Good Guy.)
Do you ever look at the industry and get depressed over what's it's become with companies with virtually no product and running deep in the red but who have "e-" or "dot-com" in their names pulling off ridiculously huge IPOs, companies patenting obviously unpatentable concepts and ideas apparently for the express purpose of suing the pants off of competitors instead of competing with the quality of their products, companies like Microsoft going beyond the boundaries of the law and way, way beyond the boundaries of ethical behaviour to get a step up on the competition, the industry lobbying government to pass laws that would create an entirely unregulated industry, including things like legislation that would legally disavow software companies of any responsibility for creating shoddy products that don't even do what the box says they will do, employees floating with a company just long enough to vest and then bailing out without a backwards glance so they can go to The Next Big IPO, etc, etc, etc.
What do you look at in this industry to remind yourself that computers and the computer industry can actually help make the world a better place?
I've been doing a LOT of really good work with things like servlets, GSP, Apache-JServ, and so on. Java has really come into its own on the server-side, thanks to things like JDBC that make database integration relatively painless. Java is starting to become The Technology of Choice.
It's the same old bait-n-switch we've grown to know and loathe from Microsoft, only with a different brand underneath.
These little shenanigans, along with the way Sun is milking the Open Source cow with their so-called SCSL and their treatment of the Blackdown fiasco has got them on my sh*t list but good. They had better realize pretty quickly that the industry isn't going to stand anymore for the same old tricks that Microsoft's been pulling all these years and that Sun isn't anywhere near as powerful and influential as Microsoft to be able to pull them off.
It's enough to want to make me give up Java and learn Perl... Well, ok, maybe Python...:)
Who woulda thunk it a couple of years ago that a die-hard Linux fan who does a lot of Java and database work would today be saying, "At least there's IBM to look to for real support of Java on Linux without trying to screw us over."
"...Epic is probably only doing this because they have to match id or UT will be blown out of the water by Q3."
Dunno. I don't want to start any flame wars, because I know everyone will have their own opinions, but my opinion is that I enjoy UT a lot more than I do Q3A. I bought both as soon as they were available mostly because I wanted to do as much as I could to show my support to these companies for supporting Linux, not because I'm some kind of FPS maniac, because I'm not.
I played UT first, so that might have biased my opinion a little, but after getting a couple friends to play them both too, I'm not so sure.
Q3A seems to have better overall framerate. Which isn't such a surprise considering who wrote the danged engine. UT seems to have better "playability" for lack of a better term.
A friend of mine who has now also played both made the comment that "Q3A 'feels like' an arcade game" while UT "feels like" a really nice FPS. Q3A, to me, has some dreadfully boring weapons, it's maps are... well... mostly red, orange and brown, and the bots on the one hand don't seem to be very smart and on the other run around like weasels on speed, making it virtually impossible to hit them.
UT on the other hand, has a really diverse collection of maps, great weapon selection (and the sounds that go along seem to be better in production quality, too, making them more fun to play with) and its bots in many cases have been hard for me to tell if I was playing a bot or another person. (Granted, not a very good person, but still...)
I dunno, like I said, I'm not trying to start a flame war, but Q3A really kind of gave me the same impression as the new Star Wars movie -- a lot of hype and then it really was just "OK" for the most part. (Well, ok I HATED TPM, but you get the idea...) Not to say that Q3A isn't fun, it is, but I don't think Epic has anything to worry about Q3A digging them a big hole to go lie down in. A LOT of people are enjoying UT and doing a lot of third-party mods for it.
I guess I just kind of take exception to that comment in the same way I would take exception to someone saying something like "Well, now that Linux is on the scene, I guess FreeBSD is just gonna die." They're just different and they will each have their fans and personally I'm glad they're BOTH running on Linux.
"The true beauty of GreenMarine putting the source out is that we -the linux community- will benifit by having the game improved for us (and by us). The other benifit, is that as UT improves on the Linux platform, more people may think about trying (or switching to) Linux."
This always sounds trite when you hear people say it about Application "X" being ported to Linux, but just last night I was at a friend's house, fragging away at him with the Linux version of UT when another friend of ours stopped by and made a comment of the "Wow! Check out those awesome graphics! This looks like a cool game! Now you're going to try to tell me you're running it on Linux right?" Joking because of COURSE games like that don't run on Linux. Well, we told him it was, he was amazed, and it was one more chip away in his Windows userishness. (He's already jealous of the way we don't have to keep reinstalling our machines any time something weird happens...)
The moral of the story? I dunno. I guess that having a cool game running well under Linux is probably going to do a lot more for getting people to want to switch than the fact that Apache runs over 50% of the world's web servers.
No, you missed the middle ground, which I think is where most slashdotters will stand:
We are against software patents.
IBM can go ahead and patent all they want on physical computing devices. Just don't get us (or me anyway) riled up by trying to PATENT some piece of software - that's what copyrights are for. And don't even THINK about patenting an algorithm - those are just not patentable, if you believe the current US patent laws. An algorithm is a mathematical formula and as such, is unpatentable. Of course, that hasn't stopped anyone in the computing industry before, witness RSA.
Google is just fine if they want to COPYRIGHT the code they've written. They'd just better not think about PATENTING "index all the pages on the internet and rank pages by how many other pages link to them." That's an algorithm and is unpatentable. Of course, like I said, the USPTO is certainly not going to pay attention to their own laws and will surely grant them a patent for it anyway.
Someone's eventually going to come out and tell us the solution to this, right? I mean, because if not, I may never get another decent night's sleep for the rest of my life...
"Hello, sir, this is the NYPD. We have been informed by Microsoft that you have machines here that have been bought for the express purpose of running a Microsoft operating system but you are instead running Linux on them. We would like to come in and confiscate those machines."
I saw Toy Story 2 in the theatre in Orlando a couple weeks ago and I had the same reservations everyone here is complaining about: "Low resolution, artifacting from compression, just a gimmicky technology, etc."
I've done a lot of digital video stuff, so I have been well "trained" in noticing all the various artifacting that can be caused with lossy compression and all the other things that go along with digital video. I'm also a movie snob, so I'm also well "trained" in noticing all the little niggly things that can screw up a movie for me that the "normal" movie viewer may not notice.
I was pleasantly surprised.
I noticed *no* pixelation, I noticed *no* artifacting of any sort. The two major concerns I had with image quality simply failed to materialize.
Now, what I *did* get was the best color I've ever seen on a movie screen. Bright blues, deep greens, vivid reds, etc. If you've seen any Pixar movies (TS, ABL, TS2...) you know their opening scene with the rendered Disney castle against the sky blue background, well, I've never seen that blue sharper and the image look more crisp than I did in the DLP theatre in Orlando.
PLUS, as an added bonus, since there were none of the typical film flaws or frame jitter normally associated with 35mm film projection, the film was overall more *enjoyable* to watch because there were no distracting 1/30sec bits of dust or scratches or annoying little blips on the screen to have to tune out and the image was ROCK STEADY for the entire film.
So, all I have to say: don't even try to judge the technology until you have actually SEEN it in action.
If you bother going to Xybernaut's website, you find out that the base model, which is a meager (but servicable) Pentium 200 with 32MB of RAM and a 2GB hard drive is $3500 and goes up from there. That price is *not* including the Head-mounted-display, which is an additional $2000.
Personally, I'd rather try to cobble together my own which I could probably do for about half that price.
The Blackdown team *knows* that the SCSL gives Sun the exclusive right to the modifications to the JDK source that they might "contribute" back to Sun. (I won't say what my own personal opinions of the SCSL are...) The issue here is not an issue of the Blackdown team not understanding the license, they certainly did/do.
The issue here is that the Blackdown team has been working porting new versions of the JDK source to work on Linux for YEARS in good faith with the understanding that Sun would consider the results of their efforts the "unofficial but blessed-by-Sun Linux JDK". Blackdown trusted Sun to play fair and Sun turned around and stabbed them in the back.
The amount of ill-will on the java-linux list is impressive. I wouldn't be surprised if the Blackdown team finishes their port of the Java2 JDK and then simply walks away from the whole thing.
Sun has probably lost what little confidence Java-Linux proponents have had left and garnered the ill-will of a tremendous number of people.
Now it's plainly obvious why they engineered the SCSL the way they have and why they are continuing to stick with it despite protests that it's not truly Open Source. They don't give a rat's ass about Open Source - they just see its developers as a resource to exploit. Good luck exploiting it any further now.
I'd like to see the Cyberlife people team up with the Sony people and put their seriously advance AI code into a hardware device. (Wow, how about a "real live" Norn? That would be awesome. They'd just have to have a longer lifespan than that in the game - about 8 hours.:)
I think the most interesting aspect of the Cyberlife technology is the synthesis of a "biophysical" system in software - they have code to simulate digestive, circulatory, immunological systems, etc, completely outside of the neural network that makes up their cognitive system.
If you could marry that concept with hardware to emulate it (i.e. the battery is getting low so the feedback to the brain is "I'm hungry!") I bet you could come up with some seriously complicated and complex emergent behaviours.
I thought this was going to be an interesting article about user input interfaces and then WHAM, right in the middle, it starts to turn into an EMacs slam-fest.
Personally, I get a shitload more work done with EMacs than I do with vi, despite what some may consider a "brain-damaged" interface. I'm used to it. *I* can "zen out" with EMacs.
Just 'coz "Ctrl-S" isn't as easy to type as "/" doesn't mean you can't get as much work done with it, or even more. I know if I had to use vi all day long, I'd get much less work done.
Can someone clarify or point to a place I can find more info on the UTdemo stuff? I have a friend who is a BSD-devotee and would like to use some of the Linux software that uses GLIDE/3DFX but apparently the "/dev/3dfx" interface that most software uses nowadays is something he's never been able to get working under FreeBSD because you have to make a kernel module for GLIDE to access the hardware in non-root environments and that's a totally Linux-specific interface. Does this mean someone's "ported" the/dev/3dfx driver to FreeBSD or what?
I can't find any corroborating evidence, but a friend of mine told me he saw a special on Discovery/TLC/PBS/etc. that the whole Star Wars/Strategic Defence Initiative thing from the Reagan years was, essentially, a hoax.
A special, and incredibly top-secret task force of, yes, science fiction authors, including Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and many others was convened for the specific purpose of writing the "Star Wars Bible" which would define the technology that would be used to "develop" the SDI stuff. In this show some of these authors were supposed to have been interviewed and commented about the whole thing.
However, the intent of SDI was *not* to actually develop these things, but to build a believable enough facade of R&D and press release type material that the "Damn Russkies" would blow their budget trying to make their own version of such so they could stay in the race. The only people who knew this was a hoax were the authors and the few government people who put the plan together. Everyone else was told it was legitimate and to do their best to make it reality and given enough budget to make it look good but not enough to break the bank.
This is also the point at which RAH and Arthur C. Clarke were supposed to have had their big split and stopped talking to each other. "RAH" wanted to bust the "damned commies" back to the stone age if possible, where ACC didn't think this was a very moral or ethical application of his knowledge and skills.
One thing that makes me believe this could be a true story is that if you read Niven/Pournelle's "Footfall" there's a "task force" set up to come up with wacky outrageous ideas to fight the alien invaders consisting entirely of, you guessed it, sci-fi authors. They all go by pseudonyms but the behavioural and personalities developed by Niven/Pournelle are obviously a group of well-known authors, in fact the same group of authors supposedly reported to have been involved in the SDI "hoax." I know enough about Niven's twisted sense of humour that it strikes me as exactly the sort of thing he'd do: present a real, but ostensibly top-secret project as a bunch of characters in a science fiction book - obviously made-up.
The other thing is that this isn't the usual "Friend-of-a-Friend" story - a friend of mine claims to have seen the show first-hand and he's not the sort to imagine or make this sort of thing up. In fact he called me the next day specifically to tell me about the cool TV show he'd seen the night before.
Does anyone else have any references that could corroborate this story? If so, it sure sounds like a "Great Hack" although also possibly one of the least ethical and most destructive hacks I can think of as there were also supposed to be many Soviet military and government types on the show who reported that they had sunk a large amount of monetary and human resources into trying to develop their own SDI program, which, while surely not the single cause, contributed at least in part to the Soviet Union going bust and collpasing.
;; This file implements a XEmacs lisp extension ;; that allows multiple major modes ;; to co-exist in a single buffer. It's a ;; workable, yet imperfect, solution that ;; basically supports key bindings and font-lock ;; in those regions with a secondary ;; major mode. To activate one secondary major ;; mode, simply add a hook to the ;; primary major mode's hook. For details, see ;; defun `mmm-activator'.
Unfortunately, it's pretty big to try to actually post as a comment and there's no URL in the comments of the LISP file. You'll probably have to search through something like Altavista for 'mmm.el' or search on Deja.com or just write the author and see where you can pick up a copy.
I use it myself for about a year or so with XEmacs (It requires a 21.x version to work correctly) and it works about 99% perfectly with HTML and whichever scripting language I happen to be embedding. (It actually uses a major-mode for the scripting language, so for JSP, the "primary major mode" is HTML except when your cursor is inside <java> tags in which case mmm switches to JDE mode.)
There are a few global settings, like TABs I think, that it doesn't change because the "primary major mode" sets them globally and they won't get changed when you enter the "secondary major mode" but they're really pretty minor issues. (Pardon the pun.)
The main drawback is you will have to learn a *little* bit of LISP hacking to set up the filters to let mmm know when to switch modes, but there are enough examples in the comment section of mmm.el that you can pretty much just cut-n-paste to get it to work for your particular situation.
I don't follow KDE development extremely closely, but it seemed to me that details about Magellan popped into sight very suddenly and vanished again nearly as quickly. Considering the power and capabilities detailed in the article linked above, this sounds like a major component to having a devastatingly powerful desktop based on KDE2, since an easy-to-use EMail client like Magellan would fulfill one of the two basic "killer apps" I imagine an average user would want from a desktop environment. (The other being a decent web browser, which KDE2 looks to also provide with Konqueror.) Is development of Magellan still on track? Can we reasonably expect it to live up to expectations? Or is this considered an "outside" application to what the core KDE2 functionality is expected to provide and therefore outside of what you can comment on?
Slashdot Mirror
If I recall, (I can't find the specific patent right now) it's a patent on displaying a Windows app on an X machine by intercepting the Win32 display API calls and translating them into X API calls. Hardly "unobvious" and therefore not deserving of a patent if you ask me. The fact that GraphOn decided they deserved a patent for "displaying Windows apps on X" in the first place doesn't bode well for the ethics of the company.
Further, if you read GraphOn's press release, they claim to have, "a U.S. patent for the remote display of Microsoft Windows applications on UNIX® and Linux® desktops with X Windows® [...] remoted, or displayed, over a network or any other type of connection to any X Window system."
Doesn't sound like GraphOn wants anyone else to be able to display Windows apps on X no matter what the technology and is trying to make sure everyone believes they have a patent on everything that displays Windows apps on X. Like I said, it's hard for me to get excited about anything dealing with a company that likes to do business this way.
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Showing support for a company that goes for outrageously stupid patent things is hardly something I'd want to get excited about.
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Patient: Doctor, Doctor, it hurts when I do like this!
Doctor: Then don't do like that!
Now THAT's what I call an effective security fix. If you find a security hole, just tell your customers not to do anything that might take advantage of it! Piece of cake!
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It sounds, from the wording of the press release and the comments of other users here, rather like they decided they couldn't make Interbase 6 into a commercial product so they're taking whatever they have lying around under the IB6 code tree and going to release it as open source rather than let the product line die. So maybe technically it is "Beta" but since there will never be a "final" they can just as realistically just call it "Interbase 6" as they seem to be doing now.
It's also interesting that they say "Open Source" but nothing about "free." Not that I am going to complain too much, it's they're code after all, but I wonder if they're going to still make this a commercial product, just one with source code as part of the package. I'd like to see it free, because I'd like to have a "high-end" database I can deploy in situations where MySQL or PostgreSQL just won't cut it but can't afford to spend the trillions of dollars it would cost to put Oracle in place.
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Do you ever look at the industry and get depressed over what's it's become with companies with virtually no product and running deep in the red but who have "e-" or "dot-com" in their names pulling off ridiculously huge IPOs, companies patenting obviously unpatentable concepts and ideas apparently for the express purpose of suing the pants off of competitors instead of competing with the quality of their products, companies like Microsoft going beyond the boundaries of the law and way, way beyond the boundaries of ethical behaviour to get a step up on the competition, the industry lobbying government to pass laws that would create an entirely unregulated industry, including things like legislation that would legally disavow software companies of any responsibility for creating shoddy products that don't even do what the box says they will do, employees floating with a company just long enough to vest and then bailing out without a backwards glance so they can go to The Next Big IPO, etc, etc, etc.
What do you look at in this industry to remind yourself that computers and the computer industry can actually help make the world a better place?
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Which is precisely why Sun is pulling stupid stunts like pulling Java out of ECMA stadardization and trying to charge royalties for the use of the J2EE logo. Sun realizes that Java is A Big Thing now, so they want to get their cut, one way or another.
It's the same old bait-n-switch we've grown to know and loathe from Microsoft, only with a different brand underneath.
These little shenanigans, along with the way Sun is milking the Open Source cow with their so-called SCSL and their treatment of the Blackdown fiasco has got them on my sh*t list but good. They had better realize pretty quickly that the industry isn't going to stand anymore for the same old tricks that Microsoft's been pulling all these years and that Sun isn't anywhere near as powerful and influential as Microsoft to be able to pull them off.
It's enough to want to make me give up Java and learn Perl... Well, ok, maybe Python...
Who woulda thunk it a couple of years ago that a die-hard Linux fan who does a lot of Java and database work would today be saying, "At least there's IBM to look to for real support of Java on Linux without trying to screw us over."
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Dunno. I don't want to start any flame wars, because I know everyone will have their own opinions, but my opinion is that I enjoy UT a lot more than I do Q3A. I bought both as soon as they were available mostly because I wanted to do as much as I could to show my support to these companies for supporting Linux, not because I'm some kind of FPS maniac, because I'm not.
I played UT first, so that might have biased my opinion a little, but after getting a couple friends to play them both too, I'm not so sure.
Q3A seems to have better overall framerate. Which isn't such a surprise considering who wrote the danged engine. UT seems to have better "playability" for lack of a better term.
A friend of mine who has now also played both made the comment that "Q3A 'feels like' an arcade game" while UT "feels like" a really nice FPS. Q3A, to me, has some dreadfully boring weapons, it's maps are... well... mostly red, orange and brown, and the bots on the one hand don't seem to be very smart and on the other run around like weasels on speed, making it virtually impossible to hit them.
UT on the other hand, has a really diverse collection of maps, great weapon selection (and the sounds that go along seem to be better in production quality, too, making them more fun to play with) and its bots in many cases have been hard for me to tell if I was playing a bot or another person. (Granted, not a very good person, but still...)
I dunno, like I said, I'm not trying to start a flame war, but Q3A really kind of gave me the same impression as the new Star Wars movie -- a lot of hype and then it really was just "OK" for the most part. (Well, ok I HATED TPM, but you get the idea...) Not to say that Q3A isn't fun, it is, but I don't think Epic has anything to worry about Q3A digging them a big hole to go lie down in. A LOT of people are enjoying UT and doing a lot of third-party mods for it.
I guess I just kind of take exception to that comment in the same way I would take exception to someone saying something like "Well, now that Linux is on the scene, I guess FreeBSD is just gonna die." They're just different and they will each have their fans and personally I'm glad they're BOTH running on Linux.
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This always sounds trite when you hear people say it about Application "X" being ported to Linux, but just last night I was at a friend's house, fragging away at him with the Linux version of UT when another friend of ours stopped by and made a comment of the "Wow! Check out those awesome graphics! This looks like a cool game! Now you're going to try to tell me you're running it on Linux right?" Joking because of COURSE games like that don't run on Linux. Well, we told him it was, he was amazed, and it was one more chip away in his Windows userishness. (He's already jealous of the way we don't have to keep reinstalling our machines any time something weird happens...)
The moral of the story? I dunno. I guess that having a cool game running well under Linux is probably going to do a lot more for getting people to want to switch than the fact that Apache runs over 50% of the world's web servers.
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"With this device, under development at Georgia Tech, a cancer specialist can gather data using a sensor glove."
And then this image. Notice if you will, the part of the "doctor's" hand covered by the glove.
Think about it...
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We are against software patents.
IBM can go ahead and patent all they want on physical computing devices. Just don't get us (or me anyway) riled up by trying to PATENT some piece of software - that's what copyrights are for. And don't even THINK about patenting an algorithm - those are just not patentable, if you believe the current US patent laws. An algorithm is a mathematical formula and as such, is unpatentable. Of course, that hasn't stopped anyone in the computing industry before, witness RSA.
Google is just fine if they want to COPYRIGHT the code they've written. They'd just better not think about PATENTING "index all the pages on the internet and rank pages by how many other pages link to them." That's an algorithm and is unpatentable. Of course, like I said, the USPTO is certainly not going to pay attention to their own laws and will surely grant them a patent for it anyway.
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"Hello, sir, this is the NYPD. We have been informed by Microsoft that you have machines here that have been bought for the express purpose of running a Microsoft operating system but you are instead running Linux on them. We would like to come in and confiscate those machines."
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Oop, my bad. Of course, I meant to say "1/24 sec" which is film frame rate...
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I've done a lot of digital video stuff, so I have been well "trained" in noticing all the various artifacting that can be caused with lossy compression and all the other things that go along with digital video. I'm also a movie snob, so I'm also well "trained" in noticing all the little niggly things that can screw up a movie for me that the "normal" movie viewer may not notice.
I was pleasantly surprised.
I noticed *no* pixelation, I noticed *no* artifacting of any sort. The two major concerns I had with image quality simply failed to materialize.
Now, what I *did* get was the best color I've ever seen on a movie screen. Bright blues, deep greens, vivid reds, etc. If you've seen any Pixar movies (TS, ABL, TS2...) you know their opening scene with the rendered Disney castle against the sky blue background, well, I've never seen that blue sharper and the image look more crisp than I did in the DLP theatre in Orlando.
PLUS, as an added bonus, since there were none of the typical film flaws or frame jitter normally associated with 35mm film projection, the film was overall more *enjoyable* to watch because there were no distracting 1/30sec bits of dust or scratches or annoying little blips on the screen to have to tune out and the image was ROCK STEADY for the entire film.
So, all I have to say: don't even try to judge the technology until you have actually SEEN it in action.
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Personally, I'd rather try to cobble together my own which I could probably do for about half that price.
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The issue here is that the Blackdown team has been working porting new versions of the JDK source to work on Linux for YEARS in good faith with the understanding that Sun would consider the results of their efforts the "unofficial but blessed-by-Sun Linux JDK". Blackdown trusted Sun to play fair and Sun turned around and stabbed them in the back.
The amount of ill-will on the java-linux list is impressive. I wouldn't be surprised if the Blackdown team finishes their port of the Java2 JDK and then simply walks away from the whole thing.
Sun has probably lost what little confidence Java-Linux proponents have had left and garnered the ill-will of a tremendous number of people.
Now it's plainly obvious why they engineered the SCSL the way they have and why they are continuing to stick with it despite protests that it's not truly Open Source. They don't give a rat's ass about Open Source - they just see its developers as a resource to exploit. Good luck exploiting it any further now.
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I'd like to see the Cyberlife people team up with the Sony people and put their seriously advance AI code into a hardware device. (Wow, how about a "real live" Norn? That would be awesome. They'd just have to have a longer lifespan than that in the game - about 8 hours.
I think the most interesting aspect of the Cyberlife technology is the synthesis of a "biophysical" system in software - they have code to simulate digestive, circulatory, immunological systems, etc, completely outside of the neural network that makes up their cognitive system.
If you could marry that concept with hardware to emulate it (i.e. the battery is getting low so the feedback to the brain is "I'm hungry!") I bet you could come up with some seriously complicated and complex emergent behaviours.
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Personally, I get a shitload more work done with EMacs than I do with vi, despite what some may consider a "brain-damaged" interface. I'm used to it. *I* can "zen out" with EMacs.
Just 'coz "Ctrl-S" isn't as easy to type as "/" doesn't mean you can't get as much work done with it, or even more. I know if I had to use vi all day long, I'd get much less work done.
YMMV.
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A special, and incredibly top-secret task force of, yes, science fiction authors, including Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and many others was convened for the specific purpose of writing the "Star Wars Bible" which would define the technology that would be used to "develop" the SDI stuff. In this show some of these authors were supposed to have been interviewed and commented about the whole thing.
However, the intent of SDI was *not* to actually develop these things, but to build a believable enough facade of R&D and press release type material that the "Damn Russkies" would blow their budget trying to make their own version of such so they could stay in the race. The only people who knew this was a hoax were the authors and the few government people who put the plan together. Everyone else was told it was legitimate and to do their best to make it reality and given enough budget to make it look good but not enough to break the bank.
This is also the point at which RAH and Arthur C. Clarke were supposed to have had their big split and stopped talking to each other. "RAH" wanted to bust the "damned commies" back to the stone age if possible, where ACC didn't think this was a very moral or ethical application of his knowledge and skills.
One thing that makes me believe this could be a true story is that if you read Niven/Pournelle's "Footfall" there's a "task force" set up to come up with wacky outrageous ideas to fight the alien invaders consisting entirely of, you guessed it, sci-fi authors. They all go by pseudonyms but the behavioural and personalities developed by Niven/Pournelle are obviously a group of well-known authors, in fact the same group of authors supposedly reported to have been involved in the SDI "hoax." I know enough about Niven's twisted sense of humour that it strikes me as exactly the sort of thing he'd do: present a real, but ostensibly top-secret project as a bunch of characters in a science fiction book - obviously made-up.
The other thing is that this isn't the usual "Friend-of-a-Friend" story - a friend of mine claims to have seen the show first-hand and he's not the sort to imagine or make this sort of thing up. In fact he called me the next day specifically to tell me about the cool TV show he'd seen the night before.
Does anyone else have any references that could corroborate this story? If so, it sure sounds like a "Great Hack" although also possibly one of the least ethical and most destructive hacks I can think of as there were also supposed to be many Soviet military and government types on the show who reported that they had sunk a large amount of monetary and human resources into trying to develop their own SDI program, which, while surely not the single cause, contributed at least in part to the Soviet Union going bust and collpasing.
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Gongquan Chen (chen@posc.org)
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;; Author: Gongquan Chen
;; This file implements a XEmacs lisp extension
;; that allows multiple major modes
;; to co-exist in a single buffer. It's a
;; workable, yet imperfect, solution that
;; basically supports key bindings and font-lock
;; in those regions with a secondary
;; major mode. To activate one secondary major
;; mode, simply add a hook to the
;; primary major mode's hook. For details, see
;; defun `mmm-activator'.
Unfortunately, it's pretty big to try to actually post as a comment and there's no URL in the comments of the LISP file. You'll probably have to search through something like Altavista for 'mmm.el' or search on Deja.com or just write the author and see where you can pick up a copy.
I use it myself for about a year or so with XEmacs (It requires a 21.x version to work correctly) and it works about 99% perfectly with HTML and whichever scripting language I happen to be embedding. (It actually uses a major-mode for the scripting language, so for JSP, the "primary major mode" is HTML except when your cursor is inside <java> tags in which case mmm switches to JDE mode.)
There are a few global settings, like TABs I think, that it doesn't change because the "primary major mode" sets them globally and they won't get changed when you enter the "secondary major mode" but they're really pretty minor issues. (Pardon the pun.)
The main drawback is you will have to learn a *little* bit of LISP hacking to set up the filters to let mmm know when to switch modes, but there are enough examples in the comment section of mmm.el that you can pretty much just cut-n-paste to get it to work for your particular situation.
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