X.org is derived from XFree86. It's nice, but it's not designed for being lean.
I don't disagree that X11 can run, just that its pointless for developers to use it if they're working on a new cell phone platform, where there are plenty of other better, smaller, lighter options...
People keep claiming that there are "better, smaller, lighter options". I'd like to know what they are, because I haven't found them. Qt/Embedded, WinCE, and Palm are all slower and less functional as user interfaces than X11 on a PDA, and they have a much more restricted set of widgets and toolkits they support.
Again, someone tell me an X11 app that I want to run on my cell phone. Skype? Heh heh..
Well, QPE for starters. Then, many FLTK applications will work just fine. There are lots of emulators: Apple II, Atari, Palm, PocketPC, gaming platforms. Scripting and development tools like Tcl/Tk, wxPython, PyGTK, wxLua, and LuaFLTK (all very convenient for quickly throwing together little portable apps). PDF and other document viewers. Ebook readers. X11-based handwriting recognizers. Flashcard training programs. Kanji dictionaries. VNC viewers. Some may or may not have been ported to some "embedded" toolkit, but all of those exist for X11 and require little more than a recompile for running on a PDA or phone. With X11, it's also easy to customize or adapt the UI to new devices, since it neatly separates window management from applications and since there are many window managers one can build on already.
Even if you have a desktop app whose UI doesn't work on a phone, converting an X11 desktop app to a small screen is usually a heck of a lot easier than porting it to a different toolkit.
For debugging, running an xterm is nice on a PDA/phone. Or you can have your desktop PDA application actually running on the phone and display on your desktop--no need to synchronize or fiddle in other ways.
X11 on a portable device is just really, really nice (I know--I have used it). And with new application mobility and RandR, it's just getting better.
at least not until we've established that the license itself is specifically non-open. If I'm reading you right, you seem you seem to be suggesting that such a license acts against a given format being open, but even in the open source world formats and applications fall under licenses and are subject to licensing.
The article says "available for licensing". That implies that the license is non-transferable. If the license is non-transferable, then Microsoft can stop licensing the software whenever they like. That is incompatible with something being open. That is the reason why the MS Word formats and Java are not open either.
I'm not sure what your expectations are for "open" given your criticism of WiX.
Open source is about shared development and mutual benefits. With WiX, the benefits are still very one-sided for Microsoft, even though the software is probably open source.
As I was saying, I'm not complaining about it, I'm just pointing out that it doesn't take a big leap of faith for Microsoft to release software that enhances only their platform in open source form. In fact, it isn't even anything new: Microsoft has released source and content that you could reuse royalty free many times, but only when it was only useful for their own platforms.
My understanding is that products based around Metro will be available for licensing, not the format itself
That makes no sense; the article says "The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing,". Obviously, the licensing refers to the format. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense for it to refer to products based on the format because products are generally not licensed "royalty free".
Meanwhile, WiX has yet to be undermined in such a manner.
WiX is like many other open source projects from big companies: it's only useful in connection with their own products. It's still a step in the right direction, but until Microsoft releases something that's more generally useful in open source form, it's not much of a step.
Much as I don't like Windows, all the stuff Apple claims as innovative in Tiger has already been out for Windows free or cheap for a while.
Download Konfabulator from konfabulator.com (this is where Apple ripped off Dashboard).
Download Google or Yahoo! desktop search for free. (Google also gives you Picasa.)
For RSS, use Firefox and LiveBookmarks--better than Safari.
Pretty much all the major IM clients have offered video chat for a while. I have personally used it with Yahoo! IM.
For scripting, there are lots of choices for Windows. There are some visual scripting environments analogous to Automator, but they are a bit pricey. I think for most people, AutoHotKey is actually a better choice anyway.
The only thing "innovative" about Tiger is that Apple is bundling that stuff with the OS. Whenever Microsoft does that, there is lots of screaming and complaining. And Linux, of course, pretty much bundles all of that in its distributions (desktop search is still a separate install, but that will be bundled as well soon).
No, no it's not. PDF is fine. PDF is ubiquitous. Adding buzzword-friendly "XML" to it doesn't automatically make it better. It just makes it XML.
The PDF format is cumbersome to parse and cumbersome to manipulate; that's why there are few PDF viewers and even fewer PDF editors.
I fully agree that XML doesn't "automatically" make things better, and XML is often misapplied. But for this particular problem, it happens to be a solution to a real problem that the current format (PDF) has.
Another problem with PDF is that Adobe controls the PDF spec and periodically makes random changes to it that are only to their benefit. And Adobe's own products don't even comply with their spec.
So now should we berate them or praise them for adopting good industry standards and not reinventing more of them? Maybe this qualifies as a little less "innovative" but IMHO this is scoring much higher on the "pragmatic and timely" axis.
I'm not berating them for complying with industry standards. And compliance with industry standards is almost completely unrelated to whether a company is innovative or not. I'm not even berating them for ripping off ideas from other companies because I think it's perfectly OK to build on other people's ideas.
What I am berating them for is that:
Apple is ripping off other people's ideas and misrepresenting them as their own.
Apple is accusing other people of ripping them off, for things they did not even come up with themselves.
Apple is patenting other people's ideas as their own.
Apple is misrepresenting the quality and performance of their products in a way that puts even Microsoft to shame.
Apple is doing a lousy job when it comes to systems engineering.
Apple is not investing in research, nor contributing to computer science research, yet they are misrepresenting themselves as a kind of "innovation leader" in the industry.
Apple is claiming to be open source friendly, but they have released little of value to the open source community, and they are misrepresenting their system as "the better Linux".
Apple could be a nice company: they don't have to do any of those things in order to be successful. While they aren't ahead technically, they generally do an excellent job in terms of making things look good and stylish, and they do decent end-user application development, and that's what they should focus on.
As it is, Apple is repeating with OS X what they did with the old Mac OS: it looks prettier and prettier, but its internals were obsolete already when they bought NeXT, and they aren't updating them in any meaningful sense. OS X will fall apart over the next decade, just like Mac OS fell apart over the previous decade. And PC vendors, Windows, and Linux will shamelessly copy whatever little visual and design twists end users find appealing in Apple products; technologically, they are already ahead of Apple anyway.
An XML-based PDF-alternative is a good idea. However, a format is not "open" if it is "available for licensing". "Available for licensing" implies that the creator of the format retains some control, and that is not acceptable, no matter who the company is that created the format.
Microsoft seems to have trouble with the concept of "open"; perhaps that's not too surprising, since Sun, traditionally one of the strongest proponents of open systems and formats, has developed trouble in their understanding of "open" as well since they came out with Java.
I'm tired of every story on Linux or Windows being used by Macintosh fanboys to attempt to promote Apple. Every time it's the same lies, distortions, and inaccuracies. What do I have to do in order not to see that kind of junk anymore?
As for Tiger, just about every supposed "innovation" in it (scripting, RSS, search, Dashboard, Video Chat, etc.) is either not new, or even a blatant rip-off from some other company. As far as I'm concerned, Apple seems to be back to their old evil ways: patents, false marketing claims, and blatant rip-offs. The engineers who ran MacOS into the ground seem to be in charge with OS X again. The software architecture still sucks relative to something modern. But, unlike a few years ago, Apple doesn't even have a research lab anymore, nor do they even manufacture their hardware anymore.
Guys, please spare us both the debate: keep Apple fan fiction to the Apple section.
yeah, in theory. in practice, it'll be shit to run any X11 app on your phone, where it wasn't designed for in the first place.
That's bullshit. The fact that the XFree86 implementation, which is perhaps all you have ever seen, is obese and adapted to workstation usage doesn't mean X11 is. Furthermore, there are plenty of X11 applications for those kinds of environments.
X11 was designed for hardware that was much less powerful than today's phones. I used to run X11 and a full SVR3 UNIX system for software development on a 20MHz 386 with 4Mbytes of RAM, and that was a powerful machine at the time. Some X11 implementations are among the most light-weight window systems around.
And in terms of software, there is plenty of it. X11 has all sorts of window managers available for it, including full-screen window managers that are ideally suited to use on small screen devices, and there are many X11 applications specifically designed for small screen devices, as well as many other applications intended for bigger screens that run just fine on a small screen device. Handhelds.org has several environments, and with X11, you can use any of those applications with whatever MontaVista has on it natively.
The guy seems to be forming a company to support the code while planning to continue an open source version. If he hasn't accepted significant third party contributions to the project in the past, he owns the copyright, and that is both legal and does not violate the spirit of open source. I think it's not a good business model, but that's another question.
But let's assume that he really tried to make the project proprietary--so what? If nobody has contributed to it in the past and he still holds the copyright to the entire work (or has removed anybody else's code), that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do. I don't think it's a particularly smart thing to do, since he'll be competing with an open source version (he can't take back what he has already distributed under an open source license in the past), but anybody is free to screw themselves in whatever way they want.
The advantage of X11 is that there is lots of software that uses it: toolkits, applications, etc.
If you roll your own with SVG, there is nothing. SVG-based GUIs will probably a major role at some point, but by running them on top of X11, you give users a smooth transition.
MontaVista seems to be using X11 for their user interface. That's a big step forward. Does anybody know more details about their UI? I couldn't find a lot on their web site.
(I have several Qt/Embedded and Qtopia-based devices, and those truly suck: Qt/Embedded and Qtopia are slow, consume gobs of memory, waste screen real estate on useless UI elements, and restrict you to exactly one toolkit to program in. They feel like a bad clone of PocketPC.)
That being said, what's wrong with loving a company that makes great products?
Apple does excellent design and decent engineering. That's a good reason to buy them. But it's not an excuse for their CEO to lie or misrepresent his company. Innovators they are not, however, and just about every big idea Apple has ever shipped has been copied from someone else.
And that does matter, because, despite their claims, Apple doesn't spend any significant amount of money on research themselves. The company takes and doesn't give back. In fact, if anything, they are trying to keep others from using ideas that they themselves copied.
But with the shuffles, if the company realized their error and scheduled a pre-paid pickup, you should give it back.
It's the cost of doing business for them. God knows, they make more than enough errors that they make you pay for. Do they reimburse you for your time when they make a mistake in their software and you lose hours of work? Do they reimburse you for your time when they ship a faulty power supply or battery and you need to send it back? They don't. So, where is the moral obligation on your part when they make a mistake in your favor? It happens rarely enough, after all.
Having said that, I probably would return it myself, but I would feel like a dope doing it, and abstractly, I don't recognize any obligation to do so, legal or moral.
Wow, that's the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. What is particularly annoying about this is that, although Microsoft seems unable to actually ship it, Microsoft at least invests billions per year in computer science research and Microsoft research actually produce research results worth mentioning. Apple dissolved its research labs in the mid-90's and has produced almost no peer-reviewed, interesting research results since, while their marketing claims have gotten ever more inflated.
Furthermore, most of Apple's current system is copied from open source software: Mach, gcc, Safari, the command line utilities. The proprietary components, mostly the GUI and Objective-C, were bought in from the outside (NeXT) after Apple ran their own operation into the ground, and even those were based on ideas from Smalltalk.
Jobs's arrogance and distortion of the facts is just astounding. But that's nothing new: Apple tried to sue Microsoft already in the 90's and was soundly defeated when Xerox entered the lawsuit and demonstrated where all of those technologies really came from. But, I suppose, the best defense is a good offence. Still, I find Apple's lies and distortions disgusting.
But, of course, Apple's fanboys will find apologies for the company and will mod down anything that is remotely critical of the company (like this posting). I suppose, deep down, even you know I'm right and you're just afraid that your shiny boxes will disappear when people actually examine the company and its products rationally, rather than thinking of it as a status symbol and fashion item.
Search: Tiger will feature a built-in local search technology called "Spotlight" (technology built upon the search engines that Apple currently uses to search iTunes and e-mail).
Technology that Apple copied from many other commercial and research software, including commercial email programs.
Scripting:Tiger will include a front-end scripting environment known as "Automator." Longhorn will include a new scripting shell (currently in beta test) known as "Monad."
They have nothing to do with one another. With Automator, Apple is copying decades long research in visual scripting. Monad is Microsoft's hopeless attempt to improve on shell scripting with a ridiculously general and complex design. Both scripting technologies are useless, and neither is novel.
Built-in RSS support: Tiger will embed an RSS aggregator into the Safari browser. Longhorn will include an embedded RSS feature in the user interface.
And Firefox has been shipping with it built into the browser. Linux distributions have had RSS support shipping with them even longer.
Info-Display Panel: Tiger will have an information-display capability called "Dashboard.
Copied by Apple from a commercial application. Gnome and KDE have had similar technologies as well. And Apple, as usual, is trampling all over open source project names.
Integrated Instant Messaging/Video Chat: Tiger will feature a souped-up version of iChat.
Linux has been shipping with Gnome meeting, and Microsoft with Netmeeting for years.
64-Bit Support: Tiger will include extended 64-bit capabilities.
Wow, only, what, five years after Linux started shipping with 64bit support.
"Cryptographically strong" refers to properties of functions (usually one-way functions) and makes a statement about how difficult certain computations involving them; it has nothing to do with the quality of passwords.
You can try to force users to use "strong passwords" or "good passwords", but passwords can't be "cryptographically strong".
Even at 512M, there will be so many songs on your device that a display is very useful. Why buy the iPod shuffle if, for about the same amount of money, you can get an MP3 player with a display?
The iPod shuffle is a low-cost Chinese-made MP3 player masquerading as a brand-name item and fashion statement, just because Apple is selling it.
People who understand operating systems architectures really do disagree about how much of the GUI belongs in kernel mode. [...] For NT, I think putting the GUI in kernel mode is pretty obviously the right choice. For Linux, I think leaving it in user mode is the right choice. It's all a matter of the right trade-offs for the system design, the hardware and the usage patterns.
You are optimizing a narrow set of criteria, mostly related to efficiency and responsiveness. But what "the right thing" to do isn't a purely technical question: you also need to take into account the effort that goes into developing and maintaining it, to what degree the GUI supports innovation and new interaction styles, how well it is specified, and many other aspects.
The people who designed X11 didn't worry about squeezing the last drop of efficiency out of the GUI by putting things into the kernel, they made a choice that maximized maintainability, utility, and portability, and that is why the design has survived for 20 years, while Microsoft and Apple have had to do one rewrite after another.
but you seem a bit emotional about X, and I don't usually find it productive to discuss technical issues
I find it frustrating that a large percentage of engineers seem to just not care about design and engineering principles, beyond a small simplistic criteria that they can easily quantify. It makes no sense to optimize performance of a GUI at this point: even if Win32 graphics were faster (I don't think it is), X11 is more than good enough. I think it's actually not because they don't know that they should be doing something else, it's that they simply don't have any good ideas other than how to do performance tuning.
That's why Microsoft Windows, after twenty years of development, the supposedly best minds in the industry working on it, and billions of dollars poured into it, still doesn't work any better in any practical sense than half a dozen open source kernels with a twenty year old window system on top of them.
A few microkernel hold-outs [...] Others think user-mode servers are generally a poor design, and prefer everything in either the client process or kernel mode.
Proponents of both of those positions are making the same mistake: they think it matters and worry a lot about efficiency. There is a third approach: UNIX isn't a microkernel, yet it keeps a lot of stuff out of the kernel. That's why it doesn't have ACLs, metadata, or GUI kernel services. Like X11, and unlike any kernel design from Microsoft or Apple, the UNIX design has stood the test of time.
The world really is ready for something better than UNIX/Linux and X11, but Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and any of the other big names with money just aren't stepping up to the plate.
It was your choice to subscribe to a commercial on-line gaming service. Presumably, you think you're getting something for your money. Well, your vendor made a business decision. If you don't like it, go somehwere else.
Of course, you could get off your lazy butt and actually contribute to an open source MMOG; there are several existing ones and several new ones in the works.
No, they didn't. They didn't want to become system managers, they didn't want to have to spend their time defragging disks or dealing with viruses or any of those other problems.
A lot of managers found it easier to dump a bunch of cheap hardware on their staff and have them be their own system managers than to make a big up-front investment in a server and staff to deal with the server.
Only a few nerds preferred their own desktops. And some users that were saddled with particularly poor IT staff preferred it, too. But people who want machines that just work generally prefer well-maintained mainframes or servers to desktop machines.
Each X11 server (which is what people would be running) can be configured to use whatever collection of keyboards, mice, and displays you want it to use.
Of course, that makes it no less of a stupid idea to do that (you should be using an X terminal and set the thing up as a server). But, in principle, Linux will support this sort of insanity if you must.
As far as I can tell, this is basically no different from a dual processor system, except that you are probably going to get a little less performance out of the dual core than out of two separate processors. In return, you are going to save a bit on hardware (sockets, etc.) compared to a true dual processor system.
All these questions about whether Windows will usurp one of the cores or how to schedule the two cores seem positively bizarre, given that the answer is no different from dual processor machines.
There could be multi-core designs that can get better performance than multi-processor designs (cell attempts to be one), but this doesn't seem to be one of those.
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errmm.. no. i'm running X.org on all my boxen.
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X.org is derived from XFree86. It's nice, but it's not designed for being lean.
I don't disagree that X11 can run, just that its pointless for developers to use it if they're working on a new cell phone platform, where there are plenty of other better, smaller, lighter options
People keep claiming that there are "better, smaller, lighter options". I'd like to know what they are, because I haven't found them. Qt/Embedded, WinCE, and Palm are all slower and less functional as user interfaces than X11 on a PDA, and they have a much more restricted set of widgets and toolkits they support.
Again, someone tell me an X11 app that I want to run on my cell phone. Skype? Heh heh
Well, QPE for starters. Then, many FLTK applications will work just fine. There are lots of emulators: Apple II, Atari, Palm, PocketPC, gaming platforms. Scripting and development tools like Tcl/Tk, wxPython, PyGTK, wxLua, and LuaFLTK (all very convenient for quickly throwing together little portable apps). PDF and other document viewers. Ebook readers. X11-based handwriting recognizers. Flashcard training programs. Kanji dictionaries. VNC viewers. Some may or may not have been ported to some "embedded" toolkit, but all of those exist for X11 and require little more than a recompile for running on a PDA or phone. With X11, it's also easy to customize or adapt the UI to new devices, since it neatly separates window management from applications and since there are many window managers one can build on already.
Even if you have a desktop app whose UI doesn't work on a phone, converting an X11 desktop app to a small screen is usually a heck of a lot easier than porting it to a different toolkit.
For debugging, running an xterm is nice on a PDA/phone. Or you can have your desktop PDA application actually running on the phone and display on your desktop--no need to synchronize or fiddle in other ways.
X11 on a portable device is just really, really nice (I know--I have used it). And with new application mobility and RandR, it's just getting better.
at least not until we've established that the license itself is specifically non-open. If I'm reading you right, you seem you seem to be suggesting that such a license acts against a given format being open, but even in the open source world formats and applications fall under licenses and are subject to licensing.
The article says "available for licensing". That implies that the license is non-transferable. If the license is non-transferable, then Microsoft can stop licensing the software whenever they like. That is incompatible with something being open. That is the reason why the MS Word formats and Java are not open either.
I'm not sure what your expectations are for "open" given your criticism of WiX.
Open source is about shared development and mutual benefits. With WiX, the benefits are still very one-sided for Microsoft, even though the software is probably open source.
As I was saying, I'm not complaining about it, I'm just pointing out that it doesn't take a big leap of faith for Microsoft to release software that enhances only their platform in open source form. In fact, it isn't even anything new: Microsoft has released source and content that you could reuse royalty free many times, but only when it was only useful for their own platforms.
Click on "Show as HTML" for a PDF document in Google search results, and you will see how unsuitable HTML is for representing formatted documents.
PDF is a format for describing formatted pages; HTML, DOC, and RTF are markup languages, something entirely different.
My understanding is that products based around Metro will be available for licensing, not the format itself
That makes no sense; the article says "The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing,". Obviously, the licensing refers to the format. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense for it to refer to products based on the format because products are generally not licensed "royalty free".
Meanwhile, WiX has yet to be undermined in such a manner.
WiX is like many other open source projects from big companies: it's only useful in connection with their own products. It's still a step in the right direction, but until Microsoft releases something that's more generally useful in open source form, it's not much of a step.
Let's not move the goal posts, shall we?
Yes, you are trying to move the goal posts.
Open doesn't mean "Whatever the politicos tell me it means this week." It means open. Documented. That's all.
"Open" has meant for many, many years that third parties can implement it. Being documented is necessary but not sufficient for a format to be open.
It's called OASIS,
OASIS is a word processing format with markup and semantics. Its analog is MS Word or RTF.
PDF is a format for an exact reproduction of the appearance of documents. There is no equivalent open format.
Much as I don't like Windows, all the stuff Apple claims as innovative in Tiger has already been out for Windows free or cheap for a while.
Download Konfabulator from konfabulator.com (this is where Apple ripped off Dashboard).
Download Google or Yahoo! desktop search for free. (Google also gives you Picasa.)
For RSS, use Firefox and LiveBookmarks--better than Safari.
Pretty much all the major IM clients have offered video chat for a while. I have personally used it with Yahoo! IM.
For scripting, there are lots of choices for Windows. There are some visual scripting environments analogous to Automator, but they are a bit pricey. I think for most people, AutoHotKey is actually a better choice anyway.
The only thing "innovative" about Tiger is that Apple is bundling that stuff with the OS. Whenever Microsoft does that, there is lots of screaming and complaining. And Linux, of course, pretty much bundles all of that in its distributions (desktop search is still a separate install, but that will be bundled as well soon).
No, no it's not. PDF is fine. PDF is ubiquitous. Adding buzzword-friendly "XML" to it doesn't automatically make it better. It just makes it XML.
The PDF format is cumbersome to parse and cumbersome to manipulate; that's why there are few PDF viewers and even fewer PDF editors.
I fully agree that XML doesn't "automatically" make things better, and XML is often misapplied. But for this particular problem, it happens to be a solution to a real problem that the current format (PDF) has.
Another problem with PDF is that Adobe controls the PDF spec and periodically makes random changes to it that are only to their benefit. And Adobe's own products don't even comply with their spec.
I'm not berating them for complying with industry standards. And compliance with industry standards is almost completely unrelated to whether a company is innovative or not. I'm not even berating them for ripping off ideas from other companies because I think it's perfectly OK to build on other people's ideas.
What I am berating them for is that:
Apple could be a nice company: they don't have to do any of those things in order to be successful. While they aren't ahead technically, they generally do an excellent job in terms of making things look good and stylish, and they do decent end-user application development, and that's what they should focus on.
As it is, Apple is repeating with OS X what they did with the old Mac OS: it looks prettier and prettier, but its internals were obsolete already when they bought NeXT, and they aren't updating them in any meaningful sense. OS X will fall apart over the next decade, just like Mac OS fell apart over the previous decade. And PC vendors, Windows, and Linux will shamelessly copy whatever little visual and design twists end users find appealing in Apple products; technologically, they are already ahead of Apple anyway.
An XML-based PDF-alternative is a good idea. However, a format is not "open" if it is "available for licensing". "Available for licensing" implies that the creator of the format retains some control, and that is not acceptable, no matter who the company is that created the format.
Microsoft seems to have trouble with the concept of "open"; perhaps that's not too surprising, since Sun, traditionally one of the strongest proponents of open systems and formats, has developed trouble in their understanding of "open" as well since they came out with Java.
I'm tired of every story on Linux or Windows being used by Macintosh fanboys to attempt to promote Apple. Every time it's the same lies, distortions, and inaccuracies. What do I have to do in order not to see that kind of junk anymore?
As for Tiger, just about every supposed "innovation" in it (scripting, RSS, search, Dashboard, Video Chat, etc.) is either not new, or even a blatant rip-off from some other company. As far as I'm concerned, Apple seems to be back to their old evil ways: patents, false marketing claims, and blatant rip-offs. The engineers who ran MacOS into the ground seem to be in charge with OS X again. The software architecture still sucks relative to something modern. But, unlike a few years ago, Apple doesn't even have a research lab anymore, nor do they even manufacture their hardware anymore.
Guys, please spare us both the debate: keep Apple fan fiction to the Apple section.
yeah, in theory. in practice, it'll be shit to run any X11 app on your phone, where it wasn't designed for in the first place.
That's bullshit. The fact that the XFree86 implementation, which is perhaps all you have ever seen, is obese and adapted to workstation usage doesn't mean X11 is. Furthermore, there are plenty of X11 applications for those kinds of environments.
X11 was designed for hardware that was much less powerful than today's phones. I used to run X11 and a full SVR3 UNIX system for software development on a 20MHz 386 with 4Mbytes of RAM, and that was a powerful machine at the time. Some X11 implementations are among the most light-weight window systems around.
And in terms of software, there is plenty of it. X11 has all sorts of window managers available for it, including full-screen window managers that are ideally suited to use on small screen devices, and there are many X11 applications specifically designed for small screen devices, as well as many other applications intended for bigger screens that run just fine on a small screen device. Handhelds.org has several environments, and with X11, you can use any of those applications with whatever MontaVista has on it natively.
The guy seems to be forming a company to support the code while planning to continue an open source version. If he hasn't accepted significant third party contributions to the project in the past, he owns the copyright, and that is both legal and does not violate the spirit of open source. I think it's not a good business model, but that's another question.
But let's assume that he really tried to make the project proprietary--so what? If nobody has contributed to it in the past and he still holds the copyright to the entire work (or has removed anybody else's code), that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do. I don't think it's a particularly smart thing to do, since he'll be competing with an open source version (he can't take back what he has already distributed under an open source license in the past), but anybody is free to screw themselves in whatever way they want.
The advantage of X11 is that there is lots of software that uses it: toolkits, applications, etc.
If you roll your own with SVG, there is nothing. SVG-based GUIs will probably a major role at some point, but by running them on top of X11, you give users a smooth transition.
MontaVista seems to be using X11 for their user interface. That's a big step forward. Does anybody know more details about their UI? I couldn't find a lot on their web site.
(I have several Qt/Embedded and Qtopia-based devices, and those truly suck: Qt/Embedded and Qtopia are slow, consume gobs of memory, waste screen real estate on useless UI elements, and restrict you to exactly one toolkit to program in. They feel like a bad clone of PocketPC.)
That being said, what's wrong with loving a company that makes great products?
Apple does excellent design and decent engineering. That's a good reason to buy them. But it's not an excuse for their CEO to lie or misrepresent his company. Innovators they are not, however, and just about every big idea Apple has ever shipped has been copied from someone else.
And that does matter, because, despite their claims, Apple doesn't spend any significant amount of money on research themselves. The company takes and doesn't give back. In fact, if anything, they are trying to keep others from using ideas that they themselves copied.
But with the shuffles, if the company realized their error and scheduled a pre-paid pickup, you should give it back.
It's the cost of doing business for them. God knows, they make more than enough errors that they make you pay for. Do they reimburse you for your time when they make a mistake in their software and you lose hours of work? Do they reimburse you for your time when they ship a faulty power supply or battery and you need to send it back? They don't. So, where is the moral obligation on your part when they make a mistake in your favor? It happens rarely enough, after all.
Having said that, I probably would return it myself, but I would feel like a dope doing it, and abstractly, I don't recognize any obligation to do so, legal or moral.
Wow, that's the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. What is particularly annoying about this is that, although Microsoft seems unable to actually ship it, Microsoft at least invests billions per year in computer science research and Microsoft research actually produce research results worth mentioning. Apple dissolved its research labs in the mid-90's and has produced almost no peer-reviewed, interesting research results since, while their marketing claims have gotten ever more inflated.
Furthermore, most of Apple's current system is copied from open source software: Mach, gcc, Safari, the command line utilities. The proprietary components, mostly the GUI and Objective-C, were bought in from the outside (NeXT) after Apple ran their own operation into the ground, and even those were based on ideas from Smalltalk.
Jobs's arrogance and distortion of the facts is just astounding. But that's nothing new: Apple tried to sue Microsoft already in the 90's and was soundly defeated when Xerox entered the lawsuit and demonstrated where all of those technologies really came from. But, I suppose, the best defense is a good offence. Still, I find Apple's lies and distortions disgusting.
But, of course, Apple's fanboys will find apologies for the company and will mod down anything that is remotely critical of the company (like this posting). I suppose, deep down, even you know I'm right and you're just afraid that your shiny boxes will disappear when people actually examine the company and its products rationally, rather than thinking of it as a status symbol and fashion item.
Search: Tiger will feature a built-in local search technology called "Spotlight" (technology built upon the search engines that Apple currently uses to search iTunes and e-mail).
Technology that Apple copied from many other commercial and research software, including commercial email programs.
Scripting:Tiger will include a front-end scripting environment known as "Automator." Longhorn will include a new scripting shell (currently in beta test) known as "Monad."
They have nothing to do with one another. With Automator, Apple is copying decades long research in visual scripting. Monad is Microsoft's hopeless attempt to improve on shell scripting with a ridiculously general and complex design. Both scripting technologies are useless, and neither is novel.
Built-in RSS support: Tiger will embed an RSS aggregator into the Safari browser. Longhorn will include an embedded RSS feature in the user interface.
And Firefox has been shipping with it built into the browser. Linux distributions have had RSS support shipping with them even longer.
Info-Display Panel: Tiger will have an information-display capability called "Dashboard.
Copied by Apple from a commercial application. Gnome and KDE have had similar technologies as well. And Apple, as usual, is trampling all over open source project names.
Integrated Instant Messaging/Video Chat: Tiger will feature a souped-up version of iChat.
Linux has been shipping with Gnome meeting, and Microsoft with Netmeeting for years.
64-Bit Support: Tiger will include extended 64-bit capabilities.
Wow, only, what, five years after Linux started shipping with 64bit support.
"Cryptographically strong" refers to properties of functions (usually one-way functions) and makes a statement about how difficult certain computations involving them; it has nothing to do with the quality of passwords.
You can try to force users to use "strong passwords" or "good passwords", but passwords can't be "cryptographically strong".
Even at 512M, there will be so many songs on your device that a display is very useful. Why buy the iPod shuffle if, for about the same amount of money, you can get an MP3 player with a display?
The iPod shuffle is a low-cost Chinese-made MP3 player masquerading as a brand-name item and fashion statement, just because Apple is selling it.
Thanks for the kinder, more detailed response.
People who understand operating systems architectures really do disagree about how much of the GUI belongs in kernel mode. [...] For NT, I think putting the GUI in kernel mode is pretty obviously the right choice. For Linux, I think leaving it in user mode is the right choice. It's all a matter of the right trade-offs for the system design, the hardware and the usage patterns.
You are optimizing a narrow set of criteria, mostly related to efficiency and responsiveness. But what "the right thing" to do isn't a purely technical question: you also need to take into account the effort that goes into developing and maintaining it, to what degree the GUI supports innovation and new interaction styles, how well it is specified, and many other aspects.
The people who designed X11 didn't worry about squeezing the last drop of efficiency out of the GUI by putting things into the kernel, they made a choice that maximized maintainability, utility, and portability, and that is why the design has survived for 20 years, while Microsoft and Apple have had to do one rewrite after another.
but you seem a bit emotional about X, and I don't usually find it productive to discuss technical issues
I find it frustrating that a large percentage of engineers seem to just not care about design and engineering principles, beyond a small simplistic criteria that they can easily quantify. It makes no sense to optimize performance of a GUI at this point: even if Win32 graphics were faster (I don't think it is), X11 is more than good enough. I think it's actually not because they don't know that they should be doing something else, it's that they simply don't have any good ideas other than how to do performance tuning.
That's why Microsoft Windows, after twenty years of development, the supposedly best minds in the industry working on it, and billions of dollars poured into it, still doesn't work any better in any practical sense than half a dozen open source kernels with a twenty year old window system on top of them.
A few microkernel hold-outs [...] Others think user-mode servers are generally a poor design, and prefer everything in either the client process or kernel mode.
Proponents of both of those positions are making the same mistake: they think it matters and worry a lot about efficiency. There is a third approach: UNIX isn't a microkernel, yet it keeps a lot of stuff out of the kernel. That's why it doesn't have ACLs, metadata, or GUI kernel services. Like X11, and unlike any kernel design from Microsoft or Apple, the UNIX design has stood the test of time.
The world really is ready for something better than UNIX/Linux and X11, but Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and any of the other big names with money just aren't stepping up to the plate.
It was your choice to subscribe to a commercial on-line gaming service. Presumably, you think you're getting something for your money. Well, your vendor made a business decision. If you don't like it, go somehwere else.
Of course, you could get off your lazy butt and actually contribute to an open source MMOG; there are several existing ones and several new ones in the works.
Then they wanted their own desktops.
No, they didn't. They didn't want to become system managers, they didn't want to have to spend their time defragging disks or dealing with viruses or any of those other problems.
A lot of managers found it easier to dump a bunch of cheap hardware on their staff and have them be their own system managers than to make a big up-front investment in a server and staff to deal with the server.
Only a few nerds preferred their own desktops. And some users that were saddled with particularly poor IT staff preferred it, too. But people who want machines that just work generally prefer well-maintained mainframes or servers to desktop machines.
Each X11 server (which is what people would be running) can be configured to use whatever collection of keyboards, mice, and displays you want it to use.
Of course, that makes it no less of a stupid idea to do that (you should be using an X terminal and set the thing up as a server). But, in principle, Linux will support this sort of insanity if you must.
As far as I can tell, this is basically no different from a dual processor system, except that you are probably going to get a little less performance out of the dual core than out of two separate processors. In return, you are going to save a bit on hardware (sockets, etc.) compared to a true dual processor system.
All these questions about whether Windows will usurp one of the cores or how to schedule the two cores seem positively bizarre, given that the answer is no different from dual processor machines.
There could be multi-core designs that can get better performance than multi-processor designs (cell attempts to be one), but this doesn't seem to be one of those.