We don't know enough about BSD Unix systems to run
{open|Net}BSD. Maybe after we get some more experience we'll be confident enough to use it
and build up the application system we require.
From the CNET report (Jim Cullinan being identified as the Microsoft representative)...
Cullinan, however, blamed Sun for the lawsuit and maintained Microsoft's stance that Sun was trying to stop Microsoft's innovative work with Java.
"They have harmed consumers and developers by trying to reduce choice and the
availability of technology," he said. "They decided to go to court and try to compete
on the issue."
Hang on. Weren't you the company found guilty
on exactly that? Sheez. I guess if you say it
enough people will believe you. Love the
"innovation" aspect too.
Store is always your limit. E.g, we can't sample the universe at an arbitary level of detail, not enough atoms to store the information about the atoms storing the information...
Same issue. We adopted a trademarked term from
real-life for use in our computer world and
had to change it. Same thing here. Unless of
course the phrase was in common use before
the corp. appropriated it for their own use
(a la Windows).
Unix had Xerox style UIs for years before NeXT. Lots of black and white, ugly icons, if any
(Rob doesn't like them) and menu, bad fonts. Did you ever use Sunview? A Blit? Compare
these against NeXTSTEP (Sunview makes Windows 3
look really good). At the time NeXTSTEP was a work of art. NeXTSTEP 3 especially, Keith Ohlfs (sp?, it's been a while) icons, wow.
NeXT was the first company to really get it
together with an *integrated* environment
that hid Unix. Unix, well Mach/Unix. They
relied a whole chunk on Mach's IPC but it
was essentially Unix, the implementation environment for their application - a really good personal computing environment.
I used NeXT machines for many years while working in R&D for a company that owned a big chunk of
NeXT (well that narrows it down:) We did h/w
and s/w for the boxes starting with the first
cubes. Eventually we were running NeXTSTEP 4
on NeXT, PC, Sparc (Sun clones) and HP h/w
(HP's were fastest things about at the time)
We had other machines of course, Suns, PCs,
Macs, HPUX, etc... And a lot of people with
loads of Unix experience.
Warning. Reminiscing....
The NeXT's were the best environments for actually doing our work. We had Mac-style ease of use but better - services were wonderful - got BSD unix as the command line development environment - vi in a Stuart window, NewsGrazer (with the RTF wars
years ahead of HTML postings to USENET),
a damm fine app builder for doing real apps with some pretty decent class hierarchy built on Brad
Cox's blend of C and Smalltalk. Loads of spiffy
features in the hardware - our cubes had 64MB and 64MB NeXTDimension boards, we watched movies in
windows, clipping frames with the mouse and drag and dropping into FrameMaker while listening to network audio or playing network shoot'em up games. Oh, did people realise NeXTSTEP developer shipped with a nice little distributed computing
framework (using Obj-C natch). Years before it
became popular via the mass 'net (although it
was a common technique then, I'd done loads of
it with transputers, as had many others).
That was ten years ago. What were PCs doing
at the time? They can almost do what the
($20K) NeXT machine did back then.
If you're paying more than 60% tax you
need to see someone about it. Maybe
they played a joke on you on the way in
and you still haven't got it.
And you might want to get a new television.
The ABC - state run television - seem to get
most programming from the UK. It's the
commericial stations who run the fscking
infomercials and evangelists direct from the
USA (and the sitcoms).
And you obviously haven't been here long
enough to know the real differences between
Holdens (GM to non-Oz friends) and Fords
(Ford to non-Oz friends, Mazda to Nihon friends,
Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin to UK friends, Volvo to Swedish friends). Next you'll be
telling us VB tastes like MB or some other
seppo crap:)
Lots of what you say is true however as someone
who worked in "corporate" R&D in Oz for over a
decade I can tell you it's doing just fine and
does a load of good stuff with some very, very
good people. Some of the corporate places
do quite interesting things - you'd be surprised
what actually gets designed or prototyped here
first and then sold to the world via the mother company.
The R&D world in Oz is small when compared to the USA but is growing. Many larger companies have, or have had, R&D centers in Oz. Motorola are building up their work here, Canon do a lot, CISCO have people here, DEC and HP had places. Then there's the Europeans and military work. Sun and SGI put money into Oz too. And that's not counting any local enterprises - lots of very high tech
medical equipment is done here for instance.
The USA companies like us because we're not that different (we can talk about a lot of the same TV shows), speak English, education levels are pretty good and the place is pretty close to China (think call centres). The Japanese like us because they think its the USA without the guns (which was
actually said to me by the executive of a Japanese company). And with the exchange rates the way they are the non-Oz corps are getting a bargin and there must be some kind of tax break they can wrangle in there too. Lots of pluses for all.
As for not poaching academic types? It happens
and is happening more. The low rate of pay in Oz education and quasi-government R&D means they're going to private industry. Sometimes they can
even do similar things to their original research
and get paid a lot more to do it.
Microsoft even do a little, quite interesting,
work with/via Macquarie University. ISTR some real-time extensions to NT done there. It's
a small group though. Sponsored, and therefore
owned, PhDs.
Multi-national corps. have been telling
governments what to do for ages. Big $$$
makes things happen regardless of where it
comes from (that's just an issue you
try to keep out of the press if it's anyway
embarrassing).
But MS are doing this everywhere. Count the number of times the word "broadband" appears
on MS web sites these days. They want high
speed access to as many people as possible
so they can sell.NET services to them. It's
all part of the plan to become a utility and maintain a consistent cash flow ($x/month/user
guaranteed over long contract periods, lovely).
They're in a wonderful position to do this of
course but need enough people signed
up on broadband to make it worthwhile. If they
get the bandwidth into the homes they just may
be able to convince the masses of this "PC is the
controller of the home entertainment experience" thing they're getting on to. There's also the
X-Box factor to throw into the pot. Selling
games and movies would be a nice earner too.
Exactly. I was going to say it too. The
programs are using an authentication
step to let you prove you bought the game.
The authentication tokens are selected from
a book or think of the book as one big token.
Strangely enough, according to the Register article, even Microsoft is upset with this.
Microsoft and other producers of bits to put on
disks are upset not because of the anti-
consumer aspects of the proposals but because it
increases their production costs. They don't give
a stuff about the consumer's rights.
In
Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky"
the same idea is expressed in a rather more
brutal way. Rather than volunteering service
the experts get en-slaved and plugged in as a service. Not such a bad idea if you ask me.
And not that far from the truth when looking at various parts of USENET or some company's support operations:)
I don't like the idea of someone modifying my code and not showing me what they did.
The GPL does not help all that much with
this problem. If MegaCorp use your code internally they can hack the crap out of it (or fix it;) and no one else will be the wiser. The GPL only helps if they try to distribute.
And anyway, sometimes you have to let your work go. If you want to do more than one or two things for the OSS community you often need to leave it to others to take up your work whilst you go and do something else. Bit like children. You just have to let them go. If the code's any good and the function compelling enough it will leave you anyway (yes including Linus and the kernel he started). Get over it.
Java is slowed by excessive decomposition in its class libraries and the need to dynamically load and check all those classes all the time. The mantra being delivered by the Java class library folks may not be the best way. That's not to say it's a bad way. Java does a lot of good things for many programmers (memory mgt. regardless of lack of implementation efficiency and some semantic warts concerning finalizers) and is better than many other languages, eg, VB.
Limbo offers a different approach to programming than Java. The intrinsics are immediately useful rather than just providing faciltiies to allow the construction of useful facilities. You save a layer immediately. Also Limbo's syntax, once you get accustomed to it, is refreshing. It took me, a long time C (and everything else) programmer only a few hours to feel quite comfortable. The implicit typing saves so much...typing:) You get a lot of the ease of use of dynamically or un-typed languages whilst retaining strong type checking. And then there's the CSP support which is handy for today's more complex interactive programs and may be simpler to use than the Java concurrency model (I've done a lot of occam, I'm biased, and yeah I know there's channel classes for Java).
Forget the 1940s prior art. The patent was filed
in 1980 and basically attempts to claim any
central machine with telephone connected terminals and menu-like means of getting second blocks of information using keyed data of lesser extent than the full address of said blah, blah...
A large number of mainframe and minicomputer installations at that time included dial up access to menu-based systems. The ones I used did or something implanted false memories in my brain. The patent is invalidated by common practice at the time it was filed let alone prior art from 40 years (almost) before.
What it neat-ish is it is a good early example of
bogus behaviour by the US PTO. They were being
stupid in 1980 so it actually isn't such a recent phenomon. Problem is we're currently screwed as well as being screwed for the next 20 or 30 years until we get a clue about IP in this era.
Oh, BTW, there's a load (and I mean load) of
really bad software patents we all infringe
every day. IBM have many - drawing programs, forms - Microsoft have them too (read them, some are awful) - all the large players do. As Gregory Aharonian once said,
Q. How do you know your software infringes a patent?
A. It exists.
You'll go to some agency - web based 'natch - and
say "We have problem X and will spend Y to have it fixed by Z." Your s/w agent meets with those of
the hackers and one gets selected (somehow) to do
the work (or none if you aren't paying enough). Because everyone has access to the infrastructure's source they are in a position to be able to fix problems (if capable, which is why you pay) and a nice, big, fat service market builds itself. To some extent its already happening but the base needs to be a little bigger to support more than the big name OSS celebs.
One of the benefits of the open-source model is
that this marketplace can develop. With proprietary systems you are limited to getting support from the vendor or those blessed by the vendor. You are limited by their schedule and reasoning. If they don't want third parties being able to fix things and want to lock the customer into obtaining things from just them it is all too easy to do.
And just like non-OSS software if you spend enough you get support. If you need a fix or mod to something you pay someone to do it. Or wait till it get's fixed by some other means. Just the same as with non-OSS but it probably costs less to get OSS modified than special attention from a vendor. And With more accessibility to source the costs should come down however the expertise is what you're paying for. Ever consider how long it takes someone to become adept with the workings of a large program? It's a significant investment in time from usually relatively useful people. This is one of the mistakes non-software people make when thinking about OSS. Just having the code doesn't make it useful, you need to understand it.
Fuck it. If they're being arseholes let the RIAA at 'em. Some one tell them about all them lists of song titles that are obviously the IP of the poor artists the industry so dearly likes to protect.
I honestly don't understand the hype surrounding MacOS X
Those of us who were lucky enough to use
(high powered for the time) NeXT machines
and NeXTSTEP were hoping it was coming back.
No Unix-based system has come as close to being
a really usable personal computing environment
yet preserving (and extending in numerous
ways) the benefits of a Unix environment and
network integration (Mach IPC handles networks
pretty transparently). I'm still waiting for
NeXTSTEP services in another Unix GUI.
If/. was hosted within FrameMaker the background
imagery, titles, etc... would be in the/. master
page. You press reply and a new document is created using that master page. Your text goes
into the default flow, possibly with the title in
a separate frame to allow some extra formatting
leeway. All specified in a template, you don't care. It just looks good when you type your stuff in. Use the standard templates or write one and
frames hardly get in your way (until you want
to stick a graphic in someplace).
The real beauty of Frame's approach comes when
you want real control over the document formatting. If you create templates Frames
given you precise control over the flow.
With Frame simple things are simple (using
templates) and complex things are possible
(and work). It's a good tool when you get
to know it.
Oh, and Frame also supports conditional text
so you could put nasty messages to Windows users
in/. posts that Linux users don't see:)
Throw in a 15-inch (or bigger) LCD on a swing
arm mounted near the thing and make it a
web terminal. Run the network right up your pipe (so to speak). Make newspapers rather boring.
Could make be interesting playing a network game
and web-cams could be good (and bad according
to taste).
Come to think of it you do the sort of thing
Peter Hamilton writes about in his Greg Whatshisname books. Tie a fibre to a cockroach,
or in our case a cockroach-sized robot and send
it up the sewer. In this case we want it to find
the nearest place where it can connect the house
to the 'net. The local sewerage people couple
put their pipes to more use.
I wouldn't want to be the cable guy trying to fix
the lines:)
Slashdot Mirror
Store is always your limit. E.g, we can't sample the universe at an arbitary level of detail, not enough atoms to store the information about the atoms storing the information...
No SMP support. Huh?
# dmesg
...
FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor motherboard
cpu0 (BSP): apic id: 1, version: 0x00040011, at 0xfee00000
cpu1 (AP): apic id: 0, version: 0x00040011, at 0xfee00000
Same issue. We adopted a trademarked term from real-life for use in our computer world and had to change it. Same thing here. Unless of course the phrase was in common use before the corp. appropriated it for their own use (a la Windows).
NeXT was the first company to really get it together with an *integrated* environment that hid Unix. Unix, well Mach/Unix. They relied a whole chunk on Mach's IPC but it was essentially Unix, the implementation environment for their application - a really good personal computing environment.
I used NeXT machines for many years while working in R&D for a company that owned a big chunk of NeXT (well that narrows it down :) We did h/w
and s/w for the boxes starting with the first
cubes. Eventually we were running NeXTSTEP 4
on NeXT, PC, Sparc (Sun clones) and HP h/w
(HP's were fastest things about at the time)
We had other machines of course, Suns, PCs,
Macs, HPUX, etc... And a lot of people with
loads of Unix experience.
Warning. Reminiscing....
The NeXT's were the best environments for actually doing our work. We had Mac-style ease of use but better - services were wonderful - got BSD unix as the command line development environment - vi in a Stuart window, NewsGrazer (with the RTF wars years ahead of HTML postings to USENET), a damm fine app builder for doing real apps with some pretty decent class hierarchy built on Brad Cox's blend of C and Smalltalk. Loads of spiffy features in the hardware - our cubes had 64MB and 64MB NeXTDimension boards, we watched movies in windows, clipping frames with the mouse and drag and dropping into FrameMaker while listening to network audio or playing network shoot'em up games. Oh, did people realise NeXTSTEP developer shipped with a nice little distributed computing framework (using Obj-C natch). Years before it became popular via the mass 'net (although it was a common technique then, I'd done loads of it with transputers, as had many others).
That was ten years ago. What were PCs doing at the time? They can almost do what the ($20K) NeXT machine did back then.
And you might want to get a new television. The ABC - state run television - seem to get most programming from the UK. It's the commericial stations who run the fscking infomercials and evangelists direct from the USA (and the sitcoms).
And you obviously haven't been here long enough to know the real differences between Holdens (GM to non-Oz friends) and Fords (Ford to non-Oz friends, Mazda to Nihon friends, Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin to UK friends, Volvo to Swedish friends). Next you'll be telling us VB tastes like MB or some other seppo crap :)
The R&D world in Oz is small when compared to the USA but is growing. Many larger companies have, or have had, R&D centers in Oz. Motorola are building up their work here, Canon do a lot, CISCO have people here, DEC and HP had places. Then there's the Europeans and military work. Sun and SGI put money into Oz too. And that's not counting any local enterprises - lots of very high tech medical equipment is done here for instance.
The USA companies like us because we're not that different (we can talk about a lot of the same TV shows), speak English, education levels are pretty good and the place is pretty close to China (think call centres). The Japanese like us because they think its the USA without the guns (which was actually said to me by the executive of a Japanese company). And with the exchange rates the way they are the non-Oz corps are getting a bargin and there must be some kind of tax break they can wrangle in there too. Lots of pluses for all.
As for not poaching academic types? It happens and is happening more. The low rate of pay in Oz education and quasi-government R&D means they're going to private industry. Sometimes they can even do similar things to their original research and get paid a lot more to do it.
Microsoft even do a little, quite interesting, work with/via Macquarie University. ISTR some real-time extensions to NT done there. It's a small group though. Sponsored, and therefore owned, PhDs.
But MS are doing this everywhere. Count the number of times the word "broadband" appears on MS web sites these days. They want high speed access to as many people as possible so they can sell .NET services to them. It's
all part of the plan to become a utility and maintain a consistent cash flow ($x/month/user
guaranteed over long contract periods, lovely).
They're in a wonderful position to do this of course but need enough people signed up on broadband to make it worthwhile. If they get the bandwidth into the homes they just may be able to convince the masses of this "PC is the controller of the home entertainment experience" thing they're getting on to. There's also the X-Box factor to throw into the pot. Selling games and movies would be a nice earner too.
A malicious web-site could also disguise the Flash as a banner ad and.... Hey what's that at the top of the page! Ugh.
Exactly. I was going to say it too. The programs are using an authentication step to let you prove you bought the game. The authentication tokens are selected from a book or think of the book as one big token.
Microsoft and other producers of bits to put on disks are upset not because of the anti- consumer aspects of the proposals but because it increases their production costs. They don't give a stuff about the consumer's rights.
In Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" the same idea is expressed in a rather more brutal way. Rather than volunteering service the experts get en-slaved and plugged in as a service. Not such a bad idea if you ask me. And not that far from the truth when looking at various parts of USENET or some company's support operations :)
And anyway, sometimes you have to let your work go. If you want to do more than one or two things for the OSS community you often need to leave it to others to take up your work whilst you go and do something else. Bit like children. You just have to let them go. If the code's any good and the function compelling enough it will leave you anyway (yes including Linus and the kernel he started). Get over it.
Limbo offers a different approach to programming than Java. The intrinsics are immediately useful rather than just providing faciltiies to allow the construction of useful facilities. You save a layer immediately. Also Limbo's syntax, once you get accustomed to it, is refreshing. It took me, a long time C (and everything else) programmer only a few hours to feel quite comfortable. The implicit typing saves so much...typing :) You get a lot of the ease of use of dynamically or un-typed languages whilst retaining strong type checking. And then there's the CSP support which is handy for today's more complex interactive programs and may be simpler to use than the Java concurrency model (I've done a lot of occam, I'm biased, and yeah I know there's channel classes for Java).
A large number of mainframe and minicomputer installations at that time included dial up access to menu-based systems. The ones I used did or something implanted false memories in my brain. The patent is invalidated by common practice at the time it was filed let alone prior art from 40 years (almost) before.
What it neat-ish is it is a good early example of bogus behaviour by the US PTO. They were being stupid in 1980 so it actually isn't such a recent phenomon. Problem is we're currently screwed as well as being screwed for the next 20 or 30 years until we get a clue about IP in this era.
Oh, BTW, there's a load (and I mean load) of really bad software patents we all infringe every day. IBM have many - drawing programs, forms - Microsoft have them too (read them, some are awful) - all the large players do. As Gregory Aharonian once said,
The "it" being your software.It's just as funny now as it was when it was written.
One of the benefits of the open-source model is that this marketplace can develop. With proprietary systems you are limited to getting support from the vendor or those blessed by the vendor. You are limited by their schedule and reasoning. If they don't want third parties being able to fix things and want to lock the customer into obtaining things from just them it is all too easy to do.
And just like non-OSS software if you spend enough you get support. If you need a fix or mod to something you pay someone to do it. Or wait till it get's fixed by some other means. Just the same as with non-OSS but it probably costs less to get OSS modified than special attention from a vendor. And With more accessibility to source the costs should come down however the expertise is what you're paying for. Ever consider how long it takes someone to become adept with the workings of a large program? It's a significant investment in time from usually relatively useful people. This is one of the mistakes non-software people make when thinking about OSS. Just having the code doesn't make it useful, you need to understand it.
Fuck it. If they're being arseholes let the RIAA at 'em. Some one tell them about all them lists of song titles that are obviously the IP of the poor artists the industry so dearly likes to protect.
I honestly don't understand the hype surrounding MacOS X
Those of us who were lucky enough to use (high powered for the time) NeXT machines and NeXTSTEP were hoping it was coming back.
No Unix-based system has come as close to being a really usable personal computing environment yet preserving (and extending in numerous ways) the benefits of a Unix environment and network integration (Mach IPC handles networks pretty transparently). I'm still waiting for NeXTSTEP services in another Unix GUI.
The real beauty of Frame's approach comes when you want real control over the document formatting. If you create templates Frames given you precise control over the flow. With Frame simple things are simple (using templates) and complex things are possible (and work). It's a good tool when you get to know it.
Oh, and Frame also supports conditional text so you could put nasty messages to Windows users in /. posts that Linux users don't see :)
Networking the toilet may sound stupid however...
Throw in a 15-inch (or bigger) LCD on a swing arm mounted near the thing and make it a web terminal. Run the network right up your pipe (so to speak). Make newspapers rather boring. Could make be interesting playing a network game and web-cams could be good (and bad according to taste).
Come to think of it you do the sort of thing Peter Hamilton writes about in his Greg Whatshisname books. Tie a fibre to a cockroach, or in our case a cockroach-sized robot and send it up the sewer. In this case we want it to find the nearest place where it can connect the house to the 'net. The local sewerage people couple put their pipes to more use.
I wouldn't want to be the cable guy trying to fix the lines :)
Q. How many geeks does it take to recite a Monty Python sketch?
A. All of them.
You've said far too much. With clues like that they might realise what we're doing. Dammit shutup!