Well it certainly helps GlobalFoundry to have more than one client. Apparently GF is still scaling up (and down) it's sub 32 nm processes and facilities and will be able to give TSMC some serious competition soon. AMD can only benefit from this competition.
For the future, I think This is what we are going to see from AMD. An integrated, heterogeneous MPSoC architecture with open (or at least standardized) on chip interfaces that might allow a mix and match CPU Core, GPU, PIO and Memory. Sort of taking Fusion one step further.
I can't speak for Acer tablets, but their Android phones are absolute crap. I had an Acer Liquid E (S-100) - if that had been my only Android experience I would have never even looked at the platform again. Fortunately, after 3 of my Acer Liquid E phones died prematurely, I managed to convince my carrier to forward date my hardware upgrade eligibility and got a Samsung Galaxy S. I couldn't be happier and I much prefer it to my wife's iPhone4. Based on my smart phone experience if I were looking for a tablet I would look at the Galaxy series.
I've also had Acer monitors - also crap. I've never bought an Acer laptop, but I've had 4 or 5 generations of Dell Latitudes (the Inspiron series is not so good) and will by another when my Studio XPS finally dies. Let's face it, there is a reason Acer products are cheaper - they're garbage.
But what is Cisco being accused of? Simply selling routers and network management tools that enable Internet access for millions of Chinese AND allow the Chinese government to filter, block and trace Internet communications? Or is this something more sinister, like helping the Chinese develop specific filters, policies, agents, etc. to specifically target political dissidents? I mean did Cisco simply give the Chinese government the tools to create the world's largest firewall, or did they specifically help them target political dissidents?
In two of the cases cited: HP Touchpad and Microsoft Kin, they were "me too" products that offered nothing new, compelling or innovative and were entered into markets that had dominant players with better products. It is also important to note that all three of these products relied on network externalities - a certain critical mass of users (in the case of Google Wave and Kin phones) or developers in the case of the HP Touchpad. All three were late entries into the market - MS Kin phone started life as Danger Inc's "Sidekick" phone, but had to be converted from a Java based software stack to Windows CE /.Net which significantly delayed its entry to the market.
Google Wave - I'm just not sure where it fit in the Google universe. Cloud based groupware / team collaboration? CMS portal? Social networking?
I don't mean to be callous - I wish Jobs personally well, I just find it a bit ironic that if iPhone users first news was via the WSJ - they couldn't view the photo montages.
Are you sure about this? I don't think this is true.
Google provides an Eclipse plug-in that includes a Dalvik bytecode compiler. This is the crux of how Google got around Sun/Oracle's IP restrictions on Java for mobile platforms. I'm not an Android developer, but from what I can tell, the Google Android tool chain looks like:
[Eclipse Android SDK] -> [Java Source Code] -> [Google's fork of the open source Apache Harmony Java SE class libraries] -> [Eclipse Dalvik bytecode compiler] -> [Dalvik bytecode] -> [Dalvik JIT compiler] -> [Dalvik VM] -> [Android platform native code]
The stuff in bold is entirely Google's invention, the stuff not in bold is open sourced. Oracle is basically making 2 claims:
- A copyright claim, that Google's Apache Harmony based Java SE libraries include Sun/Oracle copyrighted content. I doubt that this will succeed because the "copied" code consists of header files containing little more than function prototypes and definitions that are required to implement or even write to the API. The Java SE API is itself pretty much a copy of AT&T's C/C++ API.
- A patent infringement claim, that Google's Dalvik VM infringes upon Sun/Oracle's "invention" of the Java virtual machine. The problem here is that Sun didn't invent virtual machine technology. IBM's CP-40 VM-CMS dates back to the late 60's. Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls' (PARC) Smalltalk-80 was an object oriented programing language that compiled to bytecode which in turn is run through a JIT compiler and or interpreted by a virtual machine on each host platform. Baan, the German ERP vendor's bshell was a VM that ran the Baan 4GL language and dates to the late 70's. The "inventions" that Oracle is asserting with respect to the VM technology in its patents are common programming techniques as ubiquitous as the Unix fork() implementation.
I don't see how using a particular language syntax ties one to using a particular compiler and class libraries. If I write a program is C++ I can use gcc/glibc/libc or MS Visual C++/MFC, or VxWorks, gcc and WindRiver's versions of glibc, or Borland/Embarcadero C++Builder, or... Writing a program using Java syntax doesn't mean you have to use Sun's entire tool chain.
APIs are a 2-way street. You publish an API and distribute header files as part of an SDK, you make it easy for third party application developers to develop applications for your platform. It also makes it rather straight forward for another platform developer to emulate your API so that those same 3rd party apps, written to your API can be run on their platform. In the case of Java, Sun/Oracle also released and distributed the API and the whole JVM source code under a GPL license. So this made emulation of Java Class Libraries trivial. To now claim copyright infringement is absurd.
Again - this is not new. When Tim Paterson wrote 86-DOS (MS-DOS) he did it with an API programming manual for the yet to be released Digital Research CP/M-86 on his desk and basically emulated the system calls (which is one reason for some of the arcane crap that was in DOS for years afterwards).
FTFA, Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect:
"Java, you know, is, in my mind, pretty well locked out of the smartphone market because of Android..."
This should read:
FTFA, Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect:
"Java, you know, is, in my mind, pretty well locked out of the smartphone market because of our own incompentance..."
The Microsoft - Sun Java case was a contract / licensing dispute not a Patent / Copyright infringement suit. From what I recall, Microsoft licensed Java, implemented their own, polluted run time environment and JVM while continuing to call it Java, which violated the terms of their Java license. Sun won an injunction against MS and eventually settled out of court. MS and then phased out Java in favor of.NET, which from an IP perspective is not all that different than Java, Dalvik or Mono, etc.
In Google's case, they are not propagating a polluted JVM under the Java name in violation of a license. Rather they have created a cross compiler for the Java language that generates Dalvik byte code which is dynamically linked to the Dalvik (Apache Harmony) class libraries and a JIT compiler and Dalvik JVM that execute the Dalvik bytecode on the mobile device. To be clear - Oracle is not asserting that Dalvik is a faulty implementation of Java. Rather they are asserting that the programming constructs, algorithms and "inventions" used in Dalvik were invented by Sun and protected by software patents. Oracle is ALSO making certain copyright claims against Google, but I don't see these progressing very far as they are asserting copyright infringement primarily on test interfaces and APIs.
The Dalvik model is really no different from any other VM based platform. Mono - is an open source implementation of the.NET virtual machine. Grasshopper is a Visual Studio plug-in and compiler that produces Java bytecode so that you can run.NET applications on a Linux/J2EE application server. Parot is a cross platform VM that was originally developed for Perl and Python, but now supports compiler frontends for a variety of languages including Java. IKVM is an implementation of Java over Mono for.NET. Sun at one point was going to develop a JVM for iOS, but didn't go ahead with it. The combinations of IDE, bytecode compiler / converter, class library API emulation or Run Time Environment, Virtual Machine and JIT compliler are endless: C#/Visual basic/CLI on a Dalvik VM, Objective C on.NET, Java on iOS, Perl/Python on Mono/.NET, etc. etc.
It's funny - in Vancouver Falun Gong has had a permanent protest camp in front of the Chinese Consul General's compound on Granville Street for 10 years. It caused the city a lot of embarrassment when the city went to court to remove the permanent protest "hut", won at the BC Supreme Court but was over turned on appeal. They went back to the drawing board to draft a new bylaw that would outlaw permanent protest structures in residential neighbourhoods (Consul General is in Shaughnessy - a very wealthy residential neighbourhood) but allowed them in commercial areas. The city was embarrassed again when it came to light that the city manager consulted with the Chinese Consulate on drafting the bylaw. We should allow the Chinese government to advise us on how to handle a free speech? I expect the new bylaw will also be challenged as the consul general promotes trade and issues visas - so if they are conducting commercial activity, regardless of the residential zoning, protest structures should be allowed.
The first, and the one that everyone is citing most often, is the patent protection that they can now give Android. I must say that I do find it sad that people are so keen to destroy free software. To businesses it is of course a threat, but when you see fanboys and girls jumping and down with glee at the legal actions being brought before the system, I can't help but shake my head. Not everyone wants or can afford to part with huge volumes of cash for an iPhone, a system that is so locked down you might as well be licensing usage of the thing from Apple, rather than own it yourself.
What is really sad about this whole patent war is that all of these companies are spending billions of dollars to acquire the rights to old, obsolete technology rather than on developing new innovative products. $12B for Motorola, $6B for Nortel's IP, more for Novel, etc., etc, this is not innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it certainly helps GlobalFoundry to have more than one client. Apparently GF is still scaling up (and down) it's sub 32 nm processes and facilities and will be able to give TSMC some serious competition soon. AMD can only benefit from this competition.
For the future, I think This is what we are going to see from AMD. An integrated, heterogeneous MPSoC architecture with open (or at least standardized) on chip interfaces that might allow a mix and match CPU Core, GPU, PIO and Memory. Sort of taking Fusion one step further.
Someone who goes to cort
I can't speak for Acer tablets, but their Android phones are absolute crap. I had an Acer Liquid E (S-100) - if that had been my only Android experience I would have never even looked at the platform again. Fortunately, after 3 of my Acer Liquid E phones died prematurely, I managed to convince my carrier to forward date my hardware upgrade eligibility and got a Samsung Galaxy S. I couldn't be happier and I much prefer it to my wife's iPhone4. Based on my smart phone experience if I were looking for a tablet I would look at the Galaxy series.
I've also had Acer monitors - also crap. I've never bought an Acer laptop, but I've had 4 or 5 generations of Dell Latitudes (the Inspiron series is not so good) and will by another when my Studio XPS finally dies. Let's face it, there is a reason Acer products are cheaper - they're garbage.
But what is Cisco being accused of? Simply selling routers and network management tools that enable Internet access for millions of Chinese AND allow the Chinese government to filter, block and trace Internet communications? Or is this something more sinister, like helping the Chinese develop specific filters, policies, agents, etc. to specifically target political dissidents? I mean did Cisco simply give the Chinese government the tools to create the world's largest firewall, or did they specifically help them target political dissidents?
In two of the cases cited: HP Touchpad and Microsoft Kin, they were "me too" products that offered nothing new, compelling or innovative and were entered into markets that had dominant players with better products. It is also important to note that all three of these products relied on network externalities - a certain critical mass of users (in the case of Google Wave and Kin phones) or developers in the case of the HP Touchpad. All three were late entries into the market - MS Kin phone started life as Danger Inc's "Sidekick" phone, but had to be converted from a Java based software stack to Windows CE / .Net which significantly delayed its entry to the market.
Google Wave - I'm just not sure where it fit in the Google universe. Cloud based groupware / team collaboration? CMS portal? Social networking?
I don't mean to be callous - I wish Jobs personally well, I just find it a bit ironic that if iPhone users first news was via the WSJ - they couldn't view the photo montages.
Or does anyone else find it a bit ironic that the in-depth stories on the linked WSJ article contain photo essays on Jobs that are in .... FLASH?
Actually I think navigational charts are distributed by "bump".
Probably doesn't work in "Airplane Mode"
That's where the sharks come in.
Oh Zing! Good one. You sure nailed me!
Pilot: What's the procedure for a hot restart on a PW4062A at 10,000m?
... WTF? What's a mobi file and why can't my Kobo reader open it?
Co-Pilot: Wait a minute, I just have to find where I downloaded that manual
Pilot (grabs iPad): You idiot! Just get the ePub version and use iBooks!
Co-Pilot: Don't hold it that way it fucks up the antenna!
Pilot: That's the iPhone4 not the iPad
Co-Pilot: Oh yeah. Hey! where the hell are we?
Pilot: How the fuck should I know, this is the WiFi version with no fucking GPS!
Flight manuals and navigation charts from the AppStore? Because Apple doesn't allow in-app downloading of books from third party publishers.
Are you sure about this? I don't think this is true.
Google provides an Eclipse plug-in that includes a Dalvik bytecode compiler. This is the crux of how Google got around Sun/Oracle's IP restrictions on Java for mobile platforms. I'm not an Android developer, but from what I can tell, the Google Android tool chain looks like:
[Eclipse Android SDK] -> [Java Source Code] -> [Google's fork of the open source Apache Harmony Java SE class libraries] -> [Eclipse Dalvik bytecode compiler] -> [Dalvik bytecode] -> [Dalvik JIT compiler] -> [Dalvik VM] -> [Android platform native code]
The stuff in bold is entirely Google's invention, the stuff not in bold is open sourced. Oracle is basically making 2 claims:
- A copyright claim, that Google's Apache Harmony based Java SE libraries include Sun/Oracle copyrighted content. I doubt that this will succeed because the "copied" code consists of header files containing little more than function prototypes and definitions that are required to implement or even write to the API. The Java SE API is itself pretty much a copy of AT&T's C/C++ API.
- A patent infringement claim, that Google's Dalvik VM infringes upon Sun/Oracle's "invention" of the Java virtual machine. The problem here is that Sun didn't invent virtual machine technology. IBM's CP-40 VM-CMS dates back to the late 60's. Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls' (PARC) Smalltalk-80 was an object oriented programing language that compiled to bytecode which in turn is run through a JIT compiler and or interpreted by a virtual machine on each host platform. Baan, the German ERP vendor's bshell was a VM that ran the Baan 4GL language and dates to the late 70's. The "inventions" that Oracle is asserting with respect to the VM technology in its patents are common programming techniques as ubiquitous as the Unix fork() implementation.
I don't see how using a particular language syntax ties one to using a particular compiler and class libraries. If I write a program is C++ I can use gcc/glibc/libc or MS Visual C++/MFC, or VxWorks, gcc and WindRiver's versions of glibc, or Borland/Embarcadero C++Builder, or ... Writing a program using Java syntax doesn't mean you have to use Sun's entire tool chain.
It's also prior art on the turtleneck.
Here is even earlier prior art.
http://static.photaki.com/sumerian-clay-tablet-with-cuneiform-writing_414849.jpg
I think this predates even the Etch-A-Sketch.
http://static.photaki.com/sumerian-clay-tablet-with-cuneiform-writing_414849.jpg
APIs are a 2-way street. You publish an API and distribute header files as part of an SDK, you make it easy for third party application developers to develop applications for your platform. It also makes it rather straight forward for another platform developer to emulate your API so that those same 3rd party apps, written to your API can be run on their platform. In the case of Java, Sun/Oracle also released and distributed the API and the whole JVM source code under a GPL license. So this made emulation of Java Class Libraries trivial. To now claim copyright infringement is absurd.
Again - this is not new. When Tim Paterson wrote 86-DOS (MS-DOS) he did it with an API programming manual for the yet to be released Digital Research CP/M-86 on his desk and basically emulated the system calls (which is one reason for some of the arcane crap that was in DOS for years afterwards).
FTFA, Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect: "Java, you know, is, in my mind, pretty well locked out of the smartphone market because of Android..."
This should read:
FTFA, Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect: "Java, you know, is, in my mind, pretty well locked out of the smartphone market because of our own incompentance..."
The Microsoft - Sun Java case was a contract / licensing dispute not a Patent / Copyright infringement suit. From what I recall, Microsoft licensed Java, implemented their own, polluted run time environment and JVM while continuing to call it Java, which violated the terms of their Java license. Sun won an injunction against MS and eventually settled out of court. MS and then phased out Java in favor of .NET, which from an IP perspective is not all that different than Java, Dalvik or Mono, etc.
.NET virtual machine. Grasshopper is a Visual Studio plug-in and compiler that produces Java bytecode so that you can run .NET applications on a Linux/J2EE application server. Parot is a cross platform VM that was originally developed for Perl and Python, but now supports compiler frontends for a variety of languages including Java. IKVM is an implementation of Java over Mono for .NET. Sun at one point was going to develop a JVM for iOS, but didn't go ahead with it. The combinations of IDE, bytecode compiler / converter, class library API emulation or Run Time Environment, Virtual Machine and JIT compliler are endless: C#/Visual basic/CLI on a Dalvik VM, Objective C on .NET, Java on iOS, Perl/Python on Mono/.NET, etc. etc.
In Google's case, they are not propagating a polluted JVM under the Java name in violation of a license. Rather they have created a cross compiler for the Java language that generates Dalvik byte code which is dynamically linked to the Dalvik (Apache Harmony) class libraries and a JIT compiler and Dalvik JVM that execute the Dalvik bytecode on the mobile device. To be clear - Oracle is not asserting that Dalvik is a faulty implementation of Java. Rather they are asserting that the programming constructs, algorithms and "inventions" used in Dalvik were invented by Sun and protected by software patents. Oracle is ALSO making certain copyright claims against Google, but I don't see these progressing very far as they are asserting copyright infringement primarily on test interfaces and APIs.
The Dalvik model is really no different from any other VM based platform. Mono - is an open source implementation of the
It's funny - in Vancouver Falun Gong has had a permanent protest camp in front of the Chinese Consul General's compound on Granville Street for 10 years. It caused the city a lot of embarrassment when the city went to court to remove the permanent protest "hut", won at the BC Supreme Court but was over turned on appeal. They went back to the drawing board to draft a new bylaw that would outlaw permanent protest structures in residential neighbourhoods (Consul General is in Shaughnessy - a very wealthy residential neighbourhood) but allowed them in commercial areas. The city was embarrassed again when it came to light that the city manager consulted with the Chinese Consulate on drafting the bylaw. We should allow the Chinese government to advise us on how to handle a free speech? I expect the new bylaw will also be challenged as the consul general promotes trade and issues visas - so if they are conducting commercial activity, regardless of the residential zoning, protest structures should be allowed.
At least in the lavatory, there is one application for which a tablet will never adequately replace paper.
At least now they can Facebook.
The first, and the one that everyone is citing most often, is the patent protection that they can now give Android. I must say that I do find it sad that people are so keen to destroy free software. To businesses it is of course a threat, but when you see fanboys and girls jumping and down with glee at the legal actions being brought before the system, I can't help but shake my head. Not everyone wants or can afford to part with huge volumes of cash for an iPhone, a system that is so locked down you might as well be licensing usage of the thing from Apple, rather than own it yourself.
What is really sad about this whole patent war is that all of these companies are spending billions of dollars to acquire the rights to old, obsolete technology rather than on developing new innovative products. $12B for Motorola, $6B for Nortel's IP, more for Novel, etc., etc, this is not innovation.