Wintermute,
I'd like to talk to you about your experiences with this technology. A friend of mine is now C5, and I'd like to get him back on the net.
Drop me a note if you have a moment.
andy@lee-turk.com
Low power FM broadcast is just a bad idea to begin with. Sure, there are lots of radios out there, but the transmitting equipment is harder to come by. FM radio is nearing the end of its lifecycle communities shouldn't sink time, $$ and effort into an outdated technology going by the wayside.
Anyone who wants to narrow-cast to a local audience should use the net instead. The infrastructure is getting cheaper by the second, it can't be jammed, doesn't cause interference with other broadcasters and is a much better solution in general.
Of course, if you want another excuse to go into bitch-mode about how the gov't sucks, then that's fine by me. I've built up a tolerance to that by now.
There's a really great Java UI library (different than Swing and AWT) that does lots of neat things. It was distributed by Netscape and is freely available with source.
Read about Netscape IFC here: http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/ifc/hom e.html
Although not part of the original IFC distribution, I know that someone wrote a subclass of netscape.application.Graphics that generates Postscript/PDF instead of drawing on the screen.
IFC uses a very similar architecture to the old NeXT toolkit (since IFC was written by ex-NeXT folks). IFC even comes with the Constructor application to lay out your UI. Amazing stuff.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure where to find the Postscript output code, but someone else might know.
"The Bluetooth device address (BD_ADDR) is the 48-bit IEEE address which is unique for each Bluetooth unit. The Bluetooth addresses are publicly known, and can be obtained via MMI interactions, or, automatically, via an inquiry routine by a Bluetooth unit."
It's no great surprise that the identity of a Bluetooth tranceiver can be discovered.
#ifdef SLAM
If you never used Objective-C for anything more than a college project, then you're probably not qualified to explain why it never caught on in a production environment.
#endif
I spent 7 years in the NeXT world both writing code personally and running a company that developed software for the platform.
Here are my reasons why Objective-C never caught on:
1. It was *perceived* as being too slow.
The reality was that if you used objects at a very low level, there'd be a performance hit. If you used objects at a high level, like with NeXT's wonderful ToolKit, it was fine. Objective-C was never meant to be used for system programming. The "it's too slow" FUD stuck really well though.
2. There weren't any other Objective-C libraries other than the one that NeXT wrote.
The NeXT ToolKit was incredibly well thought out--it was a very productive platform to write code for. But that didn't help you if you were writing code for X11 or Windows or the Mac.
3. While "better" than C++ in many respects, Objective-C didn't offer enough benefits to convince people to abandon the (huge) effort they spent learning C++.
For better or worse, C++ is what educated most of the world to the benefits of OOP. Objective-C offered more OOP benefits, but was perceived as poor cousin. Since the value of a language is proportional to the amount of code written in it, this was probably accurate.
4. The world hadn't (yet) decided that C++ was a bad idea.
Long after NeXT ceased to be a factor in the workstation market, the programming world discovered the true horror of multiple inheritance, templates, and all the other landmines that lurk beneath the surface of C++.
Summary
Objective-C was cool, but the real value only came through using the libraries that NeXT wrote. Without a useful API, even a fine language will starve.
I spent many, many years in the NeXTSTEP community (through all the spellings of the name:-).
Lots of great technology came out of that world and the people who drank the kool aid.
Almost everyone still thinks NeXTSTEP had a beautiful user interface. WebTV also has a great UI. The same designer created both.
The CERN web server was originally created on NeXTSTEP.
Netscape's IFC (pure Java UI) were created by folks who came from NeXT. The IFC classes later got incorporated into Swing, Sun's current (and arguably goofy) UI library for Java.
I'm sure there are lots of other projects that had their origin at NeXT too. At the time, Steve Jobs was able to attract a lot of *very* smart people to his vision.
Unfortunately, none of it turned out to be interesting enough to displace Windows.
IANAL, but I thought patent law was there to encourage innovation. Commercial companies patent something that took you a long time to develop and then get a chance to recoup your investment.
The gov't patenting something seems like an abuse of the system. We don't really want the gov't to be in the business of licensing patents do we?
Arrgh! It's bad enough that the PTO has control over which brain-dead ideas get a 17-year window of protection, but giving "them" the ability to lock down ideas is just too scary.
Can you imagine what the world would be like if the U.S. Gov't had the one-click shopping patent instead of Amazon?!
It's interesting to compare the RIAA to Microsoft. I have 4 computers in my house each one purchased with an embedded Microsoft product.
Total revenue to Microsoft: 4*$30 = $120
I have something on the order of 200 CDs. At an average cost of $15 my tiny collection of CDs works out to $3,000 worth of revenue to the record industry.
Like Microsoft, the RIAA's products consist of bits on a CD and that CD can be easily shared and/or copied.
Piracy hasn't stopped Microsoft from making boatloads of money, so given that the same copyright laws apply to both (more or less), what is the RIAA worried about?
Answer: The RIAA is a cartel and it controls the distribution and pricing of music. They've artificially inflated the cost of their product and when they lose control of the distribution channel, they lose control of pricing.
The internet is at a point now where individuals have more power than governments do (as far as the content of the web is concerned).
Witness Napster, CARNIVORE, and the French goverment trying to tell Yahoo what to do. Centralized authority is losing its grip on its ability to enforce policy.
How do you think this will turn out? Will we all end up being netizens in flowing white robes, or will we have to pay protection money to the "mob.net" to keep bandits and theives out of our Network Neighborhood?
Bluetooth uses much *less* power than 802.11b and would likely be swamped. On the other hand, Bluetooth hops to a pseudorandom channel 1600 times a second, so it might just end up getting out of the way quickly. 802.11 scans sequentially through its channels at a much lower rate. From what I've read though, it's hard to simply guess on these effects because the usage of Bluetooth suggests that there may be a dozen BT devices for each 802.11 device.
You're right, 802.11 does use the same frequencies as Bluetooth. However, lots of folks have realized this and 802.15 is supposed to be a new standard, based on Bluetooth that's (more) compatible with 802.11. If you want to read the nitty gritty about what effect a bunch of Bluetooth tranceivers have on a 801.11 network, take a look at this: http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/15/pub/1999/Sep 99/Misc/BT-80211-Coexist.ppt The presentation only talks about the effect that BT has on 802.11, not the other way around. If I read this correctly, even with a bunch of BT piconets, 802.11 can keep chugging away. However, I wonder if the lower power BT signals will get blasted out of the sky by 802.11 packets.
Not that my occasional purchases are going to matter in the grand scheme of things, but I don't feel the need to buy from Amazon in the future because of this.
It's a great place to shop, but there are lots of alternatives. I'll spend my money with vendors who aren't resorting to dirty patent tricks in such an obvious way.
I doubt lobbying would work because the other side can spend more money on lobbying than we can.
Suppose you received a patent for your pseudo-random sequences and assigned it to a non-profit organization which would protected the patent for you? If someone wants to use your patented idea in an open-source way, then the license is very cheap. If the use is *not* open source, then it costs more.
License fees collected this way to go pay for the legal fees to patent other open source stuff.
There may be a large number of ideas like yours that could be used to set up a defensive perimeter of open source patents.
Software patents are a bad idea generally. But they (I think) can also pose problems for people publishing/using Open Source code.
Would it be possible to create something an Open Source patent organization which could "own" and enforce software patents in the open source community?
There's got to be a lot of patentable stuff in open source--it just hasn't found its way to the PTO yet. If this organization charged license fees for non-OS use of the patented idea, it could generate some funds for itself.
Over time, there might be a large enough "minefield" of OS patents that it would become economically beneficial to put new code under the OS umbrella because you wouldn't have to pay the OS patent organization any license fees.
Imagine if instead of paying Unisys $5K to get legal for using.gif images, companies paid a similar amount to a non-profit Open Source patent organization? I think that'd be pretty cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Wintermute, I'd like to talk to you about your experiences with this technology. A friend of mine is now C5, and I'd like to get him back on the net. Drop me a note if you have a moment. andy@lee-turk.com
Hey Chang, Did your laptop come with any API doc?
Low power FM broadcast is just a bad idea to begin with. Sure, there are lots of radios out there, but the transmitting equipment is harder to come by. FM radio is nearing the end of its lifecycle communities shouldn't sink time, $$ and effort into an outdated technology going by the wayside.
Anyone who wants to narrow-cast to a local audience should use the net instead. The infrastructure is getting cheaper by the second, it can't be jammed, doesn't cause interference with other broadcasters and is a much better solution in general.
Of course, if you want another excuse to go into bitch-mode about how the gov't sucks, then that's fine by me. I've built up a tolerance to that by now.
There's a really great Java UI library (different than Swing and AWT) that does lots of neat things. It was distributed by Netscape and is freely available with source.
m e.html
Read about Netscape IFC here: http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/ifc/ho
Although not part of the original IFC distribution, I know that someone wrote a subclass of netscape.application.Graphics that generates Postscript/PDF instead of drawing on the screen.
IFC uses a very similar architecture to the old NeXT toolkit (since IFC was written by ex-NeXT folks). IFC even comes with the Constructor application to lay out your UI. Amazing stuff.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure where to find the Postscript output code, but someone else might know.
"The Bluetooth device address (BD_ADDR) is the 48-bit IEEE address which is unique for each Bluetooth unit. The Bluetooth addresses are publicly known, and can be obtained via MMI interactions, or, automatically, via an inquiry routine by a Bluetooth unit."
It's no great surprise that the identity of a Bluetooth tranceiver can be discovered.
#ifdef SLAM
If you never used Objective-C for anything more than a college project, then you're probably not qualified to explain why it never caught on in a production environment.
#endif
I spent 7 years in the NeXT world both writing code personally and running a company that developed software for the platform.
Here are my reasons why Objective-C never caught on:
1. It was *perceived* as being too slow.
The reality was that if you used objects at a very low level, there'd be a performance hit. If you used objects at a high level, like with NeXT's wonderful ToolKit, it was fine. Objective-C was never meant to be used for system programming. The "it's too slow" FUD stuck really well though.
2. There weren't any other Objective-C libraries other than the one that NeXT wrote.
The NeXT ToolKit was incredibly well thought out--it was a very productive platform to write code for. But that didn't help you if you were writing code for X11 or Windows or the Mac.
3. While "better" than C++ in many respects, Objective-C didn't offer enough benefits to convince people to abandon the (huge) effort they spent learning C++.
For better or worse, C++ is what educated most of the world to the benefits of OOP. Objective-C offered more OOP benefits, but was perceived as poor cousin. Since the value of a language is proportional to the amount of code written in it, this was probably accurate.
4. The world hadn't (yet) decided that C++ was a bad idea.
Long after NeXT ceased to be a factor in the workstation market, the programming world discovered the true horror of multiple inheritance, templates, and all the other landmines that lurk beneath the surface of C++.
Summary
Objective-C was cool, but the real value only came through using the libraries that NeXT wrote. Without a useful API, even a fine language will starve.
I spent many, many years in the NeXTSTEP community (through all the spellings of the name :-).
Lots of great technology came out of that world and the people who drank the kool aid.
Almost everyone still thinks NeXTSTEP had a beautiful user interface. WebTV also has a great UI. The same designer created both.
The CERN web server was originally created on NeXTSTEP.
Netscape's IFC (pure Java UI) were created by folks who came from NeXT. The IFC classes later got incorporated into Swing, Sun's current (and arguably goofy) UI library for Java.
I'm sure there are lots of other projects that had their origin at NeXT too. At the time, Steve Jobs was able to attract a lot of *very* smart people to his vision.
Unfortunately, none of it turned out to be interesting enough to displace Windows.
IANAL, but I thought patent law was there to encourage innovation. Commercial companies patent something that took you a long time to develop and then get a chance to recoup your investment.
The gov't patenting something seems like an abuse of the system. We don't really want the gov't to be in the business of licensing patents do we?
Arrgh! It's bad enough that the PTO has control over which brain-dead ideas get a 17-year window of protection, but giving "them" the ability to lock down ideas is just too scary.
Can you imagine what the world would be like if the U.S. Gov't had the one-click shopping patent instead of Amazon?!
It's interesting to compare the RIAA to Microsoft. I have 4 computers in my house each one purchased with an embedded Microsoft product.
Total revenue to Microsoft: 4*$30 = $120
I have something on the order of 200 CDs. At an average cost of $15 my tiny collection of CDs works out to $3,000 worth of revenue to the record industry.
Like Microsoft, the RIAA's products consist of bits on a CD and that CD can be easily shared and/or copied.
Piracy hasn't stopped Microsoft from making boatloads of money, so given that the same copyright laws apply to both (more or less), what is the RIAA worried about?
Answer: The RIAA is a cartel and it controls the distribution and pricing of music. They've artificially inflated the cost of their product and when they lose control of the distribution channel, they lose control of pricing.
Witness Napster, CARNIVORE, and the French goverment trying to tell Yahoo what to do. Centralized authority is losing its grip on its ability to enforce policy.
How do you think this will turn out? Will we all end up being netizens in flowing white robes, or will we have to pay protection money to the "mob.net" to keep bandits and theives out of our Network Neighborhood?
http://boole.stanford.edu/thumbcode Of course, if you say "@" in thumbcode to someone from the U.K., you're likely to get hit.
Bluetooth uses much *less* power than 802.11b and would likely be swamped. On the other hand, Bluetooth hops to a pseudorandom channel 1600 times a second, so it might just end up getting out of the way quickly. 802.11 scans sequentially through its channels at a much lower rate. From what I've read though, it's hard to simply guess on these effects because the usage of Bluetooth suggests that there may be a dozen BT devices for each 802.11 device.
You're right, 802.11 does use the same frequencies as Bluetooth. However, lots of folks have realized this and 802.15 is supposed to be a new standard, based on Bluetooth that's (more) compatible with 802.11. If you want to read the nitty gritty about what effect a bunch of Bluetooth tranceivers have on a 801.11 network, take a look at this: http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/15/pub/1999/Sep 99/Misc/BT-80211-Coexist.ppt The presentation only talks about the effect that BT has on 802.11, not the other way around. If I read this correctly, even with a bunch of BT piconets, 802.11 can keep chugging away. However, I wonder if the lower power BT signals will get blasted out of the sky by 802.11 packets.
I'd be interested in talking more about this over email. Drop me a note at andy_turk@hotmail.com.
Andy
It's a great place to shop, but there are lots of alternatives. I'll spend my money with vendors who aren't resorting to dirty patent tricks in such an obvious way.
Suppose you received a patent for your pseudo-random sequences and assigned it to a non-profit organization which would protected the patent for you? If someone wants to use your patented idea in an open-source way, then the license is very cheap. If the use is *not* open source, then it costs more.
License fees collected this way to go pay for the legal fees to patent other open source stuff.
There may be a large number of ideas like yours that could be used to set up a defensive perimeter of open source patents.
What do you think?
Would it be possible to create something an Open Source patent organization which could "own" and enforce software patents in the open source community?
There's got to be a lot of patentable stuff in open source--it just hasn't found its way to the PTO yet. If this organization charged license fees for non-OS use of the patented idea, it could generate some funds for itself.
Over time, there might be a large enough "minefield" of OS patents that it would become economically beneficial to put new code under the OS umbrella because you wouldn't have to pay the OS patent organization any license fees.
Imagine if instead of paying Unisys $5K to get legal for using .gif images, companies paid a similar amount to a non-profit Open Source patent organization? I think that'd be pretty cool.