Java was never marketted as the ultimate fast language to do searching or to manipulate large data structures. What Java was marketted as was a language that was good enough for programming paradigms popular at the time such as object orientation and automatic garbage collection while providing the most comprehensive APIs under the control of one entity who would continue to push the extension of those APIs.
In this LinuxWorld interview look what Stroustrup is hoping to someday have in the C++ standard for libraries. It's a joke, almost all of those features are already in Java. As Stroustrup says, a standard GUI framework is not "politically feasible".
Now go listen to what Linux Torvalds is saying about what he finds to be the most exciting thing to happen to Linux the past year. Hint, it's not the completion of the kernel 2.4.x, it's KDE. The foundation of KDE's success is the triumph of Qt as the de facto standard that a large community has embraced to build an entire reimplementation of end user applications.
To fill the void of a standard GUI framework for C++, Microsoft has dictated a set of de facto standards for Windows, and Trolltech has successfully pushed Qt as the de facto standard for Linux.
I claim that as a whole the programming community doesn't care whether a standard is de jure or de facto, but they do care that SOME standard exists. When it comes to talking people into making the investment of time and money to learn a platform on which to base their careers, a multitude of incompatible choices is NOT the way to market.
I find talking about LISP as one language compared to Java to be a complete joke. Whose LISP? Scheme? Whose version of Scheme, GNU's Guile? Is the Elisp in Emacs the most widely distributed implementation of LISP? Can Emacs be rewritten using Guile? What is the GUI framework for all of LISP? Anyone come up with a set of LISP APIs that are the equivalent of J2EE or Jini?
I find it extremely disheartening that the same people who can grasp the argument that the value of networks lies in the communication people can do are incapable of applying the same reasoning to programming languages. Is it that hard to read Odlyzko and not see that people just want to do the same thing with programming languages--talk among themselves. The modern paradigm for software where the money is being made is getting things to work with each other. Dinosaur languages that wait around for decades while slow bureaucratic committees create nonsolutions are going to get stomped by faster moving mammals such as Java pushed by single-decision vendors. And so are fragmented languages with a multitude of incompatible and incomplete implementations such as LISP.
The argument that HP-UX was what held HP back in the boom times for everyone else of the 90s is nonsense--how come Sun thrived with Solaris? What held HP back was that as early as 1993 key HP executives lost faith that HP could fund the next generation of PA-RISC. Thus an alliance was made with Intel.
HP ever since has been shouting at the top of its voice that there will be complete binary compatibility between PA-RISC and IA-64 using technology such as Aries. They have to in order to retain any customers. Binary compatibility is simply non-negotiable.
Thus HP gave away its two crown jewels, processor architecture and compiler technology, to Intel for precisely one reason--binary compatibility with what was perceived to be the potential industry-standard processor of the future. It would be to say the least rather strange for HP to walk away from this to embrace either Linux or Tru64. To do this would be to admit that HP gave away its crown jewels to Intel for nothing. (Which is actually the case since anyone from IBM to Dell etc. will be allowed to be resellers for IA-64.)
My question for those who would have HP abandon HU-UX--what's left? What exactly would HP have left as crown jewels that would distinguish its Unix offerings from the competition?
I've said this before, it was the decision to not fab the next generation of PA-RISC that decided everything for HP and nothing else. Once HP surrendered any hope of competing against Intel there was nowhere to go for increasing higher margin sales. Who exactly was going to embrace HP's future offerings when more than five years ago it was common knowledge they were transitioning to a new processor fabbed by Intel? That was the reason HP had no answer to Sun during the boom of the 1990s. Instead HP was stuck with trying to sell NT workstations and then a completely desperate move to go into selling home PCs in a bid to raise cash by any means possible. Sun on the other hand, relatively free from having to worry about what either Intel or Microsoft thought, was able to create a software business from scratch with Java. By keeping control of Java, Sun was able to leverage IBM into helping it storm into corporate business software. And all this could be done without sacrificing Solaris for Linux or any other such preposterous nonsolution.
I think HP's executives simply made a series of shocking miscalculations. In this analysis there is only mention of X86 and Power PC. There is nothing said about Sun which doesn't fab their own chips, they have instead a 13+ year partnership with Texas Instruments. Last I saw Texas Instruments' market cap was larger than either HP or Compaq, considered separately. I think it was also a miscalculation that Intel would be the only place to go for a foundry, what about IBM? (I have to wonder with the Asian nations pouring so many resources into semiconductors whether we aren't entering a rather long period of plenty of surplus manufacturing capacity. The only obstacle I see is the US government's intervention in not wanting to potentially see technology shipped abroad. At least this applies to China which the US wants to keep one or two generations behind in wafer fabrication technology.)
Lastly for those who want HP to standardize on Linux...uh, standardize on what? What exactly do you think will be the winner in say filesystems? ReiserFS, Ext3, JFS, XFS? And at least three of of those four alternatives are technology controlled by other companies. How about KDE vs. Gnome, RPM vs other packaging alternatives, PostgreSQL vs MySQL? Notice that IBM has good in-house solutions they will offer for many of these basic questions, what does HP have? I think it's going to be a hard sell to argue that the complexity of HP-UX will be easier than having to potentially support all of these alternatives.
I just find it shocking that a company the size of HP/Compaq will not think it can find the funds to either fab its own chips or pay someone other than Intel to do so. At that size IBM is able to do everything from hardware to software as well as fund a massive R&D patent-producing machine. Wny is it so hard to understand that in a world where IP is king, you better own your own stuff?
Jim and Janet Baker founded Dragon Systems in 1982. (Course they did eventually sell to Lernout and Hauspie.) Stephen Wolfram founded Wolfram Research in 1987. Stephen Wolfram is about to introduce his new book to the world that will revolutionize all of science. In essence, by founding his company he funded his own research and created the tools he needed to complete it. And these are examples just off the top of my head, I'm not saying they're anywhere near the best.
...and that's what concerns me about the current series. It seems to me that Paramount and/or the creative team in charge of the Star Trek franchise is deliberately trying to downplay the essence of Star Trek as not just about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances but about being able to fantasize about superheroes.
I argue the story of Star Trek: The Original Series is not about Kirk, it's about Spock. And from my perspective, Spock is a superhero. He can read minds. He's stronger than the average human. He has extreme intelligence and knowledge. Spock's abilities quite frequently solve the episode's problem.
Similarly Star Trek: The Next Generation has Data, even stronger than Spock. Deep Space Nine has the shapeshifter Odo. Odo is not quite as impressive as Data, so notice that Paramount has to make emergency repairs midway in the show bringing back the character of Worf, now the unbeatable fighting knight-equivalent. And Bashir has to be souped up to have extreme intelligence.
With Star Trek I The Motion Picture, Wesley in The Next Generation, and Sisko in Deep Space Nine, Paramount establishes quite a string of humans becoming gods/prophets.
And then there's Voyager. The Data character is degraded into the balding holographic Doctor. Kes is the female Wesley who eventually becomes a godlike being, only she's too wimpy to do anything before she leaves. The series is teetering on collapse when Paramount finally makes the sensible decision to return to the roots and bring in a new superhero, 7 of 9. Once again we have a figure who is stronger than the average human, knows more, and is struggling to deal with emotions.
I am frustrated by what seems to be an endless repeating cycle where Paramount continues to deny the essence of the show as being about superheroes, lets the series tank a couple of years, and then finally rescues the show by increasing the powers of the characters. I think that the claim of many fans that it takes a few years for the writers to get acclimated is a myth. The writers aren't given the raw materials to work with to produce entertaining superhero stories for the first few years, then they are authorized to use good materials, then the episodes improve. They could write a thousand stories about Harry Kim or Tom Paris or whatever vanilla characters they want and never find a groove. It's strictly a decision from above when the series is to improve, and that decision is simply whether to soup up the characters as superheroes.
As UPN was saved by adding the World Wrestling Federation's Smackdown to their lineup, maybe they can learn what makes this show successful. It's called by the wrestling fans BOOKING. Yes, it is the responsibility of the owner/promoter to make decisions to hype one wrestler over another, to promote certain wrestlers above all others for long stretches of time. The World Wrestling Federation the past two decades has been carried first by the character of Hulk Hogan, then Stone Cold Steve Austin, and now The Rock. Perhaps with careful booking in the future it will be Kurt Angle or HHH.
There is already another niche where people who are sort of ordinary interact in a tension-filled extraordinary situation. It's called reality television. It's Survivor, Big Brother, etc. Star Trek can't match that, Star Trek doesn't pretend to be giving ordinary people off the street a shot at fame and fortune. Star Trek has to create its fantasies in a different way. It has to be booked in a different fashion, to emphasize certain characters as superheroes.
Yes the Russians did. But notice the contrast between what is emphasized when we talk about the genius of Alan Turing and Enigma versus the Russian approach to intelligence. Richard Sorge through many years of developing personal contacts was able to predict the German invasion of Russia, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Japanese unwillingness to attack Siberia. The Russians at least were able to act on the knowledge that Japan would not attack to transfer at a crucial moment many divisions to Moscow to launch their winter counteroffensive starting in 1941.
My argument is that people and organization are more important for intelligence work than technology.
Similarly consider Operation Bagration, the destruction of the German Army Group Center in Summer 1944. Bagration I suppose is the Russian counterpart of the Allied deception campaign that mislead the Germans about the Normandy invasion. The "technology" that led to the success of Operation Bagration was the massive fleet of trucks the West had given Russia through Lend Lease, so perhaps some argument can be made that indirectly Enigma contributed to the victory. But what made Operation Bagration work was organization, attention to detail.
In my opinion, overemphasis on technology such as Enigma is dangerous in today's era because it reinforces current United States prejudices on how to conduct intelligence without "getting one's hands dirty". It would be a shame to repeat all the mistakes of the Germans and learn nothing from what worked for say the Russians.
Thanks for the reply. I just have to disagree with all the points.:-)
Overemphasis on new technology actually lengthened the war against Japan by 18 months. Read this for one of many accounts of how the United States' dogged insistence on the efficacy of the magnetic detonation torpedo rendered the US submarine fleet impotent for 18 months, whereas after downgrading to earlier technology of contact detonation (and other fixes) the submarine fleet succeeded in sinking more than half of Japanese shipping, in effect imposing a total naval blockage. Note how scientific theory was perverted to reject empirical evidence from the submarine crews.
US intelligence had plenty of chances to have successfully warned the country of imminent Japanese attack. What saved the US was that the Japanese were so far below the US level of industrial capability and resources that even a perfect plan might not have been sufficient. The only Japanese hope was to have destroyed the oil storage tanks at Pearl Harbor in a follow-up attack. Ironically the Japanese own rigidity in their military thinking possibly influenced the commander of the fleet from pressing home the advantage, a pattern repeated when they failed at Leyte Gulf to seize the opening to attack the landing fleet.
All the futuristic technology and information isn't going to help if the leadership at the top is incapable or unwilling to determine what is of the most importance. Fortunately for the winning side in World War II the opposition had far less industrial capability and resources. And what won the war was more from the bottom-up as entire populations united and bottlenecks were solved in practical ways. As the war progressed it became easier for men of merit to get their jobs done. In such improved environments a million small improvements could work their way into the war effort, so yes there was some technical progress. But remember the Germans had V2 rockets and jet fighters and they still lost.
It seems to me the modern American large corporation is not facing a lack of technology problem, it's facing organization problems. The people at the top who are supposed to be setting direction for the company cannot or will not accurately access the reams of information at their disposal. In story after story I read about World War II, the solution to a problem turns out to be putting the competent man in charge and letting him use his expertise. Preconceptions, ideology, and prejudice driving policy are the enemy.
Did Enigma play a decisive role in stopping Germany in World War II? Curiously as time has gone by and veils of secrecy are lifted, I wonder if the role is being overemphasized to justify the hidden large budgets of today's intelligence agencies.
In truth Germany was beaten after it failed to capture Moscow in fall 1941. The Germans were completely unprepared for a winter campaign, not even having adequate clothing for their soldiers let alone other supplies. After the failure to take Moscow, Hitler dismissed many of his top generals including the father of German armor Heinz Guderian. Perhaps his decision to order the army to stand fast in the face of a strong Soviet counterattack that winter saved the front from total collapse, but otherwise, Hitler in command was an endless series of catastrophes such as Stalingrad and Kursk.
The argument I suppose is that had Great Britain been strangled by the German U-boats than the Soviet Union would not have been supplied by Lend Lease. Lend Lease provided all sorts of supplies including I believe basically the entire truck force that gave the Red Army mobility in the counterattack. However, the facts are that by December 1941 the Germans were already in retreat, they were going to lose stupendous numbers of men in the winter because of unpreparedness, the Soviets had a tank the T-34 coming into mass production better than any tank the Germans could ever produce in mass quantities, and Hitler was in personal command. Even with no Great Britain, Germany after 1941 needed to learn how to fight a defensive war to force a stalemate, precisely the type of strategy Hitler would never have authorized. And in addition, the Germans would not have been able to complete an atomic bomb for many years. Sure they would have had V2s but the Soviets had the more battlefield effective Katyusha. (Okay mass deployment was helped by those Lense Lease trucks.) Soviet technology was sufficient to counter Germany's, with the possible exception of rocket-powered fighters, a technology that Hitler delayed until it was too late due to his obsession with rocket bombers.
It is possible that a hundred years from now the real intelligence agency story of World War II will be how Joseph Stalin in his paranoid purges destroyed the finest network of spies ever assembled. Think of this, a time when Communism still had sway as an effective religion to produce loyal agents in any country. The United States for the past few decades has been continuously learning that one can't buy that type of loyal fanatic agent abroad, which is why the US is so dependent on high tech and American citizen agents, a combination totally incapable of predicting anything in hostile areas. Even though Stalin tried to order all his foreign agents back to the Soviet Union to be executed, there was still enough of a remnant such as the Red Orchestra to give Stalin a precise warning of when the Germans would attack. But Stalin had screwed things up so badly that the Soviets were caught totally unprepared. The initial catastrophe of the first few months when Soviet forces were repeatedly surrounded and annihilated was the only reason the Germans got as far as they did. Had Stalin followed through using the human intelligence network he had at his disposal, Germany would have been beaten years sooner, and perhaps all of continental Europe is occupied by the Red Army.
I have seen many posts speculating that the combined HP/Compaq can consider dropping HU-UX, can consider using Linux across the board for everything, or can even consider telling Intel to take a hike. None of these is remotely possible.
Kindly do a Google search on terms such as "Itanium PA-RISC binary compatibility" and/or "HP-UX". The entire point from HP's perspective of working with Intel was/is to guarantee that the Itanium would have binary compatibility with PA-RISC and HP-UX. Any hint of incompatibility, any hint of the alliance breaking, and HP would cease to exist in five years. The company could not survive if it could not guarantee an indefinite upgrade path for its existing customer base. Itanium has been part of that promised path for over five years now.
I have similar doubts about HP being able to keep many of its major customers if it tried to sell them on converting the entire product line over to Linux regardless of how many capabilities Linux acquires. Mandating switching to Linux from HP-UX to "save costs" would be of benefit only to HP not to the customers. Alienating major customers for reasons internal to one's company seems to me one of the fastest ways to run one's company into the ground.
HP repeats the Apollo debacle
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
In a stunning move, stunning because of the lack of a sense of history, HP simply repeats the same blunder it made when it purchased Apollo to temporarily become the "Number One Seller of Workstations". Only this is on a larger scale.
Amazing isn't it how one poor decision leads to an avalanche of further massive expenditures, good money following bad? HP decided it didn't want to spend the resources on the next generation of PA-RISC, so it decided to partner with Intel on Itanium. Unfortunately this was in time to concede huge markets to Sun, a company that has chosen to go against Wintel in both hardware and software. So HP missed out on the boom. And now it's trying to make up ground in the downturn. Look near the bottom of this article from Forbes. Since 1994! HP has been caught in a trap where it is perceived that its flagship processor will be phased out. Under those circumstances it is impossible to grow that part of the Unix business. So HP has been caught trying to sell "NT workstations", expanding into selling consumer PCs, anything to generate the slightest bit of revenue.
Meanwhile Sun and IBM went on developing their next generation 64 bit processors. After the downturn ends, and it will end, who are going to be in a better position, companies who sell their own chips or companies that are fighting to be Intel resellers? What exactly will be the barrier to one's competitors also becoming Intel resellers if that is right?
What no one seems to want to acknowledge is that if Dell continues to hold the lead in efficiency, there really is no reason for any other major player to be in the commodity Intel PC business. It doesn't matter if you're twice, three times, whatever Dell's size. If Dell is more efficient, if Dell can make money and expand even in a downturn, it's only a matter of time. And Dell can use its current strong position to keep moving up into higher revenue markets.
The combined HP/Compaq will not be able to cut a better deal from Intel than Dell can because Dell has always been an Intel-only shop, the most loyal one. Dell's competition in laptops is Sony not from anything HP/Compaq does. The only area HP/Compaq has an edge is in PDAs.
Let's think--who will survive selling PCs in five years and why. Dell wins because they are the most efficient. Sony wins because they can bundle multimedia goodies and sell at a premium, plus if PCs are getting to be more like commodities, Sony has the edge in consumer electronic design. Apple stays alive by staying off Intel and also exploiting its reputation in education and multimedia. (Although in education it is once again Dell that is the main competitor, not HP or Compaq.)
What's especially absurd is that neither HP nor Compaq can exploit what makes Dell so efficient because they can't solve the problem of how to sell directly without alienating the middlemen distributors. This problem is impossible to solve with the companies' present business model.
The prospect of trying to combine a corporation whose roots are in the Bay Area of California with one whose roots are in Texas--how come no one questions these catastrophic mis-marriages of disparate corporate culture? Houston, Texas and Palo Alto, California?! What a joke.
Okay I'll play. I've read quite a few accounts of Peter Tattam's adventures starting Trumpet Software including this and this. I don't see any mention anywhere of Microsoft licensing Trumpet Winsock. Nor is any such thing asserted in the alt.winsock FAQ. The closest I could come is Tattam's comment in the interview: "I had by that time established a good reputation producing internet software and was even offered a job by Microsoft as a consultant at one point. I'm glad I didn't take it up..:-)"
As O'Reilly states, WinSock is more a specification, a set of APIs. Anyone could write an implementation. Several did. It just so happens that Peter Tattam wrote the best for Windows 3.1. Also he wrote a scriptable dialer which back in those days was what a lot of people needed to negotiate the hodgepodge of dial-in methods required by the much less consolidated ISP industry. And Tattam gave his package away as shareware so it could spread very fast.
It gets better though from the perspective of an argument against bundling. There were quite frequent warnings as you can see in the alt.winsock FAQ about having the "right" WINSOCK.DLL installed with all others removed. And with the change to Windows 95, I can remember the huge amount of hype over whether one should go "32-bit". Here's a sample from back then which includes advice to simply remove Trumpet Winsock under certain circumstances.
Unfortunately for the opponents of bundling, the problem with this otherwise perfect example is that it is inconceivable that a modern consumer OS would lack either a TCP/IP stack or a dialer. Trumpet Software had the clear market leader. Microsoft in Windows 95 bundled both its own TCP/IP stack and a dialer DUN. This bundling introduced potential incompatibilities that even led for some to advise uninstalling Trumpet's product. So should the government have had the right to force Microsoft to stop invading this software niche? Should it have mattered that Tattam wasn't the head of a much larger company such as Netscape? Should it have mattered that Tattam wasn't American?
By the way, Trumpet Software is currently developing a new 32 bit OS PETROS.
As Microsoft for XP is licensing the CD burning technology from Roxio itself, I doubt that it is going to destroy the market for CD-burning software. This is a win-win partnership similar to what Microsoft has had with Symantec for many years. Just because MS Windows consumer operating systems have defragmentation and system monitor programs already bundled doesn't damage Symantec's sale of much more comprehensive product bundles such as Norton SystemWorks. Actually from these press releases I get the impression that Roxio is trying to use their product to leverage themselves into a CD-burning/backup troika. Also I believe that new releases of MS operating systems give Roxio further opportunties to make money off of people who purchase new products.
What exactly would be the point of Microsoft's eliminating CD-burning competition? The current strategy of simply licensing technology from someone with expertise such as Roxio makes much more sense.
When I hear complaints about Microsoft's bundling with Win9x and beyond, how come I never hear anyone complaining about the biggest victim of bundling: Trumpet Software's Trumpet Winsock. So had Trumpet been located in the US instead of Australia, would it have had a legitimate antitrust complaint versus Microsoft? Before Windows 95, Trumpet was quite often bundled with ISPs' installation software packages, and it was not considered a big deal that the customer would have to eventually purchase the product. How come no one complains on how "bundling" cost Trumpet Software untold billions in revenues?
As outlined in articles such as this one from the horse's mouth VA Linux has undergone a change in corporate strategy. The company is now betting the farm on selling SourceForge software to corporations.
It seems to me that while OSDN brings in revenue, there is an unexplored opportunity for another branch to fill exactly the niche that the article is discussing. VA Linux is no longer in the hardware business. That makes them a completely neutral player relative to that business. And they have all that knowledgable talent.
I might be wrong but I doubt that people who were originally drawn to Linux were interested in corporate hype. Isn't this supposed to be a distinguished feature of the movement? And coming off of the 10 year anniversary, Linux doesn't need the evangelism anymore. Heck, the corporations such as IBM and HP will do all the evangelism required.
There is a natural niche for older knowledgable players in any industry, and that's to be lovable curmudgeons. They've already made their mark. They have good reputations. In other words, they're naturals for the type of journalists the article calls for.
Furthermore in order for VA Linux to succeed in their SourceForge endeavor, they have to find a way to reach people outside of the current Slashdot box. Slashdot doesn't complement VA Linux at all when it comes to the image the company needs to sell to people outside the community. As Eric Raymond wrote, the company's survival depends on selling products to people different from Slashdot's audience.
Linux will survive but VA Linux won't unless they do something drastically different from what their competitors offer. VA Linux is selling a product that in essence says that things are broken in current industry. But pure Linux advocacy is incapable of reaching the people that VA Linux needs to reach to make the sale. The message needs to be communicated in a different way, and the article shows a way to try this.
A book written for newbies on how to install FreeBSD makes no sense because the policy of FreeBSD's developers is not to cater to newbies. Linux and FreeBSD are targetted towards different segments of users, why can't we just accept that? Take a look at a typical posting from a Linux user on the freebsd-newbies list. We're talking two different worlds here.
I am relatively young to the scene myself, but let's take a walk down memory lane say six years ago. Back in those days the Linux Howto's, especially the Installation Howto, were essentially Slackware Howto's. (The book I used to figure out how to install Linux was essentially the Howto's printed out.) My PC's BIOS from that era did not support booting from an ATAPI CD Rom drive. Hard drives were much smaller but the EIDE ones were coming up against a succession of limits, limits in where a kernel could be located and still be seen by a bootloader. For Linux there was a well-defined path introducing newbies: you installed and created a custom bootdisk. Linux installation instructions also told how to edit the kernel for the bootdisk floppy to change the root partition location.
From my newbie perspective, this was installation Nirvana! I didn't have to worry about LILO if I didn't want to. From the perspective of other people sharing the PC I used, other than taking up hard drive space, they didn't have to know Linux existed. And Linux could be installed in an extended partition not just a primary partition. Keep in mind that hard drives were a lot smaller then, so for dual-boot setups it was nice to be able to dedicate some more room for the Windows C: drive. And not only that but since everyone did the custom bootdisk compiling as a rite of passage, people could compile bootdisks to help others if the default floppy didn't have the right drivers.
Now from what I have read of the FreeBSD community's thoughts, they couldn't care less about such concerns. The ISP I used back then was hosted on a collection of FreeBSD boxes, abandoning a more monolothic solution with an SGI server, because the ISP's lead technical person knew how to do it. FreeBSD is more like an industrial consortium as far as the core developers go, and at least at that time there was a huge emphasis on stuff related to running ISPs. From their perspective it was laughable to devote much effort to support the most unreliable medium of all, a floppy, for custom booting a machine. And someone like an ISP wouldn't be using EIDE, they'd be using SCSI. 528MB limit, "get some real hardware, kid" I'd imagine they'd think. And they'd have their internal network and their own procedures for mass replicating setups to many machines.
Six years later I think we can see everyone got what they wanted. The Linux community developed critical mass and got wildly popular with newbies. The FreeBSD community was left alone by the newbies they didn't want to deal with.
Description question "Open-Source GUI Component"
on
Kohan for Linux
·
· Score: 2
On the webpage it is stated: 'All the toolkits available here at System 26 can be freely incorporated into your apps, royalty-free, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or "GPL"'. So why isn't the description at the top of the page "A GPLed GUI Component Stockpile For Linux And Win32 Developers"? "GPLed" is the precise description of the license, not "Open-Source".
It is fashionable to pretend to be open-minded, and it seems to make sense that the endless cycle of the creation of new popular languages will continue unabated. But I propose that Java has changed the paradigm, and unless Microsoft with its immense resources can force C# into acceptance, the era of systems programming language growth is over. What makes Java different is that Sun has focused on making sure that for every profitable application there will be an officially branded API. And since Sun controls the language no one can fork off incompatibilities. First Sun allied with IBM and Oracle to wedge Java into business and now the networking effects are taking over to draw everyone else in. Take a look at this interview with Bjarne Stroustrup. Note how many of Stroustrup's wishes are already in Java.
But why should't we spend some time having fun with other languages? We shouldn't because time is the most precious resource. Ignorance of how the small things add up to big things is how people who used to earn good money can have no savings and how people become obese. Two weeks spent on Ruby is two weeks you didn't spend on something else. If we followed Dalroth's advice, we would repeatedly waste weeks at a time on other fringe languages as well. Sure it MIGHT pay off but this is the same logic people are criticized for when they spend money on lottery tickets.
I think that learning to live in a budget is simply part of growing up. There is not infinite money to spend, most cannot eat an unlimited amount of junk food without getting fat, and one doesn't have unlimited time. One has to make hard choices. Why is it so hard to accept that people need to make time budgets, especially in light of research that it is essential to get proper amounts of sleep in order to learn.
I'm sorry but I don't believe that Bero is being completely accurate when he claims that the "GPL makes no claims to data generated, processed, or stored by something covered by it." According to the text of the GPL "The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does." IANAL, but in my opinion, for a company to be completely safe about using the output of GPLed software, they must examine every line of the source code. The reason is that it is possible that the program will inject portions of itself into the output. An example is Bison whose license was modified. To quote documentation from an older version of Bison 1.20 "Bison grammars can be used only in programs that are free software. This is in contrast to what happens with the GNU C compiler and the other GNU programming tools. The reason Bison is special is that the output of the Bison utility--the Bison parser file--contains a verbatim copy of a sizable
piece of Bison, which is the code for the yyparse function. As a result, the Bison parser file is covered by the same copying conditions that cover Bison itself and the rest of the GNU system: any program containing it has to be distributed under the standard GNU copying conditions." The license was later changed
in version 1.24 and beyond: "As of Bison version 1.24, we have changed the distribution terms for yyparse to permit using Bison's output in non-free programs. Formerly, Bison parsers could be used only in programs that were free software."
The only thing keeping me from donating an old HP 6170S is that I don't know what to do about erasing the HD. I'm using Sami Tolvanen's Eraser, a GPLed utility, but I'm still a little nervous. Of course there is the option of simply destroying the HD, but this particular monstrosity has a very flaky BIOS that somehow makes it extremely difficult to install new HDs.
Ars Technica has a fantastic article comparing and contrasting Sun's future MAJC (Microprocessor Architecture for Java Computing) CPU architecture with Intel's IA-64. It's going to be very interesting to see if Sun can carve out a large enough market to ensure MAJC's viability. My uninformed opinion after reading the article--Sun has been making decisions since its founding that have given it the only chance to survive. By almost totally eschewing both Intel and Microsoft, Sun has been forced to innovate on both hardware and software to compete with these giants. Sun simply had to invent Java--what was the alternative, reselling NT "workstations"?! Now Sun has leveraged Java into strategic partnerships with IBM, Oracle, etc. to create from scratch a major software niche, not to mention Java's future in the embedded markets. MAJC it seems to me is the logical step in hardware once Sun made the commitment to Java and once Sun decided not to become a reseller of Intel chips like say HP. Without having to worry about what Intel wants, Sun can use its traditional RISC approach to registers to once again offer a fantastic alternative--read the Ars Technica article cited above: "MAJC, however, spends so much of its die space on registers that it can have the register states for four different threads loaded at once. Since it doesn't have to save and load register states to switch between threads, its context switches are very fast". In the 1980s HP saved the company investing in PA-RISC. Maybe that was because the engineer founders David Packard and Bill Hewlett were still alive and strong. I believe that it is Sun that has applied that lesson of not surrendering control over the CPU architecture, and that HP will continue to pay a heavy price for deciding to go with Intel. Financing new chip architectures is difficult, but in my opinion there is no future for being a reseller unless one is IBM or Dell. (And note that IBM resells only because it wants to since it already manufactures alternatives, it is beholden to no one. Just who will be able to compete with IBM's Global Services?)
It seems to me Zubrin's plan immediately falls apart because we simply don't have "a single, heavy-lift booster rocket with a capability equal
to that of the Saturn 5 rockets from the Apollo era". Is Zubrin talking about something similar to Magnum? According to that article, even if the plans for the original Saturn 5 haven't been destroyed, it is simply impossible for us to manufacture something similar to the Saturn 5 today. Magnum's 80 tons of payload would be a bit less than the 100 of Saturn 5.
Speaking about great books to help write drivers, any chance there will be or is already a fourth edition of Hans-Peter Messmer's "The Indispensable PC Hardware Book"? The latest edition I have been able to find is the third, 1997. I can't even find a homepage for the author using Google. Is he still in the business?
I'd like to know what in hell you're talking about. NuSphere has stated in for example the posting cited that "The Gemini table
handler itself is already part of MySQL and is licensed under the GPL" and that "The Gemini component itself will be released via mysql.org as GPL as previously announced". NuSphere has given zero indication that they're going to challenge the validity of any part of the GPL. What gives you the idea that if a US court rules that a software license is invalid that suddenly the code becomes vulnerable to any and all use, and what indication have you had from recent US court rulings that the courts are about to give non-copyright-holders MORE rights over source code? The developers of MySQL have scrupulously arranged development so they control the copyright of the code. The issue is what exactly did MySQL AB and NuSphere contract for and is that set of agreements still in effect. It's orthogonal to the validity of the GPL.
The ISS apparently needs more funds, and according to a previous Slashdot article, the astronauts could use some more publicity. So why not have a future Big Brother be about the astronauts on the ISS?:-) Of course television would have to be given creative input into say the crew composition--more women! And the crew would have to understand the need to provide some titillation for ratings. Who knows, this could give a boost to proposals such as the Japanese were considering for sex tourism in space for couples. In short, instead of just sucking, the ISS needs more f*cking.
This idea of Microsoft's buying a country is so idiotic it's breathtaking. An independent nation under Microsoft would have no protection either from invasion or from trade barriers. The company would have to spend an incredible amount each year just to have some sort of national defense establishment, and even Microsoft's money can't purchase that many state-of-the-art fighter planes. And what leverage would Microsoft the company/country have in trade negotiations with say Europe or Asia? Furthermore what exactly would it mean for Microsoft to purchase a country? Sure they might hold all of the property and be able to ship in tens of thousands of programmers, but would this mean that Bill Gates gets instantly appointed dictator for life? Even with tens of thousands of programmers, far more people than that will be living in whatever country would be purchased. Let's see, richer mostly white minority tries to rule over a probably darker skin much more populous majority--wait a minute, that's what South Africa tried! And at least the South African whites had the motivation that they were fighting for their home country, which would not be the case for Microsoft's employees. That type of social situation is going to go over real well with the talent Microsoft must keep attracting, let alone world opinion. To buy off the population Microsoft would again be faced with ruinous expenditures on social programs--health care, education, care of the elderly. And what exactly does moving to another country do for Microsoft now that its main worries are lawsuits for damages in the US, not a break-up? Microsoft still has the bulk of its business in the US.
CSS bashers should have taken the time to click on the link to IBK. This software is not done on a lark, it appears to be an integral part of Peter Koch's business. Thus it is insulting to insist that the developer should have spent his energies on a more worthwhile project--his energies are being spent directly on his business. Looking at the technical aspects, his porting to OS/2, Windows, and Linux appears to tie in with the other product advertised on the IBK webpage, the Business Process System. Thus people who bash the developer for releasing a "new language" are totally missing the point--this developer has chosen to make available to the entire community his knowledge under the GPL. Hopefully this will reflect back to him in increased publicity and business contacts. The release of CSS is an increase to the community. Had the developer been discouraged from releasing, he would have had no incentive to have contributed to any other project.
Slashdot Mirror
In this LinuxWorld interview look what Stroustrup is hoping to someday have in the C++ standard for libraries. It's a joke, almost all of those features are already in Java. As Stroustrup says, a standard GUI framework is not "politically feasible".
Now go listen to what Linux Torvalds is saying about what he finds to be the most exciting thing to happen to Linux the past year. Hint, it's not the completion of the kernel 2.4.x, it's KDE. The foundation of KDE's success is the triumph of Qt as the de facto standard that a large community has embraced to build an entire reimplementation of end user applications.
To fill the void of a standard GUI framework for C++, Microsoft has dictated a set of de facto standards for Windows, and Trolltech has successfully pushed Qt as the de facto standard for Linux.
I claim that as a whole the programming community doesn't care whether a standard is de jure or de facto, but they do care that SOME standard exists. When it comes to talking people into making the investment of time and money to learn a platform on which to base their careers, a multitude of incompatible choices is NOT the way to market.
I find talking about LISP as one language compared to Java to be a complete joke. Whose LISP? Scheme? Whose version of Scheme, GNU's Guile? Is the Elisp in Emacs the most widely distributed implementation of LISP? Can Emacs be rewritten using Guile? What is the GUI framework for all of LISP? Anyone come up with a set of LISP APIs that are the equivalent of J2EE or Jini?
I find it extremely disheartening that the same people who can grasp the argument that the value of networks lies in the communication people can do are incapable of applying the same reasoning to programming languages. Is it that hard to read Odlyzko and not see that people just want to do the same thing with programming languages--talk among themselves. The modern paradigm for software where the money is being made is getting things to work with each other. Dinosaur languages that wait around for decades while slow bureaucratic committees create nonsolutions are going to get stomped by faster moving mammals such as Java pushed by single-decision vendors. And so are fragmented languages with a multitude of incompatible and incomplete implementations such as LISP.
HP ever since has been shouting at the top of its voice that there will be complete binary compatibility between PA-RISC and IA-64 using technology such as Aries. They have to in order to retain any customers. Binary compatibility is simply non-negotiable.
Thus HP gave away its two crown jewels, processor architecture and compiler technology, to Intel for precisely one reason--binary compatibility with what was perceived to be the potential industry-standard processor of the future. It would be to say the least rather strange for HP to walk away from this to embrace either Linux or Tru64. To do this would be to admit that HP gave away its crown jewels to Intel for nothing. (Which is actually the case since anyone from IBM to Dell etc. will be allowed to be resellers for IA-64.)
My question for those who would have HP abandon HU-UX--what's left? What exactly would HP have left as crown jewels that would distinguish its Unix offerings from the competition?
I've said this before, it was the decision to not fab the next generation of PA-RISC that decided everything for HP and nothing else. Once HP surrendered any hope of competing against Intel there was nowhere to go for increasing higher margin sales. Who exactly was going to embrace HP's future offerings when more than five years ago it was common knowledge they were transitioning to a new processor fabbed by Intel? That was the reason HP had no answer to Sun during the boom of the 1990s. Instead HP was stuck with trying to sell NT workstations and then a completely desperate move to go into selling home PCs in a bid to raise cash by any means possible. Sun on the other hand, relatively free from having to worry about what either Intel or Microsoft thought, was able to create a software business from scratch with Java. By keeping control of Java, Sun was able to leverage IBM into helping it storm into corporate business software. And all this could be done without sacrificing Solaris for Linux or any other such preposterous nonsolution.
I think HP's executives simply made a series of shocking miscalculations. In this analysis there is only mention of X86 and Power PC. There is nothing said about Sun which doesn't fab their own chips, they have instead a 13+ year partnership with Texas Instruments. Last I saw Texas Instruments' market cap was larger than either HP or Compaq, considered separately. I think it was also a miscalculation that Intel would be the only place to go for a foundry, what about IBM? (I have to wonder with the Asian nations pouring so many resources into semiconductors whether we aren't entering a rather long period of plenty of surplus manufacturing capacity. The only obstacle I see is the US government's intervention in not wanting to potentially see technology shipped abroad. At least this applies to China which the US wants to keep one or two generations behind in wafer fabrication technology.)
Lastly for those who want HP to standardize on Linux...uh, standardize on what? What exactly do you think will be the winner in say filesystems? ReiserFS, Ext3, JFS, XFS? And at least three of of those four alternatives are technology controlled by other companies. How about KDE vs. Gnome, RPM vs other packaging alternatives, PostgreSQL vs MySQL? Notice that IBM has good in-house solutions they will offer for many of these basic questions, what does HP have? I think it's going to be a hard sell to argue that the complexity of HP-UX will be easier than having to potentially support all of these alternatives.
I just find it shocking that a company the size of HP/Compaq will not think it can find the funds to either fab its own chips or pay someone other than Intel to do so. At that size IBM is able to do everything from hardware to software as well as fund a massive R&D patent-producing machine. Wny is it so hard to understand that in a world where IP is king, you better own your own stuff?
Jim and Janet Baker founded Dragon Systems in 1982. (Course they did eventually sell to Lernout and Hauspie.) Stephen Wolfram founded Wolfram Research in 1987. Stephen Wolfram is about to introduce his new book to the world that will revolutionize all of science. In essence, by founding his company he funded his own research and created the tools he needed to complete it. And these are examples just off the top of my head, I'm not saying they're anywhere near the best.
I argue the story of Star Trek: The Original Series is not about Kirk, it's about Spock. And from my perspective, Spock is a superhero. He can read minds. He's stronger than the average human. He has extreme intelligence and knowledge. Spock's abilities quite frequently solve the episode's problem.
Similarly Star Trek: The Next Generation has Data, even stronger than Spock. Deep Space Nine has the shapeshifter Odo. Odo is not quite as impressive as Data, so notice that Paramount has to make emergency repairs midway in the show bringing back the character of Worf, now the unbeatable fighting knight-equivalent. And Bashir has to be souped up to have extreme intelligence.
With Star Trek I The Motion Picture, Wesley in The Next Generation, and Sisko in Deep Space Nine, Paramount establishes quite a string of humans becoming gods/prophets.
And then there's Voyager. The Data character is degraded into the balding holographic Doctor. Kes is the female Wesley who eventually becomes a godlike being, only she's too wimpy to do anything before she leaves. The series is teetering on collapse when Paramount finally makes the sensible decision to return to the roots and bring in a new superhero, 7 of 9. Once again we have a figure who is stronger than the average human, knows more, and is struggling to deal with emotions.
I am frustrated by what seems to be an endless repeating cycle where Paramount continues to deny the essence of the show as being about superheroes, lets the series tank a couple of years, and then finally rescues the show by increasing the powers of the characters. I think that the claim of many fans that it takes a few years for the writers to get acclimated is a myth. The writers aren't given the raw materials to work with to produce entertaining superhero stories for the first few years, then they are authorized to use good materials, then the episodes improve. They could write a thousand stories about Harry Kim or Tom Paris or whatever vanilla characters they want and never find a groove. It's strictly a decision from above when the series is to improve, and that decision is simply whether to soup up the characters as superheroes.
As UPN was saved by adding the World Wrestling Federation's Smackdown to their lineup, maybe they can learn what makes this show successful. It's called by the wrestling fans BOOKING. Yes, it is the responsibility of the owner/promoter to make decisions to hype one wrestler over another, to promote certain wrestlers above all others for long stretches of time. The World Wrestling Federation the past two decades has been carried first by the character of Hulk Hogan, then Stone Cold Steve Austin, and now The Rock. Perhaps with careful booking in the future it will be Kurt Angle or HHH.
There is already another niche where people who are sort of ordinary interact in a tension-filled extraordinary situation. It's called reality television. It's Survivor, Big Brother, etc. Star Trek can't match that, Star Trek doesn't pretend to be giving ordinary people off the street a shot at fame and fortune. Star Trek has to create its fantasies in a different way. It has to be booked in a different fashion, to emphasize certain characters as superheroes.
My argument is that people and organization are more important for intelligence work than technology.
Similarly consider Operation Bagration, the destruction of the German Army Group Center in Summer 1944. Bagration I suppose is the Russian counterpart of the Allied deception campaign that mislead the Germans about the Normandy invasion. The "technology" that led to the success of Operation Bagration was the massive fleet of trucks the West had given Russia through Lend Lease, so perhaps some argument can be made that indirectly Enigma contributed to the victory. But what made Operation Bagration work was organization, attention to detail.
In my opinion, overemphasis on technology such as Enigma is dangerous in today's era because it reinforces current United States prejudices on how to conduct intelligence without "getting one's hands dirty". It would be a shame to repeat all the mistakes of the Germans and learn nothing from what worked for say the Russians.
Overemphasis on new technology actually lengthened the war against Japan by 18 months. Read this for one of many accounts of how the United States' dogged insistence on the efficacy of the magnetic detonation torpedo rendered the US submarine fleet impotent for 18 months, whereas after downgrading to earlier technology of contact detonation (and other fixes) the submarine fleet succeeded in sinking more than half of Japanese shipping, in effect imposing a total naval blockage. Note how scientific theory was perverted to reject empirical evidence from the submarine crews.
US intelligence had plenty of chances to have successfully warned the country of imminent Japanese attack. What saved the US was that the Japanese were so far below the US level of industrial capability and resources that even a perfect plan might not have been sufficient. The only Japanese hope was to have destroyed the oil storage tanks at Pearl Harbor in a follow-up attack. Ironically the Japanese own rigidity in their military thinking possibly influenced the commander of the fleet from pressing home the advantage, a pattern repeated when they failed at Leyte Gulf to seize the opening to attack the landing fleet.
All the futuristic technology and information isn't going to help if the leadership at the top is incapable or unwilling to determine what is of the most importance. Fortunately for the winning side in World War II the opposition had far less industrial capability and resources. And what won the war was more from the bottom-up as entire populations united and bottlenecks were solved in practical ways. As the war progressed it became easier for men of merit to get their jobs done. In such improved environments a million small improvements could work their way into the war effort, so yes there was some technical progress. But remember the Germans had V2 rockets and jet fighters and they still lost.
It seems to me the modern American large corporation is not facing a lack of technology problem, it's facing organization problems. The people at the top who are supposed to be setting direction for the company cannot or will not accurately access the reams of information at their disposal. In story after story I read about World War II, the solution to a problem turns out to be putting the competent man in charge and letting him use his expertise. Preconceptions, ideology, and prejudice driving policy are the enemy.
In truth Germany was beaten after it failed to capture Moscow in fall 1941. The Germans were completely unprepared for a winter campaign, not even having adequate clothing for their soldiers let alone other supplies. After the failure to take Moscow, Hitler dismissed many of his top generals including the father of German armor Heinz Guderian. Perhaps his decision to order the army to stand fast in the face of a strong Soviet counterattack that winter saved the front from total collapse, but otherwise, Hitler in command was an endless series of catastrophes such as Stalingrad and Kursk.
The argument I suppose is that had Great Britain been strangled by the German U-boats than the Soviet Union would not have been supplied by Lend Lease. Lend Lease provided all sorts of supplies including I believe basically the entire truck force that gave the Red Army mobility in the counterattack. However, the facts are that by December 1941 the Germans were already in retreat, they were going to lose stupendous numbers of men in the winter because of unpreparedness, the Soviets had a tank the T-34 coming into mass production better than any tank the Germans could ever produce in mass quantities, and Hitler was in personal command. Even with no Great Britain, Germany after 1941 needed to learn how to fight a defensive war to force a stalemate, precisely the type of strategy Hitler would never have authorized. And in addition, the Germans would not have been able to complete an atomic bomb for many years. Sure they would have had V2s but the Soviets had the more battlefield effective Katyusha. (Okay mass deployment was helped by those Lense Lease trucks.) Soviet technology was sufficient to counter Germany's, with the possible exception of rocket-powered fighters, a technology that Hitler delayed until it was too late due to his obsession with rocket bombers.
It is possible that a hundred years from now the real intelligence agency story of World War II will be how Joseph Stalin in his paranoid purges destroyed the finest network of spies ever assembled. Think of this, a time when Communism still had sway as an effective religion to produce loyal agents in any country. The United States for the past few decades has been continuously learning that one can't buy that type of loyal fanatic agent abroad, which is why the US is so dependent on high tech and American citizen agents, a combination totally incapable of predicting anything in hostile areas. Even though Stalin tried to order all his foreign agents back to the Soviet Union to be executed, there was still enough of a remnant such as the Red Orchestra to give Stalin a precise warning of when the Germans would attack. But Stalin had screwed things up so badly that the Soviets were caught totally unprepared. The initial catastrophe of the first few months when Soviet forces were repeatedly surrounded and annihilated was the only reason the Germans got as far as they did. Had Stalin followed through using the human intelligence network he had at his disposal, Germany would have been beaten years sooner, and perhaps all of continental Europe is occupied by the Red Army.
Kindly do a Google search on terms such as "Itanium PA-RISC binary compatibility" and/or "HP-UX". The entire point from HP's perspective of working with Intel was/is to guarantee that the Itanium would have binary compatibility with PA-RISC and HP-UX. Any hint of incompatibility, any hint of the alliance breaking, and HP would cease to exist in five years. The company could not survive if it could not guarantee an indefinite upgrade path for its existing customer base. Itanium has been part of that promised path for over five years now.
I have similar doubts about HP being able to keep many of its major customers if it tried to sell them on converting the entire product line over to Linux regardless of how many capabilities Linux acquires. Mandating switching to Linux from HP-UX to "save costs" would be of benefit only to HP not to the customers. Alienating major customers for reasons internal to one's company seems to me one of the fastest ways to run one's company into the ground.
Amazing isn't it how one poor decision leads to an avalanche of further massive expenditures, good money following bad? HP decided it didn't want to spend the resources on the next generation of PA-RISC, so it decided to partner with Intel on Itanium. Unfortunately this was in time to concede huge markets to Sun, a company that has chosen to go against Wintel in both hardware and software. So HP missed out on the boom. And now it's trying to make up ground in the downturn. Look near the bottom of this article from Forbes. Since 1994! HP has been caught in a trap where it is perceived that its flagship processor will be phased out. Under those circumstances it is impossible to grow that part of the Unix business. So HP has been caught trying to sell "NT workstations", expanding into selling consumer PCs, anything to generate the slightest bit of revenue.
Meanwhile Sun and IBM went on developing their next generation 64 bit processors. After the downturn ends, and it will end, who are going to be in a better position, companies who sell their own chips or companies that are fighting to be Intel resellers? What exactly will be the barrier to one's competitors also becoming Intel resellers if that is right?
What no one seems to want to acknowledge is that if Dell continues to hold the lead in efficiency, there really is no reason for any other major player to be in the commodity Intel PC business. It doesn't matter if you're twice, three times, whatever Dell's size. If Dell is more efficient, if Dell can make money and expand even in a downturn, it's only a matter of time. And Dell can use its current strong position to keep moving up into higher revenue markets.
The combined HP/Compaq will not be able to cut a better deal from Intel than Dell can because Dell has always been an Intel-only shop, the most loyal one. Dell's competition in laptops is Sony not from anything HP/Compaq does. The only area HP/Compaq has an edge is in PDAs.
Let's think--who will survive selling PCs in five years and why. Dell wins because they are the most efficient. Sony wins because they can bundle multimedia goodies and sell at a premium, plus if PCs are getting to be more like commodities, Sony has the edge in consumer electronic design. Apple stays alive by staying off Intel and also exploiting its reputation in education and multimedia. (Although in education it is once again Dell that is the main competitor, not HP or Compaq.)
What's especially absurd is that neither HP nor Compaq can exploit what makes Dell so efficient because they can't solve the problem of how to sell directly without alienating the middlemen distributors. This problem is impossible to solve with the companies' present business model.
The prospect of trying to combine a corporation whose roots are in the Bay Area of California with one whose roots are in Texas--how come no one questions these catastrophic mis-marriages of disparate corporate culture? Houston, Texas and Palo Alto, California?! What a joke.
As O'Reilly states, WinSock is more a specification, a set of APIs. Anyone could write an implementation. Several did. It just so happens that Peter Tattam wrote the best for Windows 3.1. Also he wrote a scriptable dialer which back in those days was what a lot of people needed to negotiate the hodgepodge of dial-in methods required by the much less consolidated ISP industry. And Tattam gave his package away as shareware so it could spread very fast.
It gets better though from the perspective of an argument against bundling. There were quite frequent warnings as you can see in the alt.winsock FAQ about having the "right" WINSOCK.DLL installed with all others removed. And with the change to Windows 95, I can remember the huge amount of hype over whether one should go "32-bit". Here's a sample from back then which includes advice to simply remove Trumpet Winsock under certain circumstances.
Unfortunately for the opponents of bundling, the problem with this otherwise perfect example is that it is inconceivable that a modern consumer OS would lack either a TCP/IP stack or a dialer. Trumpet Software had the clear market leader. Microsoft in Windows 95 bundled both its own TCP/IP stack and a dialer DUN. This bundling introduced potential incompatibilities that even led for some to advise uninstalling Trumpet's product. So should the government have had the right to force Microsoft to stop invading this software niche? Should it have mattered that Tattam wasn't the head of a much larger company such as Netscape? Should it have mattered that Tattam wasn't American?
By the way, Trumpet Software is currently developing a new 32 bit OS PETROS.
What exactly would be the point of Microsoft's eliminating CD-burning competition? The current strategy of simply licensing technology from someone with expertise such as Roxio makes much more sense.
When I hear complaints about Microsoft's bundling with Win9x and beyond, how come I never hear anyone complaining about the biggest victim of bundling: Trumpet Software's Trumpet Winsock. So had Trumpet been located in the US instead of Australia, would it have had a legitimate antitrust complaint versus Microsoft? Before Windows 95, Trumpet was quite often bundled with ISPs' installation software packages, and it was not considered a big deal that the customer would have to eventually purchase the product. How come no one complains on how "bundling" cost Trumpet Software untold billions in revenues?
It seems to me that while OSDN brings in revenue, there is an unexplored opportunity for another branch to fill exactly the niche that the article is discussing. VA Linux is no longer in the hardware business. That makes them a completely neutral player relative to that business. And they have all that knowledgable talent.
I might be wrong but I doubt that people who were originally drawn to Linux were interested in corporate hype. Isn't this supposed to be a distinguished feature of the movement? And coming off of the 10 year anniversary, Linux doesn't need the evangelism anymore. Heck, the corporations such as IBM and HP will do all the evangelism required.
There is a natural niche for older knowledgable players in any industry, and that's to be lovable curmudgeons. They've already made their mark. They have good reputations. In other words, they're naturals for the type of journalists the article calls for.
Furthermore in order for VA Linux to succeed in their SourceForge endeavor, they have to find a way to reach people outside of the current Slashdot box. Slashdot doesn't complement VA Linux at all when it comes to the image the company needs to sell to people outside the community. As Eric Raymond wrote, the company's survival depends on selling products to people different from Slashdot's audience.
Linux will survive but VA Linux won't unless they do something drastically different from what their competitors offer. VA Linux is selling a product that in essence says that things are broken in current industry. But pure Linux advocacy is incapable of reaching the people that VA Linux needs to reach to make the sale. The message needs to be communicated in a different way, and the article shows a way to try this.
I am relatively young to the scene myself, but let's take a walk down memory lane say six years ago. Back in those days the Linux Howto's, especially the Installation Howto, were essentially Slackware Howto's. (The book I used to figure out how to install Linux was essentially the Howto's printed out.) My PC's BIOS from that era did not support booting from an ATAPI CD Rom drive. Hard drives were much smaller but the EIDE ones were coming up against a succession of limits, limits in where a kernel could be located and still be seen by a bootloader. For Linux there was a well-defined path introducing newbies: you installed and created a custom bootdisk. Linux installation instructions also told how to edit the kernel for the bootdisk floppy to change the root partition location.
From my newbie perspective, this was installation Nirvana! I didn't have to worry about LILO if I didn't want to. From the perspective of other people sharing the PC I used, other than taking up hard drive space, they didn't have to know Linux existed. And Linux could be installed in an extended partition not just a primary partition. Keep in mind that hard drives were a lot smaller then, so for dual-boot setups it was nice to be able to dedicate some more room for the Windows C: drive. And not only that but since everyone did the custom bootdisk compiling as a rite of passage, people could compile bootdisks to help others if the default floppy didn't have the right drivers.
Now from what I have read of the FreeBSD community's thoughts, they couldn't care less about such concerns. The ISP I used back then was hosted on a collection of FreeBSD boxes, abandoning a more monolothic solution with an SGI server, because the ISP's lead technical person knew how to do it. FreeBSD is more like an industrial consortium as far as the core developers go, and at least at that time there was a huge emphasis on stuff related to running ISPs. From their perspective it was laughable to devote much effort to support the most unreliable medium of all, a floppy, for custom booting a machine. And someone like an ISP wouldn't be using EIDE, they'd be using SCSI. 528MB limit, "get some real hardware, kid" I'd imagine they'd think. And they'd have their internal network and their own procedures for mass replicating setups to many machines.
Six years later I think we can see everyone got what they wanted. The Linux community developed critical mass and got wildly popular with newbies. The FreeBSD community was left alone by the newbies they didn't want to deal with.
On the webpage it is stated: 'All the toolkits available here at System 26 can be freely incorporated into your apps, royalty-free, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or "GPL"'. So why isn't the description at the top of the page "A GPLed GUI Component Stockpile For Linux And Win32 Developers"? "GPLed" is the precise description of the license, not "Open-Source".
But why should't we spend some time having fun with other languages? We shouldn't because time is the most precious resource. Ignorance of how the small things add up to big things is how people who used to earn good money can have no savings and how people become obese. Two weeks spent on Ruby is two weeks you didn't spend on something else. If we followed Dalroth's advice, we would repeatedly waste weeks at a time on other fringe languages as well. Sure it MIGHT pay off but this is the same logic people are criticized for when they spend money on lottery tickets.
I think that learning to live in a budget is simply part of growing up. There is not infinite money to spend, most cannot eat an unlimited amount of junk food without getting fat, and one doesn't have unlimited time. One has to make hard choices. Why is it so hard to accept that people need to make time budgets, especially in light of research that it is essential to get proper amounts of sleep in order to learn.
I'm sorry but I don't believe that Bero is being completely accurate when he claims that the "GPL makes no claims to data generated, processed, or stored by something covered by it." According to the text of the GPL "The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does." IANAL, but in my opinion, for a company to be completely safe about using the output of GPLed software, they must examine every line of the source code. The reason is that it is possible that the program will inject portions of itself into the output. An example is Bison whose license was modified. To quote documentation from an older version of Bison 1.20 "Bison grammars can be used only in programs that are free software. This is in contrast to what happens with the GNU C compiler and the other GNU programming tools. The reason Bison is special is that the output of the Bison utility--the Bison parser file--contains a verbatim copy of a sizable piece of Bison, which is the code for the yyparse function. As a result, the Bison parser file is covered by the same copying conditions that cover Bison itself and the rest of the GNU system: any program containing it has to be distributed under the standard GNU copying conditions." The license was later changed in version 1.24 and beyond: "As of Bison version 1.24, we have changed the distribution terms for yyparse to permit using Bison's output in non-free programs. Formerly, Bison parsers could be used only in programs that were free software."
The only thing keeping me from donating an old HP 6170S is that I don't know what to do about erasing the HD. I'm using Sami Tolvanen's Eraser, a GPLed utility, but I'm still a little nervous. Of course there is the option of simply destroying the HD, but this particular monstrosity has a very flaky BIOS that somehow makes it extremely difficult to install new HDs.
Ars Technica has a fantastic article comparing and contrasting Sun's future MAJC (Microprocessor Architecture for Java Computing) CPU architecture with Intel's IA-64. It's going to be very interesting to see if Sun can carve out a large enough market to ensure MAJC's viability. My uninformed opinion after reading the article--Sun has been making decisions since its founding that have given it the only chance to survive. By almost totally eschewing both Intel and Microsoft, Sun has been forced to innovate on both hardware and software to compete with these giants. Sun simply had to invent Java--what was the alternative, reselling NT "workstations"?! Now Sun has leveraged Java into strategic partnerships with IBM, Oracle, etc. to create from scratch a major software niche, not to mention Java's future in the embedded markets. MAJC it seems to me is the logical step in hardware once Sun made the commitment to Java and once Sun decided not to become a reseller of Intel chips like say HP. Without having to worry about what Intel wants, Sun can use its traditional RISC approach to registers to once again offer a fantastic alternative--read the Ars Technica article cited above: "MAJC, however, spends so much of its die space on registers that it can have the register states for four different threads loaded at once. Since it doesn't have to save and load register states to switch between threads, its context switches are very fast". In the 1980s HP saved the company investing in PA-RISC. Maybe that was because the engineer founders David Packard and Bill Hewlett were still alive and strong. I believe that it is Sun that has applied that lesson of not surrendering control over the CPU architecture, and that HP will continue to pay a heavy price for deciding to go with Intel. Financing new chip architectures is difficult, but in my opinion there is no future for being a reseller unless one is IBM or Dell. (And note that IBM resells only because it wants to since it already manufactures alternatives, it is beholden to no one. Just who will be able to compete with IBM's Global Services?)
It seems to me Zubrin's plan immediately falls apart because we simply don't have "a single, heavy-lift booster rocket with a capability equal to that of the Saturn 5 rockets from the Apollo era". Is Zubrin talking about something similar to Magnum? According to that article, even if the plans for the original Saturn 5 haven't been destroyed, it is simply impossible for us to manufacture something similar to the Saturn 5 today. Magnum's 80 tons of payload would be a bit less than the 100 of Saturn 5.
Speaking about great books to help write drivers, any chance there will be or is already a fourth edition of Hans-Peter Messmer's "The Indispensable PC Hardware Book"? The latest edition I have been able to find is the third, 1997. I can't even find a homepage for the author using Google. Is he still in the business?
I'd like to know what in hell you're talking about. NuSphere has stated in for example the posting cited that "The Gemini table handler itself is already part of MySQL and is licensed under the GPL" and that "The Gemini component itself will be released via mysql.org as GPL as previously announced". NuSphere has given zero indication that they're going to challenge the validity of any part of the GPL. What gives you the idea that if a US court rules that a software license is invalid that suddenly the code becomes vulnerable to any and all use, and what indication have you had from recent US court rulings that the courts are about to give non-copyright-holders MORE rights over source code? The developers of MySQL have scrupulously arranged development so they control the copyright of the code. The issue is what exactly did MySQL AB and NuSphere contract for and is that set of agreements still in effect. It's orthogonal to the validity of the GPL.
How about the Next Generation episode (The Royale?) where Picard hinted that Fermat's Last Theorem had remained unsolved up to that time?
The ISS apparently needs more funds, and according to a previous Slashdot article, the astronauts could use some more publicity. So why not have a future Big Brother be about the astronauts on the ISS? :-) Of course television would have to be given creative input into say the crew composition--more women! And the crew would have to understand the need to provide some titillation for ratings. Who knows, this could give a boost to proposals such as the Japanese were considering for sex tourism in space for couples. In short, instead of just sucking, the ISS needs more f*cking.
This idea of Microsoft's buying a country is so idiotic it's breathtaking. An independent nation under Microsoft would have no protection either from invasion or from trade barriers. The company would have to spend an incredible amount each year just to have some sort of national defense establishment, and even Microsoft's money can't purchase that many state-of-the-art fighter planes. And what leverage would Microsoft the company/country have in trade negotiations with say Europe or Asia? Furthermore what exactly would it mean for Microsoft to purchase a country? Sure they might hold all of the property and be able to ship in tens of thousands of programmers, but would this mean that Bill Gates gets instantly appointed dictator for life? Even with tens of thousands of programmers, far more people than that will be living in whatever country would be purchased. Let's see, richer mostly white minority tries to rule over a probably darker skin much more populous majority--wait a minute, that's what South Africa tried! And at least the South African whites had the motivation that they were fighting for their home country, which would not be the case for Microsoft's employees. That type of social situation is going to go over real well with the talent Microsoft must keep attracting, let alone world opinion. To buy off the population Microsoft would again be faced with ruinous expenditures on social programs--health care, education, care of the elderly. And what exactly does moving to another country do for Microsoft now that its main worries are lawsuits for damages in the US, not a break-up? Microsoft still has the bulk of its business in the US.
CSS bashers should have taken the time to click on the link to IBK. This software is not done on a lark, it appears to be an integral part of Peter Koch's business. Thus it is insulting to insist that the developer should have spent his energies on a more worthwhile project--his energies are being spent directly on his business. Looking at the technical aspects, his porting to OS/2, Windows, and Linux appears to tie in with the other product advertised on the IBK webpage, the Business Process System. Thus people who bash the developer for releasing a "new language" are totally missing the point--this developer has chosen to make available to the entire community his knowledge under the GPL. Hopefully this will reflect back to him in increased publicity and business contacts. The release of CSS is an increase to the community. Had the developer been discouraged from releasing, he would have had no incentive to have contributed to any other project.