The article skims the big vested interests who have an interest here. There are many, many big corporations whose book value is justified by the monetary value of their patent portfolio - or "Intellectual Property" as most of them call it. Any changes in the patent validity could have a huge impact on their share prices.
As a long term Solairs SA, I can assure you that they're nothing like the same thing. While the OpenSolaris and Solaris Express releases are fluid, the GA release (at present, Solaris 10) is not. Sure, new functionality is added during the life of a major Solaris version (most recently, ZFS was added), but the existing published kernel API will not change. This means that device drivers and other software which links into the kernel (e.g. storage software) will continue to work.
This is not a minor issue. The big headache with any GNU/Linux distribution is the complicated and often intractable support matrices - a result of the fluid nature of the kernel API.
I think the current versions have an indefinate lifespan for a simple reason: virtualisation.
The reason many businesses end up having to accept OS and software upgrades is because their hardware is end of life, and they cannot buy new hardware which will run old OS and application versions. But it is now possible to buy a new box, put VMWare onto it and then run NT4 in a VM.
One of the uses for VMware which perhaps was unintended is to enable people to run NT version 4 on up to date hardware. You'd be surprised how many businesses out there have an application on which they depend, but where the developers have disappeared, and they chooses to continue running NT4 rather than update the app.
And even with the layers of abstraction, a VM on current hardware is much faster than running NT4 on 5+ year old metal.
It will be very interesting if this policy is made permanent. Like many companies mine has a policy of not putting laptops into checked luggage - for good reason.
Of course, guys who work for Sun only need to take their Java Cards in their wallets.
I don't have a problem with that - I wouldn't expect it to be PPV forever, I bet that in a year or two they will drop the price and eventually make access free. I'd rather have it online (probably achieved at considerable cost - it's not just a load of page scans, it's indexed) with a price tag than not online.
The records of parliament and my local councils are readable and searchable online for free, which is what bothers me more.
This could have very far reaching implications: it has just raised the bar for corporate users in proving that they have no outstanding financial liability for software licensing. So before a company can have its books signed off, it must either prove the software licensing or go and buy new ones.
It complicates the issue of licence management for a great many businesses, providing another incentive for using libre software instead.
A suitable shorthand term for copyright infringement would be useful, but "theft", "stealing" and "piracy" are all terms which already have meanings of their own: to use them for another purpose causes confusion, so I'll stick with "illegal copying". Only six syllables, and succinctly describes the exact nature of the offence being committed - making a copy of something where someone else has used the law to explicitly make such an act illegal.
It amazes me how many corporate document styles will tie down all sorts of specific functions in a word processing package, yet are typographically so poor. The best book I found of the subject was Typography for Desktop Publishers by Mark Hengesbaugh, written when Desktop Publishing was in its infancy, and before people equated DTP with hacking together a Word document and printing it on a domestic bubblejet printer. DTP and word processing has killed the craft of typesetting: the promise was that the drudgery would be removed, but the reality is that the experience and skill of good typography has been lost to the point where even daily newspapers can no longer use dropped capitals properly.
No, IBM were first with the dual core Power. Sun have now leapfrogged ahead with Niagara, which not only has 8 cores but has four threads per core, so the OS sees a single processor as a 32 way system.
Hmm, maybe I could have been clearer. I see two distinct situations:
a) a workload which is essentially a single task which has been parallelised b) a workload which is a single server handling a whole bunch of different requests
Now, when the parent posting suggested a need for app developers to parallelise their applications, I would see that as falling into category (a), while the bulk of middleware servers are actually running flat out doing type (b) workloads. The big difference is that for a type (a) workload you can write it so that you get a single thread causing a bottleneck, while for a type (b) workload this intrinsically cannot happen. In the Google/eBay/Wikimedia scenario, the workloads are essentially type (b) workloads, as there are basically farms of servers dealing with loads of autonomous requests.
The picture that Sun used of Niagara falls drives the point home: it's not that the water goes over particularly fast at any point, it's just that the falls are very wide, so a whole bunch of water gets over.
Niagara isn't designed for a single highly parallised workload, it's designed for where you have hundred or thousands of autonomous threads which can be horizontally scaled - think Google, or eBay, or Wikimedia. If your current architecture needs dozens of middleware and web servers, Niagara is likely to massively reduce the amount of power needed for this function, here and now. Some of the most striking results have been for web facing middleware running on top of a JVM, as so many of these things do, without any significant modification.
They've made a bet that this sort of workload will increasingly be the norm - for example, as more and more stuff has RFID tags in it the amount of shovelling and processing of small bits of data will mushroom.
The advantage you get from the Niagara servers depends very much on the workload you put on it. Remeber, this is the first stop on the move into "Throughput Computing", with the Niagara architecture being "network facing", while the subsequence Rock architecture will be "Data facing".
What this means in practice is that Niagara has blistering performance for stuff which is basically integer intensive, but ain't so exciting for anything which is floating point intensive. But for the right workloads, a single Niagara socket can produce performance similar to a quad Xeon system, in a fraction of the space, and using a fraction of the power.
Now, how significant is the power saving? Well, I've been into datacentres where the owners have invested heavily in blade technology in order to optimise the space only to find that the power and air-conditioning requirements mean they can only half fill their blade enclosures. The problem for datacentre managers now tend to be not space, or weight, but power and cooling. And for systems in colocation facilities, it's not unusual for power to cost as much as (GBP)1,000 per month for a 30A feed (at 230V), so if you can get may times the data throughput for the same amount of power then it's exciting news.
I ran into just this problem with a piece of Easter music I wanted to use, written by Vaughan Williams. He died in the 1950's, so he is in copyright for another 20 years.
I approached the copyright administrator for permission to reprint something for our congregation, and they wanted more royalties than I was prepared to pay. The net result is that a piece of music which Vaughan Williams wrote for the greater glory of God was not sung because of the copyright laws, and the excessive copyright terms. He couldn't have guarded against this - the term was life+20 at the time of his death.
The whole idea of posthumous copyright terms was to ensure that any dependants who were still minors would be supported after the author/composer's death should it come prematurely, hence life+20. Instead, longevity and life+70 terms mean that sacred music written over 100 years ago is still "owned" (no pre-1923 clause in Europe).
I hope the case runs and runs, and gets lots of coverage.
Remember the McLibel case? While McDonalds were successful on a number of issues, by contesting the case they ensured the allegations got widespread coverage, and in the end it was a disaster for them.
Now think about the coverage this case would get. Think about the OpEd pieces which will be written: "The record companies have the law on their side, but are having to use the law to prevent their death". "The record companies are using the law to distract attention from the fact that they don't matter any more".
All the time that people are paying up, they can assert that those people are admitting they are in the wrong (which, in law, they are) and that the current model for music distribution should continue (which it shouldn't). But as soon as there are daily column inches from a trial, the discussions around the subject (such as the relevance of record companies today, the contracts they sign bands up for, etc.) will hit the mainstream media.
No, this is no more theft than is illegal copying. The whole conveyor belt of signing promising bands into hideously restrictive contracts with big labels is very bad, but it is not "theft".
The demise of the RIAA, as referred to in the parent article, is coming about because there is no longer any scarcity value in being able to copy and distribute recorded music. Lots of other things are happening: the public domain is now an effective reality. Public registers are now publicy available. As the printing press made scholarship available to the many, so we are now seeing the old oligopolies falling.
Everyone is hung up on his, perhaps, ill advised comments on Photoshop. But his comments on Palm Desktop versus Outlook are spot on. Too often user interfaces are designed by techies, for techies, without regard for how it will actually be used by knowledgeable users. Interestingly, it is the same argument which the commercial software lobby use to beat FOSS, ignoring how poor their own products usually are in the same way.
So rather than getting bogged down in photo editing software, I'd be far more interested in people citing examples of software which has a well thought out UI, which allows simple things to be done without either having to master a lot of complexity or have the software use a condescending tone (the "rinky-dink" Dvorak talks about).
I'll start with Noteworthy Composer: for fine output I'll work with Lilypond, but for quickly jotting down a bit of music and preparing a presentable printout and midi stream it "does exactly what it says on the tin."
Any formatted document is a mixture of content and markup. Getting the thing to do what you want it to do is entirely dependent on getting the markup right. Everybody I know who moved from WP to MSWord missed the ability to directly manipulate the markup. With reveal codes you always had an answer to the question "why has it done that?"
Let's experiment with where this could go. We're assuming that this is going to be some big internet solution - it could be made available at various prices for various markets, ranging from free for something basic up a sliding scale for varying levels of functionality, rather like webmail accounts work today. For example, I have a paid for Hushmail account, which gives me secure encrypted webmail wherever I can find a browser and JVM. Would Hush offer over-the-wire office suite and scrambled document storage if this took off? And would people pay for it? Probably yes on both counts.
But the joy of this sort of deployment is that it can be deployed within an organisation. Sun already have a powerful set of technology with SunRay, which allows the desktop client to be totally stateless, diskless, fanless. The barriers to adoption are all to do with integration with legacy Windows environments, and users' making the transition.
A "web service office suite" deployed within an organisation enables another layer of statefulness to be taken away from the legacy windows desktop. In many places the core business systems are becoming internal web services at a rate of knots, and the fat office suite, especially MS Office, is a major constraint on being completely platform independent. Sun have been putting the pieces in the jigsaw for several years, and frankly the landscape has ended up littered with things going in different directions: The original javastation; the Java Desktop System (on Suse and Solaris); SunRay on Solaris. But these should all be seen as steps on the path to delivering business computing via a "WebTone" (McNealy's expression, not mine) which is such a compelling approach that even Sun's haphazard progress can't stop it now.
What will come out here is not a "one size fits all" office.google.com "click here for StarOffice". Rather, you will see large businesses setting up their own rigs, and niche players offering basic email and now office suite style services to small businesses who won't have to have "the server" under someone's desk at all. We saw the Application Service Provider business running through the hype phase around 2000, and through the disillusionment phase 2002-3. We may now see them start to offer the right services to the right businesses in the realism phase starting shortly. Come out with your favourite buzzwords, be it Web 2.0, the WebTone or whatever, this is where it gets interesting
OK, let's take a thought experiment a bit further: assume that the big record labels accept that their current business model will fail in time. They have two challenges right now: firstly to maximise the returns from the existing model while they can, using any means at their disposal (including, it would seem, barratry) to get money from anywhere; and secondly to safeguard their commercial future by creating a role in the new world in which they can make money.
What is at stake here is the wholesale disintermediation of what used to be commercial music. There will continue to be very high profile commercial music: the sort which you buy in Tesco/Walmart/Carrefour. But there are now options for the next generation of potentially "commercial" musicians other than signing with a label on extortionate terms.
Remember that the vast majority of artists who sign with labels never see any royalties: the offsetting of expenses by the label means that the sales threshold is too high. Instead they end up signing away the rights over their music for nothing, their titles are delisted by the label, and they are forced to remain unheard.
As has been stated in this thread, the ability to distribute music independently from the labels has upped the ante: instead of thinking "I must sign with a label to be heard", artists can now think "If I sign with this label will I be more widely heard than if I distribute myself".
I wonder whether record shops should be allowed to sell discs which loook similar to CDs interleaved with CDs? One could take the view that they are guilty of misrepresentation: they should have a separate section where they clearly display notices telling potential purchasers that the discs in that section don't comply with the CD standards.
Alternatively, they should advise customers at the till that the disc they are about to purchase isn't a CD, despite having been packaged as one.
Slashdot Mirror
The article skims the big vested interests who have an interest here. There are many, many big corporations whose book value is justified by the monetary value of their patent portfolio - or "Intellectual Property" as most of them call it. Any changes in the patent validity could have a huge impact on their share prices.
Expect vested interests to dig their heels in.
As a long term Solairs SA, I can assure you that they're nothing like the same thing. While the OpenSolaris and Solaris Express releases are fluid, the GA release (at present, Solaris 10) is not. Sure, new functionality is added during the life of a major Solaris version (most recently, ZFS was added), but the existing published kernel API will not change. This means that device drivers and other software which links into the kernel (e.g. storage software) will continue to work.
This is not a minor issue. The big headache with any GNU/Linux distribution is the complicated and often intractable support matrices - a result of the fluid nature of the kernel API.
Hmm, I don't think Richard Middlename Stallman would necessarily consider GNU a brand.
I think the current versions have an indefinate lifespan for a simple reason: virtualisation.
The reason many businesses end up having to accept OS and software upgrades is because their hardware is end of life, and they cannot buy new hardware which will run old OS and application versions. But it is now possible to buy a new box, put VMWare onto it and then run NT4 in a VM.
This paper (beware, highly graphic PDF) gives a nice overview of the state of the virtualisation union in July.
One of the uses for VMware which perhaps was unintended is to enable people to run NT version 4 on up to date hardware. You'd be surprised how many businesses out there have an application on which they depend, but where the developers have disappeared, and they chooses to continue running NT4 rather than update the app.
And even with the layers of abstraction, a VM on current hardware is much faster than running NT4 on 5+ year old metal.
And historically, climate change is associated with mass extinction of species, which seems to rather bother us just now.
Of course, guys who work for Sun only need to take their Java Cards in their wallets.
I don't have a problem with that - I wouldn't expect it to be PPV forever, I bet that in a year or two they will drop the price and eventually make access free. I'd rather have it online (probably achieved at considerable cost - it's not just a load of page scans, it's indexed) with a price tag than not online.
The records of parliament and my local councils are readable and searchable online for free, which is what bothers me more.
This could have very far reaching implications: it has just raised the bar for corporate users in proving that they have no outstanding financial liability for software licensing. So before a company can have its books signed off, it must either prove the software licensing or go and buy new ones.
It complicates the issue of licence management for a great many businesses, providing another incentive for using libre software instead.
A suitable shorthand term for copyright infringement would be useful, but "theft", "stealing" and "piracy" are all terms which already have meanings of their own: to use them for another purpose causes confusion, so I'll stick with "illegal copying". Only six syllables, and succinctly describes the exact nature of the offence being committed - making a copy of something where someone else has used the law to explicitly make such an act illegal.
It amazes me how many corporate document styles will tie down all sorts of specific functions in a word processing package, yet are typographically so poor. The best book I found of the subject was Typography for Desktop Publishers by Mark Hengesbaugh, written when Desktop Publishing was in its infancy, and before people equated DTP with hacking together a Word document and printing it on a domestic bubblejet printer. DTP and word processing has killed the craft of typesetting: the promise was that the drudgery would be removed, but the reality is that the experience and skill of good typography has been lost to the point where even daily newspapers can no longer use dropped capitals properly.
No, IBM were first with the dual core Power. Sun have now leapfrogged ahead with Niagara, which not only has 8 cores but has four threads per core, so the OS sees a single processor as a 32 way system.
Hmm, maybe I could have been clearer. I see two distinct situations:
a) a workload which is essentially a single task which has been parallelised
b) a workload which is a single server handling a whole bunch of different requests
Now, when the parent posting suggested a need for app developers to parallelise their applications, I would see that as falling into category (a), while the bulk of middleware servers are actually running flat out doing type (b) workloads. The big difference is that for a type (a) workload you can write it so that you get a single thread causing a bottleneck, while for a type (b) workload this intrinsically cannot happen. In the Google/eBay/Wikimedia scenario, the workloads are essentially type (b) workloads, as there are basically farms of servers dealing with loads of autonomous requests.
The picture that Sun used of Niagara falls drives the point home: it's not that the water goes over particularly fast at any point, it's just that the falls are very wide, so a whole bunch of water gets over.
Niagara isn't designed for a single highly parallised workload, it's designed for where you have hundred or thousands of autonomous threads which can be horizontally scaled - think Google, or eBay, or Wikimedia. If your current architecture needs dozens of middleware and web servers, Niagara is likely to massively reduce the amount of power needed for this function, here and now. Some of the most striking results have been for web facing middleware running on top of a JVM, as so many of these things do, without any significant modification.
They've made a bet that this sort of workload will increasingly be the norm - for example, as more and more stuff has RFID tags in it the amount of shovelling and processing of small bits of data will mushroom.
The advantage you get from the Niagara servers depends very much on the workload you put on it. Remeber, this is the first stop on the move into "Throughput Computing", with the Niagara architecture being "network facing", while the subsequence Rock architecture will be "Data facing".
What this means in practice is that Niagara has blistering performance for stuff which is basically integer intensive, but ain't so exciting for anything which is floating point intensive. But for the right workloads, a single Niagara socket can produce performance similar to a quad Xeon system, in a fraction of the space, and using a fraction of the power.
Now, how significant is the power saving? Well, I've been into datacentres where the owners have invested heavily in blade technology in order to optimise the space only to find that the power and air-conditioning requirements mean they can only half fill their blade enclosures. The problem for datacentre managers now tend to be not space, or weight, but power and cooling. And for systems in colocation facilities, it's not unusual for power to cost as much as (GBP)1,000 per month for a 30A feed (at 230V), so if you can get may times the data throughput for the same amount of power then it's exciting news.
I ran into just this problem with a piece of Easter music I wanted to use, written by Vaughan Williams. He died in the 1950's, so he is in copyright for another 20 years.
I approached the copyright administrator for permission to reprint something for our congregation, and they wanted more royalties than I was prepared to pay. The net result is that a piece of music which Vaughan Williams wrote for the greater glory of God was not sung because of the copyright laws, and the excessive copyright terms. He couldn't have guarded against this - the term was life+20 at the time of his death.
The whole idea of posthumous copyright terms was to ensure that any dependants who were still minors would be supported after the author/composer's death should it come prematurely, hence life+20. Instead, longevity and life+70 terms mean that sacred music written over 100 years ago is still "owned" (no pre-1923 clause in Europe).
I hope the case runs and runs, and gets lots of coverage.
Remember the McLibel case? While McDonalds were successful on a number of issues, by contesting the case they ensured the allegations got widespread coverage, and in the end it was a disaster for them.
Now think about the coverage this case would get. Think about the OpEd pieces which will be written: "The record companies have the law on their side, but are having to use the law to prevent their death". "The record companies are using the law to distract attention from the fact that they don't matter any more".
All the time that people are paying up, they can assert that those people are admitting they are in the wrong (which, in law, they are) and that the current model for music distribution should continue (which it shouldn't). But as soon as there are daily column inches from a trial, the discussions around the subject (such as the relevance of record companies today, the contracts they sign bands up for, etc.) will hit the mainstream media.
Can't wait.
No, this is no more theft than is illegal copying. The whole conveyor belt of signing promising bands into hideously restrictive contracts with big labels is very bad, but it is not "theft".
The demise of the RIAA, as referred to in the parent article, is coming about because there is no longer any scarcity value in being able to copy and distribute recorded music. Lots of other things are happening: the public domain is now an effective reality. Public registers are now publicy available. As the printing press made scholarship available to the many, so we are now seeing the old oligopolies falling.
This is A Good Thing
Am I the only one who views the use of law in this sort of a case as an admission of technical ineptitude?
Everyone is hung up on his, perhaps, ill advised comments on Photoshop. But his comments on Palm Desktop versus Outlook are spot on. Too often user interfaces are designed by techies, for techies, without regard for how it will actually be used by knowledgeable users. Interestingly, it is the same argument which the commercial software lobby use to beat FOSS, ignoring how poor their own products usually are in the same way.
So rather than getting bogged down in photo editing software, I'd be far more interested in people citing examples of software which has a well thought out UI, which allows simple things to be done without either having to master a lot of complexity or have the software use a condescending tone (the "rinky-dink" Dvorak talks about).
I'll start with Noteworthy Composer: for fine output I'll work with Lilypond, but for quickly jotting down a bit of music and preparing a presentable printout and midi stream it "does exactly what it says on the tin."
At the risk of going slightly off topic ...
Any formatted document is a mixture of content and markup. Getting the thing to do what you want it to do is entirely dependent on getting the markup right. Everybody I know who moved from WP to MSWord missed the ability to directly manipulate the markup. With reveal codes you always had an answer to the question "why has it done that?"
Let's experiment with where this could go. We're assuming that this is going to be some big internet solution - it could be made available at various prices for various markets, ranging from free for something basic up a sliding scale for varying levels of functionality, rather like webmail accounts work today. For example, I have a paid for Hushmail account, which gives me secure encrypted webmail wherever I can find a browser and JVM. Would Hush offer over-the-wire office suite and scrambled document storage if this took off? And would people pay for it? Probably yes on both counts.
But the joy of this sort of deployment is that it can be deployed within an organisation. Sun already have a powerful set of technology with SunRay, which allows the desktop client to be totally stateless, diskless, fanless. The barriers to adoption are all to do with integration with legacy Windows environments, and users' making the transition.
A "web service office suite" deployed within an organisation enables another layer of statefulness to be taken away from the legacy windows desktop. In many places the core business systems are becoming internal web services at a rate of knots, and the fat office suite, especially MS Office, is a major constraint on being completely platform independent. Sun have been putting the pieces in the jigsaw for several years, and frankly the landscape has ended up littered with things going in different directions: The original javastation; the Java Desktop System (on Suse and Solaris); SunRay on Solaris. But these should all be seen as steps on the path to delivering business computing via a "WebTone" (McNealy's expression, not mine) which is such a compelling approach that even Sun's haphazard progress can't stop it now.
What will come out here is not a "one size fits all" office.google.com "click here for StarOffice". Rather, you will see large businesses setting up their own rigs, and niche players offering basic email and now office suite style services to small businesses who won't have to have "the server" under someone's desk at all. We saw the Application Service Provider business running through the hype phase around 2000, and through the disillusionment phase 2002-3. We may now see them start to offer the right services to the right businesses in the realism phase starting shortly. Come out with your favourite buzzwords, be it Web 2.0, the WebTone or whatever, this is where it gets interesting
OK, let's take a thought experiment a bit further: assume that the big record labels accept that their current business model will fail in time. They have two challenges right now: firstly to maximise the returns from the existing model while they can, using any means at their disposal (including, it would seem, barratry) to get money from anywhere; and secondly to safeguard their commercial future by creating a role in the new world in which they can make money.
What is at stake here is the wholesale disintermediation of what used to be commercial music. There will continue to be very high profile commercial music: the sort which you buy in Tesco/Walmart/Carrefour. But there are now options for the next generation of potentially "commercial" musicians other than signing with a label on extortionate terms.
Remember that the vast majority of artists who sign with labels never see any royalties: the offsetting of expenses by the label means that the sales threshold is too high. Instead they end up signing away the rights over their music for nothing, their titles are delisted by the label, and they are forced to remain unheard.
As has been stated in this thread, the ability to distribute music independently from the labels has upped the ante: instead of thinking "I must sign with a label to be heard", artists can now think "If I sign with this label will I be more widely heard than if I distribute myself".
I wonder whether record shops should be allowed to sell discs which loook similar to CDs interleaved with CDs? One could take the view that they are guilty of misrepresentation: they should have a separate section where they clearly display notices telling potential purchasers that the discs in that section don't comply with the CD standards.
Alternatively, they should advise customers at the till that the disc they are about to purchase isn't a CD, despite having been packaged as one.