Sep 29, 2010

James Gosling on stuff

The Basement Coders CrashPlan Give Away!

Some interesting bits:
"Because lawyers just like to make revenue. And I'm sure they were looking at the license fees they were getting from Microsoft. Microsoft .NET just smears over a huge pile of Sun patents. When they did the .NET design, they basically cut and pasted from the Java spec. The way that they did CLR, you know they swizzled the way the instruction set went but the way this thing really operated, they exercised essentially no creativity when coming up with .NET. They've done some things since then that have been kind of good but as part of the various court cases we ended up with this rather odd patent deal with them that involved them paying us fairly tasty amounts of money. And I'm sure that the lawyers looked at the Microsoft numbers and said, yeah I want that from Google"
"I mean this is one of the reasons that hardware manufacturers often don't open source their drivers. Because if they open source their drivers, then other hardware manufacturers will look at that and go, oh, well your hardware must stomp on this patent device. ... I've had more than on hardware manufacturer tell me that."
"It turns out there's a small issue with the way the sine and cosine hardware is implemented in the spec on the intel platform. And we actually work around it in software. For the ranges from plus or minus five, we are close to intel speeds. You get the larger values, where the intel thing rips. So lots of folks who use math on the Java platform because we do it accurately. We put a lot of effort into it. The fact that we actually cared about that, and lots of people depend on it, but its' not the kind of thing that Joe Hacker is going to do."
"But one of the terms at the time, 15 years ago, was that every software vendor had decided that the only platform they could support was Windows NT. So all the people who were writing software for Sun Systems 15 years ago was telling us they couldn't do it anymore. (50:00) Even though you guys have a better platform, they've got better volume. But IBM was getting the same message. Everybody was getting the message in the software community that they were shutting down development on everything except NT. And for a company like Sun at the time the equation was basically, if we don't do Java, if we don't give software developers a way to develop software for our platform without shutting themselves out from NT then they're just going to abandon us and we're dead."
"One of the sad things about android was they really didn't pay attention to security issues as much as they should have. Google is kind of a funny company because a lot of them have this peace love and happiness version of evil. And by being overly peach love and happiness, and believing the whole world is peace love and happiness, they end up doing evil, because they really didn't spend enough time thinking about, there are actually nasty people out there. Google puts a lot of effort into security in things like Chrome."

cool stuff :)

Sep 22, 2010

GAME CITY - Gaming findet Stadt

GAME CITY - Gaming findet Stadt

Game City is a small game event here in Vienna. Very nice, go there if you can ..

Sep 14, 2010

Ubuntu, Canonical and motivations

Mark Shuttleworth - Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption

very insightful post. Totally true in my opinion as an outsider from Ubuntu/Canonical. I'm just a regular user of Ubuntu and thats just what I see Canonical and the Ubuntu Community do every day. And I love it! Hope they continue for a long long time with that.

Best Part of the long post:
When Ubuntu was conceived, the Linux ecosystem was in a sense fully formed. We had a kernel. We had GNOME and KDE. We had X and libc and GCC and all the other familiar tools. Sure they had bugs and they had shortcomings and they had roadmaps to address them. But there was something missing: sometimes it got articulated as “marketing”, sometimes as “end-user focus”. I remember thinking “that’s what I could bring”. So Ubuntu, and Canonical, have quite explicitly NOT put effort into things which are obviously working quite well, instead, we’ve tried to focus on new ideas and new tools and new components.

Sep 9, 2010

Debunking the 1% Myth

Debunking the 1% Myth - O'Reilly Broadcast

nicely put together. Not much new for me, but basicly what I think about the market share. I would put linux as well on about 8-10% share. Mac slightly more ..

I did start to think about "actual usage" a bit somewhere around january of this year. I came to the same conclusion as noted ini this articel. On bigger tracking websites linux market share is usually somewhere around 0.5-2%. And back then I suspected that this just can't be true. I know too many people using linux and the linux world just is too big for that.

The only thing I didn't know from this webstat tracking sites is which sites they take the data from. So I came to the conclusion that it's likely they use a lot of sites that favor windows users. A extreme example would be if they would take data from microsoft.com, msdn.com and sites like that. These sites have a lot of traffic but of course almost only from windows users (which may run a dual boot system). There just is no reason to go to these sites if you are on linux as they don't offer linux software or any help on linux.

Sep 8, 2010

6 dimensions of Open Source

The 6 dimensions of Open Source - Seeing the fnords

Good points for Open Source. Well put together.

Sep 1, 2010