But it's not supposed to be a product! MS --> Research --. It's an architectural experiment, and sure, a lot of projects graduate from Research to an actual product group. The goal is NOT to make something you can take to the open market though. It's a proper research lab, and so of course its stuff is frequently lacking. If it were to be converted to a product, it'd be staffed up with a full team who would spend a year or two -- or seven in the case of some unfortunate victims -- making it viable for public consumption.

He's talking about Eclipse 3.1 because the article has nothing to do with what the title says. It's not about Mono vs Java, even though the author thinks it is. He spends most of his time basically talking about how Debian is garbage (which seems obvious to me but reasonable people can disagree). In fact the article seems to imply that Debian IS Linux, which is broken on several levels.

Oh, cool! Where's the source to iTunes, Quicktime, iPhoto, any piece of iLife, XCode, Safari, iMovie, iDVD, Aperture, and iWork? I've always wanted to see that and I'm so thrilled that since most of the software on a Mac is GPL, most of that is surely available to me.

I worked on a commercial PS3 title (none of that homebrew bull), where the GCC compiler is available as one of the options for the platform. It generates noticeably worse -- mainly longer -- code than is reasonable, and larger x86 code than Visual C++ generates. In turn, the larger code causes a lot of methods not to be inlined, and the cascaded effect (no doubt with caching issues etc thrown in) is notably slower. We're talking maybe 5-10% total here, but 5% because of a subpar compiler is pretty harsh.

Just FYI, an open source reference implementation is NOT a standard, nor does it imply the existence of an open standard. So you may want to mention ACTUAL standards instead.

Additionally, please remember that in a patent, the abstract is not what is being patented. The abstract just provides the rough background for the actual patented invention, which is why it always sounds familiar.

Seriously. The article might even be a half decent overview of things (I'm lying -- it's not), but the illiteracy of whatever idiot wrote it is horribly painful.

That's great and all, but does it still insist on using the horrendously ugly Apple text rendering engine when running under Windows? No point in being super fast and super standards compliant if the stuff on my screen is a blurry mess...

That still doesn't explain why G3 and G4 based machines are so god awful slow. Is it become OSX is so absurdly RAM hungry?

I don't get it. It SOUNDS like this is alleging that Microsoft is behaving anti-competitive by suppressing their OWN product in favor of a newer one that people don't like. In other words, it appears that the suit alleges that Microsoft is conducting anti-competitive behavior against itself. Am I misunderstanding something? For that matter, why are they even required to give the older product at the same price? You can't frame Vista and XP as competitors and say Vista's anti-competitive behavior is destroying XP, because competition laws product companies, not products.

Again, let me know if I'm totally missing something here.

And who ever discovered analogue distortion by maxing the signal probably thought no one in their right mind would use that either. They were wrong. However, whoever discovered digital distortion by clipping probably thought no one in their right mind would want to use that ... and they have been for the most part correct.

I disagree with that somewhat. After all, nearly all of Queen's album recordings feature Brian May playing through his completely solid state amplifier. Okay, so it's not digital, but I think it's a little unreasonable all the same. How about Nine Inch Nails/Reznor for example? He certainly uses those sounds. It works well with a very different kind of music...but then, so did overdriven tube amplifiers.

Except that's totally irrelevant, because in most cases we don't CARE about regenerating the original input. You can usually create a useful attack simply by finding SOME input that generates the same output, and that's what you want to build a hash function to resist.