This is just the latest example in a very common problem: there is exactly 0 value in "a generic method to blah blah".
The value is in the network: lots and lots of companies (in this case way more than the 45 alleged in the claim BTW) using the same methods to blah blah. So in this case the patent brings 0 value to the World, the standard is what creates value.
Now will the courts share this opinion is anybody's guess...
Incidently there are 2 ways by which lots and lots of companies do things the same way: through open standards (TCP/IP, the Web, RDF...) or through a dominant player (read Microsoft) imposing its method (MS Word, passport...)
If Solitaire was not bundled any more with Windows:
Hours lost due to nervous breakdown by people not being able to relax and let off some steam using solitaire at work: 21.3 * 1 day * 3% ~ 5 million man-hours (60 floors of the Empire State Building?). Hours lost frantically searching the internet and trying to bypass the company firewall to get the darn game back: 21.2 * 2 = 42.4 million man-hours (2 Panama Canals). Damage provoqued by irrate postal workers deprived of their favorite game: 852285 * 0.001 * 20 years ~ 27 million man-hours (one more Panama Canal and an Empire State Building, we're starting to run out of Panama to dig new canals...).
I for one am really happy to see Tim Bray back in the W3C process. It's good to see someone as efficient, experimented and no-nonsense as him involved.
Plus of course as a Perl hacker, it's good to see the guy who coined the phrase "desperate Perl Hacker" (a target of the XML specification, the DPH can supposedly write an XML parser in a week) in a position to remind other W3C Working Groups that there exists indeed other languages than Java.
I can't believe the article did not mention ACME::Bleach which just bleaches your program. Run it once and your code magically disappears... but still runs!
ACME::Buffy is similar, except your program is turned into a Buffy mantra that can be chanted or executed.
In fact the whole ACME name space is reserved just for silly and incredibly useful modules.
Perl 6 for Perl 5-ers
on
Perl6 for Mortals
·
· Score: 5, Informative
One of the coolest things about the Perl 6 development is that it leads to lots of improvements available right here, right now with Perl 5.
Attribute for example have been incorporated in perl 5.7.2, and a whole unch of new modules by Damian and others use them in tons of creative ways.
I am not sure this would have been done without the Perl 6 process. It forced the whole community to re-examine the language, take a step back and think of new ways to improve it. This would have been much more difficult if we had not had license to do it freely under the Perl 6 RFC process. This is the kind of things that keep a community alive and creative.
And BTW Perl 6 will still let you write quick'n dirty one-liners, and the first goal of the design of the interpretor is Speed (Larry mentionned "and it'has to be fast" about 25 times in 60 seconds in his last State of the Onion0.
THere was an interesting discussion on XML Data Bases recently on the XML-Dev mailing list, with several XML experts giving pretty interesting and not too biased opinion on the subject. You can find a summary of it by Leigh Dodds in:XML and Databases? Follow Your Nose.
Frankly, I oppose the recent anti-terrorism bills has caving in to terrorists, but in any case in understand their intent and I understand why people would want them. After a terrible disaster law-makers are trying to find a way to protect the American people against more attacks. I can argue with the means, but not with the end.
But that companies would take advantage of this effort to try to sneak in amendments that would help them "protect their revenue flow" just makes me sick! Don't this people have any decency? Or moral sense? Or anything that would prevent them from using the death of thousands of people to try to curb the laws in their favor?
I don't know if the company deliberatly set out to con the Open Source community or not, probably not. Some of its employees (and the creator of the project) seem to have honestly believed that the product was going to be Open Source, and management was probably kinda willing to try it... until they realized they would not make money this way.
I think they, and many of the outside developers that bought into their promises forgot a couple of general rules about Open Source:
You can only hope (and that's only a hope!) to make money of an Open Source project if it is already stable and widely used.
Open Source is a very good way to overcome the barrier to entry in a market where the network effect rules: it allows the project to grow and to gain market share without a company having to survive the initial phase in which no money can be made from it.
MySQL (for MySQL AB),, Apache (for IBM), Sendmail Linux itself are good examples of that. I don't know of any attempt at creating an Open Source product from scratch that allowed a company to succed, Eazel for example died a predictable death.
Oh, and it does not hurt to create server-side software, clients don't pay! (At least Lutis had gotten that right).
This should be a quick rule to figure out if it's worth investing time and energy in an Open Source (or "nearly, soon, but not quite yet OS;--) project. Chances are that a company, especially a small company will not be able to afford waiting for the product market to be big enough to sustain itself on associated services.
Not that far actually... Damian Conway, author, amongst many other wonders, of Lingua-Romana-Perligata which lets you program in Latin, uses a module that does computation in Klingon in his OO classes and has written a module that let's you program entirely in Klingon!
The most interesting point in both Latin and Klingon is that the order of words in a sentence is not significant. Instead declensions are used to determine the role of the various tokens in an instruction: 9 declensions are used to mark whether the variable is a scalar (nextum), an array (nexta), a scalar being assigned to (nexto) etc...
BTW Damian also wrote Acme::Bleach, which turns your code into a file that apparently contains the single instruction use ACME::Bleach... but that still runs!
If your application returns results in XML you can always encode "safely" parts of the text using character entities (&#nn;). An other solution is to return not one but several results, in various encodings (you would have either to store the native encoding of a text or to figure out what it could be)
And I hope this kind of practical discussion can help to raise the level of interest in Unicode amongst application coders.
Although a lot of "core" coders (as in people who write languages and tools) are really into Unicode and trying to get their code to process it properly I found that most "application programmers", people who use those tools, are not at all interested. They tend to think that all software should support their favorite encoding natively. They also tend to curse alot when they get data in a different encoding;--) Usually they view Unicode as yet another curse thrown upon them by an irresponsible buzzword-worshipping management.
In fact Unicode is certainly hard an painful to implement, but it is a standard and at least written by people who know what they're doing. It solves problems that most of us either have had to deal with (oh the agony of dealing with odd characters in SGML data) or will have to deal with,:face it people, there are more and more people whose names include funny characters, even in the US, to leave that market untapped.
So please view Unicode as a chance, and if the poster can do it on a terabyte of data, you can certainly do it on much less, especially as the tools are coming (yes, even Perl!)
One of the main problem of the Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (RAND) policy is that as soon as the fee is not 0, it effectively discriminates again Open-Source Software. So the only Really Authentically Non-Discriminatory policy is to ask for patents to be licensed for free if they are to be used by W3C recommendations.
Another problem is: what happens to the Open-Source implementations that W3C used to provide as proofs that its recommendations worked? Are we supposed to trust closed source software now?
I am afraid we are just reaping the logical consequences of Microsoft, Adobe and al. joining W3C and playing nice for a while: now they are trying to buy it.
Re:Online XML references?
on
XML in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 2, Informative
And of course the basic reference is the annoted specification. The spec is actually quite simple (and short!) and the annotations are a great way to get the extra details that you can't get usually unless you sit in the working groups.
It is really a shame that the rest of the XML-related specs (XSLT, DOM...) have forgotten one of the basic design goals of the XML spec: simplicity!
OK, time to play the devil's advocate (I am actually a big XML fan): here are the problems you should expect when switching all your docs to XML:
the DTD/schema will never please everybody: in an old-fashioned word processor if someone is not happy with the template you are using they usually find a way to change it and there is nothing you can do about it, with XML you can (and you will most likely have to) coerce people into sticking to the company policy. People usually don't like it.
editing XML is still either painful or expensive, tools like FrameMaker (you need the SGML version to do XML) or Adept editor are outrageously expensive, even more recent tools like XML-Spy are not eally cheap, and not everybody wants to use emacs,
encoding problems: XML doesn't actually force you to use Unicode (actually UTF-8 or UTF-16) but it heavily suggests it. A lot of tools will only output UTF-8 for example. THis might make it difficult for your documents to be used in the rest of your tools, as most likely few of them are Unicode friendly.
math is a real problem, the only sane way to represent math in XML is Math ML, which is not widely supported.
XSLT: you will most likely be drawn to writing XSLT "stylesheets" to transform your documents. Don't be fooled by the name stylesheet, these are programs, written in an angle-brackety user-unfriendly functional-hell language. Even if you happen to like XSLT (did you guess I don't?;--) it _is_ a new language that you will have to learn.
In short XML is probably a good choice, it gives at least independance from the word processing software and allows you to include/retrieve data automatically in/from your documents, but don't underestimate the trouble you will have to go through to get to your "integrated-wonderful-all-encompassing system" (which doesn't exist right now, so you will get it in version 1.0...
I love my job but it's a job: it's got deadlines, weird requirements, the usual constraints. When I work on Open Source software I find myself more of a craftman. I think artist would be a tad strong, but craftman is definitely appropriate. I have complete freedom in the requirements. I can take my time, release only when I think it's ready, try alternate solutions and only keep the best one. In short I am proud of what I create.
The added bonus is when people then email me saying that they really use my tool, and then they show me the cool stuff they built with it, which I could never have written myself.
Writing Open Source Software makes me feel like coding is a noble trade and not just a race against the clock to output the crappiest software that will pass the acceptance test.
Upgrade CPAN.pm, the latest version does not force
you to upgrade Perl anymore.
Re:Making a point of law with computer code.
on
NYT On DeCSS Case
·
· Score: 1
Actually Damian Conway wrote a module that allows programming in a Latin version of Perl, complete including inflexions, order-free syntax and replacement of punctuation by the appropriate latin words.
>Once again, RMS has missed a truly crucial point: Amazon has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to protect its corporate assets.
And what do you think is Amazon's most valuable asset?
I'd say it's its brand. The only reason for their market valuation is that they managed to get their name recognised by more than 60% of americans AND their reputation is excellent.
Now alienating even a fraction of their core consumer base is NOT a smart move and actually disminishes their corporate assets.
So on one hand they gain an immediate advantage over the competition by preventing B&N to use one-click shopping, but on the other hand their all-important image is damaged.
So boycotting Amazon and maybe even more important getting the word out on them and their offensive patent use IS a valid tactic, and one that can make Amazon's management and Amazon's shareholders change their tactic.
I agree with most of the comments on how a linux box should be easy to configure and how we need a Word-impersonator (a small and robust one would be enough I think). As for the AOL stuff I have no idea.
I completely disagree on the project management aspect though. One of Linux main strength, at least as far as the kernel is concerned, is that it's todo list is not issued my a marketing department but more by developpers and users (as in sysadmin users). And that's the way it should be., that's how it will remain more robust, more efficient and more secure that its bloated competition from Redmond
>Now, I'd rate the probablity of actually getting said money at just about the same as, say, Rob and Heather Graham dating.
That's what people were saying 20 years ago when a bunch of French villages sued Amoco for the Amoco Cadiz oil spillage. They eventually (it took about 10 years I think) won. Big! A couple hundred million dollars.
So who knows, maybe it'll work this time too.
As for the British they'd really need still to figure out whether they're part of Europe (and Airbus!) or still an American colony.
Of course Waldo! The marketing campaign can then have us look at 45 different distributions on 45 different screens and try to figure out which one is the SuSE one.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just the latest example in a very common problem: there is exactly 0 value in "a generic method to blah blah". The value is in the network: lots and lots of companies (in this case way more than the 45 alleged in the claim BTW) using the same methods to blah blah. So in this case the patent brings 0 value to the World, the standard is what creates value. Now will the courts share this opinion is anybody's guess...
Incidently there are 2 ways by which lots and lots of companies do things the same way: through open standards (TCP/IP, the Web, RDF...) or through a dominant player (read Microsoft) imposing its method (MS Word, passport...)
You can also give to PerlMonks, using the appropriately named Offering Plate (they use Paypal but you can also just send a check).
If Solitaire was not bundled any more with Windows:
Hours lost due to nervous breakdown by people not being able to relax and let off some steam using solitaire at work: 21.3 * 1 day * 3% ~ 5 million man-hours (60 floors of the Empire State Building?). Hours lost frantically searching the internet and trying to bypass the company firewall to get the darn game back: 21.2 * 2 = 42.4 million man-hours (2 Panama Canals). Damage provoqued by irrate postal workers deprived of their favorite game: 852285 * 0.001 * 20 years ~ 27 million man-hours (one more Panama Canal and an Empire State Building, we're starting to run out of Panama to dig new canals...).
As they say, 87.3% of all statistics are made up.
I for one am really happy to see Tim Bray back in the W3C process. It's good to see someone as efficient, experimented and no-nonsense as him involved.
Plus of course as a Perl hacker, it's good to see the guy who coined the phrase "desperate Perl Hacker" (a target of the XML specification, the DPH can supposedly write an XML parser in a week) in a position to remind other W3C Working Groups that there exists indeed other languages than Java.
I can't believe the article did not mention ACME::Bleach which just bleaches your program. Run it once and your code magically disappears... but still runs!
ACME::Buffy is similar, except your program is turned into a Buffy mantra that can be chanted or executed.
In fact the whole ACME name space is reserved just for silly and incredibly useful modules.
One of the coolest things about the Perl 6 development is that it leads to lots of improvements available right here, right now with Perl 5.
Attribute for example have been incorporated in perl 5.7.2, and a whole unch of new modules by Damian and others use them in tons of creative ways.
I am not sure this would have been done without the Perl 6 process. It forced the whole community to re-examine the language, take a step back and think of new ways to improve it. This would have been much more difficult if we had not had license to do it freely under the Perl 6 RFC process. This is the kind of things that keep a community alive and creative.
And BTW Perl 6 will still let you write quick'n dirty one-liners, and the first goal of the design of the interpretor is Speed (Larry mentionned "and it'has to be fast" about 25 times in 60 seconds in his last State of the Onion0.
THere was an interesting discussion on XML Data Bases recently on the XML-Dev mailing list, with several XML experts giving pretty interesting and not too biased opinion on the subject. You can find a summary of it by Leigh Dodds in :XML and Databases? Follow Your Nose.
Frankly, I oppose the recent anti-terrorism bills has caving in to terrorists, but in any case in understand their intent and I understand why people would want them. After a terrible disaster law-makers are trying to find a way to protect the American people against more attacks. I can argue with the means, but not with the end.
But that companies would take advantage of this effort to try to sneak in amendments that would help them "protect their revenue flow" just makes me sick! Don't this people have any decency? Or moral sense? Or anything that would prevent them from using the death of thousands of people to try to curb the laws in their favor?
I don't know if the company deliberatly set out to con the Open Source community or not, probably not. Some of its employees (and the creator of the project) seem to have honestly believed that the product was going to be Open Source, and management was probably kinda willing to try it... until they realized they would not make money this way.
I think they, and many of the outside developers that bought into their promises forgot a couple of general rules about Open Source:
You can only hope (and that's only a hope!) to make money of an Open Source project if it is already stable and widely used.
Open Source is a very good way to overcome the barrier to entry in a market where the network effect rules: it allows the project to grow and to gain market share without a company having to survive the initial phase in which no money can be made from it.
MySQL (for MySQL AB),, Apache (for IBM), Sendmail Linux itself are good examples of that. I don't know of any attempt at creating an Open Source product from scratch that allowed a company to succed, Eazel for example died a predictable death.
Oh, and it does not hurt to create server-side software, clients don't pay! (At least Lutis had gotten that right).
This should be a quick rule to figure out if it's worth investing time and energy in an Open Source (or "nearly, soon, but not quite yet OS ;--) project. Chances are that a company, especially a small company will not be able to afford waiting for the product market to be big enough to sustain itself on associated services.
Not that far actually... Damian Conway, author, amongst many other wonders, of Lingua-Romana-Perligata which lets you program in Latin, uses a module that does computation in Klingon in his OO classes and has written a module that let's you program entirely in Klingon!
The most interesting point in both Latin and Klingon is that the order of words in a sentence is not significant. Instead declensions are used to determine the role of the various tokens in an instruction: 9 declensions are used to mark whether the variable is a scalar (nextum), an array (nexta), a scalar being assigned to (nexto) etc...
BTW Damian also wrote Acme::Bleach, which turns your code into a file that apparently contains the single instruction use ACME::Bleach... but that still runs!
If your application returns results in XML you can always encode "safely" parts of the text using character entities (&#nn;). An other solution is to return not one but several results, in various encodings (you would have either to store the native encoding of a text or to figure out what it could be)
And I hope this kind of practical discussion can help to raise the level of interest in Unicode amongst application coders.
Although a lot of "core" coders (as in people who write languages and tools) are really into Unicode and trying to get their code to process it properly I found that most "application programmers", people who use those tools, are not at all interested. They tend to think that all software should support their favorite encoding natively. They also tend to curse alot when they get data in a different encoding ;--) Usually they view Unicode as yet another curse thrown upon them by an irresponsible buzzword-worshipping management.
In fact Unicode is certainly hard an painful to implement, but it is a standard and at least written by people who know what they're doing. It solves problems that most of us either have had to deal with (oh the agony of dealing with odd characters in SGML data) or will have to deal with,:face it people, there are more and more people whose names include funny characters, even in the US, to leave that market untapped.
So please view Unicode as a chance, and if the poster can do it on a terabyte of data, you can certainly do it on much less, especially as the tools are coming (yes, even Perl!)
One of the main problem of the Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (RAND) policy is that as soon as the fee is not 0, it effectively discriminates again Open-Source Software. So the only Really Authentically Non-Discriminatory policy is to ask for patents to be licensed for free if they are to be used by W3C recommendations.
Another problem is: what happens to the Open-Source implementations that W3C used to provide as proofs that its recommendations worked? Are we supposed to trust closed source software now?
I am afraid we are just reaping the logical consequences of Microsoft, Adobe and al. joining W3C and playing nice for a while: now they are trying to buy it.
And of course the basic reference is the annoted specification. The spec is actually quite simple (and short!) and the annotations are a great way to get the extra details that you can't get usually unless you sit in the working groups.
It is really a shame that the rest of the XML-related specs (XSLT, DOM...) have forgotten one of the basic design goals of the XML spec: simplicity!
OK, time to play the devil's advocate (I am actually a big XML fan): here are the problems you should expect when switching all your docs to XML:
In short XML is probably a good choice, it gives at least independance from the word processing software and allows you to include/retrieve data automatically in/from your documents, but don't underestimate the trouble you will have to go through to get to your "integrated-wonderful-all-encompassing system" (which doesn't exist right now, so you will get it in version 1.0...
I love my job but it's a job: it's got deadlines, weird requirements, the usual constraints. When I work on Open Source software I find myself more of a craftman. I think artist would be a tad strong, but craftman is definitely appropriate. I have complete freedom in the requirements. I can take my time, release only when I think it's ready, try alternate solutions and only keep the best one. In short I am proud of what I create.
The added bonus is when people then email me saying that they really use my tool, and then they show me the cool stuff they built with it, which I could never have written myself.
Writing Open Source Software makes me feel like coding is a noble trade and not just a race against the clock to output the crappiest software that will pass the acceptance test.
Upgrade CPAN.pm, the latest version does not force you to upgrade Perl anymore.
Actually Damian Conway wrote a module that allows programming in a Latin version of Perl, complete including inflexions, order-free syntax and replacement of punctuation by the appropriate latin words.
>Once again, RMS has missed a truly crucial point: Amazon has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to protect its corporate assets.
And what do you think is Amazon's most valuable asset?
I'd say it's its brand. The only reason for their market valuation is that they managed to get their name recognised by more than 60% of americans AND their reputation is excellent.
Now alienating even a fraction of their core consumer base is NOT a smart move and actually disminishes their corporate assets.
So on one hand they gain an immediate advantage over the competition by preventing B&N to use one-click shopping, but on the other hand their all-important image is damaged.
So boycotting Amazon and maybe even more important getting the word out on them and their offensive patent use IS a valid tactic, and one that can make Amazon's management and Amazon's shareholders change their tactic.
Michel
I agree with most of the comments on how a linux box should be easy to configure and how we need a Word-impersonator (a small and robust one would be enough I think). As for the AOL stuff I have no idea.
I completely disagree on the project management aspect though.
One of Linux main strength, at least as far as the kernel is concerned, is that it's todo list is not issued my a marketing department but more by developpers and users (as in sysadmin users).
And that's the way it should be., that's how it will remain more robust, more efficient and more secure that its bloated competition from Redmond
>Now, I'd rate the probablity of actually getting said money at just about the same as, say, Rob and Heather Graham dating.
That's what people were saying 20 years ago when a bunch of French villages sued Amoco for the Amoco Cadiz oil spillage. They eventually (it took about 10 years I think) won. Big! A couple hundred million dollars.
So who knows, maybe it'll work this time too.
As for the British they'd really need still to figure out whether they're part of Europe (and Airbus!) or still an American colony.
Michel
Of course Waldo! The marketing campaign can then
have us look at 45 different distributions on 45
different screens and try to figure out which one
is the SuSE one.