Quite right. I've just got my company to sign a waiver for a project I'm about to start coding for. They did remind me about a clause in my contract that says that I must not have any outside interests that interfere with the efficient running of the company, but that does at least make both our positions clear.
If you're thinking of writing some code outside of company hours, then ask for a waiver. Resist the temptation to code when you don't have one, especially if you've asked for a waiver and they've refused. They're almost certain to demand the IP later, especially if it's beginning to get somewhere.
Having done a brief web-search, I'm fairly sure that you mean Andrew Wilkes, the mathematician that proved Fermat's Last Theorum. His work linked up the mathematical islands you mention, and was indeed a great triumph.
OK, putting the fixed point operator as your email address is pretty cool.
Re:I see a battle like Star Wars going on.
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 1
Use the source, Luke!
Re:Open Source will change our civilisation.
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 1
Socialism is a very broad term, and is usually considered to encompass Communism and Anarchism (not to be cofused with Libertarianism). Communism is usually used to mean state capitalism, while you seem to be using the term to refer to the usual understanding of Anarchism. I've seen some of your further posts, which make this distinction clearer, but without ever mentionism Anarchism.
No criticism is intended, I agree with the distinction, but following the usual understanding of techincal terms often reduces the need to explain...
Well, it turns out that we agree with each other to a small extent.
There are indeed two ways for society to be organised, capitalism or
anarchism. Traditional communism, such as Maoism, Menshevism or Bolshevism,
are merely simple forms of state capitalism, where instead of a few thousand
organisations with all the capital and power, there is a single
organisation, the state, holding it all. This clearly suffers from all the
drawbacks of state supported market capitalism, and then some.
I go for anarchism too, but anarchosyndicalism rather than
anarchocapitalism. This is because anarchocapitalism is just not
sustainable. If a society has money, then it has the means to concentrate
power. That power will be concentrated, until you have the same conditions
as the current form of western capitalism, without even the single benefit
of a state: protection from the inevitable rise of robber barons.
The only argument against anarchosyndicalism is the irrational belief
that money is necessary. It isn't. There is so much effort expended in
trying to supporting the existence of money, all of which is wasted. Nothing
useful is generated by this work. Freeing people from this horrific wastage
would deliver the benefits of the useful work that they can do, as well as
increased leisure time. Note that work is not the same as employment. Work
is necessary, employment isn't.
I do think this is possible within my lifetime, but it will take the
destruction of the delusions inherent in money, markets and states. Where do
we start? Right here, right now.
Stallman's. Bruce Perens originated The Open Source Defnition. Stallman
has been prepared to say that the OSD does capture the spirit of free
software, but that he's still unhappy to lose the focus on freedom. The
focus of the term open source is more about how to build a business model,
so that corporations will be more ready to accept the software.
You're nuts if you think capitalism is about freedom of choice. The
choice it presents to everyone is to work or starve. Choosing starvation is
not much of a choice, and the alternative leaves you as a wage slave. The
company that enslaves you in this manner, and the people who run it, are
authoriatarian and do not present you with a choice either. You either
follow theirs orders without question, or you don't keep the job.
Watch out, if RMS himself hears you, he'll remid you that he's not part
of any open source projects, but he is involved in free software projects
instead. There is a difference, and I think he's right too.
Ah, you suffer from bourgeois eternalism. If everyone thought like you,
there would indeed be no hope of changing society for the better.
Fortunately, not everyone has been so hopelessly brainwashed as you, and
between us, we will change society. You are invited to join us.
It would be nice if the lexical scoping from Vyper went into Python, but
it's so much closer to it's implementation language Ocaml than it is to
Python, that I think it would alienate many potential Python adopters.
It's a shame that so many programmers, especially those from a more
engineering background than a math background, are so hostile to functional
programming. Like the man says, it's not the 1970s any more, the amount of
clever thinking that's gone into functional programming means you can
regularly beat the engineering results from an imperative language, in many
fewer lines of code, and less hours of work.
However, Stackless Python is a different matter. The continuation
passing is totally transparent to the programmer (unless they want to use
it), that it wont have matter to those engineers, and will even please the
mathematicians. Microthreads in particular are gorgeous, no engineer would
turn their nose up at them, just because of the math background. This is a
win for everybody, it's just obviously the way Python should go.
Oh, arse. Yeah, I know, I should have used the preview button...
Anyway, as I was saying, to compute the nth fibonacci number, f(n) -> if n <= 2 then n else f(n-1) + f(n-2) ML will replace this with either a memoisation technique, or some dynamic programming technique.
Well, I'd say that ML is mostly a functional language. You can
write code in an imperative style using references, but it gets painful
really quickly. In the end it's easier to write functional code, and let ML
do all the work of turning it into something imperative, what with it's
tail-recursion elimination, automatic replacement of code that has repeated
identical recursive calls (eg. to compute the nth fibonacci number, f(n) ->
if n
If we accpet for a moment that this is neither a hoax nor vapourware,
the main question I have is how do you patch or replace the version of
embedded Linux when a new security hole is found?
I looked reasonably hard, but given that the site's "Features" and
"Specs" sections contained only broken links, and I wasn't able to read the
PDF file, it's not clear if it uses flash ram, some of the hard disk, or
whatever.
Being able to patch the OS when a new exploit is found is pretty
fundamental for this kind of product, yet the site is broken, and none of
the headings even suggest that you might need to do such a thing.
On the whole, I think this smells pretty bad, and wouldn't trust the
thing at all.
Not a bad comparison. Cherryh is almost as unrelentlessly grim in
presenting hopeless situations as Banks. I especially remember "40,000 in
Gehenna", where one side in a two-big-civilizations galaxy deliberately sets
up a planetry colonization effort to fail. The people who get sent there are
reduced to neolithic technology, since they were depending upon further
ships sending supplies. All of this upleasantness is to curtail the
expsnsion efforts of the other civilisation. Nasty.
Yes, we can trust their guidance systems. Remember when the supply
module crashed into Mir? That was when they were trying to cut costs by
getting the cosmonauts to do the docking guidance, rather than using their
automatic guidance system. They repeated this a half dozen times in
simulation, and yep, it crashed into it every time. So they went back to the
automatic system, and it's delivered the supply module successfully every
time.
Now, the Pacific ocean is pretty big, and if they can dock with Mir
using automatic guidance, we can be pretty sure they'll guide Mir into the
Pacific, even with the complication of guiding it through the upper
atmosphere first.
There was a small section in the article that said that many of the
Debian developers have never met face to face. Whilst this is clearly true,
most of them will never have met this way, I thought that before you get
accepted as a Debian developer you had to go through a face to face meeting,
to exchange public keys and the like. Is this true? Or am I barking up the
wrong tree here?
On a side note, I, and most of friends who use Linux, are big fans of
Debian. The one guy loves stability, and gives not a fig for the bleeding
edge. Another really goes for the bleeding edge, and always uses the most
up-to-date "unstable" releases. A couple of us are such awful sysadmins,
that we need something like the Debian package system in order to use Linux
without having to reinstall regularly. Lastly, I go for their right and
proper focus on free-as-in-freedom.
This is quite a spread of abilities and desires. Debian meets them all.
That's a real trick for a Linux distribution. They've earned the award. Time
for a big round of applause...
If you read Flatland ina a 80x25 window then you'll have missed the
drawings. Whilst it's easy enough to understand what's going on without
them, I really suggest you go into a bookshop and have a peruse of a paper
copy, it'll show you how old the book really is.
This is a callous and brutal attitude. The fact is, modern capitalism (or corporatism, if you will) demands inequality, poverty and homelessness. There can be no "winners" without there being many more "losers". No matter how hard the "losers" try to better themselves, they are an inevitable part of how western society is organised. Those few who manage to escape from poverty usually do so by displacing somebody very close to their previously poor position, right into exactly the same form of poverty.
The only way for the truly poor to survive is to beg. This means you or somebody like you giving them money or food. You may be like RMS, and decide that you know what they need better than they do, and buy them food. I personally think that this a patronizing, if understandable, attitude. When I give, which I'll admitt is not very often, I always give money. I don't assume that I know what they need. It might be drink or drugs. That's OK, not a choice I'll always support, but ptobably the closest thing to choice that they ever experience.
I can't really call myself much of a gamer any more, I tend to get bored after the first few minutes of pretty much any new computer game, except maybe some of the simulations. In the past though, I played computer games a lot. The novelty aspect of it at the time was a major factor in this, but there's more to it than it just being new at the time.
All the games were different from each other. Sure, things started to form into genres pretty quickly (2D platformers anyone?), but for a few years, you really tell the guys thinking up new stuff from those slavishly copying the previous big hit. Today, it's almost impossible to find a game that has any innovation whatsoever. Differences in graphical speed and quality, but very little in the way of new gameplay.
Oh, except for Ape Escape on the Playsation a year or so ago. That one was just so totally drug induced I couldn't help but like it.
Well, not quite. Perl manages memory using reference counting, so circular data structures will hang around until the Perl process dies, even if there are no references to the circular data structure left anymore.
This is less serious than the sort of memory leaks you typically get in C, where you are trying to use a reference to a data structure that has been deallocated, or where you never deallocate a data structure nothing can has a reference to. In Perl, the former is never occurs, but the latter does.
However, it's still rather weak, and should be updated to at least perform proper mark and sweep garbage collection, like Ruby, Java, Python, Eiffel, and many others.
A little more on-topic though, I don't like Perl much, but its object orientation is rather well tacked on, even if it's only been tacked on, rather than being a fundamental design decision. In truth, it's the only aspect that encourages me to use the language, whereas there are many aspects that discourage me, not least the way it's not at all easy on the eye.
Furthermore, it's a mistake to think Perl has multiple inheritance, since it is only possible call the constructor of one superclass before blessing the result as an object of the class you're defining. The "multiple inhertance" is much more like the interface mechanism in Java, with the added advantage of being able to provide method bodies.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite right. I've just got my company to sign a waiver for a project I'm about to start coding for. They did remind me about a clause in my contract that says that I must not have any outside interests that interfere with the efficient running of the company, but that does at least make both our positions clear.
If you're thinking of writing some code outside of company hours, then ask for a waiver. Resist the temptation to code when you don't have one, especially if you've asked for a waiver and they've refused. They're almost certain to demand the IP later, especially if it's beginning to get somewhere.
Having done a brief web-search, I'm fairly sure that you mean Andrew Wilkes, the mathematician that proved Fermat's Last Theorum. His work linked up the mathematical islands you mention, and was indeed a great triumph.
OK, putting the fixed point operator as your email address is pretty cool.
Use the source, Luke!
Socialism is a very broad term, and is usually considered to encompass Communism and Anarchism (not to be cofused with Libertarianism). Communism is usually used to mean state capitalism, while you seem to be using the term to refer to the usual understanding of Anarchism. I've seen some of your further posts, which make this distinction clearer, but without ever mentionism Anarchism.
No criticism is intended, I agree with the distinction, but following the usual understanding of techincal terms often reduces the need to explain...
Well, it turns out that we agree with each other to a small extent. There are indeed two ways for society to be organised, capitalism or anarchism. Traditional communism, such as Maoism, Menshevism or Bolshevism, are merely simple forms of state capitalism, where instead of a few thousand organisations with all the capital and power, there is a single organisation, the state, holding it all. This clearly suffers from all the drawbacks of state supported market capitalism, and then some.
I go for anarchism too, but anarchosyndicalism rather than anarchocapitalism. This is because anarchocapitalism is just not sustainable. If a society has money, then it has the means to concentrate power. That power will be concentrated, until you have the same conditions as the current form of western capitalism, without even the single benefit of a state: protection from the inevitable rise of robber barons.
The only argument against anarchosyndicalism is the irrational belief that money is necessary. It isn't. There is so much effort expended in trying to supporting the existence of money, all of which is wasted. Nothing useful is generated by this work. Freeing people from this horrific wastage would deliver the benefits of the useful work that they can do, as well as increased leisure time. Note that work is not the same as employment. Work is necessary, employment isn't.
I do think this is possible within my lifetime, but it will take the destruction of the delusions inherent in money, markets and states. Where do we start? Right here, right now.
That's not pollution, that's enhancment!
Stallman's. Bruce Perens originated The Open Source Defnition. Stallman has been prepared to say that the OSD does capture the spirit of free software, but that he's still unhappy to lose the focus on freedom. The focus of the term open source is more about how to build a business model, so that corporations will be more ready to accept the software.
I agree with Stallman on this too.
You're nuts if you think capitalism is about freedom of choice. The choice it presents to everyone is to work or starve. Choosing starvation is not much of a choice, and the alternative leaves you as a wage slave. The company that enslaves you in this manner, and the people who run it, are authoriatarian and do not present you with a choice either. You either follow theirs orders without question, or you don't keep the job.
Where's the freedom? Where's the choice?
Watch out, if RMS himself hears you, he'll remid you that he's not part of any open source projects, but he is involved in free software projects instead. There is a difference, and I think he's right too.
Ah, you suffer from bourgeois eternalism. If everyone thought like you, there would indeed be no hope of changing society for the better. Fortunately, not everyone has been so hopelessly brainwashed as you, and between us, we will change society. You are invited to join us.
It would be nice if the lexical scoping from Vyper went into Python, but it's so much closer to it's implementation language Ocaml than it is to Python, that I think it would alienate many potential Python adopters.
It's a shame that so many programmers, especially those from a more engineering background than a math background, are so hostile to functional programming. Like the man says, it's not the 1970s any more, the amount of clever thinking that's gone into functional programming means you can regularly beat the engineering results from an imperative language, in many fewer lines of code, and less hours of work.
However, Stackless Python is a different matter. The continuation passing is totally transparent to the programmer (unless they want to use it), that it wont have matter to those engineers, and will even please the mathematicians. Microthreads in particular are gorgeous, no engineer would turn their nose up at them, just because of the math background. This is a win for everybody, it's just obviously the way Python should go.
Oh, arse. Yeah, I know, I should have used the preview button...
Anyway, as I was saying, to compute the nth fibonacci number,
f(n) -> if n <= 2 then n else f(n-1) + f(n-2)
ML will replace this with either a memoisation technique, or some dynamic programming technique.
Well, I'd say that ML is mostly a functional language. You can write code in an imperative style using references, but it gets painful really quickly. In the end it's easier to write functional code, and let ML do all the work of turning it into something imperative, what with it's tail-recursion elimination, automatic replacement of code that has repeated identical recursive calls (eg. to compute the nth fibonacci number, f(n) -> if n
If we accpet for a moment that this is neither a hoax nor vapourware, the main question I have is how do you patch or replace the version of embedded Linux when a new security hole is found?
I looked reasonably hard, but given that the site's "Features" and "Specs" sections contained only broken links, and I wasn't able to read the PDF file, it's not clear if it uses flash ram, some of the hard disk, or whatever.
Being able to patch the OS when a new exploit is found is pretty fundamental for this kind of product, yet the site is broken, and none of the headings even suggest that you might need to do such a thing.
On the whole, I think this smells pretty bad, and wouldn't trust the thing at all.
Not a bad comparison. Cherryh is almost as unrelentlessly grim in presenting hopeless situations as Banks. I especially remember "40,000 in Gehenna", where one side in a two-big-civilizations galaxy deliberately sets up a planetry colonization effort to fail. The people who get sent there are reduced to neolithic technology, since they were depending upon further ships sending supplies. All of this upleasantness is to curtail the expsnsion efforts of the other civilisation. Nasty.
Yes, we can trust their guidance systems. Remember when the supply module crashed into Mir? That was when they were trying to cut costs by getting the cosmonauts to do the docking guidance, rather than using their automatic guidance system. They repeated this a half dozen times in simulation, and yep, it crashed into it every time. So they went back to the automatic system, and it's delivered the supply module successfully every time.
Now, the Pacific ocean is pretty big, and if they can dock with Mir using automatic guidance, we can be pretty sure they'll guide Mir into the Pacific, even with the complication of guiding it through the upper atmosphere first.
Not quite right. In truth, it was humans playing that classic old game "club an animal to death" that did for the Dodo.
Oh yes. Kevin Warwick. He's usually just a nutter, but in this case he did raise some concerns about privacy and civil liberties issues.
However, check out Kevin Warwick Watch as a guide to just how seriously you want to take what he says.
There was a small section in the article that said that many of the Debian developers have never met face to face. Whilst this is clearly true, most of them will never have met this way, I thought that before you get accepted as a Debian developer you had to go through a face to face meeting, to exchange public keys and the like. Is this true? Or am I barking up the wrong tree here?
On a side note, I, and most of friends who use Linux, are big fans of Debian. The one guy loves stability, and gives not a fig for the bleeding edge. Another really goes for the bleeding edge, and always uses the most up-to-date "unstable" releases. A couple of us are such awful sysadmins, that we need something like the Debian package system in order to use Linux without having to reinstall regularly. Lastly, I go for their right and proper focus on free-as-in-freedom.
This is quite a spread of abilities and desires. Debian meets them all. That's a real trick for a Linux distribution. They've earned the award. Time for a big round of applause...
If you read Flatland ina a 80x25 window then you'll have missed the drawings. Whilst it's easy enough to understand what's going on without them, I really suggest you go into a bookshop and have a peruse of a paper copy, it'll show you how old the book really is.
This is a callous and brutal attitude. The fact is, modern capitalism (or corporatism, if you will) demands inequality, poverty and homelessness. There can be no "winners" without there being many more "losers". No matter how hard the "losers" try to better themselves, they are an inevitable part of how western society is organised. Those few who manage to escape from poverty usually do so by displacing somebody very close to their previously poor position, right into exactly the same form of poverty.
The only way for the truly poor to survive is to beg. This means you or somebody like you giving them money or food. You may be like RMS, and decide that you know what they need better than they do, and buy them food. I personally think that this a patronizing, if understandable, attitude. When I give, which I'll admitt is not very often, I always give money. I don't assume that I know what they need. It might be drink or drugs. That's OK, not a choice I'll always support, but ptobably the closest thing to choice that they ever experience.
I can't really call myself much of a gamer any more, I tend to get bored after the first few minutes of pretty much any new computer game, except maybe some of the simulations. In the past though, I played computer games a lot. The novelty aspect of it at the time was a major factor in this, but there's more to it than it just being new at the time.
All the games were different from each other. Sure, things started to form into genres pretty quickly (2D platformers anyone?), but for a few years, you really tell the guys thinking up new stuff from those slavishly copying the previous big hit. Today, it's almost impossible to find a game that has any innovation whatsoever. Differences in graphical speed and quality, but very little in the way of new gameplay.
Oh, except for Ape Escape on the Playsation a year or so ago. That one was just so totally drug induced I couldn't help but like it.
You stupid ignorant moron.
Well, not quite. Perl manages memory using reference counting, so circular data structures will hang around until the Perl process dies, even if there are no references to the circular data structure left anymore.
This is less serious than the sort of memory leaks you typically get in C, where you are trying to use a reference to a data structure that has been deallocated, or where you never deallocate a data structure nothing can has a reference to. In Perl, the former is never occurs, but the latter does.
However, it's still rather weak, and should be updated to at least perform proper mark and sweep garbage collection, like Ruby, Java, Python, Eiffel, and many others.
A little more on-topic though, I don't like Perl much, but its object orientation is rather well tacked on, even if it's only been tacked on, rather than being a fundamental design decision. In truth, it's the only aspect that encourages me to use the language, whereas there are many aspects that discourage me, not least the way it's not at all easy on the eye.
Furthermore, it's a mistake to think Perl has multiple inheritance, since it is only possible call the constructor of one superclass before blessing the result as an object of the class you're defining. The "multiple inhertance" is much more like the interface mechanism in Java, with the added advantage of being able to provide method bodies.