Languages differentiate either because people can't talk to each other (e.g., they're separated), or because they don't want to talk to one another (e.g., some religious leader tells them that they are "special"). The first reason doesn't apply much anymore, so language is increasingly becoming a means of driving artificial wedges between groups of people. So, the fewer languages, the better.
People like to claim that they lose part of their cultural heritage that way, but that's largely bogus: most speakers of a language have no idea what associations and meanings words and language from even a century ago had to speakers back then. A good translation might well be a better rendition of their cultural heritage than any attempt to read things in the "original".
Unfortunately, two languages most deserving of being thrown into the dustbin of history, languages whose primary purpose has been to separate one group of people from the rest of the world, will likely survive: Arabic and Hebrew. If the entire Middle East converted to English, peace would be a lot more likely. It would also mean that politicians in those countries couldn't get away anymore with saying one thing to their home audience and another to the international audience. (As an added bonus, people would have trouble reading the Koran and the Torah in the so-called "original".)
If we open up the spectrum and phased arrays are needed to improve reception, then companies will fill the need quickly and efficiently. If we don't open up the spectrum first, there may simply be no economic incentive to develop cheap versions of these kinds of technologies for consumer use.
WiFi has shown that the world doesn't end when there's a region of spectrum that anybody can use; modern electronics is smart enough to co-exist, and when there is interferences (Bluetooth vs. WiFi), manufacturers get together and work it out.
So, just open up a bunch of bands under similar terms to WiFi. If Sprint wants to deploy WiMax there, great. If other people want to use it for baby monitors, that's great too.
What companies are really after is for the government to hand them a monopoly and to make it difficult for their competitors to enter the market, and that we shouldn't happen.
So, FCC, take away the bands from the spectrum-hoarding institutions, but don't give them to other companies, just open them up.
Yeah, the QTopia Greenphone is GPL alright. Unlike Linux and Gnome, Troll Tech wants commercial developers to pay them big bucks for the privilege of developing software for their platform. Even the FSF doesn't go that far. It's a marketing gimmick to help Troll Tech establish their platform on phones--a platform that deliberately excludes major other open source toolkits.
and encourages user development and contributions to its features.
Well, that's debatable. At QTopia prices, it very much discourages commercial development for the platform. Furthermore, although QTopia is released under the GPL, nobody other than Troll Tech can actually realistically develop or enhance it--if anybody tried to ship their own version of QTopia, none of the commercial QTopia apps could run on it.
And it runs Linux. If THAT isn't a better deal than an iPhone, I dunno what is.
Just about anything else: if Troll Tech manages to establish their platform as the default "open source" phone platform, open source on mobile devices would be effectively dead because it would be fully controlled by Troll Tech. You can contribute to QTopia only if Troll Tech lets you, and only if you effectively donate your free labor to them.
So, for now, I'll stick with my Palm: Palm has open source development tools, there is plenty of open source software, and the company doesn't dictate what license I can ship my software under.
(Another reason not to use QTopia is that it sucks from a user interface point of view, but that's a separate debate.)
is well within its rights to control its own device.
It stopped being "their device" when they sold it; after the sale, you can do with it whatever you want. OTOH, they can push whatever updates they like and don't have to honor their warranty if you have modified your device substantially. Furthermore, it's not like this is coming out of the blue either: Apple was clear about what the iPhone was for, they have a history of more than two decades of doing this to their customers, so WTF are people complaining about?
Sure: it ensures that people can't claim patents on the software while at the same time shipping it or profiting from it. That's very important to ensure that the software remain free and open.
I mean, we had the Microsoft/Novell deal and Microsoft's patent threats. How much more clearly do people like you need to have it spelled out for you??
This is the sort of reason why I use FreeBSD, and try my best to use BSD-, MIT-, or zlib-licensed software as much as possible.
So, tell us, where can we find the BSD-licensed equivalents of OpenChange, Samba, and Qt?
I just want [...]
Well, and I just want a flying car and a toilet seat made out of gold. It ain't gonna happen, baby. Licenses are complicated, and there are so many of them, because the real world is complicated.
And if you release the wrong software under the BSD license, you could end up screwing open source and open standards badly. Look up Microsoft, MIT, and Kerberos.
This sounds kind of bad, but think about it. If you sold John a box of apples and John then goes around telling everybody that they were rotten. Then he comes back and buys another one. Why should you have to do business with him?
AT&T isn't restricting your right to say bad things about them, they are simply saying that if you do, they don't want to do business with you anymore.
Now, perhaps if you can argue that they are a near monopoly, they shouldn't be able to do that. But if you have a choice among half a dozen other providers, I don't see a big problem. In particular, if they cancel the contract, you're out of it anyway--better than being stuck with a provider you hate for a couple of years.
(And if you made the mistake of buying a locked phone, well...)
Given Apple's recent direction towards more proprietary systems, more restrictions, and more proprietary APIs, no, I wouldn't buy one. I also don't really like their dev tools.
I spent a lot of time and effort trying to get Internet access through WiFi when I didn't have DSL or cable coverage.WiFi didn't solve the "last mile problem" for the simple reason that it doesn't go a mile under real-world circumstances. Not even half a mile. In the real world, you're lucky if a single AP can be seen from a few potential users up and down the street. And neither the hardware nor the software or band allocations were meant for anything else.
This is no more amazing than taking your desktop OCR software, scanning a page, pasting the result into Google Translate, and printing the resulting page. The reason nobody is shipping this is because the translation isn't good enough yet to make it worthwhile.
Actually, it would mean that OS X has a market share close to Vista, not to Windows as a whole.
That's a bad comparison: Vista is a version of an operating system, OS X is a whole collection of versions. Either compare versions against versions, or operating systems against operating systems. And please bring some facts to the table: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
It's still quite possible that this is false, but we keep hearing about Vista's slow uptake,
"Possible"? You must be joking. Almost every new PC is sold with Vista--you can't help it.
Until Apple starts producing an OS that runs on commodity hardware, any notions that Apple could become a mass market brand are unreal (and whether this is even desirable is an entirely separate debate).
With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around
"Hot on Vista's tail" would mean that OS X has a market share close to Windows, which is obviously not true even under the most optimistic assumptions.
There is also no sense that I can see in which Microsoft has anything to fear from Apple. Even if Microsoft got out of the OS business tomorrow, Apple simply could not fill the void. Most likely, a disappearance of Microsoft would benefit Linux and BSD much more than it would Apple, because people can run those systems on the hardware they already have.
"Revenge" is rational: if there is no extra cost for violating the rules other than to lose what you gained in violation of the rules, people will violate the rules. We see that in corporate America every day.
The correct penalty is basically the money they have saved divided by the probability of getting caught, plus a bit extra.
The sooner we find out the better, and I don't see any serious consequences.
I mean, what can happen?
SCOTUS can invalidate the GPL. So, nobody has a license, and the authors will just release a new license.
Or SCOTUS can declare that all GPL'ed code is public domain now. So, the BSD guys are really happy, and the GPL projects will simply put all new code under a new license.
Seems to me like compared to Vista, people are falling all over themselves to adopt GPLv3.
Seriously: people don't change licenses over night. In fact, projects developed under a GPLv2-only license often simply have no possibility of changing to the GPLv3. If only 43% say they will never change, that's good news because that means that nearly 60% of developers potentially could change. That's actually higher than I would have thought.
showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes."
And it also explains where the missing socks go, what the number "42" means, and why your battery always runs out on your cell phone when the conversation turns interesting.
In fact, it shares this property with a lot of mathematical assumptions. For example, if you assume that "1=0", all sorts of interesting mathematical facts follow from that (and their opposites, too!).
its questionable maintainability, many of the criticisms are based on intellectualizing the problems involved.
Questionable maintainability is exactly the problem with Perl, and it's not an "intellectualized" problem, it's a very real-world problem.
Something tells me the ongoing prejudice against Perl has a lot to do with organizations
Prejudice? You just clearly and concisely stated the reason for getting rid of Perl yourself. Of all the sins a programming language can commit, poor maintainability is probably the worst.
According to him Common Lisp is great but SBCL is not production ready and there is no free Common Lisp that is,
Of course not; I never claimed they were. They have pretty good compilers and garbage collectors, though, which is a good place to start.
I also did try learning CL, but I personally found it hard to find out how to write production code in Lisp - most of the examples on the web are all very nice for CS stuff (e.g. run this from emacs via slime) , but not real world stuff
All true--which is why I did not recommend that you actually use CommonLisp, and which is why it failed in the real world.
See, all the good compiler and language people went off doing one thing and all the real world people went off doing another thing, and the end result was two disasters: CommonLisp and Python/Perl/PHP etc.
Well, to be honest, I think the more likely resolution of this is systems like IronPython and Jython anyway. At least some of the language and runtime people eventually figured out that they were no good at the real world language stuff, so they created reasonably universal runtimes that people can now do their scripting languages on top of.
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Languages differentiate either because people can't talk to each other (e.g., they're separated), or because they don't want to talk to one another (e.g., some religious leader tells them that they are "special"). The first reason doesn't apply much anymore, so language is increasingly becoming a means of driving artificial wedges between groups of people. So, the fewer languages, the better.
People like to claim that they lose part of their cultural heritage that way, but that's largely bogus: most speakers of a language have no idea what associations and meanings words and language from even a century ago had to speakers back then. A good translation might well be a better rendition of their cultural heritage than any attempt to read things in the "original".
Unfortunately, two languages most deserving of being thrown into the dustbin of history, languages whose primary purpose has been to separate one group of people from the rest of the world, will likely survive: Arabic and Hebrew. If the entire Middle East converted to English, peace would be a lot more likely. It would also mean that politicians in those countries couldn't get away anymore with saying one thing to their home audience and another to the international audience. (As an added bonus, people would have trouble reading the Koran and the Torah in the so-called "original".)
If we open up the spectrum and phased arrays are needed to improve reception, then companies will fill the need quickly and efficiently. If we don't open up the spectrum first, there may simply be no economic incentive to develop cheap versions of these kinds of technologies for consumer use.
WiFi has shown that the world doesn't end when there's a region of spectrum that anybody can use; modern electronics is smart enough to co-exist, and when there is interferences (Bluetooth vs. WiFi), manufacturers get together and work it out.
So, just open up a bunch of bands under similar terms to WiFi. If Sprint wants to deploy WiMax there, great. If other people want to use it for baby monitors, that's great too.
What companies are really after is for the government to hand them a monopoly and to make it difficult for their competitors to enter the market, and that we shouldn't happen.
So, FCC, take away the bands from the spectrum-hoarding institutions, but don't give them to other companies, just open them up.
Trolltech has released the QTopia Greenphone
Yeah, the QTopia Greenphone is GPL alright. Unlike Linux and Gnome, Troll Tech wants commercial developers to pay them big bucks for the privilege of developing software for their platform. Even the FSF doesn't go that far. It's a marketing gimmick to help Troll Tech establish their platform on phones--a platform that deliberately excludes major other open source toolkits.
and encourages user development and contributions to its features.
Well, that's debatable. At QTopia prices, it very much discourages commercial development for the platform. Furthermore, although QTopia is released under the GPL, nobody other than Troll Tech can actually realistically develop or enhance it--if anybody tried to ship their own version of QTopia, none of the commercial QTopia apps could run on it.
And it runs Linux. If THAT isn't a better deal than an iPhone, I dunno what is.
Just about anything else: if Troll Tech manages to establish their platform as the default "open source" phone platform, open source on mobile devices would be effectively dead because it would be fully controlled by Troll Tech. You can contribute to QTopia only if Troll Tech lets you, and only if you effectively donate your free labor to them.
So, for now, I'll stick with my Palm: Palm has open source development tools, there is plenty of open source software, and the company doesn't dictate what license I can ship my software under.
(Another reason not to use QTopia is that it sucks from a user interface point of view, but that's a separate debate.)
is well within its rights to control its own device.
It stopped being "their device" when they sold it; after the sale, you can do with it whatever you want. OTOH, they can push whatever updates they like and don't have to honor their warranty if you have modified your device substantially. Furthermore, it's not like this is coming out of the blue either: Apple was clear about what the iPhone was for, they have a history of more than two decades of doing this to their customers, so WTF are people complaining about?
v3 does not ensure anything v2 didnt!
Sure: it ensures that people can't claim patents on the software while at the same time shipping it or profiting from it. That's very important to ensure that the software remain free and open.
I mean, we had the Microsoft/Novell deal and Microsoft's patent threats. How much more clearly do people like you need to have it spelled out for you??
This is the sort of reason why I use FreeBSD, and try my best to use BSD-, MIT-, or zlib-licensed software as much as possible.
So, tell us, where can we find the BSD-licensed equivalents of OpenChange, Samba, and Qt?
I just want [...]
Well, and I just want a flying car and a toilet seat made out of gold. It ain't gonna happen, baby. Licenses are complicated, and there are so many of them, because the real world is complicated.
And if you release the wrong software under the BSD license, you could end up screwing open source and open standards badly. Look up Microsoft, MIT, and Kerberos.
This sounds kind of bad, but think about it. If you sold John a box of apples and John then goes around telling everybody that they were rotten. Then he comes back and buys another one. Why should you have to do business with him?
AT&T isn't restricting your right to say bad things about them, they are simply saying that if you do, they don't want to do business with you anymore.
Now, perhaps if you can argue that they are a near monopoly, they shouldn't be able to do that. But if you have a choice among half a dozen other providers, I don't see a big problem. In particular, if they cancel the contract, you're out of it anyway--better than being stuck with a provider you hate for a couple of years.
(And if you made the mistake of buying a locked phone, well...)
Given Apple's recent direction towards more proprietary systems, more restrictions, and more proprietary APIs, no, I wouldn't buy one. I also don't really like their dev tools.
Every time a user changes a Resolver spreadsheet, the software generates Python code expressing their desires;
Oh yeah? How does Python express hot, naked babes and a sixpack?
I spent a lot of time and effort trying to get Internet access through WiFi when I didn't have DSL or cable coverage.WiFi didn't solve the "last mile problem" for the simple reason that it doesn't go a mile under real-world circumstances. Not even half a mile. In the real world, you're lucky if a single AP can be seen from a few potential users up and down the street. And neither the hardware nor the software or band allocations were meant for anything else.
This is no more amazing than taking your desktop OCR software, scanning a page, pasting the result into Google Translate, and printing the resulting page. The reason nobody is shipping this is because the translation isn't good enough yet to make it worthwhile.
Actually, it would mean that OS X has a market share close to Vista, not to Windows as a whole.
That's a bad comparison: Vista is a version of an operating system, OS X is a whole collection of versions. Either compare versions against versions, or operating systems against operating systems. And please bring some facts to the table: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
It's still quite possible that this is false, but we keep hearing about Vista's slow uptake,
"Possible"? You must be joking. Almost every new PC is sold with Vista--you can't help it.
Until Apple starts producing an OS that runs on commodity hardware, any notions that Apple could become a mass market brand are unreal (and whether this is even desirable is an entirely separate debate).
With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around
"Hot on Vista's tail" would mean that OS X has a market share close to Windows, which is obviously not true even under the most optimistic assumptions.
There is also no sense that I can see in which Microsoft has anything to fear from Apple. Even if Microsoft got out of the OS business tomorrow, Apple simply could not fill the void. Most likely, a disappearance of Microsoft would benefit Linux and BSD much more than it would Apple, because people can run those systems on the hardware they already have.
"Revenge" is rational: if there is no extra cost for violating the rules other than to lose what you gained in violation of the rules, people will violate the rules. We see that in corporate America every day.
The correct penalty is basically the money they have saved divided by the probability of getting caught, plus a bit extra.
The sooner we find out the better, and I don't see any serious consequences.
I mean, what can happen?
SCOTUS can invalidate the GPL. So, nobody has a license, and the authors will just release a new license.
Or SCOTUS can declare that all GPL'ed code is public domain now. So, the BSD guys are really happy, and the GPL projects will simply put all new code under a new license.
What's the big deal?
OTOH, the sooner we know, we can act.
Will this scare pointy-haired-bosses away from OSS if they think touching the GPL may involve a law-suit?
That's exactly what they should be thinking: "I will get sued if I violate the GPL. So, I better dot my i's and cross my t's."
They should be as scared of that as getting sued about violating any commercial license.
Seems to me like compared to Vista, people are falling all over themselves to adopt GPLv3.
Seriously: people don't change licenses over night. In fact, projects developed under a GPLv2-only license often simply have no possibility of changing to the GPLv3. If only 43% say they will never change, that's good news because that means that nearly 60% of developers potentially could change. That's actually higher than I would have thought.
Most of you must realize the iphone will be in use much longer that 2 years.
Given my experience with first generation Apple products, I really doubt it.
showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes."
And it also explains where the missing socks go, what the number "42" means, and why your battery always runs out on your cell phone when the conversation turns interesting.
In fact, it shares this property with a lot of mathematical assumptions. For example, if you assume that "1=0", all sorts of interesting mathematical facts follow from that (and their opposites, too!).
Isn't that missing the point? Why would I want to play a game and be "relaxed" in the way this device measures?
its questionable maintainability, many of the criticisms are based on intellectualizing the problems involved.
Questionable maintainability is exactly the problem with Perl, and it's not an "intellectualized" problem, it's a very real-world problem.
Something tells me the ongoing prejudice against Perl has a lot to do with organizations
Prejudice? You just clearly and concisely stated the reason for getting rid of Perl yourself. Of all the sins a programming language can commit, poor maintainability is probably the worst.
According to him Common Lisp is great but SBCL is not production ready and there is no free Common Lisp that is,
Of course not; I never claimed they were. They have pretty good compilers and garbage collectors, though, which is a good place to start.
I also did try learning CL, but I personally found it hard to find out how to write production code in Lisp - most of the examples on the web are all very nice for CS stuff (e.g. run this from emacs via slime) , but not real world stuff
All true--which is why I did not recommend that you actually use CommonLisp, and which is why it failed in the real world.
See, all the good compiler and language people went off doing one thing and all the real world people went off doing another thing, and the end result was two disasters: CommonLisp and Python/Perl/PHP etc.
Well, to be honest, I think the more likely resolution of this is systems like IronPython and Jython anyway. At least some of the language and runtime people eventually figured out that they were no good at the real world language stuff, so they created reasonably universal runtimes that people can now do their scripting languages on top of.
Your code is wrong and it is certainly not idiomatic.
More generally, using list comprehensions for side effects is just about the most awful programming style imaginable. Shame on you.
... What is the open-source alternative to Objective-C?
Well, obviously, the languages that people actually write Linux desktop apps in. Go have a look at them sometime.