The developer (the company, it is a work for hire) can take the code and distribute it. It meets all the criteria for Free Software that Richard Stallman sets out in the various bits of stuff he's written.
Ahh, you don't understand the definition of "Free Software" then. Free Software does not have to be distributed. The people who have the software must be free to run it for any purpose they choose, they must be free to study it to understand how it works, they must be free to give copies to whoever they choose and they must be free to modify it and give those modified copies to whoever they choose.
Software developed internally satisfies all of those criteria. A company generally doesn't choose to exercise its freedom to distribute but it certainly has that freedom.
You're trying to equate a physical product model with a software product model. The comparison is fundamentally flawed because the two models are fundamentally different.
It might well be that my point is that arguments comparing physical property to creative works (such as both my post and the parents) are flawed. But, it could just be that I'm stupid. You decide.:-)
Anyhow, I don't think the straight selling stuff model is totally broken. Sure you don't get a lock on it. But a whole lot of people are going to come to you to buy it because they know you're the original supplier and they want to support the work you're doing by buying it. It worked for NIN and Radiohead.
And fairness doesn't enter into it. What I'm really concerned with is what creates the greatest good for the greatest number. I don't think the incentivizing you to create stuff vs. artificially restricting people's ability to make copies tradeoff works out in copyright's favor anymore.
I am certain though, since people really want software, that some means of paying for its production will be arrived at. If people don't pay for its production, none will be produced and that will be a state of affairs that I doubt will last very long.
I am rather disappointed though in people's insistence that everything on the Android Market be free of charge.:-( Personally, I'd prefer a restriction that everything on there be under an OSI approved license and that some of it is offered in exchange for money.
Except that he's correct. More people do get paid to develop software that fits the definition of Free Software. I believe that's always been the case.
Every person who works in the IT shop of some company churning out custom solutions for that company is working on Free Software. There are a heck of a lot more people working in places like that than work for Microsoft or anybody else who's main business is producing software to be distributed.
Only people who develop software that way are worthy to write software that I'm willing to run. If not, they want a piece of my property (my computer) for themselves, and I do not condone such thieving ways.
You present a false and unsupported dichotomy between universal acceptance and people getting credit for their work (gee, I didn't know that Free Software authors didn't get credit for there work, it always seemed to me that they got LOTS more credit than most) or making money from it with something other than support.
I, personally, refuse to use most software that isn't free. It's not hard, and I don't miss the software who's agenda is to rope me in and get control over me.
If you read the article, he doesn't say that Firefox is not currently free. He says that it may not be, then gives a really excellent reason why this is so.
It's called 'being a customer'. That's what these freakish and weird entities called 'customers' do. They ask for you to support them in the choices they make. I know, it's a strange and bizarre concept. Those pesky customers should just be happy with what you decide in your great beneficence to give them, but strangely they always seem to want more.
I would generally not choose git because I think it is harder to use than several other distributed SCMs based on a very similar model. It is true that last I checked git was faster than any other one, but there is one that is pretty close to git in performance and is much easier to understand and use, and that's Mercurial.
You can actually still do that then if you like. The low bits aren't any more important than they were in a 32 bit pointer. It's mostly the high bits they were trying to keep people from abusing.
They did it because when applications start using pointer bits for stuff it restricts the range of the pointers and limits what the hardware people can do with them later. The designers of 64-bit platforms wanted to make sure that they would have free reign to extend pointers out to the full 64 bits over time without losing application compatibility.
At least, that's my guess.:-) There might well be other reasons for that design decision.
Ahh, that's an excellent reference, thank you.:-) So, yes, I will agree with you that it seems like a willingness to devote resources problem and not a code quality problem.
Though, IMHO, I don't think the re-write of the JIT should take more than a few months to a year. It's not like the instruction sets are that radically different. And they have a Sparc port as someone else pointed out, and that _is_ a radically different instruction set.
I agree that a version for the Solaris Sparc platform is a slight negative, but I bet that version is a 32-bit version as well.
There are liberties you can take when you can assume that some particular integer type and a pointer type are interchangeable, or that pointers have some particular internal structure. Most 64-bit platforms break all those assumptions.
In particular, on x86_64 the pointer is specifically structured so you can't steal either the high or low bits to represent some other sort of data. And the 'int' type in most compilers is still 32 bits, you have to use 'long' or even 'long long' to get a 64 bit integer type.
So, I think sloppy and bad programming practices are still the likely culprit.
My theory is that Adobe's Flash player is a horrible hack that is so utterly fragile and bug-ridden that Adobe can't actually make a 64-bit version without doing a full rewrite.
Oh, but Microsoft's public 'donations' are never without strings. They should be more appropriately be thought of as deep discounts on their products in order to foster lock-in.
So when those deep discounts are being given to governments, especially when those governments are contemplating the sovereignty issues inherent in being locked-in to a single vendor, you have to start wondering whether or not the word 'bribe' isn't more appropriate. Microsoft is basically using economic inducements to entice governments into making decisions that are not in the long-term best interests of the people they supposedly represent.
V4 to V6 mapping NAT is possible, but I haven't seen any good implementations. I suppose some might come into existence once this problem becomes more prevalent.
I find the idea of using that just bass ackwards. Why would you want all that ridiculous complexity when you don't have to have it?
As IPv4 addresses become scarce, people wanting to set up a random public website will be forced to use IPv6, even though it limits who can see it. Anybody who has IPv6 will be able to access that website, and anybody who doesn't won't. Some of those websites will be very useful and popular, at least in the limited community of people who can access them.
As time goes on, there will be both more of those websites and more people who can access them. The size of the IPv6 accessible network will get larger and larger while the IPv4 network remains rather static.
If a market develops in IPv4 addresses, what will eventually happen is that all public IPv4 addresses will lead to well establish public companies and anything new and innovative will happen in IPv6 first, where it's easy to get an address.
The number of available IPv4 addresses is running out, and that's a simple and obvious fact. I don't know how you think a public website will happen without a public IP address.
You can select on name, but https doesn't support that well. And that just sets it up so the companies that host the public IPv4 addresses will be able to decide what websites can exist which again will tend to make sure that the most innovative and interesting websites actually happen on IPv6 first.
Eventually it won't. In about 2.5 years IPv4 is going to be this island that can't communicate with a whole host of sites because they aren't IPv4 addressable because they can't get a public IPv4 address. And that problem island is going to get smaller and more disconnected as time goes on.
So, are you going to fix it now, or are you going to sit back and sneer about how useless it all is and wait for a crisis to actually bother to do anything?
All I see behind cries of 'NAT is enough' is some poor frightened IT geek who wants to act like a condescending know-it-all and is threatened by the idea that there might be something new to learn.
Re:The main problem with a professional organizati
on
Should IT Unionize?
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· Score: 1
I agree that bottom up is the way to go in almost anything, especially a union. That sounds like a good system.
Unfortunately, in the US, the large unions got lawmakers to pass a bunch of legislation about what is and isn't a union that the large employers also liked because it meant they could deal with an equal instead of the workers themselves. So, it doesn't really work that way here, though it would be nice if it did.
The main problem with a professional organization
on
Should IT Unionize?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Is that one of its first tasks will be to lobby for a law requiring that membership in it become mandatory for anybody practicing in the field. No thank you.
Unions are broken for very similar reasons. Basically, any large organization that claims to 'represent' you actually represents itself and only has your interests as a peripheral matter because appearing to cater to them is how it gets political power.
Another feature that ReiserFS4 can support is full transactions in your filesystem without using a journal. IMNSHO, ext2, 3 and 4 are dinosaur designs with booster rockets attached.
I want to stop having to have separate databases and filesystems. I want SQL to be a query language I can use to query (and modify) a well-structured filesystem. Having all that data stuffed into a big blob with a bizarre RPC API to access it seems all the wrong way to go.
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The developer (the company, it is a work for hire) can take the code and distribute it. It meets all the criteria for Free Software that Richard Stallman sets out in the various bits of stuff he's written.
Ahh, you don't understand the definition of "Free Software" then. Free Software does not have to be distributed. The people who have the software must be free to run it for any purpose they choose, they must be free to study it to understand how it works, they must be free to give copies to whoever they choose and they must be free to modify it and give those modified copies to whoever they choose.
Software developed internally satisfies all of those criteria. A company generally doesn't choose to exercise its freedom to distribute but it certainly has that freedom.
You're trying to equate a physical product model with a software product model. The comparison is fundamentally flawed because the two models are fundamentally different.
It might well be that my point is that arguments comparing physical property to creative works (such as both my post and the parents) are flawed. But, it could just be that I'm stupid. You decide. :-)
Anyhow, I don't think the straight selling stuff model is totally broken. Sure you don't get a lock on it. But a whole lot of people are going to come to you to buy it because they know you're the original supplier and they want to support the work you're doing by buying it. It worked for NIN and Radiohead.
And fairness doesn't enter into it. What I'm really concerned with is what creates the greatest good for the greatest number. I don't think the incentivizing you to create stuff vs. artificially restricting people's ability to make copies tradeoff works out in copyright's favor anymore.
I am certain though, since people really want software, that some means of paying for its production will be arrived at. If people don't pay for its production, none will be produced and that will be a state of affairs that I doubt will last very long.
I am rather disappointed though in people's insistence that everything on the Android Market be free of charge. :-( Personally, I'd prefer a restriction that everything on there be under an OSI approved license and that some of it is offered in exchange for money.
Except that he's correct. More people do get paid to develop software that fits the definition of Free Software. I believe that's always been the case.
Every person who works in the IT shop of some company churning out custom solutions for that company is working on Free Software. There are a heck of a lot more people working in places like that than work for Microsoft or anybody else who's main business is producing software to be distributed.
And you get to determine how much you will sell a copy of your software for and how that transaction takes place too.
Only people who develop software that way are worthy to write software that I'm willing to run. If not, they want a piece of my property (my computer) for themselves, and I do not condone such thieving ways.
You present a false and unsupported dichotomy between universal acceptance and people getting credit for their work (gee, I didn't know that Free Software authors didn't get credit for there work, it always seemed to me that they got LOTS more credit than most) or making money from it with something other than support.
I, personally, refuse to use most software that isn't free. It's not hard, and I don't miss the software who's agenda is to rope me in and get control over me.
If you read the article, he doesn't say that Firefox is not currently free. He says that it may not be, then gives a really excellent reason why this is so.
It's called 'being a customer'. That's what these freakish and weird entities called 'customers' do. They ask for you to support them in the choices they make. I know, it's a strange and bizarre concept. Those pesky customers should just be happy with what you decide in your great beneficence to give them, but strangely they always seem to want more.
It looks like then that they're well on their way to becoming a respected piece of enterprise software.
I would generally not choose git because I think it is harder to use than several other distributed SCMs based on a very similar model. It is true that last I checked git was faster than any other one, but there is one that is pretty close to git in performance and is much easier to understand and use, and that's Mercurial.
You can actually still do that then if you like. The low bits aren't any more important than they were in a 32 bit pointer. It's mostly the high bits they were trying to keep people from abusing.
They did it because when applications start using pointer bits for stuff it restricts the range of the pointers and limits what the hardware people can do with them later. The designers of 64-bit platforms wanted to make sure that they would have free reign to extend pointers out to the full 64 bits over time without losing application compatibility.
At least, that's my guess. :-) There might well be other reasons for that design decision.
Ahh, that's an excellent reference, thank you. :-) So, yes, I will agree with you that it seems like a willingness to devote resources problem and not a code quality problem.
Though, IMHO, I don't think the re-write of the JIT should take more than a few months to a year. It's not like the instruction sets are that radically different. And they have a Sparc port as someone else pointed out, and that _is_ a radically different instruction set.
I agree that a version for the Solaris Sparc platform is a slight negative, but I bet that version is a 32-bit version as well.
There are liberties you can take when you can assume that some particular integer type and a pointer type are interchangeable, or that pointers have some particular internal structure. Most 64-bit platforms break all those assumptions.
In particular, on x86_64 the pointer is specifically structured so you can't steal either the high or low bits to represent some other sort of data. And the 'int' type in most compilers is still 32 bits, you have to use 'long' or even 'long long' to get a 64 bit integer type.
So, I think sloppy and bad programming practices are still the likely culprit.
My theory is that Adobe's Flash player is a horrible hack that is so utterly fragile and bug-ridden that Adobe can't actually make a 64-bit version without doing a full rewrite.
Oh, but Microsoft's public 'donations' are never without strings. They should be more appropriately be thought of as deep discounts on their products in order to foster lock-in.
So when those deep discounts are being given to governments, especially when those governments are contemplating the sovereignty issues inherent in being locked-in to a single vendor, you have to start wondering whether or not the word 'bribe' isn't more appropriate. Microsoft is basically using economic inducements to entice governments into making decisions that are not in the long-term best interests of the people they supposedly represent.
I would be perfectly happy with this solution, and it's what I do on my network at home. I have a 6to4 address.
V4 to V6 mapping NAT is possible, but I haven't seen any good implementations. I suppose some might come into existence once this problem becomes more prevalent.
I find the idea of using that just bass ackwards. Why would you want all that ridiculous complexity when you don't have to have it?
As IPv4 addresses become scarce, people wanting to set up a random public website will be forced to use IPv6, even though it limits who can see it. Anybody who has IPv6 will be able to access that website, and anybody who doesn't won't. Some of those websites will be very useful and popular, at least in the limited community of people who can access them.
As time goes on, there will be both more of those websites and more people who can access them. The size of the IPv6 accessible network will get larger and larger while the IPv4 network remains rather static.
If a market develops in IPv4 addresses, what will eventually happen is that all public IPv4 addresses will lead to well establish public companies and anything new and innovative will happen in IPv6 first, where it's easy to get an address.
The number of available IPv4 addresses is running out, and that's a simple and obvious fact. I don't know how you think a public website will happen without a public IP address.
You can select on name, but https doesn't support that well. And that just sets it up so the companies that host the public IPv4 addresses will be able to decide what websites can exist which again will tend to make sure that the most innovative and interesting websites actually happen on IPv6 first.
Eventually it won't. In about 2.5 years IPv4 is going to be this island that can't communicate with a whole host of sites because they aren't IPv4 addressable because they can't get a public IPv4 address. And that problem island is going to get smaller and more disconnected as time goes on.
So, are you going to fix it now, or are you going to sit back and sneer about how useless it all is and wait for a crisis to actually bother to do anything?
All I see behind cries of 'NAT is enough' is some poor frightened IT geek who wants to act like a condescending know-it-all and is threatened by the idea that there might be something new to learn.
I agree that bottom up is the way to go in almost anything, especially a union. That sounds like a good system.
Unfortunately, in the US, the large unions got lawmakers to pass a bunch of legislation about what is and isn't a union that the large employers also liked because it meant they could deal with an equal instead of the workers themselves. So, it doesn't really work that way here, though it would be nice if it did.
Is that one of its first tasks will be to lobby for a law requiring that membership in it become mandatory for anybody practicing in the field. No thank you.
Unions are broken for very similar reasons. Basically, any large organization that claims to 'represent' you actually represents itself and only has your interests as a peripheral matter because appearing to cater to them is how it gets political power.
Another feature that ReiserFS4 can support is full transactions in your filesystem without using a journal. IMNSHO, ext2, 3 and 4 are dinosaur designs with booster rockets attached.
I want to stop having to have separate databases and filesystems. I want SQL to be a query language I can use to query (and modify) a well-structured filesystem. Having all that data stuffed into a big blob with a bizarre RPC API to access it seems all the wrong way to go.
So, bino as an improvement on the wino? I supposed it might make it smell less bad.