If you think syntax is the major thing you need to learn when picking up a new programming language, you are sadly mistaken. All the college when I was introduced to a new language I was given roughly a day to learn the syntactical structure.
Scheme and Smalltalk are much more than syntactically different. They are different in terms of the fundamental underpinnings of the language (although less so with Smalltalk).
Here's the huge syntactic difference you're refering to:
aBoolean ifTrue: [ b = a; ].
vs.
if (aBoolean) { b = a; }
Are you telling me that the average human being can't learn the syntactic difference is a matter of seconds? Certainly, there are larger conceptual differences underneath the hood, but the syntax is not what's killing you.
If you to concern yourself with the syntax, you should know that's Smalltalk's syntax was chosen to make it easily accessible for children, so to the extent that it's relevant it's BETTER suited to this particular task.
The presumption that young children of today are going to be doing C/C++ programming tomorrow is also pretty misleading. Based on the history of language cycles kids of today are as likely to be using C/C++ when they get out in the work force as I am of using Fortran and Cobol today.
64-bit matters if you want to do integer arithmetic with large numbers. For example, factoring large numbers with a 64-bit processor can be 4x as fast as with a 32-bit processor. Additionally, the Alpha and various other ISA's have very cool support for manipulating each of the bytes in a 64-bit register independantly. This is of course 2x as fast as doing it with a 32-bit register.;-)
A good chunk of what Intel did with MMX was to allow for faster operations on 64-bit integer values. While that didn't make MS Word go faster you will recal various multi-media routines (like Photoshop filters) got a pretty big benefit from it.
It's sad that people don't remember that Smalltalk has been specifically targetted since it's inception for teaching young kids. All the traits of Python that make it good for teaching come from Smalltalk. While Python is actively being developed for the classroom, Smalltalk has a proven track record with kids as young as kindergarten age. Smalltalk also has a more mature class library for kids to learn from and more mature tools.
I posted a reference to Squeak Earlier but it's not as "sexy" in the hacker community as Python, so I'm not moderated up to 5. I could care less about the moderation points, but I REALLY hope people try introducing their kids to programming through Squeak. I know both languages and my SO teaches young children, and I can tell you Smalltalk is the better way to go.
Squeak is your answer. It a free version of Smalltalk available on whatever platform you want. It's got excellent support for multimedia stuff, and it's nice and graphical. Kids get very immediate support. Smalltalk is actually very easy for kids to learn (they've introduced it in kindergarden classes) and allows them to define their own language and functions. Furthermore, it would instill in them good OO development practices from the beginning. OO is actually very intuitive to young kids, just not to programmers who've been hacking away at functional programing for n years.;-)
We should really take this offline... How does one exchange e-mail addresses on Slashdot without becoming victim to the SPAMmer hoards?
The stolen goods example wasn't necessarily equating pirated IP material with stolen goods. I was merely pointing out that knowingly profiting from criminal acts shouldn't allow you to take the moral high ground vs. committing those acts outright.
"If you feel strongly" isn't good enough. Lots of people "feel strongly" about wanting to kill someone.
The example of people with guns showing up at my doorstep is fairly far off topic, but the fact is we have laws that define was is legal and illegal to do in such circumstances. It'd be pretty easy (aside from winning the gunfight;-) to ensure that I managed to avoid doing anything that was illegal/that I didn't want to do.
The East India company was maniuplating the government and the legal system to their advantage. Based on the principles you're describing we should be having Boston Tea Parties at the corporate offices of most of the Fortune 500, as well as supporters of the major (and even minor really) industry lobby groups, not to mention the entire recording industry (there! back on topic!;-).
There are lots of other tried and true options for imposing your will on the system. Certainly, as a last resort, you can define your own government. There's a host of moral and ethical responsibilities you need to take in to account before you can do that though. Not the least of which are figuring out how that government will work and how it's going to interact with other governments in a way that isn't going to lead to war. You also damn well better live by the rules you're defining.
I'm sure history would be different if the Boston Tea Party had never happened, but the ends don't justify the means. It would have been pretty easy for the local tea business to picket, discouraging locals from buying East India tea. If successful, neither King George nor the East India company would have anything to gain by maintaining the unjust laws.
Imagine what might happen if nobody showed up at Metallica concerts and nobody would buy Metallica CD's. Might make the whole copyright issue moot right?
I guess your point about some pirates never having agreed to anything is valid. Someone in the Napster chain had to violate IP laws. The people who are taking advantage of them are doing in principle what is the same as buying stolen goods. I'll concede that it's a different issue though.
The problem with just randomly violating laws that are "unjust" is that the "justness" of a law is in the eye of the beholder. Presumably everyone who plees "not guilty" has a problem with how the law is being interpreted with their case. What if I feel it's "unjust" that I'm not allowed to kill people? What if I feel it's "unjust" to pay income taxes? Certainly there are people out there who would agree with those statements. Should they just ignore those laws or should they work within the system to change the laws?
The Declaration of Independence specifically describes the idea of replacing one government with another. The Boston Tea Party violated laws that were in place both before and after the American revolution. No where have I seen a law that says, "if taxed goods show up on the shores of this place the goods shall be destroyed forthwith".;-) If the intent was merely to switch to a new form of government where the local people had a say in the taxes they paid, there was no need to destroy property which belonged to a 3rd party. Sure, said 3rd party was profiting from the existing laws, but I'm sure they would have been happy to continue to sell tea under the new laws as well (perhaps not as happy, but still happy;-).
Governments and rules of law can usually be changed without doing damage to anything other than the governments and laws themselves. Even in exceptional cases it's pretty easy to avoid hurting parties that aren't involved in the enforcement of such laws.
Using Napster as you described may not in fact be a violation of copyright law, nor is sharing music, so long as you do it the right way.
I think it's pretty easy to say that if an artist says, "these are the terms under which I'm performing for you" and you accept those terms, and then violate them, that you have to question what your moral foundation is. Now, if an artist says they aren't making any claim on some music and you decide to share it, that's a different story. You can argue whether the artist should be allowed to impose those restrictions on you, but that should be argued, not ignored.
Rosa Park's actions and similar forms of civil disobedience are extreme measures, and they are always based on the principle of forcing discussion of an issue (typically in a court of law).
I'll take your point though that if you feel a law is unjust that one option is to simply refuse to do anything. However, if you think there is a problem with a law providing additional rights to "IP owners", that should take the form of refusing to impose those restricitions on IP that the law would say you own and in refusing to have anything to do with IP which comes burdened with those restrictions.
And yes, I do think the Boston Tea Party was a criminal act that could and should have been handled differently. It doesn't mean that the cause was unjust, but the means were.
This had all the elements of tabloid journalism. They were comparing two things which are so fundamentally different, refering to future incarnations of either (what has OS9 has better Internet security because it doesn't have a Unix foundation, and OS X has better Internet support because it is built on a Unix base... so MacOS is really the best of both world's right?;-), and doing it all in paragraph long analysis pieces.
Obvious pieces of insanity: Yes the MacOS comes preinstalled, but if you are upgrading to MacOS9 from MacOS8 you still need to go through an installation process. Corel Linux can be had preinstalled on several systems. Password protection of files and "seperate storage space" is not an interface feature, but either way, the Mac has nothing new in this area that wasn't available for Linux. Similarly, the Mac Find doesn't read PC and Mac disks, the OS does. That being said, I *thought* Corel Linux could do the same, certainly other Linux's can. Associations between documents and applications are handled on Linux using MIME types, and it's about as easy to set up. Of course, on Linux you don't crash the system if the setup is wrong.;-) Unique profiles is a sophisticated Mac feature!?!! PLEASE! This has been around on most other platforms for decades. While Apple does have integrated voice recognition support, I've yet to hear of anyone who has successfully used it. Almost everyone I know turns it off. The Mac's application support is impressive, but it's a crumbling base. Comparing the choice of Internet applications is very relevant and the Mac's are just pathetic. Who said Linux's best database was Paradox anyway? I'll take Oracle, DB/2, Informix, Sybase or Postgres over Filemaker any day. With the exception of FireWire, Linux supports basically every device that is supported on the Mac (the exception would be printers, where Linux still leads because it supports a wide variety of printers instead of QuickDraw, Postscript, and certain HP PCL printers). Indeed, I've always used the "Mac compatibility" test as a good guideline for whether something will work with Linux. What is the problem with a multifunction fax/printer/scanner? I thought those worked fine with Linux.
But finally, the craziest has to be the Internet support issue. Linux actually has more browsers than the Mac. Linux also supports QuickTime (limited to certain codecs for sure), RealPlayer, and MP3 no problem. Evidence that the Love Bug virus didn't effect the Mac is not proof of it's security, as it also didn't affect Linux. Lotus Notes is not an Internet product, and to the extent that it is (as a browser, NNTP and SMTP server), Linux has far more choices. The MacOS's lack of proper memory protection means that any plug-in or whatever that you install could potentially be sending all your passwords to some remote location. I could go on forever on the Internet thing. This was just laughable.
Thank god the people who developed HTTP, NFS, AFS, LDAP, and FTP didn't have the same attitude.;-) Seriously, Gnapster is just a poor implementation of distributed file sharing solutions which have been around for decades. Technologically there is nothing new here. The only thing that's new is how it's being used, so being the clever programmer who said "no, I won't build this" doesn't accomplish a damn thing. Perhaps being the business/marketing person who says, "no, I won't do this" might make a difference, though likely not.
Technology by it's very nature causes change in the status quo. This tends to upset a lot of business, legal, societal, etc. models. To suggest that the fact that the status quo deserves protection of this nature is crazy. As we learn more, we have to change the model of how we operate as a society to match. To do otherwise would bring us back to the Luddites.
I think it's merely the opportunists out there (or as Larry Wall described them "Persons of leisurely moral growth") who think it's a good thing to pirate music.
Yes, GNU and people like RMS have serious problems with copyright law as it applies to software, and RMS has said he has similar problems with regard to musical recordings. However, just because you think a law is stupid doesn't mean you break it (c.f. chaos;-). No, you do what RMS did: you live as close as possible to the way you want to live WITHIN the laws that exist, and campaign furiously to have the laws changed.
Let's face it though: copyright law does need to be revised. I don't know if it needs to be thrown out or not, but certainly the terms under which it came into existence don't match those of today. The original copyright law was put in place to protect publishers because the cost of publishing material was very expensive and they simply wouldn't make the investment in the first place if the investment somehow wasn't protected.
Fast forward to today: members of the RIAA are really not "music publishers", at least in terms of what their core compitency. If they were focused on publishing, than things like MP3 and such would be welcomed with open arms because they reduce the cost of publishing. No, the RIAA members are mostly packagers/marketers of music. No slight against them, as certainly there's a lot of sunken costs involved in doing what they do (it's just that actually pressing the CD's is not a big part of it). Certainly THEY want to protect those investments.
However, if we look at the origins of copyright law, when it was put in place there was a net benefit to the public: more books got published because publishers felt their investment was protected. Fast forward to today: more music gets packaged/marketed???? Do we really need that? Do we need it so bad that it's worth giving up some basic rights? I guess the answer is somewhat debatable, although I certainly don't see one side of the debate.
Regardless, the nature of what copyright is protecting has changed tremendously, and to that end it's worth revisiting the whole thing. I guess the DCMA was an attempt to do that, but the problem was that it started from the perspective that these copyrights had to be protected, and it's only real goal was to extend the protection of copyrights in the face of the technilogical "adversity" which was increasingly making them irrelavent.
Technology made copyright relevant in the first place, it's sad that lawmakers aren't recognizing that it's increasingly irrelvant.
So, just to make certain I understand what you are saying.... the onus is on everyone else to make sure that technology never makes it easy to bypass copyright laws which were put in place because technology made it expensive to publish books.... even if we aren't talking about books?
Dell's argument about the supply chain is laughable at this point. Over the past year we've had i820 delays, i820 bugs, i820 bugs again causing a recall, processor delays (although generally speaking not critical ones), and processor shortages from Intel. From AMD we've had... a lot of CPU's!;-) Admittedly their Irongate Chipset has been far from ideal, but once you throw VIA into the mix, things look a lot better.
Seriously, AMD's record over the past decade hasn't been great, but over the last year it appears to be much better than Intel's. If supply was really the issue I'd think at this point Dell would have taken the initiative and dabbled a bit with AMD (nobody says you have to commit your entire product line to AMD chips).
Fibre channel is cool, but I still don't see how the gigabit ethernet speeds things up. You aren't going to be able to get much more than 100MB/sec in even the most ideal conditions.
While this sounds nice, one can accomplish the same with with a SCSI raid. It's possible to have multiple SCSI host adaptors on a SCSI bus. I've seen this done with several clustering solutions. Then you just have to decide which machine will actually update the filesystem.;-)
Of course, I do seem to recall that ext2fs had some problems with this approach, I just can't remember what they are. The thing is SCSI will give you much better performance than anything running over IP.
I'm confused here. Aside from the typical NAS benefits that one can get out there, I don't see why the configuration you're discussing would have advantages over using SCSI-RAID systems. SCSI has more bandwidth, and while you can do a lot of protocol processing on fancy NIC cards, you can't compare to not having to have to handle an IP stack (the SCSI protocol is MUCH lower overhead).
Additionally, you get to deal with all the locking fun that NFS brings to the table and the fact that Linux's NFS code is still a bit slower and less stable than it should be.
Sure, NAS frees up a lot of CPU compared to IDE, but a fancy SCSI RAID controller should give you crazy performance, and allow for more efficient file I/O techniques.
If NSI owns a domain name that *I* have a trademark for, they're in BIG trouble. Based on prior court cases it's established that it's trademark infringement to own a domain name which is the same/similar to a trademark. Oh, this is going to be fun....;-)
Having the ability to access a language's meta-acces-protocol to make the language behave differently is not an indication that a language follows a particular philosophy. Perl is actually a great example of this. Are SCOS and CLOS really Scheme and Lisp or are they languages in their own right?
Secondly, I think you misunderstand the notions of OOP. OOP doesn't necessarily involve message passing. Certainly, that is how Smalltalk works, but it's not a requirement for OOP. Even in Smalltalk, all messages have a "receiver", which is a single object. Smalltalk code typically uses a mechanism called "ping-pong" to allow two objects to "talk amongst yourselves" as you describe.
In C++ you could define the behavior of the "=" operator outside of either class, and that would be basically what you're talking about. It sounds to me like in this case you really want to use a "function object" to implement your "equals" behavior. This is entirely possible in almost every OOP I can think of. Sure, the syntactic "=" is not implemented this way, but you can create your own Equals class which handles this.
Objective-C is as much a "grafted" OO language as C++. Admittedly C++ has lots of other things which have nothing to do with OO.
Java is not a language with OO "grafted" on to it. Just try writing a program without using a class. Try writing a program that does anything useful without using an object.;-)
Lisp is not an OO language, it's a functional language. CLOS is, but of course, that's a case of grafting.
There is nothing that's inherently wrong with using a VM to execute a program. Indeed, Transmeta's approach suggests it's even of benefit to the hardware guys.
Sun's Hotspot VM is based on a project that did type infrencing to improve performance. The results were much more impressive for Smalltalk, and were quite easy to achieve.
The GNOME project using a Corba ORB to bundle up bits of code into objects. Given that most of the GNOME team is writing code in C, they seem to be demonstrating a fair degree of comfort with objects while being procedural programmers.
Ok, now that we've cleaned up all that stuff, a few comments. First off, there is no question that OO programming is a different way of thinking than procedural programming. That being said, most good procedural programming follows basic OO techniques (i.e. in C this is done using structures which include pointers to functions). Indeed, the Linux kernel has tons of examples of this. So it's really just that OO programming is structured to leverage good design skills. Indeed, once you have some experience doing OO, most skilled developers find it much faster to put together a prototype with say, Smalltalk, than with a non-OO approach.
Actually, I think the EU is quite effective in providing leverage to Eurpoeans vs. multinationals that are limited to Europe. The problem is, that's not big enough.
You need governments with global juridictions, otherwise, multinationals just go outside the jurisdiction.
I hear your argument about bodies created for very specific purposes. I think the kind of things you need are bodies which have fairly "universal" derectives. These are the kinds of things we can hopefully all agree on (admittedly, that's not a lot). The U.N. in theory exists for this purpose, but it has no teeth, and furthermore does not have an even handed power structure.
Java can do this for you. It will let you talk to CORBA (and COM). It uses JDBC which is basically a Java equiavalent to ODBC (indeed there is a JDBC-ODBC bridge). Java is fairly easy to learn for C++ people.
On top of that, if you get in to J2EE then you reach the level were you don't have to worry about the database at all, where your own objects can be distributed, and where you can embed Java into web pages.
Corpratism is really about multinationals. In my opinion, companies who's reach is limited to a single country, no matter how large, very much operate at the whim of that country (unless I guess they have the option of going somewhere else, which makes them pseudo-multinational).
The problem with the multinationals is not that they're businesses, but that they can play countries off against each other. "You won't let us operate tax free with slave labour? Fine, we'll go somewhere else that does?" "Your people won't buy our cheaper products because they aren't made in your country and we don't put anything back in to the local economy? Fine, we'll go elsewhere?" Frankly, I can't blame the multinationals for doing what they do: they are essentially playing by the rules that have been set for them.
The thing is, on the political front, people are so afraid of "the New World Order" and concerned about protecting the "sovereignty of nations", that the notion of having multinational governmental bodies with real teeth (i.e. enforcement power) is just not possible these days. I have no idea why people think it's ok to have multinational companies but not multinational governmental bodies. It doesn't make any sense to me.
The truth is, the sovereignty of nations is being continually reduced, and without some form of body who's got power beyond that scope, you just create a vacuum. Instead of doing something about it, countries are sadly trying to shore up their "sovereignty" and at the same time allowing the corporations to play a "divide-and-conquer" game with them.
Countries try to limit access to the Internet. They try to establish strong trade tarifs. They try to impose "cultral protection" laws. The fact is, there are lots of things that are global. Here's some basic examples:
1) The Environment. Until countires accept the fact that they have negligable control over the environment in their net territories, they will forever be stuck doing piecemeal environmental controls which probably have more impact on their neighbors than on themselves.
2) Nuclear Arms. Trying to limit the know how about how to assemble one of these is a joke. Currently you can control access to nuclear materials to a limited degree, but there is no reason to imagine this will continue forever. Under current conditions, all it takes is one nuclear power's political/police/military structure collapsing (and we know that never happens right?;-) and the whole world is at risk.
3) Work Conditions. The unions are some of the biggest opponents to "big government", and yet they know damn well it's increasingly easy to have work done anywhere in the world (i.e. whichever country will make the most concessions).
4) Human rights abuses. Serbia is a wonderful example of this: massive human rights abuses can occur so long as you can play off different nations against each other. Imagine if a serial killer could be certain roam free as long as he could keep the various police departments in the world fighting amongst themselves.
I could go on.
Americans should look back to their history. They'll remember a time when some foreign nationals showed up on the doorsteps of the natives of this land. The natives were divided into small warring tribes with no single voice to represent their collective needs. The foreign nationals simply executed a convincing "divide-and-conquor" strategy that allowed them to commit agregious offenses while ensuring minimal retaliation. Europeans just need to look back 60 years to a leader who was able to commit shameless acts while various other nations quibbled about and worried about protecting their own back yard.
Hey, international governmental bodies scare the heck out of me too. National governments do too. The thing is, they scare me a lot less than the alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think syntax is the major thing you need to learn when picking up a new programming language, you are sadly mistaken. All the college when I was introduced to a new language I was given roughly a day to learn the syntactical structure.
Scheme and Smalltalk are much more than syntactically different. They are different in terms of the fundamental underpinnings of the language (although less so with Smalltalk).
Here's the huge syntactic difference you're refering to:
aBoolean ifTrue: [
b = a;
].
vs.
if (aBoolean) {
b = a;
}
Are you telling me that the average human being can't learn the syntactic difference is a matter of seconds? Certainly, there are larger conceptual differences underneath the hood, but the syntax is not what's killing you.
If you to concern yourself with the syntax, you should know that's Smalltalk's syntax was chosen to make it easily accessible for children, so to the extent that it's relevant it's BETTER suited to this particular task.
The presumption that young children of today are going to be doing C/C++ programming tomorrow is also pretty misleading. Based on the history of language cycles kids of today are as likely to be using C/C++ when they get out in the work force as I am of using Fortran and Cobol today.
64-bits is not just about addressing memory.
;-)
64-bit matters if you want to do integer arithmetic with large numbers. For example, factoring large numbers with a 64-bit processor can be 4x as fast as with a 32-bit processor. Additionally, the Alpha and various other ISA's have very cool support for manipulating each of the bytes in a 64-bit register independantly. This is of course 2x as fast as doing it with a 32-bit register.
A good chunk of what Intel did with MMX was to allow for faster operations on 64-bit integer values. While that didn't make MS Word go faster you will recal various multi-media routines (like Photoshop filters) got a pretty big benefit from it.
Oops, I forgot to mention... it's also open source.
It's sad that people don't remember that Smalltalk has been specifically targetted since it's inception for teaching young kids. All the traits of Python that make it good for teaching come from Smalltalk. While Python is actively being developed for the classroom, Smalltalk has a proven track record with kids as young as kindergarten age. Smalltalk also has a more mature class library for kids to learn from and more mature tools.
I posted a reference to Squeak Earlier but it's not as "sexy" in the hacker community as Python, so I'm not moderated up to 5. I could care less about the moderation points, but I REALLY hope people try introducing their kids to programming through Squeak. I know both languages and my SO teaches young children, and I can tell you Smalltalk is the better way to go.
Squeak is your answer. It a free version of Smalltalk available on whatever platform you want. It's got excellent support for multimedia stuff, and it's nice and graphical. Kids get very immediate support. Smalltalk is actually very easy for kids to learn (they've introduced it in kindergarden classes) and allows them to define their own language and functions. Furthermore, it would instill in them good OO development practices from the beginning. OO is actually very intuitive to young kids, just not to programmers who've been hacking away at functional programing for n years. ;-)
We should really take this offline... How does one exchange e-mail addresses on Slashdot without becoming victim to the SPAMmer hoards?
;-) to ensure that I managed to avoid doing anything that was illegal/that I didn't want to do.
;-).
The stolen goods example wasn't necessarily equating pirated IP material with stolen goods. I was merely pointing out that knowingly profiting from criminal acts shouldn't allow you to take the moral high ground vs. committing those acts outright.
"If you feel strongly" isn't good enough. Lots of people "feel strongly" about wanting to kill someone.
The example of people with guns showing up at my doorstep is fairly far off topic, but the fact is we have laws that define was is legal and illegal to do in such circumstances. It'd be pretty easy (aside from winning the gunfight
The East India company was maniuplating the government and the legal system to their advantage. Based on the principles you're describing we should be having Boston Tea Parties at the corporate offices of most of the Fortune 500, as well as supporters of the major (and even minor really) industry lobby groups, not to mention the entire recording industry (there! back on topic!
There are lots of other tried and true options for imposing your will on the system. Certainly, as a last resort, you can define your own government. There's a host of moral and ethical responsibilities you need to take in to account before you can do that though. Not the least of which are figuring out how that government will work and how it's going to interact with other governments in a way that isn't going to lead to war. You also damn well better live by the rules you're defining.
I'm sure history would be different if the Boston Tea Party had never happened, but the ends don't justify the means. It would have been pretty easy for the local tea business to picket, discouraging locals from buying East India tea. If successful, neither King George nor the East India company would have anything to gain by maintaining the unjust laws.
Imagine what might happen if nobody showed up at Metallica concerts and nobody would buy Metallica CD's. Might make the whole copyright issue moot right?
I guess your point about some pirates never having agreed to anything is valid. Someone in the Napster chain had to violate IP laws. The people who are taking advantage of them are doing in principle what is the same as buying stolen goods. I'll concede that it's a different issue though.
;-) If the intent was merely to switch to a new form of government where the local people had a say in the taxes they paid, there was no need to destroy property which belonged to a 3rd party. Sure, said 3rd party was profiting from the existing laws, but I'm sure they would have been happy to continue to sell tea under the new laws as well (perhaps not as happy, but still happy ;-).
The problem with just randomly violating laws that are "unjust" is that the "justness" of a law is in the eye of the beholder. Presumably everyone who plees "not guilty" has a problem with how the law is being interpreted with their case. What if I feel it's "unjust" that I'm not allowed to kill people? What if I feel it's "unjust" to pay income taxes? Certainly there are people out there who would agree with those statements. Should they just ignore those laws or should they work within the system to change the laws?
The Declaration of Independence specifically describes the idea of replacing one government with another. The Boston Tea Party violated laws that were in place both before and after the American revolution. No where have I seen a law that says, "if taxed goods show up on the shores of this place the goods shall be destroyed forthwith".
Governments and rules of law can usually be changed without doing damage to anything other than the governments and laws themselves. Even in exceptional cases it's pretty easy to avoid hurting parties that aren't involved in the enforcement of such laws.
Using Napster as you described may not in fact be a violation of copyright law, nor is sharing music, so long as you do it the right way.
I think it's pretty easy to say that if an artist says, "these are the terms under which I'm performing for you" and you accept those terms, and then violate them, that you have to question what your moral foundation is. Now, if an artist says they aren't making any claim on some music and you decide to share it, that's a different story. You can argue whether the artist should be allowed to impose those restrictions on you, but that should be argued, not ignored.
Rosa Park's actions and similar forms of civil disobedience are extreme measures, and they are always based on the principle of forcing discussion of an issue (typically in a court of law).
I'll take your point though that if you feel a law is unjust that one option is to simply refuse to do anything. However, if you think there is a problem with a law providing additional rights to "IP owners", that should take the form of refusing to impose those restricitions on IP that the law would say you own and in refusing to have anything to do with IP which comes burdened with those restrictions.
And yes, I do think the Boston Tea Party was a criminal act that could and should have been handled differently. It doesn't mean that the cause was unjust, but the means were.
This had all the elements of tabloid journalism. They were comparing two things which are so fundamentally different, refering to future incarnations of either (what has OS9 has better Internet security because it doesn't have a Unix foundation, and OS X has better Internet support because it is built on a Unix base... so MacOS is really the best of both world's right? ;-), and doing it all in paragraph long analysis pieces.
;-) Unique profiles is a sophisticated Mac feature!?!! PLEASE! This has been around on most other platforms for decades. While Apple does have integrated voice recognition support, I've yet to hear of anyone who has successfully used it. Almost everyone I know turns it off. The Mac's application support is impressive, but it's a crumbling base. Comparing the choice of Internet applications is very relevant and the Mac's are just pathetic. Who said Linux's best database was Paradox anyway? I'll take Oracle, DB/2, Informix, Sybase or Postgres over Filemaker any day. With the exception of FireWire, Linux supports basically every device that is supported on the Mac (the exception would be printers, where Linux still leads because it supports a wide variety of printers instead of QuickDraw, Postscript, and certain HP PCL printers). Indeed, I've always used the "Mac compatibility" test as a good guideline for whether something will work with Linux. What is the problem with a multifunction fax/printer/scanner? I thought those worked fine with Linux.
Obvious pieces of insanity: Yes the MacOS comes preinstalled, but if you are upgrading to MacOS9 from MacOS8 you still need to go through an installation process. Corel Linux can be had preinstalled on several systems. Password protection of files and "seperate storage space" is not an interface feature, but either way, the Mac has nothing new in this area that wasn't available for Linux. Similarly, the Mac Find doesn't read PC and Mac disks, the OS does. That being said, I *thought* Corel Linux could do the same, certainly other Linux's can. Associations between documents and applications are handled on Linux using MIME types, and it's about as easy to set up. Of course, on Linux you don't crash the system if the setup is wrong.
But finally, the craziest has to be the Internet support issue. Linux actually has more browsers than the Mac. Linux also supports QuickTime (limited to certain codecs for sure), RealPlayer, and MP3 no problem. Evidence that the Love Bug virus didn't effect the Mac is not proof of it's security, as it also didn't affect Linux. Lotus Notes is not an Internet product, and to the extent that it is (as a browser, NNTP and SMTP server), Linux has far more choices. The MacOS's lack of proper memory protection means that any plug-in or whatever that you install could potentially be sending all your passwords to some remote location. I could go on forever on the Internet thing. This was just laughable.
Thank god the people who developed HTTP, NFS, AFS, LDAP, and FTP didn't have the same attitude. ;-) Seriously, Gnapster is just a poor implementation of distributed file sharing solutions which have been around for decades. Technologically there is nothing new here. The only thing that's new is how it's being used, so being the clever programmer who said "no, I won't build this" doesn't accomplish a damn thing. Perhaps being the business/marketing person who says, "no, I won't do this" might make a difference, though likely not.
Technology by it's very nature causes change in the status quo. This tends to upset a lot of business, legal, societal, etc. models. To suggest that the fact that the status quo deserves protection of this nature is crazy. As we learn more, we have to change the model of how we operate as a society to match. To do otherwise would bring us back to the Luddites.
I think it's merely the opportunists out there (or as Larry Wall described them "Persons of leisurely moral growth") who think it's a good thing to pirate music.
;-). No, you do what RMS did: you live as close as possible to the way you want to live WITHIN the laws that exist, and campaign furiously to have the laws changed.
Yes, GNU and people like RMS have serious problems with copyright law as it applies to software, and RMS has said he has similar problems with regard to musical recordings. However, just because you think a law is stupid doesn't mean you break it (c.f. chaos
Let's face it though: copyright law does need to be revised. I don't know if it needs to be thrown out or not, but certainly the terms under which it came into existence don't match those of today. The original copyright law was put in place to protect publishers because the cost of publishing material was very expensive and they simply wouldn't make the investment in the first place if the investment somehow wasn't protected.
Fast forward to today: members of the RIAA are really not "music publishers", at least in terms of what their core compitency. If they were focused on publishing, than things like MP3 and such would be welcomed with open arms because they reduce the cost of publishing. No, the RIAA members are mostly packagers/marketers of music. No slight against them, as certainly there's a lot of sunken costs involved in doing what they do (it's just that actually pressing the CD's is not a big part of it). Certainly THEY want to protect those investments.
However, if we look at the origins of copyright law, when it was put in place there was a net benefit to the public: more books got published because publishers felt their investment was protected. Fast forward to today: more music gets packaged/marketed???? Do we really need that? Do we need it so bad that it's worth giving up some basic rights? I guess the answer is somewhat debatable, although I certainly don't see one side of the debate.
Regardless, the nature of what copyright is protecting has changed tremendously, and to that end it's worth revisiting the whole thing. I guess the DCMA was an attempt to do that, but the problem was that it started from the perspective that these copyrights had to be protected, and it's only real goal was to extend the protection of copyrights in the face of the technilogical "adversity" which was increasingly making them irrelavent.
Technology made copyright relevant in the first place, it's sad that lawmakers aren't recognizing that it's increasingly irrelvant.
So, just to make certain I understand what you are saying.... the onus is on everyone else to make sure that technology never makes it easy to bypass copyright laws which were put in place because technology made it expensive to publish books.... even if we aren't talking about books?
Perhaps I misunderstand the question, but isn't this what NAS is all about?
Dell's argument about the supply chain is laughable at this point. Over the past year we've had i820 delays, i820 bugs, i820 bugs again causing a recall, processor delays (although generally speaking not critical ones), and processor shortages from Intel. From AMD we've had... a lot of CPU's! ;-) Admittedly their Irongate Chipset has been far from ideal, but once you throw VIA into the mix, things look a lot better.
Seriously, AMD's record over the past decade hasn't been great, but over the last year it appears to be much better than Intel's. If supply was really the issue I'd think at this point Dell would have taken the initiative and dabbled a bit with AMD (nobody says you have to commit your entire product line to AMD chips).
Because mostly what it demonstrates is the benefit of the MicroQuill heap. ;-)
Fibre channel is cool, but I still don't see how the gigabit ethernet speeds things up. You aren't going to be able to get much more than 100MB/sec in even the most ideal conditions.
While this sounds nice, one can accomplish the same with with a SCSI raid. It's possible to have multiple SCSI host adaptors on a SCSI bus. I've seen this done with several clustering solutions. Then you just have to decide which machine will actually update the filesystem. ;-)
Of course, I do seem to recall that ext2fs had some problems with this approach, I just can't remember what they are. The thing is SCSI will give you much better performance than anything running over IP.
I'm confused here. Aside from the typical NAS benefits that one can get out there, I don't see why the configuration you're discussing would have advantages over using SCSI-RAID systems. SCSI has more bandwidth, and while you can do a lot of protocol processing on fancy NIC cards, you can't compare to not having to have to handle an IP stack (the SCSI protocol is MUCH lower overhead).
Additionally, you get to deal with all the locking fun that NFS brings to the table and the fact that Linux's NFS code is still a bit slower and less stable than it should be.
Sure, NAS frees up a lot of CPU compared to IDE, but a fancy SCSI RAID controller should give you crazy performance, and allow for more efficient file I/O techniques.
If NSI owns a domain name that *I* have a trademark for, they're in BIG trouble. Based on prior court cases it's established that it's trademark infringement to own a domain name which is the same/similar to a trademark. Oh, this is going to be fun.... ;-)
Having the ability to access a language's meta-acces-protocol to make the language behave differently is not an indication that a language follows a particular philosophy. Perl is actually a great example of this. Are SCOS and CLOS really Scheme and Lisp or are they languages in their own right?
Secondly, I think you misunderstand the notions of OOP. OOP doesn't necessarily involve message passing. Certainly, that is how Smalltalk works, but it's not a requirement for OOP. Even in Smalltalk, all messages have a "receiver", which is a single object. Smalltalk code typically uses a mechanism called "ping-pong" to allow two objects to "talk amongst yourselves" as you describe.
In C++ you could define the behavior of the "=" operator outside of either class, and that would be basically what you're talking about. It sounds to me like in this case you really want to use a "function object" to implement your "equals" behavior. This is entirely possible in almost every OOP I can think of. Sure, the syntactic "=" is not implemented this way, but you can create your own Equals class which handles this.
Actually, parametric polymorphism handles this as well. A good example of this would be ML.
- Objective-C is as much a "grafted" OO language as C++. Admittedly C++ has lots of other things which have nothing to do with OO.
- Java is not a language with OO "grafted" on to it. Just try writing a program without using a class. Try writing a program that does anything useful without using an object.;-)
- Lisp is not an OO language, it's a functional language. CLOS is, but of course, that's a case of grafting.
- There is nothing that's inherently wrong with using a VM to execute a program. Indeed, Transmeta's approach suggests it's even of benefit to the hardware guys.
- Sun's Hotspot VM is based on a project that did type infrencing to improve performance. The results were much more impressive for Smalltalk, and were quite easy to achieve.
- The GNOME project using a Corba ORB to bundle up bits of code into objects. Given that most of the GNOME team is writing code in C, they seem to be demonstrating a fair degree of comfort with objects while being procedural programmers.
Ok, now that we've cleaned up all that stuff, a few comments. First off, there is no question that OO programming is a different way of thinking than procedural programming. That being said, most good procedural programming follows basic OO techniques (i.e. in C this is done using structures which include pointers to functions). Indeed, the Linux kernel has tons of examples of this. So it's really just that OO programming is structured to leverage good design skills. Indeed, once you have some experience doing OO, most skilled developers find it much faster to put together a prototype with say, Smalltalk, than with a non-OO approach.Actually, I think the EU is quite effective in providing leverage to Eurpoeans vs. multinationals that are limited to Europe. The problem is, that's not big enough.
You need governments with global juridictions, otherwise, multinationals just go outside the jurisdiction.
I hear your argument about bodies created for very specific purposes. I think the kind of things you need are bodies which have fairly "universal" derectives. These are the kinds of things we can hopefully all agree on (admittedly, that's not a lot). The U.N. in theory exists for this purpose, but it has no teeth, and furthermore does not have an even handed power structure.
Java can do this for you. It will let you talk to CORBA (and COM). It uses JDBC which is basically a Java equiavalent to ODBC (indeed there is a JDBC-ODBC bridge). Java is fairly easy to learn for C++ people.
On top of that, if you get in to J2EE then you reach the level were you don't have to worry about the database at all, where your own objects can be distributed, and where you can embed Java into web pages.
Seriously, give it a whirl.
Corpratism is really about multinationals. In my opinion, companies who's reach is limited to a single country, no matter how large, very much operate at the whim of that country (unless I guess they have the option of going somewhere else, which makes them pseudo-multinational).
;-) and the whole world is at risk.
The problem with the multinationals is not that they're businesses, but that they can play countries off against each other. "You won't let us operate tax free with slave labour? Fine, we'll go somewhere else that does?" "Your people won't buy our cheaper products because they aren't made in your country and we don't put anything back in to the local economy? Fine, we'll go elsewhere?" Frankly, I can't blame the multinationals for doing what they do: they are essentially playing by the rules that have been set for them.
The thing is, on the political front, people are so afraid of "the New World Order" and concerned about protecting the "sovereignty of nations", that the notion of having multinational governmental bodies with real teeth (i.e. enforcement power) is just not possible these days. I have no idea why people think it's ok to have multinational companies but not multinational governmental bodies. It doesn't make any sense to me.
The truth is, the sovereignty of nations is being continually reduced, and without some form of body who's got power beyond that scope, you just create a vacuum. Instead of doing something about it, countries are sadly trying to shore up their "sovereignty" and at the same time allowing the corporations to play a "divide-and-conquer" game with them.
Countries try to limit access to the Internet. They try to establish strong trade tarifs. They try to impose "cultral protection" laws. The fact is, there are lots of things that are global. Here's some basic examples:
1) The Environment. Until countires accept the fact that they have negligable control over the environment in their net territories, they will forever be stuck doing piecemeal environmental controls which probably have more impact on their neighbors than on themselves.
2) Nuclear Arms. Trying to limit the know how about how to assemble one of these is a joke. Currently you can control access to nuclear materials to a limited degree, but there is no reason to imagine this will continue forever. Under current conditions, all it takes is one nuclear power's political/police/military structure collapsing (and we know that never happens right?
3) Work Conditions. The unions are some of the biggest opponents to "big government", and yet they know damn well it's increasingly easy to have work done anywhere in the world (i.e. whichever country will make the most concessions).
4) Human rights abuses. Serbia is a wonderful example of this: massive human rights abuses can occur so long as you can play off different nations against each other. Imagine if a serial killer could be certain roam free as long as he could keep the various police departments in the world fighting amongst themselves.
I could go on.
Americans should look back to their history. They'll remember a time when some foreign nationals showed up on the doorsteps of the natives of this land. The natives were divided into small warring tribes with no single voice to represent their collective needs. The foreign nationals simply executed a convincing "divide-and-conquor" strategy that allowed them to commit agregious offenses while ensuring minimal retaliation. Europeans just need to look back 60 years to a leader who was able to commit shameless acts while various other nations quibbled about and worried about protecting their own back yard.
Hey, international governmental bodies scare the heck out of me too. National governments do too. The thing is, they scare me a lot less than the alternatives.