That's a Windows x86 compiler, not a Win32 platform compiler - meaning that it's not very useful for production development code, since the Win32 support in gcc is very much a work-in-progress, last I checked.
"Uh, excuse me, but there aren't many poor GPL Linux programmers these days. Is this a particular personal income problem?"
Presumably one would think that based on the rhetoric on fsf.org that the end goal of all of this is to abolish intellectual property rights.
That may not be what YOU want, Bruce, but it's clearly what RMS wants.
It would be very interesting to see the economic consequences of this. (I don't think there's any accurate indicator as to what would happen, but there's reason to be concerned.)
Perhaps advancing the state of the art in programming languages is actually something worthwhile?
OOP is not a silver bullet, neither is functional programming. But to deny that either has major advantages over a basic procedural language is pure hubris.
"He seems to think that the purpose of DeCSS is to pirate DVD's rather than to watch them."
Hey wow - so does the judge in this case. And, on the face of it, is there any evidence within the DeCSS distro that says "don't copy discs illegally with this, it's just a test so we can play our DVD's on linux!". If DeCSS is just for Linux, why was it developed openly on Windows? (Yes I know UFS wasn't out for Linux at the time, but why spread it far & wide if you don't intend to use it on that platform?)
I don't think so. What we have is a lot of rhetoric that's implying a certain intention, but no evidence to that effect.
The release of DeCSS should have been kept private until a suitable "shell" of a DVD player was created around it, and they should have been released as a package. At least then, there would be evidence in favor of the authors. For now, we're resorting to trying to destory the DMCA - which is a very long shot, and will take a LOT LONGER than otherwise clearing the case to make way for Linux DVD players.
But "insightful" and "interesting" are just meant to be vague descriptions of why you moderated a post, as opposed to the original +1 / -1.
Insightful posts, imho, usually are of the highest caliber. Informative next, then interesting last.
Overrated / underrated is useful for times when a very _extreme_ opinion is pushed up to say a 5, when really it warrents maybe a 3 or a 4. It's meant to balance out the system when an abnormal number of people swayed to a particular opinion have pumped up everything in favour of it, drowning out the dissenters.
Of course, these things can go vice-versa, as Zico was complaining about.
I don't think there's any solution given the current system other than improving Meta moderation... I still liked the 300-person system better.
I think what AOL means by "launch" is marketspeak for 'big PR bonanza'.
I believe the web pages for the Mozilla project have claimed that late Summer is the most likely shipping date, and early Fall is probably a more conservative estimate.
I too ran BBS' from 1991 - 1996. I have tremendous appreciation for the message-based community. Unfortunately, not everyone does: I still remember the days where you had to enforce a "one post per call" policy to keep away from the downloads section.
based on my anecdotal evidence, Slashdot's main problem in Threads is that
- There are some very _extreme_ opinions that don't make a lot of logical sense or are based on faulty premises.
- Many of those opinions get moderated up, depending on what portion of the Slashdot crowd happens to have moderators access at the time. This is not a good start to a discussion because it's rather pointless to argue against a zealot except for entertainment value.
- Don't you notice how some weeks the discussion is great, and then the next week all of the zealots really come out in full force?
Basically, the signal-to-noise ratio on Slashdot Threads is slowly approaching Usenet levels - depending on how active the moderators are on a particular day. I really think Rob should go back to the "300 people" moderator system, made up of a representative group of opinions to provide balance.
These are two different cases. Under the DMCA you're allowed to reverse engineer software for interoperability purposes.
However, the judge in the MPAA case has made it explicitly clear that breaking the CSS encryption was about reverse engineering a -protection mechanism-, not software, and that there are many legal precidents that limit reverse engineering in this regard.
I don't agree completely with the judge's interpretation of the "reverse engineering" clause, but IANAL and we'll have to see how the defense handles it.
For now, I believe that the DMCA isn't going anywhere, and it's a legal long shot to apply the "reverse engineering" clause to the DeCSS case.
There already are Quicktime players for Linux. Apple has not made one yet because it would still be as limited as the existing players.
The reason for this is that the CODECS must be recompiled for Linux. Talk to Sorensen, et al.
Anyone that has ever used XAnim knows this, and it's not Apple's responsibility to get these codec vendors' asses in gear [who use multiple file formats including AVI]. It is OUR responsibility, as Linux users, to do so.
Furthermore, QuickTime is a HUGE API set, larger than the Linux kernel itself. This would have to see significant return on investment - i.e. content creators and multimedia programmers would have to be _flocking_ to Linux in droves for this to be cost effective.
Most people just want to play.mov files. Which implies that the best solution is to get a pretty player & more codec vendors on the bandwagon - not pestering Apple for something that isn't in their best interest.
I'm Canadian, so my rights aren't actually on trial...:) But, i do get concerned when our large neighbour dances on dangerous territory.
As for your reply, yes, I do think this can wind up as a 1st ammendment case, but I'm just skeptical about it because the supreme court may view tampering as copyright infringement & not protected speech (as they've done before, though the untested part this time is the notion of "tampering"...)
No, actually what he was proposing was that in a mathematical system, you couldn't prove that God doesn't exist nor that he does exist. (Hence his discussion of Godel's incompleteness theorem).
This is different from the "empircal" world where a healthy dose of skepticism is always good. Over-skepticism, however, is destructive.
The moral, imho, is that once you reduce every statement to its ontological roots, you're going to run into a point where rationality no longer holds. Hence, no matter what systems of believe you have, whether athiest, agnostic, or catholic, you're going to at some point have "faith".
(For instance, you believe that "reason" is superior to "faith". Prove that. You'll find that eventually you'll find that you actually have "Faith" in a belief WITHOUT evidence. Which sorta leads to a paradox that your disbelief in faith is founded on a faith, which will make your head explode like in Scanners, or something...)
[Witness the countless attempts at trying to come up with "Morality without God"... It drove Nietzche and J.S. Mill nuts...:) ]
Yes, the constitution does refer to economic interest in Section 8, Clause 8:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; "
That basically means 'limit freedom of copy for economic incentive, for the good of society'.
Furthermore: Yes, the DCMA has been finalized into law, except for a couple of portions. Namely, it is NOT yet a felony to actually circumvent technology, but it IS a felony to create a product whose sole purpose is circumvention.
- DeCSS can be used to pirate disks. There are MANY players available for Windows and (and to a lesser extent) Macintosh that allow the playing of unencrypted movies. Hint: buy any low-budget porn DVD, and I guarantee you it's not encrypted.
- DeCSS is not competition because it was released seperately from a "DVD player", and was also ported to platforms that already had plenty of players. Sorry, the authors goofed when they ported it to Windows.
This is all not to say that the DCMA sucks & trumps "fair use" law, but it is to say that, unless portions of the DCMA are modified, our DeCSS friends are screwed.
Read the judge's briefing. The supreme court has made it clear _many_ times that copyright infringement is not protected speech - and that includes creating a program who's sole purpose is technology circumvention.
WHAT may be challengable:
- The part of the DCMA not yet enacted: it makes it a felony to circumvent protection schemes, with exception for research purposes (subject to review by the Library of Congress). It could be seen that this is too much of a limit on freedom. Realistically, I have my doubts - what good comes of circumvention? Yes, Linux DVD players, but that brings me to my second point:
- The Reverse Engineering exception of the DCMA is only relevant to software.. Well, it's quite a fine line to distinguish between software & encryption schemes. I think DeCSS *should* fall under this section of the law.
...which was EXACTLY why RMS made such a big deal about Qt's non-free license. He didn't want to see his free software plans go up in smoke because the dominating desktop & toolkit of Linux would be non-free AND usable under the GPL.
If you look at his messages on linux-kernel, and his essay on fsf.org, they reflect this.
Types are not everything. Some of the best OO programmers in existence first learned the concepts on Smalltalk, then later applied them to C++ and Java, adapting to the idosyncracies of a strongly-typed system.
Perl is questionable as a first language because it is by its very nature a language that you can blow your leg off with - there is a lot of power, but knowing how to properly use that power is something a newbie won't grasp immediately.
With Smalltalk, you get to learn the wonders of inheritance & polymorphism WITHOUT dealing with derived-types, casting, etc. You also get to learn the wonders of block-closures and the reasoning behind seperating interface from implementation. You also become (out of necessity) a _relentless_ unit tester, since you don't have compile time checking for semantic errors.
So, some over-generalizations about "intermediate-level" programmers based on my experiences in the industry and in university:
- Most programmers don't properly apply OO concepts in Perl, Java or C++. - Most programmers don't grasp the idiosyncracies each language brings to the OO programming model. - Most programmers don't test their stuff. - Most programmers don't seperate interface from implementation, nor do they see why they would want to. - Most programmers think cleverness is cooler than clean, readable, modular code.
All of these can be attributed to LINEAGE of education. In C, it was tedious to test stuff, and you HAD to be clever to survive.
So, I think Smalltalk would be a great first language. [s/Smalltalk/Python or Obj-C]
That's the chairman of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences... [usually an older dude]
Many members of the acadamy really _dislike_ Valenti for the MPAA's horrid history in censoring horror flicks and the like, plus the incompetence displayed with the handling of the NC-17 rating. (Eyes Wide Shut is a prime example of an art movie that was censored because of the MPAA's shortsightedness)
I agree with everything you said, in fact, I dont think I could have said it any better.:)
Though one of the respondants did make a good point: what is the limit of copyright in a society where copyright is owned by "immortal" corporations? Or should there be a hard and fast date to copyright expiration, like patents have?
"Similarly, it's not possible to say that you want "most" code to be open source, any more than you can say you want "most" speech to be free. Freedom scales in some ways, but not in this way."
The FSF claims that Copyright no longer serves society. I reject this.
To begin with, absolute freedom is a fallacy. The Western notion of freedom ends when it interferes with someone else's rights. In this way, autonomy is checked by non-harm. In a Marxist society, you are free to be helped by your society to reach your goals, but you lose autonomy.
Secondly, history so far has shown that private property is the foundation of an affluent society. It only makes sense to attempt to apply those principles to the realm of "manifestations of ideas" when the global economy is becoming more and more dependent on these works for continued growth.
This is a limitation on your freedom precicely because last I checked, continued lifestyle improvement was a more important realm of freedom than being able to modify copyrighted works.
Are these laws perfect? No. They invite the very abuse that we are seeing with the MPAA and DVD CCA cases. However, the evolution of these laws WILL occur as it HAS occured in the past: through the courts. And for the doomsayers, the supreme court has made it VERY clear that copyright exists solely for the BENEFIT of society as an incentive to innovation. The battle for a "balanced" copyright law isn't over yet, but we do have a significant chance of winning it.
So, yes, you can have "most" speech to be free, when it interferes with someone else's freedom. When you As soon as you libel someone else, you are open for libel suit - a limitation on your freedom. Similarily, death threats are not protected.
And, yes, you can have "not all" software as free, precicely because it is foolish to expect rapid innovation to continue without _ANY_ economic incentive.
No it's not utopia, but it is pragmatic, and so far, it's working.
Sergio Zyman, the marketing head at Coca Cola when New Coke was released makes an interesting point about it in his book "The End of Marketing as We Know It":
The release of New Coke caused a huge surge of consumer concern for their beloved Coca Cola orginal formula. The release of the NEW drink had effectively resurrected interest in an old drink.
Consequently, the re-release of Coca Cola as "Coca Cola Classic" was one of the most successful marketing moves ever - Coke's sales soared upon its release, leaving Pepsi in the dust.
The lesson: unexpected failure can lead to bigger and better opportunities, IF you're willing to have humility to accept the failure, and then turn it on its head.
I can see your point in being critical of Tog, and while I tend to agree more with him than disagree with him, here's something I just thought of to spur debate:
You say programming languages are also a form of HCI. I agree with this, and I also agree that Tog isn't properly treating the subject by saying that, in effect, "BASIC rules all".
Perhaps there's a cognitive dissonance going on here. A programming language is an HCI that imposes a "schema" on the user, meaning that a user has to accomodate this new interface into his mental processes. The focus is on taking a mental model and sticking with it, in order to concentrate on the application of that language. Examples of this trend are evident in Functional vs. Object oriented vs. Imperative vs. Declarative vs. Logic programming.
Contrast this to a non-instructional HCI like a GUI, which most HCI literature aims at making "intuitive", or in other words, an interface that is easy to "assimilate" into one's mental processes. The focus here is for the user interface designer to do the "accomodating", not the user him or herself.
From this latter perspective, I think it's quite easy to see why Tog can claim that "BASIC rules all". It is the most English-like language available, and hence the most intuitive.
However, programming language theory has advanced to a point that we know that what is intuitive isn't always the best language: there are trade-offs with performance, expressibility and power when designing languages. So, in effect, Tog is wrong from the PL point of view.
Could you, perhaps, explain what you're trying to get at here?
I found Tog's article to be well expressed, logical, and backed up with relevant facts. Almost everything Tog said in that article was structured in a proper critical thinking manner: facts lead to premises lead to conclusions. This is something one would expect from an author of two bestselling technical books.
Now, if you're a technical writer by profession, or an English major, I probably could somehwat understand your reaction [since they seem to have an uncanny ability to analyze the language beyond the mainstream]. Even then, however, I think your reaction just doesn't make a whole lot of sense (maybe that was your intention?)
Must everything in the universe be Linux-centred? Linux is not ready to run banks and stock exchanges - maybe some day it will be.
BUT, the only way I can see kernal hackers adding Solaris-like features to Linux [i.e. failover clustering, high availability support, 64-proc SMP] is if Sun continues to put their money into funding competitors like Solaris. It keeps the game fresh, and gives the OSS community a reason to keep on innovating by releasing open versions of that which is closed...
Slashdot Mirror
That's a Windows x86 compiler, not a Win32 platform compiler - meaning that it's not very useful for production development code, since the Win32 support in gcc is very much a work-in-progress, last I checked.
"Uh, excuse me, but there aren't many poor GPL Linux programmers these days. Is this a particular personal income
problem?"
Presumably one would think that based on the rhetoric on fsf.org that the end goal of all of this is to abolish intellectual property rights.
That may not be what YOU want, Bruce, but it's clearly what RMS wants.
It would be very interesting to see the economic consequences of this. (I don't think there's any accurate indicator as to what would happen, but there's reason to be concerned.)
Perhaps advancing the state of the art in programming languages is actually something worthwhile?
OOP is not a silver bullet, neither is functional programming. But to deny that either has major advantages over a basic procedural language is pure hubris.
"He seems to think that the purpose of DeCSS is to pirate DVD's rather than to watch them."
Hey wow - so does the judge in this case. And, on the face of it, is there any evidence within the DeCSS distro that says "don't copy discs illegally with this, it's just a test so we can play our DVD's on linux!". If DeCSS is just for Linux, why was it developed openly on Windows? (Yes I know UFS wasn't out for Linux at the time, but why spread it far & wide if you don't intend to use it on that platform?)
I don't think so. What we have is a lot of rhetoric that's implying a certain intention, but no evidence to that effect.
The release of DeCSS should have been kept private until a suitable "shell" of a DVD player was created around it, and they should have been released as a package. At least then, there would be evidence in favor of the authors. For now, we're resorting to trying to destory the DMCA - which is a very long shot, and will take a LOT LONGER than otherwise clearing the case to make way for Linux DVD players.
But "insightful" and "interesting" are just meant to be vague descriptions of why you moderated a post, as opposed to the original +1 / -1.
Insightful posts, imho, usually are of the highest caliber. Informative next, then interesting last.
Overrated / underrated is useful for times when a very _extreme_ opinion is pushed up to say a 5, when really it warrents maybe a 3 or a 4. It's meant to balance out the system when an abnormal number of people swayed to a particular opinion have pumped up everything in favour of it, drowning out the dissenters.
Of course, these things can go vice-versa, as Zico was complaining about.
I don't think there's any solution given the current system other than improving Meta moderation... I still liked the 300-person system better.
I think what AOL means by "launch" is marketspeak for 'big PR bonanza'.
I believe the web pages for the Mozilla project have claimed that late Summer is the most likely shipping date, and early Fall is probably a more conservative estimate.
I too ran BBS' from 1991 - 1996. I have tremendous appreciation for the message-based community. Unfortunately, not everyone does: I still remember the days where you had to enforce a "one post per call" policy to keep away from the downloads section.
based on my anecdotal evidence, Slashdot's main problem in Threads is that
- There are some very _extreme_ opinions that don't make a lot of logical sense or are based on faulty premises.
- Many of those opinions get moderated up, depending on what portion of the Slashdot crowd happens to have moderators access at the time. This is not a good start to a discussion because it's rather pointless to argue against a zealot except for entertainment value.
- Don't you notice how some weeks the discussion is great, and then the next week all of the zealots really come out in full force?
Basically, the signal-to-noise ratio on Slashdot Threads is slowly approaching Usenet levels - depending on how active the moderators are on a particular day. I really think Rob should go back to the "300 people" moderator system, made up of a representative group of opinions to provide balance.
These are two different cases. Under the DMCA you're allowed to reverse engineer software for interoperability purposes.
However, the judge in the MPAA case has made it explicitly clear that breaking the CSS encryption was about reverse engineering a -protection mechanism-, not software, and that there are many legal precidents that limit reverse engineering in this regard.
I don't agree completely with the judge's interpretation of the "reverse engineering" clause, but IANAL and we'll have to see how the defense handles it.
For now, I believe that the DMCA isn't going anywhere, and it's a legal long shot to apply the "reverse engineering" clause to the DeCSS case.
I wish people would quit feigning ignorance.
.mov files. Which implies that the best solution is to get a pretty player & more codec vendors on the bandwagon - not pestering Apple for something that isn't in their best interest.
There already are Quicktime players for Linux.
Apple has not made one yet because it would still be as limited as the existing players.
The reason for this is that the CODECS must be recompiled for Linux. Talk to Sorensen, et al.
Anyone that has ever used XAnim knows this, and it's not Apple's responsibility to get these codec vendors' asses in gear [who use multiple file formats including AVI]. It is OUR responsibility, as Linux users, to do so.
Furthermore, QuickTime is a HUGE API set, larger than the Linux kernel itself. This would have to see significant return on investment - i.e. content creators and multimedia programmers would have to be _flocking_ to Linux in droves for this to be cost effective.
Most people just want to play
I'm Canadian, so my rights aren't actually on trial... :) But, i do get concerned when our large neighbour dances on dangerous territory.
As for your reply, yes, I do think this can wind up as a 1st ammendment case, but I'm just skeptical about it because the supreme court may view tampering as copyright infringement & not protected speech (as they've done before, though the untested part this time is the notion of "tampering"...)
No, actually what he was proposing was that in a mathematical system, you couldn't prove that God doesn't exist nor that he does exist. (Hence his discussion of Godel's incompleteness theorem).
:) ]
This is different from the "empircal" world where a healthy dose of skepticism is always good. Over-skepticism, however, is destructive.
The moral, imho, is that once you reduce every statement to its ontological roots, you're going to run into a point where rationality no longer holds. Hence, no matter what systems of believe you have, whether athiest, agnostic, or catholic, you're going to at some point have "faith".
(For instance, you believe that "reason" is superior to "faith". Prove that. You'll find that eventually you'll find that you actually have "Faith" in a belief WITHOUT evidence. Which sorta leads to a paradox that your disbelief in faith is founded on a faith, which will make your head explode like in Scanners, or something...)
[Witness the countless attempts at trying to come up with "Morality without God"... It drove Nietzche and J.S. Mill nuts...
Stu
You make a number of errors in your assertions:
Yes, the constitution does refer to economic interest in Section 8, Clause 8:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; "
That basically means 'limit freedom of copy for economic incentive, for the good of society'.
Furthermore: Yes, the DCMA has been finalized into law, except for a couple of portions. Namely, it is NOT yet a felony to actually circumvent technology, but it IS a felony to create a product whose sole purpose is circumvention.
- DeCSS can be used to pirate disks. There are MANY players available for Windows and (and to a lesser extent) Macintosh that allow the playing of unencrypted movies. Hint: buy any low-budget porn DVD, and I guarantee you it's not encrypted.
- DeCSS is not competition because it was released seperately from a "DVD player", and was also ported to platforms that already had plenty of players. Sorry, the authors goofed when they ported it to Windows.
This is all not to say that the DCMA sucks & trumps "fair use" law, but it is to say that, unless portions of the DCMA are modified, our DeCSS friends are screwed.
Read the judge's briefing. The supreme court has made it clear _many_ times that copyright infringement is not protected speech - and that includes creating a program who's sole purpose is technology circumvention.
WHAT may be challengable:
- The part of the DCMA not yet enacted: it makes it a felony to circumvent protection schemes, with exception for research purposes (subject to review by the Library of Congress). It could be seen that this is too much of a limit on freedom. Realistically, I have my doubts - what good comes of circumvention? Yes, Linux DVD players, but that brings me to my second point:
- The Reverse Engineering exception of the DCMA is only relevant to software.. Well, it's quite a fine line to distinguish between software & encryption schemes. I think DeCSS *should* fall under this section of the law.
...which was EXACTLY why RMS made such a big deal about Qt's non-free license. He didn't want to see his free software plans go up in smoke because the dominating desktop & toolkit of Linux would be non-free AND usable under the GPL.
If you look at his messages on linux-kernel, and his essay on fsf.org, they reflect this.
See my post in the thread above.
[Or Scheme / LISP, actually. All three languages are actually quite alike, with the edge in flexibility going to Lisp.]
And to people who still think OO or LISP is retarded: get out of the dark ages please.
Types are not everything. Some of the best OO programmers in existence first learned the concepts on Smalltalk, then later applied them to C++ and Java, adapting to the idosyncracies of a strongly-typed system.
Perl is questionable as a first language because it is by its very nature a language that you can blow your leg off with - there is a lot of power, but knowing how to properly use that power is something a newbie won't grasp immediately.
With Smalltalk, you get to learn the wonders of inheritance & polymorphism WITHOUT dealing with derived-types, casting, etc. You also get to learn the wonders of block-closures and the reasoning behind seperating interface from implementation. You also become (out of necessity) a _relentless_ unit tester, since you don't have compile time checking for semantic errors.
So, some over-generalizations about "intermediate-level" programmers based on my experiences in the industry and in university:
- Most programmers don't properly apply OO concepts in Perl, Java or C++.
- Most programmers don't grasp the idiosyncracies each language brings to the OO programming model.
- Most programmers don't test their stuff.
- Most programmers don't seperate interface from implementation, nor do they see why they would want to.
- Most programmers think cleverness is cooler than clean, readable, modular code.
All of these can be attributed to LINEAGE of education. In C, it was tedious to test stuff, and you HAD to be clever to survive.
So, I think Smalltalk would be a great first language. [s/Smalltalk/Python or Obj-C]
Yep, you can work from your cozy home in Finland.
or you can move to the valley and rake in tons of $$$$. Most companies haven't warmed up to the idea of full-time wide-area telecommuniting yet.
So, despite that "information wants to be free", people also want to be free of financial burden.
That's the chairman of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences... [usually an older dude]
Many members of the acadamy really _dislike_ Valenti for the MPAA's horrid history in censoring horror flicks and the like, plus the incompetence displayed with the handling of the NC-17 rating. (Eyes Wide Shut is a prime example of an art movie that was censored because of the MPAA's shortsightedness)
See "Testing Computer Software" by Cem Kaner et al.
I agree with everything you said, in fact, I dont think I could have said it any better. :)
Though one of the respondants did make a good point: what is the limit of copyright in a society where copyright is owned by "immortal" corporations? Or should there be a hard and fast date to copyright expiration, like patents have?
"Similarly, it's not possible to say that you want "most" code to be open source, any more than you can say you want "most" speech to be free. Freedom scales in some ways, but not in this way."
The FSF claims that Copyright no longer serves society. I reject this.
To begin with, absolute freedom is a fallacy. The Western notion of freedom ends when it interferes with someone else's rights. In this way, autonomy is checked by non-harm. In a Marxist society, you are free to be helped by your society to reach your goals, but you lose autonomy.
Secondly, history so far has shown that private property is the foundation of an affluent society. It only makes sense to attempt to apply those principles to the realm of "manifestations of ideas" when the global economy is becoming more and more dependent on these works for continued growth.
This is a limitation on your freedom precicely because last I checked, continued lifestyle improvement was a more important realm of freedom than being able to modify copyrighted works.
Are these laws perfect? No. They invite the very abuse that we are seeing with the MPAA and DVD CCA cases. However, the evolution of these laws WILL occur as it HAS occured in the past: through the courts. And for the doomsayers, the supreme court has made it VERY clear that copyright exists solely for the BENEFIT of society as an incentive to innovation. The battle for a "balanced" copyright law isn't over yet, but we do have a significant chance of winning it.
So, yes, you can have "most" speech to be free, when it interferes with someone else's freedom. When you As soon as you libel someone else, you are open for libel suit - a limitation on your freedom. Similarily, death threats are not protected.
And, yes, you can have "not all" software as free, precicely because it is foolish to expect rapid innovation to continue without _ANY_ economic incentive.
No it's not utopia, but it is pragmatic, and so far, it's working.
Sergio Zyman, the marketing head at Coca Cola when New Coke was released makes an interesting point about it in his book "The End of Marketing as We Know It":
The release of New Coke caused a huge surge of consumer concern for their beloved Coca Cola orginal formula. The release of the NEW drink had effectively resurrected interest in an old drink.
Consequently, the re-release of Coca Cola as "Coca Cola Classic" was one of the most successful marketing moves ever - Coke's sales soared upon its release, leaving Pepsi in the dust.
The lesson: unexpected failure can lead to bigger and better opportunities, IF you're willing to have humility to accept the failure, and then turn it on its head.
I can see your point in being critical of Tog, and while I tend to agree more with him than disagree with him, here's something I just thought of to spur debate:
You say programming languages are also a form of HCI. I agree with this, and I also agree that Tog isn't properly treating the subject by saying that, in effect, "BASIC rules all".
Perhaps there's a cognitive dissonance going on here. A programming language is an HCI that imposes a "schema" on the user, meaning that a user has to accomodate this new interface into his mental processes. The focus is on taking a mental model and sticking with it, in order to concentrate on the application of that language. Examples of this trend are evident in Functional vs. Object oriented vs. Imperative vs. Declarative vs. Logic programming.
Contrast this to a non-instructional HCI like a GUI, which most HCI literature aims at making "intuitive", or in other words, an interface that is easy to "assimilate" into one's mental processes. The focus here is for the user interface designer to do the "accomodating", not the user him or herself.
From this latter perspective, I think it's quite easy to see why Tog can claim that "BASIC rules all". It is the most English-like language available, and hence the most intuitive.
However, programming language theory has advanced to a point that we know that what is intuitive isn't always the best language: there are trade-offs with performance, expressibility and power when designing languages. So, in effect, Tog is wrong from the PL point of view.
Thoughts?
Could you, perhaps, explain what you're trying to get at here?
I found Tog's article to be well expressed, logical, and backed up with relevant facts. Almost everything Tog said in that article was structured in a proper critical thinking manner: facts lead to premises lead to conclusions. This is something one would expect from an author of two bestselling technical books.
Now, if you're a technical writer by profession, or an English major, I probably could somehwat understand your reaction [since they seem to have an uncanny ability to analyze the language beyond the mainstream]. Even then, however, I think your reaction just doesn't make a whole lot of sense (maybe that was your intention?)
Anyhow.
Must everything in the universe be Linux-centred? Linux is not ready to run banks and stock exchanges - maybe some day it will be.
BUT, the only way I can see kernal hackers adding Solaris-like features to Linux [i.e. failover clustering, high availability support, 64-proc SMP] is if Sun continues to put their money into funding competitors like Solaris. It keeps the game fresh, and gives the OSS community a reason to keep on innovating by releasing open versions of that which is closed...