> But what if you are writing derived commercial applications?
Assuming that by "commercial applications", you mean, "proprietary, non-free, closed-source, applications," then your situation is unchanged. You have no more rights to use those patents than you did yesterday, but nobody on slashdot gives a rat's ass about you anyway, so, so what?:)
(Actually, you are, I'm sure, perfectly welcome to negotiate a patent license with CA if you don't like the terms of their generous public donation. But I suppose it's more fun to whine on slashdot.)
Otherwise, the answer is, your commercial applications have to be free/libre/open-source commercial applications. Then there's no problem.
> any BSD or MIT license would be completely subverted
"Completely subverted?" What are you? The hyperbole fairy? Try "somewhat limited" and I might go along with you. I mean, when I've released code under BSD or MIT licenses, I've been assuming that it was so that anyone could benefit freely from the code. Not just people creating proprietary commercial derivatives. If I'd known it was just for propietary commercial derivatives, I probably wouldn't have bothered!
> The only way to clean up this mess is to overhaul the patent system (unlikely) or to release the patents to the public, *without* any restrictions.
Well, either, a) you're the kind of insane BSD fanatic who makes the Stallmanites look like moderates, or b) you're a greedy bastard who just wants other people to give him free money. I won't speculate which. But, needless to say, I disagree with you. Not that I'm not sympathetic to your point of view; but I still disagree.
The point about the impact of this (and IBM's patent grant) on BSD/MIT licenses is an important one, and I'm glad you raised the point. I just wish you hadn't resorted to such histrionics in doing so.
Yup, that, perhaps combined with a certain natural reluctance to support a company whose main business seems to be litigation and FUD, rather than software, these days. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that any Unixware enhancements were added at all. I suppose it's not the customers' fault that their vendor has turned into a rabid dog, but still....
Actually, the original question is not as dumb as it sounds. (And no, I'm not going to bring up anti-scientific bullshit like Idiotic Design.) One might as readily ask, is strength hereditary? The answer is, somewhat-but-mostly-not. The capacity for strength (and possible limits) are hereditary, but strength itself is developed through exercise. Within the ranges allowed by heredity, one can develop a magnificent physique or turn into a lard-butt. And, unlike muscle, the brain does most of its growth in the very early years; thus early stimulus is far more important to the development of intelligence.
Secondly, "intelligence" is not really a thing. It's a combination of a number of brain functions. We've reified it into a single thing, but it's not. Even something as simple as running speed is actually a combination of factors: leg length (hereditary), muscle tone (developed), lung capacity (some of both), etc. And what we call "intelligence" is far more complicated than that.
There is a sort of myth that genes map to traits, but nature is rarely that simple or straightforward. Most of what we would recognize as traits are tied to combinations of genes. And on top of that, what we might call "capacity-for-intelligence" is based on a large number of traits. And individual genes are far more widely spread through our gene pool than most people realize.
Clearly there are genetic components to intelligence, but at the same time, the simplistic, eugenic "solutions" this suggest are, frankly, idiotic. As is the thread-starter--evolution takes place on a timescale of millions of years, not hundreds or even thousands. The so-called "Darwin Awards", for example, are sadly misleading and sadly misnnamed. Killing a few thousand idiots may increase the average IQ of our species, but is highly unlikely to "improve the gene pool". (Even assuming that we were smart enough to quantify such "improvement", which is highly doubtful.)
Crush, Crumble and Chomp! came out in '81 (it was based on an earlier board-game, The Creature that Ate Sheboygan). And, of course, many early fantasy games allowed you to choose whether to be good or evil, e.g. Nethack. And, of course, in non-computer games, there's a long tradition of games where you can be the bad guy. When I was a kid, we still played Cowboys-and-Indians, and someone had to be the Indian. I suspect kids from earlier centuries played crusaders-and-paynim or han-and-mongols or whatever the local equivalent might be....
And, of course, there's always Leisure Suit Larry....:)
I very strongly disagree with you. The job of a manager is to manage people, and make sure that things get done. (And, more importantly, that the right things get done.) If you don't have a good manager, then yes, having someone with technical skills is good, because he can help you guys do your work, but that's not the same as managing. It also tends to result in systems that users hate, because there was nobody on the team who understood the non-technical side of the requirements.
The thing is that good management skills are rare. Very very rare. But if you'd ever had a good manager (and I have), you wouldn't be spouting this nonsense.
What is all-too-common is to have a manager who lacks both technical and managerial skills. But that's a separate problem. If all you've ever experienced is managers with no management skills, then, yes, it is easy to assume that managers without technical skills are worthless. But that merely reflects your own lack of experience.
So some other program now exists that's based on the same code. How does this affect you? It's some other program! It may offer you some nice options, i.e. you may be able to switch over to the new system, but otherwise, you're unaffected!
You might just as justifiably claim that Linux/PPC is a "problem" for OS/X users. It's not a problem, it's an alternative! And one you're welcome to ignore if you so choose!
Nope, don't know the first thing about javascript. Outside my domain for the most part.
I do see that Ruby has functional aspects, but I don't have to use those for the basics--I can stick to the models I know, like OO. So its easy for me to get started. Eventually, yes, I suspect it will be as you say, but I'm not quite there yet. Still, I'm having fun, and that's the important thing.:)
It's not like Ruby's a hard language if you already know Perl/PHP. I was able to pick up the basics in a couple of hours browsing. Now, if someone came out with, say, a functional scripting language, I might hesitate. I keep meaning to study Haskell or one of its cousins, but never find the time. But Ruby? That's about as straightforward as it gets!
A) I can't believe this discussion is going on days later. (Although I suppose that's not your fault.)
B) Mighty freakin' sensitive, aren't we? I started with BASIC, just like so many other people, and I was able to post that classic bit of humor. You, on the other hand, freaked out and went into a tizzy when you saw it. Is there some reason you're so defensive about being accused of being mentally mutilated? Maybe you've had people look at your code and make snide comments?:)
In my experience, most people who started with BASIC and who are any good at programming fully understand Dijkstra's position, so I think your hypothesis that it was just because they weren't willing to accept someone else's definition of "good" is clearly crap. I know it took me quite a while to unlearn the lessons of BASIC. Maybe Dijkstra was kidding AND there was a strong, underlying element of truth to what he said. But I can't believe I'm having to explain this--most good programmers who started with BASIC know this already! (See, for example, most of the other replies to my post.)
Yes, I have looked at RealBasic, at least briefly, and I agree it's not as bad as the language(s) that Dijkstra was complaining about (you'll note that I even said something along those lines). But if it's more like Java, then what's the point? Just teach 'em Java, and that way they'll have something that might actually be useful to them someday.
Frankly, I think Pascal or Python or Scheme or Modula or Eiffel or Smalltalk would be a much better choice for an introduction to programming, but I certainly don't see the point in switching to an obscure language that is vaguely derived from BASIC just because it still has the string "Basic" in its name, especially since you should be moving away from anything named "Basic" as rapidly as possible.
I'd probably recommend ADA before I recommended RealBasic, and I'm not a huge ADA fan. But it is (like RealBasic) a much better language than its reputation would suggest.
Please, it takes kids YEARS to recover from the damage that learning any flavor of BASIC does!
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5
Things (specifically BASIC variants) have improved since Dijkstra wrote that, but an underlying fundamental truth remains.
"Whom the gods would destroy, they first teach BASIC."
-- unknown
I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't notice it because I haven't used Windows since '98, haven't had Wine installed since '01 or '02, and have no idea what WGA looks like.
On the other hand, my Debian box passes the Debian Genuine Advantage test just fine, and that one actually IS a genuine advantage! Unlike Microsoft's oxymoron.:)
Yeah, I know, but for years the Hugos were dominated by SF. And they are given at the World Science Fiction Convention. In the early years, I can really only find one unequivacable fantasy story that won a Hugo (Avram Davidson's "All the Seas with Oysters"). And even that's a bit of an odd duck, without any "traditional" fantasy elements. And anyway, fantasy does have it's own separate award.
Congrats on the WFA, though. I sure didn't expect to find a WFA winner/judge posting on slashdot!:)
I still prefer the Locus awards to the Hugo awards, though. Even though I've personally voted on more Hugo ballots.:)
Yup, that's how I first read it, but no, I didn't think "oh those Slashdot editors". Instead I thought, "cool, I'm sick of fantasy stories winning what is supposed to be basically an SF award. Fantasy has it's own awards!
Anyway, I've been losing respect for the Hugos for some time now. The Hugo voters seem to be increasingly insular and out-of-touch. My favorite genre awards right now are the Locus Awards, which usually have more voters than the Hugo and Nebula combined. Plus, they have separate categories for fantasy and SF.
Hmm, I think I agree completely. However, as another poster noted earlier, this all applies just as much to proprietary software as to "open source".:)
It's possible to use something without being enthused by it. I use Perl and Python, but I'm more enthused by Python, even though I probably use Perl more.
There is no "userspace"! There is only MICROSOFTspace! I mean, what are you going to do, run the Win95 GUI layer on a XP kernel? Or vice versa? I don't THEENK so!
Under-the-hood features I expect to see: "improved" DRM, "improved" ability for IE to displace/take over from Firefox/Opera/etc., "improved" ability to prevent "untrusted" apps (like OpenOffice.org) from working, "improved" draconian license terms, "improved" patent coverage, and so on and so on.
surveil
v : keep under surveillance; "The police had been following him
for weeks but they could not prove his involvement in the
bombing" [syn: {follow}, {survey}]
It is a backformation, but it's in my 1980 Websters too, so it's been around for a while. If you wanted to argue that there shouldn't be such a word, I might be more sympathetic. It is rather ugly. But it is, I think, a word by any reasonable person's definition.
You can save a lot of log file space (and a modest amount of bandwidth) if you do as the first poster suggested, and block access except from specific IPs or IP blocks. At least unless you need to provide access from anywhere. And surely no more than one machine on your network needs to do that. (The others can all just accept access from that one machine.)
That's my complete access log since cron ran this morning. If they get a login prompt, they can keep trying and trying, but if all they get is "connection refused", they rarely try more than twice.
What are you talking about? "Obstain" is a perfectly cromulent word!:)
Actually, it may even be a more appropriate word in this case. If "obstain" is to "obstinance" as "abstain" is to "abstinence", well, I'm pretty sure the record industry will dig their heels in and keep paying out that ol' payola. It's been going on non-stop for half a century, and previous busts did little or nothing to halt the process. Sony may have agreed to abstain, but I betcha they'll actually obstain!
As grandparent said, "what happens when someone sends spam appearing to be from a competitors site"? This thing is tailor-made for joe jobs! Man, what a cool way to get someone you dislike DDOS'd! Not just competitors, this will let someone take out any site they don't like! You don't even need a botnet - you'll have people acting as your robot *voluntarily*!
This should have been checked. It's the single biggest flaw in the scheme, and it's a flaw so big you could drive a medium-sized death-star through it! Attacking web sites that appear in spam virtually GUARANTEES a massive increase in joe jobbing! Damn, what a simple way to DDOS someone you don't like!
Slashdot Mirror
> But what if you are writing derived commercial applications?
:)
Assuming that by "commercial applications", you mean, "proprietary, non-free, closed-source, applications," then your situation is unchanged. You have no more rights to use those patents than you did yesterday, but nobody on slashdot gives a rat's ass about you anyway, so, so what?
(Actually, you are, I'm sure, perfectly welcome to negotiate a patent license with CA if you don't like the terms of their generous public donation. But I suppose it's more fun to whine on slashdot.)
Otherwise, the answer is, your commercial applications have to be free/libre/open-source commercial applications. Then there's no problem.
> any BSD or MIT license would be completely subverted
"Completely subverted?" What are you? The hyperbole fairy? Try "somewhat limited" and I might go along with you. I mean, when I've released code under BSD or MIT licenses, I've been assuming that it was so that anyone could benefit freely from the code. Not just people creating proprietary commercial derivatives. If I'd known it was just for propietary commercial derivatives, I probably wouldn't have bothered!
> The only way to clean up this mess is to overhaul the patent system (unlikely) or to release the patents to the public, *without* any restrictions.
Well, either, a) you're the kind of insane BSD fanatic who makes the Stallmanites look like moderates, or b) you're a greedy bastard who just wants other people to give him free money. I won't speculate which. But, needless to say, I disagree with you. Not that I'm not sympathetic to your point of view; but I still disagree.
The point about the impact of this (and IBM's patent grant) on BSD/MIT licenses is an important one, and I'm glad you raised the point. I just wish you hadn't resorted to such histrionics in doing so.
Yup, that, perhaps combined with a certain natural reluctance to support a company whose main business seems to be litigation and FUD, rather than software, these days. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that any Unixware enhancements were added at all. I suppose it's not the customers' fault that their vendor has turned into a rabid dog, but still....
Actually, the original question is not as dumb as it sounds. (And no, I'm not going to bring up anti-scientific bullshit like Idiotic Design.) One might as readily ask, is strength hereditary? The answer is, somewhat-but-mostly-not. The capacity for strength (and possible limits) are hereditary, but strength itself is developed through exercise. Within the ranges allowed by heredity, one can develop a magnificent physique or turn into a lard-butt. And, unlike muscle, the brain does most of its growth in the very early years; thus early stimulus is far more important to the development of intelligence.
Secondly, "intelligence" is not really a thing. It's a combination of a number of brain functions. We've reified it into a single thing, but it's not. Even something as simple as running speed is actually a combination of factors: leg length (hereditary), muscle tone (developed), lung capacity (some of both), etc. And what we call "intelligence" is far more complicated than that.
There is a sort of myth that genes map to traits, but nature is rarely that simple or straightforward. Most of what we would recognize as traits are tied to combinations of genes. And on top of that, what we might call "capacity-for-intelligence" is based on a large number of traits. And individual genes are far more widely spread through our gene pool than most people realize.
Clearly there are genetic components to intelligence, but at the same time, the simplistic, eugenic "solutions" this suggest are, frankly, idiotic. As is the thread-starter--evolution takes place on a timescale of millions of years, not hundreds or even thousands. The so-called "Darwin Awards", for example, are sadly misleading and sadly misnnamed. Killing a few thousand idiots may increase the average IQ of our species, but is highly unlikely to "improve the gene pool". (Even assuming that we were smart enough to quantify such "improvement", which is highly doubtful.)
> To be fair, you may show that there are ramifications, but your ramifications are not very realistic.
:p ;)
Uh-huh. And if there's anything video games are famous for, it's being realistic!
Crush, Crumble and Chomp! came out in '81 (it was based on an earlier board-game, The Creature that Ate Sheboygan). And, of course, many early fantasy games allowed you to choose whether to be good or evil, e.g. Nethack. And, of course, in non-computer games, there's a long tradition of games where you can be the bad guy. When I was a kid, we still played Cowboys-and-Indians, and someone had to be the Indian. I suspect kids from earlier centuries played crusaders-and-paynim or han-and-mongols or whatever the local equivalent might be....
:)
And, of course, there's always Leisure Suit Larry....
I very strongly disagree with you. The job of a manager is to manage people, and make sure that things get done. (And, more importantly, that the right things get done.) If you don't have a good manager, then yes, having someone with technical skills is good, because he can help you guys do your work, but that's not the same as managing. It also tends to result in systems that users hate, because there was nobody on the team who understood the non-technical side of the requirements.
The thing is that good management skills are rare. Very very rare. But if you'd ever had a good manager (and I have), you wouldn't be spouting this nonsense.
What is all-too-common is to have a manager who lacks both technical and managerial skills. But that's a separate problem. If all you've ever experienced is managers with no management skills, then, yes, it is easy to assume that managers without technical skills are worthless. But that merely reflects your own lack of experience.
just a thought.... :)
Open Labs for Software Development
> What does the acronymn PHP stand for ?
:)
I've been told that it stands for "Poorly Hacked Perl", but somehow I doubt that, no matter how appropriate it may seem.
So some other program now exists that's based on the same code. How does this affect you? It's some other program! It may offer you some nice options, i.e. you may be able to switch over to the new system, but otherwise, you're unaffected!
You might just as justifiably claim that Linux/PPC is a "problem" for OS/X users. It's not a problem, it's an alternative! And one you're welcome to ignore if you so choose!
Sheesh!
Nope, don't know the first thing about javascript. Outside my domain for the most part.
:)
I do see that Ruby has functional aspects, but I don't have to use those for the basics--I can stick to the models I know, like OO. So its easy for me to get started. Eventually, yes, I suspect it will be as you say, but I'm not quite there yet. Still, I'm having fun, and that's the important thing.
It's not like Ruby's a hard language if you already know Perl/PHP. I was able to pick up the basics in a couple of hours browsing. Now, if someone came out with, say, a functional scripting language, I might hesitate. I keep meaning to study Haskell or one of its cousins, but never find the time. But Ruby? That's about as straightforward as it gets!
A) I can't believe this discussion is going on days later. (Although I suppose that's not your fault.)
:)
B) Mighty freakin' sensitive, aren't we? I started with BASIC, just like so many other people, and I was able to post that classic bit of humor. You, on the other hand, freaked out and went into a tizzy when you saw it. Is there some reason you're so defensive about being accused of being mentally mutilated? Maybe you've had people look at your code and make snide comments?
In my experience, most people who started with BASIC and who are any good at programming fully understand Dijkstra's position, so I think your hypothesis that it was just because they weren't willing to accept someone else's definition of "good" is clearly crap. I know it took me quite a while to unlearn the lessons of BASIC. Maybe Dijkstra was kidding AND there was a strong, underlying element of truth to what he said. But I can't believe I'm having to explain this--most good programmers who started with BASIC know this already! (See, for example, most of the other replies to my post.)
Yes, I have looked at RealBasic, at least briefly, and I agree it's not as bad as the language(s) that Dijkstra was complaining about (you'll note that I even said something along those lines). But if it's more like Java, then what's the point? Just teach 'em Java, and that way they'll have something that might actually be useful to them someday.
Frankly, I think Pascal or Python or Scheme or Modula or Eiffel or Smalltalk would be a much better choice for an introduction to programming, but I certainly don't see the point in switching to an obscure language that is vaguely derived from BASIC just because it still has the string "Basic" in its name, especially since you should be moving away from anything named "Basic" as rapidly as possible.
I'd probably recommend ADA before I recommended RealBasic, and I'm not a huge ADA fan. But it is (like RealBasic) a much better language than its reputation would suggest.
Please, it takes kids YEARS to recover from the damage that learning any flavor of BASIC does!
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5
Things (specifically BASIC variants) have improved since Dijkstra wrote that, but an underlying fundamental truth remains.
"Whom the gods would destroy, they first teach BASIC."
-- unknown
> Why has no one else noticed this?
:)
I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't notice it because I haven't used Windows since '98, haven't had Wine installed since '01 or '02, and have no idea what WGA looks like.
On the other hand, my Debian box passes the Debian Genuine Advantage test just fine, and that one actually IS a genuine advantage! Unlike Microsoft's oxymoron.
Yeah, I know, but for years the Hugos were dominated by SF. And they are given at the World Science Fiction Convention. In the early years, I can really only find one unequivacable fantasy story that won a Hugo (Avram Davidson's "All the Seas with Oysters"). And even that's a bit of an odd duck, without any "traditional" fantasy elements. And anyway, fantasy does have it's own separate award.
:)
:)
Congrats on the WFA, though. I sure didn't expect to find a WFA winner/judge posting on slashdot!
I still prefer the Locus awards to the Hugo awards, though. Even though I've personally voted on more Hugo ballots.
Yup, that's how I first read it, but no, I didn't think "oh those Slashdot editors". Instead I thought, "cool, I'm sick of fantasy stories winning what is supposed to be basically an SF award. Fantasy has it's own awards!
Anyway, I've been losing respect for the Hugos for some time now. The Hugo voters seem to be increasingly insular and out-of-touch. My favorite genre awards right now are the Locus Awards, which usually have more voters than the Hugo and Nebula combined. Plus, they have separate categories for fantasy and SF.
Hmm, I think I agree completely. However, as another poster noted earlier, this all applies just as much to proprietary software as to "open source". :)
It's possible to use something without being enthused by it. I use Perl and Python, but I'm more enthused by Python, even though I probably use Perl more.
Enthusiasm != use.
There is no "userspace"! There is only MICROSOFTspace! I mean, what are you going to do, run the Win95 GUI layer on a XP kernel? Or vice versa? I don't THEENK so!
Under-the-hood features I expect to see: "improved" DRM, "improved" ability for IE to displace/take over from Firefox/Opera/etc., "improved" ability to prevent "untrusted" apps (like OpenOffice.org) from working, "improved" draconian license terms, "improved" patent coverage, and so on and so on.
cheers
You can save a lot of log file space (and a modest amount of bandwidth) if you do as the first poster suggested, and block access except from specific IPs or IP blocks. At least unless you need to provide access from anywhere. And surely no more than one machine on your network needs to do that. (The others can all just accept access from that one machine.)
/etc/hosts.allow, line 14: can't verify hostname: getaddrinfo(m1.lebshama.com, AF_INET) failed
Jul 26 13:12:49 starless sshd[7168]: refused connect from host150-93.pool8017.interbusiness.it (80.17.93.150)
Jul 26 13:38:16 starless sshd[7306]: warning:
Jul 26 13:38:16 starless sshd[7306]: refused connect from 202.64.241.54 (202.64.241.54)
Jul 26 15:04:34 starless sshd[7696]: refused connect from jporr.plus.com (84.92.133.188)
Jul 26 15:19:42 starless sshd[7765]: refused connect from jporr.plus.com (84.92.133.188)
Jul 26 15:43:27 starless sshd[7896]: refused connect from adsl-64-108-8-141.dsl.chcgil.ameritech.net (64.108.8.141)
That's my complete access log since cron ran this morning. If they get a login prompt, they can keep trying and trying, but if all they get is "connection refused", they rarely try more than twice.
What are you talking about? "Obstain" is a perfectly cromulent word! :)
Actually, it may even be a more appropriate word in this case. If "obstain" is to "obstinance" as "abstain" is to "abstinence", well, I'm pretty sure the record industry will dig their heels in and keep paying out that ol' payola. It's been going on non-stop for half a century, and previous busts did little or nothing to halt the process. Sony may have agreed to abstain, but I betcha they'll actually obstain!
As grandparent said, "what happens when someone sends spam appearing to be from a competitors site"? This thing is tailor-made for joe jobs! Man, what a cool way to get someone you dislike DDOS'd! Not just competitors, this will let someone take out any site they don't like! You don't even need a botnet - you'll have people acting as your robot *voluntarily*!
You left out the most important one!
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
This should have been checked. It's the single biggest flaw in the scheme, and it's a flaw so big you could drive a medium-sized death-star through it! Attacking web sites that appear in spam virtually GUARANTEES a massive increase in joe jobbing! Damn, what a simple way to DDOS someone you don't like!