Hey where did the experts come from
on
Gene Leakage
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· Score: 3
Suddenly/. is populated with experts in genetic engineering. Hey, some looney limey scaremongering, must be some kind of luddite, evolution has been going on forever etc etc, GM foods are no big deal...
There is a big difference between selective breeding, natural selection, hybridization and genetic engineering. We're creating all kinds of combinations that would just never occur in nature (such as mixing of plant and animal DNA). I would say the burden of proof should be on the companies producing GM crops to explain why there is no way nasty side effects can crop up.
The GM debate in the states has been cleverly framed so that people questioning the safety of GM crops are painted as uneducated and anti-science. (By safety I mean long term effects of existence of modified genes, NOT the danger that the food might be bad for you - that's easily tested). There's an instant aura of rationality that can be obtained by dismissing allegations of possible dangers as nonsense. Who really knows what the effects of introducing radically new gene sequences into the environment will be ? These are sequences which would never arise naturally. There may well be no danger, but would you happily allow life forms from another planet into our eco-system (hey, its probably harmless), or would it make you kinda nervous.
CRC is one of those Reagan think tanks founded to safeguard the interests of minorities (such as wealthy individuals or corporations - the poor wee things) against powerful pressure groups such as unwed mothers or disabled people.
Theie assertions are provided without any arguments based upon logic or facts. Example:
'How could anyone but a radical anarchist support a concept like "free software"? It may seem like a boon for consumers. But they should realize that a market totally free of prices is not likely to produce quality merchandise and will quickly collapse.'
Except the quality merchandise already exists and shows no signs of collapsing. So, what is the assertion based upon ? They seem to be saying
"The existence of free quality software is inconsistent with our theories --- therefore the world is obviously going to change so that the facts will become consistent with our beliefs"
A more rational group might reason as follows:
"The facts are inconsistent with our theories --- therefore there might be something wrong with our theories".
These people are TRUE BELIEVERS though, so they make assertions and back them with their beliefs
'But OSS has a fatal flaw: it is based on a false theory of production.'
What does this mean ? OSS will not work, and here's why - it won't work because it is based on a "false theory", and how do we know this theory is false - easy, it's different to our theories so it must be false.
These guy's should have worked for the Spanish inquisition. They've got the techniques down pat.
There is no concrete line between free and non-free, there are only degrees of freedom. Yes, public domain code IS more free than GPL code. I know that the restrictions in the GPL are designed to safeguard the freedom of the users (especially users of derived works) but they are still restrictions.
IMHO it is up the author to decide what level of freedom to provide in his license. What I object to is the FSFs total conviction that they occupy some sort of moral high ground. Software released under a license which grants less freedom is judged "immoral" while software which grants more freedom is "misguided" or worse "fails to safeguard freedom".
LGPL has fewer restrictions that GPL, hence it is more free. Public domain is more free still. As an example of how these extra freedoms can benefit users, commercial companies take public domain code, add some extra functionality to make it useful and sell it to people. RMS calls this "freedom subtracted" software as opposed to "value added" (fair comment), but to non-programmers, an executable that does what you want is better than source code that doesn't.
I agree with FSF hierarchy of freedom, and I think more freedom is generally a good thing. I just wanted to point out that there were other levels besides the one's they defined. My take is that it is purely up to the author to decide what license to release code under. I almost never pay attention to arguments based on somebody else's interpretation of morailty.
I like the changes on the whole but I think it is a very bad idea for people who write stupid comments to start with a negative score.
The main reason is that they will just get themselves different accounts. If they are juvenile, loud and offensive they want to be heard and will certainly go to the trouble of creating a new account. This means that not only will they not start with a negative score, but readers will no longer recognise the name as someone who writes crap, so we lose the best form of filtering (individuals using their own judgement to not read something by X).
I was more thinking in terms of just transfering the entire account immediately:) The virus would be discovered within a couple of days, but if you infected 500000 accounts in that time (like mellissa could), it would be worthwhile. Some Germans demonstrated this with an ActiveX control, just as a little example of how amazingly defenseless THAT stuff is. Just place it on your web site and anybody visiting using IE with security turned down has a problem. The nice thing about it is that you have all this security/passwords etc to access the bank account (that most people take pretty seriously), but it does them no good at all if the data on their PCs has already been compromised. Actually, a macro virus that added a link from any index.html files on the local machine to an ActiveX control that also contained the virus (and transfered funds) would spread pretty quick.
The point is that melissa was really NOT that malicious, if someone really wanted to play silly buggers on this hugely dangerous combination of crap software and naive users they could do FAR more damage.
"He was charged with interruption of public communications, theft of computer services and wrongful access to computer systems."
Interesting 3 crimes listed there. I guess in some sense he was guilty of 1, but I don't see how he could be guilty of 2 or 3. Does the fact that your program is running on somebody else's hardware without their consent constitute theft of computer services. w95 was running on my hardware when I bought it - can I charge MS with theft of computer services. Likewise if your data appears on another computer does that consitute wrongful access to computer systems? How about spam, can we lock people away for 40 years for sending spam, far more offensive to me than being sent a program which I would have to be a moron to run.
Are there any specific laws against self-replicating programs. Powerful memes such as religion can be considered virus's that run on wetware and are highly contagious. Should these be illegal too ?
While I'm looking for different angles, I think he should counter-sue the US govenment for violating his copyright. When federal employees pressed the "run macro" button they ended up sending copies of his software to different organisations without consent. A variation of melissa with a nice (C) on it could be an effective way of protesting daft IP laws.
The guy has done society a huge service by waking people up to the huge security holes in their software. It would have been just as easy to send out a truly destructive virus that introduced random errors across the harddisk or appended "transfer funds" instructions to the Quicken files for people who do online banking. Now that would be an interesting virus.
I am so sick of this "Author doesn't get it" crap. The author is perfectly aware that RMS believes in Free Speech !beer. What the hell were the moderators thinking in awarding you 3 points for repeating that trite and inaccurate mantra.
I agree that the COSS idea has flaws but do you have any better ideas? There must be some decent way of combining the benefits of commerical and free software and I applaud attempts to try to find it. Do you really think that poeple will write slick GUI's for accounting software and release it under GPL (for fun ? for respect ???). People need software like that and they are happy to pay for it. The FREEDOM to obtain the software you need (under whatever license) is also important.
Sometimes/. seems sanctimonious in the extreme. There's an attitude of - well, he might be trying to do something useful, but he doesn't care about "freedom" as deeply as me and so I'll ignore him.
I believe there are FAR more programmers doing custom development than writing shrink-wrapped applications. Does anyone have any figures on this ? The software sector is not really that large an industry - any large company has it's own IT departments - mostly doing custom development and support for purely internal use.
I mostly agree with your other points though, I haven't seen convincing arguments that releasing OSS is generally good business for the companies doing so. Companies (like RedHat) can make money selling software that other people have written, but thats not the same as it being profitable to release your own code.
I really don't think we will see a fall in demand for programmers as a result of open source though. As custom tweaks to OSS become possible, companies will want more from their software to make their businesses more efficient and they will pay for custom tweaks - it'll save them money.
For most people an OS is something on which to achieve other things, not an end in itself. Is there a "news for writers" site which is obsessed with the latest and greatest typewriter.
When I encounter writing which I can't understand it generally means either I am being stupid or the writer is, or both. I am interested in the subject matter - I believe that technology will greatly effect consciousness, and the web will play a significant part (humanity WILL turn into the borg, but I don't want to go into that just now). However after a short while I gave up on trying to extract some worthwhile meaning from his words...
"The images of the world we internalize from life online also become obsolete each time we turn off the computer."
Is this profound or profoundly stupid ?
It's a common trick to give an impression of intelligence by talking incomprehensibly. If other people cannot understand you then you must be more intelligent than they;-)
On Feynman's maxim though "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity" I think it more likely that the author is either incapable of expressing himself clearly or doesn't have anything tangible to express. Personally I blame the fact that children are no longer beaten or humiliated when they produce sub-standard English - I must be getting old.
Record companies seem to be sending the message: "We will persecute anybody involved in MP3's even if they are doing nothing illegal because we want to squash the whole thing". This is a genuine threat since the lawsuits cost a lot of money for the companies involved even if they are frivolous. IANAL but isn't this itself of questionable legality.. "class action suit" anybody ?
Rant follows...
Of course this technique only works under American legal system where the defender of a stupid lawsuit still has huge bills (as opposed to loser pays costs system). This won't change since the only people with power to change it are lawyers (American politicians are almost exclusively former lawyers, etc etc). Eventually it will be economic madness to be anything but a lawyer in America. For instance you won't even be able to drive without earning lawyer salaries because of all the lawsuits putting insurance premiums up. And all the time they talk about about how this is defending your rights and protecting the consumer bla bla bla... I need to get out more.
If I could just butt in between responses to Cmdr's gentle troll in the editorial
Who the hell is this clueless old fart Butler anyway ? It's like coming across a zdnet article from 6 months ago.. Linux lacks support, windows works today, etc etc.
Doesn't the smug old git (checkout the photo) understand that the reason technical people (dismissed as "anoraks") are interested in Linux is that it works better than Windows. It never was the "anoraks" who were interested in Windows 10 years ago. It caught on as part of the "nobody ever fired for buying IBM" mentality.
AARGH, I just hit myself. I should know better than to bother looking at zdnet. Is there any other profession in the world which is so badly represented by it's press. It's not as though you find medical journals written by people with no qualifications at all saying things like
"Anti-biotics or Leeches - in depth article on what's wrong with these untested new fads"
Why does RMS think he has the right to influence what people call the OS ?
Is it because as the author of a large chunk of it, he believes he has rights over it that other people don't have. I suppose it's his "intellectual property";-).
It seems to me that continual harping on this point turns people off. Lot's of things are named inappropriately eg "America", get over it. If he want's people to really listen to his message about "freedom" then he would be better off dropping this name thing. BTW, just as I take exception to terms like "software piracy" and "intellectual property" I don't think people should automatically accept RMS's definition of free software. For instance, LGPL seems much more free to me than GPL.
Obfuscation products that operate on object files DO exist - I can't remember the name but a product for reducing the size of.exe files is also very effective for obsufcation purposes.
Your point about if you know the algorithms exist then you can look for them while it takes more guts to do the pure research when you're not even sure a solution is feasible is a very good one.
Although you didn't go into it I also have to admit that NDAs don't really work anyway - what if some Japanese firm hires a couple of programmers - try suing them in Japan - good luck.
I think we're mostly in agreement on this. Software patents in their current form are daft, but they are beneficial in some circumstances. They are SO bad right now though that the industry would be better off without them. If the non-obvious criteria was tightened up HUGELY and length was reduced to 5 years max, I would be more in favor of them.
If you patent something then the algorithms are public, anyone who wants to can read the patent application and discover the algorithms. It is VERY hard to discover algorithms by decompiling source code - much harder than reading the legalese of a patent application.
If the programmer decompiled the program and used that in his product then he could be sued for breach of copyright. Obsfucation products exist, you guys should use them. If an algorithm is genuinely difficult to discover, keep it secret, make sure everybody signs non-disclosure agreements, and you will make plenty of money before anyone can replicate it. Software patents are only beneficial to companies with ideas that CAN be easily rediscovered by someone else.
BTW, I am a hypocrite - I am named as inventor on 5 software patents (taken out by my previous employer) but I'm not proud of it. Some of these ideas were non-obvious but patents are still unnecessary. The protection for a good idea is that it would take a long time for someone else to rediscover it. Many of my ideas that were patented took about 5 minutes to come up with - any competent developer faced with the same problem would come up with these ideas.
You make a good argument that software patents are sometimes necessary, but in their current form, they do much more harm than good.
America would be a really nice country if it wasn't for the lawyer added tax on everything. Of course the justice department opposes limits on litigation - they're all lawyers. The only long term beneficiaries of litigation are lawyers.
Eventually it will be uneconomic to be anything except a lawyer in America. You won't be able to afford to drive because insurance will be so high with everyone suing everyone - you'll need to work as a lawyer to pay for it.
The founding fathers were mostly lawyers, your politicians all mostly lawyers eventually you'll all be lawyers...
America - government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers.
VRML is derivative subset of OpenInventor file format. OpenInventor is a truly excellent interactive 3d c++ development library built on top of OGL.
SGI thought that vrml & the web would save their hides because everyone would start using 3D on the web, and that would somehow generate demand for SGI hardware. This failed miserably since nobody had any real reason to use 3D on the web, and nobody had any serious development tools to make it possible. If SGI had released OpenInventor source code back then VRML would really have taken off since developers would have been able to create excellent tools for building 3D worlds.
Instead SGI dropped OpenInventor (now licensed to www.tgs.com) and tried to create the end user modeling tools/viewers themselves. The Cosmo modeler was kinda crappy and expensive so nobody bothered.
The release of cosmo stuff is definite step in the right direction, but the real masterstroke that would revitalise VRML would be to release OpenInventor under LPGL. This would enable lots of developers to build proper 3D applications (not just web crap) and really would stimulate demand for good 3d hardware (ummmmmmm... SGI's VPC + decent drivers for Linux).
I've also wondered about this stuff. I think using it for keystrokes is kinda stupid - it would be better to use it as an alternative to a mouse so you wouldn't ever need to move your hands off the keyboard.
Still not satisfactory - bring on the implants. Humanity doesn't have long to go, we'll all plug into our computers, then we'll mesh with the hardware, then we'll use the hardware in our heads for enhanced communication, but multiple communicating processors are really just a single machine once communication bandwidth gets high enough... we will become the Borg.. any other existence will seem shallow, and eventually literally unthinkable (try to imagine being a mollusk). All within a few hundred years. Isn't technology wonderful.
Latest processors never worth the price, but with laptops especially you are much better off with older processor (battery life + heat) and more RAM.
Older Thinkpad 770 (200 P5, 1024x768x16) costs less than latest 300Mh PII from craptops.com will take 256Meg ram and is sturdy as fuck, runs Linux perfectly, very expandable and top quality, 5hr battery, THREE YEAR GUARANTEE.
There was a frenzy of media activity on Monday as 100's of normally reclusive "nerds" were seen outside. These normally reticent creatures were finally drawn away from their computer screens to protest about the fact that they were forced to pay for software they don't use.
"I've received email from these creatures and I've even seen some before, but it's extremely unusual to find this many of them outside" said Ivor Clue a reporter from the Washington Post "I'm supposed to cover high tech and I've heard of Linux (some shareware thingy that runs on windows95) but nobody is interested and I don't understand it so I jumped at the opportunity to photograph them in the flesh."
The reason this story got mainstream coverage is that there is something for non-techies to see. Jon, nice job pointing out that this event received a surprising amount of coverage, but I don't think there's anything profound going on. If we want the mainstream to pay more attention to us, we should just get out more.
I was really happy when I saw the original article. It was full of crap and deliberately misleading ("MS is written by hard-working 60hr a week professionals and Linux is written by part time hackers....etc etc") but I was happy to see it.
Why was I happy - simple: I'm looking to buy one year Put Options on MS and as people start to believe Linux really is a threat, this diminishes the amount of money I can make. The more FUD I see, the happier I am. It won't help them in the long run.
MS is powerful, smart, unscrupulous and rich, but they are just one company. How can they compete against the rest of the world ? Why do people use MS at all - because most people care more about the applications than the OS. Yes, there are far more applications for MS at the moment, but that will change. Running a small ISV, which do I prefer: a sensible, reliable OS with free development tools where if I succeed I can keep my market - or a crappy OS where success will just result in being squished like a bug when MS incorporates a poor clone of my product into the OS or into Office ?
Slashdot Mirror
Suddenly /. is populated with experts in genetic engineering. Hey, some looney limey scaremongering, must be some kind of luddite, evolution has been going on forever etc etc, GM foods are no big deal...
There is a big difference between selective breeding, natural selection, hybridization and genetic engineering. We're creating all kinds of combinations that would just never occur in nature (such as mixing of plant and animal DNA). I would say the burden of proof should be on the companies producing GM crops to explain why there is no way nasty side effects can crop up.
The GM debate in the states has been cleverly framed so that people questioning the safety of GM crops are painted as uneducated and anti-science. (By safety I mean long term effects of existence of modified genes, NOT the danger that the food might be bad for you - that's easily tested). There's an instant aura of rationality that can be obtained by dismissing allegations of possible dangers as nonsense. Who really knows what the effects of introducing radically new gene sequences into the environment will be ? These are sequences which would never arise naturally. There may well be no danger, but would you happily allow life forms from another planet into our eco-system (hey, its probably harmless), or would it make you kinda nervous.
CRC is one of those Reagan think tanks founded to safeguard the interests of minorities (such as wealthy individuals or corporations - the poor wee things) against powerful pressure groups such as unwed mothers or disabled people.
Theie assertions are provided without any arguments based upon logic or facts. Example:
'How could anyone but a radical anarchist support a concept like "free software"? It may seem like a boon for consumers. But they should realize that a market totally free of prices is not likely to produce quality merchandise and will quickly collapse.'
Except the quality merchandise already exists and shows no signs of collapsing. So, what is the assertion based upon ? They seem to be saying
"The existence of free quality software is inconsistent with our theories --- therefore the world is obviously going to change so that the facts will become consistent with our beliefs"
A more rational group might reason as follows:
"The facts are inconsistent with our theories --- therefore there might be something wrong with our theories".
These people are TRUE BELIEVERS though, so they make assertions and back them with their beliefs
'But OSS has a fatal flaw: it is based on a false theory of production.'
What does this mean ? OSS will not work, and here's why - it won't work because it is based on a "false theory", and how do we know this theory is false - easy, it's different to our theories so it must be false.
These guy's should have worked for the Spanish inquisition. They've got the techniques down pat.
There is no concrete line between free and non-free, there are only degrees of freedom.
Yes, public domain code IS more free than GPL code. I know that the restrictions in the GPL are designed to safeguard the freedom of the users (especially users of derived works) but they are still restrictions.
IMHO it is up the author to decide what level of freedom to provide in his license. What I object to is the FSFs total conviction that they occupy some sort of moral high ground. Software released under a license which grants less freedom is judged "immoral" while software which grants more freedom is "misguided" or worse "fails to safeguard freedom".
LGPL has fewer restrictions that GPL, hence it is more free. Public domain is more free still. As an example of how these extra freedoms can benefit users, commercial companies take public domain code, add some extra functionality to make it useful and sell it to people. RMS calls this "freedom subtracted" software as opposed to "value added" (fair comment), but to non-programmers, an executable that does what you want is better than source code that doesn't.
I agree with FSF hierarchy of freedom, and I think more freedom is generally a good thing. I just wanted to point out that there were other levels besides the one's they defined. My take is that it is purely up to the author to decide what license to release code under. I almost never pay attention to arguments based on somebody else's interpretation of morailty.
4. The freedom to link the software with code that is under a different license.
ie LGPL passes 1-4, GPL passes 1-3.
I like the changes on the whole but I think it is a very bad idea for people who write stupid comments to start with a negative score.
The main reason is that they will just get themselves different accounts. If they are juvenile, loud and offensive they want to be heard and will certainly go to the trouble of creating a new account. This means that not only will they not start with a negative score, but readers will no longer recognise the name as someone who writes crap, so we lose the best form of filtering (individuals using their own judgement to not read something by X).
The inability to perform one specific and highly unusual task with a piece of software does not make it worthless.
Try this: Linux is worthless
Yes, worthless. Let's say I want to write a document using word97. Word97 does not run on Linux...
I was more thinking in terms of just transfering the entire account immediately :) The virus would be discovered within a couple of days, but if you infected 500000 accounts in that time (like mellissa could), it would be worthwhile. Some Germans demonstrated this with an ActiveX control, just as a little example of how amazingly defenseless THAT stuff is. Just place it on your web site and anybody visiting using IE with security turned down has a problem. The nice thing about it is that you have all this security/passwords etc to access the bank account (that most people take pretty seriously), but it does them no good at all if the data on their PCs has already been compromised. Actually, a macro virus that added a link from any index.html files on the local machine to an ActiveX control that also contained the virus (and transfered funds) would spread pretty quick.
The point is that melissa was really NOT that malicious, if someone really wanted to play silly buggers on this hugely dangerous combination of crap software and naive users they could do FAR more damage.
"He was charged with interruption of public communications, theft of computer services and wrongful access to computer systems."
Interesting 3 crimes listed there. I guess in some sense he was guilty of 1, but I don't see how he could be guilty of 2 or 3. Does the fact that your program is running on somebody else's hardware without their consent constitute theft of computer services. w95 was running on my hardware when I bought it - can I charge MS with theft of computer services. Likewise if your data appears on another computer does that consitute wrongful access to computer systems? How about spam, can we lock people away for 40 years for sending spam, far more offensive to me than being sent a program which I would have to be a moron to run.
Are there any specific laws against self-replicating programs. Powerful memes such as religion can be considered virus's that run on wetware and are highly contagious. Should these be illegal too ?
While I'm looking for different angles, I think he should counter-sue the US govenment for violating his copyright. When federal employees pressed the "run macro" button they ended up sending copies of his software to different organisations without consent. A variation of melissa with a nice (C) on it could be an effective way of protesting daft IP laws.
The guy has done society a huge service by waking people up to the huge security holes in their software. It would have been just as easy to send out a truly destructive virus that introduced random errors across the harddisk or appended "transfer funds" instructions to the Quicken files for people who do online banking. Now that would be an interesting virus.
I am so sick of this "Author doesn't get it" crap. The author is perfectly aware that RMS believes in Free Speech !beer. What the hell were the moderators thinking in awarding you 3 points for repeating that trite and inaccurate mantra.
/. seems sanctimonious in the extreme. There's an attitude of - well, he might be trying to do something useful, but he doesn't care about "freedom" as deeply as me and so I'll ignore him.
I agree that the COSS idea has flaws but do you have any better ideas? There must be some decent way of combining the benefits of commerical and free software and I applaud attempts to try to find it. Do you really think that poeple will write slick GUI's for accounting software and release it under GPL (for fun ? for respect ???). People need software like that and they are happy to pay for it. The FREEDOM to obtain the software you need (under whatever license) is also important.
Sometimes
I believe there are FAR more programmers doing custom development than writing shrink-wrapped applications. Does anyone have any figures on this ? The software sector is not really that large an industry - any large company has it's own IT departments - mostly doing custom development and support for purely internal use.
I mostly agree with your other points though, I haven't seen convincing arguments that releasing OSS is generally good business for the companies doing so. Companies (like RedHat) can make money selling software that other people have written, but thats not the same as it being profitable to release your own code.
I really don't think we will see a fall in demand for programmers as a result of open source though. As custom tweaks to OSS become possible, companies will want more from their software to make their businesses more efficient and they will pay for custom tweaks - it'll save them money.
Linux is a good OS
Can we move on now
There is more to a nerds life than that
For most people an OS is something on which to achieve other things, not an end in itself. Is there a "news for writers" site which is obsessed with the latest and greatest typewriter.
When I encounter writing which I can't understand it generally means either I am being stupid or the writer is, or both. I am interested in the subject matter - I believe that technology will greatly effect consciousness, and the web will play a significant part (humanity WILL turn into the borg, but I don't want to go into that just now).
;-)
However after a short while I gave up on trying to extract some worthwhile meaning from his words...
"The images of the world we internalize from life online also become obsolete each time we turn off the computer."
Is this profound or profoundly stupid ?
It's a common trick to give an impression of intelligence by talking incomprehensibly. If other people cannot understand you then you must be more intelligent than they
On Feynman's maxim though "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity" I think it more likely that the author is either incapable of expressing himself clearly or doesn't have anything tangible to express. Personally I blame the fact that children are no longer beaten or humiliated when they produce sub-standard English - I must be getting old.
Record companies seem to be sending the message: "We will persecute anybody involved in MP3's even if they are doing nothing illegal because we want to squash the whole thing". This is a genuine threat since the lawsuits cost a lot of money for the companies involved even if they are frivolous.
IANAL but isn't this itself of questionable legality.. "class action suit" anybody ?
Rant follows...
Of course this technique only works under American legal system where the defender of a stupid lawsuit still has huge bills (as opposed to loser pays costs system). This won't change since the only people with power to change it are lawyers (American politicians are almost exclusively former lawyers, etc etc). Eventually it will be economic madness to be anything but a lawyer in America. For instance you won't even be able to drive without earning lawyer salaries because of all the lawsuits putting insurance premiums up. And all the time they talk about about how this is defending your rights and protecting the consumer bla bla bla... I need to get out more.
If I could just butt in between responses to Cmdr's gentle troll in the editorial
Who the hell is this clueless old fart Butler anyway ? It's like coming across a zdnet article from 6 months ago.. Linux lacks support, windows works today, etc etc.
Doesn't the smug old git (checkout the photo) understand that the reason technical people (dismissed as "anoraks") are interested in Linux is that it works better than Windows. It never was the "anoraks" who were interested in Windows 10 years ago. It caught on as part of the "nobody ever fired for buying IBM" mentality.
AARGH, I just hit myself. I should know better than to bother looking at zdnet. Is there any other profession in the world which is so badly represented by it's press. It's not as though you find medical journals written by people with no qualifications at all saying things like
"Anti-biotics or Leeches - in depth article on what's wrong with these untested new fads"
Extra choice is seldom a bad thing, and more than that, I think he belongs. For those who don't like it - Just ignore It (TM)
Why does RMS think he has the right to influence what people call the OS ?
;-).
Is it because as the author of a large chunk of it, he believes he has rights over it that other people don't have. I suppose it's his "intellectual property"
It seems to me that continual harping on this point turns people off. Lot's of things are named inappropriately eg "America", get over it. If he want's people to really listen to his message about "freedom" then he would be better off dropping this name thing. BTW, just as I take exception to terms like "software piracy" and "intellectual property" I don't think people should automatically accept RMS's definition of free software. For instance, LGPL seems much more free to me than GPL.
Obfuscation products that operate on object files DO exist - I can't remember the name but a product for reducing the size of .exe files is also very effective for obsufcation purposes.
Your point about if you know the algorithms exist then you can look for them while it takes more guts to do the pure research when you're not even sure a solution is feasible is a very good one.
Although you didn't go into it I also have to admit that NDAs don't really work anyway - what if some Japanese firm hires a couple of programmers - try suing them in Japan - good luck.
I think we're mostly in agreement on this. Software patents in their current form are daft, but they are beneficial in some circumstances. They are SO bad right now though that the industry would be better off without them. If the non-obvious criteria was tightened up HUGELY and length was reduced to 5 years max, I would be more in favor of them.
If you patent something then the algorithms are public, anyone who wants to can read the patent application and discover the algorithms. It is VERY hard to discover algorithms by decompiling source code - much harder than reading the legalese of a patent application.
If the programmer decompiled the program and used that in his product then he could be sued for breach of copyright. Obsfucation products exist, you guys should use them. If an algorithm is genuinely difficult to discover, keep it secret, make sure everybody signs non-disclosure agreements, and you will make plenty of money before anyone can replicate it. Software patents are only beneficial to companies with ideas that CAN be easily rediscovered by someone else.
BTW, I am a hypocrite - I am named as inventor on 5 software patents (taken out by my previous employer) but I'm not proud of it. Some of these ideas were non-obvious but patents are still unnecessary. The protection for a good idea is that it would take a long time for someone else to rediscover it. Many of my ideas that were patented took about 5 minutes to come up with - any competent developer faced with the same problem would come up with these ideas.
You make a good argument that software patents are sometimes necessary, but in their current form, they do much more harm than good.
America would be a really nice country if it wasn't for the lawyer added tax on everything. Of course the justice department opposes limits on litigation - they're all lawyers. The only long term beneficiaries of litigation are lawyers.
Eventually it will be uneconomic to be anything except a lawyer in America. You won't be able to afford to drive because insurance will be so high with everyone suing everyone - you'll need to work as a lawyer to pay for it.
The founding fathers were mostly lawyers, your politicians all mostly lawyers eventually you'll all be lawyers...
America - government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers.
...
VRML is derivative subset of OpenInventor file format. OpenInventor is a truly excellent interactive 3d c++ development library built on top of OGL.
SGI thought that vrml & the web would save their hides because everyone would start using 3D on the web, and that would somehow generate demand for SGI hardware. This failed miserably since nobody had any real reason to use 3D on the web, and nobody had any serious development tools to make it possible. If SGI had released OpenInventor source code back then VRML would really have taken off since developers would have been able to create excellent tools for building 3D worlds.
Instead SGI dropped OpenInventor (now licensed to www.tgs.com) and tried to create the end user modeling tools/viewers themselves. The Cosmo modeler was kinda crappy and expensive so nobody bothered.
The release of cosmo stuff is definite step in the right direction, but the real masterstroke that would revitalise VRML would be to release OpenInventor under LPGL. This would enable lots of developers to build proper 3D applications (not just web crap) and really would stimulate demand for good 3d hardware (ummmmmmm... SGI's VPC + decent drivers for Linux).
I've also wondered about this stuff.
I think using it for keystrokes is kinda stupid - it would be better to use it as an alternative to a mouse so you wouldn't ever need to move your hands off the keyboard.
Still not satisfactory - bring on the implants. Humanity doesn't have long to go, we'll all plug into our computers, then we'll mesh with the hardware, then we'll use the hardware in our heads for enhanced communication, but multiple communicating processors are really just a single machine once communication bandwidth gets high enough... we will become the Borg.. any other existence will seem shallow, and eventually literally unthinkable (try to imagine being a mollusk). All within a few hundred years. Isn't technology wonderful.
Latest processors never worth the price, but with laptops especially you are much better off with older processor (battery life + heat) and more RAM.
Older Thinkpad 770 (200 P5, 1024x768x16) costs less than latest 300Mh PII from craptops.com will take 256Meg ram and is sturdy as fuck, runs Linux perfectly, very expandable and top quality, 5hr battery, THREE YEAR GUARANTEE.
Picked up mine for £1000 - worth every penny.
Sorry, the statements "I do real work at home"
and "both ran win95" do not belong together.
As for your benchmarks... Win95 is a 16 bit OS,
PPros run slowly on it. NT or Linux run much faster on PPro than Cyrix shite. Try it.
There was a frenzy of media activity on Monday as 100's of normally reclusive "nerds" were seen outside. These normally reticent creatures were finally drawn away from their computer screens to protest about the fact that they were forced to pay for software they don't use.
"I've received email from these creatures and I've even seen some before, but it's extremely unusual to find this many of them outside" said Ivor Clue a reporter from the Washington Post "I'm supposed to cover high tech and I've heard of Linux (some shareware thingy that runs on windows95) but nobody is interested and I don't understand it so I jumped at the opportunity to photograph them in the flesh."
The reason this story got mainstream coverage is that there is something for non-techies to see. Jon, nice job pointing out that this event received a surprising amount of coverage, but I don't think there's anything profound going on. If we want the mainstream to pay more attention to us, we should just get out more.
I was really happy when I saw the original article. It was full of crap and deliberately misleading ("MS is written by hard-working 60hr a week professionals and Linux is written by part time hackers....etc etc") but I was happy to see it.
Why was I happy - simple: I'm looking to buy one year Put Options on MS and as people start to believe Linux really is a threat, this diminishes the amount of money I can make. The more FUD I see, the happier I am. It won't help them in the long run.
MS is powerful, smart, unscrupulous and rich, but they are just one company. How can they compete against the rest of the world ? Why do people use MS at all - because most people care more about the applications than the OS. Yes, there are far more applications for MS at the moment, but that will change. Running a small ISV, which do I prefer: a sensible, reliable OS with free development tools where if I succeed I can keep my market - or a crappy OS where success will just result in being squished like a bug when MS incorporates a poor clone of my product into the OS or into Office ?