Er, how is a monopoly control of the idea compatible with the idea is released to benefit progress? It is not.
Read up on your patent law, my friend. A patent lasts a finite amount of time. Study the pharma business, in particular the issue of generic drugs for many examples.
The whole concept behind gpl and open source development, is people volunteer and collaborate, costing not much more than their time. This type of development *is* the future of not just software development, but a future on how productive forces will work in other areas. Kiss markets and IP laws down the trash, this world will not be ruled by a bunch of money grubbing control freaks!
Yeah, Stalin thought so too - the collectivization of Soviet farms actually resulted in mass starvation. Same thing happened to Mao in China, and again in North Korea and it's happening right now in Zimbabwe.
Remember, everyone who writes open source has got to eat, live somewhere, pay bills, etc. How many open source developers support themselves wholly through open source? 1%? Less? I'm not counting the IBM types who are really in the business of selling hardware.
Let's see how many "volunteers" you get to work in the fields so some geeks can sit in air conditioned offices all day. Let's see if you can get your groceries for free because you wrote a device driver in the web server back in the company's head office. Let's see if you can hack code on your landlord's PC instead of paying the rent.
Open source works because it's funded by people's day jobs. If those day jobs don't pay, Open source will simply disappear.
If most (or all) software were Free, then redundant development would occur more rarely, and only when the programmer thought he could do a better job, not just an equivalent one.
Do you work with many programmers? All of them think they can do a better job, and all of them will try to reinvent the wheel from scratch on every project, if you let them. I remember we once left a programmer alone for too long, he invented a whole new language to script his bit of the application! Now he could have embedded TCL (which is what TCL was designed for), he could have exposed a COM interface and used VBA, he could've reused something else, but he didn't.
But this is a fraud, "intellectual property" is not a free market property right.
You might have had a point in the day when the cost of manufacturing a product vastly outweighed the cost of designing it. In the beginning, car designs were very simple, but it didn't matter, because no-one without vast amounts of capital could afford to build a factory, so the design was safe.
Nowadays, the cost of designing a product - be it a piece of software or a new drug - vastly outweights the cost of manufacturing it. Software in particular can be duplicated very cheaply. Therefore we need a structure that makes it possible to obtain a return on investment - and note that I said "possible" not "certain" - in development of a new product. That's what the patent system was designed to do.
But there is an attitude among free software people that can be summarized as "I freely choose to make no money from my software work, therefore everyone else must be denied the right to make money from software". That's the thinking behind the GPL. It might work from the ivory tower of a MacArthur Foundation grant at MIT, but it isn't viable in the real world.
Remember, IBM makes it's money on hardware. It doesn't care about Linux on ideological grounds, it merely wants to cut the cost of shipping hardware.
An artificial stimulant to the market, sure, but it certainly strengthened their position in the worldwide marketplace...
Japan is the ultimate example of boom and bust, triggered by their government creating just these sorts of distortions in the market. Now they're trapped in a deflationary spiral. Sure Japan was a player in the 80s, but they are very much weaker now.
I've had the misfortune to have two Dell laptops (Inspiron 7000 back in '99, Latitude C840 presently). They were not my choice - work machines. Both have been heavy, cheaply made junk. The Inspiron had multiple hardware repairs before I got rid of it (screen failure, memory, casing). The current Latitude is only 5 months old and the hard drive crapped out last week. It takes the patience of Job to deal with Dell Support, particularly when you are an IT professional and you already know what is wrong! It only took 3 days to argue the drive replacement out of them.
Gotta say my experience of Dell is completely different. Only problem I've had with my Inspiron notebook (~18 months old) is a battery going bad, and some old geezer from Dell showed up the next day with a new one. He took the old battery away, and even flash-updated my BIOS for me while he was here. I used a Dell desktop at work for about 2 years, and it was a great generic machine - just sat there running Win2K and working as it should. If I was buying x86 I'd probably go straight to dell.com to do it.
Just this morning, I write a backdoor into a web project. Very often the testing users give me really strange errors that I just can't verify at all. It's useful to have a "master password" that I'll disable later (probably.) Backdoors are most often used for debugging purposes. Fortunately for the users, I'll be the sysadmin when the system goes live, so there isn't much of a risk (yet.)
If you're the sysadmin, then it's not a backdoor. After all, you could just fire up a debugger on the process and find out anything you wanted, passwords, data, anything. Or log onto the database as the DBA and just query the tables directly. Or place a packet sniffer on the network.
A back door implies that it gives you something you couldn't and shouldn't have.
Its like that theory that BAE/Mcdonnel-Douglas embedded the F15 Eagle fighter plane with a backdoor in its computer systems so if its ever used against the USA it will strangely malfunction.
Britain should've done that with the Type 42 Destroyer, in the Falklands war the British forces were facing an enemy with identical equipment - even their rifles were the same. Didn't help the Argentines much, tho'. I'd bet that Iraqi pilots in F15s would get beaten hands down by Americans in the same aircraft.
Did you ever think of what would happen if a cracker found out about such a backdoor? Just because you do your best to keep it a secret doesn't mean that crackers can't find out about it.
Well I don't know about you, but I use the same combination as on my luggage.
Would you really want to work for a company where everyone fitted into the same precisely-defined psychological profile? That isn't a company, it's a cult!
If I remember correctly, in CLOS you can specify a method "foo", and then another method "foo" with the ":before" modifier that would be executed before the normal "foo" method. There is also an ":after" specifier.
Yes, and relational databases have had trigger methods before and after different SQL operations. You can define 12 triggers on a table in Oracle, made out of combinations of (before, after) (insert, update, delete) (for each row, for each statement). You code them in PL/SQL which is a fairly comprehensive language similar to Ada. Is AOP merely triggers for Java methods? Because you could do that already, by subclassing, overriding the method, and calling the superclass method within your own code.
Basically, imagine if you wrote a program which had "hooks" scattered through it. As you write your code, you place hooks for before/after doing many things: reading user input, transmitting network data, accessing preference files, checking permissions, etc. (Imagine wrapping all your function calls with dynamically-bound functions which you don't yet know if map to an identity function, or have some effect)
So it's the same thing as NSAPI/ISAPI? Or is it more like a trigger in a database?
Fission power has huge solid waste issues which is why it's evil.
Which is why you use breeder reactors, rather than attempting to store the waste. After all, it's highly radioactive, so why not continue to extract power from it? Unfortunately, breeders can also be used in weapons manufacture, so the hippies get doubly upset!
So, they don't want nuclear waste, yet they don't want waste to be recycled either! How anyone can take these people seriously is beyond me - one more reason that not everyone should have a vote.
Nope. The power to weight ratio is too lousy to run your entire industry off of this or any other power source transported from Earth. You'd probably send a few RTEGs to run control electronics during lunar night, but that's about it.
Well, it depends if you want thermal energy, or electrical energy. If it's mostly thermal and some mechanical, a nuke is very efficient and you can fit it in 4 tons or less, shielding and all.
Mining 40 tonnes of He3 would provide the entire U.S. electricity consumption in 2000.
Assuming we had a fusion reactor, that is. Which we don't. And if we did the hippies wouldn't let us use it: "it's not just nuclear, but thermonuclear!". The West could happily and safely power itself with fission, using breeder reactors to recycle the fuel, if it wasn't for political idiots.
The moon's crust is largely silicates, and with thin films even a relatively small smelter/purification plant will get you an impressive acreage in solar collectors.
Plenty of silicon dioxide, not much hydrogen or carbon. Hardly any, in fact, and you kinda need them to manufacture solar cells. If you want to produce anything made of silicon on the moon, be prepared to import a lot of hydrogen and carbon. Or skip the moon altogether and go to Mars.
Or just extract aluminum from the crust (which is also plentiful), and build reflectors for a heat engine.
Manufacturing aluminium takes a lot of energy, 20 kWh for a single kilo. Where are you going to get all that power, since you can't manufacture solar cells?
So, unless you want to haul far too much hydrogen or build power cables and thermoelectric plants around a latitude circle, you're stuck shutting down mining for two thirds of the month.
You'd be better off importing a submarine-style nuclear reactor from Earth.
Of course the US could decide to abrogate this treaty like so many others of late. However it does not seem likely that even 'The Family' want to start a war with China at this point, they probably don't even rate a mention in the top ten.
Until someone does tear the treaty up, moon colonization will continue to go nowhere. What's the point of spending billions of dollars locating mineral deposits, if anyone can just show up and take them from you, because you've no "claim" over it? No, until entrepreneurs can buy/homestead/claim plots of land on the moon (or Mars or wherever) and can also rely on their governments to defend their property, space will remain a mere academic curiousity.
Screw Microsoft and their proprietary methods. Once we get Bushy boy out of office, look for more anti-trust charges to be filed hot on the heels of the European case.
Yeah, and while we're at it, why not have Coke sell Pepsi at all their franchises too?
Microsoft leaving the ARB means nothing, as third parties are still quite welcome to write their own drivers, and they will, because workstation software (like CAD packages) aren't going to move off OpenGL anytime soon. You will still be able to get OpenGL drivers for your Quadro or Fire card.
How obvious! Type a long string of "words" (I use the term loosely since only one of those is recognizeably English) and all your problems are solved!
That is the problem Linux needs to address. On VMS, you could pretty much guess the command, and most of the time it would work, because the people who wrote it had planned the system from the ground up, rather that cobbling it together from lots of different utilities written by lots of different people.
His point is, AOL didn't invent something like, mp3, or the merge sort, true type fonts or X11. They took a basic net connection, a little db management for buddy lists and a lot of servers to manage connections. No innovation here.
Like most techies, you've forgotten that not all innovation is technical. AOL used simple technology to create a service that appealed to millions of people. IRC is probably technically more sophisticated than AIM, but it's remained in a niche. Why is that?
I'm working an Foo.java and have a question about a line of code. I use cvs annotate to determine that Bob last modified it. I turn my head to the left and say "Bob, I need help with Foo.java,"
and then I remember that Bob has taken his laptop and is working in Geneva this week. I've no idea what his phone number is there, but wherever he is logged in his IM address is the same. So I drop him an IM containing the line of code I'm curious about, since reading out code over the phone is an imappropriate use of the medium. Bob's actually on the phone, but rather than interrupt him, he notices that he has an IM waiting. 5 minutes later, he's off the phone, he types and line of code back, and we're done.
Personally were I running a business this is about the last thing in the world I would bother spending any money on. That's just me though. Maybe there is some great benefit to this that I don't see. Someone make me a case for why I would need to spend some money on something like this. I'm curious here. Doubtlessly there's got to be something I'm missing.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, how is a monopoly control of the idea compatible with the idea is released to benefit progress? It is not.
Read up on your patent law, my friend. A patent lasts a finite amount of time. Study the pharma business, in particular the issue of generic drugs for many examples.
The whole concept behind gpl and open source development, is people volunteer and collaborate, costing not much more than their time. This type of development *is* the future of not just software development, but a future on how productive forces will work in other areas. Kiss markets and IP laws down the trash, this world will not be ruled by a bunch of money grubbing control freaks!
Yeah, Stalin thought so too - the collectivization of Soviet farms actually resulted in mass starvation. Same thing happened to Mao in China, and again in North Korea and it's happening right now in Zimbabwe.
Remember, everyone who writes open source has got to eat, live somewhere, pay bills, etc. How many open source developers support themselves wholly through open source? 1%? Less? I'm not counting the IBM types who are really in the business of selling hardware.
Let's see how many "volunteers" you get to work in the fields so some geeks can sit in air conditioned offices all day. Let's see if you can get your groceries for free because you wrote a device driver in the web server back in the company's head office. Let's see if you can hack code on your landlord's PC instead of paying the rent.
Open source works because it's funded by people's day jobs. If those day jobs don't pay, Open source will simply disappear.
If most (or all) software were Free, then redundant development would occur more rarely, and only when the programmer thought he could do a better job, not just an equivalent one.
Do you work with many programmers? All of them think they can do a better job, and all of them will try to reinvent the wheel from scratch on every project, if you let them. I remember we once left a programmer alone for too long, he invented a whole new language to script his bit of the application! Now he could have embedded TCL (which is what TCL was designed for), he could have exposed a COM interface and used VBA, he could've reused something else, but he didn't.
But this is a fraud, "intellectual property" is not a free market property right.
You might have had a point in the day when the cost of manufacturing a product vastly outweighed the cost of designing it. In the beginning, car designs were very simple, but it didn't matter, because no-one without vast amounts of capital could afford to build a factory, so the design was safe.
Nowadays, the cost of designing a product - be it a piece of software or a new drug - vastly outweights the cost of manufacturing it. Software in particular can be duplicated very cheaply. Therefore we need a structure that makes it possible to obtain a return on investment - and note that I said "possible" not "certain" - in development of a new product. That's what the patent system was designed to do.
But there is an attitude among free software people that can be summarized as "I freely choose to make no money from my software work, therefore everyone else must be denied the right to make money from software". That's the thinking behind the GPL. It might work from the ivory tower of a MacArthur Foundation grant at MIT, but it isn't viable in the real world.
Remember, IBM makes it's money on hardware. It doesn't care about Linux on ideological grounds, it merely wants to cut the cost of shipping hardware.
An artificial stimulant to the market, sure, but it certainly strengthened their position in the worldwide marketplace...
Japan is the ultimate example of boom and bust, triggered by their government creating just these sorts of distortions in the market. Now they're trapped in a deflationary spiral. Sure Japan was a player in the 80s, but they are very much weaker now.
I've had the misfortune to have two Dell laptops (Inspiron 7000 back in '99, Latitude C840 presently). They were not my choice - work machines. Both have been heavy, cheaply made junk. The Inspiron had multiple hardware repairs before I got rid of it (screen failure, memory, casing). The current Latitude is only 5 months old and the hard drive crapped out last week. It takes the patience of Job to deal with Dell Support, particularly when you are an IT professional and you already know what is wrong! It only took 3 days to argue the drive replacement out of them.
Gotta say my experience of Dell is completely different. Only problem I've had with my Inspiron notebook (~18 months old) is a battery going bad, and some old geezer from Dell showed up the next day with a new one. He took the old battery away, and even flash-updated my BIOS for me while he was here. I used a Dell desktop at work for about 2 years, and it was a great generic machine - just sat there running Win2K and working as it should. If I was buying x86 I'd probably go straight to dell.com to do it.
Just this morning, I write a backdoor into a web project. Very often the testing users give me really strange errors that I just can't verify at all. It's useful to have a "master password" that I'll disable later (probably.) Backdoors are most often used for debugging purposes. Fortunately for the users, I'll be the sysadmin when the system goes live, so there isn't much of a risk (yet.)
If you're the sysadmin, then it's not a backdoor. After all, you could just fire up a debugger on the process and find out anything you wanted, passwords, data, anything. Or log onto the database as the DBA and just query the tables directly. Or place a packet sniffer on the network.
A back door implies that it gives you something you couldn't and shouldn't have.
Its like that theory that BAE /Mcdonnel-Douglas embedded the F15 Eagle fighter plane with a backdoor in its computer systems so if its ever used against the USA it will strangely malfunction.
Britain should've done that with the Type 42 Destroyer, in the Falklands war the British forces were facing an enemy with identical equipment - even their rifles were the same. Didn't help the Argentines much, tho'. I'd bet that Iraqi pilots in F15s would get beaten hands down by Americans in the same aircraft.
Did you ever think of what would happen if a cracker found out about such a backdoor? Just because you do your best to keep it a secret doesn't mean that crackers can't find out about it.
Well I don't know about you, but I use the same combination as on my luggage.
Would you really want to work for a company where everyone fitted into the same precisely-defined psychological profile? That isn't a company, it's a cult!
Many miles before even arriving, I loose signal on my GSM phone.
Thuraya phones use GSM by default but will fail over to satellite mode when no GSM signal is available.
A team I was on early last year had a legacy Java db access module that was rife with poor exception handling.
:-P
There's legacy Java code already... oh dear.
A cunning technique, tho'.
If I remember correctly, in CLOS you can specify a method "foo", and then another method "foo" with the ":before" modifier that would be executed before the normal "foo" method. There is also an ":after" specifier.
Yes, and relational databases have had trigger methods before and after different SQL operations. You can define 12 triggers on a table in Oracle, made out of combinations of (before, after) (insert, update, delete) (for each row, for each statement). You code them in PL/SQL which is a fairly comprehensive language similar to Ada. Is AOP merely triggers for Java methods? Because you could do that already, by subclassing, overriding the method, and calling the superclass method within your own code.
Basically, imagine if you wrote a program which had "hooks" scattered through it. As you write your code, you place hooks for before/after doing many things: reading user input, transmitting network data, accessing preference files, checking permissions, etc. (Imagine wrapping all your function calls with dynamically-bound functions which you don't yet know if map to an identity function, or have some effect)
So it's the same thing as NSAPI/ISAPI? Or is it more like a trigger in a database?
Fission power has huge solid waste issues which is why it's evil.
Which is why you use breeder reactors, rather than attempting to store the waste. After all, it's highly radioactive, so why not continue to extract power from it? Unfortunately, breeders can also be used in weapons manufacture, so the hippies get doubly upset!
So, they don't want nuclear waste, yet they don't want waste to be recycled either! How anyone can take these people seriously is beyond me - one more reason that not everyone should have a vote.
Nope. The power to weight ratio is too lousy to run your entire industry off of this or any other power source transported from Earth. You'd probably send a few RTEGs to run control electronics during lunar night, but that's about it.
Well, it depends if you want thermal energy, or electrical energy. If it's mostly thermal and some mechanical, a nuke is very efficient and you can fit it in 4 tons or less, shielding and all.
How about a model that lets you chat via IRC? That one I'll buy for sure.
With a JVM and an always-on connection, you can do whatever you can code...
Mining 40 tonnes of He3 would provide the entire U.S. electricity consumption in 2000.
Assuming we had a fusion reactor, that is. Which we don't. And if we did the hippies wouldn't let us use it: "it's not just nuclear, but thermonuclear!". The West could happily and safely power itself with fission, using breeder reactors to recycle the fuel, if it wasn't for political idiots.
The moon's crust is largely silicates, and with thin films even a relatively small smelter/purification plant will get you an impressive acreage in solar collectors.
Plenty of silicon dioxide, not much hydrogen or carbon. Hardly any, in fact, and you kinda need them to manufacture solar cells. If you want to produce anything made of silicon on the moon, be prepared to import a lot of hydrogen and carbon. Or skip the moon altogether and go to Mars.
Or just extract aluminum from the crust (which is also plentiful), and build reflectors for a heat engine.
Manufacturing aluminium takes a lot of energy, 20 kWh for a single kilo. Where are you going to get all that power, since you can't manufacture solar cells?
So, unless you want to haul far too much hydrogen or build power cables and thermoelectric plants around a latitude circle, you're stuck shutting down mining for two thirds of the month.
You'd be better off importing a submarine-style nuclear reactor from Earth.
Of course the US could decide to abrogate this treaty like so many others of late. However it does not seem likely that even 'The Family' want to start a war with China at this point, they probably don't even rate a mention in the top ten.
Until someone does tear the treaty up, moon colonization will continue to go nowhere. What's the point of spending billions of dollars locating mineral deposits, if anyone can just show up and take them from you, because you've no "claim" over it? No, until entrepreneurs can buy/homestead/claim plots of land on the moon (or Mars or wherever) and can also rely on their governments to defend their property, space will remain a mere academic curiousity.
Screw Microsoft and their proprietary methods. Once we get Bushy boy out of office, look for more anti-trust charges to be filed hot on the heels of the European case.
Yeah, and while we're at it, why not have Coke sell Pepsi at all their franchises too?
Microsoft leaving the ARB means nothing, as third parties are still quite welcome to write their own drivers, and they will, because workstation software (like CAD packages) aren't going to move off OpenGL anytime soon. You will still be able to get OpenGL drivers for your Quadro or Fire card.
apt-get install mt-st scsiadd scsitools sformat sg-utils sg3-utils smartsuite taper
How obvious! Type a long string of "words" (I use the term loosely since only one of those is recognizeably English) and all your problems are solved!
That is the problem Linux needs to address. On VMS, you could pretty much guess the command, and most of the time it would work, because the people who wrote it had planned the system from the ground up, rather that cobbling it together from lots of different utilities written by lots of different people.
His point is, AOL didn't invent something like, mp3, or the merge sort, true type fonts or X11. They took a basic net connection, a little db management for buddy lists and a lot of servers to manage connections. No innovation here.
Like most techies, you've forgotten that not all innovation is technical. AOL used simple technology to create a service that appealed to millions of people. IRC is probably technically more sophisticated than AIM, but it's remained in a niche. Why is that?
I'm working an Foo.java and have a question about a line of code. I use cvs annotate to determine that Bob last modified it. I turn my head to the left and say "Bob, I need help with Foo.java,"
and then I remember that Bob has taken his laptop and is working in Geneva this week. I've no idea what his phone number is there, but wherever he is logged in his IM address is the same. So I drop him an IM containing the line of code I'm curious about, since reading out code over the phone is an imappropriate use of the medium. Bob's actually on the phone, but rather than interrupt him, he notices that he has an IM waiting. 5 minutes later, he's off the phone, he types and line of code back, and we're done.
Personally were I running a business this is about the last thing in the world I would bother spending any money on. That's just me though. Maybe there is some great benefit to this that I don't see. Someone make me a case for why I would need to spend some money on something like this. I'm curious here. Doubtlessly there's got to be something I'm missing.
Chat is taken very seriously in the financial services industry.