Given that current satellites are able to read print the size of license plates
I think that's an urban myth. You would need to broadcast on frequencies that are distinct from any ambient emitters and reflectors which probably rules out anything between IR and UV. Even then the satellite would only see you as a point source. And then, there are no real advantages over radio.
The reason it doesnt is that any large scale implementation would be stopped (somehow) by media companies
No it wouldn't. The vast majority of that traffic will be going too and from the hardwired networks. There's no point in running servers on a wireless network, because you need your servers to be in a physically secure, environmentally controlled data center, where there is ample wired bandwidth anyway. The more access points there are on your wireless network, the more hardwires there will need to be to support them, otherwise the few APs that are connected will become hotspots for traffic (and have to foot all the associated bills). The only people that would see a decline in business are the dial-up ISPs.
Its amazing that most people of the world search for similar things, irrespective of language! Good they put filters.... otherwise a normal visitor would be shocked that most of the world wants naked ladies.
How about an E2zeitgeist? Cream of the cool is close, but it would be interesting to see what people are searching for as well as what they are contributing. I sometimes even check E2 before Google, because at least there is some active quality control on E2 nodes, unlike the web at large.
There's only one condition where this is true: when you have proprietary binary formats for files. Other than that, the methods and algorithms used by commercial software companies are widely available in books and training manuals.
There is a big, big difference between learning and implementing a piece of code yourself and cutting and pasting from someone elses code. Not least is that you are getting the original author's testing and debugging time for free. As I said in another post, the value-add in software is the time taken to do it.
To reuse the car analogy, iron ore is just sitting their in the earth waiting to be dug up, but that doesn't mean that cars should be free.
I've tried this and it looks incredible- it's a shame no commercial games have used this technique yet. Reminds me of that 80s music video where the gal walks into the mirror, and everything's all "pencilly-looking" but in real-time... now what was that damn song?
Internet censorship is no better than a Nazi bookburning. Doesn't make a difference if they're blocking printed text or unicode.
These companies might be selling technology that could be repurposed to suppress freedom to an oppressive regime, but the Open Source community is willing to give it to them for free.
If Amnesty had published an article on the Chinese government using ipchains or squid in the Great Firewall, or using Perl to search proxy logs for who was looking at unapproved sites, would/. have been so eager to criticize?
This economy is an unnatural mode of pseudo-slavery. It's rules and mechanics are entirely derivative. Stop regurgitating and start thinking.
How amusing. You do know that the Marxist economic system was a complete, abject and utter failure, don't you? That the people of the Soviet Empire, Cambodia, Cuba and North Korea live(d) in poverty?
I suggest you read some Ludwig von Mises, Adam Smith or Ayn Rand.
How many open source success stories are there, where the open-source solution is so clearly superior that it's used by everyone? Uh, zero.
Well, everyone is probably an exaggeration in some cases, but not in others. Are there any closed-source, proprietary DNS servers, for example? But a sendmail/pop3d/imapd combination is competitive with some proprietary mail solutions (if you aren't into workflow/groupware it's usable in place of Exchange/Lotus etc).
Basically, it all depends how you define mainstream. GCC and xemacs and make and perl are all used by "mainstream" Unix software developers for example. But there's a long way to go before StarOffice is used by mainstream secretaries, or Moray replaces Maya anywhere.
If the source to Windows or IE were available, people who would want to know such things could actually see all those security holes and exploits before they are "exploited".
I'm sure you believe this, but source code availability didn't stop people from exploiting security holes in bind and sendmail and sshd and so on (review bugtraq and CERT archives if you require convincing).
The problem is that everyone repeats the mantra that many eyes make all bugs shallow, but everyone also assumes that everyone else is doing it so doesn't bother. There's little evidence that open source software actually is any more secure than close source.
Finally, is it possible for two different programmers to look at the same source code and have strongly differing opinions about its quality, or is it a pretty much agreed upon criteria?
What matters is the elegance of the thought behind the code. Simply put, it is code that transforms its inputs into its outputs using the fewest possible number of operations, variables, etc, and correctly handles unusual or unexpected inputs without behaving unpredictably. Coincidentally elegant code tends to be easy to maintain and efficient to execute, but these two factors alone are insufficient to make a piece of code elegant.
If you are interested in this sort of thing, I recommend reading Knuth, generally reckoned to be the greatest authority on such things.
Yeah, before you know it, book authors might just let people read the words in their stories (even people who own photocopiers, gasp!).. no wonder you cant make a living as an author!
Reproduce an author's work in your own work and you will be in violation of copyright, and liable for legal action. Furthermore, your reputation will be in tatters as a plagiarist and you will find it very difficult to find an editor or a publisher. The ideas of intellectual property applied to books long before there was a software industry.
In any large software system, the truly unique code probably accounts for about 1% of the source.
In an academic, Computer Science research sort of way, you're probably right. And there is a lot of common code in many applications, it's true - but that's what vendor-supplied and third party.so and.dll files are for.
The #1 cost in most software is time - to design, to code, to test and to document. That's what adds value. What you are saying is like saying that "houses should cost no more than the bricks they're made of, or that cars should cost no more than what the iron ore cost to mine. Hell, iron ore should be free, right, it's just sitting there in the ground waiting to be dug up!"
Here are the facts:
Software costs money to write. Even open source software isn't written for free; everyone involved has a day job, and invests the money from that into the product. Even prominent figures such as Linus Torvalds (works for a chip designer) and Richard Stallman (funded by the MacArthur Foundation/MIT) don't pay their bills with open source.
Software is a risky business. An organization can invest literally tens of millions of dollars in a software project, only to see it fail. This could be because it doesn't do what it's supposed to, or because too few customers buy it, but either way they don't get back what they invested.
There needs to be a mechanism by which people who write software get paid - assuming that you want software to be written at all, of course. Further, there needs to be a means by which this cost can be spread amongst many people, so that commodity software can be written.
Therefore, until the cost of food, housing, transport, energy etc tends to zero because these things can be reproduced at near-zero cost (not going to happen anytime soon) software must be a product like any other product.
People like you will continue to say that software should be free, and you'll keep coming up with ways to justify your belief. That's fine, because you're fighting the laws of economics, and they're just as implacable as the laws of thermodynamics.
Absolutely. I have never met anyone who has received any sort of employer-branded merchandise that wouldn't have rather had the cash. It has a knock on effect to: every time a manager says there isn't budget for upgrades, training etc, someone will mutter "huh, they had the money for those stupid t-shirts."
One company I worked for we got t-shirts, hooded sweaters, mousemats, rubber bouncy balls, magic 8-balls, juggling balls, yoyos, record bags, you name it.
Needless to say, since it's peak in 2000 about 90% of their staff have been laid off...
I did a Slashdot-search for SEVIS but came up with nothing. I'd love to hear some opinions from people who are familiar with the program or perhaps took part in its development.
A "Slashdot-search"? What is it with all these people thinking Slashdot is some sort of authoritative source of news about anything other than the occasional kernel patch?
If you have a question about contracts, ask a contract lawyer. If you have a question about immigration, contact an immigration lawyer, or the INS themselves. Slashdot is the "peanut gallery" - sometimes well meaning, sometimes sarcastic, generally uninformed about much of anything but happy to comment on it anyway.
How should I configure a segment of my network for them, and them only, to make sure that the remainder of my networks are not susceptible to any of their natural security 'features' . Any and all ideas are welcome."
SOCKS proxy.
If you have to ask, you are unqualified to do your job, and should resign immediately.
But who's it for? The type of people who build their own PCs are also the type who shun all things pre-installed.
Not only that, but it must have every driver for every supported piece of hardware already installed. Much better to only install the basic generic drivers, and install the ones you actually need for your system after you've got it up.
Is the concept of "pay me for work" completely dead? Must everything be "pay me for work, and keep paying me for years later too?"
Say you invest $1,000,000 developing a piece of software (salaries, rent, equipment, etc). You want to sell copies of the software for $100 per seat. You have revenue coming in after you've finished coding. The 10001st copy of the software is where you start to make a profit.
Or are you saying that customer 1 should pay the full $1M (for a word processor, say) and all the rest should get it for free? Even the most elementary understanding of the software market or economics in general. should enable you to understand why it cannot work like that.
I get paid to give someone a analysis of this, or an analysis of that... and i tell them "that will take 6 months and cost you $100,000". My reputation is good, so i get more people to come back to me and keep hiring me to do more work for them.
You're in a completely different market: your product does not require upfront investment, and can be sold for what it cost to do. You're a bespoke tailor, and a software house is Sears.
Now you wouldn't think of developing on UNIX with anything but GCC and the associated build tools.
Actually a lot of people would. The quality of code generated by the SUNpro and MIPSpro compilers on SPARC and MIPS processors respectively leaves GCC in the dust. GCC really only comes into its own on x86, because Linux (or *BSD) on x86 is the platform that it gets used most on. GCC is portable, yes, but it isn't built for compiling high-performance code. So you need to ask yourself whether getting binaries that execute 2x as fast is worth using a slightly less well known compiler for.
I think any programmer who sees the benifts of CVS would understand where im going with this concept. We all have functions we use again and again - and realizing that there is a potential flaw in a given function at one point is always followed by exasperation because one realizes that the function needs to be changes in X number of programs.
You don't need a new version control tool, you need a refactoring tool.
In the latter case, there is no sale. You pay a fee for a service or more specifically a right - the limited right to use some copyrighted content subject to a bunch of restrictions. There is no transfer of ownership, only a temporary grant of permission (temporary may extend to your natural lifetime, but who's counting?).
It's easy to disprove this. If you had in fact bought a license to the content rather than the media it was stored on, then:
Lost, stolen or damaged media would be replaced for a nominal cost by the publisher, provided you could prove you did once own it, so you can continue to enjoy the content you have paid for.
Upgrades to new formats would be provided by the publisher for cost of media, so you can continue to enjoy the content you have paid for, even though you physically bought a record and would now like a CD. You could own the same content in as many different formats as you like, since you are licensed to the content for no more than the additional cost of the media itself.
Neither of these happen; a CD or a DVD is treated just like an ordinary product. If it's damaged when you bought it, the store will replace it, just like they would for a washing machine or a pack of bagels. If it's lost or stolen, then either you or your insurance company will be paying full price for a brand new one. If you want it on a different format, even if you physically relinquish your original media, you will still have to pay full price for the new media.
The media publishers want to have their cake and eat it - all the money from product sales, none of the responsibilities of license sales. I predict that eventually case law will force them to choose one model or the other.
We are not obligated to make matching contributions if Gates abuses his charity to promote Microsoft's interests. So yes, the Gates Foundation WILL be criticized and rightfully so. Such donations have nothing to do with real charity and it is more than proper to point it out.
If Gates abuses his charity. It hasn't happened, and there's no evidence to suggest it will happen. There isn't even a historical precendent... did Carnegie use his charity to sell more steel? Or Rockefeller to sell more oil?
Like many Slashbots, you've long since left the realm of rational debate, your hatred of Gates and Microsoft is rabid and there's nothing they can do that you won't feel is a personal affront to you.
I think you should instead think about the number of printers in-use that are parallell-port only, and then think about if the parallell port is "obsolete".
But those printers are in-use on hardware which does have parallel ports, and if you assume computers generally outlive printers (true, IME) then there's no problem manufacturing motherboads without the legacy ports. The only problem is if you need to run the new printers on those old PCs...
and as the register pointed out.. $100 million fighting aids. $423 million fighting Open Source. Thanks Bill.
In other news, the people of India today presented the editors and readers of Slashdot with absolutely nothing, in recognition of the donations they haven't made to the treatment of AIDS.
When Eric Raymond matches Bill Gates dollar for dollar (hell, dollar for thousand dollars, even), then maybe the Open Source community will have grounds to criticize the Gates Foundation, but not before.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that current satellites are able to read print the size of license plates
I think that's an urban myth. You would need to broadcast on frequencies that are distinct from any ambient emitters and reflectors which probably rules out anything between IR and UV. Even then the satellite would only see you as a point source. And then, there are no real advantages over radio.
The reason it doesnt is that any large scale implementation would be stopped (somehow) by media companies
No it wouldn't. The vast majority of that traffic will be going too and from the hardwired networks. There's no point in running servers on a wireless network, because you need your servers to be in a physically secure, environmentally controlled data center, where there is ample wired bandwidth anyway. The more access points there are on your wireless network, the more hardwires there will need to be to support them, otherwise the few APs that are connected will become hotspots for traffic (and have to foot all the associated bills). The only people that would see a decline in business are the dial-up ISPs.
Its amazing that most people of the world search for similar things, irrespective of language! Good they put filters.... otherwise a normal visitor would be shocked that most of the world wants naked ladies.
How about an E2 zeitgeist? Cream of the cool is close, but it would be interesting to see what people are searching for as well as what they are contributing. I sometimes even check E2 before Google, because at least there is some active quality control on E2 nodes, unlike the web at large.
"Abject Poverty" might be a good description at first glance, but take a look at the underlying quality of life, and how happy people are.
It would indeed be enlightening to visit an area of Cuba not under the control of the secret police and the communist party.
There's only one condition where this is true: when you have proprietary binary formats for files. Other than that, the methods and algorithms used by commercial software companies are widely available in books and training manuals.
There is a big, big difference between learning and implementing a piece of code yourself and cutting and pasting from someone elses code. Not least is that you are getting the original author's testing and debugging time for free. As I said in another post, the value-add in software is the time taken to do it.
To reuse the car analogy, iron ore is just sitting their in the earth waiting to be dug up, but that doesn't mean that cars should be free.
I've tried this and it looks incredible- it's a shame no commercial games have used this technique yet. Reminds me of that 80s music video where the gal walks into the mirror, and everything's all "pencilly-looking" but in real-time... now what was that damn song?
Wasn't it "Take On Me" by A-ha?
Internet censorship is no better than a Nazi bookburning. Doesn't make a difference if they're blocking printed text or unicode.
/. have been so eager to criticize?
These companies might be selling technology that could be repurposed to suppress freedom to an oppressive regime, but the Open Source community is willing to give it to them for free.
If Amnesty had published an article on the Chinese government using ipchains or squid in the Great Firewall, or using Perl to search proxy logs for who was looking at unapproved sites, would
Marx's Kapital.
This economy is an unnatural mode of pseudo-slavery. It's rules and mechanics are entirely derivative. Stop regurgitating and start thinking.
How amusing. You do know that the Marxist economic system was a complete, abject and utter failure, don't you? That the people of the Soviet Empire, Cambodia, Cuba and North Korea live(d) in poverty?
I suggest you read some Ludwig von Mises, Adam Smith or Ayn Rand.
How many open source success stories are there, where the open-source solution is so clearly superior that it's used by everyone? Uh, zero.
Well, everyone is probably an exaggeration in some cases, but not in others. Are there any closed-source, proprietary DNS servers, for example? But a sendmail/pop3d/imapd combination is competitive with some proprietary mail solutions (if you aren't into workflow/groupware it's usable in place of Exchange/Lotus etc).
Basically, it all depends how you define mainstream. GCC and xemacs and make and perl are all used by "mainstream" Unix software developers for example. But there's a long way to go before StarOffice is used by mainstream secretaries, or Moray replaces Maya anywhere.
If the source to Windows or IE were available, people who would want to know such things could actually see all those security holes and exploits before they are "exploited".
I'm sure you believe this, but source code availability didn't stop people from exploiting security holes in bind and sendmail and sshd and so on (review bugtraq and CERT archives if you require convincing).
The problem is that everyone repeats the mantra that many eyes make all bugs shallow, but everyone also assumes that everyone else is doing it so doesn't bother. There's little evidence that open source software actually is any more secure than close source.
Finally, is it possible for two different programmers to look at the same source code and have strongly differing opinions about its quality, or is it a pretty much agreed upon criteria?
What matters is the elegance of the thought behind the code. Simply put, it is code that transforms its inputs into its outputs using the fewest possible number of operations, variables, etc, and correctly handles unusual or unexpected inputs without behaving unpredictably. Coincidentally elegant code tends to be easy to maintain and efficient to execute, but these two factors alone are insufficient to make a piece of code elegant.
If you are interested in this sort of thing, I recommend reading Knuth, generally reckoned to be the greatest authority on such things.
Yeah, before you know it, book authors might just let people read the words in their stories (even people who own photocopiers, gasp!) .. no wonder you cant make a living as an author!
Reproduce an author's work in your own work and you will be in violation of copyright, and liable for legal action. Furthermore, your reputation will be in tatters as a plagiarist and you will find it very difficult to find an editor or a publisher. The ideas of intellectual property applied to books long before there was a software industry.
In an academic, Computer Science research sort of way, you're probably right. And there is a lot of common code in many applications, it's true - but that's what vendor-supplied and third party
The #1 cost in most software is time - to design, to code, to test and to document. That's what adds value. What you are saying is like saying that "houses should cost no more than the bricks they're made of, or that cars should cost no more than what the iron ore cost to mine. Hell, iron ore should be free, right, it's just sitting there in the ground waiting to be dug up!"
Here are the facts:
People like you will continue to say that software should be free, and you'll keep coming up with ways to justify your belief. That's fine, because you're fighting the laws of economics, and they're just as implacable as the laws of thermodynamics.
Nothing beats cash.
Absolutely. I have never met anyone who has received any sort of employer-branded merchandise that wouldn't have rather had the cash. It has a knock on effect to: every time a manager says there isn't budget for upgrades, training etc, someone will mutter "huh, they had the money for those stupid t-shirts."
One company I worked for we got t-shirts, hooded sweaters, mousemats, rubber bouncy balls, magic 8-balls, juggling balls, yoyos, record bags, you name it.
Needless to say, since it's peak in 2000 about 90% of their staff have been laid off...
I did a Slashdot-search for SEVIS but came up with nothing. I'd love to hear some opinions from people who are familiar with the program or perhaps took part in its development.
A "Slashdot-search"? What is it with all these people thinking Slashdot is some sort of authoritative source of news about anything other than the occasional kernel patch?
If you have a question about contracts, ask a contract lawyer. If you have a question about immigration, contact an immigration lawyer, or the INS themselves. Slashdot is the "peanut gallery" - sometimes well meaning, sometimes sarcastic, generally uninformed about much of anything but happy to comment on it anyway.
How should I configure a segment of my network for them, and them only, to make sure that the remainder of my networks are not susceptible to any of their natural security 'features' . Any and all ideas are welcome."
SOCKS proxy.
If you have to ask, you are unqualified to do your job, and should resign immediately.
But who's it for? The type of people who build their own PCs are also the type who shun all things pre-installed.
Not only that, but it must have every driver for every supported piece of hardware already installed. Much better to only install the basic generic drivers, and install the ones you actually need for your system after you've got it up.
Is the concept of "pay me for work" completely dead? Must everything be "pay me for work, and keep paying me for years later too?"
Say you invest $1,000,000 developing a piece of software (salaries, rent, equipment, etc). You want to sell copies of the software for $100 per seat. You have revenue coming in after you've finished coding. The 10001st copy of the software is where you start to make a profit.
Or are you saying that customer 1 should pay the full $1M (for a word processor, say) and all the rest should get it for free? Even the most elementary understanding of the software market or economics in general. should enable you to understand why it cannot work like that.
I get paid to give someone a analysis of this, or an analysis of that... and i tell them "that will take 6 months and cost you $100,000". My reputation is good, so i get more people to come back to me and keep hiring me to do more work for them.
You're in a completely different market: your product does not require upfront investment, and can be sold for what it cost to do. You're a bespoke tailor, and a software house is Sears.
Now you wouldn't think of developing on UNIX with anything but GCC and the associated build tools.
Actually a lot of people would. The quality of code generated by the SUNpro and MIPSpro compilers on SPARC and MIPS processors respectively leaves GCC in the dust. GCC really only comes into its own on x86, because Linux (or *BSD) on x86 is the platform that it gets used most on. GCC is portable, yes, but it isn't built for compiling high-performance code. So you need to ask yourself whether getting binaries that execute 2x as fast is worth using a slightly less well known compiler for.
I think any programmer who sees the benifts of CVS would understand where im going with this concept. We all have functions we use again and again - and realizing that there is a potential flaw in a given function at one point is always followed by exasperation because one realizes that the function needs to be changes in X number of programs.
You don't need a new version control tool, you need a refactoring tool.
I don't so much want to learn about ontologies. I want to learn what an ontology is.
It's a way to leverage the synergy of paradigms.
Or in otherwords, the CS equivalent of management consultant bullshit.
It's easy to disprove this. If you had in fact bought a license to the content rather than the media it was stored on, then:
Neither of these happen; a CD or a DVD is treated just like an ordinary product. If it's damaged when you bought it, the store will replace it, just like they would for a washing machine or a pack of bagels. If it's lost or stolen, then either you or your insurance company will be paying full price for a brand new one. If you want it on a different format, even if you physically relinquish your original media, you will still have to pay full price for the new media.
The media publishers want to have their cake and eat it - all the money from product sales, none of the responsibilities of license sales. I predict that eventually case law will force them to choose one model or the other.
We are not obligated to make matching contributions if Gates abuses his charity to promote Microsoft's interests. So yes, the Gates Foundation WILL be criticized and rightfully so. Such donations have nothing to do with real charity and it is more than proper to point it out.
If Gates abuses his charity. It hasn't happened, and there's no evidence to suggest it will happen. There isn't even a historical precendent... did Carnegie use his charity to sell more steel? Or Rockefeller to sell more oil?
Like many Slashbots, you've long since left the realm of rational debate, your hatred of Gates and Microsoft is rabid and there's nothing they can do that you won't feel is a personal affront to you.
I think you should instead think about the number of printers in-use that are parallell-port only, and then think about if the parallell port is "obsolete".
But those printers are in-use on hardware which does have parallel ports, and if you assume computers generally outlive printers (true, IME) then there's no problem manufacturing motherboads without the legacy ports. The only problem is if you need to run the new printers on those old PCs...
and as the register pointed out.. $100 million fighting aids. $423 million fighting Open Source. Thanks Bill.
In other news, the people of India today presented the editors and readers of Slashdot with absolutely nothing, in recognition of the donations they haven't made to the treatment of AIDS.
When Eric Raymond matches Bill Gates dollar for dollar (hell, dollar for thousand dollars, even), then maybe the Open Source community will have grounds to criticize the Gates Foundation, but not before.