Wait! Wait! Wait! I've got a million lines of SCO code I want to insert!
Don't be greedy, pal. It's enough to put in 70 lines, as long as it's cut'n pasted from an ancient CS book and has no copyright comments.
Or at least that seems to work ok for some, YMMV.
Re:Memes, ah yes he missed them!
on
Software Fashion
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· Score: 1
How is the idea of the selfish gene silly?
I may be oversimplifying this (not having read the actual book, just peoples' interpretations of it), but to me the notion of genes being "first-class" self-controlling entities seems just an interesting sci-fi thought, but not much more.
If selfish gene means that genetic programming (or evolution) does not necesarily lead to optimal path for individual, but for something else, then that's much less controversial.
The myth about telcos building the networks with just their own money is, well, a myth. Most were heavily subsidized by society. For cable companies situation may be different.
However, point is that they should get compensated to cover expenses (plus profit), AS LONG AS the pricing is non-discriminatory. Best way to guarantee this is to make sure infrastructure companies DO NOT compete on ISP side like they now do, so that they have no
incentive to skew pricing.
What I really don't get is just why do telcos even bother offering ISP services (one of exceptions being Qwest, company that despite their other flaws is doing the right thing -- they sold their ISP part, and make money out of DSL connectivity). I mean, leasing their lines is much more stable business than ISP -- ISPs are service heavy, and it's much more difficult to make money. This must be based on misunderstanding on exactly where value addition is with the Internet -- it definitely isn't in the middle-man, ISP.
As to roads and society -- governments do not sell cars or gasoline. Their regulation is not based on monopolistic economic needs. In a way government does lease the roads, since they collect various taxes. And that allows many other companies (from car manufacturers and oil companies, to UPS and pizza taxis) to compete on service side.
What actually differentiates it from Suse aside from including some proprietary browser plugins and some java freeware?
Sun branding and StarOffice? It's similar to distinction between Open Office and Star Office, or Mozilla and Netscape 7. Plus, "only" including some properietary add-ons may be good enough, if pricing, delivery, and most importantly, service, are on par with alternatives like SuSE.
They're just refusing to force existing cable providers to open up their lines. They're not stopping anyone from laying thier own cable to compete.
Jeez. Oh sure, it's trivially easy and cheap to lay your own cable. Who in their right minds would rather beg for other companies to rent the ones they already have? Surely it's so much better to wastefully duplicate this infrastructure. Just look at stellar success of backbone network companies, from Level 3 to all the other ones that went bankrupt, Global Crossing, ICG, MCI, and dozens of others.
From analogy perspective, you are trying to say it's ok to let road constructors mandate brand of car one drives (based on either them owning
car company, or having exclusive deals with one).
See, competition exists; any other construction company could conceivably construct their own road, and allow you to drive a Hyundai instead of Chevrolet. Plus, there are also airlines (and in some countries, railroad) to keep in mind -- isn't there plenty of competition, even if products are not identical.
Making people learn XML would be nice, but it's too complex a thing to make "required reading" for GeoCities weenies.
For the most part understanding basic XML (as in "tags need properly nest, you need both open and close tags") is hardly more difficult than knowing valid HTML. In case of XHTML, if W3C had resisted their temptation to overengineer things, and for the most part just cleaned up HTML 3.2 (or 4.0... which itself wasn't really adopted), this would be a moot point. There'd be little to argue for not going to XHTML.
But of course W3C's "academic elitism" attitude is effecting XHTML to become another monstrosity (hey, let's enforce semantic distinctions as lowest common denominator where it really matters little! we're so snobby!). You can have a look at DocBook standard to see where that path leads to (DB itself, however, makes some sense for printable material... so it's not completely useless, just fairly heavy-weight committee work).
I certainly would vote the whole "meme" thing right in the fashion category, of being grossly overused and applied in strangest places. Just like the silly idea of "selfish genes" itself (which was funny variation of "tail wagging the dog", but not much more).
True. I have noticed, however, that the good thing about fads is that, well, they fade away after a while. So, most of you fellow swengineers will come to their senses over time. And the rest... well, some people never return from their LSD trips either.:-)
I thought the same thing when Java was introduced. The alternatives I considered at the time were Python and Smalltalk, each having much more to offer than Java, and better implemented.
Sounds like you don't really know what you are talking about. If you are implying Smalltalk and Python are supersets of Java (as it exists currently), you are just ignorant. Each of 3 languages (or platform, if you wish), has their specific strengths, but claiming Java is inferior of 3 is ridiculous. It may be that when first commonly used JVMs arrived (1.0.2?) Java was mostly inferior, but lot has happened since then.
Further, claiming that Java is very close to C is patently absurd. Superficially there are more similarities (syntax) than semantically. Python and Java, for example, are much more similar than C and Java.
As to C# (I assume you mean C# when referring to.NET) I actually do agree. It's similar enough to Java to be useful as is, although not markedly superior (with sole exception of being easier to integrate with native code). But it will probably gain momentum, and improve due to enough resources being put into developing C# as well as standard libraries.
Re:Let's vote for the greatest forgotten...
on
Software Fashion
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· Score: 0
C# (as opposed to the generic.NET) actually is a good language that does improve on Java a lot.
Now, I have no big complaints about C# (ok, I haven't really used it, just read articles and summaries about it), but to me it seems that it has just some minor improvements over Java. So little, in fact, that for me trade-off (some nifty improvements vs. platform lock-in) are not worth it, at least not at this point. That's
not all that bad -- Java is a nice language in itself, and Microsoft often knows which parts not to mess with, when copying others' products, just that to me it's clear MS didn't want to risk too much by trying to create something revolutionary. They settled for evolutionary.
Which things do you consider the significant improvements of the language itself to be? (ie. not accompanying.NET class libraries) It would be nice to hear actual examples, if you have specific examples for both languages?
Frankly, I can't understand why SCO would pursue this into court at this point in time.
Finding reasonable sane logic in SCO's actions is often challenging... but in this case they are probably really trying to help their IBM case. They are trying to portray wide-scale "stealing" of their "intellectual property"; no matter how contrived the example is, they are just trying to show well-known big computer companies that are supposedly feeding Linux developers with stolen goods. Knowing how
little real evidence SCO has I guess they must try to bring in all cases for which they think they have anything resembling evidence... and this just shows how desperate they are.
Thus, from their point of view SGI probably is more collateral damage, small fry, whatever you want to call it, and IBM (plus other wealthy Linux-using co's) is the main target.
What if the patent's claims are broad enough to cover any algorithm that results in a conforming bitstream?
Personally I would wonder if patent was too broad to have been granted in the first place... but in reality that doesn't seem to matter.:-/
Now, proving that there can be no algorithm that produces conforming bit stream sounds like a pretty challenging theoretical CS problem to me; even in specific cases such as MPEG encoding. Thus, I'd say that even though one could say that it may be impossible to implement an algorithm that doesn't infringe on certain patent(s), this thinking can only serve as a starting point. After that it has to be proven that certain implementation does indeed infringe on specific patents.
For user-land software, things like python are becoming very practical. Java is probably acceptable for daemons and such (so long as they're not massively performance critical) but isn't ready to be used for anything with a GUI or where startup time matters.
For user-land things, scripting languages like Python and TCL/TK (or preferably, Ruby) have been practical for quite a while now. GUIs
are really not all that performance sensitive,
at least when native GUI system is used by scripting language.
But as to Java, your blanket statement seems pretty weird. Java is very nice for GUI programs, as well as for server-side programming, and I'm not sure why you'd even claim it is not.
Startup time on the other hand really depends more on what app itself does when getting started, and only secondarily on
how Java app (or rather, JVM it runs on) is deployed and started.
But even with default startup, with all JITing, what really matters is how app itself is designed to startup, not so much on implementation language. If app does too much upfront processing, it's dog to start up.
Biggest performance problem with java apps is that although developers know application development is significantly faster and easier than with "old school" languages like C or C++, they need to pay bit more attention to responsiveness, if they do anything 'advanced' with GUI (ie. do additional rendering, not just default components).
But perhaps your perception is based on older JVMs, 1.2 for example was the slowest one in existence, with both bad startup and sustainable performance. But even back then it was possible to have Java apps that performance-wise (wrt GUI) weren't noticeable different from native apps (I know, I wrote couple).
M$ on the other hand wasn't to control a platform that is SUPPOSED to be open to the entire industry.
That's not really true; back when PCs were introduced it was pretty integrated with MS-DOS. The open nature was limited to clones (which came to existence almost by chance originally), not so much to OSes.
Mr. Coward, why did you bother wasting everyone's time by writing that bunch of nonsense? Are you just trying to learn how to troll? If so, have a look at more succesful and entertaining enterpreneurs in that field, before continuing.
Win32 codecs CAN be used, but are not included by default. If users choose to use them against EULAs (assuming EULAs were found legally binding), its users' choice.
Secondly, as to MPEG, MPEG is _NOT AN ALGORITHM_. It's a video/movie compression standard; standards can not be patented. There may exist patented algorithms for MPEG encoding/decoding; if so, it's up to patent holders to enforce said patents, if such exists;
and then it's up to developers to act accordingly.
Thirdly, you are ASSUMING mplayer is based on reverse-engineering; and that if it is, there are EULAs associated with parts RE'd; and further, that said EULAs would have any enforceability.
There's nothing automatically wrong with RE in the first place, and even more draconian laws (DMCA) have clauses specifically allowing RE when working on interoperability issues.
Won't this seem daunting to the end user (labelled automatically as stupid), having two different applications, with individual libraries, for doing the exact same thing.
Why would it? You just happen to use one or the other? If they are exactly the same, what is the problem?
The fact there are different gasoline station chains, which pretty much do the same thing; or banks, or supermarkets, or fast food chains; I don't feel overwhelmed by confusion. So why should availability of multiple similar apps really be a problem in that sense?!?!
Now, there are other pluses and minuses involved; divided developer base is potential drawback... but increased competition is a definite plus. Plus there's less risk when all the eggs are not in just one basket. But your point seems like an odd red herring to me.
Ideally, there should be one standard toolkit api that is easily extensible by developers
You mean like the Good Old One-Size-Fits-All (OSFA) solution? Swiss pocketknife cross-bred with spork? Now, I know you are not alone in thinking this way, but it's also fair to say many others strongly disagree. I'm not sure if I disagree strongly or mildly, but I do disagree.
I think competition coupled with evolution is the way to go. There should ALWAYS be choice in implementations (and designs) of various layers of complete software systems, down to and including low-level display layers.
And since there is really no way to dictate that there should be just two or three, it's ok to initially (and/or intermittenly) see lots of flowers blooming, and then eventually see just few of prettiest ones really thriving. And this is, lo and behold, what seems to happen with QT and GTK (in case of X-windows based toolkits).
It's actually interesting that not many Open Source "evangelists" preach the BENEFITS of multiple competing implementations, since to me it seems like a corollary of "cathedral vs bazaar" story. Not only are individual projects loose and self-organized, so is the bigger Open Source "eco-system" (pardon the buzzword). So in addition to the view of the whole as sum of individuals, there's also the view of the whole as group of projects, competing as well as working together with other projects.
And in my opinion, this dynamic competition/co-operation between groups, projects, even individuals, is what truly improves things. Getting into one sanctioned solution degrades the eventual quality of best-of-breed implementations, even if it speeds up convergence towards that "right" implementation.
when at this very moment, the most important (IMHO) issue Linux faces is the very real threat of being rendered illegal via SCO?
Perhaps because most other people around here do not consider that threat as being all that real? Dirt-throwing by SCO is very real, but there threats sound pretty hollow, especially due to low content/noise ratio of their actual claims, much less their proof (what proof?)
Also, I would venture a guess that the Linux advocate in question has been working for a while, much longer than SCO has been trying to install their troll toll booth for Unix users.
Because they would be same kind of amateurs as SCO "experts" probably are. The problem is to figure out where piece of source code came from. Source code is written in programming languages, NOT natural languages (where linguists might help); and source code is not a living organism (where biologists might help).
There isn't much common ground there, that's why. And finally, assuming this is just raw data comparison implies not really understanding software development very well (incidentally this also relates SCO and methods it seems to have used, raw string similarity comparisons).
Essentially, using biologists or linguists wouldn't be much better than using astrologists or ventriloquists to figure out the relevant relationships.
I would hate to have to relive those all of those "You can enlarge your penis!!" moments, or once again be haunted by
"Britney XXX HOT and young CAUGHT J-Lo action action!!".
I'm pretty sure that 7k price tag ensures no such advertising gets done, along with Nigerian gentlemen, septic tank salesmen and get-your-website-on-search-engines spoofs.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be greedy, pal. It's enough to put in 70 lines, as long as it's cut'n pasted from an ancient CS book and has no copyright comments. Or at least that seems to work ok for some, YMMV.
How is the idea of the selfish gene silly?
I may be oversimplifying this (not having read the actual book, just peoples' interpretations of it), but to me the notion of genes being "first-class" self-controlling entities seems just an interesting sci-fi thought, but not much more.
If selfish gene means that genetic programming (or evolution) does not necesarily lead to optimal path for individual, but for something else, then that's much less controversial.
However, point is that they should get compensated to cover expenses (plus profit), AS LONG AS the pricing is non-discriminatory. Best way to guarantee this is to make sure infrastructure companies DO NOT compete on ISP side like they now do, so that they have no incentive to skew pricing.
What I really don't get is just why do telcos even bother offering ISP services (one of exceptions being Qwest, company that despite their other flaws is doing the right thing -- they sold their ISP part, and make money out of DSL connectivity). I mean, leasing their lines is much more stable business than ISP -- ISPs are service heavy, and it's much more difficult to make money. This must be based on misunderstanding on exactly where value addition is with the Internet -- it definitely isn't in the middle-man, ISP.
As to roads and society -- governments do not sell cars or gasoline. Their regulation is not based on monopolistic economic needs. In a way government does lease the roads, since they collect various taxes. And that allows many other companies (from car manufacturers and oil companies, to UPS and pizza taxis) to compete on service side.
Sun branding and StarOffice? It's similar to distinction between Open Office and Star Office, or Mozilla and Netscape 7. Plus, "only" including some properietary add-ons may be good enough, if pricing, delivery, and most importantly, service, are on par with alternatives like SuSE.
Jeez. Oh sure, it's trivially easy and cheap to lay your own cable. Who in their right minds would rather beg for other companies to rent the ones they already have? Surely it's so much better to wastefully duplicate this infrastructure. Just look at stellar success of backbone network companies, from Level 3 to all the other ones that went bankrupt, Global Crossing, ICG, MCI, and dozens of others.
From analogy perspective, you are trying to say it's ok to let road constructors mandate brand of car one drives (based on either them owning car company, or having exclusive deals with one). See, competition exists; any other construction company could conceivably construct their own road, and allow you to drive a Hyundai instead of Chevrolet. Plus, there are also airlines (and in some countries, railroad) to keep in mind -- isn't there plenty of competition, even if products are not identical.
For the most part understanding basic XML (as in "tags need properly nest, you need both open and close tags") is hardly more difficult than knowing valid HTML. In case of XHTML, if W3C had resisted their temptation to overengineer things, and for the most part just cleaned up HTML 3.2 (or 4.0... which itself wasn't really adopted), this would be a moot point. There'd be little to argue for not going to XHTML.
But of course W3C's "academic elitism" attitude is effecting XHTML to become another monstrosity (hey, let's enforce semantic distinctions as lowest common denominator where it really matters little! we're so snobby!). You can have a look at DocBook standard to see where that path leads to (DB itself, however, makes some sense for printable material... so it's not completely useless, just fairly heavy-weight committee work).
I certainly would vote the whole "meme" thing right in the fashion category, of being grossly overused and applied in strangest places. Just like the silly idea of "selfish genes" itself (which was funny variation of "tail wagging the dog", but not much more).
True. I have noticed, however, that the good thing about fads is that, well, they fade away after a while. So, most of you fellow swengineers will come to their senses over time. And the rest... well, some people never return from their LSD trips either. :-)
Sounds like you don't really know what you are talking about. If you are implying Smalltalk and Python are supersets of Java (as it exists currently), you are just ignorant. Each of 3 languages (or platform, if you wish), has their specific strengths, but claiming Java is inferior of 3 is ridiculous. It may be that when first commonly used JVMs arrived (1.0.2?) Java was mostly inferior, but lot has happened since then.
Further, claiming that Java is very close to C is patently absurd. Superficially there are more similarities (syntax) than semantically. Python and Java, for example, are much more similar than C and Java.
As to C# (I assume you mean C# when referring to .NET) I actually do agree. It's similar enough to Java to be useful as is, although not markedly superior (with sole exception of being easier to integrate with native code). But it will probably gain momentum, and improve due to enough resources being put into developing C# as well as standard libraries.
Now, I have no big complaints about C# (ok, I haven't really used it, just read articles and summaries about it), but to me it seems that it has just some minor improvements over Java. So little, in fact, that for me trade-off (some nifty improvements vs. platform lock-in) are not worth it, at least not at this point. That's not all that bad -- Java is a nice language in itself, and Microsoft often knows which parts not to mess with, when copying others' products, just that to me it's clear MS didn't want to risk too much by trying to create something revolutionary. They settled for evolutionary.
Which things do you consider the significant improvements of the language itself to be? (ie. not accompanying .NET class libraries) It would be nice to hear actual examples, if you have specific examples for both languages?
Finding reasonable sane logic in SCO's actions is often challenging... but in this case they are probably really trying to help their IBM case. They are trying to portray wide-scale "stealing" of their "intellectual property"; no matter how contrived the example is, they are just trying to show well-known big computer companies that are supposedly feeding Linux developers with stolen goods. Knowing how little real evidence SCO has I guess they must try to bring in all cases for which they think they have anything resembling evidence... and this just shows how desperate they are.
Thus, from their point of view SGI probably is more collateral damage, small fry, whatever you want to call it, and IBM (plus other wealthy Linux-using co's) is the main target.
Personally I would wonder if patent was too broad to have been granted in the first place... but in reality that doesn't seem to matter. :-/
Now, proving that there can be no algorithm that produces conforming bit stream sounds like a pretty challenging theoretical CS problem to me; even in specific cases such as MPEG encoding. Thus, I'd say that even though one could say that it may be impossible to implement an algorithm that doesn't infringe on certain patent(s), this thinking can only serve as a starting point. After that it has to be proven that certain implementation does indeed infringe on specific patents.
For user-land things, scripting languages like Python and TCL/TK (or preferably, Ruby) have been practical for quite a while now. GUIs are really not all that performance sensitive, at least when native GUI system is used by scripting language.
But as to Java, your blanket statement seems pretty weird. Java is very nice for GUI programs, as well as for server-side programming, and I'm not sure why you'd even claim it is not.
Startup time on the other hand really depends more on what app itself does when getting started, and only secondarily on how Java app (or rather, JVM it runs on) is deployed and started. But even with default startup, with all JITing, what really matters is how app itself is designed to startup, not so much on implementation language. If app does too much upfront processing, it's dog to start up.
Biggest performance problem with java apps is that although developers know application development is significantly faster and easier than with "old school" languages like C or C++, they need to pay bit more attention to responsiveness, if they do anything 'advanced' with GUI (ie. do additional rendering, not just default components).
But perhaps your perception is based on older JVMs, 1.2 for example was the slowest one in existence, with both bad startup and sustainable performance. But even back then it was possible to have Java apps that performance-wise (wrt GUI) weren't noticeable different from native apps (I know, I wrote couple).
That's not really true; back when PCs were introduced it was pretty integrated with MS-DOS. The open nature was limited to clones (which came to existence almost by chance originally), not so much to OSes.
Win32 codecs CAN be used, but are not included by default. If users choose to use them against EULAs (assuming EULAs were found legally binding), its users' choice.
Secondly, as to MPEG, MPEG is _NOT AN ALGORITHM_. It's a video/movie compression standard; standards can not be patented. There may exist patented algorithms for MPEG encoding/decoding; if so, it's up to patent holders to enforce said patents, if such exists; and then it's up to developers to act accordingly.
Thirdly, you are ASSUMING mplayer is based on reverse-engineering; and that if it is, there are EULAs associated with parts RE'd; and further, that said EULAs would have any enforceability. There's nothing automatically wrong with RE in the first place, and even more draconian laws (DMCA) have clauses specifically allowing RE when working on interoperability issues.
Why would it? You just happen to use one or the other? If they are exactly the same, what is the problem?
The fact there are different gasoline station chains, which pretty much do the same thing; or banks, or supermarkets, or fast food chains; I don't feel overwhelmed by confusion. So why should availability of multiple similar apps really be a problem in that sense?!?!
Now, there are other pluses and minuses involved; divided developer base is potential drawback... but increased competition is a definite plus. Plus there's less risk when all the eggs are not in just one basket. But your point seems like an odd red herring to me.
You mean like the Good Old One-Size-Fits-All (OSFA) solution? Swiss pocketknife cross-bred with spork? Now, I know you are not alone in thinking this way, but it's also fair to say many others strongly disagree. I'm not sure if I disagree strongly or mildly, but I do disagree.
I think competition coupled with evolution is the way to go. There should ALWAYS be choice in implementations (and designs) of various layers of complete software systems, down to and including low-level display layers. And since there is really no way to dictate that there should be just two or three, it's ok to initially (and/or intermittenly) see lots of flowers blooming, and then eventually see just few of prettiest ones really thriving. And this is, lo and behold, what seems to happen with QT and GTK (in case of X-windows based toolkits).
It's actually interesting that not many Open Source "evangelists" preach the BENEFITS of multiple competing implementations, since to me it seems like a corollary of "cathedral vs bazaar" story. Not only are individual projects loose and self-organized, so is the bigger Open Source "eco-system" (pardon the buzzword). So in addition to the view of the whole as sum of individuals, there's also the view of the whole as group of projects, competing as well as working together with other projects. And in my opinion, this dynamic competition/co-operation between groups, projects, even individuals, is what truly improves things. Getting into one sanctioned solution degrades the eventual quality of best-of-breed implementations, even if it speeds up convergence towards that "right" implementation.
Perhaps because most other people around here do not consider that threat as being all that real? Dirt-throwing by SCO is very real, but there threats sound pretty hollow, especially due to low content/noise ratio of their actual claims, much less their proof (what proof?)
Also, I would venture a guess that the Linux advocate in question has been working for a while, much longer than SCO has been trying to install their troll toll booth for Unix users.
Um, where have you been for past couple of years? This has been going on for a while, nothing new here (alas!).
Yeah, I would definitely say they are *morons, oxy- or no oxy. Perhaps even just "plain old morons".
Man, that IS funny. :-)
True, but you haven't gained that exclusivity either. You have compromised the exclusivity of copy rights, not stolen them.
Because they would be same kind of amateurs as SCO "experts" probably are. The problem is to figure out where piece of source code came from. Source code is written in programming languages, NOT natural languages (where linguists might help); and source code is not a living organism (where biologists might help). There isn't much common ground there, that's why. And finally, assuming this is just raw data comparison implies not really understanding software development very well (incidentally this also relates SCO and methods it seems to have used, raw string similarity comparisons).
Essentially, using biologists or linguists wouldn't be much better than using astrologists or ventriloquists to figure out the relevant relationships.
I'm pretty sure that 7k price tag ensures no such advertising gets done, along with Nigerian gentlemen, septic tank salesmen and get-your-website-on-search-engines spoofs.
Ok. My apologies if I misunderstood your post.