It sucks that the government and corporate interests are using the Internet as an excuse to erode our privacy, free speech and fair use rights, don't you think?
What you said. I agree with you completely.
2) Copyright laws
It sucks that copyright has been twisted into something our founding fathers never intended, don't you think?
I agree with you completely. I am deeply concerned about this, and am writing up something on this topic that may or may not further your specific agenda, and that may or may not ever be debated in a committee.
3) Why
did you guys ever pass 1201 (a ) (1) that makes a mockery of fair use?
1201 (a ) (1) makes a mockery of fair use. What a shame.
4) How do you keep up?
I sure hope you don't give email short shrift.
Emails to my office are tallied on an "Issue/For/Against" spreadsheet just like snail mails.
5) Taxes and the Internet
My home state is trying to collect sales tax on mail-order purchases!
You should have been paying those all along, you scofflaw!
6) Taking back the 'Net
It sucks that big money is using the Net as an excuse to erode our privacy, first amendment, and fair-use rights. Don't you agree?
I'm not afraid of their dollars! But if they win, it'll be because you guys didn't take a stand. Email jody.olson @mail.house.gov to participate in this grassroots campaign I have conveniently created for you.
7) Overall cluefulness?
The day before yesterday, none of you Washington lawyers had a clue. Do you now?
We try. We learn. We rely on the Supreme Court to catch our mistakes.
8) Free Speech and Computer Code by IanCarlson
It sucks that big money is using the Net as an excuse to erode our privacy, first amendment, and fair-use rights. Don't you agree?
Tell me more. I'm listening.
9) Government playing catch-up, and losing
It sucks that old-fashioned businesses don't want to go to the effort to adapt to a new market opportunity, don't you think?
I agree with you completely. That's just what I've been saying to them when they come by with their donations.
10) Just who is answering these questions?
Hello? Is anybody in there?
Every one of these questions has been addressed with a lovingly hand-crafted paragraph from my stock-responses portfolio. And we mean that sincerely.
Either way, Apple has a much better history of supporting old machines.
I don't know if I necessarily buy that. You can compile and run Linux on some REALLY OLD hardware, and ls and vi run like a champ.:-) But your point is well taken. For example, while I was at VersionTracker, I just happened to notice that one of my favorite Mac shareware games from days of yore has been updated for OS X! Yes, Klondike lives! You download one game,and it runs on essentially every Macintosh model made in the last 15 years; every MacOS made in the last 12 years; and it still looks and plays great! How many 17-year-old PC games have aged that gracefully?
In point of fact, numerous Power Macintosh models are based on ATX form factor motherboards. You can even get one without buying a whole Mac.
But what makes you think you wouldn't want to add all of the above items to an already complete Mac? PC users don't have a monopoly on upgrading or expanding; why shouldn't Mac users have a shot at the least expensive commodity parts, too?
MacOS (and also Windows) fall under ``easy-to-learn''. They do not have as many of the flexible, powerful tools
available to them. They really don't care about that, they want people to be able to do easy tasks without having to sit
down and understand things. Things are hidden from the user as much as possible; many times it is impossible to do
tasks that are trivial under a UNIX machine.
Your have much to learn. If you think MacOS or Windows lack powerful tools, then you haven't used them enough. So you like grep? You can do regex searches on MacOS and Windows. Like writing shell scripts? You will not find a better shell scripting language than AppleScript. Perl floats your boat? Perl works excellently on MacOS (not just X, 7 thru 9) and Windows. Want to repartition your hard drive? Trivial. All of the great, powerful tools and commands you love about Unix have MacOS and Windows equivalents. You just have to learn how to use them -- just like Unix.
Don't assume, just because you don't know about something, that it does not exist.
Furthermore, a GUI allows you to trivially perform complex operations that would be very difficult on a command line. It cuts both ways. Think how easy a GUI makes it to select and open, copy, or delete a large number of files with no easily identifiable pattern in their names.
"I mean, a 450 MHz processor dedicated to one thing at a time? "
Hold your hashes. MacOS has supported multitasking since the very beginning, for appropriate values of "multitasking".
First of all, any OS that allows the processor to handle interrupts, e.g., for I/O, is dedicating the CPU to multiple tasks as much as any single-processor OS does. The CPU does indeed work on one task at a time, going off periodically to work on something else, without the user's bidding.
Second, desk accessories let the user launch a small application without leaving the main app since the earliest days of MacOS. It's not the same thing as general multitasking, but it did allow the USER to multitask somewhat, which is what really matters.
App switchers came out around the time Macs got big enough to hold more than one in memory, roughly 1986.
MultiFinder, a true multitasking shell, came out with MacOS 6, around 1988 or so. Every MacOS since the late 1980s has had multitasking built-in. I know Unix weenies like to bitch and moan about preemption, but the truth of the matter is, cooperative multitasking is just as real a form of multitasking as preemptive, and is in many ways a superior one, especially for a single-user desktop machine.
Case in point: Have you ever had your foreground app in X-windows bog down because some other task went nuts? I have. Oh, goodness gracious, have I ever. Took so much CPU, the stupid computer couldn't even read my kill signal. Maybe there's something to be said after all for a system that encourages tasks to voluntarily take a breather occasionally.
And, of course, MacOS has supported multiple threads, and even multiple CPUs, for the past several years.
I usually run anywhere from 5 to 15 interactive applications simultaneously on my Mac, for days at a time without quitting them or shutting down. Just like on Unix. And when a task does get out of hand, I can almost always kill it from the shell. Just like on Unix. As a USER, I say there's nothing wrong with the multitasking on classic MacOS.
So let's just agree to drop the "Macs don't multitask" line.
"It needed to be gutted."
That is definitely true. The lack of memory protection was a major shortcoming. It's a whole lot easier to accidentally dereference a garbage pointer than to design an app without WaitNextEvent.
"However, like many GNU purists, I think their decision to go with BSD over Mach is pretty short-sighted."
You think Apple should have waited for the HURD to be released? I should live to be so old as to see that day. I think their decision to spruce up a mature, stable, 10-year-old Unix implementation was pretty smart.
"And, like many Linux purists, I would prefer the more fun, more chaotic environment of a less-mature, more malleable OS."
Ah-ha, now we get to the bottom of it. You're not having fun unless you're having a kernel panic. You need to run Windows.
I think you'll find that MacOS and OS X are a whole lot more malleable than you give them credit for. I've been tweaking and skinning MacOS since about 1989, and I have no intention of stopping now. (Will MacFish run on X?)
"Besides, I prefer the look and feel of Linux on a Mac versus BSD;)"
Despite your subject, the body of your reply doesn't seem to disagree with me (this is okay by me). But I'll use your example to illustrate my point.
y= a*x*x + b*x + c
Math: By this statement, I define a logical constraint that a hypothetical quanitiy "y" and a hypothetical expression "a*x*x + b*x + c" are equivalent (i.e., will evaluate to the same value).
Algorithm:
Evaluate the expression "a*x*x + b*x + c", using previously established values stored in memory locations corresponding to a, b, c, and x. Store the result of this computation in the memory location designated to hold the value of y.
With all due respect, I just don't buy that. Software is a way of describing what you want a computer to do. That's a lot less general than "ideas".
Without a compiler (...) and a processor (...) and supporting hardware infrastructure, software is just writing on a page.
That's true. Well, you need a computer, anyway. Or at least a programmable machine. The only reason people invented software was to make these machines work. All software presumes some kind of computer on which it will execute.
Surely a non-mechanical mechanical nature is a contradiction in terms?
I said a non-physical mechanical nature (although, if you want to get picky, software does have a real, physical existence inside the computer). Mechanical in the sense of pertaining to machines, not in the sense of having mass and volume (although this is certainly also true). Mechanical in the sense of not carried out directly by human hands. I stand by my statement.
Can I conclude with the point that anyone who has studied computer science will have written software by hand on paper (in an exam) to
express ideas to another human being (the examiner) who then understood that expression of ideas without a machine intermediary.
Only if you resist the urge to follow up on my rebuttal.:-)
In the exam, you are demonstrating your ability to construct a software machine that performs a task identified by the instructor. A person may read it and judge its merit, but execution on a computer is still the real target of your effort.
In MechE class, we drew pictures of trusses, not just to make intellectual commentary on redirection of force, but to demonstrate our ability to configure physical members to support a load or perform other real tasks. In CS, we wrote pseudocode to demonstrate our ability to configure electric circuits to perform real tasks. In both cases, we constructed a machine to do X using a specifically restricted toolbox of components.
A bridge is not just a bunch of atoms lying around, waiting for someone to "discover" that they can be stacked in a way that supports weight; it is the invention of a human mind. It obeys all the laws of physics, but it takes a combination of understanding physics and applied ingenuity to shape it into a bridge.
QuickSort was not just some mathematical principle lying around, waiting to be discovered like the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius; it was the invention of a human mind, a novel and creative method to accomplish a well-identified task more cleverly than other, similar inventions had done. The mathematical principles still apply, and C.A.R. Hoare clearly understood them well when inventing QuickSort.
Whether in software or steel, a machine is a machine. It's all the same to me.
"The fact that something is not physical does not dimish its physical nature."
I don't accept that as a valid paraphrase of what I said. Mechanical != physical. In my statement, mechanical refers to the fact that human control over a process is indirect. Mechanical as opposed to manual.
"1. Math is mechanical
2. Algorithms are mechanical "
I think math is intellectual, but algorithms are mechanical.
"The math is not patented..., but the software based on that math is."
Right. Math does not actually do anything; it's just a set of rules. When you create an algorithm, you are not making a mathematical expression, you are making a procedural one.
So, as I see it, you cannot patent the concept of an integral, but you can patent a specific algorithm for calculating one.
I maintain that an algorithm is precisely describes a specific process. Rewriting it in a different programming language is a trivial varition at best. On the other hand, I would maintain that changing the nesting order of loops could introduce enough novelty to be considered a different algorithm.
As for whether you can write a noninfringing GIF decoder, let's just say I'm unconvinced that Unisys' patent covers every conceivable way of interpreting those bits. I believe that there may be devised other, legitimately separate, algorithms to accomplish the same task.
"While its quite clear to you and I that algorithms are math, it just took one judge with no knowledge of math or computers to set a precedent."
IANAJWNKOMOC, and it's not at all clear to me that algorithms are math. In fact, I'm taking the position that alogrithms are NOT math, they are processes. What, after all, is an algorithm? It is a set of operations through which some task is performed. That sure sounds like a process to me. (In my earlier post, I said programs are machines. I stand by both statements.)
Math is a set of abstract concepts that people find useful to apply when we want to model or understand something. Some of math is purely theoretical; an abstract exercise in probing the limits of a set of constraints. Other math is more concrete, used to describe an object, property or process. In this sense, the math only has meaning in that a person can make a mental correlation between the math and the real phenomenon.
By itself, Math is nothing. It's just a framework that people use for applying thought.
Software, on the other hand, does something. Its express purpose is to cause a human-built machine to perform a well-defined task. Some of the tasks performed by software exist primarily in the virtual realm (e.g., a program that locates prime numbers), while others directly affect the physical world (e.g., machine control software), and some are in between (e.g., banking and e-commerce).
In no case, however, is the software simply a set of abstract concepts intended to facilitate human navel-contemplation. Software explicitly describes a process that will take place on a machine under its control. Even an "abstract" algorithm assumes the existence of a defined set of machine instructions. Just because the control mechanism of a machine has moved from a purely physical implementation to an electronic one does not diminish the truth of its mechanical nature.
We allow the patenting of physical machines and industrial processes. (Whether we should is a question I don't intend to address.) Why should logical ones not receive equal protection?
Is ten years of research really worth a 20% decrease in power consumption and a 15% decrease in overall chip size?
It is absolutely worthwhile to have a handful of people working for 10 years on this if, at the end, everyone can leverage the benefit of their work. In this specific case, asynchronous vs. synchronous is orthogonal to fabrication technologies. The lessons learned can be applied to future processes as easily as present-day ones.
The Mickey Mouse argument is bogus. I hear people rationalizing the extension of copyright for works such as "Steamboat Willie", etc., in order to protect Disney's investment in the Mickey Mouse icon. That's total BS. Mickey Mouse is, as used by Disney, a trademark. Trademark law provides all the basis Disney needs to prevent people from selling sweatshirts, pens, pencils, coffee mugs, etc., with Mickey's image on them. Disney's trademark usage of Mickey's current image, and the revenue they currently derive from it, would not be harmed by releasing "Steamboat Willie" and other ancient animations, and its outdated artwork that Disney no longer actively uses in trade, into the public domain.
The administration of the junior high school probably places no restrictions out of sheer igrorance. If they knew even a tenth what we know about computer networks, they'd probably put the kaibosh on the whole thing and collapse into a quivering heap of terrified bureaucratium. I don't know what it's like today, but when I graduated from high school, they still thought Apple IIe's with 5.25" floppies were the vanguard of technology. Nowadays, I suspect their most high-tech equipment is metal detectors.
In my admittedly limited experience, the GNU versions of most Unix utilities appear to be BETTER than the originals, or even the versions of those utilities that ship as part of expensive, proprietary products such as Solaris or Window NT. In my mind, that hardly makes them cheap rip-offs.
If you want examples of innovative software released specifically under the GPL, I would nominate two right off the bat: EMACS and GCC, particularsy the former. If you know of an earlier text editor that was user-extensible on the fly, I'd like to see it. Not only are EMACS and GCC GPLed products, but were written by RMS himself.
Also, in their defense, UNLIKE MICROSOFT, the FSF in particular has never claimed to be an innovator, AFAIK. Their goal has always been to produce a free-as-in-speech Unix clone, and that is what they did. Other free software projects that released their code under the GPL have been more original. Perl, for example (although GPL wasn't its first licence).
I would also argue, quite reasonably I think, that FSF's most important innovation of all was the GPL itself: A viral copyright that guarantees that works so protected, and all derivative works, cannot have their freedom revoked by profiteering private concerns. That's downright brilliant.
But TrueType (an Apple/Microsoft venture) came standard with Windows
3.1 first.
TrueType is an Apple invention. It is NOT an Apple/MS joint venture. You are thinking of a technology swap: Apple's TrueType for Microsoft's PostScript interpreter. TrueType has been a standard part of MacOS since version 7.0 (which comes after Win 3.0 but before 3.1), but it also works with 6.0.x.
Lest we all forget, before microcomputers turned everything upside down, renting software by the month was normal. In a manner extremely similar to our large, dynamic web sites and services today, in the 60s and 70s, you sat before a comparatively simple terminal (browser), while all of the application's functionality resided on the mainframe (server). Your company bought or leased an IBM mainframe (or even rented time on someone else's) that supported hundreds of simultaneous users (sessions) and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition to this, your company paid separate monthly rental fees for the OS, libraries, development tools, and application software. These monthly software rental fees alone could easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars. In Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month", there is even a reference to the monthly rental fee for a RAM module (in 1974, about $12/kb IIRC).
Yep, y'all,.NET ain't nothin' new. It's a return to the Bad Old Days(tm) of the 1960s and 70s, only this time it's Microsoft instead of IBM that is clutching 90% of the computing world's collective scrota. Don't you think it's ironic that the man who was possibly the most instrumental in breaking the IBM mainframe paradigm is trying to get the world to return to it, now that he's on top?
It's interesting to consider that the DOJ ran an antitrust trial against IBM for about 2 decades, dropping it only when it became clear that market forces had made the case moot.
"...paying $15 for a cd with 10 songs on it is the biggest and longest running scam going on right now."
Small potatoes. The biggest, longest-running scam going on right now is paying $9.50 to see a 90-minute movie. CD prices comes in somewhere after social security, insurance fraud, and patenting results of publicly funded research.;-)
... have a lot of broken marriages. Coincidence? I doubt it. People have a lot of broken marriages too, but I'm not usually surprised when non-actors stay married for more than 5 years.
Sure, it's possible and probably even fun to roleplay a relationship that has no meaning for you-the-player. But I don't know many people who can do it well without foundering on the rocks of personal involvement. I don't even know many people who can deal with their real-life romances, let alone additional make-believe ones. I have a hard time role-playing without feeling what my characters feel. I do believe it can be done, but most of us lack the strength to role-play in a more-than-superficial manner and still maintain an impervious emotional barrier between player and character. There's plenty of fun situations to role-play that won't screw up your emotional stability (or make your SO jealous). Avoid RP romances.
My group was hit by the "OnTheFly" virus this morning (see source elswhere in this thread). Figure on a couple of handfulls of engineers reading the attachment in their Unix-based mail readers and sending each other notes saying, "Hey, check out this virus!" At five minutes per engineer screwing around with this ineffectual Windows-based virus, we lost easily $100 in productivity.
Naughty troll! Back in your cage!
on
DSL Woes
·
· Score: 1
You can call it communism if you like. I call it leveling the playing field so that competition can flourish and more wealth is created. To everything, spin, spin, spin.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
1) Protecting our rights
It sucks that the government and corporate interests are using the Internet as an excuse to erode our privacy, free speech and fair use rights, don't you think?
What you said. I agree with you completely.
2) Copyright laws
It sucks that copyright has been twisted into something our founding fathers never intended, don't you think?
I agree with you completely. I am deeply concerned about this, and am writing up something on this topic that may or may not further your specific agenda, and that may or may not ever be debated in a committee.
3) Why
did you guys ever pass 1201 (a ) (1) that makes a mockery of fair use?
1201 (a ) (1) makes a mockery of fair use. What a shame.
4) How do you keep up?
I sure hope you don't give email short shrift.
Emails to my office are tallied on an "Issue/For/Against" spreadsheet just like snail mails.
5) Taxes and the Internet
My home state is trying to collect sales tax on mail-order purchases!
You should have been paying those all along, you scofflaw!
6) Taking back the 'Net
It sucks that big money is using the Net as an excuse to erode our privacy, first amendment, and fair-use rights. Don't you agree?
I'm not afraid of their dollars! But if they win, it'll be because you guys didn't take a stand. Email jody.olson @mail.house.gov to participate in this grassroots campaign I have conveniently created for you.
7) Overall cluefulness?
The day before yesterday, none of you Washington lawyers had a clue. Do you now?
We try. We learn. We rely on the Supreme Court to catch our mistakes.
8) Free Speech and Computer Code by IanCarlson
It sucks that big money is using the Net as an excuse to erode our privacy, first amendment, and fair-use rights. Don't you agree?
Tell me more. I'm listening.
9) Government playing catch-up, and losing
It sucks that old-fashioned businesses don't want to go to the effort to adapt to a new market opportunity, don't you think?
I agree with you completely. That's just what I've been saying to them when they come by with their donations.
10) Just who is answering these questions?
Hello? Is anybody in there?
Every one of these questions has been addressed with a lovingly hand-crafted paragraph from my stock-responses portfolio. And we mean that sincerely.
:-)
CarbonLib is supported for MacOS 8.1 and higher. You can get it from VersionTracker.
Either way, Apple has a much better history of supporting old machines.
I don't know if I necessarily buy that. You can compile and run Linux on some REALLY OLD hardware, and ls and vi run like a champ. :-) But your point is well taken. For example, while I was at VersionTracker, I just happened to notice that one of my favorite Mac shareware games from days of yore has been updated for OS X! Yes, Klondike lives! You download one game,and it runs on essentially every Macintosh model made in the last 15 years; every MacOS made in the last 12 years; and it still looks and plays great! How many 17-year-old PC games have aged that gracefully?
In point of fact, numerous Power Macintosh models are based on ATX form factor motherboards. You can even get one without buying a whole Mac.
But what makes you think you wouldn't want to add all of the above items to an already complete Mac? PC users don't have a monopoly on upgrading or expanding; why shouldn't Mac users have a shot at the least expensive commodity parts, too?
;-)
MacOS (and also Windows) fall under ``easy-to-learn''. They do not have as many of the flexible, powerful tools available to them. They really don't care about that, they want people to be able to do easy tasks without having to sit down and understand things. Things are hidden from the user as much as possible; many times it is impossible to do tasks that are trivial under a UNIX machine.
Your have much to learn. If you think MacOS or Windows lack powerful tools, then you haven't used them enough. So you like grep? You can do regex searches on MacOS and Windows. Like writing shell scripts? You will not find a better shell scripting language than AppleScript. Perl floats your boat? Perl works excellently on MacOS (not just X, 7 thru 9) and Windows. Want to repartition your hard drive? Trivial. All of the great, powerful tools and commands you love about Unix have MacOS and Windows equivalents. You just have to learn how to use them -- just like Unix.
Don't assume, just because you don't know about something, that it does not exist.
Furthermore, a GUI allows you to trivially perform complex operations that would be very difficult on a command line. It cuts both ways. Think how easy a GUI makes it to select and open, copy, or delete a large number of files with no easily identifiable pattern in their names.
"I mean, a 450 MHz processor dedicated to one thing at a time? "
;)"
Hold your hashes. MacOS has supported multitasking since the very beginning, for appropriate values of "multitasking".
First of all, any OS that allows the processor to handle interrupts, e.g., for I/O, is dedicating the CPU to multiple tasks as much as any single-processor OS does. The CPU does indeed work on one task at a time, going off periodically to work on something else, without the user's bidding.
Second, desk accessories let the user launch a small application without leaving the main app since the earliest days of MacOS. It's not the same thing as general multitasking, but it did allow the USER to multitask somewhat, which is what really matters.
App switchers came out around the time Macs got big enough to hold more than one in memory, roughly 1986.
MultiFinder, a true multitasking shell, came out with MacOS 6, around 1988 or so. Every MacOS since the late 1980s has had multitasking built-in. I know Unix weenies like to bitch and moan about preemption, but the truth of the matter is, cooperative multitasking is just as real a form of multitasking as preemptive, and is in many ways a superior one, especially for a single-user desktop machine.
Case in point: Have you ever had your foreground app in X-windows bog down because some other task went nuts? I have. Oh, goodness gracious, have I ever. Took so much CPU, the stupid computer couldn't even read my kill signal. Maybe there's something to be said after all for a system that encourages tasks to voluntarily take a breather occasionally.
And, of course, MacOS has supported multiple threads, and even multiple CPUs, for the past several years.
I usually run anywhere from 5 to 15 interactive applications simultaneously on my Mac, for days at a time without quitting them or shutting down. Just like on Unix. And when a task does get out of hand, I can almost always kill it from the shell. Just like on Unix. As a USER, I say there's nothing wrong with the multitasking on classic MacOS.
So let's just agree to drop the "Macs don't multitask" line.
"It needed to be gutted."
That is definitely true. The lack of memory protection was a major shortcoming. It's a whole lot easier to accidentally dereference a garbage pointer than to design an app without WaitNextEvent.
"However, like many GNU purists, I think their decision to go with BSD over Mach is pretty short-sighted."
You think Apple should have waited for the HURD to be released? I should live to be so old as to see that day. I think their decision to spruce up a mature, stable, 10-year-old Unix implementation was pretty smart.
"And, like many Linux purists, I would prefer the more fun, more chaotic environment of a less-mature, more malleable OS."
Ah-ha, now we get to the bottom of it. You're not having fun unless you're having a kernel panic. You need to run Windows.
I think you'll find that MacOS and OS X are a whole lot more malleable than you give them credit for. I've been tweaking and skinning MacOS since about 1989, and I have no intention of stopping now. (Will MacFish run on X?)
"Besides, I prefer the look and feel of Linux on a Mac versus BSD
Heretic! Heretic!
;-)
Despite your subject, the body of your reply doesn't seem to disagree with me (this is okay by me). But I'll use your example to illustrate my point.
y= a*x*x + b*x + c
Math: By this statement, I define a logical constraint that a hypothetical quanitiy "y" and a hypothetical expression "a*x*x + b*x + c" are equivalent (i.e., will evaluate to the same value).
Algorithm:
Evaluate the expression "a*x*x + b*x + c", using previously established values stored in memory locations corresponding to a, b, c, and x. Store the result of this computation in the memory location designated to hold the value of y.
Software is a way of expressing ideas.
With all due respect, I just don't buy that. Software is a way of describing what you want a computer to do. That's a lot less general than "ideas".
Without a compiler (...) and a processor (...) and supporting hardware infrastructure, software is just writing on a page.
That's true. Well, you need a computer, anyway. Or at least a programmable machine. The only reason people invented software was to make these machines work. All software presumes some kind of computer on which it will execute.
Surely a non-mechanical mechanical nature is a contradiction in terms?
I said a non-physical mechanical nature (although, if you want to get picky, software does have a real, physical existence inside the computer). Mechanical in the sense of pertaining to machines, not in the sense of having mass and volume (although this is certainly also true). Mechanical in the sense of not carried out directly by human hands. I stand by my statement.
Can I conclude with the point that anyone who has studied computer science will have written software by hand on paper (in an exam) to express ideas to another human being (the examiner) who then understood that expression of ideas without a machine intermediary.
Only if you resist the urge to follow up on my rebuttal. :-)
In the exam, you are demonstrating your ability to construct a software machine that performs a task identified by the instructor. A person may read it and judge its merit, but execution on a computer is still the real target of your effort.
In MechE class, we drew pictures of trusses, not just to make intellectual commentary on redirection of force, but to demonstrate our ability to configure physical members to support a load or perform other real tasks. In CS, we wrote pseudocode to demonstrate our ability to configure electric circuits to perform real tasks. In both cases, we constructed a machine to do X using a specifically restricted toolbox of components.
A bridge is not just a bunch of atoms lying around, waiting for someone to "discover" that they can be stacked in a way that supports weight; it is the invention of a human mind. It obeys all the laws of physics, but it takes a combination of understanding physics and applied ingenuity to shape it into a bridge.
QuickSort was not just some mathematical principle lying around, waiting to be discovered like the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius; it was the invention of a human mind, a novel and creative method to accomplish a well-identified task more cleverly than other, similar inventions had done. The mathematical principles still apply, and C.A.R. Hoare clearly understood them well when inventing QuickSort.
Whether in software or steel, a machine is a machine. It's all the same to me.
"The fact that something is not physical does not dimish its physical nature."
I don't accept that as a valid paraphrase of what I said. Mechanical != physical. In my statement, mechanical refers to the fact that human control over a process is indirect. Mechanical as opposed to manual.
"1. Math is mechanical
2. Algorithms are mechanical "
I think math is intellectual, but algorithms are mechanical.
"The math is not patented ..., but the software based on that math is."
Right. Math does not actually do anything; it's just a set of rules. When you create an algorithm, you are not making a mathematical expression, you are making a procedural one.
So, as I see it, you cannot patent the concept of an integral, but you can patent a specific algorithm for calculating one.
I maintain that an algorithm is precisely describes a specific process. Rewriting it in a different programming language is a trivial varition at best. On the other hand, I would maintain that changing the nesting order of loops could introduce enough novelty to be considered a different algorithm.
As for whether you can write a noninfringing GIF decoder, let's just say I'm unconvinced that Unisys' patent covers every conceivable way of interpreting those bits. I believe that there may be devised other, legitimately separate, algorithms to accomplish the same task.
"While its quite clear to you and I that algorithms are math, it just took one judge with no knowledge of math or computers to set a precedent."
IANAJWNKOMOC, and it's not at all clear to me that algorithms are math. In fact, I'm taking the position that alogrithms are NOT math, they are processes. What, after all, is an algorithm? It is a set of operations through which some task is performed. That sure sounds like a process to me. (In my earlier post, I said programs are machines. I stand by both statements.)
Software is not math. Software is a machine.
Math is a set of abstract concepts that people find useful to apply when we want to model or understand something. Some of math is purely theoretical; an abstract exercise in probing the limits of a set of constraints. Other math is more concrete, used to describe an object, property or process. In this sense, the math only has meaning in that a person can make a mental correlation between the math and the real phenomenon.
By itself, Math is nothing. It's just a framework that people use for applying thought.
Software, on the other hand, does something. Its express purpose is to cause a human-built machine to perform a well-defined task. Some of the tasks performed by software exist primarily in the virtual realm (e.g., a program that locates prime numbers), while others directly affect the physical world (e.g., machine control software), and some are in between (e.g., banking and e-commerce).
In no case, however, is the software simply a set of abstract concepts intended to facilitate human navel-contemplation. Software explicitly describes a process that will take place on a machine under its control. Even an "abstract" algorithm assumes the existence of a defined set of machine instructions. Just because the control mechanism of a machine has moved from a purely physical implementation to an electronic one does not diminish the truth of its mechanical nature.
We allow the patenting of physical machines and industrial processes. (Whether we should is a question I don't intend to address.) Why should logical ones not receive equal protection?
Is ten years of research really worth a 20% decrease in power consumption and a 15% decrease in overall chip size?
It is absolutely worthwhile to have a handful of people working for 10 years on this if, at the end, everyone can leverage the benefit of their work. In this specific case, asynchronous vs. synchronous is orthogonal to fabrication technologies. The lessons learned can be applied to future processes as easily as present-day ones.
The Mickey Mouse argument is bogus. I hear people rationalizing the extension of copyright for works such as "Steamboat Willie", etc., in order to protect Disney's investment in the Mickey Mouse icon. That's total BS. Mickey Mouse is, as used by Disney, a trademark. Trademark law provides all the basis Disney needs to prevent people from selling sweatshirts, pens, pencils, coffee mugs, etc., with Mickey's image on them. Disney's trademark usage of Mickey's current image, and the revenue they currently derive from it, would not be harmed by releasing "Steamboat Willie" and other ancient animations, and its outdated artwork that Disney no longer actively uses in trade, into the public domain.
The administration of the junior high school probably places no restrictions out of sheer igrorance. If they knew even a tenth what we know about computer networks, they'd probably put the kaibosh on the whole thing and collapse into a quivering heap of terrified bureaucratium. I don't know what it's like today, but when I graduated from high school, they still thought Apple IIe's with 5.25" floppies were the vanguard of technology. Nowadays, I suspect their most high-tech equipment is metal detectors.
In my admittedly limited experience, the GNU versions of most Unix utilities appear to be BETTER than the originals, or even the versions of those utilities that ship as part of expensive, proprietary products such as Solaris or Window NT. In my mind, that hardly makes them cheap rip-offs.
If you want examples of innovative software released specifically under the GPL, I would nominate two right off the bat: EMACS and GCC, particularsy the former. If you know of an earlier text editor that was user-extensible on the fly, I'd like to see it. Not only are EMACS and GCC GPLed products, but were written by RMS himself.
Also, in their defense, UNLIKE MICROSOFT, the FSF in particular has never claimed to be an innovator, AFAIK. Their goal has always been to produce a free-as-in-speech Unix clone, and that is what they did. Other free software projects that released their code under the GPL have been more original. Perl, for example (although GPL wasn't its first licence).
I would also argue, quite reasonably I think, that FSF's most important innovation of all was the GPL itself: A viral copyright that guarantees that works so protected, and all derivative works, cannot have their freedom revoked by profiteering private concerns. That's downright brilliant.
But TrueType (an Apple/Microsoft venture) came standard with Windows 3.1 first.
TrueType is an Apple invention. It is NOT an Apple/MS joint venture. You are thinking of a technology swap: Apple's TrueType for Microsoft's PostScript interpreter. TrueType has been a standard part of MacOS since version 7.0 (which comes after Win 3.0 but before 3.1), but it also works with 6.0.x.
For more information, see A Brief History of TrueType. For even more information, see A History of TrueType.
mankind evolved over a long period of time from primitive ... ancestors.
The same is true of the Linux kernel.
Lest we all forget, before microcomputers turned everything upside down, renting software by the month was normal. In a manner extremely similar to our large, dynamic web sites and services today, in the 60s and 70s, you sat before a comparatively simple terminal (browser), while all of the application's functionality resided on the mainframe (server). Your company bought or leased an IBM mainframe (or even rented time on someone else's) that supported hundreds of simultaneous users (sessions) and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition to this, your company paid separate monthly rental fees for the OS, libraries, development tools, and application software. These monthly software rental fees alone could easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars. In Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month", there is even a reference to the monthly rental fee for a RAM module (in 1974, about $12/kb IIRC).
.NET ain't nothin' new. It's a return to the Bad Old Days(tm) of the 1960s and 70s, only this time it's Microsoft instead of IBM that is clutching 90% of the computing world's collective scrota. Don't you think it's ironic that the man who was possibly the most instrumental in breaking the IBM mainframe paradigm is trying to get the world to return to it, now that he's on top?
Yep, y'all,
It's interesting to consider that the DOJ ran an antitrust trial against IBM for about 2 decades, dropping it only when it became clear that market forces had made the case moot.
"...paying $15 for a cd with 10 songs on it is the biggest and longest running scam going on right now."
;-)
Small potatoes. The biggest, longest-running scam going on right now is paying $9.50 to see a 90-minute movie. CD prices comes in somewhere after social security, insurance fraud, and patenting results of publicly funded research.
The only thing that matters is whether or not your actions are beneficial or hurtful to others, regardless of what label applies.
... have a lot of broken marriages. Coincidence? I doubt it. People have a lot of broken marriages too, but I'm not usually surprised when non-actors stay married for more than 5 years.
Sure, it's possible and probably even fun to roleplay a relationship that has no meaning for you-the-player. But I don't know many people who can do it well without foundering on the rocks of personal involvement. I don't even know many people who can deal with their real-life romances, let alone additional make-believe ones. I have a hard time role-playing without feeling what my characters feel. I do believe it can be done, but most of us lack the strength to role-play in a more-than-superficial manner and still maintain an impervious emotional barrier between player and character. There's plenty of fun situations to role-play that won't screw up your emotional stability (or make your SO jealous). Avoid RP romances.
My group was hit by the "OnTheFly" virus this morning (see source elswhere in this thread). Figure on a couple of handfulls of engineers reading the attachment in their Unix-based mail readers and sending each other notes saying, "Hey, check out this virus!" At five minutes per engineer screwing around with this ineffectual Windows-based virus, we lost easily $100 in productivity.
You can call it communism if you like. I call it leveling the playing field so that competition can flourish and more wealth is created. To everything, spin, spin, spin. :-)