The government, like any large organization, has a good reason to standardize on two things:
1) The format(s) used for exchanging documents between various government department, and 2) The format(s) used for exchanging documents with external users.
The first reason is important for the smooth function of the government (or for any other large, multi-branch organization), and the second reason makes it much simpler for citizens and other entities, so they won't have to have a zillion different pieces of software for communicating with the government.
You can argue that it could leave it up to the individual department what formats to use internally, but for practical reasons the internal and external formats will tend to be the same.
Microsoft has general patent cross license deals with many companies, including Sun and IBM, and perhaps also Apple. So if Apple or StarOffice violate some Microsoft patents, they might actually be in the clear nontheless. But someone who bought Red Hat, including Gnome and OpenOffice.org, could still be fair game.
The BSD public "NET" release are almost 20 years old and the code base is even older, which means that 1) any patents covering the code has passed - or is close to - the expire date, and 2) Microsoft hadn't begun their patent collection yet, so any patent violation found in the BSD code would in fact be prior art and invalidate the patent.
Isn't that the norm? Our state church gets a couple of percent of our income, collected by the government tax authorities. I thought non-state churches just collected their membership fees themselves.
Historically, Modernism was cultural revolt against Christianity in particular, and religion in general. Humanism, Socialism, and Liberalism (in the original European meaning of the word) are all Modern ideologies.
Some watered down versions of Christianity are "compatible" with "modern liberal democracy", but there are similar toothless variants of Islam. You can't really compare whole families of religions like Christianity and Islam with a closed organization like Scientology. You can compare it with the Catholic Church, which is also at odds with modernism and democracy. Currently, the Catholic Church is trying to write itself a role in the institutions of the European Union, meeting some resistance from protestant countries and the secular France in the process.
The move by the vendors to collaborate on Linux in Japan comes from a edict from the country's government to make Linux and open source a priority for all IT procurements, starting this July.
The government is a (very large) consumer, this (very large) consumer says that is will spend ten billions on mostly Linux based infrastructure. Not surprisingly, the vendors try to bid into this very large order.
Many Microsoft users won't even consider non-Microsoft solutions. That is, when you think about it, a lot more fanatic than the Apple or Free Software users who can usually tell you (to annoyingly great length) why they prefer their choice over the alternatives.
The fanatic Microsoft users don't constitute a cult, of course, since a cult per definition can not be mainstream.
> Actually, they had better be putting out a HELL OF A LOT more content than Guild Wars for that > price. You'd normally pay 20-30 bucks for an expansion, and see maybe one or two of them a year > normally.
The stated goal for Guild Wars was two new campaigns a year, each for the price of a full game (which you also got, as they could be played without the original campaign). That's US$100 per year.
Of course reality was a bit different, we only got two campaigns (plus the original), and the promise of an ordinary expansion (cheaper, can't be played without one of the old campaigns) next year.
The study is pretty commonly quoted as an argument against pornography, not sure why.
It is not really surprising that there is a correlation between people who think it is fun to attempt to chock the interviewer by admitting their use of pornography, and people that who think it is fun to attempt to chock the interviewer by condoning rape. Nor that there is a correlation between people who find they need to lie about their use of pornography to appear more moral than they are, and people who find they need to get tough on rape for similar reasons. Even if all the answers were truthful (unlikely given the subject), it would be surprising if people who had little trouble with rape would see pornography as wrong.
The study mostly seems like a pseudo-rational crutch for people who oppose pornography for other reasons.
Japan has a generally low crime rate, so it is not really that surprising that sexual crime is also low.
The traditional example is Denmark, where there was a statistically significant decrease in rapes after the legalization of pornography. That statistic actually helped getting pornography legalized in other countries, not always with the same effect (so it might have been a fluke).
I read the report, and I believe the word think tank is misleading. It was a just seminar or workshop, where people in the industry exchanged experiences for their mutual inspiration and benefit.
A think tank is more of a permanent or at least longer term organization, where similar minded people tries to build a rational justification for their already existing viewpoints.
Both are actually quite useful. The seminars / workshops are a fine place to learn from others mistakes, so you can make your own new and exciting mistakes instead of merely repeating the old and boring mistakes made by others.
The think thanks are just about the only thing today that even attempts to raise political discourse above the level of sound bites. I'm very glad they exists, even those think thanks that support the opposing side.
As a personal note, I was on the Internet in 1985, long before most people had heard of it, because I was a cs student at the time, and I was wildly fascinated by its potential. And I remember discussions later with people who worked at developing proprietary data networks for consumer use just before the Internet took off, that they didn't stand a chance. One of my main argument was that U.S. vice president was advocating the Internet every day to US industry and congress.
Nonetheless, like everybody else I laughed at the "Al Gore invented the Internet" claim when I first heard it, considering that I was already on it before Al Gore got involved.
But the more I thought about it, the more his actual quote "[I] took the initiative in creating the Internet" seems only stupid in one way; Namely that everything a politician says must survive being twisted and presented out of context to people ignorant on the subject. The Internet, as the popular phenomen we know today, was still being created, and and Al Gore definitely took the initiative in doing that. At the time, being locked into competing, closed proprietary networks run by phone companies was a quite likely outcome. Consumers would have the choice of services provided by their phone company, plus a few third party service providers approved by the phone company, and delivering part of their revenue to the phone company. It would have been a safer, duller and much less inventive world.
In fact, I suspect that even if he somehow succeeds in minimizing the rise of the greenhouse effect, his contribution to the creation of the Internet as we know it might dwarf any of his other accomplishments, as well as all the accomplishments of Bill Clinton, measured in the effects on human society. The Internet has transformed society, and is still transforming society. The possibility of instant communication and collaboration between people all over the world has that effect. Much more than a few degrees rise in temperature, and raising water levels.
> Isn't that what they call a straw man argument...
Nope. It would be a straw man argument if he claimed these were the spoken arguments against birth control. But he doesn't, he speculate that these are the unspoken reasons (at least #1 and #2).
It does show a total lack of respect for the opponents. Nothing wrong with that. The official spoken arguments for certain positions, such as alien visitors, creationism or the immorality of birth control are utterly insane. Trying to counter them with rational arguments are a total waste of time, as they are not based on rational thinking.
It is much more productive to try to analyze which emotional needs makes people hold to these irrational positions. Once you understand the true reasoning behind them, you can start working on filling the emotional need the motivates them, and the positions become irrelevant.
> You have put those with different opinions than you in a box, and then made up there thoughts so > you can be better than them... isn't that what your post was complaining about in the first > place?
Nope, he was complaining about people trying to control others behavior. Not about people trying to change others opinions.
Java, OpenOffice.org, and OpenSolaris are all mainly created by Sun employees.
Actually, Linux, Firefox, Apache, SAMBA, MySQL, GCC, and the other high profile free software projects are mainly developed by people who get their salary for doing exactly that.
It works the other way as well, half the developers surveyed by the EU FLOSS project state that they do their free software work as part of their job (some indirectly, they contribute to projects they use in their work). The other half consist of equal amounts of students and hobbyists.
The myth that free software is created by unpaid volunteers is hard to kill, despite having little basis in reality. The free software people actually use tends to be created by paid professionals.
I write code like yours (or wrote, back when I still programmed in C). But only because of the whole "goto is evil" mantra. The original code is much more robust and slightly more readable.
The code duplication you advocate (and I also practiced) is simply asking for trouble. Luckily for both of us, it only happen in error handling situations, so the bugs that almost certainly will be in the code using our style after a few years of maintenance will most likely never be discovered.
You could argue that a comment would remove the doubt. However, this is presumable a standard idiom used everywhere in the code by the poster, and such idioms should not really be explained every time they are used. They would be better placed in a separate "coding standards" document.
I'd really hope you would not be surprised that a function called "alloc"-something would allocate memory on success.
As sample code leaks since nothing points to the allocated memory, presumably because it is not relevant for the technique being illustrated.
The technique would be useful for a constructor function, returning a pointer to an initialized object. A matching destructor function would then free the memory.
> Wouldn't nested 'if..then's be better in this case?
I'd prefer the code as is, using nested ifs for partial cleanup quickly becomes a mess.
I believe goto in general works best when you use it to mimic specific missing language features... In this case "std::auto_ptr" from C++ or "finally" from Java/C#.
Back when I programmed assembler (where use of goto is mandatory), I always put the conceptual high-level construct in a comment, like "if then else endif" or "repeat until".
Most of it is pretty obvious, they can't show you trade secrets and then allow you to later "reverse engineer" the stuff. And there are even reasonable relaxations, such as when the stuff becomes public anyway (by no fault of yours), you are free to use it. Since the NDA itself is now public, all the self-referring limitations are void.
The only strange part is the prohibition against naming or implying Google. It is (as far as I can see) not limited to any particular context. It is way to broad to be enforceable as it stands, so I suspect some intended limitations were lost. You could guess from context that it somehow only applies to the NDA itself.
Your understanding of the term "native" is rather limited, as used today it tends to imply the use of the libraries and/or environments most closely associated to the platform.
In general, people would not refer to Cygwin binaries as MS Windows native, nor.exe files running under Linux with Wine.
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The government, like any large organization, has a good reason to standardize on two things:
1) The format(s) used for exchanging documents between various government department, and
2) The format(s) used for exchanging documents with external users.
The first reason is important for the smooth function of the government (or for any other large, multi-branch organization), and the second reason makes it much simpler for citizens and other entities, so they won't have to have a zillion different pieces of software for communicating with the government.
You can argue that it could leave it up to the individual department what formats to use internally, but for practical reasons the internal and external formats will tend to be the same.
Microsoft has general patent cross license deals with many companies, including Sun and IBM, and perhaps also Apple. So if Apple or StarOffice violate some Microsoft patents, they might actually be in the clear nontheless. But someone who bought Red Hat, including Gnome and OpenOffice.org, could still be fair game.
The BSD public "NET" release are almost 20 years old and the code base is even older, which means that 1) any patents covering the code has passed - or is close to - the expire date, and 2) Microsoft hadn't begun their patent collection yet, so any patent violation found in the BSD code would in fact be prior art and invalidate the patent.
Isn't that the norm? Our state church gets a couple of percent of our income, collected by the government tax authorities. I thought non-state churches just collected their membership fees themselves.
> Its a profit oriented company disguised as religion.
Is that like a "government law enforcement employee disguised as a policeman", or maybe like a "professional crop grower disguised as a farmer"?
Historically, Modernism was cultural revolt against Christianity in particular, and religion in general. Humanism, Socialism, and Liberalism (in the original European meaning of the word) are all Modern ideologies.
Some watered down versions of Christianity are "compatible" with "modern liberal democracy", but there are similar toothless variants of Islam. You can't really compare whole families of religions like Christianity and Islam with a closed organization like Scientology. You can compare it with the Catholic Church, which is also at odds with modernism and democracy. Currently, the Catholic Church is trying to write itself a role in the institutions of the European Union, meeting some resistance from protestant countries and the secular France in the process.
From the article:
The government is a (very large) consumer, this (very large) consumer says that is will spend ten billions on mostly Linux based infrastructure. Not surprisingly, the vendors try to bid into this very large order.
It has more the feel of a computer science article than a math article.
Many Microsoft users won't even consider non-Microsoft solutions. That is, when you think about it, a lot more fanatic than the Apple or Free Software users who can usually tell you (to annoyingly great length) why they prefer their choice over the alternatives.
The fanatic Microsoft users don't constitute a cult, of course, since a cult per definition can not be mainstream.
> Actually, they had better be putting out a HELL OF A LOT more content than Guild Wars for that
> price. You'd normally pay 20-30 bucks for an expansion, and see maybe one or two of them a year
> normally.
The stated goal for Guild Wars was two new campaigns a year, each for the price of a full game (which you also got, as they could be played without the original campaign). That's US$100 per year.
Of course reality was a bit different, we only got two campaigns (plus the original), and the promise of an ordinary expansion (cheaper, can't be played without one of the old campaigns) next year.
The study is pretty commonly quoted as an argument against pornography, not sure why.
It is not really surprising that there is a correlation between people who think it is fun to attempt to chock the interviewer by admitting their use of pornography, and people that who think it is fun to attempt to chock the interviewer by condoning rape. Nor that there is a correlation between people who find they need to lie about their use of pornography to appear more moral than they are, and people who find they need to get tough on rape for similar reasons. Even if all the answers were truthful (unlikely given the subject), it would be surprising if people who had little trouble with rape would see pornography as wrong.
The study mostly seems like a pseudo-rational crutch for people who oppose pornography for other reasons.
Japan has a generally low crime rate, so it is not really that surprising that sexual crime is also low.
The traditional example is Denmark, where there was a statistically significant decrease in rapes after the legalization of pornography. That statistic actually helped getting pornography legalized in other countries, not always with the same effect (so it might have been a fluke).
I read the report, and I believe the word think tank is misleading. It was a just seminar or workshop, where people in the industry exchanged experiences for their mutual inspiration and benefit.
A think tank is more of a permanent or at least longer term organization, where similar minded people tries to build a rational justification for their already existing viewpoints.
Both are actually quite useful. The seminars / workshops are a fine place to learn from others mistakes, so you can make your own new and exciting mistakes instead of merely repeating the old and boring mistakes made by others.
The think thanks are just about the only thing today that even attempts to raise political discourse above the level of sound bites. I'm very glad they exists, even those think thanks that support the opposing side.
Here is a link to V.Cerf and B.Kahn's message.
As a personal note, I was on the Internet in 1985, long before most people had heard of it, because I was a cs student at the time, and I was wildly fascinated by its potential. And I remember discussions later with people who worked at developing proprietary data networks for consumer use just before the Internet took off, that they didn't stand a chance. One of my main argument was that U.S. vice president was advocating the Internet every day to US industry and congress.
Nonetheless, like everybody else I laughed at the "Al Gore invented the Internet" claim when I first heard it, considering that I was already on it before Al Gore got involved.
But the more I thought about it, the more his actual quote "[I] took the initiative in creating
the Internet" seems only stupid in one way; Namely that everything a politician says must survive being twisted and presented out of context to people ignorant on the subject. The Internet, as the popular phenomen we know today, was still being created, and and Al Gore definitely took the initiative in doing that. At the time, being locked into competing, closed proprietary networks run by phone companies was a quite likely outcome. Consumers would have the choice of services provided by their phone company, plus a few third party service providers approved by the phone company, and delivering part of their revenue to the phone company. It would have been a safer, duller and much less inventive world.
In fact, I suspect that even if he somehow succeeds in minimizing the rise of the greenhouse effect, his contribution to the creation of the Internet as we know it might dwarf any of his other accomplishments, as well as all the accomplishments of Bill Clinton, measured in the effects on human society. The Internet has transformed society, and is still transforming society. The possibility of instant communication and collaboration between people all over the world has that effect. Much more than a few degrees rise in temperature, and raising water levels.
"We are everywhere! For your convenience."
I think I'll pass.
> Isn't that what they call a straw man argument...
Nope. It would be a straw man argument if he claimed these were the spoken arguments against birth control. But he doesn't, he speculate that these are the unspoken reasons (at least #1 and #2).
It does show a total lack of respect for the opponents. Nothing wrong with that. The official spoken arguments for certain positions, such as alien visitors, creationism or the immorality of birth control are utterly insane. Trying to counter them with rational arguments are a total waste of time, as they are not based on rational thinking.
It is much more productive to try to analyze which emotional needs makes people hold to these irrational positions. Once you understand the true reasoning behind them, you can start working on filling the emotional need the motivates them, and the positions become irrelevant.
> You have put those with different opinions than you in a box, and then made up there thoughts so
> you can be better than them... isn't that what your post was complaining about in the first
> place?
Nope, he was complaining about people trying to control others behavior. Not about people trying to change others opinions.
Java, OpenOffice.org, and OpenSolaris are all mainly created by Sun employees.
Actually, Linux, Firefox, Apache, SAMBA, MySQL, GCC, and the other high profile free software projects are mainly developed by people who get their salary for doing exactly that.
It works the other way as well, half the developers surveyed by the EU FLOSS project state that they do their free software work as part of their job (some indirectly, they contribute to projects they use in their work). The other half consist of equal amounts of students and hobbyists.
The myth that free software is created by unpaid volunteers is hard to kill, despite having little basis in reality. The free software people actually use tends to be created by paid professionals.
I write code like yours (or wrote, back when I still programmed in C). But only because of the whole "goto is evil" mantra. The original code is much more robust and slightly more readable.
The code duplication you advocate (and I also practiced) is simply asking for trouble. Luckily for both of us, it only happen in error handling situations, so the bugs that almost certainly will be in the code using our style after a few years of maintenance will most likely never be discovered.
Actually, using exceptions just make the problem worse, as every function call may potentially cause an early exit.
Which is why programming languages with exceptions have mechanisms for automatic cleanups, like finally in Java or std::auto_ptr in C++.
You could argue that a comment would remove the doubt. However, this is presumable a standard idiom used everywhere in the code by the poster, and such idioms should not really be explained every time they are used. They would be better placed in a separate "coding standards" document.
> I believe that the labels were intended to be above each of the free calls, rather than below.
Not really, you don't need to call free when malloc fails.
Looks tome that he want to keep the same structure for each malloc, which will also make the code more robust if new mallocs are added.
I'd really hope you would not be surprised that a function called "alloc"-something would allocate memory on success.
As sample code leaks since nothing points to the allocated memory, presumably because it is not relevant for the technique being illustrated.
The technique would be useful for a constructor function, returning a pointer to an initialized object. A matching destructor function would then free the memory.
> Wouldn't nested 'if..then's be better in this case?
I'd prefer the code as is, using nested ifs for partial cleanup quickly becomes a mess.
I believe goto in general works best when you use it to mimic specific missing language features... In this case "std::auto_ptr" from C++ or "finally" from Java/C#.
Back when I programmed assembler (where use of goto is mandatory), I always put the conceptual high-level construct in a comment, like "if then else endif" or "repeat until".
Most of it is pretty obvious, they can't show you trade secrets and then allow you to later "reverse engineer" the stuff. And there are even reasonable relaxations, such as when the stuff becomes public anyway (by no fault of yours), you are free to use it. Since the NDA itself is now public, all the self-referring limitations are void.
The only strange part is the prohibition against naming or implying Google. It is (as far as I can see) not limited to any particular context. It is way to broad to be enforceable as it stands, so I suspect some intended limitations were lost. You could guess from context that it somehow only applies to the NDA itself.
Your understanding of the term "native" is rather limited, as used today it tends to imply the use of the libraries and/or environments most closely associated to the platform.
.exe files running under Linux with Wine.
In general, people would not refer to Cygwin binaries as MS Windows native, nor