I recognize the idiom immidiately, it is pretty common. I can also rationalize how it works, it takes a few seconds (and a few more worrying I missed some boundary case).
I'd never write it myself, and I would be suspicious of anyone who does. Three side-effects in one expression is two more than I feel comfortable with.
I prefer zero side-effects in anything with a value that is used, and can live with one. Antyhing more requires analyzing, unless it is an idiom.
Have there ever been a IDC prediction that turned out to be correct? In the 15 years I have been involved in the the industry, I don't remember a single one to be correct, or even close. I remember a lot of the other kind of predictions, such as the expected dominating role of OS/2 and Unix (at one point, IDC bascially predicted these two would divide the market between them), and how PC's, DOS and MS Windows would stay niche products. Of course, there has also been IDC predictions about the later would dominate the market, but these were all after Wintel boxes already dominated the market.
Statistically, IDC ought to be right sometimes. But as it is now, they may actually have a value because the negative corrolation between their predictions and reality.
As everyone else have said, legally there is no problem, and from a rigid ethical point of view you are also in the clear. Especially if the other guy is not the original author.
However, this misses another point which is also very important, namely how to create an athmosphere of cooperation (or at least peaceful coexistence), which will benefit both of you. Or more specifically in this case, how to teach the other guy the value of sharing.
If you say "fuck you, the GPL gives me the right to copy your code!", you can be pretty sure he will do his best to obstruct your work, and won't release any code again under the GPL (or any other free software license) when given a choice.
And given that he actually does write code worth of copying, that would be a loss for the community.
If you can give the impresion that you respect his wishes, but hope that you can find an arrangement so that you can incorporate his excellent work in a way he doesn't find unfair (maybe after an official release), and if there is any of your humble work he might find of use, you would be flattered to help make it accesible to him, and are there any other ways you could cooperate...
The instinct of most of us is to stand proudly on our rights, but often better results are achieved by looking at what you really want to achieve. Is being "right" really your end goal?
The software patent decision was twice undemocratic, first the parliament was ignored, second it was passed through the council of ministers by trickery.
No matter what you think of software patents, everyone should be happy that someone in EU thinks democracy is worth taking serious.
Funny that it should be one of the new members, given the "superior" attitude most of the old members take.
I followed the link you provided, and I saw no "scare tactics", at least not in the beginning of the thread (it was long, so it might have degenerated). Only level headed discussions about the pro- and contra of working on the mainline vs. a fork.
The project home page (number one hit on a google seach for SpamAssassin) has a link to a list of commercial support solutions written with a large font at the top of the page.
This add is likely to generate a lot of spin-off publicity, simply because the concept is new. So it will (hopefully) be good value for the money.
However, any additional ads will not generate the same spin-off, so they will only have the direct effect of the add. And there is no way Firefox can compete MSIE on a dolar for dolar marketing campaign.
It is often better to be an expert in one tool, than to be a jack-of-all-trades.
Yes, it means that there are jobs you will have to say no to, because they are not within your particular expertice. But for the jobs that lies within your field of expertise, you will be the best.
Both specialists and generalists are needed, which one you choose to be should depend on where your talents lie: In getting a broad overview, or in diving deep into a particular aspect.
Those "scientists" believe in this "global warming" humbug have conspired to keep all the true scientists out of their journals!
This is just like the conspiracy to keep the shame of the evolution theory alive, as well as the fake moonlanding, and the lie that our world is not flat!
The current software patents in EU has been granted illegally by the EPO. It is this illegal practise that the EPO (and the commision) is desperately trying to legalize.
That companies have invested millions in an illegal practize is not reason to legalize it.
> Software patents are even more important than > patents in other fields, due to the ease with which > software techniques can be duplicated. Patents are > absolutely necessary to protect small companies > from having their ideas taken without any credit or > compensation to the original source.
First, you misunderstood the purpose of patents. It isn't to help inventors make money or get credit, but to promote the progress of technology. So if you want to defend software patents, you should come up with examples of software technology that would not have been developed without the incensitive of a time limited monopoly on the technology.
The fact that software technology is easy to recreate from scratch is an argument for keeping the field free of patents. Unlike, e.g. medicine, where the necessary investments are huge.
Second, the "big bad" vs "small good" red herring is always stupid, but the facts in this case is also the other way. Software is very interconnected, so if you allow patents big companies with a large patent portfolie will be able to keep small companies out of the market. A small company with a product will not be able to use patents against big companies, as they will themselves violate several of the big companies patents. The only small companies who can make use of it are litigation companies with no product of their own.
> So yeah, they'll make tons of noise about being against sw patents, and then silently pass it into law.
Actually, we *won* this one. The European Parliament changed the wording of the patent law, so it actually said what its proponents in the original form claimed (and still claims) it said.
Unfortunately, EU is not a democracy, and the unelected commision managed to trick the council into adopting a "compromise" during a late night meeting where there were no way for grassroots to give any input to the politicians. The transcripts of the meeting were horrifying, with the chairman pressuring the Danish member into voting, even though the Danish member clearly requested more information about what he was voting for.
Luckily, the Polish member who was also fooled has withdrawn his support, which mean we can actually still win this one. A lot of politicians are royaly pissed over how the commision and the epo has manipulated them.
He has, by the example of his competent leadership, demonstrated that important business software can be developed under a free software license.
This has influenced the industry so that 1) it is much more likely to rely on free software (Linux and other), and 2) it is much more likely comtribute to, and to release software of its own under a free software license.
The only people I know who have an Apple computer at home, also use Apple at work. I strongly suspect that is the general trend.
For home, most people choose 1) what they have at work, or 2) something capable of web and email, or 3) something to play games on. For 2, everything works, but a PC is cheapest. For 3, PC has the games and game hardware first.
Well, formally they do. But "the lone coder" will almost always do consulting-type work for small businesses, and you will be under the radar for most IP holders. You can violate patents and trade secrets as you wish, and you can violate copyrights and even trademarks as long as you are not to blatant about it.
Of course, if you want to make shrink-wrap software the software is different because you need to advertise it widely. But I think the room for lone coder shrink-wrap software is very small anyway.
Go for the one-product, one customer market instead. That is where the jobs are.
The point was that the person I replied to took "Wikipedia will only approach the truth" as a point against Wikipedia, because then it will never be "the Truth" (with capital T even).
That is a point *for* Wikipedia, at least for me, and my arguments were relevant for explaining why.
Of course a high ratio of factual errors, as well as poor writting, are points *against* Wikipedia. But all also irrelevant for the point I was making.
Actually, it may be relevant. There is a strong tendency in US media, including/., that you either have to be for or against something, and if you are for you can only argue its good points and deny its bad points, and vice-versa. This could come from the same autoritarian tradition, where there is a single Truth which is propagaded from God to the masses through proper channals. And thus, an issue can either be on the side of Truth and be all god, or else it will be on the side of Falsehood and be all bad.
I don't see it that way, both collborative works like Wikipedia and authoritarian works like Britannica has there strong and weak points, and both are useful when navigating in this world.
Which was the point I made. Go to a priest for the Truth. Those of us who will no go that road will have to do with less, namely models that are useful.
Maybe it is my background in natural science speaking, but I don't see
Truth as something you reach. It is something you, at best, approach.
Science (real science) has of a lot of models. None of these models
are the Truth. All we know is that they have made good predictions in
the past. And we constantly refine and replace our models, so they
can make better and better predictions. Science is not the product
(the models), it is the process (how we improve them). Some of us
like to believe this means our models approach the Truth, but that is
an article of faith as the Britannica author point out.
Wikipedia, when it is at its best, is similar. It will never reach
the Truth, however, as people contribute to it, it will hopefully
approach it. Information that is not useful (because it conflicts too
grossly with other "models of the Truth" out there) will be removed,
and information that is useful (help the users) will be added.
The Britannica author comes from another tradition. A tradition where
Truth is based on authority rather than consensus. The ultimate Truth
is God, and is expressed through the hierarchy of the Church down to
the common churchgoer. Lately, the Church has been supplemented by
Science. This gives the common layman view of Science as a Truth,
competing or supplementing the Church. Scientists, of course, know
that is not so, but the whole dissemination system (schools) has not
been updated yet. It uses the old Church based mechanisms. When
scientists teach, they try to teach pupils to think. They don't just
pass knowledge given from above.
Much of the Britannica authors ruminations about the degeneration of
modern society stems from the same source. Focus is shifting towards
the process, and old barriers are removed. Teaching methods is
(slowly) catching up. The world is changing, and the best you can
teach your pupils is how to adapt to the change. He does not
understand that. What was once the Truth, will always be the Truth.
That is the nature of Truth. He complains that Wikipedia does not
consider the reader, only the authors. This is because the
Wikipedians don't use the same model of the world he does. There are
no separation between authors and readers, both are users and
contributors to the system. The Truth may stay the same, but how we
see it will change. It has always changed, but it changes faster now.
Being able to change with it is a competitive advantage.
Try to get away from the "here is always a catch".
Google believe they have a superior product, offering pop3 support will lure new users in, and eventually they will make the switch.
Even if they *don't* make the switch for reading new mail, they will for reading old mail. GMail store a copy of all your mail. It will not delete the mail you retrieve from teh server, just mark it as read (moving it from "inbox" to "all mail"). So when you can't remember where you put a mail with your local client, you will go to gmail and find it with google's search technology. Which will be faster. Just like it today in all cases I have tried has been faster to find information about a product I have bought by asking google, than by looking in the help files and other online documentation provided by the vendor.
If two students, who are writting an irc client in order to improve their programming skills, deside to use sourceforge as a repository (so they both can work on it) and put it under an free software license "just in case", they are part of "most" free software projects.
But they are also utterly irrelevant to any business case. The only software projects that are relevant to business is that which has achieved a code base that is mature enough to be used. That includes basis software like Linux and FreeBSD, server software like Apache and SAMBA, desktop software like OpenOffice and Firefox, developer tools like the GNU chain, Perl, Python and PHP, and and databases like MySQL and Postgres.
What is relevant is whether you can find expertise for *those* projects (and products), not whether you can find expertise for some random hobbyist project on sourceforge.
Measured in number of projects, the random hobbyist and studenst dominate. Measured in number of users, it is a much more limited number of projects that dominate, and it is primarily those projects that a busniness case should be build on.
The idea of "standards" are foreign to most web designers, even those that really ought to know better (/.).
Instead, they will make two versions of the page, one for IE and one for Mozilla/Firefox, and tell everyone else to "upgrade". Just like they did when Netscape and IE both had significant marketshare.
PS: The Firefox version will of course be so outdated and broken, that you get better results by pretenting to be IE and let FireFox "bug compatibility" handle it.
Actually, the idea is to combine oxygen with hydrocarbons and use the surplus energy. In our atmosphere (with plenty of oxygen), you bring the hydrocarbons. On titan (apparently with plenty of hydrocarbons), you would bring the oxygen. Same result.
Also, at this step, you probably want the "more informed and better educated" readership, they are more likely to be semi-early adopters of a "new" product.
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I recognize the idiom immidiately, it is pretty common. I can also rationalize how it works, it takes a few seconds (and a few more worrying I missed some boundary case).
I'd never write it myself, and I would be suspicious of anyone who does. Three side-effects in one expression is two more than I feel comfortable with.
I prefer zero side-effects in anything with a value that is used, and can live with one. Antyhing more requires analyzing, unless it is an idiom.
Have there ever been a IDC prediction that turned out to be correct? In the 15 years I have been involved in the the industry, I don't remember a single one to be correct, or even close. I remember a lot of the other kind of predictions, such as the expected dominating role of OS/2 and Unix (at one point, IDC bascially predicted these two would divide the market between them), and how PC's, DOS and MS Windows would stay niche products. Of course, there has also been IDC predictions about the later would dominate the market, but these were all after Wintel boxes already dominated the market.
Statistically, IDC ought to be right sometimes. But as it is now, they may actually have a value because the negative corrolation between their predictions and reality.
As everyone else have said, legally there is no problem, and from a rigid ethical point of view you are also in the clear. Especially if the other guy is not the original author.
However, this misses another point which is also very important, namely how to create an athmosphere of cooperation (or at least peaceful coexistence), which will benefit both of you. Or more specifically in this case, how to teach the other guy the value of sharing.
If you say "fuck you, the GPL gives me the right to copy your code!", you can be pretty sure he will do his best to obstruct your work, and won't release any code again under the GPL (or any other free software license) when given a choice.
And given that he actually does write code worth of copying, that would be a loss for the community.
If you can give the impresion that you respect his wishes, but hope that you can find an arrangement so that you can incorporate his excellent work in a way he doesn't find unfair (maybe after an official release), and if there is any of your humble work he might find of use, you would be flattered to help make it accesible to him, and are there any other ways you could cooperate...
The instinct of most of us is to stand proudly on our rights, but often better results are achieved by looking at what you really want to achieve. Is being "right" really your end goal?
The software patent decision was twice undemocratic, first the parliament was ignored, second it was passed through the council of ministers by trickery.
No matter what you think of software patents, everyone should be happy that someone in EU thinks democracy is worth taking serious.
Funny that it should be one of the new members, given the "superior" attitude most of the old members take.
I followed the link you provided, and I saw no "scare tactics", at least not in the beginning of the thread (it was long, so it might have degenerated). Only level headed discussions about the pro- and contra of working on the mainline vs. a fork.
The project home page (number one hit on a google seach for SpamAssassin) has a link to a list of commercial support solutions written with a large font at the top of the page.
This add is likely to generate a lot of spin-off publicity, simply because the concept is new. So it will (hopefully) be good value for the money.
However, any additional ads will not generate the same spin-off, so they will only have the direct effect of the add. And there is no way Firefox can compete MSIE on a dolar for dolar marketing campaign.
It is often better to be an expert in one tool, than to be a jack-of-all-trades.
Yes, it means that there are jobs you will have to say no to, because they are not within your particular expertice. But for the jobs that lies within your field of expertise, you will be the best.
Both specialists and generalists are needed, which one you choose to be should depend on where your talents lie: In getting a broad overview, or in diving deep into a particular aspect.
Nerds tend to be specialists.
Those "scientists" believe in this "global warming" humbug have conspired to keep all the true scientists out of their journals!
This is just like the conspiracy to keep the shame of the evolution theory alive, as well as the fake moonlanding, and the lie that our world is not flat!
The current software patents in EU has been granted illegally by the EPO. It is this illegal practise that the EPO (and the commision) is desperately trying to legalize.
That companies have invested millions in an illegal practize is not reason to legalize it.
> Software patents are even more important than
> patents in other fields, due to the ease with which
> software techniques can be duplicated. Patents are
> absolutely necessary to protect small companies
> from having their ideas taken without any credit or
> compensation to the original source.
First, you misunderstood the purpose of patents. It isn't to help inventors make money or get credit, but to promote the progress of technology. So if you want to defend software patents, you should come up with examples of software technology that would not have been developed without the incensitive of a time limited monopoly on the technology.
The fact that software technology is easy to recreate from scratch is an argument for keeping the field free of patents. Unlike, e.g. medicine, where the necessary investments are huge.
Second, the "big bad" vs "small good" red herring is always stupid, but the facts in this case is also the other way. Software is very interconnected, so if you allow patents big companies with a large patent portfolie will be able to keep small companies out of the market. A small company with a product will not be able to use patents against big companies, as they will themselves violate several of the big companies patents. The only small companies who can make use of it are litigation companies with no product of their own.
> So yeah, they'll make tons of noise about being against sw patents, and then silently pass it into law.
Actually, we *won* this one. The European Parliament changed the wording of the patent law, so it actually said what its proponents in the original form claimed (and still claims) it said.
Unfortunately, EU is not a democracy, and the unelected commision managed to trick the council into adopting a "compromise" during a late night meeting where there were no way for grassroots to give any input to the politicians. The transcripts of the meeting were horrifying, with the chairman pressuring the Danish member into voting, even though the Danish member clearly requested more information about what he was voting for.
Luckily, the Polish member who was also fooled has withdrawn his support, which mean we can actually still win this one. A lot of politicians are royaly pissed over how the commision and the epo has manipulated them.
He has, by the example of his competent leadership, demonstrated that important business software can be developed under a free software license.
This has influenced the industry so that 1) it is much more likely to rely on free software (Linux and other), and 2) it is much more likely comtribute to, and to release software of its own under a free software license.
The only people I know who have an Apple computer at home, also use Apple at work. I strongly suspect that is the general trend.
For home, most people choose 1) what they have at work, or 2) something capable of web and email, or 3) something to play games on. For 2, everything works, but a PC is cheapest. For 3, PC has the games and game hardware first.
Well, formally they do. But "the lone coder" will almost always do consulting-type work for small businesses, and you will be under the radar for most IP holders. You can violate patents and trade secrets as you wish, and you can violate copyrights and even trademarks as long as you are not to blatant about it.
Of course, if you want to make shrink-wrap software the software is different because you need to advertise it widely. But I think the room for lone coder shrink-wrap software is very small anyway.
Go for the one-product, one customer market instead. That is where the jobs are.
The point was that the person I replied to took "Wikipedia will only approach the truth" as a point against Wikipedia, because then it will never be "the Truth" (with capital T even).
/., that you either have to be for or against something, and if you are for you can only argue its good points and deny its bad points, and vice-versa. This could come from the same autoritarian tradition, where there is a single Truth which is propagaded from God to the masses through proper channals. And thus, an issue can either be on the side of Truth and be all god, or else it will be on the side of Falsehood and be all bad.
That is a point *for* Wikipedia, at least for me, and my arguments were relevant for explaining why.
Of course a high ratio of factual errors, as well as poor writting, are points *against* Wikipedia. But all also irrelevant for the point I was making.
Actually, it may be relevant. There is a strong tendency in US media, including
I don't see it that way, both collborative works like Wikipedia and authoritarian works like Britannica has there strong and weak points, and both are useful when navigating in this world.
Which was the point I made. Go to a priest for the Truth. Those of us who will no go that road will have to do with less, namely models that are useful.
Wikipedia, when it is at its best, is similar. It will never reach the Truth, however, as people contribute to it, it will hopefully approach it. Information that is not useful (because it conflicts too grossly with other "models of the Truth" out there) will be removed, and information that is useful (help the users) will be added.
The Britannica author comes from another tradition. A tradition where Truth is based on authority rather than consensus. The ultimate Truth is God, and is expressed through the hierarchy of the Church down to the common churchgoer. Lately, the Church has been supplemented by Science. This gives the common layman view of Science as a Truth, competing or supplementing the Church. Scientists, of course, know that is not so, but the whole dissemination system (schools) has not been updated yet. It uses the old Church based mechanisms. When scientists teach, they try to teach pupils to think. They don't just pass knowledge given from above.
Much of the Britannica authors ruminations about the degeneration of modern society stems from the same source. Focus is shifting towards the process, and old barriers are removed. Teaching methods is (slowly) catching up. The world is changing, and the best you can teach your pupils is how to adapt to the change. He does not understand that. What was once the Truth, will always be the Truth. That is the nature of Truth. He complains that Wikipedia does not consider the reader, only the authors. This is because the Wikipedians don't use the same model of the world he does. There are no separation between authors and readers, both are users and contributors to the system. The Truth may stay the same, but how we see it will change. It has always changed, but it changes faster now. Being able to change with it is a competitive advantage.
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Try to get away from the "here is always a catch".
Google believe they have a superior product, offering pop3 support will lure new users in, and eventually they will make the switch.
Even if they *don't* make the switch for reading new mail, they will for reading old mail. GMail store a copy of all your mail. It will not delete the mail you retrieve from teh server, just mark it as read (moving it from "inbox" to "all mail"). So when you can't remember where you put a mail with your local client, you will go to gmail and find it with google's search technology. Which will be faster. Just like it today in all cases I have tried has been faster to find information about a product I have bought by asking google, than by looking in the help files and other online documentation provided by the vendor.
If two students, who are writting an irc client in order to improve their programming skills, deside to use sourceforge as a repository (so they both can work on it) and put it under an free software license "just in case", they are part of "most" free software projects.
But they are also utterly irrelevant to any business case. The only software projects that are relevant to business is that which has achieved a code base that is mature enough to be used. That includes basis software like Linux and FreeBSD, server software like Apache and SAMBA, desktop software like OpenOffice and Firefox, developer tools like the GNU chain, Perl, Python and PHP, and and databases like MySQL and Postgres.
What is relevant is whether you can find expertise for *those* projects (and products), not whether you can find expertise for some random hobbyist project on sourceforge.
Measured in number of projects, the random hobbyist and studenst dominate. Measured in number of users, it is a much more limited number of projects that dominate, and it is primarily those projects that a busniness case should be build on.
The idea of "standards" are foreign to most web designers, even those that really ought to know better (/.).
Instead, they will make two versions of the page, one for IE and one for Mozilla/Firefox, and tell everyone else to "upgrade". Just like they did when Netscape and IE both had significant marketshare.
PS: The Firefox version will of course be so outdated and broken, that you get better results by pretenting to be IE and let FireFox "bug compatibility" handle it.
> Stupid Germans and French.
And Spaniards, and Italians, and Scandinavians, and...
Oxygen is an explosive gas...
Actually, the idea is to combine oxygen with hydrocarbons and use the surplus energy. In our atmosphere (with plenty of oxygen), you bring the hydrocarbons. On titan (apparently with plenty of hydrocarbons), you would bring the oxygen. Same result.
thus, it is a more international choice.
Also, at this step, you probably want the "more informed and better educated" readership, they are more likely to be semi-early adopters of a "new" product.