My undergrad college rolled out a Peoplesoft based system with (IIRC) the objective of avoiding having to deal with fixing the old mainframe based setup. After a very large amount of money (which included fixing the old system anyway since the new system wasn't ready in time) we got a new system that (at least from the student side) was less attractive than the old one. I don't know all that much about the admin/teaching sides of things, but from what I saw Postgresql + PHP + better initial design considerations + a few good coders would have done wonders for a fraction of the $$. At that time we also had wind of other schools having similar trouble with Peoplesoft.
Perhaps the system got better over time, but I can't help wondering why Peoplesoft is so dominant in such situations - do people have better experiences with them they can report? My experience with it was admittedly very light (in the form of rather useless and highly non-intuitive grade reports) but if that was a sample of their standard work quality the market should be begging for competition.
While it is refreshing to see an outburst of sanity from the Supreme Court, remember that Congress can proceed to pass new laws (a point made by the blogger.)
If the commercial interests in the patent system in its current form are able to purchase enough political influence, Congress may take the steps needed to make software and friends explicitly patentable under the law.
The only answer to something like that would be to vote in people who would change the law back to something sane. Will it happen? Who knows. It doesn't seem too terribly fantastic given the current system...
I don't suppose the engineering geeks among us will now get to see and search through online the complete Mercury, Gemini, Saturn V, etc. blueprints hidden away in physical archives? I expect that sort of material doesn't qualify for what they're doing now but it would be really nice to have that information preserved electronically and publicly. Especially the Saturn V - that's probably as close as modern civilization will ever get to something like pyramid building. Right now, if the records are still in reasonable condition, we could preserve the details for posterity. While we're at it, I don't suppose the Russian government still has the blueprints for the N-1 lying around?
How about a nerd project to take the BRL-CAD system, and try re-creating a Saturn V in it from blueprints?:-). If we can't go to the moon for real at least we can try simulating it.
ITAR could be a real problem for a LOT of activity if they chose to chase after people.
If you read the COPYING file in the Maxima computer algebra program, you will see the following paragraph:
"Distribution of such derivative works is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (Title 15 CFR 768-799), which implements the Export Administration Act of 1979, as amended, and/or the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, of 12-6-84, (Title 22 CFR 121-130), which implements the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2728) and may require license for export."
It is included in the file at the request of the folks who gave the original distributor permission. Can anybody explain why a COMPUTER ALGEBRA PROGRAM would constitute something worth putting under ITAR? When did math become classified? (IIRC, Mathematica has similar restrictions. Maple is based in Canada - does that mean Maple is a security threat because it's a CAS not under US control?)
I have a feeling a rather impressive array of open source software tools COULD fall under this control, if someone wanted to be sufficiently nit-picky about it - after all a CAS apparently does. Never mind all the technology being sent overseas to get short term cost gains, for example. (It would be rather entertaining to see if they would try to put ITAR restrictions on programs written overseas but widely available here - "distributed authorship" might blow a few fuses.)
People overseas are just as smart as we are (hell we're educating the best of them in universities right here!) and will figure out anything we can given time. The wars being fought today aren't about short term technology advantages, and the benefits of wide technological literacy far outweigh any temporary slowdowns the "bad people" would have getting ahold of whatever they need.
Maybe they should ban all "smart people" from ever leaving the US, like the USSR tried to do with their high profile brains? Get a Phd, get assigned an "information security manager" you have to report to? If you show signs of being too "smart" you are forced to register so the powers that be can keep an eye on you? I don't know how else you prevent the spread of these ideas. Do you scan every CD leaving the country to make sure it doesn't contain a copy of Mathematica? How do you control information in a digital age?
As near as I can tell, this is GPLv2 ONLY (without the "or any later version" clause). Checking a random source file in the distribution, there is no "later version" language present.
This doesn't surprise me much, actually - I imaging Intel wouldn't want to commit their code to an unknown future license, and I expect they're still evaluating GPLv3. Even if they were done with that evaluation, the process for releasing this under v2 probably took a LONG time to complete - Intel is after all a large corporation. Restarting with GPLv3 probably would have just delayed it, although I suppose the only ones who would actually know that work for Intel.
Actually, it's not so much that they are pointless - just that they are useless. There is a point to knowing how many Linux boxes are out there (demographic studies, confidence in support longevity as a function of install base, etc.) But most known techniques for counting remain useless.
To be honest, this might be just as well. Any technology that COULD count successfully all the Linux boxes out there would be a bit scary - many people probably don't WANT anyone to be able to know what they are running. (OK so nmap can probably figure out anyway...)
Large scale counts like this are a difficult proposition - the only things that approaches being successful in this respect are probably automobile registration systems, census systems, and the tax system - in other words, massive systems with compulsary reporting for every existing component member.
Now, of more interest might be to work with the BSA for a while (or someone else who has the authority to open random IT doors at random) and do an anonymous study of deployment percentages at random under guise of a random license check or soemthing. Probably (hopefully!) not legal but it would be a way to get statistically meaningful results if the sample was chosen well.
Not as a whole, true. But Solaris doesn't NEED the whole kernel - they just need some key parts they don't have. Drivers are an obvious one, and the usual list of ZFS and dtrace - I wonder what dtrace would be able to do as far as improving drivers imported from the Linux kernel. There are probably other parts, but I'm not up on the details enough to know what they would be - anybody have a list?
Of course, incorporating any of Linux into Solaris would probably mean instrumenting it and/or other non-trivial work, but I'm guessing it would still be easier than working from scratch.
Now the interesting part - will this license prove to be one Sun feels they can use for OpenSolaris?
If so, and the copyright holders for the parts of the Linux kernel of use to Sun are willing to license their code under GPLv3 as well, we may begin to see some major impacts on the open source OS landscape.
If someone exploits a bug or flaw in a program's design (and just how does one define that in a precise enough fasion for a patent, anyway), I should think the most obvious thing in the world would be to fix the bug/flaw. HOW one fixes it is going to vary widely, from "opps that should have been +1 not -1" to "some guy at *UNIVERSITY* just found a new algorithm that cracks our protection, back to the drawing boards". A lot of fixes should fail instantly on the obviousness criteria - the attack itself often suggests a solution to one skilled in the art. I would hope such approaches would fail for other reasons, but I'm not an expert in patent law.
On the other hand, this behavior is so egregiously anti-social that even if it is currently legal it might actually prompt a response from lawmakers. (One plus to all this might be that research funding into security techniques and formal development methods might see a boost - attempt to influct death by starvation, so to speak.)
Re:~$ mv CommitAccess MergePrivileges
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Linus on GIT and SCM
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I tend to agree - what becomes the "official" code (i.e. what would go into a release tarball) is a social problem without technical solution. A coordinated release requires AGREEMENT, however that agreement is arrived at.
What GIT does differently, as I understand it, is it makes flipping around branches much easier than before. CVS and SVN have the concept of a central server, so if two developers are trying to resolve differences in their branches before either can get their changes into the main tree they have to work outside svn/cvs to communicate those changes to each other. With GIT, both developers can set up their individual archives and pull from each other, without ever involving the main tree. In other words, the benefits of version control and branch control are available between any two individuals with repositories, without relying on the main branch.
GIT also makes it trivially easy for everyone to switch away from the "official" branch to someone else's as the standard, but that begs the question of resolving differences WITHIN the project.
GIT is a neat tool, and I think it has a lot of potential. But like every other technological solution, it does not and cannot resolve fundamentally social issues.
But don't the anti-patent provisions in GPLv3 only prevent war WITHIN the open source community? In effect, they will stop the Trojan Horse of patented open source code being used to extort money.
What they DON'T stop is someone without ties to GPLv3 code taking patents and launching an attack. I always thought that IF such an attack would come (at least on a large scale), it would be far more likely to come from someone like Microsoft who would be untouched by any GPLv3 conditions. Small scale bullying might (and in some cases apparently has already) take place, but a large scale "destroy the free software ecosystem" attack I always thought was more likely from someone who had no financial incentive to see free software exist. After all, even patent trolls need someone to attack, and if they kill the free software world there will be nothing left for them to prey on except people who can afford lawyers to fight back. Admittedly they would survive, but I doubt they would be institutionally committed to the destruction of free software.
I admit it might make a repeat of the SCO fiasco with patent claims instead of contract and copyright laws somewhat less likely, and that's beyond question a good thing, but it doesn't reduce the large scale threat in any important way I can see. It's still a patent version of the MAD directive that's holding things in check, and (like the real Cold War) if anyone starts shooting the whole works (commercial AND open source) could go down the drain (in the US at least, and I am regrettably certain at least a few large corporate interests and US lawmakers will do their best to make the consequences felt elsewhere, if only to avoid competition getting an edge by not having to fork over for lawyers to fight patent issues.
What we REALLY need is software patent DISARMAMENT. Reform. What have you. I don't doubt ingenious folk in the commercial world will look for some other way to achieve the same end (as some insightful person said - "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing") but at least this particular gambit will be over.
The ideal case from our side would be to have protection for software that is given away at no cost (with source code) to the benefit of society. Of course the whole "limited monopoly to promote innovation that is publicly disclosed" bit would need to be debated, but at least we would be HAVING the debate. Software patents are just a manifestation of one view of how society should function. There are other views, and I would much prefer to see the debate take place on a societal level in a serious way than to drain the industry's resources fighting legal skirmishes. Life is too short for that, and there's too much code to write.
If they don't want to fight it out with NeoOffice (no idea how hard that would be, I haven't used it) why not just work with AppleWorks? I assume Apple would be reasonable, since they are not the 800lb gorilla - and they have to know getting it used in Education could only help them. (Plus, they would want to keep the Macs there as well, and I'm sure someone will eventually suggest converting to all Windows PCs as a cost savings and getting Office everywhere...)
I mean, this IS education we're talking about here. Their needs should be fairly basic - if not I would be suspicious of their teaching methods. If it were up to me I would build plans on AppleWorks but also introduce students to NeoOffice. Using both would force them to develop flexibility and the ability to learn new software. It is something they will need to do for the rest of their lives.
Definitely seconded, although the focus of those projects is not symbolic computation per-say. Both R and Octave are very good tools - R is an industrial strength statistical environment (it probably has the most active user base of any of these projects - certainly its contributed materials are formidable) and Octave tends more toward numerical computation.
Open source systems are out there, too
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Mathematica 6 Launched
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· Score: 4, Informative
While you're checking out Mathematica, consider taking a look at the major open source computer algebra projects:
Axiom: http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/ (formerly known as Scratchpad) was developed at IBM as a commercial system, sold to NAG, and released a few years ago as an open source program.
and
Maxima: http://maxima.sf.net/ (descended from the pre-commercial Macsyma codebase) was maintained by William Schelter for many years and he obtained permission to release it as open source. Sadly, he passed away a few years later but the Maxima project has grown and now has many active contributors.
They won't have the glitzy graphics or army of specialized packages Mathematica boasts, but they also don't cost $1500 and (theoretically) can be audited for correctness all the way down to their foundations. I regard the latter as very important for people trying to do scientific research with computer algebra tools, and what's more no commercial company is required for their survival (the story of Macsyma is a very good object lesson.)
Maxima is the more "engineering" oriented of the two systems and will probably make more sense to Mathematica inclined users - it can use gnuplot, run on Windows and has a decent GUI called wxMaxima: http://wxmaxima.sf.net./ Axiom is more oriented towards being "strong" mathematically - it takes more getting used to and has very ambitious goals for long term mathematical research. It is attempting to become a literate program in the tradition of Knuth's TeX system. It doesn't currently have the interfaces to familiar tools the way Maxima does.
Both systems are already very powerful and while there are many bugs to work out progress is being made. If you're shopping around for a CAS and are interested in open source systems, I highly recommend checking them out.
(Bias disclosure - I have been a (minor) member of the Maxima project and am currently interested in/doing a little work on/with Axiom, in case the URL in my info doesn't give it away.)
If you think about it, one of the most significant difficulties with building nuclear power plants is the "not in my backyard" problem. This could move the problem onto the oceans, perhaps the safest place for it. (This doesn't address the "any nuke is a bad nuke" arguments, but those are likely to prove impractical in a power hungry world in the long run...)
Benefits:
1) No immediate population centers. This gives any fallout time to disperse in case of a major failure. 2) Portability. Aside from the commercial advantages (shift reactors to high demand areas, no building costs for new locations/shutdown and cleanup costs for areas suddenly with low demand, etc) things like this could be moved off the coasts of disaster regions to provide major power to devastated areas quickly. 3) If they build it to be submersible, they can simply ride out any storm below the wave level. This means a lot of the extreme construction required for fixed-target plant defenses (storm and hostile) becomes less critical.
Risks:
1) Reliability engineering may prove a challenge for large scale plants. This is unknown at present, and I didn't see enough information handy as to studies done on the designs. You need to simulate the heck out of these things, and design failsafe (I wonder if it could be made provably failsafe...)
2) If a large amount of radioactive material gets dumped accidentally into a major ocean current (I should think this an unlikely failure mode with correct designs, but just suppose...), I'm not sure about the effects - better or worse than venting into the atmosphere? Will it simply sink and stay in one area, eventually recoverable?
Using truly modern designs, I am willing to believe the risk of major disaster can be made very small. (It seems like the human element was the least accounted for in older designs, so including that in the designs this time around should help...) This is a very interesting idea, and I think it deserves a detailed study to ascertain its risks, benefits, and whether it is practical with current technology.
In Back to School, Vonnegut was hired to write a report for a class about one of his own books. The results of that report being graded were a failing grade and the remark "whoever wrote that didn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut."
To my way of thinking that was probably the funniest bit of the movie (my own experiences in English classes in high school made me wonder essentially the same thing - did the author ACTUALLY mean any of this?), and I have always wondered who's idea it originally was to do that bit.
Cost is the direct driver for most businesses, because it always yields a short term benefit. Most companies do not have either the resources, interest, or patience to work for long term benefits.
That said, I would think R&D would be the LAST thing we would want to outsource, simply because if we do that the next generation of companies will develop not in the US but everywhere else. We cannot become a nation of businessmen/women and lawyers, because the world will quickly wake up to the fact that they already have all the smarts and physical resources to make whatever they need and can provide their own businessfolk and legal team. If the US makes too much trouble, we can be safely ignored because we won't be producing anything any more except hot air.
When it comes down to bare knuckles, US labor costs too much. Period. We don't have some "magical" quality that makes us better, we just happen to have a large number of well educated people in the US at the moment. The rest of the world can also be educated, and for cheaper than it costs to hire US labor. Businesses are finding that out - train the folks overseas, and guess what - they can do it too! Today, that lines the pocketbooks of those with control of the companies. What they aren't thinking about or don't care about is that tomorrow those folks will be making their own companies and coming right back at us, and we will no longer have the technological chops to keep up because the only money to be had in the US was by going into business or law.
Hopefully, we will retain our education and knowledge edge. We need to keep investing in education and keep ahead of the pack, however - the game is getting rougher and it will mean either a lower standard of living or harder work for us. There is no magic here, and in the end all competitive edges not based on natural resource advantage are short term.
Rail done correctly is by far a better solution for high density traffic than automobiles. No parking problems, accidents, traffic conjestion, or road rage to worry about. No endless stream of internal combustion engines with associated CO2 emissions and other nastyness.
The major problem is being crammed in with a lot of other people, some of whom may not be at all polite or tolerable. Security on such trains needs to be well maintained, and probably different cars with a people density/cost tradeoff. The Dallas light rail system (DART) which opened up a few years ago started on a good note - the major problem was too many people wanting to ride it from too far out. In theory, this might be handled with running more lines in parallel as the rail system gets closer to the center of the city - it's an interesting problem. (Of course, the expense of putting a rail system through a city not designed to accomidate it is non-trivial...)
Regardless, I think the more efficient resource utilization of trains makes them a no-brainer for long term development. The US is lamentably far behind - Amtrack is stuck playing second fiddle to freight trains and has abysmal performance (I'm probably biased as I was once 17 hours late on a train...). Freight rail and passenger rail need different tracks and independent scheduling - freight can move more slowly over rougher tracks, but passenger rail needs to be rapid.
I have always wondered if a properly designed and implemented rail system across the US would be cheaper than air travel (and not all THAT much slower, for bullet trains, particularly given delays airports can introduce...) I guess it's the old bootstrap problem - no money to lay down tracks because there is no guarantee of return on investment, while air travel already has massive inertia behind it and a lot of financial clout to use on the political system.
I hope someday we can muster the political will to build a rail infrastructure the way we have built a highway infrastructure, because there may well come a time when raw materials are too expensive to make building massive car fleets and replacing them every few years economically viable. It would be nice to have a fast, inexpensive way to travel that is actually able to provide reliability.
Solar powered cars are not practical as a general solution to personal conveyance, the energy density offered by sunlight is simply insufficient to power a car capable of practical day to day activities, even under the best conditions. And cars are seldom driver under the best conditions.
Cars are a problem because they require extremely high energy per volume storage at low weight and low cost. In the long run the better bet is to structure society around rail and other forms of transportation that are not so difficult to optimize. Japan is a good example of what is possible with mass transportation systems, and I doubt even there they are close the practical limits.
Most of the motivation for cars is the legacy of cities designed for horse and buggy or foot traffic. Starting from scratch, it should be possible to logically design a city structure that concentrates high traffic commercial sites near major arteries of traffic flow and branches out in a fractal-like system from there. Of course, starting from scratch with cities is not economical, but if a plan is put in place to gradually build up the system as older structures decay (or, in some cases, where a small city with up-and-coming economic fortunes can look ahead) surely we can think in terms of large scale long term scalable viability.
but my question is this - if the company is using the students' work for commercial gain, and the work is submitted involuntarily (below a certain grade level the student doesn't get to refuse, after all - they have to turn it in for the grade and they are compelled to attend by law) mightn't this run into child labor law concerns? In effect, the kids writing the papers are providing work with demonstrable commercial value to the company. And not by choice, either.
While Linus Torvalds is not the sole copyright holder of the Linux kernel, it cannot be denied that an "official" project to shift the kernel from GPLv2 to GPLv3 would open up some interesting possibilities.
One immediate question I would have is whether he would leave in the "or any later version" clause this time or remove it again. If he does that we might have to go through this whole mess again in another 15 years, but maybe that's the idea.
Linux as GPL3 only becomes of true importance if OpenSolaris also becomes GPL3. If that is the case, there could be an immediate and dramatic improvement seen in both projects as the code starts to flow both ways. OpenSolaris could start to take advantage of the driver code in Linux (or at least, use it to make the code Solaris would need) and Linux could start working on goodies like Dtrace support. Mutually beneficial, and everyone wins.
Of course, there is no reason beyond speculation to think Solaris will use GPL3. The situation is potentially very exciting, but it would require both Solaris and Linux to move from their current license and neither decision will be made lightly.
Slashdot Mirror
My undergrad college rolled out a Peoplesoft based system with (IIRC) the objective of avoiding having to deal with fixing the old mainframe based setup. After a very large amount of money (which included fixing the old system anyway since the new system wasn't ready in time) we got a new system that (at least from the student side) was less attractive than the old one. I don't know all that much about the admin/teaching sides of things, but from what I saw Postgresql + PHP + better initial design considerations + a few good coders would have done wonders for a fraction of the $$. At that time we also had wind of other schools having similar trouble with Peoplesoft.
Perhaps the system got better over time, but I can't help wondering why Peoplesoft is so dominant in such situations - do people have better experiences with them they can report? My experience with it was admittedly very light (in the form of rather useless and highly non-intuitive grade reports) but if that was a sample of their standard work quality the market should be begging for competition.
While it is refreshing to see an outburst of sanity from the Supreme Court, remember that Congress can proceed to pass new laws (a point made by the blogger.)
If the commercial interests in the patent system in its current form are able to purchase enough political influence, Congress may take the steps needed to make software and friends explicitly patentable under the law.
The only answer to something like that would be to vote in people who would change the law back to something sane. Will it happen? Who knows. It doesn't seem too terribly fantastic given the current system...
For those who want more meat, these look like places to start:
7 85/
n 72/
Pier Luigi Luisi, Francesca Ferri and Pasquale Stano Approaches to semi-synthetic minimal cells: a review
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y218jk71n1k40
Giovanni Murtas Question 7: Construction of a Semi-Synthetic Minimal Cell: A Model for Early Living Cells
http://www.springerlink.com/content/9p404l8247968
I guess my next graphics card will be an ATI, unless the opengraphics project comes up with something first.
I don't suppose the engineering geeks among us will now get to see and search through online the complete Mercury, Gemini, Saturn V, etc. blueprints hidden away in physical archives? I expect that sort of material doesn't qualify for what they're doing now but it would be really nice to have that information preserved electronically and publicly. Especially the Saturn V - that's probably as close as modern civilization will ever get to something like pyramid building. Right now, if the records are still in reasonable condition, we could preserve the details for posterity. While we're at it, I don't suppose the Russian government still has the blueprints for the N-1 lying around?
:-). If we can't go to the moon for real at least we can try simulating it.
How about a nerd project to take the BRL-CAD system, and try re-creating a Saturn V in it from blueprints?
The original guy with the website issue has posted an update:
b rowse_thread/thread/a607576dfe803de0/265b512758989 6cf?hl=en#265b5127589896cf
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.space.history/
ITAR could be a real problem for a LOT of activity if they chose to chase after people.
If you read the COPYING file in the Maxima computer algebra program, you will see the following paragraph:
"Distribution of such derivative works is subject to the U.S. Export
Administration Regulations (Title 15 CFR 768-799), which implements the
Export Administration Act of 1979, as amended, and/or the International
Traffic in Arms Regulations, of 12-6-84, (Title 22 CFR 121-130), which
implements the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2728) and may require
license for export."
It is included in the file at the request of the folks who gave the original distributor permission. Can anybody explain why a COMPUTER ALGEBRA PROGRAM would constitute something worth putting under ITAR? When did math become classified? (IIRC, Mathematica has similar restrictions. Maple is based in Canada - does that mean Maple is a security threat because it's a CAS not under US control?)
I have a feeling a rather impressive array of open source software tools COULD fall under this control, if someone wanted to be sufficiently nit-picky about it - after all a CAS apparently does. Never mind all the technology being sent overseas to get short term cost gains, for example. (It would be rather entertaining to see if they would try to put ITAR restrictions on programs written overseas but widely available here - "distributed authorship" might blow a few fuses.)
People overseas are just as smart as we are (hell we're educating the best of them in universities right here!) and will figure out anything we can given time. The wars being fought today aren't about short term technology advantages, and the benefits of wide technological literacy far outweigh any temporary slowdowns the "bad people" would have getting ahold of whatever they need.
Maybe they should ban all "smart people" from ever leaving the US, like the USSR tried to do with their high profile brains? Get a Phd, get assigned an "information security manager" you have to report to? If you show signs of being too "smart" you are forced to register so the powers that be can keep an eye on you? I don't know how else you prevent the spread of these ideas. Do you scan every CD leaving the country to make sure it doesn't contain a copy of Mathematica? How do you control information in a digital age?
As near as I can tell, this is GPLv2 ONLY (without the "or any later version" clause). Checking a random source file in the distribution, there is no "later version" language present.
This doesn't surprise me much, actually - I imaging Intel wouldn't want to commit their code to an unknown future license, and I expect they're still evaluating GPLv3. Even if they were done with that evaluation, the process for releasing this under v2 probably took a LONG time to complete - Intel is after all a large corporation. Restarting with GPLv3 probably would have just delayed it, although I suppose the only ones who would actually know that work for Intel.
That's a good way to start a Monday :-).
Actually, it's not so much that they are pointless - just that they are useless. There is a point to knowing how many Linux boxes are out there (demographic studies, confidence in support longevity as a function of install base, etc.) But most known techniques for counting remain useless.
To be honest, this might be just as well. Any technology that COULD count successfully all the Linux boxes out there would be a bit scary - many people probably don't WANT anyone to be able to know what they are running. (OK so nmap can probably figure out anyway...)
Large scale counts like this are a difficult proposition - the only things that approaches being successful in this respect are probably automobile registration systems, census systems, and the tax system - in other words, massive systems with compulsary reporting for every existing component member.
Now, of more interest might be to work with the BSA for a while (or someone else who has the authority to open random IT doors at random) and do an anonymous study of deployment percentages at random under guise of a random license check or soemthing. Probably (hopefully!) not legal but it would be a way to get statistically meaningful results if the sample was chosen well.
Not as a whole, true. But Solaris doesn't NEED the whole kernel - they just need some key parts they don't have. Drivers are an obvious one, and the usual list of ZFS and dtrace - I wonder what dtrace would be able to do as far as improving drivers imported from the Linux kernel. There are probably other parts, but I'm not up on the details enough to know what they would be - anybody have a list?
Of course, incorporating any of Linux into Solaris would probably mean instrumenting it and/or other non-trivial work, but I'm guessing it would still be easier than working from scratch.
Now the interesting part - will this license prove to be one Sun feels they can use for OpenSolaris?
If so, and the copyright holders for the parts of the Linux kernel of use to Sun are willing to license their code under GPLv3 as well, we may begin to see some major impacts on the open source OS landscape.
Fingers crossed.
If someone exploits a bug or flaw in a program's design (and just how does one define that in a precise enough fasion for a patent, anyway), I should think the most obvious thing in the world would be to fix the bug/flaw. HOW one fixes it is going to vary widely, from "opps that should have been +1 not -1" to "some guy at *UNIVERSITY* just found a new algorithm that cracks our protection, back to the drawing boards". A lot of fixes should fail instantly on the obviousness criteria - the attack itself often suggests a solution to one skilled in the art. I would hope such approaches would fail for other reasons, but I'm not an expert in patent law.
On the other hand, this behavior is so egregiously anti-social that even if it is currently legal it might actually prompt a response from lawmakers. (One plus to all this might be that research funding into security techniques and formal development methods might see a boost - attempt to influct death by starvation, so to speak.)
I tend to agree - what becomes the "official" code (i.e. what would go into a release tarball) is a social problem without technical solution. A coordinated release requires AGREEMENT, however that agreement is arrived at.
What GIT does differently, as I understand it, is it makes flipping around branches much easier than before. CVS and SVN have the concept of a central server, so if two developers are trying to resolve differences in their branches before either can get their changes into the main tree they have to work outside svn/cvs to communicate those changes to each other. With GIT, both developers can set up their individual archives and pull from each other, without ever involving the main tree. In other words, the benefits of version control and branch control are available between any two individuals with repositories, without relying on the main branch.
GIT also makes it trivially easy for everyone to switch away from the "official" branch to someone else's as the standard, but that begs the question of resolving differences WITHIN the project.
GIT is a neat tool, and I think it has a lot of potential. But like every other technological solution, it does not and cannot resolve fundamentally social issues.
But don't the anti-patent provisions in GPLv3 only prevent war WITHIN the open source community? In effect, they will stop the Trojan Horse of patented open source code being used to extort money.
What they DON'T stop is someone without ties to GPLv3 code taking patents and launching an attack. I always thought that IF such an attack would come (at least on a large scale), it would be far more likely to come from someone like Microsoft who would be untouched by any GPLv3 conditions. Small scale bullying might (and in some cases apparently has already) take place, but a large scale "destroy the free software ecosystem" attack I always thought was more likely from someone who had no financial incentive to see free software exist. After all, even patent trolls need someone to attack, and if they kill the free software world there will be nothing left for them to prey on except people who can afford lawyers to fight back. Admittedly they would survive, but I doubt they would be institutionally committed to the destruction of free software.
I admit it might make a repeat of the SCO fiasco with patent claims instead of contract and copyright laws somewhat less likely, and that's beyond question a good thing, but it doesn't reduce the large scale threat in any important way I can see. It's still a patent version of the MAD directive that's holding things in check, and (like the real Cold War) if anyone starts shooting the whole works (commercial AND open source) could go down the drain (in the US at least, and I am regrettably certain at least a few large corporate interests and US lawmakers will do their best to make the consequences felt elsewhere, if only to avoid competition getting an edge by not having to fork over for lawyers to fight patent issues.
What we REALLY need is software patent DISARMAMENT. Reform. What have you. I don't doubt ingenious folk in the commercial world will look for some other way to achieve the same end (as some insightful person said - "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing") but at least this particular gambit will be over.
The ideal case from our side would be to have protection for software that is given away at no cost (with source code) to the benefit of society. Of course the whole "limited monopoly to promote innovation that is publicly disclosed" bit would need to be debated, but at least we would be HAVING the debate. Software patents are just a manifestation of one view of how society should function. There are other views, and I would much prefer to see the debate take place on a societal level in a serious way than to drain the industry's resources fighting legal skirmishes. Life is too short for that, and there's too much code to write.
If they don't want to fight it out with NeoOffice (no idea how hard that would be, I haven't used it) why not just work with AppleWorks? I assume Apple would be reasonable, since they are not the 800lb gorilla - and they have to know getting it used in Education could only help them. (Plus, they would want to keep the Macs there as well, and I'm sure someone will eventually suggest converting to all Windows PCs as a cost savings and getting Office everywhere...)
I mean, this IS education we're talking about here. Their needs should be fairly basic - if not I would be suspicious of their teaching methods. If it were up to me I would build plans on AppleWorks but also introduce students to NeoOffice. Using both would force them to develop flexibility and the ability to learn new software. It is something they will need to do for the rest of their lives.
Definitely seconded, although the focus of those projects is not symbolic computation per-say. Both R and Octave are very good tools - R is an industrial strength statistical environment (it probably has the most active user base of any of these projects - certainly its contributed materials are formidable) and Octave tends more toward numerical computation.
R is located at http://www.r-project.org/
Octave is at http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
While you're checking out Mathematica, consider taking a look at the major open source computer algebra projects:
Axiom: http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/ (formerly known as Scratchpad) was developed at IBM as a commercial system, sold to NAG, and released a few years ago as an open source program.
and
Maxima: http://maxima.sf.net/ (descended from the pre-commercial Macsyma codebase) was maintained by William Schelter for many years and he obtained permission to release it as open source. Sadly, he passed away a few years later but the Maxima project has grown and now has many active contributors.
They won't have the glitzy graphics or army of specialized packages Mathematica boasts, but they also don't cost $1500 and (theoretically) can be audited for correctness all the way down to their foundations. I regard the latter as very important for people trying to do scientific research with computer algebra tools, and what's more no commercial company is required for their survival (the story of Macsyma is a very good object lesson.)
Maxima is the more "engineering" oriented of the two systems and will probably make more sense to Mathematica inclined users - it can use gnuplot, run on Windows and has a decent GUI called wxMaxima: http://wxmaxima.sf.net./ Axiom is more oriented towards being "strong" mathematically - it takes more getting used to and has very ambitious goals for long term mathematical research. It is attempting to become a literate program in the tradition of Knuth's TeX system. It doesn't currently have the interfaces to familiar tools the way Maxima does.
Both systems are already very powerful and while there are many bugs to work out progress is being made. If you're shopping around for a CAS and are interested in open source systems, I highly recommend checking them out.
(Bias disclosure - I have been a (minor) member of the Maxima project and am currently interested in/doing a little work on/with Axiom, in case the URL in my info doesn't give it away.)
If you think about it, one of the most significant difficulties with building nuclear power plants is the "not in my backyard" problem. This could move the problem onto the oceans, perhaps the safest place for it. (This doesn't address the "any nuke is a bad nuke" arguments, but those are likely to prove impractical in a power hungry world in the long run...)
Benefits:
1) No immediate population centers. This gives any fallout time to disperse in case of a major failure.
2) Portability. Aside from the commercial advantages (shift reactors to high demand areas, no building costs for new locations/shutdown and cleanup costs for areas suddenly with low demand, etc) things like this could be moved off the coasts of disaster regions to provide major power to devastated areas quickly.
3) If they build it to be submersible, they can simply ride out any storm below the wave level. This means a lot of the extreme construction required for fixed-target plant defenses (storm and hostile) becomes less critical.
Risks:
1) Reliability engineering may prove a challenge for large scale plants. This is unknown at present, and I didn't see enough information handy as to studies done on the designs. You need to simulate the heck out of these things, and design failsafe (I wonder if it could be made provably failsafe...)
2) If a large amount of radioactive material gets dumped accidentally into a major ocean current (I should think this an unlikely failure mode with correct designs, but just suppose...), I'm not sure about the effects - better or worse than venting into the atmosphere? Will it simply sink and stay in one area, eventually recoverable?
Using truly modern designs, I am willing to believe the risk of major disaster can be made very small. (It seems like the human element was the least accounted for in older designs, so including that in the designs this time around should help...) This is a very interesting idea, and I think it deserves a detailed study to ascertain its risks, benefits, and whether it is practical with current technology.
I have seen Citadel mentioned in the past: http://www.citadel.org/doku.php
I don't know much about it - can anyone comment on whether this could work in place of Exchange?
In Back to School, Vonnegut was hired to write a report for a class about one of his own books. The results of that report being graded were a failing grade and the remark "whoever wrote that didn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut."
To my way of thinking that was probably the funniest bit of the movie (my own experiences in English classes in high school made me wonder essentially the same thing - did the author ACTUALLY mean any of this?), and I have always wondered who's idea it originally was to do that bit.
Cost is the direct driver for most businesses, because it always yields a short term benefit. Most companies do not have either the resources, interest, or patience to work for long term benefits.
That said, I would think R&D would be the LAST thing we would want to outsource, simply because if we do that the next generation of companies will develop not in the US but everywhere else. We cannot become a nation of businessmen/women and lawyers, because the world will quickly wake up to the fact that they already have all the smarts and physical resources to make whatever they need and can provide their own businessfolk and legal team. If the US makes too much trouble, we can be safely ignored because we won't be producing anything any more except hot air.
When it comes down to bare knuckles, US labor costs too much. Period. We don't have some "magical" quality that makes us better, we just happen to have a large number of well educated people in the US at the moment. The rest of the world can also be educated, and for cheaper than it costs to hire US labor. Businesses are finding that out - train the folks overseas, and guess what - they can do it too! Today, that lines the pocketbooks of those with control of the companies. What they aren't thinking about or don't care about is that tomorrow those folks will be making their own companies and coming right back at us, and we will no longer have the technological chops to keep up because the only money to be had in the US was by going into business or law.
Hopefully, we will retain our education and knowledge edge. We need to keep investing in education and keep ahead of the pack, however - the game is getting rougher and it will mean either a lower standard of living or harder work for us. There is no magic here, and in the end all competitive edges not based on natural resource advantage are short term.
Rail done correctly is by far a better solution for high density traffic than automobiles. No parking problems, accidents, traffic conjestion, or road rage to worry about. No endless stream of internal combustion engines with associated CO2 emissions and other nastyness.
The major problem is being crammed in with a lot of other people, some of whom may not be at all polite or tolerable. Security on such trains needs to be well maintained, and probably different cars with a people density/cost tradeoff. The Dallas light rail system (DART) which opened up a few years ago started on a good note - the major problem was too many people wanting to ride it from too far out. In theory, this might be handled with running more lines in parallel as the rail system gets closer to the center of the city - it's an interesting problem. (Of course, the expense of putting a rail system through a city not designed to accomidate it is non-trivial...)
Regardless, I think the more efficient resource utilization of trains makes them a no-brainer for long term development. The US is lamentably far behind - Amtrack is stuck playing second fiddle to freight trains and has abysmal performance (I'm probably biased as I was once 17 hours late on a train...). Freight rail and passenger rail need different tracks and independent scheduling - freight can move more slowly over rougher tracks, but passenger rail needs to be rapid.
I have always wondered if a properly designed and implemented rail system across the US would be cheaper than air travel (and not all THAT much slower, for bullet trains, particularly given delays airports can introduce...) I guess it's the old bootstrap problem - no money to lay down tracks because there is no guarantee of return on investment, while air travel already has massive inertia behind it and a lot of financial clout to use on the political system.
I hope someday we can muster the political will to build a rail infrastructure the way we have built a highway infrastructure, because there may well come a time when raw materials are too expensive to make building massive car fleets and replacing them every few years economically viable. It would be nice to have a fast, inexpensive way to travel that is actually able to provide reliability.
Solar powered cars are not practical as a general solution to personal conveyance, the energy density offered by sunlight is simply insufficient to power a car capable of practical day to day activities, even under the best conditions. And cars are seldom driver under the best conditions.
Cars are a problem because they require extremely high energy per volume storage at low weight and low cost. In the long run the better bet is to structure society around rail and other forms of transportation that are not so difficult to optimize. Japan is a good example of what is possible with mass transportation systems, and I doubt even there they are close the practical limits.
Most of the motivation for cars is the legacy of cities designed for horse and buggy or foot traffic. Starting from scratch, it should be possible to logically design a city structure that concentrates high traffic commercial sites near major arteries of traffic flow and branches out in a fractal-like system from there. Of course, starting from scratch with cities is not economical, but if a plan is put in place to gradually build up the system as older structures decay (or, in some cases, where a small city with up-and-coming economic fortunes can look ahead) surely we can think in terms of large scale long term scalable viability.
but my question is this - if the company is using the students' work for commercial gain, and the work is submitted involuntarily (below a certain grade level the student doesn't get to refuse, after all - they have to turn it in for the grade and they are compelled to attend by law) mightn't this run into child labor law concerns? In effect, the kids writing the papers are providing work with demonstrable commercial value to the company. And not by choice, either.
While Linus Torvalds is not the sole copyright holder of the Linux kernel, it cannot be denied that an "official" project to shift the kernel from GPLv2 to GPLv3 would open up some interesting possibilities.
One immediate question I would have is whether he would leave in the "or any later version" clause this time or remove it again. If he does that we might have to go through this whole mess again in another 15 years, but maybe that's the idea.
Linux as GPL3 only becomes of true importance if OpenSolaris also becomes GPL3. If that is the case, there could be an immediate and dramatic improvement seen in both projects as the code starts to flow both ways. OpenSolaris could start to take advantage of the driver code in Linux (or at least, use it to make the code Solaris would need) and Linux could start working on goodies like Dtrace support. Mutually beneficial, and everyone wins.
Of course, there is no reason beyond speculation to think Solaris will use GPL3. The situation is potentially very exciting, but it would require both Solaris and Linux to move from their current license and neither decision will be made lightly.
Fingers crossed...