i really wonder what is the more arrogant between sending military troups illegaly in a few countries and trying to promote latin-based words in a latin-based continent instead of english words.
I think we need a new version of Godwin's law that applies whenever someone drags the Iraq war into an unrelated conversation.
I think it's perfectly legitimate for a language to have new words for new technologies/items and use words proper to the language rather than import words from other languages. That's what it is to be living language.
Of course, but the question is whether the government should be in the business of controlling and regulating the use of that language, as the French government does. If the French language cannot survive in its current form without artificial government intervention, then its current form is not a "living" language at all - but a nostalgic fiction.
I speak with some experience on this subject having grown up in the South of Ireland where almost all school children are forced to learn the virtually extinct language "Gaelic" from the ages of 4 to 18, spending similar amounts of time on it as they do with Maths or English. The result? Most people hate the language because they resent having it forced down their throats.
Unless they are in a work of Orwellian fiction - governments have no business telling their populations what words they can and cannot use.
It is a shame that by focusing on cell phones they are missing the opportunity to leap-frog the whole 1G, 2G, 3G thing and get straight to where people on the ground are slowly progressing - pervasive WiFi which, combined with VoIP, can subsume all of the functions provided by cell-phones today.
There were at least a half-dozen projects that did various kinds of "swarming" or cooperative downloading of files before BitTorrent.
Very true, probably the best example is Red Swoosh which is already been used by IGN.com in their downloader (and is thus, I suspect, far more widely used than BitTorrent).
I happen to know quite a bit about how R.S works internally and I can say that it is far more sophisticated than BitTorrent. Unfortunately, Red Swoosh isn't Open Source (something that makes BT more useful in the long-run), and I can't really justify that claim without violating a confidence.
Clearly this was inevitable with BitTorrent - it is a centralized technology. Freenet, while not designed for distribution of copyrighted material (any more than BT was), at least it afforts protection to the publishers of that material. Currently, in fact, it is pretty much as easy to use as BT - if not easier. Further, I would argue that Freenet has many benefits over BT as a content distribution platform irrespective of its anonymity benefits (such as its adaptive caching).
This reads to me that they are going after software producers which seek to mislead users about what the software is doing by burying stuff in the small-print (such as what Altnet does when they make their users unwitting participants in their P2P content distribution networks).
The Freenet developers do not and never have had any interest in misleading users about what Freenet is and does.
Of course, I am not trying to defend this bill - it is clearly another example of "rent-a-politician".
Free software has been around for over 20 years in this environment, and there's no reason to suspect it will die in europe under much more sensible patent laws that do allow software patents.
For just one example of how patents have hurt free software in the US, just look at the evolution of gzip, they had to rewrite it several times as each time they discovered that some patent covered the algorithm they were using.
Why would you try to factor a prime number? Think.
What part of "impossible challenge" did you not understand? Think.
Re:Problems with newer versions
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
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· Score: 1
To the best of my recollection, there isn't much else that's not backwards-compatible
To an ISP fearful of bringing his customer's websites down, that kind of assurance is simply useless. He needs a guarantee of backward compability before he is going to upgrade PHP - and the PHP development team simply don't provide anything close.
There are good reasons that ISPs want to use mod_php - and using your proposed solution these benefits are lost.
If there was some way that you could allow the user to have multiple PHP versions all being used as Apache modules where the user could select the one they want using their.htaccess file, that would be a possible solution.
Of course, the real solution is for the PHP development team to take the issue of backward-compatability more seriously then they clearly do at the moment.
Re:Problems with newer versions
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If you're doing a non-trivial php site, and trying to make it work with different versions of php (osCommerce, for example), you end up having to rewrite many functions yourself to make sure they work consistently.
Absolutely, this is exactly the experience I had.
I like PHP, but it suffers from an "incrementalism" design approach. Some stuff really needs to be rethought, and I think PHP 5 is on the right track to doing that.
I hope you are right, but right now I am more concerned about how to deal with differences between different PHP4 versions - it is immensely frustrating to inadvertantly use a function only to discover that it doesn't exist on your new ISPs version of PHP (and of-course they won't upgrade for love nor money lest they upset their other users).
Someone involved in PHP needs to take a cold hard look at this issue and figure out how to tackle it head-on, or they will find that with each new version, people take longer and longer to take advantage of new features which will cause PHP to stagnate.
With Java, at least I know for a fact that some Java 1.1 code will work with Java 1.4 and as a result most ISPs keep their Java versions quite up-to-date.
Until the PHP team treat lack of backward compatability as a bug, this problem will persist.
Re:Problems with newer versions
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
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· Score: 1
There's no problem running different versions of php on the same webserver. We're running php 3 and php 4 here, without any problems.
The issues I encountered were with two different versions of php 4.
Problems with newer versions
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I recently developed a number of sites in PHP and ran into serious problems when it became clear that most hosting providers use older versions of PHP, and are scared to death to upgrade lest they screw things up for their existing users.
The PHP people need to provide ways that people can upgrade the versions of PHP on their system such that they can be reasonably sure that existing users aren't suddenly going to find their sites don't work.
The sweat glistened on his brow as he bravely hammered away at the keyboard - it was a life or death situation, Travolta's character had set the good-looking well-built computer geek an impossible challenge - factorize a large prime number while receiving a blow-job from a beautiful woman, all within sixty seconds...
...nope, I guess if John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, and Halle Berry can't make hacking sound exciting, then a few photos of geeks staring at blackboards are unlikely to make mathematicians the new sex-symbols either.
I think the whole point of the article is that if the justification for sending people into space is some romantic notion of exploration, then that is fine, but don't pretend that it is about scientific research when it isn't.
I felt a great sense of excitment back when pathfinder first started to transmit its pictures back from Mars, I didn't need an anthropomorphic prop like a couple of good-looking astronauts to make me appreciate the moment.
Remember that every penny spent using astronauts as expensive PR tools is a penny that we aren't spending on learning more about space, and is probably pushing the day that people might venture into space for good reasons further into the future.
...that Michael, who is supposed to be fighting against censorship, is squatting on the censorware.org website over a dust-up with the members of the Censorware project?
clarifies the existing patent law across the European Union and makes it clear that only software which forms part of a technological process will be patentable.
Point out that a "technological process" could be stretched to include virtually anything, and that this language will be totally ineffective in preventing patents on trivial software processes.
This will allow patents to be provided for genuine technical inventions and stimulate European economic development in areas of economic strength like mobile telephony, digital television and computer controlled machine tools to name just a few possibilities.
Explain that there have been no economic studies whatsoever which indicate that permitting software patents will stimulate innovation, while almost every analysis of the effects of software patents have concluded that they damage competition and innovation. One good example is the Fraunhofer Institute for Innovation Research study (http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/bmwi-fhgmpi01/index. en.html).
It isn't just academics that recognise the harmful effects of software patents. Who would know more about this issue than Bill Gates who said:
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.... The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.
The basic issue is that the software industry has thrived without software patents, and where they have been applied - they have only served to slow innovation and inhibit competition. European software developers need to be protected from software patents, not protected by them.
I just received an email today from someone involved in this saying that "the meeting of the Secretary generals has postponed the report till
September". Apparently it will now happen some time between the 1st and the 4th of September - which gives us more time to educate our MEPs.
If you are an EU citizen and care about this don't wait for other people to take action - contact your MEP and make sure they are familiar with the issues! You can read my email to my MEP in my/. Journal and you are welcome to borrow ideas from it if you like.
This is definitely beneficial, and it is virtually impossible for even the most rabit pro-Intellectual Property advocate to argue against it, however it is worth remembering that it is a very small step indeed.
I am a long-time Java user, and over the past year have done some C# work. While I was obviously very familiar indeed with Java, its language, and its API, I must say that I was quickly seduced by C# convenience features like the "foreach" loop and auto-boxing (where you don't have to worry about converting between an "int" and an "Integer").
Turns out that Java 1.5 will have these features and more - one thing I am really looking forward to is generics.
The final advantage of C# over Java was that a C# program looked like it belongs on Windows - same widget set, same "feel". This is a bigger deal than most people realize. Windows users grow accustomed to doing things a certain way, and they don't like it when you try to impose something different on them. Swing just doesn't cut it in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
I speak with some experience on this subject having grown up in the South of Ireland where almost all school children are forced to learn the virtually extinct language "Gaelic" from the ages of 4 to 18, spending similar amounts of time on it as they do with Maths or English. The result? Most people hate the language because they resent having it forced down their throats.
Unless they are in a work of Orwellian fiction - governments have no business telling their populations what words they can and cannot use.
It is a shame that by focusing on cell phones they are missing the opportunity to leap-frog the whole 1G, 2G, 3G thing and get straight to where people on the ground are slowly progressing - pervasive WiFi which, combined with VoIP, can subsume all of the functions provided by cell-phones today.
I happen to know quite a bit about how R.S works internally and I can say that it is far more sophisticated than BitTorrent. Unfortunately, Red Swoosh isn't Open Source (something that makes BT more useful in the long-run), and I can't really justify that claim without violating a confidence.
Clearly this was inevitable with BitTorrent - it is a centralized technology. Freenet, while not designed for distribution of copyrighted material (any more than BT was), at least it afforts protection to the publishers of that material. Currently, in fact, it is pretty much as easy to use as BT - if not easier. Further, I would argue that Freenet has many benefits over BT as a content distribution platform irrespective of its anonymity benefits (such as its adaptive caching).
The Freenet developers do not and never have had any interest in misleading users about what Freenet is and does.
Of course, I am not trying to defend this bill - it is clearly another example of "rent-a-politician".
Nothibng sinister - just a fubar, the domain expired and Ian's spam filter filtered out the notification messages. It is back up now.
16 colors?! I remember back when we had 2 colors, green and black - and by golly we were happy to have those!
If there was some way that you could allow the user to have multiple PHP versions all being used as Apache modules where the user could select the one they want using their .htaccess file, that would be a possible solution.
Of course, the real solution is for the PHP development team to take the issue of backward-compatability more seriously then they clearly do at the moment.
Someone involved in PHP needs to take a cold hard look at this issue and figure out how to tackle it head-on, or they will find that with each new version, people take longer and longer to take advantage of new features which will cause PHP to stagnate.
With Java, at least I know for a fact that some Java 1.1 code will work with Java 1.4 and as a result most ISPs keep their Java versions quite up-to-date.
Until the PHP team treat lack of backward compatability as a bug, this problem will persist.
The PHP people need to provide ways that people can upgrade the versions of PHP on their system such that they can be reasonably sure that existing users aren't suddenly going to find their sites don't work.
I felt a great sense of excitment back when pathfinder first started to transmit its pictures back from Mars, I didn't need an anthropomorphic prop like a couple of good-looking astronauts to make me appreciate the moment.
Remember that every penny spent using astronauts as expensive PR tools is a penny that we aren't spending on learning more about space, and is probably pushing the day that people might venture into space for good reasons further into the future.
(What is the smiley for an evil grin? ;]
It isn't just academics that recognise the harmful effects of software patents. Who would know more about this issue than Bill Gates who said:
The basic issue is that the software industry has thrived without software patents, and where they have been applied - they have only served to slow innovation and inhibit competition. European software developers need to be protected from software patents, not protected by them.If you are an EU citizen and care about this don't wait for other people to take action - contact your MEP and make sure they are familiar with the issues! You can read my email to my MEP in my /. Journal and you are welcome to borrow ideas from it if you like.
This is definitely beneficial, and it is virtually impossible for even the most rabit pro-Intellectual Property advocate to argue against it, however it is worth remembering that it is a very small step indeed.
...SCO's worst offense is confusing Linux with GNU/Linux!
Turns out that Java 1.5 will have these features and more - one thing I am really looking forward to is generics.
The final advantage of C# over Java was that a C# program looked like it belongs on Windows - same widget set, same "feel". This is a bigger deal than most people realize. Windows users grow accustomed to doing things a certain way, and they don't like it when you try to impose something different on them. Swing just doesn't cut it in this regard.