Students studying computer science write programs which are graded by their teachers on both technical correctness and, quite often, style. One extreme of the style spectrum might be the Obfuscated C contest, but programming style is an important component of computer science education.
Nowhere has the stylistic aspect of code been more clear to me than in a class I took on algorithmic analysis. In a pen-and-paper test I had to design and prove an algorithm whose purpose I've long since forgotten. I happened to accomplish this task in a manner my teacher found very unusual. My solution expressed a way of looking at the problem in a manner that neither the teacher nor any of the other students in the class had thought of. And in order for the instructor to discuss my approach--or to contrast it with his approach or that of other students, it was necessary to use code.
Code can be just as functional and as expressive as, for example, a lawyer's brief or a judge's decision. Lawyers would be arrogant to think otherwise.
Film students studying aspects of film which involve intricate physical details--e.g. photography. lighting, or set design--would not be served at all by fair use of excerpting for scholarly purposes if they had access to even a slightly corrupted image of the original set. This fair use would require that the students have access to still images or entire shots of the highest quality available.
Well etoy had been around long before eToys was incorporated. In this case, OpenGL has been around for far longer than OpenIL. And while it might be hard to confuse a European subversive art collective with a (formerly) publicly traded dot-com which sells toys, the likelihood of confusion between an "image library" (OpenIL) and a "graphics library" (OpenGL) is substantial, especially since the API of the former is modelled upon the API of the latter.
"It's as if we had hired a huge bunch of programmers for free," asserts Ernie Prabhakar, Apple's product manager for Mac OS X Server. "We'll have a final product with better performance and new features."
I can only hope for Apple's sake that Ernie was terribly misquoted or that he's the only one at Apple who feels this way. But given Apple's lack of real participation in the open source community, I fear that my hopes are unfounded.
This quote exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding of the open source process. We work on open source software because it's ours: it belongs to the community. We don't work on Free Software to make Apple rich. And we certainly don't work on open source software so that Apple can take our code, modify it, and prevent us from using the end result without paying--or certainly denying us access to work based off of our code.
If Apple wants to benefit from the open source community, Apple has to participate in a larger way. As long as Darwin is nothing more than an enabler for Apple's proprietary Mac OS X, the vast majority of the open source community doesn't really benefit from helping out.
I used to think more highly of Apple. It appears that they are merely joining the herds who are attempting to cash in on open source without joining our community.
In the case Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States, Inc. (1974), the Supreme Court held that claims of product libel must be backed up by showing "actual malice" on the part of the accused. In Bose, it was held that the right to constitutionally protected speech outweighs any interest of corporations against product libel except under these narrow circumstances.
UCITA wouldn't be designed from the outset as violative of established Supreme Court First Amendment precedent, would it?
Try YACAS (Yet Another Computer Algebra System). In my opinion it lacks the polish of Mathematica, but it's got a fairly powerful core (which you can always extend).
Five years ago, U2 was the artist with the best record deal: they received $2.50 per CD while most signed artists received $1 or less per CD. Today, Ani DiFranco makes the most money per album: about $7. She is in this position because she runs her own record label. Any artist who's ever tried to run a label knows it's a lot of work and takes a lot of time away from actually producing art.
I am surprised that CD sales are continuing to grow despite the fact that artists receive progressively smaller percentages of the price tag consumers pay (which is typically about $14 these days--an amount I consider outrageous given how little of that money goes to the artists).
Labels, for the service of distribution and promotion, typically get about half of the price tag you pay in the store. The retail stores mark up music about 100%. On-line music retail companies like CD Now, Music Boulevard, Amazon, etc. are no better in this regard, charging prices similar to or at best pennies less than "traditional" retail music outlets.
The MP3 phenomenon makes a loud statement: something is fundamentally wrong with the manner in which the music industry conducts business. Hopefully some reform to the system will eventually come forth.
Traditional economic analysis is not entirely applicable here because CD's are not indistinguishable and art is not a commodity. But when the music industry gets the message that sales of CD's keep increasing, they will interpret that to mean the industry can and should continue to charge more for CD's.
Is there any doubt that if this system is allowed to continue further the average artist will continue to receive progressively less than 7% of the gross price of the retail price of a CD for doing the great majority of the work?
Personally, I really think the words "geek" and "nerd" are so derogatory and negative that they have no place within the community at this time. Their continued use within the community makes it seem to outsiders that these words carry no derogatory connotation; this is particularly troubling. <p> I can see the perspective of those who use these words like some African-Americans use the word "nigger" to describe themselves or other African-Americans. (In this case a label used by some in an insulting manner is being reclaimed by self-application. Some think this self-application takes the bite out of the word and that they reclaim power over the word.) However, many African-Americans still find the word "nigger" offensive even when coming from a fellow African-American. (I'm not trying to compare the plights of these two very different communities; I'm only using this example to illustrate the common phenomenon of reclaiming derogatory epithets.) <p> It's my opinion--though I may be in a small minority in feeling so--that outsiders do not have the right to use the words "geek" and "nerd," nor do members of the community have the right to use the words in settings outside the community.
Disney has had multi-user caves in a commercial product for the Hercules ride at DisneyQuest for over a year. These multiple users were in the same cave. Offshoots of the Responsive Workbench project (by one or more of the Gang of Five schools if I recall correctly) have focused on remote collaboration in the RWB's semi-immsersive virtual reality environment. While there may be some interesting uses arising from synchronization of multiple caves, the concept is certainly not novel. The accomplishment in this project seems to be the acquisition of the necessary funding to put well-known research work in a "real-world" setting.
Conversely, it would really hurt Apple's popularity if they were to refuse to let XFree86 make use of TrueType. Can they really afford that kind of backlash at this point?
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that genetically engineered drug-producing crops should be kept out of the food supply, do something about it.
Nowhere has the stylistic aspect of code been more clear to me than in a class I took on algorithmic analysis. In a pen-and-paper test I had to design and prove an algorithm whose purpose I've long since forgotten. I happened to accomplish this task in a manner my teacher found very unusual. My solution expressed a way of looking at the problem in a manner that neither the teacher nor any of the other students in the class had thought of. And in order for the instructor to discuss my approach--or to contrast it with his approach or that of other students, it was necessary to use code.
Code can be just as functional and as expressive as, for example, a lawyer's brief or a judge's decision. Lawyers would be arrogant to think otherwise.
Film students studying aspects of film which involve intricate physical details--e.g. photography. lighting, or set design--would not be served at all by fair use of excerpting for scholarly purposes if they had access to even a slightly corrupted image of the original set. This fair use would require that the students have access to still images or entire shots of the highest quality available.
Well etoy had been around long before eToys was incorporated. In this case, OpenGL has been around for far longer than OpenIL. And while it might be hard to confuse a European subversive art collective with a (formerly) publicly traded dot-com which sells toys, the likelihood of confusion between an "image library" (OpenIL) and a "graphics library" (OpenGL) is substantial, especially since the API of the former is modelled upon the API of the latter.
Does anyone remember this Macworld article: "Apple Goes Open Source with Mac Server: Surprise move will adcelerate [sic] Mac OS development efforts"? I think the following quote really sets the tone of Apple's relationship with the open source community.
"It's as if we had hired a huge bunch of programmers for free," asserts Ernie Prabhakar, Apple's product manager for Mac OS X Server. "We'll have a final product with better performance and new features."
I can only hope for Apple's sake that Ernie was terribly misquoted or that he's the only one at Apple who feels this way. But given Apple's lack of real participation in the open source community, I fear that my hopes are unfounded.
This quote exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding of the open source process. We work on open source software because it's ours: it belongs to the community. We don't work on Free Software to make Apple rich. And we certainly don't work on open source software so that Apple can take our code, modify it, and prevent us from using the end result without paying--or certainly denying us access to work based off of our code.
If Apple wants to benefit from the open source community, Apple has to participate in a larger way. As long as Darwin is nothing more than an enabler for Apple's proprietary Mac OS X, the vast majority of the open source community doesn't really benefit from helping out.
I used to think more highly of Apple. It appears that they are merely joining the herds who are attempting to cash in on open source without joining our community.
In the case Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States, Inc. (1974), the Supreme Court held that claims of product libel must be backed up by showing "actual malice" on the part of the accused. In Bose, it was held that the right to constitutionally protected speech outweighs any interest of corporations against product libel except under these narrow circumstances.
UCITA wouldn't be designed from the outset as violative of established Supreme Court First Amendment precedent, would it?
Try YACAS (Yet Another Computer Algebra System). In my opinion it lacks the polish of Mathematica, but it's got a fairly powerful core (which you can always extend).
Five years ago, U2 was the artist with the best record deal: they received $2.50 per CD while most signed artists received $1 or less per CD. Today, Ani DiFranco makes the most money per album: about $7. She is in this position because she runs her own record label. Any artist who's ever tried to run a label knows it's a lot of work and takes a lot of time away from actually producing art.
I am surprised that CD sales are continuing to grow despite the fact that artists receive progressively smaller percentages of the price tag consumers pay (which is typically about $14 these days--an amount I consider outrageous given how little of that money goes to the artists).
Labels, for the service of distribution and promotion, typically get about half of the price tag you pay in the store. The retail stores mark up music about 100%. On-line music retail companies like CD Now, Music Boulevard, Amazon, etc. are no better in this regard, charging prices similar to or at best pennies less than "traditional" retail music outlets.
The MP3 phenomenon makes a loud statement: something is fundamentally wrong with the manner in which the music industry conducts business. Hopefully some reform to the system will eventually come forth.
Traditional economic analysis is not entirely applicable here because CD's are not indistinguishable and art is not a commodity. But when the music industry gets the message that sales of CD's keep increasing, they will interpret that to mean the industry can and should continue to charge more for CD's.
Is there any doubt that if this system is allowed to continue further the average artist will continue to receive progressively less than 7% of the gross price of the retail price of a CD for doing the great majority of the work?
Personally, I really think the words "geek" and "nerd" are so derogatory and negative that they have no place within the community at this time. Their continued use within the community makes it seem to outsiders that these words carry no derogatory connotation; this is particularly troubling.
<p>
I can see the perspective of those who use these words like some African-Americans use the word "nigger" to describe themselves or other African-Americans. (In this case a label used by some in an insulting manner is being reclaimed by self-application. Some think this self-application takes the bite out of the word and that they reclaim power over the word.) However, many African-Americans still find the word "nigger" offensive even when coming from a fellow African-American. (I'm not trying to compare the plights of these two very different communities; I'm only using this example to illustrate the common phenomenon of reclaiming derogatory epithets.)
<p>
It's my opinion--though I may be in a small minority in feeling so--that outsiders do not have the right to use the words "geek" and "nerd," nor do members of the community have the right to use the words in settings outside the community.
Disney has had multi-user caves in a commercial product for the Hercules ride at DisneyQuest for over a year. These multiple users were in the same cave. Offshoots of the Responsive Workbench project (by one or more of the Gang of Five schools if I recall correctly) have focused on remote collaboration in the RWB's semi-immsersive virtual reality environment. While there may be some interesting uses arising from synchronization of multiple caves, the concept is certainly not novel. The accomplishment in this project seems to be the acquisition of the necessary funding to put well-known research work in a "real-world" setting.
Conversely, it would really hurt Apple's popularity if they were to refuse to let XFree86 make use of TrueType. Can they really afford that kind of backlash at this point?