I'm not sure that Dr. Johnson would accept your definition of where this sentence ended. If I were to say "Hey!" would this sentence have ended? Perheaps(sp?) you need to rethink this a bit.
I seem to remember that this was tried a couple of decades ago, and there was an immediate attack based on substituting a Russian character that looks like a "c", so it was recanted. Fortunately, it was still so new that it was easy to recant. At the time there was talk about possible fixes, but I don't think an agreement was ever reached on how to proceed.
OTOH, I was definitely FAR out at the periphery, being a mere/. reader.
That's not at all what people have been saying. I'll admit I'm not sure why not, but that's not at all what I would expect, either. None of those are part of ASCII-7 (though they're in lots of the 8-bit expansions).
But *IS* there a decent way to enter Chinese characters? Last I heard people in China (& Japan) used Roman letters because as clumsy as the were, they were easier to enter than the Hiragana. (I think I got that right. Of course, even if I did that would be Japanese only, and it doesn't include Kanji.)
With most languages the problem is different. European languages all have a small and well defined set of characters..so small that they could ALL have been handled by a one-byte code. Arabic languages are more difficult, as they have multiple different context sensitive forms for certain letters. (And that's the extent of my Arabic.) Hebrew is more amenable to computerized representation...but it still means that you need to go beyond the one-byte limit (if you want to include the other languages).
OTOH! Sanskrit, Javanese, Minoan, Burmese, etc. 32 bits isn't quite enough to handle everyone. So now you're using 32 bits for each character transmitted, unless you use a culturally biased form. You've just quadrupled the overhead on the DNS.
Yes, it's possible. I don't really think it's a good idea, though. If you were just proposing the UTF-8 subset then this argument wouldn't apply, but it would then STILL be culturally biased, and it would have all sorts of "false twin" URL mappings. And various other problems (see the other posts).
Walt Disney didn't create the story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. He didn't even create the broom. All he did was change the apprentice to a mouse and draw it.
And for this he got an eternal copyright on the story. Not legally, but effectively. Nobody else would DARE tell that story now, because they'd be sued.
Patents are bad, but I'm not certain that indefinitely extended copyrights aren't worse.
The reason is that the graffito "artists" serve a useful function, they alert you to holes in you work, and they don't generally do much damage. (Not compared to the others.)
Think about it, which is worse: 1) a virus that crashes your system 2) a virus that doesn't crash your system, but corrupts the payroll files
As you, in principle, note, the problem is updates.
If you stick with SUSE, you are counting on them to not include any MS IP in their updates. News from yesterday (2006/11/18) indicates that this may not be a reasonable presumption. (Google under Novell Excel compatibility.)
Of course, with so much of the deal being secret, any presumptions are guesses. That is a part of the intention in making the deal secret. When somebody goes out of their way to hide things from me, I form a suspicion that they aren't working to my benefit.
I believe that he's sincere. It's possible that he's correct. That he is correct, however, is less than 50% probable. I'll believe that the problems he encountered last time will be fixed by scaling. I will expect, however, that new problems will show up.
Scaling up a complex system is rarely simple. I feel that he's over-optimistic.
(That said, given the potential pay-off this might be a worth-while piece of research. I don't need to decide, so I'm not going to. There's a potential high pay-off, and the odds are against success. I'll decide that those two statements are both correct.)
Unless, of course, you want it to double as an emergency space suite. (That's why they need to be form-fitting, right? So they can apply pressure in case of emergency.)
Larry Niven wasn't the first, but he's the only one I can think of at the moment.
P.S.: What you are calling "Speculative Fiction" is the original meaning of Science Fiction. Lots of authors don't stick very close to what's plausible, possibly because they don't know, but that's the idea. Unfortunately, a bunch of cliches have been adopted by those with lesser skill levels or who don't really want to write Science Fiction, but feel themselves forced into it. Thus "Sturgeon's Law": 90% of everything is crap.
The MPAA wrote the law and paid for it, so they should know.
I can accept that this perfectly legitimate business is a violation of the law. It's that kind of a law. Personally I'm in favor of extreme prejudice against every legislator who voted in favor of it, every lobbyist who campaigned in favor of it, and every executive who hired them to do so. This isn't going to happen.
Since the DMCA was passed I have begun to consider pirates more moral than either legislators or businessmen. (I know. I know. Faint praise and all that. They don't rate more than faint praise.)
P.S.: Every time you buy a movie tie-in you are supporting the MPAA. Every time you pay money to see a movie you are supporting the MPAA. This is a bad idea.
I suspect that NOVELL Linux infringes, and that the infringement is withing mono.
No proof, of course, no proof that there is ANY infringement. On general principles, however, I've removed all mono from my system. (I had been thinking of switching my next project to C#, and moaning to myself about the lack of documentation. Now I suspect that I might choose Java, but if I do I'll wait until after Sun actually releases it under GPL. Until then I'll investigate other options...like python + pyrex.)
When a religion arises it generally has a set of beliefs that matches well those of the original followers. In traditional cultures this generally has been informal economics, among other things. As long as the environment doesn't change very much, most people who follow the religion follow it "reasonably well".
When the religion is taken over by a non-visionary leader, or by a bureaucracy, it tends to adopt rules designed mainly to increase it's power. At this point the rules change to the advantage of the leadership. Generally the form this follows is "Everybody should be guilty!", so rules are passed that people find impossible to follow. From this point on your arguments are valid.
N.B.: Frequently one of the purposes of the original religion is to split the tribe in half, so that it will occupy two fields rather than one. Unfortunately, this doesn't work very well when you have neighbors on all sides, but it seems to be instinctive rather than reasoned.
If that's what you want, use Java, Ruby, Python, or some other approach.
This one looks too dangerous to risk. It *MIGHT* be safe... but "do you feel lucky?".
MS has issued a clear warning that is some project becomes popular, they will bankrupt it. Exactly which patents might be used aren't obvious, but there have long been suspicions that MS has some patents covering parts of.net which are ostensibly "Well, the API is open. Build it if you can." This contract with Novell right before the release of a version of mono with WinForms rather suggests that Novell is being used as a stalking horse.
I've looked at Erlang, but I've never really tried it. Certainly it has separate processes that are easy, but I've always suspected that it would be unacceptably slow. Currently I only have a dual processor, so the possible improvement is minor. OTOH, in a decade things will be quite different...and I don't know just HOW different.
The interesting question is not what they CAN do, but what they will choose to do.
My suspicion is that the Democrats are basically after the same goals as the Republicans, but they are more concerned with having a good public image as likable people. If so, then I predict that the votes will somehow allow the vile bills that Bush proposes to go through, even though the Democrats could, nominally, prevent them. The distribution of power allows them to blame the Republicans, so long as there isn't a recorded roll-call vote.
Perhaps I'm too cynical. The next two years will reveal this.
OTOH, have you checked out Digital Mars D? ( http://www.digitalmars.com/d/index.html ) It offers many of the featurs you are claiming for the new C++, and a useable version is available NOW.
I'm not a great fan of either Java or C++ or C. (I dislike both pointers and restrictive licenses.) That said, the great strength of all three languages is in their libraries. It's essentially impossible for any individual or moderately sized company to put out a new language, because of the lack of libraries. The general solution is to enable the calling of C libraries, but this isn't usually an easy matter.
If the new C++ spec is as different as you are implying, then I would expect that it will be YEARS before it has a respectible number of implementations. (I am NOT impressed with the "elegance" of the STL...quite the contrary. OTOH, my interest is not as much in make - every - CPU - cycle - count effenciency as in power of expression and flexibility. Object persistance is as important to me as any other single feature.)
That said, wxWidgets does look rather nice, and it seems a good fit for many user interface tasks. Also probably much faster than Swing (I haven't times it, but when I did time Swing it was SLOW!!!).
How does the new C++ handle splitting processes off to run on a different processor? This could be quite important in the coming decades, and I know of NO current language that handles this well. A Dataflow language would appear to be the optimum, but Prograf appears to have died, and the other such languages I've encountered were special purpose. Io handles this by running the separate processes as separate tasks, and communicating via IP ports, I'm not sure how much intrinsic overhead this has, but it might be significant, and is certainly clumsy at the moment. This should be automatically instigated by a co-routine call or some such. That way it could be optimized when hardware allowed it.
I suspect that you've not encountered many new languae releases...if you had you would be a bit less optimistic that they will live up to all the hype.
What's needed is a moderation system for tags...or perhaps an ordered list, ranked by votes. Depends on how you want the tags to be used. If it's just for human readers than an ordered list supplemented by a color code for how many votes each particular tag had. If it's intended to be a filter then the tags should be paired, and only when 2/3s of the votes are on one side or the other should the tag appear. Etc.
Freely applied tags will act just like freely applied comments.
Yes, but the Iniuit were not farmers. That's the point. Hunter/fishers can survive in an area that never gets warm enough to grow crops. The Vikings were primarily farmers, with hunting and fishing only as supplements.
I suspect that during the last century of occupation the Vikings crops failed so frequently that they were forced into being primarily fishers & hunters, but this wasn't the way they were (culturally) adapted to live. Over-farming speaks to how narrow the strip of suitable land was, as the colony's population was never large. Still, it's the groups living near the edge that will first be forced out by climatic change. Happened then, happens now. If your culture is wealthy, you've got more cushion.
Actually, at the time he discovered it there was a belt on land near the coast that wasn't covered with ice. The Vikings had farms there for nearly a century (more? less?) before it got too cold for the crops to survive. It was never "hospitable", but it was endurable. For farmers, who supplemented their farming with fishing. Later this colony got frozen out.
If you think about it, this seems to imply that the Greenland had just been warmer than it currently is, and that it was starting to freeze up again when Eric discovered it. The ice has stopped migrating to the sea, but hadn't yet expanded to cover the shore again. (I could be wrong, perhaps there is currently a strip around the edge of Greenland that's suitable for raising rye or some such. It wouldn't need to be anything a modern farmer would find attractive.)
I don't know. I think that the GPL terms mean that if the people you distribute to are limited in their ability to alter, recompile, reuse, and redistribute...then you didn't have the right to distribute in the first place.
It's true that this is enforced via extensions to basic copyright permissions...but it covers everything. If there's a law saying that you can't modify a chunk of code, then you aren't allowed to distribute it. Copyright, patent, trademark...it doesn't make any difference.
N.B.: If Novell were the sole owner of the copyright then this argument wouldn't apply. The copyright holder is allowed to distribute the work without any extra rights beyond those of the copyright law, so that wouldn't depend on the GPL allowing the code to be distributed to enable the distribution, even if the license used was the GPL. But it would mean that Novell couldn't distribute under the any GPL code that it wasn't the copyright holder for that included a Microsoft patent, regardless of any patent sharing agreement that the two companies might have UNLESS Novell was the copyright holder. (In that case they wouldn't be distributing the code under the GPL, but rather under their right as copyright holders...so people who received it would not have any rights under the GPL to redistribute it, even though the code was covered by the GPL, because it was also covered by a patent that did not have the appropriate permissions. [If Novell owned the patent, then as I understand things it would be implicitly granting all necessary permissions...])
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that Dr. Johnson would accept your definition of where this sentence ended.
If I were to say "Hey!" would this sentence have ended?
Perheaps(sp?) you need to rethink this a bit.
I seem to remember that this was tried a couple of decades ago, and there was an immediate attack based on substituting a Russian character that looks like a "c", so it was recanted. Fortunately, it was still so new that it was easy to recant. At the time there was talk about possible fixes, but I don't think an agreement was ever reached on how to proceed.
/. reader.
OTOH, I was definitely FAR out at the periphery, being a mere
That's not at all what people have been saying. I'll admit I'm not sure why not, but that's not at all what I would expect, either. None of those are part of ASCII-7 (though they're in lots of the 8-bit expansions).
But *IS* there a decent way to enter Chinese characters? Last I heard people in China (& Japan) used Roman letters because as clumsy as the were, they were easier to enter than the Hiragana. (I think I got that right. Of course, even if I did that would be Japanese only, and it doesn't include Kanji.)
With most languages the problem is different. European languages all have a small and well defined set of characters..so small that they could ALL have been handled by a one-byte code. Arabic languages are more difficult, as they have multiple different context sensitive forms for certain letters. (And that's the extent of my Arabic.) Hebrew is more amenable to computerized representation...but it still means that you need to go beyond the one-byte limit (if you want to include the other languages).
OTOH! Sanskrit, Javanese, Minoan, Burmese, etc. 32 bits isn't quite enough to handle everyone. So now you're using 32 bits for each character transmitted, unless you use a culturally biased form. You've just quadrupled the overhead on the DNS.
Yes, it's possible. I don't really think it's a good idea, though. If you were just proposing the UTF-8 subset then this argument wouldn't apply, but it would then STILL be culturally biased, and it would have all sorts of "false twin" URL mappings. And various other problems (see the other posts).
Is there a legally binding agreement not to sue if you use them? Then it's worthless.
Having a patented spec be visible doesn't make it open, and is SURE doesn't make it free.
Walt Disney didn't create the story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. He didn't even create the broom. All he did was change the apprentice to a mouse and draw it.
And for this he got an eternal copyright on the story. Not legally, but effectively. Nobody else would DARE tell that story now, because they'd be sued.
Patents are bad, but I'm not certain that indefinitely extended copyrights aren't worse.
It's worse to attack for money or patriotism.
The reason is that the graffito "artists" serve a useful function, they alert you to holes in you work, and they don't generally do much damage. (Not compared to the others.)
Think about it, which is worse:
1) a virus that crashes your system
2) a virus that doesn't crash your system, but corrupts the payroll files
I think you'll agree that 2 is MUCH worse than 1.
As you, in principle, note, the problem is updates.
If you stick with SUSE, you are counting on them to not include any MS IP in their updates. News from yesterday (2006/11/18) indicates that this may not be a reasonable presumption. (Google under Novell Excel compatibility.)
Of course, with so much of the deal being secret, any presumptions are guesses. That is a part of the intention in making the deal secret. When somebody goes out of their way to hide things from me, I form a suspicion that they aren't working to my benefit.
I trust that in five years (or less!) when MS changes the terms for renewing the deal, you'll still be able to switch to a decent OS.
I'm sure that if you've been running SUSE it's quite convenient to continue running it. It just isn't very smart.
I believe that he's sincere. It's possible that he's correct. That he is correct, however, is less than 50% probable. I'll believe that the problems he encountered last time will be fixed by scaling. I will expect, however, that new problems will show up.
Scaling up a complex system is rarely simple. I feel that he's over-optimistic.
(That said, given the potential pay-off this might be a worth-while piece of research. I don't need to decide, so I'm not going to. There's a potential high pay-off, and the odds are against success. I'll decide that those two statements are both correct.)
Unless, of course, you want it to double as an emergency space suite. (That's why they need to be form-fitting, right? So they can apply pressure in case of emergency.)
Larry Niven wasn't the first, but he's the only one I can think of at the moment.
P.S.: What you are calling "Speculative Fiction" is the original meaning of Science Fiction. Lots of authors don't stick very close to what's plausible, possibly because they don't know, but that's the idea. Unfortunately, a bunch of cliches have been adopted by those with lesser skill levels or who don't really want to write Science Fiction, but feel themselves forced into it. Thus "Sturgeon's Law": 90% of everything is crap.
The MPAA wrote the law and paid for it, so they should know.
I can accept that this perfectly legitimate business is a violation of the law. It's that kind of a law. Personally I'm in favor of extreme prejudice against every legislator who voted in favor of it, every lobbyist who campaigned in favor of it, and every executive who hired them to do so. This isn't going to happen.
Since the DMCA was passed I have begun to consider pirates more moral than either legislators or businessmen. (I know. I know. Faint praise and all that. They don't rate more than faint praise.)
P.S.: Every time you buy a movie tie-in you are supporting the MPAA. Every time you pay money to see a movie you are supporting the MPAA. This is a bad idea.
I've got my suspicions.
I suspect that NOVELL Linux infringes, and that the infringement is withing mono.
No proof, of course, no proof that there is ANY infringement. On general principles, however, I've removed all mono from my system. (I had been thinking of switching my next project to C#, and moaning to myself about the lack of documentation. Now I suspect that I might choose Java, but if I do I'll wait until after Sun actually releases it under GPL. Until then I'll investigate other options...like python + pyrex.)
You've made a good case that the system is broken, but I didn't hear a proposal on how it should be patched.
When a religion arises it generally has a set of beliefs that matches well those of the original followers. In traditional cultures this generally has been informal economics, among other things. As long as the environment doesn't change very much, most people who follow the religion follow it "reasonably well".
When the religion is taken over by a non-visionary leader, or by a bureaucracy, it tends to adopt rules designed mainly to increase it's power. At this point the rules change to the advantage of the leadership. Generally the form this follows is "Everybody should be guilty!", so rules are passed that people find impossible to follow. From this point on your arguments are valid.
N.B.: Frequently one of the purposes of the original religion is to split the tribe in half, so that it will occupy two fields rather than one. Unfortunately, this doesn't work very well when you have neighbors on all sides, but it seems to be instinctive rather than reasoned.
If that's what you want, use Java, Ruby, Python, or some other approach.
.net which are ostensibly "Well, the API is open. Build it if you can." This contract with Novell right before the release of a version of mono with WinForms rather suggests that Novell is being used as a stalking horse.
This one looks too dangerous to risk. It *MIGHT* be safe... but "do you feel lucky?".
MS has issued a clear warning that is some project becomes popular, they will bankrupt it. Exactly which patents might be used aren't obvious, but there have long been suspicions that MS has some patents covering parts of
I've looked at Erlang, but I've never really tried it. Certainly it has separate processes that are easy, but I've always suspected that it would be unacceptably slow. Currently I only have a dual processor, so the possible improvement is minor. OTOH, in a decade things will be quite different...and I don't know just HOW different.
The interesting question is not what they CAN do, but what they will choose to do.
My suspicion is that the Democrats are basically after the same goals as the Republicans, but they are more concerned with having a good public image as likable people. If so, then I predict that the votes will somehow allow the vile bills that Bush proposes to go through, even though the Democrats could, nominally, prevent them. The distribution of power allows them to blame the Republicans, so long as there isn't a recorded roll-call vote.
Perhaps I'm too cynical. The next two years will reveal this.
I'll believe this after I see an implementation.
OTOH, have you checked out Digital Mars D? ( http://www.digitalmars.com/d/index.html ) It offers many of the featurs you are claiming for the new C++, and a useable version is available NOW.
I'm not a great fan of either Java or C++ or C. (I dislike both pointers and restrictive licenses.) That said, the great strength of all three languages is in their libraries. It's essentially impossible for any individual or moderately sized company to put out a new language, because of the lack of libraries. The general solution is to enable the calling of C libraries, but this isn't usually an easy matter.
If the new C++ spec is as different as you are implying, then I would expect that it will be YEARS before it has a respectible number of implementations. (I am NOT impressed with the "elegance" of the STL...quite the contrary. OTOH, my interest is not as much in make - every - CPU - cycle - count effenciency as in power of expression and flexibility. Object persistance is as important to me as any other single feature.)
That said, wxWidgets does look rather nice, and it seems a good fit for many user interface tasks. Also probably much faster than Swing (I haven't times it, but when I did time Swing it was SLOW!!!).
How does the new C++ handle splitting processes off to run on a different processor? This could be quite important in the coming decades, and I know of NO current language that handles this well. A Dataflow language would appear to be the optimum, but Prograf appears to have died, and the other such languages I've encountered were special purpose. Io handles this by running the separate processes as separate tasks, and communicating via IP ports, I'm not sure how much intrinsic overhead this has, but it might be significant, and is certainly clumsy at the moment. This should be automatically instigated by a co-routine call or some such. That way it could be optimized when hardware allowed it.
I suspect that you've not encountered many new languae releases...if you had you would be a bit less optimistic that they will live up to all the hype.
What's needed is a moderation system for tags...or perhaps an ordered list, ranked by votes. Depends on how you want the tags to be used. If it's just for human readers than an ordered list supplemented by a color code for how many votes each particular tag had. If it's intended to be a filter then the tags should be paired, and only when 2/3s of the votes are on one side or the other should the tag appear. Etc.
Freely applied tags will act just like freely applied comments.
Yes, but the Iniuit were not farmers. That's the point. Hunter/fishers can survive in an area that never gets warm enough to grow crops. The Vikings were primarily farmers, with hunting and fishing only as supplements.
I suspect that during the last century of occupation the Vikings crops failed so frequently that they were forced into being primarily fishers & hunters, but this wasn't the way they were (culturally) adapted to live. Over-farming speaks to how narrow the strip of suitable land was, as the colony's population was never large. Still, it's the groups living near the edge that will first be forced out by climatic change. Happened then, happens now. If your culture is wealthy, you've got more cushion.
No. They planted vineyards in Vinland. This was probably around Labrador, Nova Scotia, but it could have been further south. This was NOT Greenland.
Actually, at the time he discovered it there was a belt on land near the coast that wasn't covered with ice. The Vikings had farms there for nearly a century (more? less?) before it got too cold for the crops to survive. It was never "hospitable", but it was endurable. For farmers, who supplemented their farming with fishing. Later this colony got frozen out.
If you think about it, this seems to imply that the Greenland had just been warmer than it currently is, and that it was starting to freeze up again when Eric discovered it. The ice has stopped migrating to the sea, but hadn't yet expanded to cover the shore again. (I could be wrong, perhaps there is currently a strip around the edge of Greenland that's suitable for raising rye or some such. It wouldn't need to be anything a modern farmer would find attractive.)
I don't know. I think that the GPL terms mean that if the people you distribute to are limited in their ability to alter, recompile, reuse, and redistribute...then you didn't have the right to distribute in the first place.
It's true that this is enforced via extensions to basic copyright permissions...but it covers everything. If there's a law saying that you can't modify a chunk of code, then you aren't allowed to distribute it. Copyright, patent, trademark...it doesn't make any difference.
N.B.: If Novell were the sole owner of the copyright then this argument wouldn't apply. The copyright holder is allowed to distribute the work without any extra rights beyond those of the copyright law, so that wouldn't depend on the GPL allowing the code to be distributed to enable the distribution, even if the license used was the GPL. But it would mean that Novell couldn't distribute under the any GPL code that it wasn't the copyright holder for that included a Microsoft patent, regardless of any patent sharing agreement that the two companies might have UNLESS Novell was the copyright holder. (In that case they wouldn't be distributing the code under the GPL, but rather under their right as copyright holders...so people who received it would not have any rights under the GPL to redistribute it, even though the code was covered by the GPL, because it was also covered by a patent that did not have the appropriate permissions. [If Novell owned the patent, then as I understand things it would be implicitly granting all necessary permissions...])
CAUTION IANAL!