...but it's interesting that a filter feature designed to weed out trolls also succeeds in weeding out AOL-for-Dummies type statements. Perhaps there's a connection???
Read a bit of Gregory Chaitin's book, The Unknowable (the linked site seems to contain the full text), and you will find some mathematical/philosophical assertions, backed up by LISP code, that aren't so far from the kinds of things you suggest. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and Turing's proof of the unsolvability of the Halting Problem, are allegedly proved using LISP programs. And of course, programs like this tend to require that the language be able to evaluate/compile expressions at runtime, so perhaps the original claim isn't so off-base!;)
Is anyone going to comment on FullPliant's unique features, or is everybody stuck on Religious Flamewar mode?
I think the most interesting thing about FullPliant is the whole concept of taking the Linux kernel by itself and using it to build a system free of all the grodiness of the GNU utilities, X, etc. If this helps expand people's imaginations about possible uses for the best GPL'd OS in existence, that's great. And that way, RMS would finally have to stop complaining that it should really be called GNU/Linux!;^)
But I don't see the actual FullPliant implementation as much more than a curiosity. The language seems to embody many of the author's personal preferences and prejudices ("inheritance leads to too clever and sophisticated programs"), and the end result seems predictably mediocre. I think some of his stated goals are worthwhile: I consider making languages truly extensible a worthwhile goal, for example, and one which very few languages today even come close to.
But unfortunately, even if FullPliant succeeds in achieving one or other of its goals, the fact that it is such a complete package, right down to a page definition language of dubious value, is likely to inhibit its actual use. I think the author would do better to focus on pushing Pliant as a language with certain unique features, than somewhat Java-like, as a "platform". The whole "Linux without Unix" slant of this/. article is a case in point: no-one's even talking about the language or compiler technology, and what value it may have.
The platform-like stuff could be included as "sample code". It all reminds me a little of things like Pike+Roxen, which undoubtedly could also be implemented on top of a naked Linux kernel to provide a server that, in general, would be pretty useless in real life...
For the record, it's not "Undo" that works across sessions, it's the "Track Changes" feature. There have been documented examples (i.e. not just apocryphal) of companies making available documents, such as contracts, which were edited with "Track Changes" enabled, and then sent out without removing the change history, so that simply by enabling change highlighting, details of prior edits to the document could be seen.
I haven't heard this story related to any classified material, but it's certainly quite feasible. Or, the commercial sector stories may just have been adapted.
Nice idea, but I think you'll find there aren't enough people who think like you do, to make a difference. You might succeed in creating a bit more awareness, but most people will remain disinterested until the issue bites them in their own ass.
I don't know about "surreptitiously participate": I think it's more an issue of pragmatic acceptance. Stamping out individual "file sharing" (to avoid that loaded term, "piracy") is virtually impossible, without a world full of things like CPRM and CSS. If you try to stamp it out, it's not good for PR and you look like an evil bloodsucking corporation. You also don't achieve much, so the hit to your PR is probably not worth it.
[Case in point: I'm currently helping a company install various Linux servers in their NT network, the decision for which was significantly helped along by the threatening letter they received from Microsoft about reporting their current licensing status. Way to go Microsoft, threaten legitimate customers who've just begun to have a viable alternative to your monopoly...]
Added to this is the fact that the unauthorized users of your software don't all represent paying customers. Many of them either can't afford the product, don't really need it, or don't think it's worth the price, and if forced to pay would rather just stop using it. The numbers that software industry groups report as being "lost to piracy" are overinflated by orders of magnitude, in the sense that while copying may nominally add up to those kind of figures, under no conceivable market or legal conditions would that money actually ever be collectible.
Finally, yes, copying is a marketing tool, and one which companies don't have to spend any time, money or other resources on. Since companies can't easily control copying of their products, it makes sense to allow it to occur and judiciously play the heavy every now and then - especially indirectly, through an industry organization - to make sure that potential customers remember that they're supposed to be paying for this stuff.
I have no idea what Linus' visa status actually is, and I suspect he's already a US permanent resident, but if he wasn't he could easily qualify for permanent residence as an "alien of exceptional merit and ability". He doesn't have to rely on Transmeta for work permits.
A lot of those "uneducated American beer-swilling, pork rind-munching citizens" are either in Congress, or working for the INS, and ensure that the rest of the UABSPRM citizens have their jobs "protected" by keeping them dang furriners out. At least, that's all one can conclude if you've ever dealt with any of these people.
After watching the internet bubble expand and pop, taking down so many businesses with it, investors will forever scrutinize the fundamentals in order to make sure such a bloodshed of money never happens to them again.
Oh, it'll happen again, it's just a question of how long it takes for people to forget. There was a nice bubble in electronics companies in the '60s; a big silver bubble in the '70s; a real estate bubble in the '80s; and back when electricity was first commercialized, there was an electricity company bubble.
The other problem is that it's not necessarily prudent to ignore these bubbles: a big problem that mutual funds faced over the past few years was that if they weren't invested in tech stocks, they would underperform everyone else, so they had to invest in tech even if they didn't consider it safe. The same applied to many other kinds of investors, including individuals. So bubbles get fed by otherwise prudent investors who don't see a good alternative. And the longer it carries on, the more people get sucked in. Sneaky, these bubbles!
It's not slander, since I didn't say that I had knowledge that he was a pedophile. I made a speculative comment based on information available to everyone here, namely Katz's own comment, and qualified it with the phrase "sounds like he might be". I'd love to hear someone explain Katz's comment in anything other than a sexist, paternalistic light at the very least.
Thanks! I *did* mean.357, and I picked that up right after I pressed Submit, naturally. But perhaps subconsciously I was thinking of one of the ones you mentioned. Yeah, that's it...;)
A service economy doesn't mean that there are no manufacturing businesses, or that manufacturing businesses aren't important. Rather, it means that services represent a greater proportion of the monetary flow through the economy than do manufactured goods.
The recent bursting of the dot-com bubble has very little to do with whether the economy is service- or manufacturing- based. The "comeback" of traditional manufacturing companies and utilities is a stock market phenomenon, and is simply a conservative investment response to uncertainty in the tech sector. It doesn't represent any kind of long term shift in the economy. Ultimately, what the stock market does, does not actually decide what happens in the economy anyway. The recent dot-com collapse proves this: the stock market attempted, in effect, to jumpstart a new industry by pumping money into it, and although it succeeded to a degree, at some point the reality of what customers actually do with their money had to take over.
Saying that manufacturing "is a more solid and sensible base" misses the point. A service economy necessarily has a base that includes manufacturing, food production, etc.
The simple fact is that dotcoms are merely margin tight vehicles for the distribution of manfactured goods.
You have an obvious strong bias towards manufacturing, but I don't think it reflects reality. You're talking about a subset of the business-to-consumer websites as though it represents the entire market. What about financial services, including banking, share trading, and insurance? What about business-to-business services, which, buzzwords and fads aside, are already big and growing bigger?
They are a symptom of the volatile worldview on Wall Street.
You got that right. One thing you can safely say about investors as a whole: they overreact, to both good news and bad news. Entire successful trading strategies have been built on this fact. But I have news for you: your message represents a fairly typical overreaction of the exact kind that drives people to buy manufacturing stocks in times like these. They then drive the price up beyond what the fundamentals of the companies can support, and soon enough, you'll be reading about how manufacturing stocks are slumping.
martial arts is replacing the fist,.9mm and taser as popular culture's favorite form of combat.
Katz is clearly on top of the trends here: he's noticed the surge in popularity of the.9mm gun. Using bullets ten times smaller than the popular 9mm which it replaces, the.9mm is a thousand times less deadly. People who have been shot with.9mm guns say it feels like the biggest fucking mosquito they've ever seen just bit them, hard. You need a good pair of tweezers to get the bullets out.
In a private interview with Katz, he told me that he was impressed by the fact that the.9mm was 2.4 times bigger than that other famous microweapon, the.375 Magnum. When I pointed out to him that.375 was actually an inch measurement, he turned an unusual shade of crimson and mumbled something about NASA and Mars probes before changing the subject.
What the interview really says is that IBM is not planning to open source AIX, however it is willing to open source any piece of it that the Linux community considers useful. It's claimed that dumping all those lines of source out there at once "wouldn't be prudent".
I've worked with brainwave sensing stuff, which is exactly why I want something more physical. You're suggesting technology which will be as good or better at interpreting signals from our brain than our own nervous system. From what I've seen, we're an incredibly long way from that...
BTW, not a perfect analogy, but why do you plug your printer into your computer's parallel port? Why not just hook it directly to the pins on the CPU?
But I think someone somewhere has misunderstood what languages are for;). When a language is being discussed more than used, it's an utter failure.
Amen! This goes back to what I started out saying. Languages based on academic foundations often tend to have rigorous goals that have much more to do with the requirements of formal systems, or other theoretical requirements, than with making them usable by real humans. There are really two different goals: theoretical soundness vs. usability - and the two often don't intersect, or even have anything to do with each other, although people confuse the two all the time. (Ask a Scheme or Smalltalk programmer to explain why the syntax of their lanugage sucks and you'll get an example of this;)
But I also think that some people underestimate the compromises it takes to "ship" version 1.0 of any given software system. It's easy in hindsight to look back and say, "hey, why didn't Tim just stick to the clean separation of content, structure and presentation which SGML allows", but regardless of any misunderstandings Tim may or may not have had, the real answer to that will invariably be "because we didn't have the time or resources to do it perfectly first time round."
If you were there, why didn't you just set him straight?;)
Thanks for the reference, but I browsed some messages from the early '90s and didn't see anything particularly incriminating. Unless you can provide something more concrete, I shall continue to believe that Tim was a lot smarter than all the SGML nuts, and knew what was really important...
You keep saying that Tim misunderstood SGML, but do you actually have any evidence of that? I'm suggesting that he may have understood SGML and its goals perfectly well, but in the process of singlehandedly creating something useful, he made some pragmatic compromises. Often, the ability to make such compromises work can indicate a deeper understanding of the issues than you might think.
Of course, it's also possible that Tim did misunderstand SGML, or just didn't care about its intent and saw it as simply a useful tool. But I don't know that that's true.
None of these vendors are trying to set new standards - rather, they're addressing specific niches - users with health problems, mobile users, and users who're looking for something a bit more efficient or just different. There'll always be a market for this stuff, but obviously, the Qwerty ain't goin' anywhere anytime soon.
Me, I want MEMS accelerometers embedded in my fingertips so I can just wiggle my fingers and have text appear on the screen...
I'm always amazed at how wrong Tim Berners-Lee got SGML and how for exactly that reason HTML was successful where SGML had failed miserably.
I assume you're saying that Tim misunderstood SGML's goals and mangled them in the creation of HTML, but mightn't it have been a more pragmatic thing? He wanted something usable, and he created it, and it worked.
The software field is littered with theoretically pure technologies which aren't widely adopted because of a staggering variety of practical issues that arise when ordinary mortals are faced with the task of doing something useful with a computer. Every now and then, someone with a practical bent comes along and incorporates just enough of the most useful and usable pieces of one of these pure technologies into a working end product, which people then adopt en masse, largely because the theoretical underpinnings, while imperfectly implemented, significantly improve on what went before.
Think of computing science and the concepts it produces as a Platonic world which effectively has no real existence, because of lack of practically usable implementations. The real world can only generate weak shadows of the concepts in that Platonic world. Cutting-edge software designers attempt to translate theoretical concepts into useful and usable end products, but these attempts often fail.
One can't and shouldn't judge people like Tim and their achievements from a purely software-theoretic point of view. Rather, he made something usable for the rest of us, and raised the bar for those coming after him.
You're absolutely right. But you could turn this around: get yourself an Amex or Discover card with the one-time number capability (see the other messages here about one-time card numbers), and explain to your parents how you've taken steps to ensure that your web transactions are secure. Then they'll be impressed by what a smart and savvy daughter they have!
Slashdot Mirror
...but it's interesting that a filter feature designed to weed out trolls also succeeds in weeding out AOL-for-Dummies type statements. Perhaps there's a connection???
Read a bit of Gregory Chaitin's book, The Unknowable (the linked site seems to contain the full text), and you will find some mathematical/philosophical assertions, backed up by LISP code, that aren't so far from the kinds of things you suggest. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and Turing's proof of the unsolvability of the Halting Problem, are allegedly proved using LISP programs. And of course, programs like this tend to require that the language be able to evaluate/compile expressions at runtime, so perhaps the original claim isn't so off-base! ;)
I think the most interesting thing about FullPliant is the whole concept of taking the Linux kernel by itself and using it to build a system free of all the grodiness of the GNU utilities, X, etc. If this helps expand people's imaginations about possible uses for the best GPL'd OS in existence, that's great. And that way, RMS would finally have to stop complaining that it should really be called GNU/Linux! ;^)
But I don't see the actual FullPliant implementation as much more than a curiosity. The language seems to embody many of the author's personal preferences and prejudices ("inheritance leads to too clever and sophisticated programs"), and the end result seems predictably mediocre. I think some of his stated goals are worthwhile: I consider making languages truly extensible a worthwhile goal, for example, and one which very few languages today even come close to.
But unfortunately, even if FullPliant succeeds in achieving one or other of its goals, the fact that it is such a complete package, right down to a page definition language of dubious value, is likely to inhibit its actual use. I think the author would do better to focus on pushing Pliant as a language with certain unique features, than somewhat Java-like, as a "platform". The whole "Linux without Unix" slant of this /. article is a case in point: no-one's even talking about the language or compiler technology, and what value it may have.
The platform-like stuff could be included as "sample code". It all reminds me a little of things like Pike+Roxen, which undoubtedly could also be implemented on top of a naked Linux kernel to provide a server that, in general, would be pretty useless in real life...
I haven't heard this story related to any classified material, but it's certainly quite feasible. Or, the commercial sector stories may just have been adapted.
Nice idea, but I think you'll find there aren't enough people who think like you do, to make a difference. You might succeed in creating a bit more awareness, but most people will remain disinterested until the issue bites them in their own ass.
BTW, I suspect what you're running into is the "no ASCII art pr0n" restriction, in case you didn't already know that.
[Case in point: I'm currently helping a company install various Linux servers in their NT network, the decision for which was significantly helped along by the threatening letter they received from Microsoft about reporting their current licensing status. Way to go Microsoft, threaten legitimate customers who've just begun to have a viable alternative to your monopoly...]
Added to this is the fact that the unauthorized users of your software don't all represent paying customers. Many of them either can't afford the product, don't really need it, or don't think it's worth the price, and if forced to pay would rather just stop using it. The numbers that software industry groups report as being "lost to piracy" are overinflated by orders of magnitude, in the sense that while copying may nominally add up to those kind of figures, under no conceivable market or legal conditions would that money actually ever be collectible.
Finally, yes, copying is a marketing tool, and one which companies don't have to spend any time, money or other resources on. Since companies can't easily control copying of their products, it makes sense to allow it to occur and judiciously play the heavy every now and then - especially indirectly, through an industry organization - to make sure that potential customers remember that they're supposed to be paying for this stuff.
I have no idea what Linus' visa status actually is, and I suspect he's already a US permanent resident, but if he wasn't he could easily qualify for permanent residence as an "alien of exceptional merit and ability". He doesn't have to rely on Transmeta for work permits.
After watching the internet bubble expand and pop, taking down so many businesses with it, investors will forever scrutinize the fundamentals in order to make sure such a bloodshed of money never happens to them again.
Oh, it'll happen again, it's just a question of how long it takes for people to forget. There was a nice bubble in electronics companies in the '60s; a big silver bubble in the '70s; a real estate bubble in the '80s; and back when electricity was first commercialized, there was an electricity company bubble.
The other problem is that it's not necessarily prudent to ignore these bubbles: a big problem that mutual funds faced over the past few years was that if they weren't invested in tech stocks, they would underperform everyone else, so they had to invest in tech even if they didn't consider it safe. The same applied to many other kinds of investors, including individuals. So bubbles get fed by otherwise prudent investors who don't see a good alternative. And the longer it carries on, the more people get sucked in. Sneaky, these bubbles!
Sorry, but if you read Katz, you deserve to have comments like mine inflicted on you.
It's not slander, since I didn't say that I had knowledge that he was a pedophile. I made a speculative comment based on information available to everyone here, namely Katz's own comment, and qualified it with the phrase "sounds like he might be". I'd love to hear someone explain Katz's comment in anything other than a sexist, paternalistic light at the very least.
Thanks! I *did* mean .357, and I picked that up right after I pressed Submit, naturally. But perhaps subconsciously I was thinking of one of the ones you mentioned. Yeah, that's it... ;)
The recent bursting of the dot-com bubble has very little to do with whether the economy is service- or manufacturing- based. The "comeback" of traditional manufacturing companies and utilities is a stock market phenomenon, and is simply a conservative investment response to uncertainty in the tech sector. It doesn't represent any kind of long term shift in the economy. Ultimately, what the stock market does, does not actually decide what happens in the economy anyway. The recent dot-com collapse proves this: the stock market attempted, in effect, to jumpstart a new industry by pumping money into it, and although it succeeded to a degree, at some point the reality of what customers actually do with their money had to take over.
Saying that manufacturing "is a more solid and sensible base" misses the point. A service economy necessarily has a base that includes manufacturing, food production, etc.
The simple fact is that dotcoms are merely margin tight vehicles for the distribution of manfactured goods.
You have an obvious strong bias towards manufacturing, but I don't think it reflects reality. You're talking about a subset of the business-to-consumer websites as though it represents the entire market. What about financial services, including banking, share trading, and insurance? What about business-to-business services, which, buzzwords and fads aside, are already big and growing bigger?
They are a symptom of the volatile worldview on Wall Street.
You got that right. One thing you can safely say about investors as a whole: they overreact, to both good news and bad news. Entire successful trading strategies have been built on this fact. But I have news for you: your message represents a fairly typical overreaction of the exact kind that drives people to buy manufacturing stocks in times like these. They then drive the price up beyond what the fundamentals of the companies can support, and soon enough, you'll be reading about how manufacturing stocks are slumping.
Katz is clearly on top of the trends here: he's noticed the surge in popularity of the .9mm gun. Using bullets ten times smaller than the popular 9mm which it replaces, the .9mm is a thousand times less deadly. People who have been shot with .9mm guns say it feels like the biggest fucking mosquito they've ever seen just bit them, hard. You need a good pair of tweezers to get the bullets out.
In a private interview with Katz, he told me that he was impressed by the fact that the .9mm was 2.4 times bigger than that other famous microweapon, the .375 Magnum. When I pointed out to him that .375 was actually an inch measurement, he turned an unusual shade of crimson and mumbled something about NASA and Mars probes before changing the subject.
I agree. Not only that, sounds like he might be a pedophile too...
What the interview really says is that IBM is not planning to open source AIX, however it is willing to open source any piece of it that the Linux community considers useful. It's claimed that dumping all those lines of source out there at once "wouldn't be prudent".
I've worked with brainwave sensing stuff, which is exactly why I want something more physical. You're suggesting technology which will be as good or better at interpreting signals from our brain than our own nervous system. From what I've seen, we're an incredibly long way from that...
BTW, not a perfect analogy, but why do you plug your printer into your computer's parallel port? Why not just hook it directly to the pins on the CPU?
Amen! This goes back to what I started out saying. Languages based on academic foundations often tend to have rigorous goals that have much more to do with the requirements of formal systems, or other theoretical requirements, than with making them usable by real humans. There are really two different goals: theoretical soundness vs. usability - and the two often don't intersect, or even have anything to do with each other, although people confuse the two all the time. (Ask a Scheme or Smalltalk programmer to explain why the syntax of their lanugage sucks and you'll get an example of this ;)
But I also think that some people underestimate the compromises it takes to "ship" version 1.0 of any given software system. It's easy in hindsight to look back and say, "hey, why didn't Tim just stick to the clean separation of content, structure and presentation which SGML allows", but regardless of any misunderstandings Tim may or may not have had, the real answer to that will invariably be "because we didn't have the time or resources to do it perfectly first time round."
Thanks for the reference, but I browsed some messages from the early '90s and didn't see anything particularly incriminating. Unless you can provide something more concrete, I shall continue to believe that Tim was a lot smarter than all the SGML nuts, and knew what was really important...
Of course, it's also possible that Tim did misunderstand SGML, or just didn't care about its intent and saw it as simply a useful tool. But I don't know that that's true.
Me, I want MEMS accelerometers embedded in my fingertips so I can just wiggle my fingers and have text appear on the screen...
I think I'm beginning to see why you're so confused...
I assume you're saying that Tim misunderstood SGML's goals and mangled them in the creation of HTML, but mightn't it have been a more pragmatic thing? He wanted something usable, and he created it, and it worked.
The software field is littered with theoretically pure technologies which aren't widely adopted because of a staggering variety of practical issues that arise when ordinary mortals are faced with the task of doing something useful with a computer. Every now and then, someone with a practical bent comes along and incorporates just enough of the most useful and usable pieces of one of these pure technologies into a working end product, which people then adopt en masse, largely because the theoretical underpinnings, while imperfectly implemented, significantly improve on what went before.
Think of computing science and the concepts it produces as a Platonic world which effectively has no real existence, because of lack of practically usable implementations. The real world can only generate weak shadows of the concepts in that Platonic world. Cutting-edge software designers attempt to translate theoretical concepts into useful and usable end products, but these attempts often fail.
One can't and shouldn't judge people like Tim and their achievements from a purely software-theoretic point of view. Rather, he made something usable for the rest of us, and raised the bar for those coming after him.
You're absolutely right. But you could turn this around: get yourself an Amex or Discover card with the one-time number capability (see the other messages here about one-time card numbers), and explain to your parents how you've taken steps to ensure that your web transactions are secure. Then they'll be impressed by what a smart and savvy daughter they have!