but we need that money...
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Living Terrors
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· Score: 2
If you read Living Terrors, however, you'll find that we focus instead on the kind of recommendations that preserve civil liberties while actually making a difference--chiefly, upgrading the public health system to be able to respond quickly to a bioterrorist attack. That kind of spending is needed anyway for responding to foodborne disease outbreaks and run-of-the-mill epidemics, so it's just sound public policy.
Sorry, pal, but we need that money for an asteroid shield. First things first!
Seriously, I think one has to attempt make a realistic assessment of the threat and prioritize it amongst many other potential risks civilization faces every day.
Does the book include or reference any assessments of actual likelihoods of such attacks, and rank their expected severity against that of other threats?
I notice that quite a few of the responses to this article contain the expected degree of hysteria. Fear of the unknown quantity is a very powerful persuasive tool, and its abuse can be a form of infoterrorism: a way of achieving desired political goals, without actual bloodshed. I see this tactic used in the computer business all the time: to sell expensive firewalls to gullible companies that would be fine with something at 1/10th the cost, for example. When faced with such issues, we should consider very carefully the degree to which our response is based on unreasoning fear.
I've been reading Slashdot for years, but the only personality I know is Jon Katz.
Have you forgotten Signal 11 already?!;)
I take your point. My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek - I think one reason sites like/. work is that the anonymity doesn't matter, or is an asset, when you're discussing things you're passionate about. You can find people who'll say "yeah, I think that's cool too" or even, "no, dude, that sucks." Either of those responses can be preferable to "that's very interesting" said in baffled or bored tones, which can happen in smaller, more "real" communities, unless they're very interest-centric.
If Katz reads our comments, it's only to calculate how best to make his next piece annoy us, so we'll discuss it, so more banners will get loaded. The ad revenue must flow!
Katz is a Wired-mag reject - frightening thought, but the reality of it doesn't disappoint - who washed up on the shores of Slashdot. Like all "writers" paid to be controversial in newspapers, magazines and on websites, he parades his own half-baked opinions as though they were established facts, the results of years of diligent study. It's a classic technique that still suckers people. It's the very definition of "troll".
So why am I here? Ah, but I have a mission: to spread the word to those who mistake Katz's drivel as a serious attempt at discourse. Be warned: that way lies madness!!!
Well, Slashdot isn't really a community, per se. [...] There are many different purposes here, and nobody really knows each other. What if I were to post 'hey! I'm about to get married!' (I am)? Would anbody care? No. I'm a member of several REAL online communities where this isn't the case.
You mean, when one's karma reaches 50 one hasn't attained ultimate perfection as an individual? OMG!
But you're defining a "REAL" community as one where members care about trivialities in each other's meatspace lives, such as marriage. Heck, I have "real"-life friends with whom I never really discuss such stuff. Babies? Marriage? Death in the family? It's all irrelevant! The question is, how are we going to implement the next cool idea???
If the following lacks coherence or is overly long and rambling, that's 'coz it's 3am and I don't feel like editing it into an ironclad position paper.
Tell me what you consider an extensible language and I'll tell you why I don't think it's extensible enough.
C++ isn't a good example to use, since the level from which it starts is such that no matter how much you extend it, you can't get away from its basic closeness-to-the-machine. That's its strength, when you need it, but you don't always need it. (I'm a good C++ programmer and have developed commercial products with it, so I do have some basis for saying this.)
The criticism of C++ operator overloading is a separate discussion, really, and you have to examine the specifics of the criticism. I don't buy the "it's too powerful so it's confusing/dangerous" kind of argument - that's merely an argument against letting certain programmers loose with it. If one is against operator overloading in general, then you'd have to be against it in other languages like Haskell or even Smalltalk (where operators have names instead of symbols), and I haven't really heard that kind of general criticism. I think the problem a lot of people have with C++ is that it's just plain big and confusing - it has a steep learning curve to reach full competence, and features like operator overloading may appear somewhat "tacked-on". So I don't think the C++ example is really relevant in a discussion of extensibility in programming languages, since I see C++ as having special constraints which aren't faced by higher-level but lower-performing languages.
In general, I think operator overloading is an essential extensibility feature and should probably have its name changed to make it sound less like some kind of extreme measure. In any language in which you can define new data types, you ought to be able to define the operations on those types, and have the language be aware of the relationship between the types and operations. If you can't at least do that, then you're back to plain old procedural programming in FORTRAN/Pascal-original/C.
But extensibility is not just being able to define new classes of object, and the operations on those objects, although that kind of thing is a start.
There are many areas in which extensibility is conceivable and potentially desirable. One that has not been well-addressed is syntax extensibility. The C/C++ preprocessor is one of the most widely-used programming features in existence - take a look at any source code for Linux or GNU and this is quite obvious. However, there are well known problems with this mechanism, and some of those problems significantly limit the potential uses of preprocessor-like features. C-like preprocessors support extensions that don't conform to the language's syntax rules and don't really follow any grammatical-style rules of their own, for example. There have been some attempts at coming up with syntax extensibility which doesn't suffer from this problem, notably in Scheme; but in Scheme, the feature is still constrained by the basic everything-is-a-function-call design of the language.
It can be argued that syntax extensibility isn't necessary or desirable, but I think it's usually an argument from a position of never having had a good example of it. An interesting example of syntax extensibility could be found in the old Clipper database language, which had a very powerful preprocessor that many third-party companies used to create custom command sets, more powerful than the kind of thing that can be done in with C-style preprocessors. This was a very popular feature. However, that preprocessor still suffered from the same problems as the C/C++ preprocessor.
I would be willing to bet large sums of money that if a competent language became available which had useful and theoretically sound syntax extensibility capability, users would go crazy for it. For a comparison in a slightly different area, look at what's happening with XML - everyone and his dog is designing new mini-languages using XML. Some might criticize this or be unnerved by it, but it's filling a need, and even if many examples of XML-based languages are unwise or poorly designed, many are very useful.
Then there's the question of the limitations of existing extensibility features. For example, object-oriented languages which only provide single inheritance are self-limiting in terms of the designs that can be practically implemented in them. I'm not suggesting that traditional multiple inheritance is an essential feature in those environments: I think the problem is that both approaches are wrong. There's more of a future in the separation of interface and implementation required by environments like CORBA and COM, although CORBA also came from an objects-have-a-single-interface direction. From a type-theory perspective, it's obvious that data types can have more than a single interface, but it's also obvious that this doesn't mean that they have to share implementations. So you need the ability to define multiple interfaces on a type or class, and ideally the ability to reuse implementations somewhat independently. The only languages I'm aware of that let you do anything even remotely close to this are some of the functional languages, like Haskell. Interestingly, Java came close but didn't quite make it: it supports classes with multiple interfaces, but the semantics of combining interfaces is slightly broken, and the ability to reuse interface implementations is virtually nonexistent.
So I'm suggesting that many languages with alleged extensibility features actually have serious Achille's heels which limit the usefulness of those features.
Some might say that languages like Smalltalk are extensible. Superficially, that may seem true. But in a sense, they're the opposite of extensible: everything is an object and all operations are message sends, and that's all the compiler understands, syntactically. This makes it trivial to write compilers for the language, but doesn't make the language easier for ordinary humans to write and read. You can add object classes, but you can't build it up beyond the level it was designed to operate at. In this sense, I see languages like Smalltalk, and to a lesser extent, Scheme, as severely limited, rather than extensible. Some might consider this a perverse perspective, but it comes from experience and I can provide real world examples of problems that are difficult to solve in these languages, that can be handled by something as simple as, again, the C preprocessor.
Some of this is just the inevitable mismatch between theoretically-based languages, arising from various mathematical, logical, or computing science formalisms, which tend to be aimed at highly intelligent users in the sciences; and the needs of a broader mass market which usually has far more mundane concerns, including many relating to apparently extraneous issues like deployment, portability, configuration management etc.
The bottom line is that I think we're still in the most incredibly early stages of computer language development. That's probably because designing a really good computer language is an extraordinarily difficult task, and changing people's programming habits is even more difficult. But progress does happen, slowly.
Languages like Java don't represent the state of the art in theoretical language design, but they do represent the slow trickling down of powerful theoretical features into languages that are in widespread use. But standard Java doesn't even support something as basic as first class functions or closures, so we have a long way to go.
First of all, it is your fault that you're +2! If you don't want to be +2, stop posting so many insightful, informative and interesting comments!
Secondly, just as in life, the karma system isn't perfect - it is the sum of what all people do to each other, and sometimes people do bad things to each other, even when assigning karma. Hopefully meta-moderation should ultimately ensure justice for the assignors of undeserved bad karma.
My advice is just sit back, relax, let karma happen, and don't get in it's way!
Making your own copy of someones copyrighted material is not theft since you're not taking anything away from the "victim".
You are taking something away, it's just not something physical. But since the original work isn't physical either, that doesn't mean much.
What you're taking away is some of the author's control over his own work, diluting his right (assuming you grant that it exists) to decide who can benefit from it and under what circumstances. It's a theft of power or control.
If you agree that an author should be allowed to have such rights over his work, then you have to consider violation of those rights immoral. The moral equation changes if you don't feel that authorship rights should be so strong.
BTW, (related to other messages on the thread), this has nothing to do with open source, since most open source depends on authorship rights to control its perpetuation. Otherwise, I could take Linux, modify it, and sell it without source code (kinda like FreeBSD.)
> Here's a zany suggestion: read the article, > take from it what you will, and shut up!
Now there's an enlightened attitude! I read the article, took from it what I wanted, and commented on some of what I took from it - as you did to my comment. Seems fair.
I hope Katz *does* read what's written about him. He might use some of it to improve his writing. My comment wasn't intended as a mindless flame of Katz, but rather because everything he posts generates a slew of this kind of discussion, with incoherent flames (such as your message) on both sides, and I was commenting on why that might be the case - and by implication, why it's not likely to change, unless Katz gets an editor.
This piece raised some thought-provoking ideas. But as with most of Katz's work, he manages to come up with some interesting topics and overall viewpoints, but then flubs it in the execution. He should find himself an editor, or even a ghostwriter, who can make his pieces much more incisive. His big-picture perspective, combined with an eye for human interest items, such as the old Texan woman in this story, seem to provide some readers with enough of the warm fuzzies that they don't care about, or notice, the overall wooliness of his rambling pieces. It's no coincidence he writes so much for Slashdot. His work would be ripped to shreds by a professional editor. (I'm assuming no-one at Slashdot actually edits his work.) In fact, I saw a Katz piece in the magazine Brill's Content (I think?) a while back, and remember thinking that it was more focused than his usual work. I'd love to know how much editing went on in that case; or perhaps he just had a word count to fit within, so was forced to self-edit for a change. It's no surprise that a writer whose lack of analytical skill radiates from every paragraph receives a mixed reception from the Slashdot audience, many of whom prize analytical ability above all else.
I just got a letter in the mail from Microsoft saying that now every local developer on a network is licensed to use the complete package.
So what you're saying is that Microsoft is feeling the heat in the competition for developers, probably at least in part from its open source competitor, Linux.
Decent, commercial software is done by professionals who CAN afford 3K.
That's arguable, but kids out of school who want something to learn and play with usually can't afford $3K. The article has an excellent point - Microsoft, to a large extent, in its push into the big iron world occupied by Sun, Oracle, and IBM, has a licensing policy that's started to look a lot like that of minicomputers when PCs were up-and-coming. This is leaving young and small developers out in the cold - the same class of people who helped get Microsoft where they are now, back when all Microsoft's development tools put together didn't add up to $3K.
"At most, I would accept the idea that time is a consumable - once you use it, it's gone. No going back to check on it later or jumping ahead to see how it's progressing."
I like this idea - Time is kinda like fuel for the universe. Without it, the universe is just up on blocks in a garage somewhere, a useless, static lump.
But put some Time in the tank, start the engine with a Big Bang, and you've got yourself a happenin' Universe - at least until Time runs out!
You're right that the author lost focus in some places, but his basic point is valid: that Linux, and more generally, open source, has the potential to be, or already is, a disruptive technology.
At the moment, there are few cases of established companies that have been seriously hurt by open source (SCO?), but the signs on the ground are there that it's going to start happening more and more, specifically in connection with Microsoft.
As one small example, I've talked to IT managers at smallish companies (50-200 employees) that have been through the cycle of migrating from file servers running Novell to file servers running NT. Some of them are now wondering if they should migrate again, to Linux servers (with their existing Windows workstations.)
Why would they do this? Obviously cost is an issue: why pay expensive MS per-user or per-server license fees for something as basic as file services, which can now be had from any of a number of reliable, free operating systems? Also, customers don't like Microsoft's upgrade-pushing style: one company I know recently was told by MS support to install IE5 on their main file server, in order to fix a problem they were having. This raised some eyebrows, and reminded the customer that with MS, they don't necessarily get to control what software they install on their own boxes. Besides, this says one of two things about Microsoft: either they're deliberately forcing customers to upgrade to newer versions, even of software the customer shouldn't need; or they're not sufficiently competent, either at the support or development level, to maintain separation between their products. Either way, the customer isn't in control, and these are good reasons for customers to consider alternatives.
The same goes for web & proxy servers, etc. - I'm seeing Microsoft shops starting to experiment with these kinds of services running on Linux.
The Linux enterprise server and/or workstation revolution may still be some ways away, but Microsoft is going to start feeling price pressure from Linux on its server licensing policy sometime soon, if it hasn't already.
Articles like this one about General Motors considering Linux for 7,500 dealerships are, at the very least, forcing Microsoft to cut deals with particular customers, or lose business.
The Linux FUD page which Microsoft recently posted on its web site is proof of its concern.
In fact, Linux and open source are particularly interesting disruptive technologies, because they aren't controlled by for-profit companies acting in their own interests, as previous disruptive technologies have been. There really does seem to be the potential here for a fundamental shift in the economics of intellectual property, that may eventually extend beyond the software world (into media, for example). That's not to say that proprietary software will necessarily die, just that it will have to change in some difficult-to-foresee ways, to make room for an unusual competitor.
In many ways, it isn't so hard to understand: companies and individuals are learning the value of sharing on a global scale.
AFAIK, only really small black holes radiate enough to have a significant effect (and evaporate completely). I've not heard of an upper limit on the size of a black hole, and speculation is that the centers of galaxies are humongous black holes with the mass of large numbers of stars.
According to that scenario, our solar system could end up inside such a black hole eventually, as our orbit around the black hole at the core of our galaxy deteriorates...
Re:Is this a blow for CORBA?
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KDE Looks Ahead
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· Score: 1
Is this a small victory for COM?
None of these projects are actually using COM itself (they can't because COM isn't sufficiently multi-platform), so it's not exactly a victory for COM per se.
But you could see it as a victory for some of the ideas behind COM, which has a stronger emphasis on local components.
Does Open Source *need* a COM-like standard???
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KDE Looks Ahead
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· Score: 1
I work on distributed systems, but not at the UI level, so I'm not very familiar with the innards of KDE or Gnome. However, from what I'm reading, both use a somewhat COM-like local component model. Another open source project that does something similar is Mozilla, with its XPCOM architecture.
Shouldn't this be telling us that there's a need, in the open source world, for a standard model of this kind? In-process CORBA seems to have been found wanting by these projects, as discussed elsewhere in this thread and also, for example, in this kde-core-devel message.
Perhaps there's something to be learned from Microsoft here - MS started out with COM as a strictly local component architecture (and took a lot of PR heat from the OMG at the time because of not being distributed), but, has it ended up with a model that's more suitable for local component work?
People have talked about the potential benefits of being able to develop for both KDE and Gnome - a way to help this happen would be for them both to be using the same underlying component model.
Something like this would have benefits way beyond KDE & Gnome. Very few open source projects use CORBA as a central architectural model. Berlin is one exception - it would be interesting to hear what its developers see as the pros and cons of CORBA in that context. But the lack of a standard component model elsewhere limits interoperability throughout the open source universe.
Perhaps the open source community would have better luck than the OMG in coming up with a smaller, tighter common spec for local components than CORBA. It doesn't mean the whole of CORBA has to be thrown out - XPCOM still uses IDL, for example.
As one small example of the benefits of a common local component model, imagine if Mozilla, KDE & Gnome could share low-level components! Surely there's some potential for reuse between those projects (even if only at the level of the component model itself)? Also, developers could work on more than one of these projects, without having to deal with a different API in each case.
Of course, these kind of benefits would all be possible with CORBA. I don't have direct knowledge of the reasons these projects have rejected CORBA in this context, but I'm assuming their reasons were good, and extrapolating from that to the question asked in the subject:
If the chip industry really does hit a "silicon wall", that could be very good for the tech industry as a whole, in the long run.
The silicon chip business has been a bit like the gasoline/petroleum industry, in that many interesting ideas with plenty of potential have been pushed aside or starved for funding, as long as the prevailing product continues to deliver what we're used to.
Businesses are happiest growing and changing incrementally, and it usually takes outside factors to force major change. But when that happens, almost everyone's better off in the end, because we end up with more choices.
I look forward to looking back on the latter part of the 20th Century as the primitive Age of Silicon, and wondering how we ever survived without nano/optic/bio/quantum tech...
"The reaction I've seen to my column here does nothing to change the perception that an awful lot of people just don't get it. Some come across as "I get it, so what?", and that's OK."
I think this is the whole point. You made a generalized claim about an entire group of people, with little or no substantiation. If the distinguishing characteristic of the group in question was a particular skin color, rather than an operating system, this kind of commentary could be called racism.
You now acknowledge that this claim doesn't actually apply to the whole group. Well, there are jerks in any group, particularly online ones, and particularly surrounding something as heavily hyped as Linux. But your reaction to this, via the column, makes you part of the problem.
I think your characterization is particularly unfair given that it's the Linux geeks and Slashdot readers who will shoulder much of the burden of free support of friends, family and neighbours as Linux grows.
"Looks from here like I've touched a nerve. Totally unintentional, but fascinating nonetheless."
This is a common refrain of columnists who make provocative statements in public forums, and profess to be surprised by the response. Often this is sheer disingenuousness, but it can also be because they haven't sufficiently examined the basis of their own opinions and motives, or thought through their statements from an outside perspective. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and put you in the latter category.
Sorry, Evan, but the original poster had the right idea (moderate him up to a 5, somebody!)
Unsubstantiated statements such as "These examples show how the conventional Linux geeks appear to be losing touch with the changing face of the Linux mainstream, and with the people who are buying Linux by the box in ever-increasing numbers" seem to indicate a prejudice of some kind, and certainly qualifies as a troll in my book. Perhaps it wasn't specifically designed to attract Slashdot's attention, but it's specifically designed to annoy the kind of people who read Slashdot. It would be a little different if it was, or could be, substantiated.
How about a bit of research or analysis to find out who these people are who are buying Macmillan's Linux? How many get sold along with a book and end up as shelfware? How many geeks use it and just call it Mandrake? If there really were a huge body of non-geek Macmillan Linux users out there, you'd think there'd be some more evidence of that floating around that could be reported on.
Unfortunately, the line between journalism and opinion pieces has become very blurred, and this article was a good example - presenting a few facts and using them to promote the author's point of view. Ultimately, it doesn't convey anything useful - it raises some interesting facts but doesn't actually make any meaningful attempt to explain them.
There's a big difference between online content regulation that's self-imposed by industry, in response to customer concerns, and content regulation that is imposed by law on all public web sites or web users. The former could be relatively benign, as long as participation is voluntary, e.g. if you want your site to be viewable through filtering software, you have to participate in a rating scheme. There are certainly still concerns here, but nothing like the problems that are raised when governments start mandating aspects of filtering.
The Australian plan is a particularly insidious and unsettling one - while on the surface it seems to allow people to continue to do as they please without repercussions, in fact it requires the individual to acknowledge and accept the government's right to censor material which they view.
There is no voluntary component - under the Australian law, as I understand it, if users choose not to run filtering software on their computer, they are violating the law. Citizens are forced to choose between exercising what many consider a basic human right, namely the freedom to communicate with others, and breaking the law. Some may consider this a minor issue, but it isn't minor when a government begins criminalizing behavior which otherwise law-abiding citizens might reasonably indulge in.
It's a pity that people like Papows so take for granted the protections that their (U.S.) Constitution provides them with, that they forget how important such protections are. Unfortunately, Australia may need to learn firsthand what the disadvantages of broad censorship laws are before sufficient political will is mustered to eliminate them.
I imagine that Dr. Sinai's other work in security and terrorism analysis is probably of a higher standard, but Jane's would do its readers a service by not publishing this article.
It reads like a bad term paper, and there's little meaningful information to be gleaned from it. This raises the question of what the point would be of inflicting it on Jane's readers, who presumably pay for the magazine, as well as valuing their own time.
The first post I read in response to the IPv4 article indicated it was a piece of garbage
All the more reason for Hemos (in that particular case) to have saved us all some time, checked up on it, and posted it as a hoax (if he was going to post it at all), rather than using Slashdot as his personal "I don't know enough to evaluate this, can you guys help?" service.
I was encouraged by Roblimo's statement about the checking of the 911 story. If all Slashdot "journalists" are as thorough, then I'm happy.
BTW, I wasn't saying trad media is better. There's no question the Slashdot approach adds value to traditional news, in a bunch of ways. But with its specific focus, and the fact that it doesn't produce large quantities of its own material, there's little excuse for quality control holes.
I wonder if slashdotting a police web server is a crime?;^)
So, it looks like this might be the real thing, but I agree with the basic concern: the verification bar on Slashdot right now is pretty low.
The other day, that IETF draft that claimed to have expanded the IPv4 address space was a good example of something that I would have been quite happy never to have heard of - a pointless waste of time. If the initial article had mentioned that it was either a hoax or just plain confused, I wouldn't have bothered to try to read it. Posting such things on Slashdot only lends them undeserved legitimacy and exposure.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, pal, but we need that money for an asteroid shield. First things first!
Seriously, I think one has to attempt make a realistic assessment of the threat and prioritize it amongst many other potential risks civilization faces every day.
Does the book include or reference any assessments of actual likelihoods of such attacks, and rank their expected severity against that of other threats?
I notice that quite a few of the responses to this article contain the expected degree of hysteria. Fear of the unknown quantity is a very powerful persuasive tool, and its abuse can be a form of infoterrorism: a way of achieving desired political goals, without actual bloodshed. I see this tactic used in the computer business all the time: to sell expensive firewalls to gullible companies that would be fine with something at 1/10th the cost, for example. When faced with such issues, we should consider very carefully the degree to which our response is based on unreasoning fear.
Have you forgotten Signal 11 already?! ;)
I take your point. My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek - I think one reason sites like /. work is that the anonymity doesn't matter, or is an asset, when you're discussing things you're passionate about. You can find people who'll say "yeah, I think that's cool too" or even, "no, dude, that sucks." Either of those responses can be preferable to "that's very interesting" said in baffled or bored tones, which can happen in smaller, more "real" communities, unless they're very interest-centric.
Katz is a Wired-mag reject - frightening thought, but the reality of it doesn't disappoint - who washed up on the shores of Slashdot. Like all "writers" paid to be controversial in newspapers, magazines and on websites, he parades his own half-baked opinions as though they were established facts, the results of years of diligent study. It's a classic technique that still suckers people. It's the very definition of "troll".
So why am I here? Ah, but I have a mission: to spread the word to those who mistake Katz's drivel as a serious attempt at discourse. Be warned: that way lies madness!!!
You mean, when one's karma reaches 50 one hasn't attained ultimate perfection as an individual? OMG!
But you're defining a "REAL" community as one where members care about trivialities in each other's meatspace lives, such as marriage. Heck, I have "real"-life friends with whom I never really discuss such stuff. Babies? Marriage? Death in the family? It's all irrelevant! The question is, how are we going to implement the next cool idea???
BTW, best wishes for your impending marriage! ;^)
Tell me what you consider an extensible language and I'll tell you why I don't think it's extensible enough.
C++ isn't a good example to use, since the level from which it starts is such that no matter how much you extend it, you can't get away from its basic closeness-to-the-machine. That's its strength, when you need it, but you don't always need it. (I'm a good C++ programmer and have developed commercial products with it, so I do have some basis for saying this.)
The criticism of C++ operator overloading is a separate discussion, really, and you have to examine the specifics of the criticism. I don't buy the "it's too powerful so it's confusing/dangerous" kind of argument - that's merely an argument against letting certain programmers loose with it. If one is against operator overloading in general, then you'd have to be against it in other languages like Haskell or even Smalltalk (where operators have names instead of symbols), and I haven't really heard that kind of general criticism. I think the problem a lot of people have with C++ is that it's just plain big and confusing - it has a steep learning curve to reach full competence, and features like operator overloading may appear somewhat "tacked-on". So I don't think the C++ example is really relevant in a discussion of extensibility in programming languages, since I see C++ as having special constraints which aren't faced by higher-level but lower-performing languages.
In general, I think operator overloading is an essential extensibility feature and should probably have its name changed to make it sound less like some kind of extreme measure. In any language in which you can define new data types, you ought to be able to define the operations on those types, and have the language be aware of the relationship between the types and operations. If you can't at least do that, then you're back to plain old procedural programming in FORTRAN/Pascal-original/C.
But extensibility is not just being able to define new classes of object, and the operations on those objects, although that kind of thing is a start.
There are many areas in which extensibility is conceivable and potentially desirable. One that has not been well-addressed is syntax extensibility. The C/C++ preprocessor is one of the most widely-used programming features in existence - take a look at any source code for Linux or GNU and this is quite obvious. However, there are well known problems with this mechanism, and some of those problems significantly limit the potential uses of preprocessor-like features. C-like preprocessors support extensions that don't conform to the language's syntax rules and don't really follow any grammatical-style rules of their own, for example. There have been some attempts at coming up with syntax extensibility which doesn't suffer from this problem, notably in Scheme; but in Scheme, the feature is still constrained by the basic everything-is-a-function-call design of the language.
It can be argued that syntax extensibility isn't necessary or desirable, but I think it's usually an argument from a position of never having had a good example of it. An interesting example of syntax extensibility could be found in the old Clipper database language, which had a very powerful preprocessor that many third-party companies used to create custom command sets, more powerful than the kind of thing that can be done in with C-style preprocessors. This was a very popular feature. However, that preprocessor still suffered from the same problems as the C/C++ preprocessor.
I would be willing to bet large sums of money that if a competent language became available which had useful and theoretically sound syntax extensibility capability, users would go crazy for it. For a comparison in a slightly different area, look at what's happening with XML - everyone and his dog is designing new mini-languages using XML. Some might criticize this or be unnerved by it, but it's filling a need, and even if many examples of XML-based languages are unwise or poorly designed, many are very useful.
Then there's the question of the limitations of existing extensibility features. For example, object-oriented languages which only provide single inheritance are self-limiting in terms of the designs that can be practically implemented in them. I'm not suggesting that traditional multiple inheritance is an essential feature in those environments: I think the problem is that both approaches are wrong. There's more of a future in the separation of interface and implementation required by environments like CORBA and COM, although CORBA also came from an objects-have-a-single-interface direction. From a type-theory perspective, it's obvious that data types can have more than a single interface, but it's also obvious that this doesn't mean that they have to share implementations. So you need the ability to define multiple interfaces on a type or class, and ideally the ability to reuse implementations somewhat independently. The only languages I'm aware of that let you do anything even remotely close to this are some of the functional languages, like Haskell. Interestingly, Java came close but didn't quite make it: it supports classes with multiple interfaces, but the semantics of combining interfaces is slightly broken, and the ability to reuse interface implementations is virtually nonexistent.
So I'm suggesting that many languages with alleged extensibility features actually have serious Achille's heels which limit the usefulness of those features.
Some might say that languages like Smalltalk are extensible. Superficially, that may seem true. But in a sense, they're the opposite of extensible: everything is an object and all operations are message sends, and that's all the compiler understands, syntactically. This makes it trivial to write compilers for the language, but doesn't make the language easier for ordinary humans to write and read. You can add object classes, but you can't build it up beyond the level it was designed to operate at. In this sense, I see languages like Smalltalk, and to a lesser extent, Scheme, as severely limited, rather than extensible. Some might consider this a perverse perspective, but it comes from experience and I can provide real world examples of problems that are difficult to solve in these languages, that can be handled by something as simple as, again, the C preprocessor.
Some of this is just the inevitable mismatch between theoretically-based languages, arising from various mathematical, logical, or computing science formalisms, which tend to be aimed at highly intelligent users in the sciences; and the needs of a broader mass market which usually has far more mundane concerns, including many relating to apparently extraneous issues like deployment, portability, configuration management etc.
The bottom line is that I think we're still in the most incredibly early stages of computer language development. That's probably because designing a really good computer language is an extraordinarily difficult task, and changing people's programming habits is even more difficult. But progress does happen, slowly. Languages like Java don't represent the state of the art in theoretical language design, but they do represent the slow trickling down of powerful theoretical features into languages that are in widespread use. But standard Java doesn't even support something as basic as first class functions or closures, so we have a long way to go.
Happy New Year!
First of all, it is your fault that you're +2! If you don't want to be +2, stop posting so many insightful, informative and interesting comments!
Secondly, just as in life, the karma system isn't perfect - it is the sum of what all people do to each other, and sometimes people do bad things to each other, even when assigning karma. Hopefully meta-moderation should ultimately ensure justice for the assignors of undeserved bad karma.
My advice is just sit back, relax, let karma happen, and don't get in it's way!
You are taking something away, it's just not something physical. But since the original work isn't physical either, that doesn't mean much.
What you're taking away is some of the author's control over his own work, diluting his right (assuming you grant that it exists) to decide who can benefit from it and under what circumstances. It's a theft of power or control.
If you agree that an author should be allowed to have such rights over his work, then you have to consider violation of those rights immoral. The moral equation changes if you don't feel that authorship rights should be so strong.BTW, (related to other messages on the thread), this has nothing to do with open source, since most open source depends on authorship rights to control its perpetuation. Otherwise, I could take Linux, modify it, and sell it without source code (kinda like FreeBSD .)
> take from it what you will, and shut up!
Now there's an enlightened attitude! I read the article, took from it what I wanted, and commented on some of what I took from it - as you did to my comment. Seems fair.
I hope Katz *does* read what's written about him. He might use some of it to improve his writing. My comment wasn't intended as a mindless flame of Katz, but rather because everything he posts generates a slew of this kind of discussion, with incoherent flames (such as your message) on both sides, and I was commenting on why that might be the case - and by implication, why it's not likely to change, unless Katz gets an editor.
Click here to find out why Katz isn't universally liked.
This piece raised some thought-provoking ideas. But as with most of Katz's work, he manages to come up with some interesting topics and overall viewpoints, but then flubs it in the execution. He should find himself an editor, or even a ghostwriter, who can make his pieces much more incisive. His big-picture perspective, combined with an eye for human interest items, such as the old Texan woman in this story, seem to provide some readers with enough of the warm fuzzies that they don't care about, or notice, the overall wooliness of his rambling pieces. It's no coincidence he writes so much for Slashdot. His work would be ripped to shreds by a professional editor. (I'm assuming no-one at Slashdot actually edits his work.) In fact, I saw a Katz piece in the magazine Brill's Content (I think?) a while back, and remember thinking that it was more focused than his usual work. I'd love to know how much editing went on in that case; or perhaps he just had a word count to fit within, so was forced to self-edit for a change. It's no surprise that a writer whose lack of analytical skill radiates from every paragraph receives a mixed reception from the Slashdot audience, many of whom prize analytical ability above all else.
...especially when the cactus in question contains a video camera for monitoring clandestine meetings between Disney staff and journalists!
So what you're saying is that Microsoft is feeling the heat in the competition for developers, probably at least in part from its open source competitor, Linux.
Decent, commercial software is done by professionals who CAN afford 3K.
That's arguable, but kids out of school who want something to learn and play with usually can't afford $3K. The article has an excellent point - Microsoft, to a large extent, in its push into the big iron world occupied by Sun, Oracle, and IBM, has a licensing policy that's started to look a lot like that of minicomputers when PCs were up-and-coming. This is leaving young and small developers out in the cold - the same class of people who helped get Microsoft where they are now, back when all Microsoft's development tools put together didn't add up to $3K.
I like this idea - Time is kinda like fuel for the universe. Without it, the universe is just up on blocks in a garage somewhere, a useless, static lump.
But put some Time in the tank, start the engine with a Big Bang, and you've got yourself a happenin' Universe - at least until Time runs out!
At the moment, there are few cases of established companies that have been seriously hurt by open source (SCO?), but the signs on the ground are there that it's going to start happening more and more, specifically in connection with Microsoft.
As one small example, I've talked to IT managers at smallish companies (50-200 employees) that have been through the cycle of migrating from file servers running Novell to file servers running NT. Some of them are now wondering if they should migrate again, to Linux servers (with their existing Windows workstations.)
Why would they do this? Obviously cost is an issue: why pay expensive MS per-user or per-server license fees for something as basic as file services, which can now be had from any of a number of reliable, free operating systems? Also, customers don't like Microsoft's upgrade-pushing style: one company I know recently was told by MS support to install IE5 on their main file server, in order to fix a problem they were having. This raised some eyebrows, and reminded the customer that with MS, they don't necessarily get to control what software they install on their own boxes. Besides, this says one of two things about Microsoft: either they're deliberately forcing customers to upgrade to newer versions, even of software the customer shouldn't need; or they're not sufficiently competent, either at the support or development level, to maintain separation between their products. Either way, the customer isn't in control, and these are good reasons for customers to consider alternatives.
The same goes for web & proxy servers, etc. - I'm seeing Microsoft shops starting to experiment with these kinds of services running on Linux.
The Linux enterprise server and/or workstation revolution may still be some ways away, but Microsoft is going to start feeling price pressure from Linux on its server licensing policy sometime soon, if it hasn't already.
Articles like this one about General Motors considering Linux for 7,500 dealerships are, at the very least, forcing Microsoft to cut deals with particular customers, or lose business.
The Linux FUD page which Microsoft recently posted on its web site is proof of its concern.
In fact, Linux and open source are particularly interesting disruptive technologies, because they aren't controlled by for-profit companies acting in their own interests, as previous disruptive technologies have been. There really does seem to be the potential here for a fundamental shift in the economics of intellectual property, that may eventually extend beyond the software world (into media, for example). That's not to say that proprietary software will necessarily die, just that it will have to change in some difficult-to-foresee ways, to make room for an unusual competitor.
In many ways, it isn't so hard to understand: companies and individuals are learning the value of sharing on a global scale.
According to that scenario, our solar system could end up inside such a black hole eventually, as our orbit around the black hole at the core of our galaxy deteriorates...
None of these projects are actually using COM itself (they can't because COM isn't sufficiently multi-platform), so it's not exactly a victory for COM per se.
But you could see it as a victory for some of the ideas behind COM, which has a stronger emphasis on local components.
Shouldn't this be telling us that there's a need, in the open source world, for a standard model of this kind? In-process CORBA seems to have been found wanting by these projects, as discussed elsewhere in this thread and also, for example, in this kde-core-devel message.
Perhaps there's something to be learned from Microsoft here - MS started out with COM as a strictly local component architecture (and took a lot of PR heat from the OMG at the time because of not being distributed), but, has it ended up with a model that's more suitable for local component work?
People have talked about the potential benefits of being able to develop for both KDE and Gnome - a way to help this happen would be for them both to be using the same underlying component model.
Something like this would have benefits way beyond KDE & Gnome. Very few open source projects use CORBA as a central architectural model. Berlin is one exception - it would be interesting to hear what its developers see as the pros and cons of CORBA in that context. But the lack of a standard component model elsewhere limits interoperability throughout the open source universe.
Perhaps the open source community would have better luck than the OMG in coming up with a smaller, tighter common spec for local components than CORBA. It doesn't mean the whole of CORBA has to be thrown out - XPCOM still uses IDL, for example.
As one small example of the benefits of a common local component model, imagine if Mozilla, KDE & Gnome could share low-level components! Surely there's some potential for reuse between those projects (even if only at the level of the component model itself)? Also, developers could work on more than one of these projects, without having to deal with a different API in each case.
Of course, these kind of benefits would all be possible with CORBA. I don't have direct knowledge of the reasons these projects have rejected CORBA in this context, but I'm assuming their reasons were good, and extrapolating from that to the question asked in the subject:
Does Open Source need a COM-like standard???
The silicon chip business has been a bit like the gasoline/petroleum industry, in that many interesting ideas with plenty of potential have been pushed aside or starved for funding, as long as the prevailing product continues to deliver what we're used to.
Businesses are happiest growing and changing incrementally, and it usually takes outside factors to force major change. But when that happens, almost everyone's better off in the end, because we end up with more choices.
I look forward to looking back on the latter part of the 20th Century as the primitive Age of Silicon, and wondering how we ever survived without nano/optic/bio/quantum tech...
I think this is the whole point. You made a generalized claim about an entire group of people, with little or no substantiation. If the distinguishing characteristic of the group in question was a particular skin color, rather than an operating system, this kind of commentary could be called racism.
You now acknowledge that this claim doesn't actually apply to the whole group. Well, there are jerks in any group, particularly online ones, and particularly surrounding something as heavily hyped as Linux. But your reaction to this, via the column, makes you part of the problem.
I think your characterization is particularly unfair given that it's the Linux geeks and Slashdot readers who will shoulder much of the burden of free support of friends, family and neighbours as Linux grows.
"Looks from here like I've touched a nerve. Totally unintentional, but fascinating nonetheless."
This is a common refrain of columnists who make provocative statements in public forums, and profess to be surprised by the response. Often this is sheer disingenuousness, but it can also be because they haven't sufficiently examined the basis of their own opinions and motives, or thought through their statements from an outside perspective. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and put you in the latter category.
Unsubstantiated statements such as "These examples show how the conventional Linux geeks appear to be losing touch with the changing face of the Linux mainstream, and with the people who are buying Linux by the box in ever-increasing numbers" seem to indicate a prejudice of some kind, and certainly qualifies as a troll in my book. Perhaps it wasn't specifically designed to attract Slashdot's attention, but it's specifically designed to annoy the kind of people who read Slashdot. It would be a little different if it was, or could be, substantiated.
How about a bit of research or analysis to find out who these people are who are buying Macmillan's Linux? How many get sold along with a book and end up as shelfware? How many geeks use it and just call it Mandrake? If there really were a huge body of non-geek Macmillan Linux users out there, you'd think there'd be some more evidence of that floating around that could be reported on.
Unfortunately, the line between journalism and opinion pieces has become very blurred, and this article was a good example - presenting a few facts and using them to promote the author's point of view. Ultimately, it doesn't convey anything useful - it raises some interesting facts but doesn't actually make any meaningful attempt to explain them.
The Australian plan is a particularly insidious and unsettling one - while on the surface it seems to allow people to continue to do as they please without repercussions, in fact it requires the individual to acknowledge and accept the government's right to censor material which they view.
There is no voluntary component - under the Australian law, as I understand it, if users choose not to run filtering software on their computer, they are violating the law. Citizens are forced to choose between exercising what many consider a basic human right, namely the freedom to communicate with others, and breaking the law. Some may consider this a minor issue, but it isn't minor when a government begins criminalizing behavior which otherwise law-abiding citizens might reasonably indulge in.
It's a pity that people like Papows so take for granted the protections that their (U.S.) Constitution provides them with, that they forget how important such protections are. Unfortunately, Australia may need to learn firsthand what the disadvantages of broad censorship laws are before sufficient political will is mustered to eliminate them.
It reads like a bad term paper, and there's little meaningful information to be gleaned from it. This raises the question of what the point would be of inflicting it on Jane's readers, who presumably pay for the magazine, as well as valuing their own time.
All the more reason for Hemos (in that particular case) to have saved us all some time, checked up on it, and posted it as a hoax (if he was going to post it at all), rather than using Slashdot as his personal "I don't know enough to evaluate this, can you guys help?" service.
I was encouraged by Roblimo's statement about the checking of the 911 story. If all Slashdot "journalists" are as thorough, then I'm happy.
BTW, I wasn't saying trad media is better. There's no question the Slashdot approach adds value to traditional news, in a bunch of ways. But with its specific focus, and the fact that it doesn't produce large quantities of its own material, there's little excuse for quality control holes.
http://www.ci.st-george.ut.us/sgpd/geninfo/email.h tm
I wonder if slashdotting a police web server is a crime? ;^)
So, it looks like this might be the real thing, but I agree with the basic concern: the verification bar on Slashdot right now is pretty low.
The other day, that IETF draft that claimed to have expanded the IPv4 address space was a good example of something that I would have been quite happy never to have heard of - a pointless waste of time. If the initial article had mentioned that it was either a hoax or just plain confused, I wouldn't have bothered to try to read it. Posting such things on Slashdot only lends them undeserved legitimacy and exposure.
The article is here: Intel Cuts Pentium Prices