I remember reading about the music industry from "insiders" before Napster et al. The story about six years ago went thus:
"Record companies lose money on CDs. Recorded music has not turned a profit for a long time. The real money is made from concert tickets and merchandising."
I'd be interested to know what happened to this story and the people who used to tell it. Sounds to me like it's every bit as relevant today. But the RIAA don't want anyone to hear it, because now it has a scapegoat for its members' lousy market performances.
> I get the graphical abilities of X without all the clutter that usually attends it
It would be churlish of me not to mention...:)
X-Windows:...A mistake carried out to perfection. X-Windows:...Dissatisfaction guaranteed. X-Windows:...Don't get frustrated without it. X-Windows:...Even your dog won't like it. X-Windows:...Flaky and built to stay that way. X-Windows:...Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems. X-Windows:...Flawed beyond belief. X-Windows:...Form follows malfunction. X-Windows:...Garbage at your fingertips. X-Windows:...Ignorance is our most important resource. X-Windows:...It could be worse, but it'll take time. X-Windows:...It could happen to you. X-Windows:...Japan's secret weapon. X-Windows:...Let it get in *your* way. X-Windows:...Live the nightmare. X-Windows:...More than enough rope. X-Windows:...Never had it, never will. X-Windows:...No hardware is safe. X-Windows:...Power tools for power fools. X-Windows:...Putting new limits on productivity. X-Windows:...Simplicity made complex. X-Windows:...The cutting edge of obsolescence. X-Windows:...The art of incompetence. X-Windows:...The defacto substandard. X-Windows:...The first fully modular software disaster. X-Windows:...The joke that kills. X-Windows:...The problem for your problem. X-Windows:...There's got to be a better way. X-Windows:...Warn your friends about it. X-Windows:...You'd better sit down. X-Windows:...You'll envy the dead.
Every article like this I read makes me happier and happier that IANAL. Can you image having to deal with that kind of stuff every day? Eeeeew. It's worse than Prolog! >:-o
If I ever *do* become a lawyer for some reason, someone please put me out of my misery?
> CDMA was so revolutionary that when it was first discussed, many thought it couldn't be made to work.
I have to take issue with this, as it's clearly nonsense. Multi-user spread-spectrum radio communications have been in use for over fifty years by the military. The technology is so basic they've been teach the principles to undergraduates for at least ten years.
Anyone who did express that kind of scepticism would surely have been laughed out the door.
So, someone's finally noticed that using a souped-up version of BASIC for writing mission-critical numerical code is a bad idea.:)
However, it's likely that most programmers who needed features such as inheritence, polymorphism, function pointers and so on have already bitten the bullet and moved to a C++ environment; trading off some gripes about the "standard implicit type conversions" (spit) for the increase in modularity, interoperability, etc. Introducing such features into the Fortran language now isn't going to re-write thirty years of pre-F2000 code. It feels like we're going to end up with "VB for scientists"at this rate! But the real reason that so many people still stubbornly use Fortran is *performance*. Because the language is so much simpler (i.e. less expressive) than C or Java, it's hell of a lot easier to perform optimisations on it. Good Fortran compilers can re-arrange loop nests and do all sorts of clever stuff to improve parallelism, locality, and other aspects of performance. Add expressiveness (in the form of pointers, for example) and you add many extra complications which can render the optimisations invalid. If you can't optimise it as aggressively as you used to, you've just lost the penultimate excuse that anyone is still writing in Fortran. (The last excuse is that the 500,000 line codebase they're working on is also written in Fortran:-)).
Now I'm sure that lots of professional users and compiler writers have been involved in drafting the new standard, and that these concerns have been addressed. But I still reckon that Fortran needs euthanasia, not resurrection!
> Finally, they use this common secret bitstring as a key for a one-time pad.
Aha! So the cyphertext itself can be transmitted over an "open" channel. Cunning.:)
But, it sounds to me like it could be fairly inefficient. From what I remember, you need one bit of one-time-pad for every bit of plaintext you want to transmit. The process above could be quite time-consuming (relatively speaking) if only 0.1% of your photons get through. And even if you're sending the equivalent of an email, you'll need a key-string of tens of thousands of bits. So it might be secure, but you'd end up paying for it in speed.
From the guff written here, it all seems implausible. Encoding a message in single photons is fine, but I find it hard to believe that you can transmit a stream of photons several miles through the atmosphere without a single one of them being absorbed or scattered (which would look the same as interception). It's just light, after all.
I wish I could remember any physics. Then I could say something about the possibility of "amplifying" a signal in which the symbols are single photons. But I can't, so I won't even try.
Plus, even taking the above on trust, it doesn't sound too hard to disrupt (with, say, a mirror).
Corrections and extra technical info most welcome!:)
Genetic algorithms are not proof of evolutionary theory. They merely demonstrate that, under very controlled conditions, the application of "survival of the fittest" and random mutations in a "gene pool" can allow solutions to develop in a way analogous to natural selection.
You can't make a jump from that to proving the theory of evolution by natural selection. Indeed, it's highly unlikely that that theory will ever be proved beyond doubt, and many people (not just loonies) expect it to be debunked sooner rather than later. (Personally, I don't hold that view.) Genetic algorithms are interesting - I've had fun with them myself. But they *prove* exactly nothing.
>OO style can be written in any language, including assembler, C, Pascal, you name it.
> OO code however can only be written in an OO language.
This is a distinction which I've never heard made before. I don't believe that it holds water.
By the duck argument: If it looks like an OO program, and it quacks like an OO program, then it's an OO program. If it neither looks nor quacks object oriented, then it's not. The language is merely the vehicle for expression.
Doing OOP in a language which doesn't support it is a nuisance, and writing non-OO code in a language which is "purely OO" can also be so. I spent some time writing OO code in ANSI C, then gave up because manually maintaining a "this" pointer is messy, error prone and a waste of my time when I can get a machine to do it for free. And don't even bother trying vtbls and runtime type identification without language support.
And yes, I've been in the position of inheriting some non-OO code (K&R C, in fact) and having to munge it into an OO framework. Yes, you do end up with some objects whose methods are just spaghetti, but by abstracting those functions behind a suitable class interface (i.e. encapsulation), you get some modules which can be used in an object-oriented application. You can go ahead and instantiate many objects of those classes, and they all function independently. But I *still* would not go as far as to call it object-oriented code.
> > One word - ew! > Why ew? Because of your limited programming > experience with languages where this was > eschewed?
Nope, just flamebait:)
> Explain? How can you write a Non-OO program in > a Pure-OO language?
I'm not sure what your question really is here, and you seem to have answered it yourself. You can take your problem, use structured design / functional decomposition to come up with a solution circa 1980, then implement it in Java much as you would do in C. A single class, with many methods and members (hell, make 'em static while you're at it)... no polymorphism, no inheritence, no data hiding, no application-level abstraction.
You can go one step back up the ladder and pretend to be using Pascal/Modula2/Ada, using classes as abstract data types and providing simple access functions. Still not what most people would call an "object-oriented" program.
Remember, design *is* programming. A program which deliberately avoids the object-oriented features of its implementation language cannot be called OO just because it "contains objects". A good language is one which allows the programmer to express him/herself in the most suitable way for the problem being solved. If a developer has to find "ways around" a particular feature of the language, then that language is flawed.
Me? If I was asked "what is the most harmful programming construct", I would choose type casts every time - yes, even over gotos and pointers.
As you've probably guessed, I like C++. I tried Java and didn't like it. Therefore, I am just ranting bitterly and should be ignored at all costs.:))
> This will undoubtedly be my most controversial > proposal, but bear with me.
I can agree with almost every other proposal in this article, but he's right - this one will cause a fracas.
> I am not talking about removing int, float, > double, char, and other types completely. I > simply want to make them full objects with > classes, methods, inheritance, and so forth.
One word - ew!
> This would make Java's type system much > cleaner. We'd no longer need to use type- > wrapper classes to add primitives to lists and > hash tables. We could write methods that > operated on all variables and data.
What you really need is generics (as in C++ templates). Java collections are vile, since they suffer from type loss even when used with "real" objects. I'm surprised that didn't come into this top ten; it's a major language deficiency.
> All types would be classes and all > classes would be types. Every variable, field, > and argument would be an instance of Object. > Java would finally become a pure object- > oriented language.
However, that wouldn't make all Java programs "object-oriented programs", nor would it make all Java developers "object-oriented programmers". I have a suspicion that it might impact things like the JNI too.
> Programmers in each environment need a language > tailored for them. One size does not fit all.
<ahem> Quite. That's why you don't start an exercise in OOD by deriving everything from "TObject".:)
The real problem with "research" like this is that it brings out the very worst in the peer review
system which usually serves scientists so well. As soon as a journal dares to publish something so
dubious, there is a huge backlash by the establishment, to the extent that real, innovative research
can be stifled.
The best-known example of this phenomenon was the cold-fusion debacle of the late '80s.
A group of researchers claimed (essentially) to have initiated nuclear fusion in a beaker using
heavy water and palladium electrodes. No-one else was able to reproduce the experimental results.
The result, however, was not just to discredit the report's authors, but to cause a scepticism so
immense that no electro-chemist could publish a paper which mentioned a similar experiment. I can
see the same happening to unsuspecting scientists working on superconductors now.
I would link to an interesting editorial in this month's NewScientist,
which describes the phenomenon in considerable detail, but it would appear that they only put it
in the print version. Shame, that.
165 In view of the failure of the applicants to establish that the copyright work was protected by a technological protection measure, it is not necessary for me to determine whether the devices installed by Mr Stevens in the PlayStation consoles were circumvention devices.
166 In an affidavit read on the last day of the hearing, Mr Nabarro expressed the opinion that the chips had no purpose other than overriding the anti-piracy devices of the applicants. The price Mr Bannon paid for being permitted to read the affidavit at such a late stage (Mr Nabarro being already on his way to the airport) was that he conceded that Mr Nabarro's evidence was not literally true. In particular, Mr Bannon accepted that the installation of the chip enabled the owner of the console also to play a back-up copy of the PlayStation game which lacked the access code.
167 On the evidence, I would have held that the chips installed by Mr Stevens had only a limited commercially significant use other than circumventing or facilitating the circumvention of the access code. Thus, if the access code had been a "technological protection measure", the chips would have been circumvention devices. I would also have found that Mr Stevens sold or promoted (through advertisements in the Trading Post) the circumvention devices and that he knew that the devices would be used to circumvent or facilitate the circumvention of a technological protection measure.
</snip>
(Emphasis added)
So despite the fact that the judge thought it unnecessary to determine whether the mod chips were a "circumvention device", he goes ahead and expresses the opinion that they blatantly are, and he would have prefered to rule in the opposite direction.
At least it sets some kind of lower threshold on what can be considered a "technological protection measure", thus raising the bar slightly higher for companies trying to stifle fair use of their products. But in the end, the wrong law was passed, and the wrong law is still on the statute books. So how great this ruling really is, I don't know.
And it was nice to see the old chestnut of "loading into RAM is theft" re-appearing; I thought that one was already put to rest for good!
We still need to discuss the LICENSE of Arianne as actually code is only usable for GPL projects and being an engine that perhaps is not good, also we need to avoid the GPL 2.0 blackhole by, perhaps, switching to Affero GPL to disallow service providers to avoid the GPL restrictions to enforce users rights. Our goals should be:
Open Source
Disallow possible ways of close RP, AI or framework of the Engine
Allow creation of close source clients easily
Disallow use of Arianne by Service providers that doesn't collaborate into Open Source
The resulting license and the discussion to reach it should be done on arianne-general. I WON'T allow any kind of Arianne special License. We DON'T forbid commercialization of Arianne, we forbid closing source the application.
Apart from the fact that I can only make sense of one word in three, I smell confusion. If the code is currently released under GPL, then I guess that's because either (a) it contains code borrowed from some other GPL'd program, (b) one or more of the developers has decided to copyleft their contribution, or (c) both of the above. If you want to modify the license in some way, you'd better start re-writing the parts of the code which are under GPL.
Let's look at these goals:
> Open Source
GPL does that.
> Disallow possible ways of close RP, AI or > framework of the Engine
GPL does that.
> Allow creation of close source clients easily
Why would you want to do that? As RMS would say, "We are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter".
> Disallow use of Arianne by Service providers > that doesn't collaborate into Open Source
Why would you want to do that? If they're not producing a "derivative work", then they cannot infringe on anyone's copyright. I'm not entirely sure what's meant by "collaborate into"; if it means "contribute", then it's blatantly unfair (why should a distributer/service provider have to also write code for the priviledge?); if it means "co-operate with", well it still doesn't make sense:) Are we trying to stop people making money from selling free software and related services?
> We DON'T forbid commercialization of Arianne
GPL doesn't do that either.
> we forbid closing source the application.
GPL does that.
I don't understand where this compulsion to avoid the GPL is coming from. I mean, we're writing *free* software here, yes? Seems to be the perfect candidate from where I'm sitting.
(For the full story on "commercialisation" vs GPL see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html)
> This paper aims to address the following > questions: > 1. How must the depensation model be modified > in order to account for conceptual > differences between P2P networks and animal > populations? > 2. What are the conditions necessary to cause > catastrophes in P2P networks? > 3. What does the model imply about other ways > to limit or stop P2P networks? > 4. What is the most effective method to stop > P2P networks?
I bet if you'd set out to answer a more interesting question, you'd have obtained a more interesting answer.
Natural populations are well known for their ability to adapt to their environment; to mutate or change their behaviour in response to stimuli (threats) in their surroundings. If you truly wish to study P2P networks as if they are ecosystems or populations, there are plenty of more productive entymological questions to be asked.
This paper reads like a biologist saying "given, say, fish - how can we go about killing them?"
Nice to see *some* scientific analysis of this subject, however misdirected.
> The general rule is: add road capacity, and > more people will drive.
At best, this applies only up to a point. At worst, it's a myth - and a dangerous one. Roads aren't just for car drivers! They're also for cyclists, motobikes and buses. The congestion problem in London (UK) is particularly acute to the extent that the administration is trying to introduce tolls for entering the city centre.
How can they persuade more people to ditch their cars and use public transport? By providing reliable bus and underground services. No-one uses London buses in rush hour, because they're too slow. Why? Because there's so much traffic on the roads, caused by the people who won't take the bus... the only way to break the cycle is to reduce congestion. This means reducing the density of traffic, either by (a) removing cars from the roads, or (b) making the roads bigger, or (c) both of the above.
In London at least, roads don't "cause traffic" as you suggest. No-one in their right mind would try driving in/through London if they didn't absolutely have to.
The issue with cyclists is the same. Nobody want to cycle in central London because it's so dangerous. Why? Because of all the traffic... and so on. Why don't more people walk, instead of driving half a mile down the road? Because the roads are lethal for pedestrians and the pelicon crossings take forever to change. Why? because of all the tra....:)
Of course, any move to impose congestion charging / extra taxation / higher petrol prices or whatever are met with huge resistance from motoring groups. But by continuing to overuse their cars, they only make the situation worse for themselves.
OK, time to stop my off-topic ranting. I just get irate about these things.:) BTW I don't own a car and neither does my wife; we take the train to work because it's cheaper and safer.
> It relies on the fact that, when switched on, > cellphones are in regular communication with > the nearest base station, giving a precise > location for the phone.
> As the user moves around, their phone sends > signals to other base stations, allowing the > network's computer to log their route.
Depends what you mean by "precise". By monitoring signal strength at all nearby antennas very carefully, you could get a reasonable fix on the UE location (but throw in a couple of tall buildings, and accuracy starts to go out the window). Currently the base stations will do this monitoring just well enough to ensure proper inter-cell handoff. That doesn't require getting an "accurate" fix on your location at all. If it were possible, it would already be done as an alternative to (e.g.) GPS.
On a large motorway (or interstate, or autoroute, or whatever you have in your country), this would probably work very well. In an urban area with lots of interconnected roads and lots of buildings (full of stationary people at their desks), I don't think you'll be able to pinpoint the jam to any useful accuracy.
Still, might serve well as an "early warning" system, so you can decide where to send the traffic helicopters.:)
AMD and Intel can argue for as long as they like about whose benchmarks are rigged, but it doesn't change the fact that, in the end, they are just that - benchmarks. They bear absolutely no resemblence to real life performance whatsoever. In the end, it doesn't matter what the graphs say or who claims to be faster that whom.
If you're going to start sueing people for misleading the public into buying products by presenting them with misleading data, then any hardware or software vendor who uses a benchmark in their marketing literature should be prosecuted.
The hierarchy is thus: lies, damned lies, statistics... benchmarks.:)
> You don't know the difference between patent and copyright, do you?
I'm not sure whom you're addressing, but I would think that most of us do.
Just because both copyright law and patents are dangerous in the hands of a monopolist, does not mean that anyone is equating the two. Nor does it mean that they are necessarily wrong. Your point about copying software whose license forbids such behaviour is perfectly valid. However, what if Microsoft had been granted a patent on the concept of "an operating system with an integrated graphical user interface", or something similar. This would be much more serious, because any (potential) competition would be stifled by such a restriction on creativity.
I think the root of the patent/copyright confusion stems from the verb "to copy". If you make a verbatim copy a piece of software, or music, or film, when the creator of that work has requested in its license that you do not do so without paying them money, then you are in breach of copyright law. If you take someone else's idea and copy it, in order to produce a competing product, and the creator of that idea had sought patent protection for it, then you are in breach of patent law.
The latter scenario causes markets to stagnate as the company with the most lawyers goes round racketeering from their ability to file more ideas at the patent office in a given period of time. The former scenario royally pisses off the customers who suffer from the copy-prevention madness that is currently circulating in the form of the bill-formerly-known-as-SSSCA.
Stallman's point is that software, like music, art and speech, is not by its very nature amenable to patent protection. In my opinion, enforcing software and business process patents is like legislating water to run uphill. Whereas enshrining some level of copyright protection in law can allow many business models to survive where software developers want to make a living, patent protection on software does nothing for the wellbeing of its creators nor its consumers.
In conclusion... I think I'm agreeing with you, but in a rather roundabout way:)
> I have not yet met a parent who has NEVER lost sight of a child for a few seconds
Fair enough. You're a parent, you're out shopping, your kid suddenly disappears. Do you:
a) Call his/her name; b) Find the nearest assistant and tell them you've lost your child; c) Look for him/her, heading first towards the toy department; d) Go find the nearest Internet cafe, log on, type in your account number, wait a few minutes for them to tell you that they can't locate the device because it's inside a large building...
Responsible parents wouldn't pick (d), even if their child did happen to be wearing one of these things. On top of which, I don't think the company would stay solvent very long if every parent who loses sight of their child for thirty seconds starts ringing them up demanding that they be found immediately. Unfortunately, I think the majority of parents who would buy these contraptions in the first place are the kind of people who would do exactly that.
The real use intended for this is locating children who have actually gone missing (i.e. who are feared abducted). In that scenario, I do not doubt for a minute that serious crimes could be prevented. But my personal feeling towards this company is one of revulsion - they are preying on the fears of parents for commercial gain.
Your child is hunreds of times more likely to die while crossing the street than be abducted and killed. So does that mean you're an irresponsible parent because you don't make your child wear luminous clothing and head-to-toe padding whenever they leave the house? Please.
...whether a theory, unifying the gravitational force with the other three fundamental forces, would be at odds with the existence of black holes?
I have often wondered (but never had the time, inclination or intelligence to go find out:)) how a quantum view of gravity would affect theories on black holes and the birth of the universe. Basically my question is: If gravitational attraction is carried by a particle (the graviton) as is conjectured by many scientists, then how can one of these escape from a black hole any more than another particle?
I guess that either:
a) It can't, ergo black holes don't exist; b) It can, and Einstein was wrong somewhere; c) There is some effect similar to the X-ray "emissions" from black holes, whereby the particles appear to come from the black hole but actually never cross its event horizon.
Which just goes to show that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.:)
Excellent idea (although perhaps red-on-brown isn't the most ergnomic of configurations):)
I can see a particular application for this - people who have to author documents in many different languages. If you're a translator, or you're working on application localisation, you're quite often going to want a different key-map from your everyday layout. With this thing, a couple of clicks could give you a keyboard laid out for writing Russian, Greek, German, or whatever-you-like!
Perhaps you could even program it to give you an "any" key...:)
> I wonder if U.S. businesses would enjoy being > constrained to French, Chinese or Uzbekistani > commercial law if a resident there buys their > product
See This page which explains the negotiation of the Hague convention on jurisdiction and foreign judgments in civil and commercial matters.
I wonder if U.S. citizens would enjoy being constrained to French, Chinese or Uzbekistani civil law if a U.S. business takes a dislike to them.
> "The entry of patent law into these areas was
> greeted with predictions of disaster,"
> said "Yet the United States is the
> international leader in [software] and other
> technological areas."
The U.S. is the richest nation in the world. It was the international leader in software and other technological areas long before software patents reared their ugly head. But Mr. Rogan sounds surprised...
"How can this be? The U.S. has passed laws that allow us to arrest foreign programmers whose code we dislike and throw them in jail! We put export restrictions on encryption software! We grant patents on algorithms that are then included in ISO standards! We allow corporations to rip off huge quantities of code and call it "the Windows (R) network stack", and give them laws to allow the prosecution of anyone who makes unauthorised copies of it! How come we're the world leader?"
> "A return by competition regulators to viewing
> IP rights with a 1970s-era suspicion would risk
> interfering with these market-based incentives
> to innovate."
Market-based incentives to innovate are only incentives to the people involved in the marketing. You can't persuade an inventor to "invent more" by offering cash. You can only persuade firms to invest more in R&D, which isn't quite the same. Just as musical people would write and perform music whether or not they ever had a chance of becoming millionaires, so creative people would continue to create and invent. This is particularly true of software, where the cost of distribution is virtually nil. The deal is - money is (or should be) the means of exchange, not an end in itself.
The crunch comes with patents on drugs, where the initial investment is so large. There will never be (if you like to think in these terms) a medical-research Linus Torvalds to play the role of nemesis to the evil Glaxo-Smithkline, because you need more than a couple of PCs and some skill to cure cancer. I think this is a much more interesting and important area, and one that's a lot less easy to solve in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember reading about the music industry from "insiders" before Napster et al. The story about six years ago went thus:
"Record companies lose money on CDs. Recorded music has not turned a profit for a long time. The real money is made from concert tickets and merchandising."
I'd be interested to know what happened to this story and the people who used to tell it. Sounds to me like it's every bit as relevant today. But the RIAA don't want anyone to hear it, because now it has a scapegoat for its members' lousy market performances.
Ho hum.
> I get the graphical abilities of X without all the clutter that usually attends it
:)
...A mistake carried out to perfection. ...Dissatisfaction guaranteed. ...Don't get frustrated without it. ...Even your dog won't like it. ...Flaky and built to stay that way. ...Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems. ...Flawed beyond belief. ...Form follows malfunction. ...Garbage at your fingertips. ...Ignorance is our most important resource. ...It could be worse, but it'll take time. ...It could happen to you. ...Japan's secret weapon. ...Let it get in *your* way. ...Live the nightmare. ...More than enough rope. ...Never had it, never will. ...No hardware is safe. ...Power tools for power fools. ...Putting new limits on productivity. ...Simplicity made complex. ...The cutting edge of obsolescence. ...The art of incompetence. ...The defacto substandard. ...The first fully modular software disaster. ...The joke that kills. ...The problem for your problem. ...There's got to be a better way. ...Warn your friends about it. ...You'd better sit down. ...You'll envy the dead.
It would be churlish of me not to mention...
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Every article like this I read makes me happier and happier that IANAL. Can you image having to deal with that kind of stuff every day? Eeeeew. It's worse than Prolog! >:-o
If I ever *do* become a lawyer for some reason, someone please put me out of my misery?
> CDMA was so revolutionary that when it was first discussed, many thought it couldn't be made to work.
I have to take issue with this, as it's clearly nonsense. Multi-user spread-spectrum radio communications have been in use for over fifty years by the military. The technology is so basic they've been teach the principles to undergraduates for at least ten years.
Anyone who did express that kind of scepticism would surely have been laughed out the door.
Grrr misinformation grr!
So, someone's finally noticed that using a souped-up version of BASIC for writing mission-critical numerical code is a bad idea. :)
:-)).
:)
However, it's likely that most programmers who needed features such as inheritence, polymorphism, function pointers and so on have already bitten the bullet and moved to a C++ environment; trading off some gripes about the "standard implicit type conversions" (spit) for the increase in modularity, interoperability, etc. Introducing such features into the Fortran language now isn't going to re-write thirty years of pre-F2000 code. It feels like we're going to end up with "VB for scientists"at this rate!
But the real reason that so many people still stubbornly use Fortran is *performance*. Because the language is so much simpler (i.e. less expressive) than C or Java, it's hell of a lot easier to perform optimisations on it. Good Fortran compilers can re-arrange loop nests and do all sorts of clever stuff to improve parallelism, locality, and other aspects of performance. Add expressiveness (in the form of pointers, for example) and you add many extra complications which can render the optimisations invalid. If you can't optimise it as aggressively as you used to, you've just lost the penultimate excuse that anyone is still writing in Fortran. (The last excuse is that the 500,000 line codebase they're working on is also written in Fortran
Now I'm sure that lots of professional users and compiler writers have been involved in drafting the new standard, and that these concerns have been addressed. But I still reckon that Fortran needs euthanasia, not resurrection!
There, my 2p is now your 2p
> Finally, they use this common secret bitstring as a key for a one-time pad.
:)
Aha! So the cyphertext itself can be transmitted over an "open" channel. Cunning.
But, it sounds to me like it could be fairly inefficient. From what I remember, you need one bit of one-time-pad for every bit of plaintext you want to transmit. The process above could be quite time-consuming (relatively speaking) if only 0.1% of your photons get through. And even if you're sending the equivalent of an email, you'll need a key-string of tens of thousands of bits. So it might be secure, but you'd end up paying for it in speed.
Interesting, though.
Anyone got a link to the Nature article itself?
:)
From the guff written here, it all seems implausible. Encoding a message in single photons is fine, but I find it hard to believe that you can transmit a stream of photons several miles through the atmosphere without a single one of them being absorbed or scattered (which would look the same as interception). It's just light, after all.
I wish I could remember any physics. Then I could say something about the possibility of "amplifying" a signal in which the symbols are single photons. But I can't, so I won't even try.
Plus, even taking the above on trust, it doesn't sound too hard to disrupt (with, say, a mirror).
Corrections and extra technical info most welcome!
Come on moderators, this is a blatant troll!
Genetic algorithms are not proof of evolutionary theory. They merely demonstrate that, under very controlled conditions, the application of "survival of the fittest" and random mutations in a "gene pool" can allow solutions to develop in a way analogous to natural selection.
You can't make a jump from that to proving the theory of evolution by natural selection. Indeed, it's highly unlikely that that theory will ever be proved beyond doubt, and many people (not just loonies) expect it to be debunked sooner rather than later. (Personally, I don't hold that view.)
Genetic algorithms are interesting - I've had fun with them myself. But they *prove* exactly nothing.
>OO style can be written in any language, including assembler, C, Pascal, you name it.
> OO code however can only be written in an OO language.
This is a distinction which I've never heard made before. I don't believe that it holds water.
By the duck argument: If it looks like an OO program, and it quacks like an OO program, then it's an OO program. If it neither looks nor quacks object oriented, then it's not. The language is merely the vehicle for expression.
Doing OOP in a language which doesn't support it is a nuisance, and writing non-OO code in a language which is "purely OO" can also be so. I spent some time writing OO code in ANSI C, then gave up because manually maintaining a "this" pointer is messy, error prone and a waste of my time when I can get a machine to do it for free. And don't even bother trying vtbls and runtime type identification without language support.
And yes, I've been in the position of inheriting some non-OO code (K&R C, in fact) and having to munge it into an OO framework. Yes, you do end up with some objects whose methods are just spaghetti, but by abstracting those functions behind a suitable class interface (i.e. encapsulation), you get some modules which can be used in an object-oriented application. You can go ahead and instantiate many objects of those classes, and they all function independently. But I *still* would not go as far as to call it object-oriented code.
Because it doesn't quack.
> > One word - ew!
:)
:))
> Why ew? Because of your limited programming
> experience with languages where this was
> eschewed?
Nope, just flamebait
> Explain? How can you write a Non-OO program in
> a Pure-OO language?
I'm not sure what your question really is here, and you seem to have answered it yourself. You can take your problem, use structured design / functional decomposition to come up with a solution circa 1980, then implement it in Java much as you would do in C. A single class, with many methods and members (hell, make 'em static while you're at it)... no polymorphism, no inheritence, no data hiding, no application-level abstraction.
You can go one step back up the ladder and pretend to be using Pascal/Modula2/Ada, using classes as abstract data types and providing simple access functions. Still not what most people would call an "object-oriented" program.
Remember, design *is* programming. A program which deliberately avoids the object-oriented features of its implementation language cannot be called OO just because it "contains objects". A good language is one which allows the programmer to express him/herself in the most suitable way for the problem being solved. If a developer has to find "ways around" a particular feature of the language, then that language is flawed.
Me? If I was asked "what is the most harmful programming construct", I would choose type casts every time - yes, even over gotos and pointers.
As you've probably guessed, I like C++. I tried Java and didn't like it. Therefore, I am just ranting bitterly and should be ignored at all costs.
Number 8 -
:)
> Eliminate primitive data types.
> This will undoubtedly be my most controversial
> proposal, but bear with me.
I can agree with almost every other proposal in this article, but he's right - this one will cause a fracas.
> I am not talking about removing int, float,
> double, char, and other types completely. I
> simply want to make them full objects with
> classes, methods, inheritance, and so forth.
One word - ew!
> This would make Java's type system much
> cleaner. We'd no longer need to use type-
> wrapper classes to add primitives to lists and
> hash tables. We could write methods that
> operated on all variables and data.
What you really need is generics (as in C++ templates). Java collections are vile, since they suffer from type loss even when used with "real" objects. I'm surprised that didn't come into this top ten; it's a major language deficiency.
> All types would be classes and all
> classes would be types. Every variable, field,
> and argument would be an instance of Object.
> Java would finally become a pure object-
> oriented language.
However, that wouldn't make all Java programs "object-oriented programs", nor would it make all Java developers "object-oriented programmers". I have a suspicion that it might impact things like the JNI too.
> Programmers in each environment need a language
> tailored for them. One size does not fit all.
<ahem> Quite. That's why you don't start an exercise in OOD by deriving everything from "TObject".
The real problem with "research" like this is that it brings out the very worst in the peer review system which usually serves scientists so well. As soon as a journal dares to publish something so dubious, there is a huge backlash by the establishment, to the extent that real, innovative research can be stifled.
The best-known example of this phenomenon was the cold-fusion debacle of the late '80s. A group of researchers claimed (essentially) to have initiated nuclear fusion in a beaker using heavy water and palladium electrodes. No-one else was able to reproduce the experimental results. The result, however, was not just to discredit the report's authors, but to cause a scepticism so immense that no electro-chemist could publish a paper which mentioned a similar experiment. I can see the same happening to unsuspecting scientists working on superconductors now.
I would link to an interesting editorial in this month's NewScientist, which describes the phenomenon in considerable detail, but it would appear that they only put it in the print version. Shame, that.
From the very bottom of the article:
<snip>
165 In view of the failure of the applicants to establish that the copyright work was protected by a technological protection measure, it is not necessary for me to determine whether the devices installed by Mr Stevens in the PlayStation consoles were circumvention devices.
166 In an affidavit read on the last day of the hearing, Mr Nabarro expressed the opinion that the chips had no purpose other than overriding the anti-piracy devices of the applicants. The price Mr Bannon paid for being permitted to read the affidavit at such a late stage (Mr Nabarro being already on his way to the airport) was that he conceded that Mr Nabarro's evidence was not literally true. In particular, Mr Bannon accepted that the installation of the chip enabled the owner of the console also to play a back-up copy of the PlayStation game which lacked the access code.
167 On the evidence, I would have held that the chips installed by Mr Stevens had only a limited commercially significant use other than circumventing or facilitating the circumvention of the access code. Thus, if the access code had been a "technological protection measure", the chips would have been circumvention devices. I would also have found that Mr Stevens sold or promoted (through advertisements in the Trading Post) the circumvention devices and that he knew that the devices would be used to circumvent or facilitate the circumvention of a technological protection measure.
</snip>
(Emphasis added)
So despite the fact that the judge thought it unnecessary to determine whether the mod chips were a "circumvention device", he goes ahead and expresses the opinion that they blatantly are, and he would have prefered to rule in the opposite direction.
At least it sets some kind of lower threshold on what can be considered a "technological protection measure", thus raising the bar slightly higher for companies trying to stifle fair use of their products. But in the end, the wrong law was passed, and the wrong law is still on the statute books. So how great this ruling really is, I don't know.
And it was nice to see the old chestnut of "loading into RAM is theft" re-appearing; I thought that one was already put to rest for good!
From the front page...
:) Are we trying to stop people making money from selling free software and related services?
We still need to discuss the LICENSE of Arianne as actually code is only usable for GPL projects and being an engine that perhaps is not good, also we need to avoid the GPL 2.0 blackhole by, perhaps, switching to Affero GPL to disallow service providers to avoid the GPL restrictions to enforce users rights. Our goals should be:
Open Source
Disallow possible ways of close RP, AI or framework of the Engine
Allow creation of close source clients easily
Disallow use of Arianne by Service providers that doesn't collaborate into Open Source
The resulting license and the discussion to reach it should be done on arianne-general. I WON'T allow any kind of Arianne special License. We DON'T forbid commercialization of Arianne, we forbid closing source the application.
Apart from the fact that I can only make sense of one word in three, I smell confusion. If the code is currently released under GPL, then I guess that's because either (a) it contains code borrowed from some other GPL'd program, (b) one or more of the developers has decided to copyleft their contribution, or (c) both of the above. If you want to modify the license in some way, you'd better start re-writing the parts of the code which are under GPL.
Let's look at these goals:
> Open Source
GPL does that.
> Disallow possible ways of close RP, AI or
> framework of the Engine
GPL does that.
> Allow creation of close source clients easily
Why would you want to do that? As RMS would say, "We are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter".
> Disallow use of Arianne by Service providers
> that doesn't collaborate into Open Source
Why would you want to do that? If they're not producing a "derivative work", then they cannot infringe on anyone's copyright. I'm not entirely sure what's meant by "collaborate into"; if it means "contribute", then it's blatantly unfair (why should a distributer/service provider have to also write code for the priviledge?); if it means "co-operate with", well it still doesn't make sense
> We DON'T forbid commercialization of Arianne
GPL doesn't do that either.
> we forbid closing source the application.
GPL does that.
I don't understand where this compulsion to avoid the GPL is coming from. I mean, we're writing *free* software here, yes? Seems to be the perfect candidate from where I'm sitting.
(For the full story on "commercialisation" vs GPL see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html)
From the introduction in the paper:
> This paper aims to address the following
> questions:
> 1. How must the depensation model be modified
> in order to account for conceptual
> differences between P2P networks and animal
> populations?
> 2. What are the conditions necessary to cause
> catastrophes in P2P networks?
> 3. What does the model imply about other ways
> to limit or stop P2P networks?
> 4. What is the most effective method to stop
> P2P networks?
I bet if you'd set out to answer a more interesting question, you'd have obtained a more interesting answer.
Natural populations are well known for their ability to adapt to their environment; to mutate or change their behaviour in response to stimuli (threats) in their surroundings. If you truly wish to study P2P networks as if they are ecosystems or populations, there are plenty of more productive entymological questions to be asked.
This paper reads like a biologist saying "given, say, fish - how can we go about killing them?"
Nice to see *some* scientific analysis of this subject, however misdirected.
> The general rule is: add road capacity, and
:)
:) BTW I don't own a car and neither does my wife; we take the train to work because it's cheaper and safer.
> more people will drive.
At best, this applies only up to a point. At worst, it's a myth - and a dangerous one. Roads aren't just for car drivers! They're also for cyclists, motobikes and buses. The congestion problem in London (UK) is particularly acute to the extent that the administration is trying to introduce tolls for entering the city centre.
How can they persuade more people to ditch their cars and use public transport? By providing reliable bus and underground services. No-one uses London buses in rush hour, because they're too slow. Why? Because there's so much traffic on the roads, caused by the people who won't take the bus... the only way to break the cycle is to reduce congestion. This means reducing the density of traffic, either by (a) removing cars from the roads, or (b) making the roads bigger, or (c) both of the above.
In London at least, roads don't "cause traffic" as you suggest. No-one in their right mind would try driving in/through London if they didn't absolutely have to.
The issue with cyclists is the same. Nobody want to cycle in central London because it's so dangerous. Why? Because of all the traffic... and so on. Why don't more people walk, instead of driving half a mile down the road? Because the roads are lethal for pedestrians and the pelicon crossings take forever to change. Why? because of all the tra....
Of course, any move to impose congestion charging / extra taxation / higher petrol prices or whatever are met with huge resistance from motoring groups. But by continuing to overuse their cars, they only make the situation worse for themselves.
OK, time to stop my off-topic ranting. I just get irate about these things.
> It relies on the fact that, when switched on,
:)
> cellphones are in regular communication with
> the nearest base station, giving a precise
> location for the phone.
> As the user moves around, their phone sends
> signals to other base stations, allowing the
> network's computer to log their route.
Depends what you mean by "precise". By monitoring signal strength at all nearby antennas very carefully, you could get a reasonable fix on the UE location (but throw in a couple of tall buildings, and accuracy starts to go out the window). Currently the base stations will do this monitoring just well enough to ensure proper inter-cell handoff. That doesn't require getting an "accurate" fix on your location at all. If it were possible, it would already be done as an alternative to (e.g.) GPS.
On a large motorway (or interstate, or autoroute, or whatever you have in your country), this would probably work very well. In an urban area with lots of interconnected roads and lots of buildings (full of stationary people at their desks), I don't think you'll be able to pinpoint the jam to any useful accuracy.
Still, might serve well as an "early warning" system, so you can decide where to send the traffic helicopters.
AMD and Intel can argue for as long as they like about whose benchmarks are rigged, but it doesn't change the fact that, in the end, they are just that - benchmarks. They bear absolutely no resemblence to real life performance whatsoever. In the end, it doesn't matter what the graphs say or who claims to be faster that whom.
:)
If you're going to start sueing people for misleading the public into buying products by presenting them with misleading data, then any hardware or software vendor who uses a benchmark in their marketing literature should be prosecuted.
The hierarchy is thus: lies, damned lies, statistics... benchmarks.
> You don't know the difference between patent and copyright, do you?
:)
I'm not sure whom you're addressing, but I would think that most of us do.
Just because both copyright law and patents are dangerous in the hands of a monopolist, does not mean that anyone is equating the two. Nor does it mean that they are necessarily wrong. Your point about copying software whose license forbids such behaviour is perfectly valid. However, what if Microsoft had been granted a patent on the concept of "an operating system with an integrated graphical user interface", or something similar. This would be much more serious, because any (potential) competition would be stifled by such a restriction on creativity.
I think the root of the patent/copyright confusion stems from the verb "to copy". If you make a verbatim copy a piece of software, or music, or film, when the creator of that work has requested in its license that you do not do so without paying them money, then you are in breach of copyright law. If you take someone else's idea and copy it, in order to produce a competing product, and the creator of that idea had sought patent protection for it, then you are in breach of patent law.
The latter scenario causes markets to stagnate as the company with the most lawyers goes round racketeering from their ability to file more ideas at the patent office in a given period of time. The former scenario royally pisses off the customers who suffer from the copy-prevention madness that is currently circulating in the form of the bill-formerly-known-as-SSSCA.
Stallman's point is that software, like music, art and speech, is not by its very nature amenable to patent protection. In my opinion, enforcing software and business process patents is like legislating water to run uphill. Whereas enshrining some level of copyright protection in law can allow many business models to survive where software developers want to make a living, patent protection on software does nothing for the wellbeing of its creators nor its consumers.
In conclusion... I think I'm agreeing with you, but in a rather roundabout way
> I have not yet met a parent who has NEVER lost sight of a child for a few seconds
Fair enough. You're a parent, you're out shopping, your kid suddenly disappears. Do you:
a) Call his/her name;
b) Find the nearest assistant and tell them you've lost your child;
c) Look for him/her, heading first towards the toy department;
d) Go find the nearest Internet cafe, log on, type in your account number, wait a few minutes for them to tell you that they can't locate the device because it's inside a large building...
Responsible parents wouldn't pick (d), even if their child did happen to be wearing one of these things. On top of which, I don't think the company would stay solvent very long if every parent who loses sight of their child for thirty seconds starts ringing them up demanding that they be found immediately. Unfortunately, I think the majority of parents who would buy these contraptions in the first place are the kind of people who would do exactly that.
The real use intended for this is locating children who have actually gone missing (i.e. who are feared abducted). In that scenario, I do not doubt for a minute that serious crimes could be prevented. But my personal feeling towards this company is one of revulsion - they are preying on the fears of parents for commercial gain.
Your child is hunreds of times more likely to die while crossing the street than be abducted and killed. So does that mean you're an irresponsible parent because you don't make your child wear luminous clothing and head-to-toe padding whenever they leave the house? Please.
</rant>
> ...interview with the surviving lawyer who
:)
> spammed Usenet with multiple "Green Card
> Lottery" posts in '94."
...makes me wonder what happened to all the other lawyers who spammed Usenet in '94? Were they thrown in a tar-pit or something?
I think this submission scores "Flamebait" from the outset. No rational discussion to be had here. Move along, please.
...whether a theory, unifying the gravitational force with the other three fundamental forces, would be at odds with the existence of black holes?
:)) how a quantum view of gravity would affect theories on black holes and the birth of the universe. Basically my question is: If gravitational attraction is carried by a particle (the graviton) as is conjectured by many scientists, then how can one of these escape from a black hole any more than another particle?
:)
I have often wondered (but never had the time, inclination or intelligence to go find out
I guess that either:
a) It can't, ergo black holes don't exist;
b) It can, and Einstein was wrong somewhere;
c) There is some effect similar to the X-ray "emissions" from black holes, whereby the particles appear to come from the black hole but actually never cross its event horizon.
Which just goes to show that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Excellent idea (although perhaps red-on-brown isn't the most ergnomic of configurations) :)
:)
I can see a particular application for this - people who have to author documents in many different languages. If you're a translator, or you're working on application localisation, you're quite often going to want a different key-map from your everyday layout. With this thing, a couple of clicks could give you a keyboard laid out for writing Russian, Greek, German, or whatever-you-like!
Perhaps you could even program it to give you an "any" key...
> I wonder if U.S. businesses would enjoy being
:-((
> constrained to French, Chinese or Uzbekistani
> commercial law if a resident there buys their
> product
See This page which explains the negotiation of the Hague convention on jurisdiction and foreign judgments in civil and commercial matters.
I wonder if U.S. citizens would enjoy being constrained to French, Chinese or Uzbekistani civil law if a U.S. business takes a dislike to them.
Now start writing to politicians.
James Rogan, director of the U.S. patent office:
> "The entry of patent law into these areas was
> greeted with predictions of disaster,"
> said "Yet the United States is the
> international leader in [software] and other
> technological areas."
The U.S. is the richest nation in the world. It was the international leader in software and other technological areas long before software patents reared their ugly head. But Mr. Rogan sounds surprised...
"How can this be? The U.S. has passed laws that allow us to arrest foreign programmers whose code we dislike and throw them in jail! We put export restrictions on encryption software! We grant patents on algorithms that are then included in ISO standards! We allow corporations to rip off huge quantities of code and call it "the Windows (R) network stack", and give them laws to allow the prosecution of anyone who makes unauthorised copies of it! How come we're the world leader?"
> "A return by competition regulators to viewing
> IP rights with a 1970s-era suspicion would risk
> interfering with these market-based incentives
> to innovate."
Market-based incentives to innovate are only incentives to the people involved in the marketing. You can't persuade an inventor to "invent more" by offering cash. You can only persuade firms to invest more in R&D, which isn't quite the same. Just as musical people would write and perform music whether or not they ever had a chance of becoming millionaires, so creative people would continue to create and invent. This is particularly true of software, where the cost of distribution is virtually nil. The deal is - money is (or should be) the means of exchange, not an end in itself.
The crunch comes with patents on drugs, where the initial investment is so large. There will never be (if you like to think in these terms) a medical-research Linus Torvalds to play the role of nemesis to the evil Glaxo-Smithkline, because you need more than a couple of PCs and some skill to cure cancer. I think this is a much more interesting and important area, and one that's a lot less easy to solve in the long run.
I dunno.