I just had a quick look at the GPL. I didn't see any assertions that 'all published software should be free.'
It did say something to the effect that, if you want to publish software, you can protect yourself and make sure someone else doesn't profit from your effort by making it 'free.'
Commercial software licenses and BSD licenses also contain political messages, if implied. Isn't it nice to have choice.
I'm not trying to defend anyone. I was saying, in my clumsy way, that Republicans pointing the finger at Democrats, and vice versa, is like the pot calling the kettle black.
However, it's the Republicans who always appeal to righteousness, so I feel duty bound to point out their hypocrisy.
Your personal political stance had little or nothing to do with it.
I love it! The path to deep insight goes like this: I can't write cursively so it musn't be a worthy skill.
Occaisionaly some comment along the lines of "I can't ever remember what a cursive capital Q looks like, let alone scribe one" is interspersed among the whinging.
Sour grapes!
I'm laying out 10 to 1 that these same sour grapers hold their pen with their thumb and middle finger with the pen raised at right angles to the paper. Come on, there are people who care about things you don't. Get over it.
Two other manifestations of 1984 are the blurring of big business and government and the use fear and military action to sidestep dissent, ie 'don't question their motives, don't you know we're under threat/at war?'
I could be wrong, but isn't cocaine possession a felony?
Lying about intelligence isn't a felony but perhaps it ought to be.
The funny thing about Republicans and their insistance on absolute truth is that truth becomes so much more flexible when it's a member of their party in office.
Brooks might argue that there's no such thing as disembodied intelligence, or at least creating an intelligent agent is easier if it has a physical manifestation. (I know he's backed a little away from the extreme position. It's hard to prove a negative.)
Of course, there have been some great successes using AI for network routing and fraud detection. Note however that these software agents are fully engaged in an abstract world where they are, in a manner, "embodied". They make no assertions about the physical world, only the world they exist in.
Happily, you may disagree with this position. Probably you could talk with more authority, citing more research, than I could. But, asserting that robotics is concerned with the attachment of sensors and rollers to a piece of machinery with/guided by a computer does not make your case, which I take to be that better algorithms is the key to AI.
A roboticist would argue that an agent cannot have common sense outside of the domain it exists in. If your goal is to have an agent with common sense regarding a rugged, dynamic, unpredictable, physical environment, then your best bet is to build a mobile machine with a variety of sensors, ie a robot.
Linus misunderstands the 'just an engineer' remark
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 1
RMS is not labelling Linus with 'engineer' in order to associate him with limited competance. Ie, engineers are dunderheads, Linus is an engineer, therefore Linus is a dunderhead.
Not at all. What RMS is suggesting is that Linus' notable skills and intelligence are limited to engineering. He doesn't have the breadth of knowledge necessary for visionary thinking. Linus is not a renaissance man.
So Linus takes some pains to point out that he's in the enviable position of not having to take a stand on much of anything. Big deal. We should all have such courage.
Come on Linus, pick an issue, make a stand, stake your reputation. I dare ya!
Otherwise, show some gratitude to those who've taken risks to maintain and extend the political, social, and technilogical environmnet that has allowed you and others to make your invaluable contribution to the endeavor of applied computing.
In the company of champions
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 1
What about politicians, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs abusing the system to further there political and economic ambitions?
When the system doesn't work correctly, who is held accountable? How is reparation made to innocent victums?
How secret will the system be?
Who monitors the functioning of the system? Does the average citizen get access to his own records? How do we tell when someone is using the system for economic advantage?
How do we protect the rights of someone implicated by the system? How do we ensure they are assumed innocent until proven guilty?
Wait till you get on a list somewhere and Fed agents start knocking on your door and asking questions to your neighbors and colleagues. Watch as your children are shunned at school. Sit in disbelief at you desk as you are passed over yet again for a promotion. Drown in the mundane and trivial work you'll be assigned. You didn't expect real assignments once you were tagged, did you?
All this because some bit of software made a false positive on you and put you on a list. You could be as patriotic as the day is long, but you'll still be a political football. False postives will be treated harshely: no one will want the word to get out that the system failed.
Beyond the H1-B fiasco and the spineless Congress that won't stand up to the big (fat lying) corps, I'm very concerned at our lack of esteem of our own profession. Programming is difficult, highly specialized, and best done by intelligent, talented people.
We best start thinking this way or we will lose the profession we've come to enjoy so much. We are members of a profession, we are highly trained, we are in demand.
We work in the tradition of Turing and von Neumann. We should be proud.
This is amazing because I found parsing newline delimited text to be "irritaing, time-consuming, and error-prone" as well!
Isn't it intriguing how the we reached the same conclusion using such profoundly different technologies? Gee, the more things change, the more things stay the same...
...but does anyone truly believe that simply switching the primary desktop OS of the government of a country from MS to Linux is going to foster in a new age of innovation or something?
Yes, I believe so and here's why. The cost of entry for developing Linux apps is next to nothing. Plus, file formats are standard and open for many useful applications, so adding value is possible.
How does a team insure that the first few thousand lines of code, the first board, etc, fit neatly within the system as a whole once it is completed? The best we can currently do is follow some established principles of design and implementation.
Someone said it earlier: Have some knowledge of the entire system, but write code in the black box principle. It is the only way to minimize maintenance of one module if a change is made in another module. Eg, by all means, understand how a module works behind the API, but when coding as a client of the API, you must treat it as a black box, unless of course you enjoy tedious maintenance.
It is essential the programmer or at least the designer know about the entire system or the program code could do something completely inappropriate when handling an exceptional condition. Eg, exit(1) is likely a bad choice for an aeronautical system.
On the other hand, it is entirely impossible for a designer or programmer to keep an entire system of any complexity in their head at one time. Hence, it is necessary to modularize. And for the robustness of the system as a whole, the modules need to be loosely coupled: if one should fail, all others should recover gracefully.
Regarding GUIs, I must disagree. It is a different beast. The complexity comes from dealing with the loss of control flow and ambiguities brought on by different execution order (I clicked there, then here and then the whole screen turned blue). Backend code should be as far removed as possible from presentation code. In a windowed system, the programmer should code for event driven programming only. If the backend makes assumptions about the GUI, then any GUI changes will mean a rewrite of the backend.
If you black box the backend, then the GUI can select from the backend as required, and the chance of an exceptional condition is minimized.
BTW, it probably no consolation at all, but none of my university prof would have considered suggesting that a programmer needs to know nothing of the underlying hardware. There was a great posting on
Leaky Abstractions that makes a great case for
understanding the implementation of a module.
Slashdot Mirror
I just had a quick look at the GPL. I didn't see any assertions that 'all published software should be free.'
It did say something to the effect that, if you want to publish software, you can protect yourself and make sure someone else doesn't profit from your effort by making it 'free.'
Commercial software licenses and BSD licenses also contain political messages, if implied. Isn't it nice to have choice.
Redundant? I said it first, nimrod.
He meant, "the European law sets the right benchmark rather than the loser U.S. system."
(Yeah, I know. I have no plans to quit my day job.)
Using the war analogy is a way of avoiding critique. How can you argue with war?
"This is war! You just don't understand. We'll talk when you understand that this is war. Never mind that I'm a pompous ass."
The available options and opportunity for real dialog are diminished when you use the war analogy. All positions but yours are ludicrous.
(I only know 'cause I use this technique all the time. But I refrain from war and nazi comparisons. Too gauche!)
I made none of those assumptions.
I'm not trying to defend anyone. I was saying, in my clumsy way, that Republicans pointing the finger at Democrats, and vice versa, is like the pot calling the kettle black.
However, it's the Republicans who always appeal to righteousness, so I feel duty bound to point out their hypocrisy.
Your personal political stance had little or nothing to do with it.
Nice use of the b tag, by the way.
I love it! The path to deep insight goes like this: I can't write cursively so it musn't be a worthy skill.
Occaisionaly some comment along the lines of "I can't ever remember what a cursive capital Q looks like, let alone scribe one" is interspersed among the whinging.
Sour grapes!
I'm laying out 10 to 1 that these same sour grapers hold their pen with their thumb and middle finger with the pen raised at right angles to the paper. Come on, there are people who care about things you don't. Get over it.
Two other manifestations of 1984 are the blurring of big business and government and the use fear and military action to sidestep dissent, ie 'don't question their motives, don't you know we're under threat/at war?'
I could be wrong, but isn't cocaine possession a felony?
Lying about intelligence isn't a felony but perhaps it ought to be.
The funny thing about Republicans and their insistance on absolute truth is that truth becomes so much more flexible when it's a member of their party in office.
Brooks might argue that there's no such thing as disembodied intelligence, or at least creating an intelligent agent is easier if it has a physical manifestation. (I know he's backed a little away from the extreme position. It's hard to prove a negative.)
Of course, there have been some great successes using AI for network routing and fraud detection. Note however that these software agents are fully engaged in an abstract world where they are, in a manner, "embodied". They make no assertions about the physical world, only the world they exist in.
Happily, you may disagree with this position. Probably you could talk with more authority, citing more research, than I could. But, asserting that robotics is concerned with the attachment of sensors and rollers to a piece of machinery with/guided by a computer does not make your case, which I take to be that better algorithms is the key to AI.
A roboticist would argue that an agent cannot have common sense outside of the domain it exists in. If your goal is to have an agent with common sense regarding a rugged, dynamic, unpredictable, physical environment, then your best bet is to build a mobile machine with a variety of sensors, ie a robot.
RMS is not labelling Linus with 'engineer' in order to associate him with limited competance. Ie, engineers are dunderheads, Linus is an engineer, therefore Linus is a dunderhead.
Not at all. What RMS is suggesting is that Linus' notable skills and intelligence are limited to engineering. He doesn't have the breadth of knowledge necessary for visionary thinking. Linus is not a renaissance man.
So Linus takes some pains to point out that he's in the enviable position of not having to take a stand on much of anything. Big deal. We should all have such courage.
Come on Linus, pick an issue, make a stand, stake your reputation. I dare ya!
Otherwise, show some gratitude to those who've taken risks to maintain and extend the political, social, and technilogical environmnet that has allowed you and others to make your invaluable contribution to the endeavor of applied computing.
From Linus:
No, Linus, you're not.
Extra credit for thinking big, though.
Ok... We'll have to agree to disagree then.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but "fundamentally corrupt" is not the same as totally "free from corruption".
Here's one for Painter: every old money wealthy family has a thief for an ancestor.
And no, in this instance I did not RTFA.
Here two, Australia and Norway (someone already took Sweden).
Great points. We must consider the ramifications and potential abuses.
Blood money.
What about false positives?
What about fraudulent use?
What about politicians, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs abusing the system to further there political and economic ambitions?
When the system doesn't work correctly, who is held accountable? How is reparation made to innocent victums?
How secret will the system be?
Who monitors the functioning of the system? Does the average citizen get access to his own records? How do we tell when someone is using the system for economic advantage?
How do we protect the rights of someone implicated by the system? How do we ensure they are assumed innocent until proven guilty?
Wait till you get on a list somewhere and Fed agents start knocking on your door and asking questions to your neighbors and colleagues. Watch as your children are shunned at school. Sit in disbelief at you desk as you are passed over yet again for a promotion. Drown in the mundane and trivial work you'll be assigned. You didn't expect real assignments once you were tagged, did you?
All this because some bit of software made a false positive on you and put you on a list. You could be as patriotic as the day is long, but you'll still be a political football. False postives will be treated harshely: no one will want the word to get out that the system failed.
Beyond the H1-B fiasco and the spineless Congress that won't stand up to the big (fat lying) corps, I'm very concerned at our lack of esteem of our own profession. Programming is difficult, highly specialized, and best done by intelligent, talented people.
We best start thinking this way or we will lose the profession we've come to enjoy so much. We are members of a profession, we are highly trained, we are in demand.
We work in the tradition of Turing and von Neumann. We should be proud.
This is amazing because I found parsing newline delimited text to be "irritaing, time-consuming, and error-prone" as well!
Isn't it intriguing how the we reached the same conclusion using such profoundly different technologies? Gee, the more things change, the more things stay the same...
Yes, I believe so and here's why. The cost of entry for developing Linux apps is next to nothing. Plus, file formats are standard and open for many useful applications, so adding value is possible.
How does a team insure that the first few thousand lines of code, the first board, etc, fit neatly within the system as a whole once it is completed? The best we can currently do is follow some established principles of design and implementation.
Someone said it earlier: Have some knowledge of the entire system, but write code in the black box principle. It is the only way to minimize maintenance of one module if a change is made in another module. Eg, by all means, understand how a module works behind the API, but when coding as a client of the API, you must treat it as a black box, unless of course you enjoy tedious maintenance.
It is essential the programmer or at least the designer know about the entire system or the program code could do something completely inappropriate when handling an exceptional condition. Eg, exit(1) is likely a bad choice for an aeronautical system.
On the other hand, it is entirely impossible for a designer or programmer to keep an entire system of any complexity in their head at one time. Hence, it is necessary to modularize. And for the robustness of the system as a whole, the modules need to be loosely coupled: if one should fail, all others should recover gracefully.
Regarding GUIs, I must disagree. It is a different beast. The complexity comes from dealing with the loss of control flow and ambiguities brought on by different execution order (I clicked there, then here and then the whole screen turned blue). Backend code should be as far removed as possible from presentation code. In a windowed system, the programmer should code for event driven programming only. If the backend makes assumptions about the GUI, then any GUI changes will mean a rewrite of the backend.
If you black box the backend, then the GUI can select from the backend as required, and the chance of an exceptional condition is minimized.
BTW, it probably no consolation at all, but none of my university prof would have considered suggesting that a programmer needs to know nothing of the underlying hardware. There was a great posting on Leaky Abstractions that makes a great case for understanding the implementation of a module.
Yeah, the free market idealogical crap is soooo much better.
Visual Studio C++ and advanced programming are mutually exclusive.
All Visual Studio C++ programmers, advance yourselves onto a professional platform with a quality API.