Well, court rewards and copyright start with financial damages, and commercial Unix has those from Linux. So SCO probably just figured that they had a decent reward coming, and the payout in the other direction would be pretty much limited to a stern "thanks for removing the offending code, and don't do that again."
Of course, that did pretty much hinge on them having some evidence... So much for that.
This was (is) standard in the project I worked for. They went a little further, and used a comment extractor to use the comments to generate the pseudocode, which was reviewed separately from the code. You had to turn in the formatted pseudocode at the end of the design phase.
It wasn't terrible, but the result was a lot of comments that were echos of the code, and an unknowable amount of code that should have been broken out into discrete functions, but was instead kept nearby its comment because the comment made sense where it was. And don't forget the old code that had comments that no longer matched what the code did!!!
All in all, I prefer the "code smells" approach to comments -- when you see a comment, think carefully about whether it's a good thing in itself, or whether it's actually being used to hide bad code. For an example of a question I might ask, with your comment "# Store fields in their columns", might it possibly be better to have a function named StoreFieldsInTheirColumns()?
You're replying to Phil Karn, amongst many other things the author of KA9Q (well, that's his callsign too), a superb TCP/IP stack and suite. I relied on it while I was in college; many modern TCP stacks use his fine-tunings.
Read his article on MACA, his invention. You will be impressed if you have any understanding.
For a very interesting read, and a very thought provoking read, try: Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
That book makes a mockery of the boundary between fictional writing and outright fraud. It's another conspiricy theory, but unlike so many others, the facts it's based on are largely made up. (Unlike the other conspiracy theories, where the facts are usually real, but the implications and motivations are made up.)
I don't know when you last used darcs or what your idea of "a small tree" is, but I use it on a laptop with 256M of memory without problems. There are some slow operations, but by and large it's quite pleasant.
I wouldn't use it on something half the size of the Linux kernel, though. That's HUGE.
darcs rocks -- I use it for everything. (Well, everything it's appropriate for.) But the OP was talking about Bazaar-NG, which is essentially a combination of the best features of darcs and arch. If the bazaar people can pull that off, it'll rock even harder:-).
The Raskin Center has been carrying on his work... hopefully they'll continue it, especially with the funding they've been given. Oh, the name of THE has been changed, and it's scope has been expanded.
The things the Linux kernel calls "capabilities" aren't the type of capabilities that EROS and Coyotos talks about. Making them finer-grained, as you say, would only increase the security problem and slow the system down. Read up on "object capabilities" to see what is meant, and why they can make system administration much easier and safer.
Developers, promoters and users of this language should consider the fate of Ada83 language before they invest a ton of effort or money.
Yes -- Ada83 died on the vine not because it couldn't get programmers, but because it couldn't get reasonable compilers. The hurdles were just far too high.
Now there is a reliable, cheap, well supported Ada compiler, and in spite of the lack of programmers many projects are able to use Ada appropriately.
BTW, Ada didn't support provability; it encouraged software engineering principles. A later branch of Ada (SPARK Ada) was developed to support provability, and it's finding a surprising amount of use in critical embedded system, enough so that some proposed modifications from it were taken for the Ada 2005 specification. (Interestingly, every SPARK Ada program is a correct Ada program which compiles and executes in precisely the same way on every Ada platform and compiler.)
the "I'm not going to give you a chance to screw up" approach to programming embodied in Ada does not map well to typical [if somewhat shoddy] coding practices and creates a much steeper learning curve for would-be programmers.
Although there's truth in this, it doesn't lead one to C; it leads to Smalltalk, Python, and Lisp.
I do get the impression that you probably don't know Ada, and almost certainly haven't used it. Is this the case?
Why? Because the FCC is a government entity and was created to protect and serve the people.
This is where you miss the point. The FCC was not created to protect the people; it was created to fulfill a specific area of the law. The discussion we're having is regarding the publicly "owned" airwaves, the management of which is part of the FCC's mandate.
The owners of an asset have the absolute and uncontestable right to manage it as they see fit.
If you insist on not seeing it any other way,
I do; any other way to see it would be false and useless.
then consider this the voice of a shareholder (I pay taxes and vote) speaking out against company policies.
You don't have to use stockholder language to make sense. What you are is one of the owners of the airwaves, and I understand and respect that you disagree with the management (FCC). My point, and the previous poster's point, is that your disagreement doesn't give the management the right to manage OTHER companies as well. Nor, in fact, does it take away their right to manage what we own. Someone has to manage it!
The only way, the ONLY way to take back control from the tyranny of inoffensiveness is to turn the airwaves over to private property.
You missed the point of the previous post. The purpose of the FCC is _not_ to "stop people from seeing what is subjectively considered indecent", but rather to manage a publicly owned good. As the manager acting for the owner, they have a right to veto anything they want, subject to the rules of the owner.
I don't agree with the FCC either, but your argument is entirely beside the point and wrong. Especially when you insist that the FCC should be able to control things it doesn't own, simply because it controls things that it DOES own.
Iverson, one of the developers of the APL and J languages, wrote a brilliant text on calculus which uses his notation/language, "J", to teach and compute calculus. The reason I call it brilliant is that it takes a completely different approach to calc than I've ever seen before, starting with polynomial approximations rather than limits, and including fractional derivatives and other amazing oddities. Oh, and in the process you'll learn J, which is worth the study -- you won't learn to program in it, but you'll learn to express yourself in it better than most programmers.
Not likely -- Bush's stated intentions (which are consistent with his record) are to appoint judges who believe in limiting the federal gov'ts authority, based on the Constitution. In general, you may see some reduced civil rights and some increased civil rights -- but only at the federal level. The states will retain the right to change all of those (since by definition those powers are not explicit in the constitution).
No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?
Yes, no folders. Instead they have categories, and yes, you can make a filter that places mail from a mailing list into a category, and you can choose whether that filter also removes the email from the inbox. I have a few filters that do this.
I have no argument with the rest of your post, although many of the things you cite mean little to me (or don't happen to me), I respect your right to want full headers by default.:-)
The only problem I personally have with GMail is the difficulty of finding things that happen to be in huge conversations.
Oh, I'm not asking for civility. I'm asking for some compliance with the rules of evidence, debate, and reason. Calling every citizen in a state that sent its electors for Bush a bigot isn't rational. Calling every person who voted for Bush an idiot isn't rational.
Civility doesn't enter into it. Civility is what happens when you want to convince people, beyond simply arguing with them.
Neither of those two definitions have anything to do with the original use of "liberal" in politics. It was used to refer to Adam Smith and his followers in much the same way that the word "libertarian" is used now.
In other words, it doesn't mean "open"; it means "free". And the modern leftists have inherited the name, and abandoned the meaning.
That's nonsense -- the record is open, and you can see which sections of the Act were not only discussed, but _rewritten_, and by which senator. Kerry himself wrote part of it (title IV, I believe).
The computer models are BS, but economics is a science -- it's just not mature. It's immature because there's so much disagreement over the foundations of the field (for example, there's even disagreement over whether economics can be done experimentally).
There have been quite a few economists whose models have reliably predicted the future. One of them, Keynes, is the major driver in political economics today; he made a KILLING on the stock market, and although he failed to predict the Great Depression, he managed to get out of its way. Von Mises did well too (in spite of being exiled due to pissing off the national socialists in Germany), and managed to predict the Great Depression.
I think the major thing that's stunted the growth of formal (academic) economics is politicalization; I think the most succesful economics is now done on a freelance basis, by entrepreneurs and corporations. The formal economists are attempting to devise ways to help their masters (government) control and predict "the economy", a fundamentally impossible task.
In his system he'd look for a source of tax revenue that would be related to the things being taxed. For law enforcement and military, you'd either tax property (since property is the primary thing being protected by the military and police) or place a levy on the states (who arguably share a responsibility for protecting their citizens; it's contitutionally arguable that there are no federal citizens), who should then follow some rational means to decide what to tax (perhaps they'd largely choose to tax property, or perhaps sales). Income would be another logical source, I should mention:-).
Science? You could fund that by taxing patents, or uses of patents, or licensing public patents, or something like that. I don't care for these ideas; I suspect it's because science isn't a good target for public funding (this is my prior belief), but perhaps the real reason I can't think of any sources I like is simply because I'm prejudiced. I'm quite willing to listen to some proposals for public income sources for science, together with rationales for why they're tied together.
Of course, just because a source is logically related to the final use of the money doesn't mean using the source is a good idea. In the case of income taxes, they were originally explicitly prohibited in the constitution, with very good reason. We ignored that reason when we amended the constitution.
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Well, court rewards and copyright start with financial damages, and commercial Unix has those from Linux. So SCO probably just figured that they had a decent reward coming, and the payout in the other direction would be pretty much limited to a stern "thanks for removing the offending code, and don't do that again."
Of course, that did pretty much hinge on them having some evidence... So much for that.
-Billy
This was (is) standard in the project I worked for. They went a little further, and used a comment extractor to use the comments to generate the pseudocode, which was reviewed separately from the code. You had to turn in the formatted pseudocode at the end of the design phase.
It wasn't terrible, but the result was a lot of comments that were echos of the code, and an unknowable amount of code that should have been broken out into discrete functions, but was instead kept nearby its comment because the comment made sense where it was. And don't forget the old code that had comments that no longer matched what the code did!!!
All in all, I prefer the "code smells" approach to comments -- when you see a comment, think carefully about whether it's a good thing in itself, or whether it's actually being used to hide bad code. For an example of a question I might ask, with your comment "# Store fields in their columns", might it possibly be better to have a function named StoreFieldsInTheirColumns()?
-Billy
You're replying to Phil Karn, amongst many other things the author of KA9Q (well, that's his callsign too), a superb TCP/IP stack and suite. I relied on it while I was in college; many modern TCP stacks use his fine-tunings.
Read his article on MACA, his invention. You will be impressed if you have any understanding.
-Billy
What an efficient visual combination of metaphors.
For a very interesting read, and a very thought provoking read, try:
Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
That book makes a mockery of the boundary between fictional writing and outright fraud. It's another conspiricy theory, but unlike so many others, the facts it's based on are largely made up. (Unlike the other conspiracy theories, where the facts are usually real, but the implications and motivations are made up.)
-Billy
It means they need to fire the other 50%.
-Billy
I don't know when you last used darcs or what your idea of "a small tree" is, but I use it on a laptop with 256M of memory without problems. There are some slow operations, but by and large it's quite pleasant.
I wouldn't use it on something half the size of the Linux kernel, though. That's HUGE.
-Billy
darcs rocks -- I use it for everything. (Well, everything it's appropriate for.) But the OP was talking about Bazaar-NG, which is essentially a combination of the best features of darcs and arch. If the bazaar people can pull that off, it'll rock even harder :-).
-Billy
The Raskin Center has been carrying on his work ... hopefully they'll continue it, especially with the funding they've been given. Oh, the name of THE has been changed, and it's scope has been expanded.
-Billy
The things the Linux kernel calls "capabilities" aren't the type of capabilities that EROS and Coyotos talks about. Making them finer-grained, as you say, would only increase the security problem and slow the system down. Read up on "object capabilities" to see what is meant, and why they can make system administration much easier and safer.
-Billy
Developers, promoters and users of this language should consider the fate of Ada83 language before they invest a ton of effort or money.
Yes -- Ada83 died on the vine not because it couldn't get programmers, but because it couldn't get reasonable compilers. The hurdles were just far too high.
Now there is a reliable, cheap, well supported Ada compiler, and in spite of the lack of programmers many projects are able to use Ada appropriately.
BTW, Ada didn't support provability; it encouraged software engineering principles. A later branch of Ada (SPARK Ada) was developed to support provability, and it's finding a surprising amount of use in critical embedded system, enough so that some proposed modifications from it were taken for the Ada 2005 specification. (Interestingly, every SPARK Ada program is a correct Ada program which compiles and executes in precisely the same way on every Ada platform and compiler.)
the "I'm not going to give you a chance to screw up" approach to programming embodied in Ada does not map well to typical [if somewhat shoddy] coding practices and creates a much steeper learning curve for would-be programmers.
Although there's truth in this, it doesn't lead one to C; it leads to Smalltalk, Python, and Lisp.
I do get the impression that you probably don't know Ada, and almost certainly haven't used it. Is this the case?
-Billy
Actually, it does matter -- if the user's email applications can't run programs that delete files (and such), the users can clickety all they want.
Capabilities are amazingly powerful. If you can't refer to something, there's no way to possibly mess that something up.
That does require some clever configuration, but current work seems to show that such configuration is conceivably possible.
-Billy
Why? Because the FCC is a government entity and was created to protect and serve the people.
This is where you miss the point. The FCC was not created to protect the people; it was created to fulfill a specific area of the law. The discussion we're having is regarding the publicly "owned" airwaves, the management of which is part of the FCC's mandate.
The owners of an asset have the absolute and uncontestable right to manage it as they see fit.
If you insist on not seeing it any other way,
I do; any other way to see it would be false and useless.
then consider this the voice of a shareholder (I pay taxes and vote) speaking out against company policies.
You don't have to use stockholder language to make sense. What you are is one of the owners of the airwaves, and I understand and respect that you disagree with the management (FCC). My point, and the previous poster's point, is that your disagreement doesn't give the management the right to manage OTHER companies as well. Nor, in fact, does it take away their right to manage what we own. Someone has to manage it!
The only way, the ONLY way to take back control from the tyranny of inoffensiveness is to turn the airwaves over to private property.
-Billy
You missed the point of the previous post. The purpose of the FCC is _not_ to "stop people from seeing what is subjectively considered indecent", but rather to manage a publicly owned good. As the manager acting for the owner, they have a right to veto anything they want, subject to the rules of the owner.
I don't agree with the FCC either, but your argument is entirely beside the point and wrong. Especially when you insist that the FCC should be able to control things it doesn't own, simply because it controls things that it DOES own.
-Billy
Iverson, one of the developers of the APL and J languages, wrote a brilliant text on calculus which uses his notation/language, "J", to teach and compute calculus. The reason I call it brilliant is that it takes a completely different approach to calc than I've ever seen before, starting with polynomial approximations rather than limits, and including fractional derivatives and other amazing oddities. Oh, and in the process you'll learn J, which is worth the study -- you won't learn to program in it, but you'll learn to express yourself in it better than most programmers.
Check it out!
-Billy
So you're an APL fan (of the K dialect, or possibly J)?
-Billy
Not likely -- Bush's stated intentions (which are consistent with his record) are to appoint judges who believe in limiting the federal gov'ts authority, based on the Constitution. In general, you may see some reduced civil rights and some increased civil rights -- but only at the federal level. The states will retain the right to change all of those (since by definition those powers are not explicit in the constitution).
-Billy
No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?
:-)
Yes, no folders. Instead they have categories, and yes, you can make a filter that places mail from a mailing list into a category, and you can choose whether that filter also removes the email from the inbox. I have a few filters that do this.
I have no argument with the rest of your post, although many of the things you cite mean little to me (or don't happen to me), I respect your right to want full headers by default.
The only problem I personally have with GMail is the difficulty of finding things that happen to be in huge conversations.
-Billy
The really fun stuff is hand-drawn, and all you need is a compass (with two points) and a shiny but scratchable surface. Oh, and a bit of time.
Hand Drawn Holograms.
-Billy
Oh, I'm not asking for civility. I'm asking for some compliance with the rules of evidence, debate, and reason. Calling every citizen in a state that sent its electors for Bush a bigot isn't rational. Calling every person who voted for Bush an idiot isn't rational.
Civility doesn't enter into it. Civility is what happens when you want to convince people, beyond simply arguing with them.
-Billy
Neither of those two definitions have anything to do with the original use of "liberal" in politics. It was used to refer to Adam Smith and his followers in much the same way that the word "libertarian" is used now.
In other words, it doesn't mean "open"; it means "free". And the modern leftists have inherited the name, and abandoned the meaning.
-Billy
And neither one is acceptable in the sense that's being done here. Surely you can see that?
-Billy
That's nonsense -- the record is open, and you can see which sections of the Act were not only discussed, but _rewritten_, and by which senator. Kerry himself wrote part of it (title IV, I believe).
-Billy
The computer models are BS, but economics is a science -- it's just not mature. It's immature because there's so much disagreement over the foundations of the field (for example, there's even disagreement over whether economics can be done experimentally).
There have been quite a few economists whose models have reliably predicted the future. One of them, Keynes, is the major driver in political economics today; he made a KILLING on the stock market, and although he failed to predict the Great Depression, he managed to get out of its way. Von Mises did well too (in spite of being exiled due to pissing off the national socialists in Germany), and managed to predict the Great Depression.
I think the major thing that's stunted the growth of formal (academic) economics is politicalization; I think the most succesful economics is now done on a freelance basis, by entrepreneurs and corporations. The formal economists are attempting to devise ways to help their masters (government) control and predict "the economy", a fundamentally impossible task.
-Billy
In his system he'd look for a source of tax revenue that would be related to the things being taxed. For law enforcement and military, you'd either tax property (since property is the primary thing being protected by the military and police) or place a levy on the states (who arguably share a responsibility for protecting their citizens; it's contitutionally arguable that there are no federal citizens), who should then follow some rational means to decide what to tax (perhaps they'd largely choose to tax property, or perhaps sales). Income would be another logical source, I should mention :-).
Science? You could fund that by taxing patents, or uses of patents, or licensing public patents, or something like that. I don't care for these ideas; I suspect it's because science isn't a good target for public funding (this is my prior belief), but perhaps the real reason I can't think of any sources I like is simply because I'm prejudiced. I'm quite willing to listen to some proposals for public income sources for science, together with rationales for why they're tied together.
Of course, just because a source is logically related to the final use of the money doesn't mean using the source is a good idea. In the case of income taxes, they were originally explicitly prohibited in the constitution, with very good reason. We ignored that reason when we amended the constitution.
-Billy