It's clear that the online multiplayer games are the most addictive -- but that's usually not because they're good games, but rather because they're fun communities.
It's clear to me that the most addictive games are the Roguelikes: Nethack, Angband, ADOM, Omega (my game;-), Rogue itself, and so on. Civilization is at least a close second (it's an easier habit to break).
It's amazing how the Roguelikes keep drawing me (and many others) back; they're not well designed, their UI sucks, and they have zero graphics. But they have a depth of gameplay which is just astounding, and INCREDIBLE replayability. Oh, and a very large amount of challenge.
And no, they're not changing America, nor any of the other countries (yes, Mr. Katz, there are other countries). What a blowhard.
If HTML 3.2 is sufficient, then so is plain text with an index. In fact, I'm quite happy with DOC format, which is essentially plain text.
However, for some info you need more structure than either one of these will provide; that's why PDF was designed, and even though PDF provides FAR more than is needed for that, that's how it's used.
Now, I honestly don't think LaTeX will work, because it's too complicated (and was designed for yet another completely different purpose); however, it provides a proof-of-concept for quite sophisticated layout which is mostly independant of page size.
pdf is just about the worst format for palmtop documents I can imagine! The fixed page size is the worst feature of the format, of course; but there are tons of other problems with it. In general, a standard which requires fixed font layout is a very bad idea for anything other than 600dpi laser printers.
I liked the earlier article on LaTeX; for all of its problems, it could become a usable document standard. We'd need a good reader, of course; tex and dvi take FAR too long to produce output. IBM's browser plugin is a decent proof of concept, but more features, such as pagination support, bookmarks, and annotation are needed.
At the Squeak mailing list (Squeak is Disney's open source Smalltalk) they're working on making Squeak work on Linux palmtops. We're already running it on a Helio (good price!!). There's a lot of work needed, though; Squeak assumes a mouse and has a really clumsy polling input. But otherwise it's very promising!
Yes, you could live with it -- and so could I, if I were. You seem to have missed the point, though; the question isn't whether people will *complain*, the question is whether they'll use their financial power to consolidate political power into their own hands.
They're already bad enough with financial power. What will they be like when they have all the vote as well?
Does the percentage matter? The important problem is not how hard the rich are being hurt. The important question is how much our government can be hurt by them. If they're paying 50% of the bills, they hold 50% of the financial sway over the government. Now, if they were 20% of the people there would be no worry; I don't even believe that 5% is that much of a worry. But watch as the numbers go down!
This country is not exactly a plutocracy; it's ruled by the press and the legislature, and both of those are at least superficially controlled by the people.
I do agree with you on the limits, though. I find that very reassuring.
You talk about a "much uglier kind of social change." It's typical of liberals (which you clearly are) to consider the crimes of the poor as much uglier than the crimes of the wealthy, as though wealth washed away sins. A system which twisted the balance *that* way would be just as badly out of whack as our current system.
Fortunately, there's a good amount of territory in between the two extremes. A system doesn't have to be hyperregressive in order to avoid being hyperprogressive. I'm not going to even suggest what the correct amount would be -- but I will suggest that the current amounts need to be backed away from a bit.
But they won't be, of course. The rich have every reason to want more power; the middle class have every reason to want others to pay; and the poor don't care.
Your insults don't change the fact that the top 5% pay 50% of the taxes.
And I'm not whining about the wealthy -- I'm telling you what the wealthy are going to DO TO YOU. I don't want that, you don't want it. Don't let your partisanship get in the way of your ability to think.
The people who pay for the government WILL run the government.
Actually, yes. Because our taxes are withheld monthly (or biweekly) and computed yearly, the gov't gets to hold our money for up to a year at no charge. If we could hold that money we could invest it.
Now, switching to a monthly tax computation wouldn't be _needed_; it would just be the easiest way to evade the obvious mistakes of not saving enough to pay your taxes. I would personally prefer withholding to be done, but the money placed under my control until the appropriate time.
The result would be that we would *know* how much we're being taxed. Right now we can only guess.
In a sense, this article is a troll; it's very shoddily researched journalism, and extremely sensationalist. Of course tax deductions exist; I depend on those, and I would HOPE that corporations take advantage of them just like I do (and this one is even a GOOD deduction).
I've also seen and agreed with the arguments that corporate taxes are a demagogic sham in the first place; the money should be honestly taxed from individuals, so that we can keep track of how high our taxes really are, and be able to vote our outrage when appropriate.
However, there is some point in the outrage over how little corporations pay. The fundamental problem is that majorities vote, but a minority pays taxes. Fewer and fewer americans pay taxes, and they're the richest part of America. We're reaching the point again where we have taxation without representation -- but this time we're trying to do that to people who have real financial power, and IT WON'T WORK.
People with financial power have the means to work against those taxes; they start by lobbying for tons of loopholes, but pretty soon they're going to insist on being given political power proportionate to their tax burden, and pretty soon they will wield all of the political power in addition to all of their financial power.
This is assuming a complete lack of bad motives, of course. If you're the conspiracy theorist type, mix in those; you'll find that the result isn't much worse.
So we've encouraged poor people to trade their franchise tomorrow for a few dollars less in taxes today. Think about it. Does a progressive tax really sound so good now?
This is *really* an odd message, Archvile. I would expect a little better.
All of AMD's chips have been VERY good for compatibility; they've put a lot of energy into that. There have been flaws, a couple of the older ones being TERRIBLE, but the rarity of those flaws is almost incredible. Intel itself does worse.
And the AMD processor architecture is different from the P6 and 7 architecture. You're talking out of your hat to claim otherwise. The design is different.
Only the TRG Pro however has a working and delivered OS tweak that allows many applications and databases to be stored on the compact flash and transparently swapped into memory on demand.
Correct. The Visor doesn't need that tweak, because Springboard memory is mapped directly onto the Dragonball's memory bus.
I don't know why anyone would want this MP3 player, but the other one that's being made for the Visor is definitely very cool. It does natively allow you to use its MMC cards as Visor storage.
Of course, I won't buy it; I don't want an MP3 player. Nor do I need more storage; I've berely come close to filling up the 8M I have.
One think I DO envy about the TRGPro, though, is its killer speaker. That rocks.
What I think would be ideal would be if TRG licensed the Springboard from Handspring and made a TRGVisor with a good speaker, and THEN offered a Springboard CF reader. The best of all worlds.
The TRGPro has only one expansion slot, just like the Visor. Therefore, only one expansion board at a time.
However, either one can support cradle plugins at the same time as expansion board ones; many Visor users flaunt their ability to use a keyboard while modeming:-).
IMO: the Visor is the right product for the right price -- but the TRGPro has a KILLER speaker. A speaker is FAR FAR more important than a color screen. I have a buzzer springboard for my Visor, so I'm close enough, but with the TRG it's builtin.
OTOH, again, the Visor is both cheaper AND better-supported. TRG isn't at all good at marketing.
Java's speed problem is not GC. Modern GC actually has a small negative impact on speed (and no, emacs' GC is not modern) for trivial programs, and it can be faster than manual GC for some types of large program.
Now, it's clear that manual GC can always do better than runtime GC. But not/that/ much better.
Java's terrible speed is partly because of its interpretation and partly because of how long Netscape takes to start it up.
I don't see any number keys - also I assume you are typing IN ALL CAPS. (Yaay, go AOL).
Bad assumption.:-) A normal tap is lowercase; a 'slide' is upper case (i.e. when you start on the letter's square, slide the stylus, and lift not on the square). It's a VERY quick way of getting mixed case; absolutely no need for shift.
Number keys are right there, on the right. I have no idea how you could miss them. Shift-number gives you a few symbols, and the rest are available by tapping one of four buttons which pops up a replacement keyboard picture (you can tap on the picture or on the Fitaly to get the symbol).
I'm quite happy with the result; it is indeed far faster with Fitaly than it was without. I have to say that I'd like to replace at least one of the auxilary keyboard modes with my own custom one (with my commonly used symbols).
Where do people get the idea that BASIC's syntax is simple? It's not -- it's almost insanely crufty. Almost every single statement has its own special syntax.
It's only BASIC in comparison to FORTRAN -- and thank goodness nobody's mentioned that:-).
Me? I think I'll be using Alice (www.alice.org) to teach; it's very motivating. I'll then upgrade to jPython.
This may very well be the case. However, you're missing a possibly subtle point.
We're not in a war against them. We don't need to watch W2K die. We just need to continue doing our jobs -- and continue contributing to the community -- just as we've been doing.
I'm not saying that we should ignore this kind of deliberate attack; it's likely that this attack will get in the way of us doing our jobs. My point is simply that we don't have to watch W2K die. The mere fact that its supporter is Microsoft, a company who does this kind of thing, will kill it -- together with the fact that the people (us) supporting the better operating systems don't do that.
We should be known as the people willing to help other people get their jobs done, without stooping to bickering and fighting. Our motto should be something along the lines of: "It's not an operating system. It's people."
-Billy "IT'S PEOPLE!!! YOU'VE GOT TO TELL THEM IT'S PEOPLE!! IT'S MADE OF PEOPLE!" -- Charlton Heston
The number of perl programmers is so comparably high, that categorizing them and comparing them to Forth programmers is also probably a waste of time.
I have to admit the utter and complete truth of this. In fact, in spite of the fact that I _did_ do some comparison (blush), the main thrust of my little essay was to point out that the comparison was inaccurate.
As an engineer, I can say with certainty that most engineers have never heard of Forth.
Most engineers have never heard of Java, so this is no big deal. (Of course, I'm not counting computer scientists as engineers;-). I wasn't claiming that engineers were converting to computer programmers en masse because of Forth; I was merely claiming that Forth use in engineers is MUCH higher than Forth use in computer scientists. Engineers also tend to wind up *liking* Forth, perhaps because it gets less in the way, or perhaps because they would be good programmers but never bother to learn any other language.
And I disagree with every single thing you said there. I only had to read one book to understand Forth; furthermore, far from having a mess of inconsistent syntax, Forth has next to NO syntax.
Forth doesn't make solving hard problems impossible; it makes writing application-specific languages easy. You can then solve your problem in a language which is natural for solving it -- and one which may not look very much like Forth. That's not even remotely possible in Perlish or Pythonic languages (outside of going to ridiculous lengths, like building a parser and parsing a seperate file or comments).
Now, what does this have to do with Perl? I'm thinking that you're accusing Perl of being a fad, like Forth was in the early 80s. (And worse yet, a bad fad.) I don't think you have a leg to stand on here; not only did Perl manage to catch a MASSIVE growth spurt in the industry, but it has completely different characteristics from Forth in just about every way -- have you ever written a Forth compiler? How about a Perl compiler;-)?
Now, I'm sure that Perl will die out; it has nothing to offer that isn't done better in other places, and the sheer mass of its syntax is already causing it problems. Forth is still around, in OpenBoot and OTA (EuroPay), but only because it offered something really unique -- a simple VM which the programmer could understand and write to, without first having to master a byzantine language (I'm sorry, but even UCSD Pascal is byzantine compared to Forth).
Perl seems popular among web monkeys and CS geeks. Forth is popular among engineers (I've also met a few mathematicians who like Forth, oddly enough).
This is a facinating discussion; I find it doubly so, since I had to deal with this issue myself as I made a new license for Omega and persuaded the previous contributors to accept it. (In case you're wondering, I used the LGPL, and defined the terms such that new levels could be made and released under some other license.)
If applications are derivative works of the libraries they reference (which is what I believe you are asserting) then third party GPLed MS Apps would be derivative works of MS Windows.
I don't think that's what he's asserting; he's simply pointing out that the GPL makes at least _that_ much explicit: system libraries don't count.
It seems to me that he has a very strong case; if the GPL is explicit about certain libraries _not_ counting, doesn't it seem reasonable that other libraries _do_ count?
Yes, the executable is under the GPL license. That's really fundamental
I do not believe this to true. For a start some (most, all?) GPL binaries on my system do not contain the GPL notice (and many of them are not part of some larger package that is GPLed). I have many GPL binaries on my system that are clearly not GPLed.
Whoah here. There is NO provision in the GPL that claims that it only applies to binaries which include the GPL (or something of the sort); in fact, to the best of my recollection, there's no provision for a "GPL notice" (to use your term). A license is made to a _person_, not to a program; the author is NOT making a three-way legal contract between a program, himself, and you, but rather a one-way license which gives up some of his rights (but retains some others).
_You can't run, or even copy into memory, the binaries if you aren't licensed to do so._ It doesn't matter if the binaries have or don't have the entire text of the GPL. You MUST have permission. And having gotten that permission (through the GPL), you're free to do so, regardless of what text the program contains in it.
This is bad but it is not the only bad thing there are several other severe problems with the license too. I can list some of them if you like
No thanks. I know what you mean; I don't care for the GPL in many ways, and I seem to recall Bruce (the person with whom you're arguing) having similar problems.
My main problem isn't actually with the GPL itself; it's really with a certain class of the people who advocate it (mind you, I'm NOT making this allegation about GPL defenders in general): some people strongly and stupidly believe that anyone arguing against the GPL is trying to steal source code and use it for proprietary gain.
DUH.
That sounds like a strawman, but I've seen it written SO often it's scary. It's often written in INCREDIBLY strong terms.
Put in more rational-sounding terms, the GPL is often described as being "about freedom." So it is, and it's an honorable fight. But it's not the only way to fight, and it's not the way I choose to fight. I personally believe that freedom is achieved not by writing laws which claim to forever make tyranny impossible, but rather by each and every person remaining eternally vigilant.
Except that I can't find out how DES was developed. Oh sure I have the source, but it contains tables and tables and tables of magic numbers! The choice of the values for the S boxes and why and how those choices were made is **still** classified! That's true, and should have an impact on the decision process -- but again, we've been eyeballing those S-boxes for a LONG time, and we've found a lot of their characteristics -- and all of them we've found so far indicate that they're _strong_, not weak. But at least other algorithms *can* be explored. There's no magic unexplainable source code in there. Now, what would make you say _that_? The fact that you haven't studied crypto? _All_ of the other algorithms contain incompletely understood mathematics. Even RC4, a model of beauty, simplicity, and NO magic numbers, is a black box mathematically. And I trust many crypto experts around the globe saying [crypto-method] is secure based on examining the algorithm Ahem. Fire them. All of them. Any crypto expert telling you an algorithm is "secure" is LYING. Okay, there's ONE exception: one-time-pad. And that's impractical. than I do the gov't telling me DES is secure "because we say it's secure but won't tell you why" Well, they don't do that -- but there _are_ hundreds and even thousands of cryptographers who have focussed on DES for years and years, and who have found not only no holes, but have found that holes which are present in other similar algorithms are absent in DES. Besides, the DOJ/FBI never did crack Kevin Mitnick's blowfished files. If they had a secret method for craching DES, would they have admitted it? Certainly not. Blowfish is more likely, since admitting that wouldn't collapse the banking system, but it's still unlikely, since if they can crack it they'll want to save the secrecy for someone they don't have control over. Mitnick is nothing. -Billy
Actually, it's not too suprising that they have an influence on the RFCs; they're very relaxed about their patents, and tend to be willing to politely compete with people who are violating them (or, more often, fairly license to people who were starting to infringe). The only time I've seen them get nasty is when the competitor starts making threats, as happened with Microsoft. (It was good to see MS get a comeuppance there.:-)
For those who don't know, BTW, Hi/fn is the core of the company formerly known as STAC; we split off from STAC a couple of years ago.
FPGA is cool, but it's really slow. We prototyped one of our old chips in it back when, and decided we didn't enjoy it (plus, almost no existing FPGA will hold a compression engine).
A better solution is to slap a MIPS processor, one of Hi/fn's newer chips (with a MIPS bus and protected mode, the 7811 will do for now, especially with its six DMA channels), and some memory on a PCI board. Write some code for the MIPS, and you've got yourself a packet processor which can be made FIPS-secure, possibly up to level 3. See the data sheet for the 7811 for more info on this kind of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's clear that the online multiplayer games are the most addictive -- but that's usually not because they're good games, but rather because they're fun communities.
;-), Rogue itself, and so on. Civilization is at least a close second (it's an easier habit to break).
It's clear to me that the most addictive games are the Roguelikes: Nethack, Angband, ADOM, Omega (my game
It's amazing how the Roguelikes keep drawing me (and many others) back; they're not well designed, their UI sucks, and they have zero graphics. But they have a depth of gameplay which is just astounding, and INCREDIBLE replayability. Oh, and a very large amount of challenge.
And no, they're not changing America, nor any of the other countries (yes, Mr. Katz, there are other countries). What a blowhard.
-Billy
If HTML 3.2 is sufficient, then so is plain text with an index. In fact, I'm quite happy with DOC format, which is essentially plain text.
However, for some info you need more structure than either one of these will provide; that's why PDF was designed, and even though PDF provides FAR more than is needed for that, that's how it's used.
Now, I honestly don't think LaTeX will work, because it's too complicated (and was designed for yet another completely different purpose); however, it provides a proof-of-concept for quite sophisticated layout which is mostly independant of page size.
-Billy
pdf is just about the worst format for palmtop documents I can imagine! The fixed page size is the worst feature of the format, of course; but there are tons of other problems with it. In general, a standard which requires fixed font layout is a very bad idea for anything other than 600dpi laser printers.
I liked the earlier article on LaTeX; for all of its problems, it could become a usable document standard. We'd need a good reader, of course; tex and dvi take FAR too long to produce output. IBM's browser plugin is a decent proof of concept, but more features, such as pagination support, bookmarks, and annotation are needed.
-Billy
At the Squeak mailing list (Squeak is Disney's open source Smalltalk) they're working on making Squeak work on Linux palmtops. We're already running it on a Helio (good price!!). There's a lot of work needed, though; Squeak assumes a mouse and has a really clumsy polling input. But otherwise it's very promising!
-Billy
Yes, you could live with it -- and so could I, if I were. You seem to have missed the point, though; the question isn't whether people will *complain*, the question is whether they'll use their financial power to consolidate political power into their own hands.
They're already bad enough with financial power. What will they be like when they have all the vote as well?
Does the percentage matter? The important problem is not how hard the rich are being hurt. The important question is how much our government can be hurt by them. If they're paying 50% of the bills, they hold 50% of the financial sway over the government. Now, if they were 20% of the people there would be no worry; I don't even believe that 5% is that much of a worry. But watch as the numbers go down!
This country is not exactly a plutocracy; it's ruled by the press and the legislature, and both of those are at least superficially controlled by the people.
I do agree with you on the limits, though. I find that very reassuring.
You talk about a "much uglier kind of social change." It's typical of liberals (which you clearly are) to consider the crimes of the poor as much uglier than the crimes of the wealthy, as though wealth washed away sins. A system which twisted the balance *that* way would be just as badly out of whack as our current system.
Fortunately, there's a good amount of territory in between the two extremes. A system doesn't have to be hyperregressive in order to avoid being hyperprogressive. I'm not going to even suggest what the correct amount would be -- but I will suggest that the current amounts need to be backed away from a bit.
But they won't be, of course. The rich have every reason to want more power; the middle class have every reason to want others to pay; and the poor don't care.
-Billy
Your insults don't change the fact that the top 5% pay 50% of the taxes.
And I'm not whining about the wealthy -- I'm telling you what the wealthy are going to DO TO YOU. I don't want that, you don't want it. Don't let your partisanship get in the way of your ability to think.
The people who pay for the government WILL run the government.
-Billy
Actually, yes. Because our taxes are withheld monthly (or biweekly) and computed yearly, the gov't gets to hold our money for up to a year at no charge. If we could hold that money we could invest it.
Now, switching to a monthly tax computation wouldn't be _needed_; it would just be the easiest way to evade the obvious mistakes of not saving enough to pay your taxes. I would personally prefer withholding to be done, but the money placed under my control until the appropriate time.
The result would be that we would *know* how much we're being taxed. Right now we can only guess.
-Billy
In a sense, this article is a troll; it's very shoddily researched journalism, and extremely sensationalist. Of course tax deductions exist; I depend on those, and I would HOPE that corporations take advantage of them just like I do (and this one is even a GOOD deduction).
I've also seen and agreed with the arguments that corporate taxes are a demagogic sham in the first place; the money should be honestly taxed from individuals, so that we can keep track of how high our taxes really are, and be able to vote our outrage when appropriate.
However, there is some point in the outrage over how little corporations pay. The fundamental problem is that majorities vote, but a minority pays taxes. Fewer and fewer americans pay taxes, and they're the richest part of America. We're reaching the point again where we have taxation without representation -- but this time we're trying to do that to people who have real financial power, and IT WON'T WORK.
People with financial power have the means to work against those taxes; they start by lobbying for tons of loopholes, but pretty soon they're going to insist on being given political power proportionate to their tax burden, and pretty soon they will wield all of the political power in addition to all of their financial power.
This is assuming a complete lack of bad motives, of course. If you're the conspiracy theorist type, mix in those; you'll find that the result isn't much worse.
So we've encouraged poor people to trade their franchise tomorrow for a few dollars less in taxes today. Think about it. Does a progressive tax really sound so good now?
-Billy
This is *really* an odd message, Archvile. I would expect a little better.
All of AMD's chips have been VERY good for compatibility; they've put a lot of energy into that. There have been flaws, a couple of the older ones being TERRIBLE, but the rarity of those flaws is almost incredible. Intel itself does worse.
And the AMD processor architecture is different from the P6 and 7 architecture. You're talking out of your hat to claim otherwise. The design is different.
-Billy
Only the TRG Pro however has a working and delivered OS tweak that allows many applications and databases to be stored on the compact flash and transparently swapped into memory on demand.
Correct. The Visor doesn't need that tweak, because Springboard memory is mapped directly onto the Dragonball's memory bus.
I don't know why anyone would want this MP3 player, but the other one that's being made for the Visor is definitely very cool. It does natively allow you to use its MMC cards as Visor storage.
Of course, I won't buy it; I don't want an MP3 player. Nor do I need more storage; I've berely come close to filling up the 8M I have.
One think I DO envy about the TRGPro, though, is its killer speaker. That rocks.
What I think would be ideal would be if TRG licensed the Springboard from Handspring and made a TRGVisor with a good speaker, and THEN offered a Springboard CF reader. The best of all worlds.
-Billy
Yes, it can do SWING calls. It can call arbitrary Java code. Interestingly, it also correctly handles Python's multiple inheritance.
-Billy
The TRGPro has only one expansion slot, just like the Visor. Therefore, only one expansion board at a time.
:-).
However, either one can support cradle plugins at the same time as expansion board ones; many Visor users flaunt their ability to use a keyboard while modeming
IMO: the Visor is the right product for the right price -- but the TRGPro has a KILLER speaker. A speaker is FAR FAR more important than a color screen. I have a buzzer springboard for my Visor, so I'm close enough, but with the TRG it's builtin.
OTOH, again, the Visor is both cheaper AND better-supported. TRG isn't at all good at marketing.
-Billy
May I suggest Oberon? It meets all of what you're asking for -- and is a good language.
;-).
Its (optional) portable binary format is sheer genius.
Of course, I use and like Python, so my judgement is suspect at best
-Billy
Java's speed problem is not GC. Modern GC actually has a small negative impact on speed (and no, emacs' GC is not modern) for trivial programs, and it can be faster than manual GC for some types of large program.
/that/ much better.
Now, it's clear that manual GC can always do better than runtime GC. But not
Java's terrible speed is partly because of its interpretation and partly because of how long Netscape takes to start it up.
-Billy
I don't see any number keys - also I assume you are typing IN ALL CAPS. (Yaay, go AOL).
:-) A normal tap is lowercase; a 'slide' is upper case (i.e. when you start on the letter's square, slide the stylus, and lift not on the square). It's a VERY quick way of getting mixed case; absolutely no need for shift.
Bad assumption.
Number keys are right there, on the right. I have no idea how you could miss them. Shift-number gives you a few symbols, and the rest are available by tapping one of four buttons which pops up a replacement keyboard picture (you can tap on the picture or on the Fitaly to get the symbol).
I'm quite happy with the result; it is indeed far faster with Fitaly than it was without. I have to say that I'd like to replace at least one of the auxilary keyboard modes with my own custom one (with my commonly used symbols).
-Billy
Fines don't go to victims; they go to the gov't.
If a company wants a remedy, they need to sue Microsoft.
-Billy
Where do people get the idea that BASIC's syntax is simple? It's not -- it's almost insanely crufty. Almost every single statement has its own special syntax.
:-).
It's only BASIC in comparison to FORTRAN -- and thank goodness nobody's mentioned that
Me? I think I'll be using Alice (www.alice.org) to teach; it's very motivating. I'll then upgrade to jPython.
-Billy
This may very well be the case. However, you're missing a possibly subtle point.
We're not in a war against them. We don't need to watch W2K die. We just need to continue doing our jobs -- and continue contributing to the community -- just as we've been doing.
I'm not saying that we should ignore this kind of deliberate attack; it's likely that this attack will get in the way of us doing our jobs. My point is simply that we don't have to watch W2K die. The mere fact that its supporter is Microsoft, a company who does this kind of thing, will kill it -- together with the fact that the people (us) supporting the better operating systems don't do that.
We should be known as the people willing to help other people get their jobs done, without stooping to bickering and fighting. Our motto should be something along the lines of: "It's not an operating system. It's people."
-Billy
"IT'S PEOPLE!!! YOU'VE GOT TO TELL THEM IT'S PEOPLE!! IT'S MADE OF PEOPLE!" -- Charlton Heston
The number of perl programmers is so comparably high, that categorizing them and comparing them to Forth programmers is also probably a waste of time.
;-). I wasn't claiming that engineers were converting to computer programmers en masse because of Forth; I was merely claiming that Forth use in engineers is MUCH higher than Forth use in computer scientists. Engineers also tend to wind up *liking* Forth, perhaps because it gets less in the way, or perhaps because they would be good programmers but never bother to learn any other language.
I have to admit the utter and complete truth of this. In fact, in spite of the fact that I _did_ do some comparison (blush), the main thrust of my little essay was to point out that the comparison was inaccurate.
As an engineer, I can say with certainty that most engineers have never heard of Forth.
Most engineers have never heard of Java, so this is no big deal. (Of course, I'm not counting computer scientists as engineers
-Billy
How many of you still program in FORTH?
;-)?
I do.
And I disagree with every single thing you said there. I only had to read one book to understand Forth; furthermore, far from having a mess of inconsistent syntax, Forth has next to NO syntax.
Forth doesn't make solving hard problems impossible; it makes writing application-specific languages easy. You can then solve your problem in a language which is natural for solving it -- and one which may not look very much like Forth. That's not even remotely possible in Perlish or Pythonic languages (outside of going to ridiculous lengths, like building a parser and parsing a seperate file or comments).
Now, what does this have to do with Perl? I'm thinking that you're accusing Perl of being a fad, like Forth was in the early 80s. (And worse yet, a bad fad.) I don't think you have a leg to stand on here; not only did Perl manage to catch a MASSIVE growth spurt in the industry, but it has completely different characteristics from Forth in just about every way -- have you ever written a Forth compiler? How about a Perl compiler
Now, I'm sure that Perl will die out; it has nothing to offer that isn't done better in other places, and the sheer mass of its syntax is already causing it problems. Forth is still around, in OpenBoot and OTA (EuroPay), but only because it offered something really unique -- a simple VM which the programmer could understand and write to, without first having to master a byzantine language (I'm sorry, but even UCSD Pascal is byzantine compared to Forth).
Perl seems popular among web monkeys and CS geeks. Forth is popular among engineers (I've also met a few mathematicians who like Forth, oddly enough).
-Billy
This is a facinating discussion; I find it doubly so, since I had to deal with this issue myself as I made a new license for Omega and persuaded the previous contributors to accept it. (In case you're wondering, I used the LGPL, and defined the terms such that new levels could be made and released under some other license.)
If applications are derivative works of the libraries they reference (which is what I believe you are asserting) then third party GPLed MS Apps would be derivative works of MS Windows.
I don't think that's what he's asserting; he's simply pointing out that the GPL makes at least _that_ much explicit: system libraries don't count.
It seems to me that he has a very strong case; if the GPL is explicit about certain libraries _not_ counting, doesn't it seem reasonable that other libraries _do_ count?
Yes, the executable is under the GPL license. That's really fundamental
I do not believe this to true. For a start some (most, all?) GPL binaries on my system do not contain the GPL notice (and many of them are not part of some larger package that is GPLed). I have many GPL binaries on my system that are clearly not GPLed.
Whoah here. There is NO provision in the GPL that claims that it only applies to binaries which include the GPL (or something of the sort); in fact, to the best of my recollection, there's no provision for a "GPL notice" (to use your term). A license is made to a _person_, not to a program; the author is NOT making a three-way legal contract between a program, himself, and you, but rather a one-way license which gives up some of his rights (but retains some others).
_You can't run, or even copy into memory, the binaries if you aren't licensed to do so._ It doesn't matter if the binaries have or don't have the entire text of the GPL. You MUST have permission. And having gotten that permission (through the GPL), you're free to do so, regardless of what text the program contains in it.
This is bad but it is not the only bad thing there are several other severe problems with the license too. I can list some of them if you like
No thanks. I know what you mean; I don't care for the GPL in many ways, and I seem to recall Bruce (the person with whom you're arguing) having similar problems.
My main problem isn't actually with the GPL itself; it's really with a certain class of the people who advocate it (mind you, I'm NOT making this allegation about GPL defenders in general): some people strongly and stupidly believe that anyone arguing against the GPL is trying to steal source code and use it for proprietary gain.
DUH.
That sounds like a strawman, but I've seen it written SO often it's scary. It's often written in INCREDIBLY strong terms.
Put in more rational-sounding terms, the GPL is often described as being "about freedom." So it is, and it's an honorable fight. But it's not the only way to fight, and it's not the way I choose to fight. I personally believe that freedom is achieved not by writing laws which claim to forever make tyranny impossible, but rather by each and every person remaining eternally vigilant.
-Billy
Except that I can't find out how DES was developed. Oh sure I have the source, but it contains tables and tables and tables of magic numbers! The choice of the values for the S boxes and why and how those choices were made is **still** classified! That's true, and should have an impact on the decision process -- but again, we've been eyeballing those S-boxes for a LONG time, and we've found a lot of their characteristics -- and all of them we've found so far indicate that they're _strong_, not weak. But at least other algorithms *can* be explored. There's no magic unexplainable source code in there. Now, what would make you say _that_? The fact that you haven't studied crypto? _All_ of the other algorithms contain incompletely understood mathematics. Even RC4, a model of beauty, simplicity, and NO magic numbers, is a black box mathematically. And I trust many crypto experts around the globe saying [crypto-method] is secure based on examining the algorithm Ahem. Fire them. All of them. Any crypto expert telling you an algorithm is "secure" is LYING. Okay, there's ONE exception: one-time-pad. And that's impractical. than I do the gov't telling me DES is secure "because we say it's secure but won't tell you why" Well, they don't do that -- but there _are_ hundreds and even thousands of cryptographers who have focussed on DES for years and years, and who have found not only no holes, but have found that holes which are present in other similar algorithms are absent in DES. Besides, the DOJ/FBI never did crack Kevin Mitnick's blowfished files. If they had a secret method for craching DES, would they have admitted it? Certainly not. Blowfish is more likely, since admitting that wouldn't collapse the banking system, but it's still unlikely, since if they can crack it they'll want to save the secrecy for someone they don't have control over. Mitnick is nothing. -Billy
Grin. I think that's part of it, yes.
:-)
Actually, it's not too suprising that they have an influence on the RFCs; they're very relaxed about their patents, and tend to be willing to politely compete with people who are violating them (or, more often, fairly license to people who were starting to infringe). The only time I've seen them get nasty is when the competitor starts making threats, as happened with Microsoft. (It was good to see MS get a comeuppance there.
For those who don't know, BTW, Hi/fn is the core of the company formerly known as STAC; we split off from STAC a couple of years ago.
-Billy
FPGA is cool, but it's really slow. We prototyped one of our old chips in it back when, and decided we didn't enjoy it (plus, almost no existing FPGA will hold a compression engine).
A better solution is to slap a MIPS processor, one of Hi/fn's newer chips (with a MIPS bus and protected mode, the 7811 will do for now, especially with its six DMA channels), and some memory on a PCI board. Write some code for the MIPS, and you've got yourself a packet processor which can be made FIPS-secure, possibly up to level 3. See the data sheet for the 7811 for more info on this kind of thing.
-Billy