If you think the Washington Post is biased to the right, then you need to try reading the Washington Times. The Washington Times makes Fox News look like CNN.
Look, a court case between two private individuals (which is what corporations are legally) has nothing to do with democracy; it has everything to do with capitalism. That's why it's a CIVIL case. I'd suggest going back and learning something about politics and economics before embarrassing yourself again.
Apparently you're not that familiar with the case -- it has nothing to do with copyright (read the filings) and everything to do with contract law. I'd recommend spending some time over at GrokLaw reading the filings and the discussions.
While I'm curious as to the contents of the 18 documents that SCO requested be sealed (and the 17 that IBM had sealed), the judge's opinion is what will matter, and that won't be sealed (though it may be redacted). In any case, there is very little here that will affect copyright or set any precedents -- SCO hasn't presented any evidence of copyright violation OR for that matter, that they actually own the copyrights on Unix System V in the first place. SCO's case is based on three legs: (1) that they own the copyright to Unix System V [which is disputed by Novell, among others], (2) a completely unprecedented definition of derivative work, and (3) that IBM copied parts of AIX/Dynix into Linux that would fall under SCO's definition of derivative work [disputed by IBM and others]. While IBM did donate pieces of AIX and Dynix to Linux, IBM contends that what was contributed was IBM's work, and not part of some nebulous derivative of Unix System V, and thus not a problem.
To give you an idea of what I mean, under SCO's definition of derivative work, they claim if you write something that links against any of the APIs that were distributed with Unix System V, everything you wrote is a derivative product of their intellectual property, and that they can control what you do with your software. Thus if you write to the POSIX APIs for I/O, memory allocation, or threading in one routine, you produced an unauthorized derivative of Unix System V, and you owe SCO compensation.
(Yeah, I am not a lawyer, but that hasn't stopped anyone else from voicing an opinion.)
... or something like it. She was driving her old Chevy Spectrum down a two-lane road at rush hour, when the carburator's butterfly valve stuck open. Standing on the brakes had no effect. Eventually she got to a safe place where she could run the car into a parking lot, shift into neutral, and stop the car as it coasted up an incline to a halt -- with the engine still racing. Then she was able to turn off the ignition, thus slaying the demon.
While she could have turned off the ignition at any time to kill the engine, she would have had almost no control over the vehicle (power brakes, power steering), and traffic was pretty heavy... a sure formula for an accident. Once she had it stopped, she had her mechanic come out and look at it, and he replaced the butterfly value... for free, since he'd done a tune up on the car a week earlier.
In regards to the AIX code, yes we do. One of the major thrusts behind project monterey was to bring Unix to the PPC platform, and the project fell through in the negotiation stage.
Buzzz! Wrong. PPC = an implementation of IBM's Power architecture. AIX has run on the Power architecture since the late 80s. (I first used AIX on a Power RT system in 1990.)
Project Monterey was intended to port Unix to Intel/HP's Itanium processors. Project Montery actually ran for several years; it fell apart when IBM realized that the Itanium processors were (1) not going to arrive on time, and (2) weren't going to have the power that Intel predicted.
The question of expense would be covered by NOT spending millions of dollars on the machines in the first place. Stick with pencil and paper and get some reliable auditors to check the counts in closely contested precints.
Unfortunately, that really isn't an option, either. The primary reason for going to eVoting is accessibility -- a computer can provide more flexible balloting mechanisms (large print, multiple languages, speech synthesis, touch screens, etc) than simple paper-and-pencil.
How are you sure that the human counting your paper-and-pencil ballot counted it correctly (multiple election observers are not truly sufficient to prevent collusion)?How are you sure that your optically scanned ballot was counted correctly?
By bringing in independent auditors to do a recount.
How are you sure that the open-source election software loaded on the machine hasn't been tampered with? After all, having the source code doesn't mean that you have THE source code, does it?
Establish and follow a chain of evidence, and have an independent auditor build the code and compare the results.
The answer to ALL of your concerns is to use independent auditors. Sure, they're expensive, but if you budget for it up front (ie: expect to randomly audit 1% of the precincts anyways) then it's not such a big deal. Require the hardware/software vendors to produce an audit trail for the assembly and configuration of the hardware, and then randomly pick 1% of machines to verify.
The biggest deterrent to election fraud is the potential to recount the ballots; the problem that Diebold and company have caused is that they want to remove the audit trail. The point is that with Open Source at least you *can* audit the results, the same way that you can audit the results of old-style ballots: you don't necessarily know *who* cast a particular ballot, but you have a whole box of them that can be counted as many times as you feel is necessary to guarantee that you've counted them correctly.
Is word creation in English substantially different than in other languages?
The primary reason for the size of the English vocabulary (and why English is one of the most popular international languages) is that English is like the Borg: all new words are assimilated into the collective. When someone creates a new word, all it takes to be part of English is for people to use it. For that matter, English sucks in words from other languages continuously -- 'rendezvous' was originally from the French phrase 'rendez vous', for present yourself.
Compare and contrast that with French, where the Académie française dictates whether or not a word is allowed to be part of 'French', and it can take decades to approve of a new word. (BTW, Have the French decided what to call a computer yet?)
"A language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy."
-- attributed to Professor Max Weinreich
So, when you use nonexistent words like "misunderestimate"
"The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world's languages (which now number some 2,700), it is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The compendious
Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words; and a further half-million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neighboring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 and French fewer than 100,000, including such Franglais as le snacque-barre and le hit-parade."
-- Robert McCrum, William Cran, & Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. New York: Penguin, 1992: 1
There is no such thing as a non-existant word -- once you use it, it exists, and nothing can take it away. 'Misunderestimate' is a word (4,370 hits on Google) in much the same manner as 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'; it may be rare, but it has a definite meaning to a significant number of people.
Haven't you heard? Small is beautiful, or at least that's what all the idealistic kids have been saying for years...;)
PS: pay some attention to demographics. In the US (as it is in most modernized countries) the population is old, and getting older. You're the one who's outnumbererd. Quoting from here: http://www.usembassy.de/usa/society-demographics.h tm
Age Structure
The United States has seen a rapid growth in its elderly population during the 20th century. The number of Americans aged 65 and older climbed to 35 million in 2000, compared with 3.1 million in 1900. For the same years, the ratio of elderly Americans to the total population jumped from one in 25 to one in eight. The trend is guaranteed to continue in the coming century as the baby-boom generation grows older. Between 1990 and 2020, the population aged 65 to 74 is projected to grow 74 percent.
The elderly population explosion is a result of impressive increases in life expectancy. When the nation was founded, the average American could expect to live to the age of 35. Life expectancy at birth had increased to 47.3 by 1900 and the average American born in 2000 can expect to live to the age of 77.
Because these older age groups are growing so quickly, the median age (with half of all Americans above and half below) reached 35.3 years in 2000, the highest it has ever been. West Virginia's population continued to be the nation's oldest, with a median age of 38.6 years; Utah was the youngest state, with a median age of 26.7 years.
Young people today are tolerant and open-minded by their nature. There is simply no going back - those 90% of functionally retarded people in the world will not matter, the progress will run them over.:) And the modern technology doesn't help the puritans, unless they manage to control all of it and that is impossible.
I can tell from your comments that you think you're one of the young and tolerant. Too bad your tolerance doesn't extend to the 'functionally retarded people'. Just remember, old age and treachery will overcome youth and enthusiasm...
What planet are you referring to? It can't be the same Earth I grew up on.
Jay: Why the big secret? People are smart, they can handle it.
Kay: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.
-- Men In Black (1997)
Those dumb, panicky, dangerous animals are your friends and neighbors, and they will never be as tolerant as you wish. American society oscillates between tolerance and puritanism, but while the amplitude of the oscillation has grown, the centerline hasn't shifted. There will come a puritan backlash to the current tolerance, and the tools of 24x7 monitoring will serve the puritans much better than they will serve the tolerant.
"When
John Brunner first told me of his intention to write this book, I was
fascinated -- but I wondered whether he, or anyone, could bring it off.
Bring it off he has -- with cool brilliance. A hero with transient
personalities, animals with souls, think tanks and survival communities
fuse to form a future so plausibly alive it has twitched at me ever
since."
-- Alvin Toffler, Author of Future Shock
He Was The Most Dangerous Fugitive Alive, But He Didn't Exist!
Nickie
Haflinger had lived a score of lifetimes...but technically he didn't
exist. He was a fugitive from Tarnover, the high-powered government
think tank that had educated him. First he had broken his identity code
-- then he escaped.
Now he had to find a way to restore sanity and
personal freedom to the computerized masses and to save a world
tottering on the brink of disaster.
He didn't care how he did
it...but the government did. That's when his Tarnover teachers got him
back in their labs...and Nickie Haflinger was set up for a whole new
education!
One of my professors loaned me his copy of The Shockwave Rider in 1982. I don't know if this book changed my life, but it certainly made me think about how computers could (and should) be used. Written in 1975, John Brunner guessed wrong about the details of the technology, but scored a direct hit on the results of technology on society, and what it will mean for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the 21st century. This book was out of print for years, and it took me more than a decade of scowering used book stores to find a copy for myself -- I now have several copies so that I can lend them to others.
... which is this: why should we have to buy Tax preparation software in the first place? What's wrong with our Tax system that it has to be this complex? Or if it must be complex, why doesn't the IRS (who has to cope with end results on an efile) just write a front-end client that can be distributed for free? It would have to be cheaper for the government than what they have now.
Of course that would cut into the business models of the tax preparers and tax software manufacturers, so I guess it isn't really feasible, is it?
I have a Books24x7.com subscription through work. While the selection of content is ok, the books themselves can leave a lot to be desired. For starters, they only have deals with certain publishers (not surprisingly, O'Reilly is not on the list). Often the books are out of date, or just not that good in the first place.
A bigger problem is the web interface -- for most books you only get to read a couple of paragraphs before you have to advance the page. I want to be able to read an entire chapter at one shot -- paragraph-at-a-time just takes too long. The biggest problem though is that I do the majority of my reading offline (even if its just kicking back in my chair for a few minutes) -- reading is my break from staring at a screen.
So for me, Books24x7.com (or Safari for that matter) just doesn't cut it.
Are you aware of Jython (Jython.org) that implements Python in Java, so that you get most (if not all) of the extensive Python standard library in the JVM. Jython is exactly equivalent to Groovy (you can inherit Jython from Java and vice-versa) but is based on a more well-known language...
I've been a Python programmer as long as I've been a Java programmer (since 1996), so I've followed Jython with great interest. The problem with Jython is that it's implementation is ssssllllooooooooowww. As in 2-3 magnitudes slower than Python on the same machine, the last time I measured.:( Decompile some Jython classes and you'll quickly see why -- there's a large cost associated with implementing Python semantics on top of Java.
Groovy interests me because it looks like I can leverage all of the Java class libraries while taking advantage of an agile, functional language, and still have most of the speed of Java (there is some performance hit because of auto-boxing and some of the other automagic features). I'm particularly interested in comparing the performance of Groovy with the performance of Java and Python/Jython for similar functions.
Precisely! If you look at the GNU Classpath compatibility reports (GNU Classpath vs:
JDK 1.0JDK 1.1JDK 1.2JDK 1.3JDK 1.4) you'll see that the biggest piece that's missing is Swing, largely because there isn't a specification for Swing.
The other problem is performance -- the OSS JVM's are much slower than the commercial JVMs, but that's really a chicken and egg problem, driven by adoption rates. Few people (comparatively) are using the open JVMs, so there isn't much incentive to improve them... and until their performance improves (and package coverage improves), there isn't much reason to use them.
Of course, since Eclipse's SWT is open source and doesn't depend upon Swing, I'm hoping to see more Java applications built using SWT, which might bridge the gap and kickstart Java adoption. This is probably the biggest threat to Sun, and the largest potential fork for the Java specification, which is why Sun isn't interested in working with Eclipse.org.
It's NOT nearly as portable as C with the proper libraries, and the proper libraries can turn even the most obtuse language into an easy development environment.
This doesn't make any sense for anything but trivial programs.
The C Standard I/O library will only handle command-line programs that work with plain I/O streams. No GUIs, no networked applications, no databases. All that portability really means is that you can do data-crunching with a fair level of success. If you want portable C applications that do more than just data crunching, you have to pick libraries for the additional capabilities, and every decision you make limits the portability of your application, and increases the number of vendors you're dependent upon for 'the proper libraries'.
On the other hand, Java includes a standard set of classes for handling 2D and 3D graphics, G customer or the UIs, network I/O, Internationalization, memory management, databases, distributed programming, XML, and much more. The APIs are portable across a multitude of OSes, and while admittedly there are bugs, when you compare the scope of the APIs to their list of bugs, the miracle is that there aren't 10 or 100 times as many bugs. The point with Java is that it includes 'the proper libraries' as part of the specification, and a vendor can't claim an implementation is Java unless it passes certification tests to prove that their implementation is correct.
But what do I know... I've only been programming for 30 years on everything from basic web apps to commercial software to high-end mission-critical applications. I've NEVER had any application (except perhaps some client-side graphical eye-candy) really scream out to be coded in Java.
In the last 25 years, I've never had any application really scream out to be coded in any particular language -- usually the development/deployment environment will drive that decision, in combination with the timeline.
One thing I notice about Java aficiandos [sic] is that it usually ends up being their primary (if not only) language and they're trying to squeeze it to work in a wide variety of environments where it really is not the best choice.
Yeah, I'm a Java aficionado. But it wasn't my first programming language, or even my twenty-first. C and Python both beat Java for a lot of uses, but as a general-purpose, application development language, Java beats both of them. For me, Java is much more productive and useful for the types programs that I get paid to develop than any of the languages that I've used before, or since.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think the Washington Post is biased to the right, then you need to try reading the Washington Times. The Washington Times makes Fox News look like CNN.
Not a bad deal for PayPal, but not a good deal for anyone else.
You're not going to get a job by posting spoilers.
So ... What's it like, working for SCO?
Look, a court case between two private individuals (which is what corporations are legally) has nothing to do with democracy; it has everything to do with capitalism. That's why it's a CIVIL case. I'd suggest going back and learning something about politics and economics before embarrassing yourself again.
Apparently you're not that familiar with the case -- it has nothing to do with copyright (read the filings) and everything to do with contract law. I'd recommend spending some time over at GrokLaw reading the filings and the discussions.
While I'm curious as to the contents of the 18 documents that SCO requested be sealed (and the 17 that IBM had sealed), the judge's opinion is what will matter, and that won't be sealed (though it may be redacted). In any case, there is very little here that will affect copyright or set any precedents -- SCO hasn't presented any evidence of copyright violation OR for that matter, that they actually own the copyrights on Unix System V in the first place. SCO's case is based on three legs: (1) that they own the copyright to Unix System V [which is disputed by Novell, among others], (2) a completely unprecedented definition of derivative work, and (3) that IBM copied parts of AIX/Dynix into Linux that would fall under SCO's definition of derivative work [disputed by IBM and others]. While IBM did donate pieces of AIX and Dynix to Linux, IBM contends that what was contributed was IBM's work, and not part of some nebulous derivative of Unix System V, and thus not a problem.
To give you an idea of what I mean, under SCO's definition of derivative work, they claim if you write something that links against any of the APIs that were distributed with Unix System V, everything you wrote is a derivative product of their intellectual property, and that they can control what you do with your software. Thus if you write to the POSIX APIs for I/O, memory allocation, or threading in one routine, you produced an unauthorized derivative of Unix System V, and you owe SCO compensation.
(Yeah, I am not a lawyer, but that hasn't stopped anyone else from voicing an opinion.)
... or something like it. She was driving her old Chevy Spectrum down a two-lane road at rush hour, when the carburator's butterfly valve stuck open. Standing on the brakes had no effect. Eventually she got to a safe place where she could run the car into a parking lot, shift into neutral, and stop the car as it coasted up an incline to a halt -- with the engine still racing. Then she was able to turn off the ignition, thus slaying the demon.
While she could have turned off the ignition at any time to kill the engine, she would have had almost no control over the vehicle (power brakes, power steering), and traffic was pretty heavy ... a sure formula for an accident. Once she had it stopped, she had her mechanic come out and look at it, and he replaced the butterfly value ... for free, since he'd done a tune up on the car a week earlier.
That's why you use while, not for, as follows:
Sorry, my typo. I used the RS/6000 (POWER architecture) starting in 1990 through 1996; in 1991 I also used an RT/PC (yuck!).
Buzzz! Wrong. PPC = an implementation of IBM's Power architecture. AIX has run on the Power architecture since the late 80s. (I first used AIX on a Power RT system in 1990.)
Project Monterey was intended to port Unix to Intel/HP's Itanium processors. Project Montery actually ran for several years; it fell apart when IBM realized that the Itanium processors were (1) not going to arrive on time, and (2) weren't going to have the power that Intel predicted.
Unfortunately, that really isn't an option, either. The primary reason for going to eVoting is accessibility -- a computer can provide more flexible balloting mechanisms (large print, multiple languages, speech synthesis, touch screens, etc) than simple paper-and-pencil.
By bringing in independent auditors to do a recount.
How are you sure that the open-source election software loaded on the machine hasn't been tampered with? After all, having the source code doesn't mean that you have THE source code, does it?Establish and follow a chain of evidence, and have an independent auditor build the code and compare the results.
The answer to ALL of your concerns is to use independent auditors. Sure, they're expensive, but if you budget for it up front (ie: expect to randomly audit 1% of the precincts anyways) then it's not such a big deal. Require the hardware/software vendors to produce an audit trail for the assembly and configuration of the hardware, and then randomly pick 1% of machines to verify.
The biggest deterrent to election fraud is the potential to recount the ballots; the problem that Diebold and company have caused is that they want to remove the audit trail. The point is that with Open Source at least you *can* audit the results, the same way that you can audit the results of old-style ballots: you don't necessarily know *who* cast a particular ballot, but you have a whole box of them that can be counted as many times as you feel is necessary to guarantee that you've counted them correctly.
The primary reason for the size of the English vocabulary (and why English is one of the most popular international languages) is that English is like the Borg: all new words are assimilated into the collective. When someone creates a new word, all it takes to be part of English is for people to use it. For that matter, English sucks in words from other languages continuously -- 'rendezvous' was originally from the French phrase 'rendez vous', for present yourself.
Compare and contrast that with French, where the Académie française dictates whether or not a word is allowed to be part of 'French', and it can take decades to approve of a new word. (BTW, Have the French decided what to call a computer yet?)
"A language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy."
-- attributed to Professor Max Weinreich
I was discussing word creation in English; logic has nothing to do with it. On the other hand, you seem to have understood my point. :-)
There is no such thing as a non-existant word -- once you use it, it exists, and nothing can take it away. 'Misunderestimate' is a word (4,370 hits on Google) in much the same manner as 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'; it may be rare, but it has a definite meaning to a significant number of people.
Haven't you heard? Small is beautiful, or at least that's what all the idealistic kids have been saying for years... ;)
PS: pay some attention to demographics. In the US (as it is in most modernized countries) the population is old, and getting older. You're the one who's outnumbererd. Quoting from here: http://www.usembassy.de/usa/society-demographics.h tm
What makes you think we're going to just give up and let you win?
I can tell from your comments that you think you're one of the young and tolerant. Too bad your tolerance doesn't extend to the 'functionally retarded people'. Just remember, old age and treachery will overcome youth and enthusiasm ...
What planet are you referring to? It can't be the same Earth I grew up on.
Those dumb, panicky, dangerous animals are your friends and neighbors, and they will never be as tolerant as you wish. American society oscillates between tolerance and puritanism, but while the amplitude of the oscillation has grown, the centerline hasn't shifted. There will come a puritan backlash to the current tolerance, and the tools of 24x7 monitoring will serve the puritans much better than they will serve the tolerant.
That's what *I* expect will happen in the future.
One of my professors loaned me his copy of The Shockwave Rider in 1982. I don't know if this book changed my life, but it certainly made me think about how computers could (and should) be used. Written in 1975, John Brunner guessed wrong about the details of the technology, but scored a direct hit on the results of technology on society, and what it will mean for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the 21st century. This book was out of print for years, and it took me more than a decade of scowering used book stores to find a copy for myself -- I now have several copies so that I can lend them to others.
Buy it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
... which is this: why should we have to buy Tax preparation software in the first place? What's wrong with our Tax system that it has to be this complex? Or if it must be complex, why doesn't the IRS (who has to cope with end results on an efile) just write a front-end client that can be distributed for free? It would have to be cheaper for the government than what they have now.
Of course that would cut into the business models of the tax preparers and tax software manufacturers, so I guess it isn't really feasible, is it?
I have a Books24x7.com subscription through work. While the selection of content is ok, the books themselves can leave a lot to be desired. For starters, they only have deals with certain publishers (not surprisingly, O'Reilly is not on the list). Often the books are out of date, or just not that good in the first place.
A bigger problem is the web interface -- for most books you only get to read a couple of paragraphs before you have to advance the page. I want to be able to read an entire chapter at one shot -- paragraph-at-a-time just takes too long. The biggest problem though is that I do the majority of my reading offline (even if its just kicking back in my chair for a few minutes) -- reading is my break from staring at a screen.
So for me, Books24x7.com (or Safari for that matter) just doesn't cut it.
I've been a Python programmer as long as I've been a Java programmer (since 1996), so I've followed Jython with great interest. The problem with Jython is that it's implementation is ssssllllooooooooowww. As in 2-3 magnitudes slower than Python on the same machine, the last time I measured. :( Decompile some Jython classes and you'll quickly see why -- there's a large cost associated with implementing Python semantics on top of Java.
Groovy interests me because it looks like I can leverage all of the Java class libraries while taking advantage of an agile, functional language, and still have most of the speed of Java (there is some performance hit because of auto-boxing and some of the other automagic features). I'm particularly interested in comparing the performance of Groovy with the performance of Java and Python/Jython for similar functions.
Precisely! If you look at the GNU Classpath compatibility reports (GNU Classpath vs: JDK 1.0 JDK 1.1 JDK 1.2 JDK 1.3 JDK 1.4) you'll see that the biggest piece that's missing is Swing, largely because there isn't a specification for Swing.
The other problem is performance -- the OSS JVM's are much slower than the commercial JVMs, but that's really a chicken and egg problem, driven by adoption rates. Few people (comparatively) are using the open JVMs, so there isn't much incentive to improve them ... and until their performance improves (and package coverage improves), there isn't much reason to use them.
Of course, since Eclipse's SWT is open source and doesn't depend upon Swing, I'm hoping to see more Java applications built using SWT, which might bridge the gap and kickstart Java adoption. This is probably the biggest threat to Sun, and the largest potential fork for the Java specification, which is why Sun isn't interested in working with Eclipse.org.
This doesn't make any sense for anything but trivial programs.
The C Standard I/O library will only handle command-line programs that work with plain I/O streams. No GUIs, no networked applications, no databases. All that portability really means is that you can do data-crunching with a fair level of success. If you want portable C applications that do more than just data crunching, you have to pick libraries for the additional capabilities, and every decision you make limits the portability of your application, and increases the number of vendors you're dependent upon for 'the proper libraries'.
On the other hand, Java includes a standard set of classes for handling 2D and 3D graphics, G customer or the UIs, network I/O, Internationalization, memory management, databases, distributed programming, XML, and much more. The APIs are portable across a multitude of OSes, and while admittedly there are bugs, when you compare the scope of the APIs to their list of bugs, the miracle is that there aren't 10 or 100 times as many bugs. The point with Java is that it includes 'the proper libraries' as part of the specification, and a vendor can't claim an implementation is Java unless it passes certification tests to prove that their implementation is correct.
But what do I know... I've only been programming for 30 years on everything from basic web apps to commercial software to high-end mission-critical applications. I've NEVER had any application (except perhaps some client-side graphical eye-candy) really scream out to be coded in Java.In the last 25 years, I've never had any application really scream out to be coded in any particular language -- usually the development/deployment environment will drive that decision, in combination with the timeline.
One thing I notice about Java aficiandos [sic] is that it usually ends up being their primary (if not only) language and they're trying to squeeze it to work in a wide variety of environments where it really is not the best choice.Yeah, I'm a Java aficionado. But it wasn't my first programming language, or even my twenty-first. C and Python both beat Java for a lot of uses, but as a general-purpose, application development language, Java beats both of them. For me, Java is much more productive and useful for the types programs that I get paid to develop than any of the languages that I've used before, or since.