Main Entry: republic Pronunciation: ri-'p&-blik Function: noun Etymology: French république, from Middle French republique, from Latin respublica, from res thing, wealth + publica, feminine of publicus public -- more at REAL, PUBLIC Date: 1604 1 a (1) : a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government b (1) : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government c : a usually specified republican government of a political unit 2 : a body of persons freely engaged in a specified activity 3 : a constituent political and territorial unit of the former nations of Czechoslovakia, the U.S.S.R., or Yugoslavia
Main Entry: republic Pronunciation: ri-'p&-blik Function: noun Etymology: French république, from Middle French republique, from Latin respublica, from res thing, wealth + publica, feminine of publicus public -- more at REAL, PUBLIC Date: 1604 1 a (1) : a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government b (1) : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government c : a usually specified republican government of a political unit 2 : a body of persons freely engaged in a specified activity 3 : a constituent political and territorial unit of the former nations of Czechoslovakia, the U.S.S.R., or Yugoslavia
Looks to me like American government can be accurately described by either word.
Aw crap, you're right. I guess I'll give up after all.;-)
Look, I don't care how systemic the problems are. They are there and they are systemic because we, the people have almost totally abrogated our social responsibility. I see no value whatsoever in sitting on our duffs whining about it (I don't mean to abuse you personally, although it seems like it).
You can make a difference. It is still a democracy. That the task is difficult is no reason not to undertake it. Hell, you heave a brick out a window and hit ten people who will readily take on an easy job. Take on the hard job!
By thunder, I'm going to my precinct caucuses this year, come hell or high water. If we all did the same the system would change literally overnight. The popular will cannot be overwhelmed by all the money and power in the world because IT IS OUR POWER. They do, at the end of the day, need the votes.
These "implacable forces" hold sway because disillusionen citizens have given up on our democracy.
"Deep in our craven souls we know that Democracy is a dying giant, a relic breathing its last. I don't mean that America is finished as a world power, America is the wealthiest; the most powerful country in the world; and I don't mean the Communists are going to take over the world, the Communists are even deader than we are. No, what's finished is the notion that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every single individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's every single solitary one of you out there listening to me now who's finished. The entire world is becoming humanoid, creatures that look human but aren't. We are nation of 200 million deodorized, transistorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted creatures, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replacable as piston rods."
That quote (as best I can remember it, I'm writing from memory here) is from Paddy Chayefsky's magnificent screenplay for the movie "Network" (a movie I urge you all to see, by the way).
I think that nightmare vision of America is here and real. But I don't have to accept it. Nihilistic despair has no room in my life. I choose to live deliberately. I'm going to my precinct caucus and I'm going to fight for a new software patent law and I'll probably fail. Where were you when I needed you?
The illness in American Democracy is not Microsoft. It is not even big money. It is not even the absurd (IMHO) Supreme Court decision that money is speech. The illness is me. The illness is you. The illness is the fact that you didn't go to your precinct caucusses, did you? (Neither did I, I'm not getting holier-than-thou here).
The sickness is the way regard the government as "them" and the people as "us." I've got news for you folks. The government is "us." Why have "evil special interests" taken over the government and made lapdogs of legislators? Because we were not there.
This government is ours. It is structured to do what we want it to do. But we are not there saying what we want!
Instead, we participate in focus groups where the same researches who figure out why we buy one brand of toothpaste over another ask us a series of provocative questions and measure our emotional responses. They are not looking for what we think, they are after what we feel because they know a dirty little secret. People are not motivated by intellect, they are motivated by emotion.
This system allows our political discourse to descend from open discussion of matters of vital interest to us (like anti-trust and patent law, like tax policy and welfare reform) to grainy black-and-white advertisements showing a prison with a reveloving door and that scary black man! (I'm referring to the George Bush "Willie Horton" ad here, but both parties do this -- I'm not being partisan, I just think the Willie Horton ad was the most despicable example of this.)
Now, your intellect knows full well that if you vote for Dukakis, you wife will not autmatically be raped and murdered by a black man. But it, along with the rest of the scientific marketing research, designed to find your emotional hot buttons, creates an "emotional aura" around the candidate that is pervasive and insiduous, hard to identify and reason with, difficult to resist.
So what do we do? We aren't totally blind. We aren't robots. These ads don't MAKE us vote in a particular way in and of themselves, but they do make us digusted and fed up. We feel in our guts that this ISN'T democracy, so we turn off. The political diet is empty calories and we go looking elsewhere for nourishment.
I think this empty, mindless, constant appeal to emotion is why we stay away from the polls in droves.
Well-funded interests are all too happy to step in and take what they can from the carcass of our freedoms. What the hell? We don't want it.
We CAN stop this. While our government may seem to be totally out of control, and that we are powerless, our government still retains the FORM of democracy. Call your local library. Find out where your party caucus is held. Go. Talk. Question. Discuss. There will be organizers there for candidates. They will have a platform. They will have votes and positions. They will try to pressure you to keep your mouth shut. They will try to control the election of delegates. Don't let them. Speak up. Go. See how it works. It will make you mad, but don't knuckle under. Bring some friends. Insist on talking about what bothers you.
I've seen it here. Slashdotters have some definite opinions on real matters of law and commerce. Don't settle for the way things are. All the tools needed to take back our government are there. Make the next Congress an "open source" Congress (forgive me for such a weak and strained linkage, but I think the same kind of spirit that imbues open source/free software can be tapped to bring reality back to politics).
Think of it like exercise, or, yes, open source programming. I get paid to write software at work. I set aside a little time every week to work on my free software project. This year, I've decided to set aside a little time to work on my "software patent" idea. I'm going to my caucus and I'm going to get a vote on a platform plank. A platform that patents on software be limited to no more than 24 months. I know that many would like no patents on software, but other forces will want patents to stay just as they are. I'm going for a compromise.
Whatever it is that upsets you, go. Make your voice heard. Write your congretional delegation.
You must not wait for others to give you your freedom. You must take it for yourself. It is yours, but if you leave it lying on the ground, don't be surprised when someone (maybe Microsoft) picks it up and says, "hey, I could use this!"
No argument. Ours cost us less, but that's because my old man was an electrical engineer and we designed and built the S-100 cards ourselves. We even did photo-etching ourselves on some of our later cards. Fun. Educational.
No, my nitpick consisted simply of pointing out that the Apple was not that innovative in a technical sense. It was hardly the first computer with swappable cards. That's all. I'm not saying that it wasn't the market breakthrough. It certainly was. Not everyone was ready to be their own engineer and software developer. The Apple ][ was a consumer item. The CP/M based S-100 bus machines were computers for computer people who couldn't afford 370's at home (and didn't have the raised floor;-)
Because of Steve-o many killer products devloped or ripped-off) have been brought to market: -the mouse -the networked laser printer -expansion slots (Apple II)
WARNING! NITPICK AHEAD!
The Apple was hardly the first computer (even personal computer) with expansion slots. There were two major camps in the 8-bit computing world. Those who centered their designs around the 6502, and those who centered their designs around the 8080/Z80. Most of the early 8080/Z80 designs used something called the S-100 bus. It was a 100-pin bus and most of the designs had the CPU as just another card. You could swap everything including the processor. Not only that, but it was a broadcast bus so you didn't have this "slot address" crap you had with the Apple ][ bus.
The Apple did a lot, and I still think Visicalc was one of the finest pieces of software writing of all time (all that functionality squeezed out of an inferior processor running in some tight memory limits, and to this day Excel doesn't give you that much more functionality), but there were much more sophisitcated architectures out there.
They didn't win the marketing war, though.
As I said, a nitpick. BTW, I was moving a really old couch out of my parent's basement and I found a computer hobbyist catalog from 1976 in there. How would you like to buy an S-100 bus 32k (that's "k") static memory card for $835?
That's what these things cost assembled. No wonder my Dad and I wire-wrapped our first computer...
I just want to be sure I understand you. You see compression as useful any time you have multiple threads of data that must be passed through a single interface? In other words, where even if everything is operating at nearly maximum signaling rate, we still have more bandwidth in the "processor box" than we have in the data communications interface because there is more than one processor moving data at the maximum signaling rate?
I guess I'd have to admit that does offer an exception to my purely theortical objection. Holy dog chow, though! I hope never to see world where we all need that kind of bandwidth.
I can imagine myself needing several Gigs, but I can't imagine personally needing that kind of bandwidth (although, obviously when we have Gigs in our homes, someone is going to need Terabits). While I'm conceeding points, I also remember my first 10M hard drive (in my CP/M 1.4 days) and thinking "I'll never fill this thing!"
How much bandiwdth would a transporter use, anyways?;-)
If you begin to approach the bandwidth limits of a fiberoptic cable, why do you think compression would help? No processor could handle the data stream faster than the limit of the faster carrier medium, so compression would always have to take longer than transmission (because compression take some measureable amount of time). The only reason compression improves "speed" now is because the internal bus of computers is considerably faster than the external communications medium. Make them equal, or mkae communications medium faster and compression will necessarily result in lower throughput.
People are flexing their technical knowledge at you and not answering your question. Data carriers always talk about bits because bits are the most fundmental unit of information. No matter how that information is grouped into larger structures, you can always reduce it to bits, the lowest unit of information.
Sometimes a stream of data is NOT bytes. Consider sending a series of octal digits. Each octal digit is three bits. If you send that data out in a stream of 6 octal digits, you have 18 bits of data. Now, if, at the other end, you happen to be reading in bytes, you get two bytes and two bits left over. The transport medium still carried 18-bits.
Modern computers defintely have a bias towards 8-bit bytes. That's because Latin alphabets and symbols can be well represented by 7 or 8 bits. Prior to the adoption of EBCDIC and ASCII coding, a five bit protocol was used for radio teletype equipment. They used an encoding scheme called Baudot. So, what are you sending? 3-bit octal numbers? 5-bit Baudot RTTY characters? 7-bit ASCII, or 8-bit extended ASCII?
Doesn't matter to the data carrier. It's all bits.
There's another source for the prejudice. There are two major styles of data interface. Serial and Parallel. In paralell, you have one data line per bit in the "word" (a word being the "chunk" size of the data -- again, typically 8-bits, either 7-bit ASCII with parity, or 8-bit extended ASCII) and then you have control lines (STROBE) that signal when a "word" is ready to read on the lines. Paralell interfaces tend to be local, because running many wires over long distances is obviously more difficult and expensive than running one (or a pair).
This leads to "serial" communications. Serial communications uses one wire to carry data, one bit at a time. The first such protocols were the radio teletypes I mentioned earlier (RTTY).
An antenna sticking in the air carries one signal, and that signal has three states. One state is idle, not doing anything. The others are called MARK and SPACE, or 0 and 1.
The teletypes had a rotating cam that would move past five levers. A lever could be set (pressed) or clear (not pressed). The seetings of the lever would determine which hammer would be pressed forward when the carriage would move at the end of the cam's rotation, thus determining which letter (or symbol) would be printed on the paper.
So, a sending teletype operator would press a local key, this would set the levers and make the matching hammer hit the local paper. The local cam would rotate, reading the lever settings, and would send a MARK (for a set lever) or a SPACE (for a cleared lever). The receiving teletype's cam would be likewise rotating, and it would set and clear levers as the MARKs and SPACEs were received.
You should be seeing an obvious problem here. What if the cams were not in the same position? The wrong levers would be set and the wrong characters would be printed. They first tried to solve this problem with "synchronous" protocols. A sender would send a specific pattern of marks and spaces as fast as it could. The other end would speed up or slow down it's cam until it came to "top" at the beginning of the synch pattern. Then they would start with the data. Trouble is, this system tended to drift, and the text would become gibberish requiring a re-synch.
The next invention helped solve that. Called "asynchronous" serial communication, it added the concept of a "start bit" and a stop bit. The idea was that each character would begin with a start bit (a MARK) and end with one or more stop bits (SPACEs). The receivers cam would be locked at the top and when a start bit was received, it would release, go around once, and lock until it saw the next start bit. This isn't really "asynchronous," in fact it is re-synching on every letter!
This basic protocol is still in use today right in your serial port and modem. You send one start bit, an 8-bit character, and a stop bit. That's why a 2400 baud modem can send 240 cps instead of the 300 cps it ought to be able to send if it were 8 bits per character.
I chose 2400 baud, because as other posts point out, protocols get a great deal more complicated at higher speeds.
Still, the RTTY and the rotating cam idea are the reason serial communications exist, and they are the basic origins for their mechanics.
The high speed technologies discussed here are not simple serial asynchronous systems, but complex frame-based systems. Nonetheless, those frame elements are there to do the same sort of jobs that start-bits and stop-bits were meant to do: Allow a bunch of hardware to watch a "wiggling" electrical signal and figure out how to draw the intended information from it.
All of this adds up to why they talk about bits per second. The data carrier does not care how the bits are oragnized into units of meaning. No matter how they are grouped, they are just streams of bits.
DICK The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.
(For those who don't know, laws at the time were handwritten on lambskin parchment, and legal agreements were sealed with signet rings pressed in beeswax.)
And Mark Twain in his collected letters wrote (I do not remember to whom he wrote, and I'm paraphrasing):
"I agree with you and the bard, sir. Whilst killing all the lawyers in this country would probably not solve all of our problems, it would be a lot of fun and do no one any harm."
That said, I have come to have a very healthy respect for lawyers and the law, and I have come to value the convolutions and wranglings of American jurisprudence. All one has to do is to look at what governments can accomplish against their citizens in countries that do NOT have a body law before all other authority.
No, lawyers and laws are good things because the alternatives are despotism or rule by thugs. I would be very interested to see a survey of cases brought to court in the area of patent law and to see how often patent law has cut the wrong way. We know it has, an earlier poster brought up the contention over frequency modulation (an actual INVENTION!) and how patent law was used to screw the inventor.
I know most working engineers sign agreements giving their employers patent rights on their work.
Patent law has been a good thing. It encourages both innovation and dissemenation, in principle. I have frequently advocated that, if software patents must exist, they should last less than two years. It seems very bad in the software world; but is it really?
How often does patent law *really* misfire? I submit the suspicion that no one posting to this discussion topic (myself included) has the slightest idea.
Getting a patent is one thing. Exercising it is another. Is there a patent lawyer in the house who could actually throw some light on the state of patent law? How many cases result in the striking down of the patent. How many uphold the patent? And of those, how many really protect an innovation and how many protect dubious patents like "on-line sales," or "one-click shopping?"
While I do think civil disobedience is a fine and noble thing, and I wouldn't oppose this idea, have any of you tried writing your congresspersons and senators a letter? A letter writing campaign will have much more effect than an act of civil disobedience. A friend of mine once worked in a congressman's office. I asked him how many letters they had to get on a subject before it would actually be brought to the congressman's direct attention. He said four. Four!!! (Note that there are exceptions, like gun control and abortion which generate mail like crazy, but on some garden variety issue, not on the "radar", it takes four letters).
I'm sure this varies from issue to issue and from congressperson to congressperson, but I still urge you (and everyone else who cares about this) to write an original letter and put it on paper, sign it, and send it to each member of your delegation.
It *does* have an effect.
The "special interests" control the process in no small part because we don't exercise our freedoms. Want freedom of speech? Say so!
I am not distracted by grammar and spelling errors in my own writing.;-)
Also, I am quite willing to draw a distinction between an impromptu Slashdot posting and an academic paper when it comes to matters of spelling and grammar. I do not think my comments were unfair or hypocritical.
I don't think this essay is an example of particularly cogent criticism. It consists largely of a series of quotes that appear to lend credence to a series of opinions about the nature of "Open Source," but it is well thought out and lucid. I know it is declasse to bring it up, but I found the the spelling and punctuation errors a serious distraction.
All of that said, however, I think we (meaning the human race) need to do a great deal more thinking then discussing how we organize our labor for personal and community gain. As an example of that phenomenon I enjoyed the essay a great deal.
I, too, think that much of the current thought on free software and open source is somewhat utopian and idealisitc, but I think that is a good thing. Reality will always modify theory, but to change reality requires ideas that lie beyond attainability. I don't think one can dismiss ESR's ideas merely because they will never become reality -- they have and will continue to change the limits of reality, even if they are never fully attainable.
My own personal belief (and, I will admit, slightly utopian hope) is that the economic need for commerical software has ceased to exist. Instead I think programmers will work as professionals (like lawyers and doctors), paid for their knoweldge and skill. Because production and distribution of software can now be done at nearly zero cost, there is no longer any need for companies to produce shrink-wrapped software.
Given that, I think the work started by RMS, and considerably furthered by Linus, Alan, et. al., will continue -- programmers writing code they want to write and then giving it away. That fits the "scientific research" view of the author of the essay discussed here.
I do, however, also think that companies will begin to use and need such software. As they do so, they will have specific needs that are not addressed by that "research software." These companies will pay programmers (as professionals, not employees) to produce those programs. We professionals will insist that such programs be open source/free software -- contributed back to the professional community.
I use surgery as an example. When a doctor (perhaps employed in a univeristy hospital) develops a new surgical technique, he or she does not keep it a secret and then package and sell it to other doctors (Triple Bypass 98?), instead it is published in a medical journal and taught to other doctors. The discovering doctor becomes more valuable, gains prestige, brings contributions to his or her hospital, etc. No economic disaster is portends. Quite the reverse.
Please note that I believe this applies to software only, (or to technique only). The analogy does not extend to drugs or medical devices because these DO have considerable manufacturing costs -- they are not zero cost distributable.
I'm very glad to see discussion such as this essay, and I hope to see more of it.
I don't wish to belabor the point. I can assure that nothing you have said puts me on the defensive. Perhaps I infer to too much from your writing style. If you go back and read your statements, they appear rather absolute.
I'm sorry, but to find fault with the behavior of others and to reduce their whole humanity to a label, whether it be "packer" or any other label is the definition of bigoted. Again, perhaps this is me drawing overbroad conclusions from your style of rhetoric. I apologize if that is so. Even so, while you may not be guilty of these tendencies I expression concern about, the ability to use ideas like this one (and like DiSC, or like Strong-Campbell, or like any of a host of other psychological categorization systems) to segregate and create identities can be terribly abused. I am urging caution.
The reason I have invested so much effort in striking the flanks of these ideas is because they are compelling. The seem holistic, and they appear to match experience. I think there very much is something of value here. I am merely suggesting that the ideas are vague, overbroad, and incomplete. I do not for moment think they should be dismissed or suppressed; merely examined closely.
I am very willing to entertain your point of view. I entertained it very thoroughly and considered with much reflection before I committed my concerns to "paper."
The one phrase in your most recent reply that causes me deep concern is "...people are missing their full potential (not to mention annoying others incessantly) as a result..." People who don't think like you do are annoying and those people are packers?
I am not a literal-minded automata, I am merely concerned because I think many people can (and will) take these ideas not as an agenda for self-improvement, but as assurance of self-superiority, and a way to dismiss the opinions and thoughts of people whose way of thinking they find annoying.
I am not a robot, I am not a genius (I think genius does not exist, actually -- it is merely full engagement of the human mind, much as I think you believe as well), I am human being with the full mix of intellect and prejudice, of reason and emotion, of calm and rage. So are you. So is everyone who annoys you. I simply mistrust that urge in me that suggests I see clearly where others do not. There are real differences in ability, but this does not necessarily correspond to social value.
Please understand, I believe that you want to put these ideas out not to show the superiority of people who are "mappers," but rather because you believe that these ideas might help to liberate the thinking of people who haven't thought that way for some time because of social forces that discourage it. I believe your evangel to be one of liberation. I truly do. It is just that ideas like this can "tribalize" (if you'll fogive the disgusting neologism) and that does real harm.
I try to live my life by a rather classless little cliche: "If one person tells you that you have a tail, you can laugh and tell them to go to hell. If two people tell you that you have a tail, it is time to check your ass."
Yes, I think we do agree. What I think rankles me is the high-handedness of anyone who believes he belongs entirely to one camp and is therefore able to label others as belonging entirely in the other camp. My observation of human behavior doesn't bear this out. Everyone is capable of, and at times requires both kinds of thinking.
This tendency to observe something as obviously multivariate as human learning, and then to arbitarily create a handful of categories and then slam people into them (as if there were only that many kinds of people) is intellectually (and aesthetically) repellent to me. I also notice that people who categorize in this way tend to create a category with attributes they value and admire and another category with traits they dislike and revile, and then they firmply place themselves in the first category. All of these "models" of behavior seem to me to be self-serving. They seem to be a way for the creators of the model to feel good about themselves. While that's very nice, and more power to them, do not expect me to adopt their labels and say, "thank you very much. I will be so much happer knowing I am a 'type X!'. Obviously THIS is what has been holding me back all of these years!"
It is such a gross oversimplification of a complex phenomenon that it cannot help but be inaccurate.
I'm not saying generalizations are without value. If we could only talk about human behavior at the level of indivduals, we would never find patterns (in fact, we would never develop a vocabulary for it). In some cases it is the vagueness, in some cases it is the self serving quality.
I do not see a big difference between someone saying, "I am a mapper," and someone else saying "I am a Capricorn." They are both saying equally vague and meaningless things about themselves.
You willingness to dismissively throw a label on so many people you have never met, whom you know nothing about by observation, but only by assumption, and to suggest that all of the problems of the world are their fault (for obviously, you as a mapper are above any responsibility for the ills of the world) is the worst sort of uncritical and bigoted thinking, rooted, if you look deeply, not in any observation on your part, but rather on your prejudice, and, if you'll forgive me joining in, rather packerish.
Please forgive me for the tone. I am not trying to single you out personally, because I am in general agreement about the nature of open-mindednees and free-thinking. It's just that I am always suspicous of anyone who is so freely claiming to be an open-minded free-thinker. I have found this is usually an unexamined belief. I happen to feel your conclusions about the deficiences of a significant portion of the human race whom, I am fairly certain, you have never met tends to bear out my conclusions.
I cannot comment on Judge Dredd. I know nothing about it.
It isn't nuclear power that's scary; it's radiation. Radiation, like the Ebola virus, fills us with irrational dread. It there, but you can't see it, you can't feel it, hear it, or taste it, but it can contaminate you and then you die!!
There are rational arguments against nuclear power, most of them economic: Fuel refining had such a high energy cost that plant operations only recouped the energy balance some time around 1980 (that's really a number pulled from my fundament. I read it from a book written by a DOE employee and I read it over five years ago, so give or take a 5 years, and just accept that my point is it took a long time -- I'd love it if you'd go look it up and tell me exactly). The plants are very expensive to run (although the industry claims this is mostly due to overregulation). The waste problem remains intractable (and thus expensive). Even so, the rabid "anti-nuke" feeling out there is a product of a primal fear, not of reason.
All of that said, my brother is a Navy Nuke and the one thing he is certain of is that he won't work in civilian nuclear power. He (and I guess a fair portion of the nuclear Navy) feels the civilian nuclear industry just doesn't have their act together.
As for the alternatives discussed above:
Oil is being extarcted faster than it is being made. It will run out, all other things being equal. I suspect, however, that the release of all of that carbon into the atmosphere will disrupt things enough before the oil runs out that it will finally dawn on us how stupid we are being. Same for coal. I would believe that our supplies of oil and coal will last for centuries. Why? Because we only go after easy supplies now. As those supplies run out, the price rises and it becomes economical to go after "hard" supplies. Such a thing happened to make pressurized water drilling economically feasible. Eventually the same will happen for more extraordinary measures.
At some point, though, I think the rising cost of that oil will finally make solar comepletely economical. It is quite possible to power your home and break-even within the life of a mortgage right now. That's not enough to make a bank or an industry happy, but that's not too bad. Solar and wind have one major technological problem. Batteries. They suck. But you need them or some such thing because the sun isn't always over your home and the wind isn't always blowing. Grid-interitied solar systems coupled with traditional power generation would really improve things right now. We could shut down all the nukes and a significant number of coal plants (the highest emission ones, perhaps?) if people put grid-interied systems on their homes that met only 10% of their energy needs. You can do that right now, today, for less than $10,000.
Personally, I'm very much in favor of small hydro systems. The huge Grand Coulee style projects cause major environmental havoc, but small community-scale projects cause much less and that harm is known to be less than the harm of burning fossil fuels. Such hydro system can only meet a tiny fraction of our energy needs, however.
As for radiation, yep. It's scary. But I think it should be impossible to get out of high school without knowing what radition is and how it interacts with living tissue. I think people should know that, like the Palmolive commercial, they "are soaking in it" every day of their lives. That their own bones are radioactive. They should well understand how and why exposure harms us and what kind of levels exist in nature, and how much exposure is dangerous. But then, I also think you shouldn't get out of high school without knowning how the bond market works, how to get a mortgage, how to balance your checkbook, and that Carson City is the capital of Nevada. Guess I'm a dreamer...
You've completely missed the point. We have this knowledge of the "nitty gritty" details because we find them interesting.
I don't think I did. You find them interesting because you learned enough of them for your innate ability to think (to "map" as these folks put it) began to get interested in acquiring facts because you began to see a "map." I'm suggesting that "mapping" emerges naturally from sufficient observation of "facts." The problems come when people confuse information and judgement. When one becomes bigoted about facts. When one comes to accept facts not because they are observed, but because they are believed. This is the difference between knowledge and faith, and the application of judgement based on observation rather than belief is the difference between wisdom and dogma.
No, the acquisition of knowledge is learning, a new discovery, a source of exhiliration.
Having useless facts rammed down your throats by clueless teachers in the cesspit we like to call public education is drudgery.
There is no substitute for study, for the exercise of memory. There is no subsitute for rote learning when it comes to the acquisition of "facts." Facts become the arsenal for the expression of "thought," which is the higher synthesis of information, the only truly human act.
It will if you are capable of mapper thinking. Ever heard of tech manuals? A mapper is not daunted by lack of knowledge. A packer is limited by lack of thinking.
What does that mean? I have never met anyone incapable of mapper thinking. My point was that learning facts is a straightforward application of self-discipline -- that learning the facts is required in order to think, and that "mapper thinking" doesn't contribute to this process. In fact, I am arguing that mapper think emerges from having a large and wide-ranging body of knowledge. This notion that "mappers" are some sort of intellectual elite, above mere fact, is, in the literal meaning of the word, poppycock. I completely agree that mapper thinking exists. I just think it arises from a combination of wide knowledge AND self-confidence that one's thoughts are worthy of expression.
What I think public education does wrong is NOT the rote teaching of facts, but rather the ongoing process of humiliating children into thinking that their thoughts, their creativity has no value. What schools (painted with an overbroad brush) do wrong is that they criticize children when they have an insight, a flash of original thought, and they get shot down because that thought happens to be contradicted by a fact they didn't know about. That discourages the child from ever exressing another insight because they might be "wrong."
Feynman? Whatever. Feynman's DAD on the other hand is a miracle. Feynman's dad would not say, "No, that's wrong." instead he would say, "Interesting idea. I wonder how we can test that?" Feynman being a genius was inevitable after that.
No, the problem is that they teach you WHAT to think instead of HOW to think (packer vs mapper, anyone?).
Everyone knows how to think. What schools do is to shut down the desire to think. Big difference.
There is a BIG difference between how the function code pins work on the m68000 CPU and the dates that each explorer came to the americas (Can you believe that in grade 9 I had to memorize this shit in order to pass the course?)
Yes, I can. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not sure why you think there is. You never know when those facts may become integral to a much more sophisticated thought. No datum is without value.
I have never taken a computer course in my life and I now make my living writing computer software. I'll tell you this, though. While I am often a much more innovative programmer than those I have worked with, I had a lot to learn to learn from those people with their "useless" education. I had to learn a lot of engineering principles. I learned a lot about program stability, testing, completeness, and development process from those people. They have a lot of useful, practical knowledge that would otherwise only have come to be by my continuous process of Innovation by Spectacular Public Failure (I'm thinking about getting a patent). All the "mapper" thinking in the world doesn't prevent you from having to rediscover a fact that others already knew and you could have learned if only you had shut up and listened. Creative thinking is great, but no matter the subject, there is definitely somebody out there who knows something about it that you don't.
- Thomas Edison did NOT invent the lightbulb.
I never thought or said he did. He did make a commercial success of it, however, and by a very Microsoft like marketing practice made himself into the "lonely genius inventor," (like claiming to be a "mapper," perhaps?), never mind the 80 engineers working for him who actually ran all the tests and did all the experiements. Still not sure what your point is...
- The Wright brothers were NOT the first to fly a manned airplane.
Right again. Still not sure what your point is...
- Columbus did NOT discover America.
Nope. Instead he made the greatest face-saving PR move in history. I think it's fair to say America had already been discovered. By the Native Americans, at the very least. - "Honest" Abe Lincoln, your favorite president, was very much in favor of the slave trade.
Not so. This is a gross misunderstanding of Lincoln's position. He was a politician. And while he was personally opposed to slavery and the slave trade, he had to be elected. The slave trade was a northern economic concern. There was no way for a political animal to take it on directly. He also was overwhelmingly concerned with the preservation of the Union, and as such he backed away from policies that could have been perceived as abolitionist. BTW, there was very little import of slaves by the mid-nineteenth century. Most southern plantations were "breeding" their own. In fact, the Confederate Constitution outlawed the slave trade as a nod to British opposition, and in hopes of encouraging them to recognize the Confederacy. It is one of the more seemingly incongruous elements of the Civil War period.
BTW, I learned much of this in school (I was a history major) and I read a lot of it in books. Didn't "map" any of it.
No, I think the only evil is the crushing of self-expression, the discouragement of child-like wonder, the disconnection of inference and imagination. It isn't memorization of dates. You are going to find through your life that people sometimes get the facts wrong; that some of the things you think are important to memorize turn out to be useless (to YOU); that things you beleieve turn out to be wrong. What matters then is your willingness to explore. That's what gets shot out.
I believe very much that solutions emerge from holistic understanding of systems; from knowledge of computers, systems, and people so deep that decisions are more instinctual than conscious. That has been my experience. The "aha!" feeling. The flash of insight.
This appears, in this messy and poorly organized essay, to be the essence of mapping.
What I dislike about this is that this non-linear thinking arises most frequently from the fertile soil of "packer" knoweldge and experience. Every programming "genuis" I have known has not only been capable of this instinctual synthesis, but has also been posessed of encyclopedic knowledge of these nitty-gritty technical details.
The acquisition of knowledge is drudgery. The syenthsis of fact into insight is creativity. All the creativity in the world will not help you, however, if you are writing and operating system and you don't know that the interrupt enable flag is cleared on entry to an interrupt service routine and must be set on exit.
I guess what I am saying is that while modern pedagogy may overemphasize rote learning over synthesis, thought, holisticism, without the facts you have nothing.
I tend to believe that the problem lies not in how education teaches facts, but rather in that we have "dumbed down" the number facts taught. I think the human mind is so hungry for patterns that, if taught enough facts, and allowed the speculate, this facility for insight will develop on its own. When you are not taught enough about anything to see the interconnectedness of things, is it any wonder we are locked in this "packer" mode?
I remember being fascinated by the fact that the mutilples of 9 add up to 9 (for the first few mutltiples:
9x2=18 1+8=9 9x3=27 2+7=9 ... ...
You find patterns like this all over the place. How 'bout the fact that you can calculate pi with this little succession:
4 * ((1/1) - (1/3) + (1/5) - (1/7) + (1/9)...
I guess what I'm trying to drive at here is that I think the solution is NOT to push people into the fog, but to expose them to as many FACTS as possible. Their native curiosity will bring out the innovative qualities.
Unfortunately, we dumb everything down and add the "Simpsonsesque":
Okay, I know I'm getting off-topic here, but I violently (sorry violence is unfashionable; viscerally then) disagree with this assertion.
The "OpenSource" community needs to just keep telling the truth, lifting the curtains, giving away the source, and scrutinizing everything, including itself. Mindcraft used bad techniques. We called them on it. NT was still faster at a number of things. We pointed out that for 99% of installations, the "slower" Linux box would saturate the network. I think we did a great job. But NT is still faster. Will it always be? I'll bet not, because we've got the source and we can keep improving.
Marketing and advertising, in fact all consumptive waste is predicated on our continuing ignorance. As free software/open source folks, we should, to misquote Frederick Douglass, Educate! Educate! Educate!
We gain nothing by adopting their Wizard of OZ "Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain!" tactics.
I see something of an opportunity here. Could we have an "open source" set of project metrics? That is to say, create some very simple, lightweight, open source tools for tracking participation in an open source project that uses some fairly reasonable set of conventional tools (cvs, mailing lists, download mirrors) and provides some raw counts and some basic reports and graphs? It would be interesting if any open source porject could use such a toolset to keep common stats that could be used to improve the whol development model (or just to show it off to PHBs).
I'm in the middle of an open source project right now (see the cvs browser at my website if you're curious -- we haven't announced yet because its still too sketchy, but feel free to look) that ties up enough of my free time to keep me from starting such a thing right now, but I throw the idea out if someone else wants to run with it. Otherwise, such a simple toolset might be my next project...
As for the rest, I guess I'm also saying a "me too" on this post. There are a limited number of good programmers with a limited amount of spare time. There are a lot of interting projects. Some projects will break the curve because they are cool or sexy, and some will be so boring (like my OS dev stats idea) that they'll be constant (at 1?). If you average the data points, I bet you get a logarithmic curve for the very good reasons cited above.
I tend to think that programmers, for the good of all programmers, should stick to 100% open tools built using GPL'ed tools and libraries because I believe in and hope for an evolution of programming into a true profession like medicince and law where all the code (laws, medical techniques) is (are) open and more or less freely available and it is skilled people who are valuable. Software is only valuable as a product because compilation is, in effect, encryption that hides technique. It makes programmers into manufacturers, wholly dependent on their salaries from companies owned by people who can't code at all. In a world where software is difficult and expensive to distribute, this was natural (and perfectly okay in my book -- I'm not a socialist).
We are now, however, moving into a world where software is easy and almost free to distribute. The software "industry" is no longer economically necessary. In fact, I think its a dinosaur. An antique. I truly believe that we will all be more productive (and rich) when all software is free because programmers will become people valued for their skill and productivity alone. We will all be able to use one another's knowledge (just as doctors and lawyers do now) so we can spend less time doing the same things over and over again. The pace of programming innovation will accelerate dramatically and the economic benefits of computing (faster business cycles and lower costs) will be magnified by that amount of time we no longer spend building the same basics at every employer and we instead concentrate on making existing software fit the local need.
All of that said, that is not yet the world we live in. While I want us all to be using open tools, a lot of businesses have a heavy investment in specific "enterprise" technologies such as Delphi and C++ Builder. I for one welcome these tools on the Linux platform. I'll prbably use them in my workplace.
The software I develop for the open source world will still use the GNU tools and be GPL'ed and use automake/autoconf and be written for maximum portability.
I also look forward to seeing tools like Kdevelop continue to mature.
While the software industry lives, let the commercial vendors come. Just try to keep your skills up in the open tools too.
This is what makes free software unstoppable. The commercial interests can take over the business market through the gullibility of the PHBs, but no one can take away your gcc, or stop you from giving away your own code.
I believe all software will one day be free and that it will be considered fiduciary misconduct to buy an operating system, but until that day, there really is room enough for us all.
I'm not a lwayer. I haven't followed the evidence in the trial. I have idea of the legal merits of the government's case. Even so, if this were a jury trial instead of a adminstrative law procedure, and I were on the jury, I would have been deeply offended by two things Microsoft did that were widely reported. First, there was the misleading videotape -- even if Microsoft is right and the tape was factually correct, entering into a court of law and submitting evidence of "the same PC" before and after IE's removal with a tape that can be proved to have shown two different PCs would seriously damage their credibility with me. Next, in a grandstand move, to put up an empty sheet of graph paper and claim it was the analysis done by the government's expert economist is likewise insulting. The lawyer can call into question the accuracy and thoroughness of the witness without recourse to an obviously phony grandstand ploy. That was done for the court of public opinion.
All of this said, while I long to see Microsoft broken up into seperate companies, I remain completely ignorant of the actual legal issues and quality of evidence in this trial. I have no idea what will happen, although I eagerly await the results...
I basically agree with this, but I think it is fair to say that commercial market is more profitable rather than necessarily "larger." It would not surprise me (I have no numbers) if there were more PCs in homes than in businesses, but it would surpise me if per seat spending in commercial markets were not at least twice that for the home market. Probably a lot more; I don't know about you, but at work I tend to get a new PC every couple of years while at home, well, okay, I tend to get a new one every couple of years too, but I don't think I'm typical...
I sent the following e-mail to the test manager at ZD:
I've read numerous comments on various Linux news sites suggesting this is an utterly meaningless test. As a consultant who has done some security work, I must say I do not agree that this test is completely valueless, but it most emphatically is not a test of the relative security of either operating system. This is much more a test of the quality of the firewall product and the completely different web applications running on each server.
Because the most common exploits revolve around poorly written web applications (vulnerable to buffer overruns and so forth), this quite simply is, while not valueless, a totally dishonest test.
You should be using the same web application on both machines, with full source code disclosed. Ideally, you would even be running the same web server with full source code (Apache? Although they really aren't the same code when compiled for the differing OSes).
As I said, I think the test might well be very interesting, but to cast it as a contest between NT and Linux is intellectually dishonest. No meaningful conclusions about OS selection can be made on the basis of this test.
Slashdot Mirror
Yanked from the webster site:
Main Entry: republic
Pronunciation: ri-'p&-blik
Function: noun
Etymology: French république, from Middle French republique, from Latin respublica, from res thing, wealth + publica, feminine of publicus public -- more at REAL, PUBLIC
Date: 1604
1 a (1) : a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government b (1) : a government in which supreme power resides in
a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government c : a usually specified
republican government of a political unit
2 : a body of persons freely engaged in a specified activity
3 : a constituent political and territorial unit of the former nations of Czechoslovakia, the U.S.S.R., or Yugoslavia
Main Entry: republic
Pronunciation: ri-'p&-blik
Function: noun
Etymology: French république, from Middle French republique, from Latin respublica, from res thing, wealth + publica, feminine of publicus public -- more at REAL, PUBLIC
Date: 1604
1 a (1) : a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government b (1) : a government in which supreme power resides in
a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government c : a usually specified
republican government of a political unit
2 : a body of persons freely engaged in a specified activity
3 : a constituent political and territorial unit of the former nations of Czechoslovakia, the U.S.S.R., or Yugoslavia
Looks to me like American government can be accurately described by either word.
Aw crap, you're right. I guess I'll give up after all. ;-)
Look, I don't care how systemic the problems are. They are there and they are systemic because we, the people have almost totally abrogated our social responsibility . I see no value whatsoever in sitting on our duffs whining about it (I don't mean to abuse you personally, although it seems like it).
You can make a difference. It is still a democracy. That the task is difficult is no reason not to undertake it. Hell, you heave a brick out a window and hit ten people who will readily take on an easy job. Take on the hard job!
By thunder, I'm going to my precinct caucuses this year, come hell or high water. If we all did the same the system would change literally overnight. The popular will cannot be overwhelmed by all the money and power in the world because IT IS OUR POWER. They do, at the end of the day, need the votes.
These "implacable forces" hold sway because disillusionen citizens have given up on our democracy.
"Deep in our craven souls we know that Democracy is a dying giant, a relic breathing its last. I don't mean that America is finished as a world power, America is the wealthiest; the most powerful country in the world; and I don't mean the Communists are going to take over the world, the Communists are even deader than we are. No, what's finished is the notion that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every single individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's every single solitary one of you out there listening to me now who's finished. The entire world is becoming humanoid, creatures that look human but aren't. We are nation of 200 million deodorized, transistorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted creatures, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replacable as piston rods."
That quote (as best I can remember it, I'm writing from memory here) is from Paddy Chayefsky's magnificent screenplay for the movie "Network" (a movie I urge you all to see, by the way).
I think that nightmare vision of America is here and real. But I don't have to accept it. Nihilistic despair has no room in my life. I choose to live deliberately. I'm going to my precinct caucus and I'm going to fight for a new software patent law and I'll probably fail. Where were you when I needed you?
The illness in American Democracy is not Microsoft. It is not even big money. It is not even the absurd (IMHO) Supreme Court decision that money is speech. The illness is me. The illness is you. The illness is the fact that you didn't go to your precinct caucusses, did you? (Neither did I, I'm not getting holier-than-thou here).
The sickness is the way regard the government as "them" and the people as "us." I've got news for you folks. The government is "us." Why have "evil special interests" taken over the government and made lapdogs of legislators? Because we were not there.
This government is ours. It is structured to do what we want it to do. But we are not there saying what we want!
Instead, we participate in focus groups where the same researches who figure out why we buy one brand of toothpaste over another ask us a series of provocative questions and measure our emotional responses. They are not looking for what we think, they are after what we feel because they know a dirty little secret. People are not motivated by intellect, they are motivated by emotion.
This system allows our political discourse to descend from open discussion of matters of vital interest to us (like anti-trust and patent law, like tax policy and welfare reform) to grainy black-and-white advertisements showing a prison with a reveloving door and that scary black man! (I'm referring to the George Bush "Willie Horton" ad here, but both parties do this -- I'm not being partisan, I just think the Willie Horton ad was the most despicable example of this.)
Now, your intellect knows full well that if you vote for Dukakis, you wife will not autmatically be raped and murdered by a black man. But it, along with the rest of the scientific marketing research, designed to find your emotional hot buttons, creates an "emotional aura" around the candidate that is pervasive and insiduous, hard to identify and reason with, difficult to resist.
So what do we do? We aren't totally blind. We aren't robots. These ads don't MAKE us vote in a particular way in and of themselves, but they do make us digusted and fed up. We feel in our guts that this ISN'T democracy, so we turn off. The political diet is empty calories and we go looking elsewhere for nourishment.
I think this empty, mindless, constant appeal to emotion is why we stay away from the polls in droves.
Well-funded interests are all too happy to step in and take what they can from the carcass of our freedoms. What the hell? We don't want it.
We CAN stop this. While our government may seem to be totally out of control, and that we are powerless, our government still retains the FORM of democracy. Call your local library. Find out where your party caucus is held. Go. Talk. Question. Discuss. There will be organizers there for candidates. They will have a platform. They will have votes and positions. They will try to pressure you to keep your mouth shut. They will try to control the election of delegates. Don't let them. Speak up. Go. See how it works. It will make you mad, but don't knuckle under. Bring some friends. Insist on talking about what bothers you.
I've seen it here. Slashdotters have some definite opinions on real matters of law and commerce. Don't settle for the way things are. All the tools needed to take back our government are there. Make the next Congress an "open source" Congress (forgive me for such a weak and strained linkage, but I think the same kind of spirit that imbues open source/free software can be tapped to bring reality back to politics).
Think of it like exercise, or, yes, open source programming. I get paid to write software at work. I set aside a little time every week to work on my free software project. This year, I've decided to set aside a little time to work on my "software patent" idea. I'm going to my caucus and I'm going to get a vote on a platform plank. A platform that patents on software be limited to no more than 24 months. I know that many would like no patents on software, but other forces will want patents to stay just as they are. I'm going for a compromise.
Whatever it is that upsets you, go. Make your voice heard. Write your congretional delegation.
You must not wait for others to give you your freedom. You must take it for yourself. It is yours, but if you leave it lying on the ground, don't be surprised when someone (maybe Microsoft) picks it up and says, "hey, I could use this!"
It is you country. Take it.
No argument. Ours cost us less, but that's because my old man was an electrical engineer and we designed and built the S-100 cards ourselves. We even did photo-etching ourselves on some of our later cards. Fun. Educational.
;-)
No, my nitpick consisted simply of pointing out that the Apple was not that innovative in a technical sense. It was hardly the first computer with swappable cards. That's all. I'm not saying that it wasn't the market breakthrough. It certainly was. Not everyone was ready to be their own engineer and software developer. The Apple ][ was a consumer item. The CP/M based S-100 bus machines were computers for computer people who couldn't afford 370's at home (and didn't have the raised floor
Because of Steve-o many killer products devloped or ripped-off) have been brought to market: -the mouse -the networked laser printer -expansion slots (Apple II)
WARNING! NITPICK AHEAD!
The Apple was hardly the first computer (even personal computer) with expansion slots. There were two major camps in the 8-bit computing world. Those who centered their designs around the 6502, and those who centered their designs around the 8080/Z80. Most of the early 8080/Z80 designs used something called the S-100 bus. It was a 100-pin bus and most of the designs had the CPU as just another card. You could swap everything including the processor. Not only that, but it was a broadcast bus so you didn't have this "slot address" crap you had with the Apple ][ bus.
The Apple did a lot, and I still think Visicalc was one of the finest pieces of software writing of all time (all that functionality squeezed out of an inferior processor running in some tight memory limits, and to this day Excel doesn't give you that much more functionality), but there were much more sophisitcated architectures out there.
They didn't win the marketing war, though.
As I said, a nitpick. BTW, I was moving a really old couch out of my parent's basement and I found a computer hobbyist catalog from 1976 in there. How would you like to buy an S-100 bus 32k (that's "k") static memory card for $835?
That's what these things cost assembled. No wonder my Dad and I wire-wrapped our first computer...
I just want to be sure I understand you. You see compression as useful any time you have multiple threads of data that must be passed through a single interface? In other words, where even if everything is operating at nearly maximum signaling rate, we still have more bandwidth in the "processor box" than we have in the data communications interface because there is more than one processor moving data at the maximum signaling rate?
;-)
I guess I'd have to admit that does offer an exception to my purely theortical objection. Holy dog chow, though! I hope never to see world where we all need that kind of bandwidth.
I can imagine myself needing several Gigs, but I can't imagine personally needing that kind of bandwidth (although, obviously when we have Gigs in our homes, someone is going to need Terabits). While I'm conceeding points, I also remember my first 10M hard drive (in my CP/M 1.4 days) and thinking "I'll never fill this thing!"
How much bandiwdth would a transporter use, anyways?
If you begin to approach the bandwidth limits of a fiberoptic cable, why do you think compression would help? No processor could handle the data stream faster than the limit of the faster carrier medium, so compression would always have to take longer than transmission (because compression take some measureable amount of time). The only reason compression improves "speed" now is because the internal bus of computers is considerably faster than the external communications medium. Make them equal, or mkae communications medium faster and compression will necessarily result in lower throughput.
TANSTAAFL.
People are flexing their technical knowledge at you and not answering your question. Data carriers always talk about bits because bits are the most fundmental unit of information. No matter how that information is grouped into larger structures, you can always reduce it to bits, the lowest unit of information.
Sometimes a stream of data is NOT bytes. Consider sending a series of octal digits. Each octal digit is three bits. If you send that data out in a stream of 6 octal digits, you have 18 bits of data. Now, if, at the other end, you happen to be reading in bytes, you get two bytes and two bits left over. The transport medium still carried 18-bits.
Modern computers defintely have a bias towards 8-bit bytes. That's because Latin alphabets and symbols can be well represented by 7 or 8 bits. Prior to the adoption of EBCDIC and ASCII coding, a five bit protocol was used for radio teletype equipment. They used an encoding scheme called Baudot. So, what are you sending? 3-bit octal numbers? 5-bit Baudot RTTY characters? 7-bit ASCII, or 8-bit extended ASCII?
Doesn't matter to the data carrier. It's all bits.
There's another source for the prejudice. There are two major styles of data interface. Serial and Parallel. In paralell, you have one data line per bit in the "word" (a word being the "chunk" size of the data -- again, typically 8-bits, either 7-bit ASCII with parity, or 8-bit extended ASCII) and then you have control lines (STROBE) that signal when a "word" is ready to read on the lines. Paralell interfaces tend to be local, because running many wires over long distances is obviously more difficult and expensive than running one (or a pair).
This leads to "serial" communications. Serial communications uses one wire to carry data, one bit at a time. The first such protocols were the radio teletypes I mentioned earlier (RTTY).
An antenna sticking in the air carries one signal, and that signal has three states. One state is idle, not doing anything. The others are called MARK and SPACE, or 0 and 1.
The teletypes had a rotating cam that would move past five levers. A lever could be set (pressed) or clear (not pressed). The seetings of the lever would determine which hammer would be pressed forward when the carriage would move at the end of the cam's rotation, thus determining which letter (or symbol) would be printed on the paper.
So, a sending teletype operator would press a local key, this would set the levers and make the matching hammer hit the local paper. The local cam would rotate, reading the lever settings, and would send a MARK (for a set lever) or a SPACE (for a cleared lever). The receiving teletype's cam would be likewise rotating, and it would set and clear levers as the MARKs and SPACEs were received.
You should be seeing an obvious problem here. What if the cams were not in the same position? The wrong levers would be set and the wrong characters would be printed. They first tried to solve this problem with "synchronous" protocols. A sender would send a specific pattern of marks and spaces as fast as it could. The other end would speed up or slow down it's cam until it came to "top" at the beginning of the synch pattern. Then they would start with the data. Trouble is, this system tended to drift, and the text would become gibberish requiring a re-synch.
The next invention helped solve that. Called "asynchronous" serial communication, it added the concept of a "start bit" and a stop bit. The idea was that each character would begin with a start bit (a MARK) and end with one or more stop bits (SPACEs). The receivers cam would be locked at the top and when a start bit was received, it would release, go around once, and lock until it saw the next start bit. This isn't really "asynchronous," in fact it is re-synching on every letter!
This basic protocol is still in use today right in your serial port and modem. You send one start bit, an 8-bit character, and a stop bit. That's why a 2400 baud modem can send 240 cps instead of the 300 cps it ought to be able to send if it were 8 bits per character.
I chose 2400 baud, because as other posts point out, protocols get a great deal more complicated at higher speeds.
Still, the RTTY and the rotating cam idea are the reason serial communications exist, and they are the basic origins for their mechanics.
The high speed technologies discussed here are not simple serial asynchronous systems, but complex frame-based systems. Nonetheless, those frame elements are there to do the same sort of jobs that start-bits and stop-bits were meant to do: Allow a bunch of hardware to watch a "wiggling" electrical signal and figure out how to draw the intended information from it.
All of this adds up to why they talk about bits per second. The data carrier does not care how the bits are oragnized into units of meaning. No matter how they are grouped, they are just streams of bits.
Phew! Sorry for such a long post...
Shakespeare gives some excellent advice:
DICK
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE
Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.
(For those who don't know, laws at the time were handwritten on lambskin parchment, and legal agreements were sealed with signet rings pressed in beeswax.)
And Mark Twain in his collected letters wrote (I do not remember to whom he wrote, and I'm paraphrasing):
"I agree with you and the bard, sir. Whilst killing all the lawyers in this country would probably not solve all of our problems, it would be a lot of fun and do no one any harm."
That said, I have come to have a very healthy respect for lawyers and the law, and I have come to value the convolutions and wranglings of American jurisprudence. All one has to do is to look at what governments can accomplish against their citizens in countries that do NOT have a body law before all other authority.
No, lawyers and laws are good things because the alternatives are despotism or rule by thugs. I would be very interested to see a survey of cases brought to court in the area of patent law and to see how often patent law has cut the wrong way. We know it has, an earlier poster brought up the contention over frequency modulation (an actual INVENTION!) and how patent law was used to screw the inventor.
I know most working engineers sign agreements giving their employers patent rights on their work.
Patent law has been a good thing. It encourages both innovation and dissemenation, in principle. I have frequently advocated that, if software patents must exist, they should last less than two years. It seems very bad in the software world; but is it really?
How often does patent law *really* misfire? I submit the suspicion that no one posting to this discussion topic (myself included) has the slightest idea.
Getting a patent is one thing. Exercising it is another. Is there a patent lawyer in the house who could actually throw some light on the state of patent law? How many cases result in the striking down of the patent. How many uphold the patent? And of those, how many really protect an innovation and how many protect dubious patents like "on-line sales," or "one-click shopping?"
While I do think civil disobedience is a fine and noble thing, and I wouldn't oppose this idea, have any of you tried writing your congresspersons and senators a letter? A letter writing campaign will have much more effect than an act of civil disobedience. A friend of mine once worked in a congressman's office. I asked him how many letters they had to get on a subject before it would actually be brought to the congressman's direct attention. He said four. Four!!! (Note that there are exceptions, like gun control and abortion which generate mail like crazy, but on some garden variety issue, not on the "radar", it takes four letters).
I'm sure this varies from issue to issue and from congressperson to congressperson, but I still urge you (and everyone else who cares about this) to write an original letter and put it on paper, sign it, and send it to each member of your delegation.
It *does* have an effect.
The "special interests" control the process in no small part because we don't exercise our freedoms. Want freedom of speech? Say so!
See http://www.senate.gov/senators/index.cfm for a list of senators, follow through to their mailing addresses.
See http://www.house.gov/zip/ZIP2Rep.html to find out who your House member is. Follow through to their web pages which should offer an address.
Use your rights and let freedom ring (okay, I know I'm souding hokey, go rent Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and get all hokey too!)
I am not distracted by grammar and spelling errors in my own writing. ;-)
Also, I am quite willing to draw a distinction between an impromptu Slashdot posting and an academic paper when it comes to matters of spelling and grammar. I do not think my comments were unfair or hypocritical.
I don't think this essay is an example of particularly cogent criticism. It consists largely of a series of quotes that appear to lend credence to a series of opinions about the nature of "Open Source," but it is well thought out and lucid. I know it is declasse to bring it up, but I found the the spelling and punctuation errors a serious distraction.
All of that said, however, I think we (meaning the human race) need to do a great deal more thinking then discussing how we organize our labor for personal and community gain. As an example of that phenomenon I enjoyed the essay a great deal.
I, too, think that much of the current thought on free software and open source is somewhat utopian and idealisitc, but I think that is a good thing. Reality will always modify theory, but to change reality requires ideas that lie beyond attainability. I don't think one can dismiss ESR's ideas merely because they will never become reality -- they have and will continue to change the limits of reality, even if they are never fully attainable.
My own personal belief (and, I will admit, slightly utopian hope) is that the economic need for commerical software has ceased to exist. Instead I think programmers will work as professionals (like lawyers and doctors), paid for their knoweldge and skill. Because production and distribution of software can now be done at nearly zero cost, there is no longer any need for companies to produce shrink-wrapped software.
Given that, I think the work started by RMS, and considerably furthered by Linus, Alan, et. al., will continue -- programmers writing code they want to write and then giving it away. That fits the "scientific research" view of the author of the essay discussed here.
I do, however, also think that companies will begin to use and need such software. As they do so, they will have specific needs that are not addressed by that "research software." These companies will pay programmers (as professionals, not employees) to produce those programs. We professionals will insist that such programs be open source/free software -- contributed back to the professional community.
I use surgery as an example. When a doctor (perhaps employed in a univeristy hospital) develops a new surgical technique, he or she does not keep it a secret and then package and sell it to other doctors (Triple Bypass 98?), instead it is published in a medical journal and taught to other doctors. The discovering doctor becomes more valuable, gains prestige, brings contributions to his or her hospital, etc. No economic disaster is portends. Quite the reverse.
Please note that I believe this applies to software only, (or to technique only). The analogy does not extend to drugs or medical devices because these DO have considerable manufacturing costs -- they are not zero cost distributable.
I'm very glad to see discussion such as this essay, and I hope to see more of it.
I found it funny too, but you can't pipe to /dev/null. You have to redirect to it. It isn't an executable...
;-)
My God! I need a life!
And of course that should be "express," not "expression" in the second paragraph. Ah, Preview, where is thy sting? ;-)
I don't wish to belabor the point. I can assure that nothing you have said puts me on the defensive. Perhaps I infer to too much from your writing style. If you go back and read your statements, they appear rather absolute.
I'm sorry, but to find fault with the behavior of others and to reduce their whole humanity to a label, whether it be "packer" or any other label is the definition of bigoted. Again, perhaps this is me drawing overbroad conclusions from your style of rhetoric. I apologize if that is so. Even so, while you may not be guilty of these tendencies I expression concern about, the ability to use ideas like this one (and like DiSC, or like Strong-Campbell, or like any of a host of other psychological categorization systems) to segregate and create identities can be terribly abused. I am urging caution.
The reason I have invested so much effort in striking the flanks of these ideas is because they are compelling. The seem holistic, and they appear to match experience. I think there very much is something of value here. I am merely suggesting that the ideas are vague, overbroad, and incomplete. I do not for moment think they should be dismissed or suppressed; merely examined closely.
I am very willing to entertain your point of view. I entertained it very thoroughly and considered with much reflection before I committed my concerns to "paper."
The one phrase in your most recent reply that causes me deep concern is "...people are missing their full potential (not to mention annoying others incessantly) as a result..." People who don't think like you do are annoying and those people are packers?
I am not a literal-minded automata, I am merely concerned because I think many people can (and will) take these ideas not as an agenda for self-improvement, but as assurance of self-superiority, and a way to dismiss the opinions and thoughts of people whose way of thinking they find annoying.
I am not a robot, I am not a genius (I think genius does not exist, actually -- it is merely full engagement of the human mind, much as I think you believe as well), I am human being with the full mix of intellect and prejudice, of reason and emotion, of calm and rage. So are you. So is everyone who annoys you. I simply mistrust that urge in me that suggests I see clearly where others do not. There are real differences in ability, but this does not necessarily correspond to social value.
Please understand, I believe that you want to put these ideas out not to show the superiority of people who are "mappers," but rather because you believe that these ideas might help to liberate the thinking of people who haven't thought that way for some time because of social forces that discourage it. I believe your evangel to be one of liberation. I truly do. It is just that ideas like this can "tribalize" (if you'll fogive the disgusting neologism) and that does real harm.
I try to live my life by a rather classless little cliche: "If one person tells you that you have a tail, you can laugh and tell them to go to hell. If two people tell you that you have a tail, it is time to check your ass."
I am merely asking you to check your backside.
Yes, I think we do agree. What I think rankles me is the high-handedness of anyone who believes he belongs entirely to one camp and is therefore able to label others as belonging entirely in the other camp. My observation of human behavior doesn't bear this out. Everyone is capable of, and at times requires both kinds of thinking.
This tendency to observe something as obviously multivariate as human learning, and then to arbitarily create a handful of categories and then slam people into them (as if there were only that many kinds of people) is intellectually (and aesthetically) repellent to me. I also notice that people who categorize in this way tend to create a category with attributes they value and admire and another category with traits they dislike and revile, and then they firmply place themselves in the first category. All of these "models" of behavior seem to me to be self-serving. They seem to be a way for the creators of the model to feel good about themselves. While that's very nice, and more power to them, do not expect me to adopt their labels and say, "thank you very much. I will be so much happer knowing I am a 'type X!'. Obviously THIS is what has been holding me back all of these years!"
It is such a gross oversimplification of a complex phenomenon that it cannot help but be inaccurate.
I'm not saying generalizations are without value. If we could only talk about human behavior at the level of indivduals, we would never find patterns (in fact, we would never develop a vocabulary for it). In some cases it is the vagueness, in some cases it is the self serving quality.
I do not see a big difference between someone saying, "I am a mapper," and someone else saying "I am a Capricorn." They are both saying equally vague and meaningless things about themselves.
You willingness to dismissively throw a label on so many people you have never met, whom you know nothing about by observation, but only by assumption, and to suggest that all of the problems of the world are their fault (for obviously, you as a mapper are above any responsibility for the ills of the world) is the worst sort of uncritical and bigoted thinking, rooted, if you look deeply, not in any observation on your part, but rather on your prejudice, and, if you'll forgive me joining in, rather packerish.
Please forgive me for the tone. I am not trying to single you out personally, because I am in general agreement about the nature of open-mindednees and free-thinking. It's just that I am always suspicous of anyone who is so freely claiming to be an open-minded free-thinker. I have found this is usually an unexamined belief. I happen to feel your conclusions about the deficiences of a significant portion of the human race whom, I am fairly certain, you have never met tends to bear out my conclusions.
I cannot comment on Judge Dredd. I know nothing about it.
It isn't nuclear power that's scary; it's radiation. Radiation, like the Ebola virus, fills us with irrational dread. It there, but you can't see it, you can't feel it, hear it, or taste it, but it can contaminate you and then you die!!
There are rational arguments against nuclear power, most of them economic: Fuel refining had such a high energy cost that plant operations only recouped the energy balance some time around 1980 (that's really a number pulled from my fundament. I read it from a book written by a DOE employee and I read it over five years ago, so give or take a 5 years, and just accept that my point is it took a long time -- I'd love it if you'd go look it up and tell me exactly). The plants are very expensive to run (although the industry claims this is mostly due to overregulation). The waste problem remains intractable (and thus expensive). Even so, the rabid "anti-nuke" feeling out there is a product of a primal fear, not of reason.
All of that said, my brother is a Navy Nuke and the one thing he is certain of is that he won't work in civilian nuclear power. He (and I guess a fair portion of the nuclear Navy) feels the civilian nuclear industry just doesn't have their act together.
As for the alternatives discussed above:
Oil is being extarcted faster than it is being made. It will run out, all other things being equal. I suspect, however, that the release of all of that carbon into the atmosphere will disrupt things enough before the oil runs out that it will finally dawn on us how stupid we are being. Same for coal. I would believe that our supplies of oil and coal will last for centuries. Why? Because we only go after easy supplies now. As those supplies run out, the price rises and it becomes economical to go after "hard" supplies. Such a thing happened to make pressurized water drilling economically feasible. Eventually the same will happen for more extraordinary measures.
At some point, though, I think the rising cost of that oil will finally make solar comepletely economical. It is quite possible to power your home and break-even within the life of a mortgage right now. That's not enough to make a bank or an industry happy, but that's not too bad. Solar and wind have one major technological problem. Batteries. They suck. But you need them or some such thing because the sun isn't always over your home and the wind isn't always blowing. Grid-interitied solar systems coupled with traditional power generation would really improve things right now. We could shut down all the nukes and a significant number of coal plants (the highest emission ones, perhaps?) if people put grid-interied systems on their homes that met only 10% of their energy needs. You can do that right now, today, for less than $10,000.
Personally, I'm very much in favor of small hydro systems. The huge Grand Coulee style projects cause major environmental havoc, but small community-scale projects cause much less and that harm is known to be less than the harm of burning fossil fuels. Such hydro system can only meet a tiny fraction of our energy needs, however.
As for radiation, yep. It's scary. But I think it should be impossible to get out of high school without knowing what radition is and how it interacts with living tissue. I think people should know that, like the Palmolive commercial, they "are soaking in it" every day of their lives. That their own bones are radioactive. They should well understand how and why exposure harms us and what kind of levels exist in nature, and how much exposure is dangerous. But then, I also think you shouldn't get out of high school without knowning how the bond market works, how to get a mortgage, how to balance your checkbook, and that Carson City is the capital of Nevada. Guess I'm a dreamer...
You've completely missed the point.
We have this knowledge of the "nitty gritty" details because we find them interesting.
I don't think I did. You find them interesting because you learned enough of them for your innate ability to think (to "map" as these folks put it) began to get interested in acquiring facts because you began to see a "map." I'm suggesting that "mapping" emerges naturally from sufficient observation of "facts." The problems come when people confuse information and judgement. When one becomes bigoted about facts. When one comes to accept facts not because they are observed, but because they are believed. This is the difference between knowledge and faith, and the application of judgement based on observation rather than belief is the difference between wisdom and dogma.
No, the acquisition of knowledge is learning, a new discovery, a source of exhiliration.
Having useless facts rammed down your throats by clueless teachers in the cesspit we like to call public education is drudgery.
There is no substitute for study, for the exercise of memory. There is no subsitute for rote learning when it comes to the acquisition of "facts." Facts become the arsenal for the expression of "thought," which is the higher synthesis of information, the only truly human act.
It will if you are capable of mapper thinking.
Ever heard of tech manuals?
A mapper is not daunted by lack of knowledge.
A packer is limited by lack of thinking.
What does that mean? I have never met anyone incapable of mapper thinking. My point was that learning facts is a straightforward application of self-discipline -- that learning the facts is required in order to think, and that "mapper thinking" doesn't contribute to this process. In fact, I am arguing that mapper think emerges from having a large and wide-ranging body of knowledge. This notion that "mappers" are some sort of intellectual elite, above mere fact, is, in the literal meaning of the word, poppycock. I completely agree that mapper thinking exists. I just think it arises from a combination of wide knowledge AND self-confidence that one's thoughts are worthy of expression.
What I think public education does wrong is NOT the rote teaching of facts, but rather the ongoing process of humiliating children into thinking that their thoughts, their creativity has no value. What schools (painted with an overbroad brush) do wrong is that they criticize children when they have an insight, a flash of original thought, and they get shot down because that thought happens to be contradicted by a fact they didn't know about. That discourages the child from ever exressing another insight because they might be "wrong."
Feynman? Whatever. Feynman's DAD on the other hand is a miracle. Feynman's dad would not say, "No, that's wrong." instead he would say, "Interesting idea. I wonder how we can test that?" Feynman being a genius was inevitable after that.
No, the problem is that they teach you WHAT to think instead of HOW to think (packer vs mapper, anyone?).
Everyone knows how to think. What schools do is to shut down the desire to think. Big difference.
There is a BIG difference between how the function code pins work on the m68000 CPU and the dates that each explorer came to the americas (Can you believe that in grade 9 I had to memorize this shit in order to pass the course?)
Yes, I can. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not sure why you think there is. You never know when those facts may become integral to a much more sophisticated thought. No datum is without value.
I have never taken a computer course in my life and I now make my living writing computer software. I'll tell you this, though. While I am often a much more innovative programmer than those I have worked with, I had a lot to learn to learn from those people with their "useless" education. I had to learn a lot of engineering principles. I learned a lot about program stability, testing, completeness, and development process from those people. They have a lot of useful, practical knowledge that would otherwise only have come to be by my continuous process of Innovation by Spectacular Public Failure (I'm thinking about getting a patent). All the "mapper" thinking in the world doesn't prevent you from having to rediscover a fact that others already knew and you could have learned if only you had shut up and listened. Creative thinking is great, but no matter the subject, there is definitely somebody out there who knows something about it that you don't.
- Thomas Edison did NOT invent the lightbulb.
I never thought or said he did. He did make a commercial success of it, however, and by a very Microsoft like marketing practice made himself into the "lonely genius inventor," (like claiming to be a "mapper," perhaps?), never mind the 80 engineers working for him who actually ran all the tests and did all the experiements. Still not sure what your point is...
- The Wright brothers were NOT the first to fly a manned airplane.
Right again. Still not sure what your point is...
- Columbus did NOT discover America.
Nope. Instead he made the greatest face-saving PR move in history. I think it's fair to say America had already been discovered. By the Native Americans, at the very least.
- "Honest" Abe Lincoln, your favorite president, was very much in favor of the slave trade.
Not so. This is a gross misunderstanding of Lincoln's position. He was a politician. And while he was personally opposed to slavery and the slave trade, he had to be elected. The slave trade was a northern economic concern. There was no way for a political animal to take it on directly. He also was overwhelmingly concerned with the preservation of the Union, and as such he backed away from policies that could have been perceived as abolitionist. BTW, there was very little import of slaves by the mid-nineteenth century. Most southern plantations were "breeding" their own. In fact, the Confederate Constitution outlawed the slave trade as a nod to British opposition, and in hopes of encouraging them to recognize the Confederacy. It is one of the more seemingly incongruous elements of the Civil War period.
BTW, I learned much of this in school (I was a history major) and I read a lot of it in books. Didn't "map" any of it.
No, I think the only evil is the crushing of self-expression, the discouragement of child-like wonder, the disconnection of inference and imagination. It isn't memorization of dates. You are going to find through your life that people sometimes get the facts wrong; that some of the things you think are important to memorize turn out to be useless (to YOU); that things you beleieve turn out to be wrong. What matters then is your willingness to explore. That's what gets shot out.
I believe very much that solutions emerge from holistic understanding of systems; from knowledge of computers, systems, and people so deep that decisions are more instinctual than conscious. That has been my experience. The "aha!" feeling. The flash of insight.
This appears, in this messy and poorly organized essay, to be the essence of mapping.
What I dislike about this is that this non-linear thinking arises most frequently from the fertile soil of "packer" knoweldge and experience. Every programming "genuis" I have known has not only been capable of this instinctual synthesis, but has also been posessed of encyclopedic knowledge of these nitty-gritty technical details.
The acquisition of knowledge is drudgery. The syenthsis of fact into insight is creativity. All the creativity in the world will not help you, however, if you are writing and operating system and you don't know that the interrupt enable flag is cleared on entry to an interrupt service routine and must be set on exit.
I guess what I am saying is that while modern pedagogy may overemphasize rote learning over synthesis, thought, holisticism, without the facts you have nothing.
I tend to believe that the problem lies not in how education teaches facts, but rather in that we have "dumbed down" the number facts taught. I think the human mind is so hungry for patterns that, if taught enough facts, and allowed the speculate, this facility for insight will develop on its own. When you are not taught enough about anything to see the interconnectedness of things, is it any wonder we are locked in this "packer" mode?
I remember being fascinated by the fact that the mutilples of 9 add up to 9 (for the first few mutltiples:
9x2=18 1+8=9
9x3=27 2+7=9
...
...
You find patterns like this all over the place. How 'bout the fact that you can calculate pi with this little succession:
4 * ((1/1) - (1/3) + (1/5) - (1/7) + (1/9)...
I guess what I'm trying to drive at here is that I think the solution is NOT to push people into the fog, but to expose them to as many FACTS as possible. Their native curiosity will bring out the innovative qualities.
Unfortunately, we dumb everything down and add the "Simpsonsesque":
"Added extra clap: Not college material."
Okay, I know I'm getting off-topic here, but I violently (sorry violence is unfashionable; viscerally then) disagree with this assertion.
The "OpenSource" community needs to just keep telling the truth, lifting the curtains, giving away the source, and scrutinizing everything, including itself. Mindcraft used bad techniques. We called them on it. NT was still faster at a number of things. We pointed out that for 99% of installations, the "slower" Linux box would saturate the network. I think we did a great job. But NT is still faster. Will it always be? I'll bet not, because we've got the source and we can keep improving.
Marketing and advertising, in fact all consumptive waste is predicated on our continuing ignorance. As free software/open source folks, we should, to misquote Frederick Douglass, Educate! Educate! Educate!
We gain nothing by adopting their Wizard of OZ "Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain!" tactics.
I see something of an opportunity here. Could we have an "open source" set of project metrics? That is to say, create some very simple, lightweight, open source tools for tracking participation in an open source project that uses some fairly reasonable set of conventional tools (cvs, mailing lists, download mirrors) and provides some raw counts and some basic reports and graphs? It would be interesting if any open source porject could use such a toolset to keep common stats that could be used to improve the whol development model (or just to show it off to PHBs).
I'm in the middle of an open source project right now (see the cvs browser at my website if you're curious -- we haven't announced yet because its still too sketchy, but feel free to look) that ties up enough of my free time to keep me from starting such a thing right now, but I throw the idea out if someone else wants to run with it. Otherwise, such a simple toolset might be my next project...
As for the rest, I guess I'm also saying a "me too" on this post. There are a limited number of good programmers with a limited amount of spare time. There are a lot of interting projects. Some projects will break the curve because they are cool or sexy, and some will be so boring (like my OS dev stats idea) that they'll be constant (at 1?). If you average the data points, I bet you get a logarithmic curve for the very good reasons cited above.
I tend to think that programmers, for the good of all programmers, should stick to 100% open tools built using GPL'ed tools and libraries because I believe in and hope for an evolution of programming into a true profession like medicince and law where all the code (laws, medical techniques) is (are) open and more or less freely available and it is skilled people who are valuable. Software is only valuable as a product because compilation is, in effect, encryption that hides technique. It makes programmers into manufacturers, wholly dependent on their salaries from companies owned by people who can't code at all. In a world where software is difficult and expensive to distribute, this was natural (and perfectly okay in my book -- I'm not a socialist).
We are now, however, moving into a world where software is easy and almost free to distribute. The software "industry" is no longer economically necessary. In fact, I think its a dinosaur. An antique. I truly believe that we will all be more productive (and rich) when all software is free because programmers will become people valued for their skill and productivity alone. We will all be able to use one another's knowledge (just as doctors and lawyers do now) so we can spend less time doing the same things over and over again. The pace of programming innovation will accelerate dramatically and the economic benefits of computing (faster business cycles and lower costs) will be magnified by that amount of time we no longer spend building the same basics at every employer and we instead concentrate on making existing software fit the local need.
All of that said, that is not yet the world we live in. While I want us all to be using open tools, a lot of businesses have a heavy investment in specific "enterprise" technologies such as Delphi and C++ Builder. I for one welcome these tools on the Linux platform. I'll prbably use them in my workplace.
The software I develop for the open source world will still use the GNU tools and be GPL'ed and use automake/autoconf and be written for maximum portability.
I also look forward to seeing tools like Kdevelop continue to mature.
While the software industry lives, let the commercial vendors come. Just try to keep your skills up in the open tools too.
This is what makes free software unstoppable. The commercial interests can take over the business market through the gullibility of the PHBs, but no one can take away your gcc, or stop you from giving away your own code.
I believe all software will one day be free and that it will be considered fiduciary misconduct to buy an operating system, but until that day, there really is room enough for us all.
I'm not a lwayer. I haven't followed the evidence in the trial. I have idea of the legal merits of the government's case. Even so, if this were a jury trial instead of a adminstrative law procedure, and I were on the jury, I would have been deeply offended by two things Microsoft did that were widely reported. First, there was the misleading videotape -- even if Microsoft is right and the tape was factually correct, entering into a court of law and submitting evidence of "the same PC" before and after IE's removal with a tape that can be proved to have shown two different PCs would seriously damage their credibility with me. Next, in a grandstand move, to put up an empty sheet of graph paper and claim it was the analysis done by the government's expert economist is likewise insulting. The lawyer can call into question the accuracy and thoroughness of the witness without recourse to an obviously phony grandstand ploy. That was done for the court of public opinion.
All of this said, while I long to see Microsoft broken up into seperate companies, I remain completely ignorant of the actual legal issues and quality of evidence in this trial. I have no idea what will happen, although I eagerly await the results...
I basically agree with this, but I think it is fair to say that commercial market is more profitable rather than necessarily "larger." It would not surprise me (I have no numbers) if there were more PCs in homes than in businesses, but it would surpise me if per seat spending in commercial markets were not at least twice that for the home market. Probably a lot more; I don't know about you, but at work I tend to get a new PC every couple of years while at home, well, okay, I tend to get a new one every couple of years too, but I don't think I'm typical...
I sent the following e-mail to the test manager at ZD:
I've read numerous comments on various Linux news sites suggesting this is an utterly meaningless test. As a consultant who has done some security work, I must say I do not agree that this test is completely valueless, but it most emphatically is not a test of the relative security of either operating system. This is much more a test of the quality of the firewall product and the completely different web applications running on each server.
Because the most common exploits revolve around poorly written web applications (vulnerable to buffer overruns and so forth), this quite simply is, while not valueless, a totally dishonest test.
You should be using the same web application on both machines, with full source code disclosed. Ideally, you would even be running the same web server with full source code (Apache? Although they really aren't the same code when compiled for the differing OSes).
As I said, I think the test might well be very interesting, but to cast it as a contest between NT and Linux is intellectually dishonest. No meaningful conclusions about OS selection can be made on the basis of this test.