The system has already been "gamed" by its very creator and a handful of early adopters. They mined most of the bitcoins currently in existence and then they made people believe in their value and became millionaires. (Satoshi is said to own between 1 and 2 million bitcoins, that's between $7M and $14M at current market prices.) Regardless of the usefulness of the idea itself, bitcoin was also designed to be a get rich quick scheme. You could conceive a similar digital currency, where wealth distribution was not so heavily biased towards early adopters.
If developers writing competing software having prior knowledge of [parts of] the code of the original was not a problem, the concept of clean room reverse engineering wouldn't exist. But since the Mono project used not to accept contributions from people that have seen Microsoft's shared source code, they are definitely aware of the danger and must be confident that a lawsuit from Attachmate isn't coming.
Who knows what's included in their build, they only provide outdated code as archive fragments on rapidshare... whether it's because of malice or ineptitude, I wouldn't run any software those guys produce. Publishing a project on github or similar service is not rocket science. I once tried asking what the deal was on their forums, but my post didn't make it through moderation.
That's like saying the "proprietary software community" shot itself in the foot by continuing the division between Windows and MacOS. Gnome and KDE are large software stacks built on completely separate foundations, by separate teams skilled in different programming environments, and there's no unifying the codebases without throwing one of them away. Developers involved in freedesktop.org have been working on interoperability for the last 11 years, I'm not sure what more you could expect.
Using public keys as addresses would be pretty sweet, but how do you route traffic through a network with randomly distributed addresses? Ad-hoc routing can work on small scales, but there'd be serious issues making a global network like that.
Re:Need a better client-side scripting language
on
How Do Browsers Scale?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Wait, what?
Python as a choice of multithreading-enabled language? You are aware that CPython has a global lock and only one thread can execute Python code at once? Javascript will be more multicore friendly than Python when web workers get widely implemented.
And what's the point of developing a brand new sub-set of python with a brand new interpreter and set of libraries? You might as well just compile python to javascript, there's not a lot of impedance mismatch between them. Python is mostly useful because of its wealth of libraries, other than that it's just a generic dynamically-typed language with a certain syntax.
I suspect it's simply impossible to create a non-corrupt government that manages a country that big and is so far removed from its citizens. Going back to the roots and organizing ourselves into something akin to city-states might allow us to keep closer control over the people we designate. Diversity of laws can be a problem, but at least nowadays with online communications it'd be easier for such city-states to cooperate on treaties. A question that arises is whether it wouldn't actually empower corporations more, with smaller states having smaller budgets than industry leaders.
Does this version clean up the mess that is their init system? Some init scripts were sysv, some were upstart-native in 10.04, and there was no commandline utility that made sense of it all. I ran into that problem in the *server edition*, what is more central to a server installation than managing services?
OK, so they do that, and decide digging ditches is better than having their work ripped off. Now you have no apps, pirated or not (and before you yell FOSS!, why aren't you using FOSS apps now instead of ripping someone off?) Does that somehow improve your life?
I don't feel obliged to explain what software I use, which I bought and which I obtained illegaly. I'm sorry, I'm not sure how to respond to your argument, because it's so inconsequential, first you suggest that there will be no software when piracy makes commercial software developers quit. Then you acknowledge the existence of FOSS and thus software created for no monetary gain or based on non-copy-based business models.
Yep, which is why there is this huge explosion of freely available creative stuff which has just entirely removed the market for the stuff created by those greedy for-the-money bastards, right? So remind me again why it is necessary to pirate stuff which the creators did NOT want to give away for free.
There is an explosion of creative stuff, in the form of deviantart, youtube, wikipedia, CC licensed music sites and facilitated by free creative software. It hasn't displaced commercial content because the latter is still of higher quality, but give it time, as the tools mature and the public domain fills with more base art to start with, so will the quality of amateur-created culture improve. Copyright harms free culture, because it forbids, even for non-commercial purposes, the creation of derivative works.
Anyway, copyright infringement is not necessary, but it's so trivially easy and natural (and mostly victimless), that restricting it makes no sense. You can call some works victims - those that won't be created, because alternative business models can't raise enough money for them. But you can't call creators or publishers victims, because they are deprived of nothing in the process. It's their choice to cling to the old business model or search for others. I imagine they like copyright so much, because it allows them to work for a couple weeks and then get paid for the rest of their lives for it, but too bad, it simply stopped working. Any attemps by the publishing industries to make copyright enforcement ever more strict is the morally questionable path, putting the interest of so few over the interests of everybody else.
And back on subject, the software industry has it exceptionally easy because of the SaaS model, so they should be the last ones whining.
Your analogies are so inappropriate it hurts to read.
A person who produces something gets to dictate the terms under which it is used.
Good thing the workers that built my house don't know about that, or I'd be paying them royalties. I wonder if murderers get sued by gun producers for unauthorized shots fired.
If I pay someone else to dig a ditch for me, I do not have some stupid notion that they are obligated to dig other ditches for me at no further charge.
There's a big difference between a product and its copy. Ditches take time and effort to dig, a copy doesn't and more importantly, no pirate is asking the original creator to send them a copy. The act of unauthorized copying doesn't cost the creator time, effort or money, they aren't even aware of it happening. Therefore your analogy is invalid.
The reality of the matter is that real people are spending their lives and brain power writing code that makes life better for everyone who uses it.
They should also spend some brain power developing business models that don't revolve around selling an infinite resource. Software as a service has its flaws, like the lack of control over your data, but at least it's feasible and it touch with reality.
If you aren't creating it, you don't own it and you don't have any right to it. How idiotic do you have to be to believe otherwise?
Copyright was created as an incentive to creators, in the form a temporary monopoly on reproducing and distributing their creations, to boost the number of people making art and releasing it to the public. It was never a law with roots in morality or ethics. These days, when billions of people are connected by the Internet, lots of them creative for the sake of creativity, not for monetary gain, it's more of a hindrance to the propagation of scientific and artistic thought. You don't have to be an idiot to believe in cultural and technological evolution more strongly than in obsolete business models.
When you copy software, you're ignoring the wishes of the person who created it. You are violating them. You are taking away their right to earn a living for their labor.
Actually you aren't taking away their right to earn a living, they're free to choose a feasible business model.
It's a design choice by one guy, who up to this moment had no resources to make better graphics I assume. It has a consistent style and it works pretty well, once you get into it, you don't even notice how retro it looks. Broken fluid physics or hit points in multiplayer are much more annoying.
I'm surprised none of the browser vendors hired the author of this virtual machine, which beats both V8 and TraceMonkey in the shootout benchmarks by a wide margin. I'm hoping Google or Mozilla does that eventually, it'd be a pity if he got hired by a closed source browser vendor.
I never tried Moonlight, but all vm / interpreted languages can usually call native code. That's with.NET, Python, Java, etc.
Sure, but we're talking about web apps, there's a different standard of openness, accessibility and security we expect from those. Neither javascript in browsers nor actionscript in flash allow native code.
While personally I think Mono is a very nice piece of technology, in many ways superior to the Java platform... in my eyes Miguel lost all credibility back when he endorsed OOXML and later Silverlight. Helping Microsoft embrace/extend the web with Silverlight by giving the illusion that it's cross-platform was the last straw. For reference, Silverlight is neither cross-platform by design, because it's able to call native DLLs, or in practice because Moonlight is waaay behind.
It's nice to know that there are alternative fuels, but that doesn't solve anything. There's a bazillion things produced from oil: rubbers, plastics, fertilizers... And the article seems to only take personal gas usage into account, ignoring how dependant industries are on oil. It's considerably easier for a person/family to scale down gas usage than for 20 ton trucks and agricultural equipment or aircraft. There's no way that very high oil prices will not significantly affect the economy, they'll make a lot of products and processes infeasibly expensive. I don't think the average family will be very concerned about gas usage when they'll have trouble affording or finding food (which today is mostly grown far from the consumer, using tons of oil for planting, fertilization, processing and shipment.)
So if i write a book - and you buy one physical copy from me - you should be able to rewrite that book digitally and give it to the world?
In my scenario, sure, I just don't see why, since digital copies would be available anyway. (At least if you were a smart author who wanted to reach a wide audience.)
If i write something - who says the world should see it - what if i only want 100 people to have it?
Either you trust those 100 people, or you don't give them access to your infinite resource. Regardless, artificially restricting your audience is not a good business model.
i like this idea - as it presents another way of compromising, and eventually reaching that happy medium.
I'd be fine with DRM as long as it wasn't running on hardware I own, which conflicts with the fact that I also want to have access to content I bought or downloaded, from the very same hardware.
Without the incentive of making money (either extra or a living) these works would not otherwise exist.
Except selling copies is not the only way of making money off art and literature. Commissions have worked fine before the advent of copyright (technical works in particular could be commissioned by universities or enterprises.) Selling scarce goods bundled with intellectual works is already being employed by artists. The only thing standing in the way of creators making money without charging for digital copies is the sense of entitlement that they (and their children) should be paid for every copy ever made.
Careful with connlimit, it's pretty easy to DoS yourself. Its implementation has O(N) computational complexity, for each packet that gets classified by it. (It iterates all remembered connections to check if they're still alive.) That said, a limit of 20 should work fine.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like Go. The coding style of the standard library is an ugly CamelCase style thing that just makes me want to run away. But it has some very interesting programming paradigms behind it. And Google is using it to some extent already. Maybe they have something even better that they don't tell the world about yet. I mean, that's a very central aspect of their daily bread, I can't imagine them not have thought about it for long and deep hours.
Go seems more like an experiment in language design than a real effort at creating a practical language. Go's developers took way too many controversial design decisions that polarize programmers, and it only takes one to give up on a language.
Some obvious off-putting aspects of Go: * case influences semantics * whitespace sensitivity wrt. { placement * lack of exceptions or a nice way of propagating errors, like ADTs, all you get are MRVs * explicit this declarations * ugly reverse syntax for types * no equality operator for structs or arrays * and no operator or method overloading
Then again, it's an improvement over C, so it might find some use.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that he can't sell them all now is irrelevant, he can sell them eventually and probably for an average of far more than $7 per.
The system has already been "gamed" by its very creator and a handful of early adopters. They mined most of the bitcoins currently in existence and then they made people believe in their value and became millionaires. (Satoshi is said to own between 1 and 2 million bitcoins, that's between $7M and $14M at current market prices.) Regardless of the usefulness of the idea itself, bitcoin was also designed to be a get rich quick scheme. You could conceive a similar digital currency, where wealth distribution was not so heavily biased towards early adopters.
If developers writing competing software having prior knowledge of [parts of] the code of the original was not a problem, the concept of clean room reverse engineering wouldn't exist.
But since the Mono project used not to accept contributions from people that have seen Microsoft's shared source code, they are definitely aware of the danger and must be confident that a lawsuit from Attachmate isn't coming.
Who knows what's included in their build, they only provide outdated code as archive fragments on rapidshare... whether it's because of malice or ineptitude, I wouldn't run any software those guys produce. Publishing a project on github or similar service is not rocket science.
I once tried asking what the deal was on their forums, but my post didn't make it through moderation.
That's like saying the "proprietary software community" shot itself in the foot by continuing the division between Windows and MacOS.
Gnome and KDE are large software stacks built on completely separate foundations, by separate teams skilled in different programming environments, and there's no unifying the codebases without throwing one of them away. Developers involved in freedesktop.org have been working on interoperability for the last 11 years, I'm not sure what more you could expect.
Using public keys as addresses would be pretty sweet, but how do you route traffic through a network with randomly distributed addresses? Ad-hoc routing can work on small scales, but there'd be serious issues making a global network like that.
Wait, what?
Python as a choice of multithreading-enabled language? You are aware that CPython has a global lock and only one thread can execute Python code at once?
Javascript will be more multicore friendly than Python when web workers get widely implemented.
And what's the point of developing a brand new sub-set of python with a brand new interpreter and set of libraries? You might as well just compile python to javascript, there's not a lot of impedance mismatch between them. Python is mostly useful because of its wealth of libraries, other than that it's just a generic dynamically-typed language with a certain syntax.
I suspect it's simply impossible to create a non-corrupt government that manages a country that big and is so far removed from its citizens. Going back to the roots and organizing ourselves into something akin to city-states might allow us to keep closer control over the people we designate.
Diversity of laws can be a problem, but at least nowadays with online communications it'd be easier for such city-states to cooperate on treaties.
A question that arises is whether it wouldn't actually empower corporations more, with smaller states having smaller budgets than industry leaders.
Does this version clean up the mess that is their init system? Some init scripts were sysv, some were upstart-native in 10.04, and there was no commandline utility that made sense of it all.
I ran into that problem in the *server edition*, what is more central to a server installation than managing services?
Remind me, why do we have such a fragile system at the very core of modern civilisation?
I don't feel obliged to explain what software I use, which I bought and which I obtained illegaly.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure how to respond to your argument, because it's so inconsequential, first you suggest that there will be no software when piracy makes commercial software developers quit. Then you acknowledge the existence of FOSS and thus software created for no monetary gain or based on non-copy-based business models.
There is an explosion of creative stuff, in the form of deviantart, youtube, wikipedia, CC licensed music sites and facilitated by free creative software. It hasn't displaced commercial content because the latter is still of higher quality, but give it time, as the tools mature and the public domain fills with more base art to start with, so will the quality of amateur-created culture improve. Copyright harms free culture, because it forbids, even for non-commercial purposes, the creation of derivative works.
Anyway, copyright infringement is not necessary, but it's so trivially easy and natural (and mostly victimless), that restricting it makes no sense. You can call some works victims - those that won't be created, because alternative business models can't raise enough money for them. But you can't call creators or publishers victims, because they are deprived of nothing in the process. It's their choice to cling to the old business model or search for others. I imagine they like copyright so much, because it allows them to work for a couple weeks and then get paid for the rest of their lives for it, but too bad, it simply stopped working. Any attemps by the publishing industries to make copyright enforcement ever more strict is the morally questionable path, putting the interest of so few over the interests of everybody else.
And back on subject, the software industry has it exceptionally easy because of the SaaS model, so they should be the last ones whining.
Your analogies are so inappropriate it hurts to read.
Good thing the workers that built my house don't know about that, or I'd be paying them royalties. I wonder if murderers get sued by gun producers for unauthorized shots fired.
There's a big difference between a product and its copy. Ditches take time and effort to dig, a copy doesn't and more importantly, no pirate is asking the original creator to send them a copy. The act of unauthorized copying doesn't cost the creator time, effort or money, they aren't even aware of it happening. Therefore your analogy is invalid.
They should also spend some brain power developing business models that don't revolve around selling an infinite resource. Software as a service has its flaws, like the lack of control over your data, but at least it's feasible and it touch with reality.
Copyright was created as an incentive to creators, in the form a temporary monopoly on reproducing and distributing their creations, to boost the number of people making art and releasing it to the public. It was never a law with roots in morality or ethics. These days, when billions of people are connected by the Internet, lots of them creative for the sake of creativity, not for monetary gain, it's more of a hindrance to the propagation of scientific and artistic thought. You don't have to be an idiot to believe in cultural and technological evolution more strongly than in obsolete business models.
Actually you aren't taking away their right to earn a living, they're free to choose a feasible business model.
It's a design choice by one guy, who up to this moment had no resources to make better graphics I assume. It has a consistent style and it works pretty well, once you get into it, you don't even notice how retro it looks. Broken fluid physics or hit points in multiplayer are much more annoying.
I'm surprised none of the browser vendors hired the author of this virtual machine, which beats both V8 and TraceMonkey in the shootout benchmarks by a wide margin.
I'm hoping Google or Mozilla does that eventually, it'd be a pity if he got hired by a closed source browser vendor.
Sure, but we're talking about web apps, there's a different standard of openness, accessibility and security we expect from those. Neither javascript in browsers nor actionscript in flash allow native code.
While personally I think Mono is a very nice piece of technology, in many ways superior to the Java platform... in my eyes Miguel lost all credibility back when he endorsed OOXML and later Silverlight.
Helping Microsoft embrace/extend the web with Silverlight by giving the illusion that it's cross-platform was the last straw.
For reference, Silverlight is neither cross-platform by design, because it's able to call native DLLs, or in practice because Moonlight is waaay behind.
Overengineering your first proof-of-concept implementation is a good way to get overwhelmed by its complexity and never complete it.
I don't understand, what is this "sex" you speak of?
It's nice to know that there are alternative fuels, but that doesn't solve anything. There's a bazillion things produced from oil: rubbers, plastics, fertilizers...
And the article seems to only take personal gas usage into account, ignoring how dependant industries are on oil. It's considerably easier for a person/family to scale down gas usage than for 20 ton trucks and agricultural equipment or aircraft.
There's no way that very high oil prices will not significantly affect the economy, they'll make a lot of products and processes infeasibly expensive. I don't think the average family will be very concerned about gas usage when they'll have trouble affording or finding food (which today is mostly grown far from the consumer, using tons of oil for planting, fertilization, processing and shipment.)
I'm not sure how "tasteless" is grounds for blocking at all.
In my scenario, sure, I just don't see why, since digital copies would be available anyway. (At least if you were a smart author who wanted to reach a wide audience.)
Either you trust those 100 people, or you don't give them access to your infinite resource. Regardless, artificially restricting your audience is not a good business model.
I'd be fine with DRM as long as it wasn't running on hardware I own, which conflicts with the fact that I also want to have access to content I bought or downloaded, from the very same hardware.
Except selling copies is not the only way of making money off art and literature. Commissions have worked fine before the advent of copyright (technical works in particular could be commissioned by universities or enterprises.) Selling scarce goods bundled with intellectual works is already being employed by artists.
The only thing standing in the way of creators making money without charging for digital copies is the sense of entitlement that they (and their children) should be paid for every copy ever made.
Careful with connlimit, it's pretty easy to DoS yourself. Its implementation has O(N) computational complexity, for each packet that gets classified by it. (It iterates all remembered connections to check if they're still alive.)
That said, a limit of 20 should work fine.
Seems like the Indian government has found a more effective way of building a great wall around its borders - let the people outside build it.
Go seems more like an experiment in language design than a real effort at creating a practical language. Go's developers took way too many controversial design decisions that polarize programmers, and it only takes one to give up on a language.
Some obvious off-putting aspects of Go:
* case influences semantics
* whitespace sensitivity wrt. { placement
* lack of exceptions or a nice way of propagating errors, like ADTs, all you get are MRVs
* explicit this declarations
* ugly reverse syntax for types
* no equality operator for structs or arrays
* and no operator or method overloading
Then again, it's an improvement over C, so it might find some use.