That's because companies Microsoft and Apple ended up with the largest code bases. Everyone has to build on their code, so guess who wins that game? It's a good demonstration of my point.
Software complexity grows over time such that the only way to compete is to build on existing software.
If the base is GPLed then you *effectively* can't sell it. This is wonderful for big companies because it means that our only options as developers is to work for them.
If the base uses a BSD license, the little guys are able to use it and can compete on a level playing field with the behemoths like Microsoft.
Let's free ourselves from the domination of the software giants by using the BSD license and generate a new wave of MSVs (micro software vendors) that will wipe out the Microsofts, IBMs, Adobes and Apples of the world.
ShawnDoc, even transexuals have adam's apples. where is it?
Btw, I met her at the Vintage Computer Feastival in Mountain View last month. She's a very nice, intellegent (obviously) and beautifully woman (even more obviously).
The author of the post seems to assume that high grades are a good measure of learning. I'm not so sure. Einstein had poor grades, did that mean he wasn't learning?
If the spammer sets up a mail server and finds a way to get external servers to send it mail, it can send spam via this server and then pass the hashcash requests from it's outgoing connections to it's incomming connections. In this way the spammer doesn't have to calculate a single hash - it distributes the computations among all of servers sending it mail.
How does it get lots of mail from external servers? There are lots of ways, but the easiest would be to sign up for mailing lists. There are millions of them.
It's not clear whether or not Badnarik was referening to literacy for the whole population or literacy among those who attended school (and ideally, we should divide those numbers into government and non-government run schools). The statistics you cite seem to be for the former, not the later.
"Java has considerably fewer surprises..thereby resulting in a language where you cannot really make your friends go ga-ga at amazingly brief programming construct"
The real problem here is that C++ is a mess. "fewer surprises" here means that it has largely inherited C++'s mess. Java's verboseness is the product of putting in too much, not too little. "Java has been considered slow for ages." [but isn't now]
It's true that the newer Java compilers do well on benchmarks. But it still *feels* slow when I sit waiting for 60 seconds for a small Java applet to start up or when my machine starts paging because a swing applet eats up 100s of megs of memory. "Java is a strongly typed language therefore you have to tell the compiler exactly what you intend to use. And if you make a mistake in the way you use it, the compiler has the guts to tell you that you were wrong."
The problem here isn't about developers not wanting to know about their mistakes, but that strongly typed languages make it impossible to cleanly implement (and sometimes to implement at all) powerful dynamic design patterns. "Java has a vast library..."
Java's APIs are it's weakest point. They are horribly complex. I once had to work with the Java Advanced Imaging APIs. IIRC, it has over 300 classes and yet functionally wasn't significantly more usefull than Cocoa's 3 image classes. Whenever you need to get at anything (say you wanted to change a pixel), you had to use a dozen classes. There are even classes that you have to instantiate to create parameter lists in order to pass to the instantiation methods of other classes. While not this extreme, much of Java's APIs seem to suffer from a similar explosion of classes and complexity. "Java is popular. Anything that is popular has lost its elite status and therefore is not cool."
So Coke, Nike, Doom3, the PS2 and the NBA aren't cool? "Java is an application programming platform. You cannot do cool things like device drivers and games, etc (until recently - but Java gaming is coming in a big way)."
AFAIK, Java fell flat as an application programming language. Today it is primarily used a server scripting language, just like the "cool" languages that Paul Graham mentioned, such as Python.
Putting a language in XML only saves you from (maybe) writing a lexer or maybe a parser. After that there is so much variation in semantics between languages (and valid operations on the code) that the supposed "uniformity" disappears. Also, there are an huge number of ways to represent any given language's parse tree in XML. Do you even represent the parse tree or do you do it at a token level? Are numbers and strings their own element types? In other words, simply using XML doesn't buy you much in terms of uniformity.
It seems that paper assumes that information cannot be communitated between locations faster than the speed of light. AFAIK, this is still an open question.
While I don't know of any experiment that has demonstrated faster than light communication, non-locality itself has been proven by the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment.
I'm working with a company developing an IE plug-in and we noticed in our install logs that a machine at microsoft.com running IE on Linux downloaded and ran(!) our COM object. We had been scratching our heads over that one.
Steve
Has anyone considered using a PC Field Programmable Gate Array board for SETI calculations? SETI stuff is all signal processing which could be highly paralelized on a FPGA(FPGA's are even replacing DSPs in routers these days). They're also affordable - see xilinx.com and altera.com.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because companies Microsoft and Apple ended up with the largest code bases. Everyone has to build on their code, so guess who wins that game? It's a good demonstration of my point.
"As for not being able to sell GPLed software, I guess that copy of SUSE 9.2 Pro I bought at Best Buy is an illlusion."
Can you show me the gross profit figures on SUSE distro sales? Or is it actually being subsidized by some corporation?
You might next mention RedHat. But are they actually selling software or is their software being subsidized by their services?
Software complexity grows over time such that the only way to compete is to build on existing software.
If the base is GPLed then you *effectively* can't sell it. This is wonderful for big companies because it means that our only options as developers is to work for them.
If the base uses a BSD license, the little guys are able to use it and can compete on a level playing field with the behemoths like Microsoft.
Let's free ourselves from the domination of the software giants by using the BSD license and generate a new wave of MSVs (micro software vendors) that will wipe out the Microsofts, IBMs, Adobes and Apples of the world.
Many of the NeXTstep icons appear to be incorrect. Perhaps they were taken from GNUstep instead?
ShawnDoc, even transexuals have adam's apples. where is it?
Btw, I met her at the Vintage Computer Feastival in Mountain View last month. She's a very nice, intellegent (obviously) and beautifully woman (even more obviously).
The author of the post seems to assume that high grades are a good measure of learning. I'm not so sure. Einstein had poor grades, did that mean he wasn't learning?
If the spammer sets up a mail server and finds a way to get external servers to send it mail, it can send spam via this server and then pass the hashcash requests from it's outgoing connections to it's incomming connections. In this way the spammer doesn't have to calculate a single hash - it distributes the computations among all of servers sending it mail.
How does it get lots of mail from external servers? There are lots of ways, but the easiest would be to sign up for mailing lists. There are millions of them.
Do you see a future for language-based operating systems like the old Smalltalk and LISP machines or the Newton?
It's not clear whether or not Badnarik was referening to literacy for the whole population or literacy among those who attended school (and ideally, we should divide those numbers into government and non-government run schools). The statistics you cite seem to be for the former, not the later.
Sounds a bit like the SCO case, but with the GPL folks as the litigators this time.
Makes it a bit more difficult to criticize SCO...
"Java has considerably fewer surprises..thereby resulting in a language where you cannot really make your friends go ga-ga at amazingly brief programming construct"
The real problem here is that C++ is a mess. "fewer surprises" here means that it has largely inherited C++'s mess. Java's verboseness is the product of putting in too much, not too little.
"Java has been considered slow for ages." [but isn't now]
It's true that the newer Java compilers do well on benchmarks. But it still *feels* slow when I sit waiting for 60 seconds for a small Java applet to start up or when my machine starts paging because a swing applet eats up 100s of megs of memory.
"Java is a strongly typed language therefore you have to tell the compiler exactly what you intend to use. And if you make a mistake in the way you use it, the compiler has the guts to tell you that you were wrong."
The problem here isn't about developers not wanting to know about their mistakes, but that strongly typed languages make it impossible to cleanly implement (and sometimes to implement at all) powerful dynamic design patterns.
"Java has a vast library..."
Java's APIs are it's weakest point. They are horribly complex. I once had to work with the Java Advanced Imaging APIs. IIRC, it has over 300 classes and yet functionally wasn't significantly more usefull than Cocoa's 3 image classes. Whenever you need to get at anything (say you wanted to change a pixel), you had to use a dozen classes. There are even classes that you have to instantiate to create parameter lists in order to pass to the instantiation methods of other classes. While not this extreme, much of Java's APIs seem to suffer from a similar explosion of classes and complexity.
"Java is popular. Anything that is popular has lost its elite status and therefore is not cool."
So Coke, Nike, Doom3, the PS2 and the NBA aren't cool?
"Java is an application programming platform. You cannot do cool things like device drivers and games, etc (until recently - but Java gaming is coming in a big way)."
AFAIK, Java fell flat as an application programming language. Today it is primarily used a server scripting language, just like the "cool" languages that Paul Graham mentioned, such as Python.
Jave.sucks();
http://www.cafeshops.com/Java_sucks
"The Other 90%" by Robert K. Cooper, Three Rivers Press 2001
Putting a language in XML only saves you from (maybe) writing a lexer or maybe a parser. After that there is so much variation in semantics between languages (and valid operations on the code) that the supposed "uniformity" disappears. Also, there are an huge number of ways to represent any given language's parse tree in XML. Do you even represent the parse tree or do you do it at a token level? Are numbers and strings their own element types? In other words, simply using XML doesn't buy you much in terms of uniformity.
It seems that paper assumes that information cannot be communitated between locations faster than the speed of light. AFAIK, this is still an open question.
While I don't know of any experiment that has demonstrated faster than light communication, non-locality itself has been proven by the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment.
That might also explain why all the particle wave functions in the universe did't collapse into the first black hole that formed.
I'm working with a company developing an IE plug-in and we noticed in our install logs that a machine at microsoft.com running IE on Linux downloaded and ran(!) our COM object. We had been scratching our heads over that one. Steve
Sounds like a great idea for a movie plot. But it seems unlikely since SETI isn't a goverment project - Congress refused to fund it.
>Would you ever buy anything that came from a place that looked like this?
:-)
Looks more professional than Steve Job's parent's garage.
Steve
Has anyone considered using a PC Field Programmable Gate Array board for SETI calculations? SETI stuff is all signal processing which could be highly paralelized on a FPGA(FPGA's are even replacing DSPs in routers these days). They're also affordable - see xilinx.com and altera.com.