Re:Linux & *BSD aren't UNIX (technically)
on
SCO does Linux
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· Score: 1
Actually, SCO owns the copyright to the word "UNIX". I learned this in a SCO class that my boss and I took when I first started my job. (My job description said that I'd be coding in WinNT, which then moved to SCO, then RedHat, and now Debian. Not a bad progression, I'd say.)
With regards to this whole SCO issue at large, I have to say it's pretty amusing. The problem with proprietary unices is that they are *discouraged* from putting out a distro with lots of variety in its programs. SCO doesn't want to offer gcc and egcs and all the rest, it wants to sell you its proprietary c compiler (and in trying to sell you a proprietary compiler, is discouraged from offering up a choice of compilers, as this would increase development costs). The same is true with window managers, and with shells, and editors, and mail/web/whatever clients. Why give you choice? Use the SCO window manager, the SCO shell! A free *nix distro has an incentive to giving you lots of choice, because switching to another distro is relatively trivial (as someone else could just repackage that distro with more choices).
I got a free subscription to "SCO World" from the class, damn riveting reading that. It's interesting that SCO is now moving to Linux. As described in SCO World, they've been trying hard to push "Tarantella", an (IIRC) implementation of X in Java. I tried Tarantella once; it was slower than Reagan on a bad day.
The truly great thing about using weird control sequences is that you accidently learn various neat features of vi. I had no idea control-p did word completion in vim until I mistyped control-[. And most of the features of screen I've learned through poor typing skills.:)
An alternative is to retrain your fingers to type control-[ instead of escape; this lets you avoid remapping. I once tried to go really hardcore and train myself to type control-h instead of backspace, but didn't stick with it.
> Ummm... so you are saying that the Crusades were > good?
sarcasm \Sar"casm\, n. [F. sarcasme, L. sarcasmus, Gr. sarkasmo`s, from sarka`zein to tear flesh like dogs, to bite the lips in rage, to speak bitterly, to sneer, fr. sa`rx, sa`rkos, flesh.] A keen, reproachful expression; a satirical remark uttered with some degree of scorn or contempt; a taunt; a gibe; a cutting jest.
I say, that's rather defeatist logic, isn't it? It hasn't been done, ergo it can't be, and the first law of Computer Science is the Law of No Progress?
LOL! To quote Guy L. Steele (who was working at Thinking Machines at the time), "just because parallel computing is the only answer [to getting past Moore' Law] doesn't mean it is an answer."
People have been trying for decades to do what the paper describes, at the cost of other research. Compiler-generated massively fine-grained parallel code is one of those great vaporware holy grails (like natural language processing) that gets people riled up but never materializes. Coarse-grained parallel projects like distributed.net (and its more generalized fork, the name of which escapes me) are more feasible, and have direct benefits for math and science researchers. "Weak AI" has gained popularity over "strong AI" for good reasons, hopefully coarse-grained projects will continue to gain similar popularity over fine-grained parallelism.
Once again, just because software is free doesn't mean it was chaotically developed. There can still be a single company, or single programmer, behind it (just as with cars, there is a single company, and a team of safety inspectors). If a car company sells you a faulty car, it (the car company) can be sued; if a software company sells a hospital faulty software (free or otherwise) it can be used.
You should always be able to sue someone if they screw you over by selling you a faulty product. This is irrelevant to the issue of what degree you should own that product once you buy it. (If I buy a car and die because I messed around with the brakes myself, I have no one to sue; similarly, if a hospital buys and modifies free software, and someone dies as a result, that's the hospital's fault.) Software companies are responsible for the quality of their products as they are at the time of sale.
Free Software has nothing to do with the Bazaar development model, that was just ESR's observation of some open source project structures.
Here is what Free Software is about: when you buy something, it becomes yours.
When you buy a car, it is yours. You can keep it as-is, you can paint it a new color, you can soup it up, you can give it to someone else, you can crash it into a police station in your quest to kill Sarah Connor. You buy the car, the car is yours. It no longer belongs to Ford, it belongs to you.
Proprietary software doesn't work that way. You buy the software, but you can't change it. You can't give it to someone else. You can't modify the software. You can't use it to hack into a police station's computers in your quest to kill Sarah Connor. You buy the software, but it doesn't belong to you.
Folks on this discussion who don't think that a chaotic development model would fit life-or-death software are right. But chaotic development models are something peripheral to free software, not integral to it. (ESR has emphasized this development model; but ESR is, in this capacity, a salesman, albeit a very insightful one.)
The point is, once you buy a piece of software, you should own it (IMHO). Once a hospital buys some equipment, they should own it, and its software.
> The group was founded just seven years ago by a > man with high school education. He now lives in > a spacious estate in (I believe) New Jersey.
Shouldn't the chinese government ban Microsoft software, then?;) In any event, this doesn't sound like a threat to the chinese people.
> The man claims he needs no medication and > suffers no ailments.
Again, some guy too stupid to take a penecillan shot sounds less-than-threatening. How does this have anything to do with China's welfare? We have Christian Scientists in the U.S. who fail to take medicine, and with the exception of child endangerment no one cares.
> He claimed Earth is in a volatile state and > might explode in 1997 or 98. He now says he can > delay the end of world for as long as 30 years.
So...he's an idiot claiming to have super powers. Big deal.
> His methods of meditation can lift a > practitioner above water. Yet, when his > followers surrounded ZhongNanHai (where Chinese > leaders live) they failed to surround the fourth > side -- a lake.
There's a yogi meditation college is southeastern Iowa that claims to be able to levitate. Not many people believe them, but with the possible exception of Janet Reno no one wants to ban the group for being a national security threat.
I find it interesting that you would support democracy in China, but fail to support the rights of this (by your descriptions) harmless group to practice its nonsense in peace.
A certification exam could cover things such as: computability, testing, algorithm analysis, data structures, objects, basic network concepts, multi-threading concepts, etc.
Yes, one would certainly think a certification exam could cover all of those things. Except that in a multiple-choice exam, you really can't cover those things, not in depth. Ever see the CS GRE test? (I have a casual interest in grad school, but I live in fear of that damn thing.) It doesn't really ask questions about analyzing algorithms, it asks: "Which of the following is the asymptotic complexity of shaker sort?" So if you can regurgitate shaker sort, and swiftly analyze its complexity, the test gives you points for algorithm analysis -- as if this shallow knowledge of trivia were really indicative of how reliable a coder is.
Programming is probably more suited to the master/apprentice model practiced by craftsmen in the middle ages (and by the Sith a long time ago). I don't know how practical this would be, although it is how doctor training works.
I've installed the MacOS innumerable times (one of the joys of working on the student helpdesk is being blessed with the grunt work), and I must say that you're simplifying things. Yes, the installer program itself is pretty idiot-free. But this is only because partitioning is done with a seperate utility. And the installer puts in a vanilla installation, with evil unnecessary software (like AOL) and a ton of control panels and extensions for you, the user, to manually enable or disable. It also leaves networking, time zone stuff, special languages, etc., up to the user after installation. So while the install program is pretty easy to use, the install process is just as complex as any other OS.
First off, we have less need for regulation than the legal industry. Software errors are still little to moderately dangerous; legal errors can stick you in a cell or an electric chair.
The Therac-25 controller, and similarly bunged pieces of software, have killed people.
Secondly, the training required for programming has a short half-life. Many programmers don't learn this trade through the traditional channels, and I doubt that those who do are measurably better than those who don't. This, combined with the antiauthoritarianism of some programmers, would keep some of the brightest geeks out of the biz.
True, and this brings up the problem of how to do the initial certification. The best we have so far are the current CS standardized tests (the AP test, the GRE), and these are fantastically bad. Good coders, IMHO, are not measured by an encyclopaedic memory of the archaic facts of languages. This is, however, the only thing that we can objectively test.
Third, we have a serious programmer defecit in this country. Even bad programmers can help, improving under the wings of better programmers.
Yes, that would be a danger -- companies outsourcing everything to India or some other generally tech-savvy nation. But let's think about how this sort of certification has affected other professions. I recall from an Anthro class that when doctors first decided to become a certified profession, it elevated the prestige of doctors, and lowered the status of non-doctor medical workers (such as nurses and midwives). This actually attracted people to the profession, because it was seen as a really exclusive, high-class job. The same could well happen with programmers. And a stigma might develop about software developed outside the U.S. (for companies inside the U.S.), just as most U.S. people would balk at going to another country to get cheaper medical care.
Finally, imagine what a regulated programmer's association would do to free software. Regulation of programmers would necessarily transfer to regulation of software. Linux might get canned for not being 100% association-compliant!
True; the other worry is about code written exclusively for personal use. I think an association such as this ought to only cover code written for money that is (ever) used by other people. (This is still vague, but you get the idea.) (And of course, there should be an ex post facto clause for legacy code like Linux.)
The use of such an association would be for identification, not regulation. A smart company could hire both associated programmers and disaccociated programmers, specifically putting the former over the latter. Part of the "oath" of such an association might be to help unassociated programmers gain their certification.
How would this be different from the ACM or Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility?
The key words here are "a smart company"; it's not the smart companies we need to worry about.
These days, coders are doing fine in leveraging management for high pay. What they don't necessarily have a lot of leverage in is product design, code quality, the ability to refuse to release an imperfect program, et cetera. This *is* because of a rift between labor and management -- we all know that PHBs tend to care less about quality than they ought to.
Now, what powers does a union have? Unions can strike. So a tech worker union's power would stem from its popularity -- whether the union had a pervasive enough membership to effectively blacklist a company from hiring coders.
What powers does a professional organization like the Bar Association have? The Bar Association has the legal authority to select which people may practice law. Those who practice law incorrectly lose their privilege to practice law, under penalty of fine or imprisonment.
This second model strikes me as more appropriate for the programming industry. We don't really have labor problems in this industry. Most problems in the industry stem from (for example) dopes in the marketing department dictating the design of programs. A professional association's backing would be damned helpful in these sorts of disputes. ("Put automagically-executed macros into the email documents? I could be disbarred for that!") Coders need the same legally-protected autonomy that doctors, lawyers, and other such professionals have; this would be a lot more powerful than the socially-protected autonomy of labor unions.
(Labor disputes could fall under this Bar-association-equivalent as well, but I doubt that labor disputes come up in the tech industry as much as the would in, say, the mining industry, where whole town are/were owned by single corporations. Most of the labor griping here seems to center around working a long number of consecutive hours; in theory, this could be regulated for programmers the same way it is for pilots.)
In conclusion, I think that an industry-wide organization is needed to unite programmers, but a union is not the right model for that organization.
> I do not believe the GPL has anything at all to > do with the rise of Linux. It has everything to > do with Linus being at the right place, > at the right time, with the right OS.
It was in the right place at the right time -- in the Tannenbaum / Torvalds debate you cite, note that both Tannenbaum and Torvalds say that they would have used GNU (and not reinvent UNIX on their own) if the HURD had just been done. Linux did come along at just the right time -- after GNU had the aspects of a full-featured UNIX, but before it had a kernel. (Note that MINIX was not a full-featured UNIX, it had a C-like compiler, and a dinky shell, but not much else. It also had a license that restricted free and open kernel development, IIRC.)
But the GPL (in comparison to the BSD license, not pseudo-free licenses) did have an effect on the success of Linux, in that developers can tend to get fanatical about stuff. Both the BSD license and the GPL are licenses easy to deify ("the GPL preserves freedom forever!" vs. "with the BSD license you are truly free!"), and thus easy to rally around.
Ever notice how vi and Emacs are the two most popular editors among UNIX folks? Talk about extremes! Emacs and vi survived because they staked out a clear vision of how to do things, and stuck with it. Neither editor was lacking in competition. Linux and BSD were the same way.
The article didn't go into the background about the exploding hatch. What happened? Even if he did blow the hatch, why is this seen as some horribly shameful thing? The guy made it into space and came back alive; that seems like the important thing.
Re:Don't abandon your language classes anytime soo
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Universal Translators?
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> Until you have good algorithms, all the Beowulf > clusters in the world aren't going to do you a > damn bit of good...
Well, that might not be true. AI research constantly butts its collective head against NP-complete problems. If we had non-deterministic machines (which people are working on, and probably at a faster pace than any proofs of P=NP), it would bring new life to the subject. My college AI textbook was filled to the brim with heuristics for avoiding exponentially large computation in what were essentially NP-complete problems.
But in the context of that guy's post, I agree with you. Moore's law is a false hope here.
Yakman> This is pretty impressive, but nothing too Yakman> surprising I guess.
I'll take issue with that. It's pretty impressive, and damned surprising, but probably untrue. If they actually had what they claimed to have, they'd be in line for the Nobel prize. The CMU press release makes no mention of any flaws in the product; for all the reader knows, this product can translate text from any language into text in another language as well as a human. Again, this would be damned surprising! If this were true, we'd be seeing this press release on the cover of Time, and almost every other publication. A program able to process natural language that well would be able to pass the Turing test. And think about it -- if a program could really translate anything (as well as a human) from English to French, why not modify it to translate from English to a recursively-enumerable subset of English (as well as a human)? Who would need programmers after that? If they really had what they implicitly claim to have, it would be a big deal.
Writing a program that can translate natural languages as well as a human is a holy grail, and not something that should be claimed (or implicitly claimed) lightly.
I'd bet anything that this is babelfish-level translation software with voice recognition software (probably of comparable quality) slapped on. This is another example of marketing folks (or, god forbid, the programmers) trying to hype the features of a product and, by neglecting to mention its limitations, ending up lying about what the program can do.
This product is mildly interesting from a software development point-of-view, but not anything I'd go firing my human translator staff over.
----------------- "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." ==> "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."
Something is "good" if it can be experienced innumerable times and still seem worthwhile. Linux holds up well under massive usage (I sit at my machine all day); Windows becomes frustrating if it is used excessively. I could still watch Citizen Kane, or Goodfellas, or The Seven Samurai, or The Empire Strikes Back again and love watching them, even though I've seen them all a million times. And I would be happy re-reading Lord of the Rings, or Programming Pearls, or One Hundred Years of Solitude.
On the other hand, I could do without watching The Phantom Menace again -- it was pretty good the first time, but after the second time it really got on my nerves. On this basis, I can say the movie is of low quality.
Well, I am a newbie at graphics programs, or at least use them almost never. Does the GIMP not do the sort of things you're looking for? When did you try it (if you have)? It might be more feature-ful now -- from what I understand, the GIMP is very modular, and the features you need might have been developed since you tried it out.
Don't speak for ESR, he has defended RMS on several occasions, and supports the FSF. ESR just thinks talking about "freedom" won't win over the suits.
And I haven't used fetchmail, but Perl is an excellect piece of software, and a well-designed (practical) language. (Of course, this is due more to Larry Wall than anyone else.)
TC is a jerk, but that shouldn't taint the reputations of others.
Wow, Perl is a replacement of the GNU tools? That's a stretch. Even disregarding that, calling him "probably the world's single most important contributor to the bridge between free software and the commercial software industry" is absurd: rms, esr, Linus, the X consortium, and BSD have all built more bridges between the free and proprietary world than this little Perl consultant has.
Come on, this is total flamebait. You haven't critiziced what the FSF's goals, or the efficacy of their software licensing, or the value of their software. You've just parodied their tactics and style, which even (some) fans of the FSF can agree are weird sometimes. If you really find GNU software morally repugnant, write alternatives to it. Until then, stop posting flamebait. Sheesh.
Is this cultural elitism? Yes, but not in the France vs. The World way that many of the posts here imply.
Keep in mind that the prime meridian already goes through France. The "problem" is that it doesn't go through Paris. Who views this as a problem? The Parisians, most likely! How dare the origin of longitudes pass through western France? Those rural yokels will never really understand Camus the way *we* do...
I suspect this is much like those (not all) New Yorkers who callously regard Manhattan as "The Capital of the World." Luckily the U.S. founders had enough sense not to put the nation's capital in the nation's biggest city. (Even if they did have to resort to building a city on a swamp.) If they had put the capital there, we'd probably be plowing over upstate New York to build giant space-visible concrete arrows pointing at NYC.
It's a stepping stone towards a long standing holy grail of genetics: the five-assed monkey, a creature far superior to man.
Re:There were so many other problems too
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Episode II Rumours
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> 3. Good point here. It seems in TPM that Yoda > was just a member of the council, and did no > training of his own. But we do not know > for sure. It is possible that he trained Obi-Wan > early on, and then turned him over to Qui-Gon > for the completion of his training.
Remember what Obi-Wan says to Luke in his vision on Hoth: "You will learn from Yoda, the Jedi master who instructed me." Of course Lucas forgot about this in Episode I, as well as how to make a good movie...
> 9. I found Liam and Ewan to do a great job, as > well as Shimi and Palpatine. Most of the other, > pretty dry. Especially the Queen. And Darth > Maul. Darth Maul's lines were so few and far > between that I almost forgot what he sounded > like.
In ANH, the actors would joke about how bad the dialog was. "Governer Tarkin, I thought I recognized your foul stench..."
I think nearly *all* the flaws of Episode I would be solved if Lucas just let someone else direct. He's an imaginative guy, but a really bad direcor, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, SCO owns the copyright to the word
"UNIX". I learned this in a SCO class that my
boss and I took when I first started my job.
(My job description said that I'd be coding in
WinNT, which then moved to SCO, then RedHat, and
now Debian. Not a bad progression, I'd say.)
With regards to this whole SCO issue at large,
I have to say it's pretty amusing. The problem
with proprietary unices is that they are
*discouraged* from putting out a distro with
lots of variety in its programs. SCO doesn't
want to offer gcc and egcs and all the rest,
it wants to sell you its proprietary c compiler
(and in trying to sell you a proprietary
compiler, is discouraged from offering up a
choice of compilers, as this would increase
development costs). The same is true with window
managers, and with shells, and editors, and
mail/web/whatever clients. Why give you choice?
Use the SCO window manager, the SCO shell! A
free *nix distro has an incentive to giving you
lots of choice, because switching to another
distro is relatively trivial (as someone else
could just repackage that distro with more
choices).
I got a free subscription to "SCO World" from the
class, damn riveting reading that. It's
interesting that SCO is now moving to Linux.
As described in SCO World, they've been trying
hard to push "Tarantella", an (IIRC)
implementation of X in Java. I tried Tarantella
once; it was slower than Reagan on a bad day.
The truly great thing about using weird control :)
sequences is that you accidently learn various
neat features of vi. I had no idea control-p
did word completion in vim until I mistyped
control-[. And most of the features of screen
I've learned through poor typing skills.
An alternative is to retrain your fingers to type
control-[ instead of escape; this lets you avoid
remapping. I once tried to go really hardcore
and train myself to type control-h instead of
backspace, but didn't stick with it.
> Ummm... so you are saying that the Crusades were
> good?
sarcasm \Sar"casm\, n. [F. sarcasme,
L. sarcasmus, Gr. sarkasmo`s, from
sarka`zein to tear flesh like dogs, to
bite the lips in rage, to speak bitterly,
to sneer, fr. sa`rx, sa`rkos, flesh.] A
keen, reproachful expression; a
satirical remark uttered with some
degree of scorn or contempt; a taunt;
a gibe; a cutting jest.
Syn: Satire; irony; ridicule; taunt; gibe.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
LOL! To quote Guy L. Steele (who was working at Thinking Machines at the time), "just because parallel computing is the only answer [to getting past Moore' Law] doesn't mean it is an answer."
People have been trying for decades to do what the paper describes, at the cost of other research. Compiler-generated massively fine-grained parallel code is one of those great vaporware holy grails (like natural language processing) that gets people riled up but never materializes. Coarse-grained parallel projects like distributed.net (and its more generalized fork, the name of which escapes me) are more feasible, and have direct benefits for math and science researchers. "Weak AI" has gained popularity over "strong AI" for good reasons, hopefully coarse-grained projects will continue to gain similar popularity over fine-grained parallelism.
Once again, just because software is free doesn't mean it was chaotically developed. There can still be a single company, or single programmer, behind it (just as with cars, there is a single company, and a team of safety inspectors). If a car company sells you a faulty car, it (the car company) can be sued; if a software company sells a hospital faulty software (free or otherwise) it can be used.
You should always be able to sue someone if they screw you over by selling you a faulty product. This is irrelevant to the issue of what degree you should own that product once you buy it. (If I buy a car and die because I messed around with the brakes myself, I have no one to sue; similarly, if a hospital buys and modifies free software, and someone dies as a result, that's the hospital's fault.) Software companies are responsible for the quality of their products as they are at the time of sale.
> the BOFH excuse calendar
Ha ha! Is this an actual product? I seriously need one.
Free Software has nothing to do with the Bazaar development model, that was just ESR's observation of some open source project structures.
Here is what Free Software is about: when you buy something, it becomes yours.
When you buy a car, it is yours. You can keep it as-is, you can paint it a new color, you can soup it up, you can give it to someone else, you can crash it into a police station in your quest to kill Sarah Connor. You buy the car, the car is yours. It no longer belongs to Ford, it belongs to you.
Proprietary software doesn't work that way. You buy the software, but you can't change it. You can't give it to someone else. You can't modify the software. You can't use it to hack into a police station's computers in your quest to kill Sarah Connor. You buy the software, but it doesn't belong to you.
Folks on this discussion who don't think that a chaotic development model would fit life-or-death software are right. But chaotic development models are something peripheral to free software, not integral to it. (ESR has emphasized this development model; but ESR is, in this capacity, a salesman, albeit a very insightful one.)
The point is, once you buy a piece of software, you should own it (IMHO). Once a hospital buys some equipment, they should own it, and its software.
> The group was founded just seven years ago by a
;) In any event, this doesn't sound like a threat to the chinese people.
> man with high school education. He now lives in
> a spacious estate in (I believe) New Jersey.
Shouldn't the chinese government ban Microsoft software, then?
> The man claims he needs no medication and
> suffers no ailments.
Again, some guy too stupid to take a penecillan shot sounds less-than-threatening. How does this have anything to do with China's welfare? We have Christian Scientists in the U.S. who fail to take medicine, and with the exception of child endangerment no one cares.
> He claimed Earth is in a volatile state and
> might explode in 1997 or 98. He now says he can
> delay the end of world for as long as 30 years.
So...he's an idiot claiming to have super powers. Big deal.
> His methods of meditation can lift a
> practitioner above water. Yet, when his
> followers surrounded ZhongNanHai (where Chinese
> leaders live) they failed to surround the fourth
> side -- a lake.
There's a yogi meditation college is southeastern Iowa that claims to be able to levitate. Not many people believe them, but with the possible exception of Janet Reno no one wants to ban the group for being a national security threat.
I find it interesting that you would support democracy in China, but fail to support the rights of this (by your descriptions) harmless group to practice its nonsense in peace.
Yes, one would certainly think a certification exam could cover all of those things. Except that in a multiple-choice exam, you really can't cover those things, not in depth. Ever see the CS GRE test? (I have a casual interest in grad school, but I live in fear of that damn thing.) It doesn't really ask questions about analyzing algorithms, it asks: "Which of the following is the asymptotic complexity of shaker sort?" So if you can regurgitate shaker sort, and swiftly analyze its complexity, the test gives you points for algorithm analysis -- as if this shallow knowledge of trivia were really indicative of how reliable a coder is.
Programming is probably more suited to the master/apprentice model practiced by craftsmen in the middle ages (and by the Sith a long time ago). I don't know how practical this would be, although it is how doctor training works.
I've installed the MacOS innumerable times (one of the joys of working on the student helpdesk is being blessed with the grunt work), and I must say that you're simplifying things. Yes, the installer program itself is pretty idiot-free. But this is only because partitioning is done with a seperate utility. And the installer puts in a vanilla installation, with evil unnecessary software (like AOL) and a ton of control panels and extensions for you, the user, to manually enable or disable. It also leaves networking, time zone stuff, special languages, etc., up to the user after installation. So while the install program is pretty easy to use, the install process is just as complex as any other OS.
The Therac-25 controller, and similarly bunged pieces of software, have killed people.
Secondly, the training required for programming has a short half-life. Many programmers don't learn this trade through the traditional channels, and I doubt that those who do are measurably better than those who don't. This, combined with the antiauthoritarianism of some programmers, would keep some of the brightest geeks out of the biz.
True, and this brings up the problem of how to do the initial certification. The best we have so far are the current CS standardized tests (the AP test, the GRE), and these are fantastically bad. Good coders, IMHO, are not measured by an encyclopaedic memory of the archaic facts of languages. This is, however, the only thing that we can objectively test.
Third, we have a serious programmer defecit in this country. Even bad programmers can help, improving under the wings of better programmers.
Yes, that would be a danger -- companies outsourcing everything to India or some other generally tech-savvy nation. But let's think about how this sort of certification has affected other professions. I recall from an Anthro class that when doctors first decided to become a certified profession, it elevated the prestige of doctors, and lowered the status of non-doctor medical workers (such as nurses and midwives). This actually attracted people to the profession, because it was seen as a really exclusive, high-class job. The same could well happen with programmers. And a stigma might develop about software developed outside the U.S. (for companies inside the U.S.), just as most U.S. people would balk at going to another country to get cheaper medical care.
Finally, imagine what a regulated programmer's association would do to free software. Regulation of programmers would necessarily transfer to regulation of software. Linux might get canned for not being 100% association-compliant!
True; the other worry is about code written exclusively for personal use. I think an association such as this ought to only cover code written for money that is (ever) used by other people. (This is still vague, but you get the idea.) (And of course, there should be an ex post facto clause for legacy code like Linux.)
The use of such an association would be for identification, not regulation. A smart company could hire both associated programmers and disaccociated programmers, specifically putting the former over the latter. Part of the "oath" of such an association might be to help unassociated programmers gain their certification.
How would this be different from the ACM or Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility?
The key words here are "a smart company"; it's not the smart companies we need to worry about.
These days, coders are doing fine in leveraging management for high pay. What they don't necessarily have a lot of leverage in is product design, code quality, the ability to refuse to release an imperfect program, et cetera. This *is* because of a rift between labor and management -- we all know that PHBs tend to care less about quality than they ought to.
Now, what powers does a union have? Unions can strike. So a tech worker union's power would stem from its popularity -- whether the union had a pervasive enough membership to effectively blacklist a company from hiring coders.
What powers does a professional organization like the Bar Association have? The Bar Association has the legal authority to select which people may practice law. Those who practice law incorrectly lose their privilege to practice law, under penalty of fine or imprisonment.
This second model strikes me as more appropriate for the programming industry. We don't really have labor problems in this industry. Most problems in the industry stem from (for example) dopes in the marketing department dictating the design of programs. A professional association's backing would be damned helpful in these sorts of disputes. ("Put automagically-executed macros into the email documents? I could be disbarred for that!") Coders need the same legally-protected autonomy that doctors, lawyers, and other such professionals have; this would be a lot more powerful than the socially-protected autonomy of labor unions.
(Labor disputes could fall under this Bar-association-equivalent as well, but I doubt that labor disputes come up in the tech industry as much as the would in, say, the mining industry, where whole town are/were owned by single corporations. Most of the labor griping here seems to center around working a long number of consecutive hours; in theory, this could be regulated for programmers the same way it is for pilots.)
In conclusion, I think that an industry-wide organization is needed to unite programmers, but a union is not the right model for that organization.
> I do not believe the GPL has anything at all to
> do with the rise of Linux. It has everything to
> do with Linus being at the right place,
> at the right time, with the right OS.
It was in the right place at the right time -- in the Tannenbaum / Torvalds debate you cite, note that both Tannenbaum and Torvalds say that they would have used GNU (and not reinvent UNIX on their own) if the HURD had just been done. Linux did come along at just the right time -- after GNU had the aspects of a full-featured UNIX, but before it had a kernel. (Note that MINIX was not a full-featured UNIX, it had a C-like compiler, and a dinky shell, but not much else. It also had a license that restricted free and open kernel development, IIRC.)
But the GPL (in comparison to the BSD license, not pseudo-free licenses) did have an effect on the success of Linux, in that developers can tend to get fanatical about stuff. Both the BSD license and the GPL are licenses easy to deify ("the GPL preserves freedom forever!" vs. "with the BSD license you are truly free!"), and thus easy to rally around.
Ever notice how vi and Emacs are the two most popular editors among UNIX folks? Talk about extremes! Emacs and vi survived because they staked out a clear vision of how to do things, and stuck with it. Neither editor was lacking in competition. Linux and BSD were the same way.
The article didn't go into the background about the exploding hatch. What happened? Even if he did blow the hatch, why is this seen as some horribly shameful thing? The guy made it into space and came back alive; that seems like the important thing.
> Until you have good algorithms, all the Beowulf
> clusters in the world aren't going to do you a
> damn bit of good...
Well, that might not be true. AI research constantly butts its collective head against NP-complete problems. If we had non-deterministic machines (which people are working on, and probably at a faster pace than any proofs of P=NP), it would bring new life to the subject. My college AI textbook was filled to the brim with heuristics for avoiding exponentially large computation in what were essentially NP-complete problems.
But in the context of that guy's post, I agree with you. Moore's law is a false hope here.
Yakman> This is pretty impressive, but nothing too
Yakman> surprising I guess.
I'll take issue with that. It's pretty impressive, and damned surprising, but probably untrue. If they actually had what they claimed to have, they'd be in line for the Nobel prize. The CMU press release makes no mention of any flaws in the product; for all the reader knows, this product can translate text from any language into text in another language as well as a human. Again, this would be damned surprising! If this were true, we'd be seeing this press release on the cover of Time, and almost every other publication. A program able to process natural language that well would be able to pass the Turing test. And think about it -- if a program could really translate anything (as well as a human) from English to French, why not modify it to translate from English to a recursively-enumerable subset of English (as well as a human)? Who would need programmers after that? If they really had what they implicitly claim to have, it would be a big deal.
Writing a program that can translate natural languages as well as a human is a holy grail, and not something that should be claimed (or implicitly claimed) lightly.
I'd bet anything that this is babelfish-level translation software with voice recognition software (probably of comparable quality) slapped on. This is another example of marketing folks (or, god forbid, the programmers) trying to hype the features of a product and, by neglecting to mention its limitations, ending up lying about what the program can do.
This product is mildly interesting from a software development point-of-view, but not anything I'd go firing my human translator staff over.
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"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."
==> "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."
Something is "good" if it can be experienced innumerable times and still seem worthwhile. Linux holds up well under massive usage (I sit at my machine all day); Windows becomes frustrating if it is used excessively. I could still watch Citizen Kane, or Goodfellas, or The Seven Samurai, or The Empire Strikes Back again and love watching them, even though I've seen them all a million times. And I would be happy re-reading Lord of the Rings, or Programming Pearls, or One Hundred Years of Solitude.
On the other hand, I could do without watching The Phantom Menace again -- it was pretty good the first time, but after the second time it really got on my nerves. On this basis, I can say the movie is of low quality.
Well, I am a newbie at graphics programs, or at least use them almost never. Does the GIMP not do the sort of things you're looking for? When did you try it (if you have)? It might be more feature-ful now -- from what I understand, the GIMP is very modular, and the features you need might have been developed since you tried it out.
Don't speak for ESR, he has defended RMS on several occasions, and supports the FSF. ESR just thinks talking about "freedom" won't win over the suits.
And I haven't used fetchmail, but Perl is an excellect piece of software, and a well-designed (practical) language. (Of course, this is due more to Larry Wall than anyone else.)
TC is a jerk, but that shouldn't taint the reputations of others.
Wow, Perl is a replacement of the GNU tools? That's a stretch. Even disregarding that, calling him "probably the world's single most important contributor to the bridge between free software and the commercial software industry" is absurd: rms, esr, Linus, the X consortium, and BSD have all built more bridges between the free and proprietary world than this little Perl consultant has.
Come on, this is total flamebait. You haven't critiziced what the FSF's goals, or the efficacy of their software licensing, or the value of their software. You've just parodied their tactics and style, which even (some) fans of the FSF can agree are weird sometimes. If you really find GNU software morally repugnant, write alternatives to it. Until then, stop posting flamebait. Sheesh.
Is this cultural elitism? Yes, but not in the France vs. The World way that many of the posts here imply.
Keep in mind that the prime meridian already goes through France. The "problem" is that it doesn't go through Paris. Who views this as a problem? The Parisians, most likely! How dare the origin of longitudes pass through western France? Those rural yokels will never really understand Camus the way *we* do...
I suspect this is much like those (not all) New Yorkers who callously regard Manhattan as "The Capital of the World." Luckily the U.S. founders had enough sense not to put the nation's capital in the nation's biggest city. (Even if they did have to resort to building a city on a swamp.) If they had put the capital there, we'd probably be plowing over upstate New York to build giant space-visible concrete arrows pointing at NYC.
> No mention of purpose was made in this article.
It's a stepping stone towards a long standing holy grail of genetics: the five-assed monkey, a creature far superior to man.
> 3. Good point here. It seems in TPM that Yoda
> was just a member of the council, and did no
> training of his own. But we do not know
> for sure. It is possible that he trained Obi-Wan
> early on, and then turned him over to Qui-Gon
> for the completion of his training.
Remember what Obi-Wan says to Luke in his vision on Hoth: "You will learn from Yoda, the Jedi master who instructed me." Of course Lucas forgot about this in Episode I, as well as how to make a good movie...
> 9. I found Liam and Ewan to do a great job, as
> well as Shimi and Palpatine. Most of the other,
> pretty dry. Especially the Queen. And Darth
> Maul. Darth Maul's lines were so few and far
> between that I almost forgot what he sounded
> like.
In ANH, the actors would joke about how bad the dialog was. "Governer Tarkin, I thought I recognized your foul stench..."
I think nearly *all* the flaws of Episode I would be solved if Lucas just let someone else direct. He's an imaginative guy, but a really bad direcor, IMHO.