As for the code already released under the GPL, that's GPL'ed permanently for everyone...
This is blatantly and obviously false. Only the legitimate owner of a copyrighted work has the rights to offer a license. Licenses offered falsely by a third party are fraudulent; the third party is the person responsible for the damages, and the license is void.
You're correct. But really, the regulation or lack thereof doesn't actually change anything. Here in San Diego, cable companies are free to compete across eachother's territories. None of them do, however. If you contemplate the situation for a while on your own, you'll see that it simply makes little sense for them to do so: competition decreases the wire:customer density, and that increases expenses notably.
I am sure the future of communications for the home user will be wireless.
No way. Information theory just doesn't support this. Cell phones need precious little bandwidth. You can't say the same of data feeds which, while may not use gobs of bandwidth on average, chew it down at an insane pace in bursts.
I find it short sited that the government grants a monopoly to the cable company by not letting anyone else lay cable...
They don't. For example, here in San Diego, any cable company can compete with the other cable companies. Theoretically. But of course they _don't_. It would be too expensive, because by definition if you do this, you decrease the cable-length:customer-density ratio.
This is emphatically not the case. OODBs are generally vastly faster than relational databases, with transactional speeds rivaling the transactional speed of the virtual memory management process itself. Hardware-level speeds, in other words. Relational databases generally have better fault tolerance, better application-dataspace separation, better transactional management, and so forth.
I'll give you a reason: what if you're too old? That's right. Once you pass a certain age, you can't be a programmer any more. What do you do then?
Dye your hair, lie about your age, get a digital tape recorder, and hope one of your bosses confronts you over it. Then bring in the local labor bereau, sue, and retire. Since it is entirely illegal to not employ you on the basis of your age, a company letting you go for misrepresenting it would be defacto admitting to age discrimination and giving you a case.
On a less whimsical note, as a software guy, age discrimination indeeds disturbs me.
People are laid off from jobs constantly for no reason.
This is nonsense. It would be more honest for you to declare that you do not perceive the reason why people are laid off. Clearly, those doing the laying off do so for a reason, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. You merely lack comprehension as to why.
[my experience] is now worthless.
Equally nonsense. It's temporarily not in high demand -- at least amongst those you've been seeking employment with -- because of an economic turn. This is in part because there is a sudden abundance of people like you on the market, who have to be slowly reabsorbed. The employers value the skill, but don't currently possess the resources themselves to quickly bring you back into active employment. This will be temporary.
Meanwhile, you need to broaden your search, hunker down, and get through a tough time. No one and nothing can guarantee you stability. You're learning this the hard way, and I'm sorry to hear it.
Out of curiosity, was your last place of employment one that was known for stability? If not, why not?
Your insights are deeper than maybe even you think. The entire _economy_ is currently transitioning to a service-based economy. Software services -- iow, as you said "consultants" -- are the main future of the software business.
Yes, of course there will be products, but the market will move even more towards service and not product than it has already. It's a distinct overall economic trend in which the software business is only one player.
The GPL is really an _expression_ of this trend, not its cause. The trend is away from the production and ownership of ownable things and towards the application of intellect toward a task. This is true on a variety of levels: at the lowest, from the flipping of burgers, to the highest, medicine, research, practice of law, and information systems.
"...and let me tell you, they steal money from the corporate bank accounts to pay for kiddie porn..."
That would not only be libelous, but libelous per se. Someone making such a claim and presenting it as credible truth would certainly be at risk of being subject to the legal equivalent of being rended limb from limb.
No, I saw that post when it was new. US Customs can't open all the mail, you know. My suggestion was passive resistance. This whole recent trend violates the very old Doctrine of First Sale and in any case likewise violates rights to fair use. While I'm all for going after malicious violators of copyright, people who've legitimately paid for something should be able to duplicate it for their own use to their heart's content. We, The People, need to redouble our efforts to make congress aware that we require this.
It's not as if parallel algorithms are a black art or anything - there's a lot of material on the subject available.
True. And very simple patterns like Worker Pool / Job patterns make it quite accessible. It's just an issue of exposure. As soon as on-die multiple cpu machines are mainstream, multithreaded programming soon follow.
The critics of Linux -- the ones who predict it will fail in various venues, including the desktop -- lack vision and the ability to forecast trends. The entire phenomenon reminds me of my various U.S. compatriots who keep pointing at AMD's domestic U.S. market numbers and talking about these as if they were representative. They aren't, of course: AMD is a big phenomenon in Germany and Japan both, and they really matter.
But back to Linux. What's going on here?
In the United States, and large segments of the First World, the operating systems market is locked up by the major tier one vendors. Linux is a player here, and it's admirable that it's been able to get as much penetration as it has, given the power of the competing commercial interests. But this misses the bigger picture.
There is a rest of the world. In that rest of the world -- the Third World -- major tier one vendor operating systems are too expensive any price. So what happens? The various third world, economically disadvantaged, or simply price-sensitive countries select for a readily available alternative. It becomes part of their infrastructure. They become vested in it.
Then what?
The world is not a static place. It's in motion. These various other countries are developing nations. Some of the third world countries will move out of the third world. China, currently price sensitive, currently has the second largest GNP of any nation on Earth. Soon, they'll be the world's dominant economic player.
As these various players move forward, they'll move Linux. It's inevitable.
Linux critics really lack vision. The world's not going where they think it's going. The U.S. and even the current first world are hardly the only players in the game.
Virtual machines rely on things like delayed compiling that are fairly antithetical to the whole idea of Itanium, where they push enormous amounts of work previously handled by the CPU out to the compiler. Personally, I believe that VLIW for general purpose processors was a really bad idea that was disproven a good decade ago. Intel is in the middle of giant train wreck, and the market doesn't even know it yet.
Consider the downside of pushing the majority of your branch prediction to the compiler. For example, the compiler doesn't know about multiple processes and how they interact with eachother! This means that it's likely that Itanium boxes won't even serve transactions very well. This begs the question of what Itanium will be useful for. If it's not for the desktop, and it's not for transaction service, what the heck is it for? High end scientific computing? Competing for Alpha's market share is a big mistake, in my mind.
"...the study shows that longer sleep is a risk factor for cancer as well as heart disease and stroke... Heart disease was the most common cause of death, followed by stroke and cancer."
Depression itself is associated with heart disease. So it could easily be a simple bicorrelation: Depression of various levels increases sleeping, depression causes heart disease, sleeping appears to (but doesn't) cause heart disease.
Or, it really could be related. There's a reason that most heart attacks occur in one's sleep. So it might be that sleeping a bit more simply slightly extends the risk.
"...some sleep loss actually acts as an antidepressant."
Only in some individuals. Depression is more of a syndrome than anything else, meaning that it is diagnosed on the presence of a constellation of symptoms. It's quite likely that what we call "Depression" today is actually several different diseases of varying etiology. For example, it could be that of the two three theories "depression is caused by low serotonin levels" and "depression is caused by low norepinephrine levels" and "depression is caused by high cortizol levels," all three are correct. Each could be separate pathological situations in which deterioration of mental function is a symptom.
This would explain why forcible sleep deprivation only works with some patients.
You're thinking of MAO-A inhibitors, not MAO-B inhibitors. The jury is still out on selegeline in terms of its ability to extend life and brain function in humans, but it only causes generalized inhibition of MAO (including MAO-A) at high doses. Hypertensive crisis is not a risk factor in taking selegeline.
But speaking of all this, one category of drug which generally does seem to extend life in humans is ACE inhibitors. This appears to be an effect above and beyond the blood pressure lowering effect of the drug, as it seems that other antihypertensives don't extend life as well as ACE inhibitors do. So, the moral of the story seems to be: if ACE inhibitors control your hypertension, use them instead of the other alternatives.
There were any variety of peaceful folks working and minding their own peaceful business. There lack of interest in things military didn't stop them from being vaporized. Grab a clue.
I can buy that argument. Which just goes to show that there are both carrot and stick arguments for Microsoft to not fight the Mac very much. As it turns out, the Mac part of M$ actually makes some good money as well. I don't know why that's true, and I've never verified the claim, but so I've heard it said.
Apple's hardware margins are getting slimmer. Software is and always has been a higher margin business. That's why Microsoft is nearly twice the size of IBM in market capitalization.
There are other questions: Can Apple penetrate the x86 market deeply enough to justify the investment without sabotaging its current margins on hardware? That's a good question. If they were able to sell the OS kit for $200 plus and people would buy it at that price, they might. Those are big ifs, though, and personally I doubt it.
I know plenty of folks who would try OS/X for free about the same way they play with Linux, but when it comes to spending something more than chump change, there's got to be software there. That means business applications, games, and most of all: OFFICE.
They could easily drop support for MS-Office on MacOS...
They could but they won't. Writing Mac programs is a strategy they use to keep plausible deniability of their monopoly. A move to sabotage Apple would bite them in the ass.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the code already released under the GPL, that's GPL'ed permanently for everyone...
This is blatantly and obviously false. Only the legitimate owner of a copyrighted work has the rights to offer a license. Licenses offered falsely by a third party are fraudulent; the third party is the person responsible for the damages, and the license is void.
C//
Linking to an LGPL product does not make that product a derived work. You are thinking of the GPL, not the LGPL.
C//
Huh? Patents are assets. The creditors would own the Patents; they don't expire when the company goes under. Not in the U.S. anyway.
C//
You're correct. But really, the regulation or lack thereof doesn't actually change anything. Here in San Diego, cable companies are free to compete across eachother's territories. None of them do, however. If you contemplate the situation for a while on your own, you'll see that it simply makes little sense for them to do so: competition decreases the wire:customer density, and that increases expenses notably.
C//
I am sure the future of communications for the home user will be wireless.
No way. Information theory just doesn't support this. Cell phones need precious little bandwidth. You can't say the same of data feeds which, while may not use gobs of bandwidth on average, chew it down at an insane pace in bursts.
C//
If they were really blocking your outbound traffic on port 80...
Inbound traffic is what they block.
C//
I find it short sited that the government grants a monopoly to the cable company by not letting anyone else lay cable...
They don't. For example, here in San Diego, any cable company can compete with the other cable companies. Theoretically. But of course they _don't_. It would be too expensive, because by definition if you do this, you decrease the cable-length:customer-density ratio.
C//
OO is only good for academic reasons to
This is emphatically not the case. OODBs are generally vastly faster than relational databases, with transactional speeds rivaling the transactional speed of the virtual memory management process itself. Hardware-level speeds, in other words. Relational databases generally have better fault tolerance, better application-dataspace separation, better transactional management, and so forth.
C//
Well, you can probably get a few more than a hundred out of the X11 color database, but who wants to name their computers SlateGray4?
:)
C//
I'll give you a reason: what if you're too old? That's right. Once you pass a certain age, you can't be a programmer any more. What do you do then?
Dye your hair, lie about your age, get a digital tape recorder, and hope one of your bosses confronts you over it. Then bring in the local labor bereau, sue, and retire. Since it is entirely illegal to not employ you on the basis of your age, a company letting you go for misrepresenting it would be defacto admitting to age discrimination and giving you a case.
On a less whimsical note, as a software guy, age discrimination indeeds disturbs me.
C//
People are laid off from jobs constantly for no reason.
This is nonsense. It would be more honest for you to declare that you do not perceive the reason why people are laid off. Clearly, those doing the laying off do so for a reason, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. You merely lack comprehension as to why.
[my experience] is now worthless.
Equally nonsense. It's temporarily not in high demand -- at least amongst those you've been seeking employment with -- because of an economic turn. This is in part because there is a sudden abundance of people like you on the market, who have to be slowly reabsorbed. The employers value the skill, but don't currently possess the resources themselves to quickly bring you back into active employment. This will be temporary.
Meanwhile, you need to broaden your search, hunker down, and get through a tough time. No one and nothing can guarantee you stability. You're learning this the hard way, and I'm sorry to hear it.
Out of curiosity, was your last place of employment one that was known for stability? If not, why not?
C//
Your insights are deeper than maybe even you think. The entire _economy_ is currently transitioning to a service-based economy. Software services -- iow, as you said "consultants" -- are the main future of the software business.
Yes, of course there will be products, but the market will move even more towards service and not product than it has already. It's a distinct overall economic trend in which the software business is only one player.
The GPL is really an _expression_ of this trend, not its cause. The trend is away from the production and ownership of ownable things and towards the application of intellect toward a task. This is true on a variety of levels: at the lowest, from the flipping of burgers, to the highest, medicine, research, practice of law, and information systems.
C//
Curiously, all around me are people that have been employed for 2 years and more. Many of them 8+, all in the same place.
C//
"...and let me tell you, they steal money from the corporate bank accounts to pay for kiddie porn..."
That would not only be libelous, but libelous per se. Someone making such a claim and presenting it as credible truth would certainly be at risk of being subject to the legal equivalent of being rended limb from limb.
C//
No, I saw that post when it was new. US Customs can't open all the mail, you know. My suggestion was passive resistance. This whole recent trend violates the very old Doctrine of First Sale and in any case likewise violates rights to fair use. While I'm all for going after malicious violators of copyright, people who've legitimately paid for something should be able to duplicate it for their own use to their heart's content. We, The People, need to redouble our efforts to make congress aware that we require this.
C//
All of them (new ones anyway)?
Order one from Taiwan which isn't?
C//
It's not as if parallel algorithms are a black art or anything - there's a lot of material on the subject available.
True. And very simple patterns like Worker Pool / Job patterns make it quite accessible. It's just an issue of exposure. As soon as on-die multiple cpu machines are mainstream, multithreaded programming soon follow.
C//
The critics of Linux -- the ones who predict it will fail in various venues, including the desktop -- lack vision and the ability to forecast trends. The entire phenomenon reminds me of my various U.S. compatriots who keep pointing at AMD's domestic U.S. market numbers and talking about these as if they were representative. They aren't, of course: AMD is a big phenomenon in Germany and Japan both, and they really matter.
But back to Linux. What's going on here?
In the United States, and large segments of the First World, the operating systems market is locked up by the major tier one vendors. Linux is a player here, and it's admirable that it's been able to get as much penetration as it has, given the power of the competing commercial interests. But this misses the bigger picture.
There is a rest of the world. In that rest of the world -- the Third World -- major tier one vendor operating systems are too expensive any price. So what happens? The various third world, economically disadvantaged, or simply price-sensitive countries select for a readily available alternative. It becomes part of their infrastructure. They become vested in it.
Then what?
The world is not a static place. It's in motion. These various other countries are developing nations. Some of the third world countries will move out of the third world. China, currently price sensitive, currently has the second largest GNP of any nation on Earth. Soon, they'll be the world's dominant economic player.
As these various players move forward, they'll move Linux. It's inevitable.
Linux critics really lack vision. The world's not going where they think it's going. The U.S. and even the current first world are hardly the only players in the game.
C//
Virtual machines rely on things like delayed compiling that are fairly antithetical to the whole idea of Itanium, where they push enormous amounts of work previously handled by the CPU out to the compiler. Personally, I believe that VLIW for general purpose processors was a really bad idea that was disproven a good decade ago. Intel is in the middle of giant train wreck, and the market doesn't even know it yet.
Consider the downside of pushing the majority of your branch prediction to the compiler. For example, the compiler doesn't know about multiple processes and how they interact with eachother! This means that it's likely that Itanium boxes won't even serve transactions very well. This begs the question of what Itanium will be useful for. If it's not for the desktop, and it's not for transaction service, what the heck is it for? High end scientific computing? Competing for Alpha's market share is a big mistake, in my mind.
C//
"...the study shows that longer sleep is a risk factor for cancer as well as heart disease and stroke... Heart disease was the most common cause of death, followed by stroke and cancer."
Depression itself is associated with heart disease. So it could easily be a simple bicorrelation: Depression of various levels increases sleeping, depression causes heart disease, sleeping appears to (but doesn't) cause heart disease.
Or, it really could be related. There's a reason that most heart attacks occur in one's sleep. So it might be that sleeping a bit more simply slightly extends the risk.
"...some sleep loss actually acts as an antidepressant."
Only in some individuals. Depression is more of a syndrome than anything else, meaning that it is diagnosed on the presence of a constellation of symptoms. It's quite likely that what we call "Depression" today is actually several different diseases of varying etiology. For example, it could be that of the two three theories "depression is caused by low serotonin levels" and "depression is caused by low norepinephrine levels" and "depression is caused by high cortizol levels," all three are correct. Each could be separate pathological situations in which deterioration of mental function is a symptom.
This would explain why forcible sleep deprivation only works with some patients.
C//
You're thinking of MAO-A inhibitors, not MAO-B inhibitors. The jury is still out on selegeline in terms of its ability to extend life and brain function in humans, but it only causes generalized inhibition of MAO (including MAO-A) at high doses. Hypertensive crisis is not a risk factor in taking selegeline.
But speaking of all this, one category of drug which generally does seem to extend life in humans is ACE inhibitors. This appears to be an effect above and beyond the blood pressure lowering effect of the drug, as it seems that other antihypertensives don't extend life as well as ACE inhibitors do. So, the moral of the story seems to be: if ACE inhibitors control your hypertension, use them instead of the other alternatives.
C//
There were any variety of peaceful folks working and minding their own peaceful business. There lack of interest in things military didn't stop them from being vaporized. Grab a clue.
C//
I can buy that argument. Which just goes to show that there are both carrot and stick arguments for Microsoft to not fight the Mac very much. As it turns out, the Mac part of M$ actually makes some good money as well. I don't know why that's true, and I've never verified the claim, but so I've heard it said.
C//
Apple's hardware margins are getting slimmer. Software is and always has been a higher margin business. That's why Microsoft is nearly twice the size of IBM in market capitalization.
There are other questions: Can Apple penetrate the x86 market deeply enough to justify the investment without sabotaging its current margins on hardware? That's a good question. If they were able to sell the OS kit for $200 plus and people would buy it at that price, they might. Those are big ifs, though, and personally I doubt it.
I know plenty of folks who would try OS/X for free about the same way they play with Linux, but when it comes to spending something more than chump change, there's got to be software there. That means business applications, games, and most of all: OFFICE.
C//
They could easily drop support for MS-Office on MacOS...
They could but they won't. Writing Mac programs is a strategy they use to keep plausible deniability of their monopoly. A move to sabotage Apple would bite them in the ass.
C//