Anyway, there's no question that bad government can run a country into the ground because of poor management and corruption. Why couldn't a good government make a positive economic difference?
Because of the inherent conflict of interest: in an ideal economy, people's dependency on the government is greatly reduced, and therefore, so too is its power. The "positive economic difference" cannot be maintained without that power, and so things collapse.
Basically GPL is a violation of my rights to publ,ish source code and make money off of it.
If you want to make money off of what you publish, you are free to do so. One specific business model is verboten -namely, closing the code- but that is only one business model among many. A number of companies are doing quite fine making money off of open-source code, and they do so in a number of different ways. The only thing stopping you from doing this same thing is that you don't want to. That's your prerogative, of course, but you have no grounds to complain that you are being prevented from making money.
No one has the right to force me to release my developed code for free.
By default, no. The GPL is an agreement, not a law. You yourself give the authors of GPL software the right to force you to open your code when you agreed to use their software: those are the terms of the agreement. If you don't want to agree, that's fine: just don't use GPL'd code, and you're golden.
It is a companies right to protect their IP...
Completely correct. This is why you should not violate the IP rights of the author of GPL'd source code by closing it. If you don't like those terms, fine; don't use GPL'd source code.
...and GPL prevents that.
Completely false. In fact, in order to make it work for you, you're going to have to protect your IP. You will, however, not be allowed to tread on the IP rights of the authors of the code you are selling: not your own, and not anyone else's. If you are uncomfortable with this, all you have to do is not use GPL'd code.
All free softare if truly free should be GPL.
Um... did you miss some words in your sentence here? It doesn't make sense in the context of the rest of your post.
Please stop spreading the "Wii = Gamecube" lie. I know it's not giving you those marginally-sharper pictures that the marketers have somehow convinced you improve your HD games so much, but to say that makes it no different form its predecessor is absurd.
For all the good that tolerance and openness has done, the realization that one group of people is not inherently 'better' than any other does have its not-so-pleasant consequences too, and in particular it tends to not turn out well for those traditionally favored. We're dealing with one such case now. In this case, when one can do things just as well anywhere on the globe as in America, American workers just plain don't provide good value for the labor dollars being spent. In IT and manufacturing, one can get the same productivity (in terms of both amount and quality of product) or even better elsewhere at considerably better rates, and in manufacturing the difference is often so large that it even covers the overhead of shipping the finished product "back" to the target market. Why wouldn't a business jump on that? Like anyone else, they have little choice but to maximize the value they get for their money; whether or not it is good, it is what they do to survive.
There are fields where this equation doesn't hold: namely, what I call "location-tied fields" where the work needs to be done at or very near the place where its end products will finally go. Customer service is something of a counterintuitive example here, but it holds: natively speaking the language of one's target market is too huge of an advantage to ignore, as anyone who has had to deal with outsourced call centers can attest. Skilled manual labor (i.e. the trades) almost universally falls into this category as well: you cannot work unless you can work onsite. But with very few exceptions, location-tied fields don't get a lot of respect in the US, and this isn't just a matter of pay: these jobs are never considered even when politicians cry out for adding more "good jobs" to the economy. The only real exceptions to this are the fields of medicine and law, both of which are location-tied (you can't treat a patient unless you are with the patient, and while it is technically possible to practice law in places other than where one lives the complexities of jurisdiction make it quite difficult) yet make so much money as to essentially buy their way past the stigma.
This doesn't bode well for the US, and in particular for "born-Americans" (a group I'm defining as people born into American culture or steeped in it as an insider from an extremely young age, as opposed to immigrants, isolated cultural groups within the US, or non-Americans) in general. The value for the jobs that born-Americans respect just isn't in America anymore, and the jobs with value in America are not thought worth considering by born-Americans. The answers to this include either a greater focus on location-tied work (which in turn will require more respect for such work) or a correction in the cost of non-location-tied work to bring it closer to its value, but nobody really wants to do either of these things. Where, then, will their jobs come from?
One country criminalizes speech. The other country criminalizes theft. Forgive me if I see enough of a difference as to not only rule out hypocrisy, but make China's argument look ridiculous.
This is an interesting wrapper around MIME, but it is not HTTP in any way. Honestly, it's more like an "embrace-and-extend" in the Microsoft sense. It is backward-incompatible in ways that are inconsistent with its stated philosophy of bandwidth savings (and in ways which break the most basic HTTP semantics), and it throws gratuitous binary into the wrapper while using FUD to justify its presence (notably the specter of "security problems"). This is sad, because it actually does contain some much-needed improvements to HTTP, such as TLS-only, compression-by-default, and header compression. But it's not an extension, because that implies backward-compatibility: it's a replacement, and one with certain other design decisions that are questionable at best.
Some questions in particular:
1) Why break the request-line and status-line? This is the major compatibility-killer, and it adds to the bandwidth consumed by the protocol in ways directly counter to the concept of saving bandwidth. To call requests and responses "virtually unchanged" from HTTP is disingenuous when the most basic syntactic requirements for both of these things is completely different: they are in fact completely different, not virtually unchanged: what you've unchanged is MIME. 2) Why binary for the wrappers? The specter of security issues via incorrect parsing is true as far as it goes, but by no means insurmountable, and the bandwidth savings are minimal at best. In exchange, the spec becomes considerably harder to debug (and thus to implement) and to extend further as needed by future requirements.
IIRC, the West coast is on the other side of the same plate system as the points in Japan that have been having these quakes. I'm not sure if this works for or against it -I'm not a seismologist- but it does seem to be cause for concern.
When Mozilla 5's codebase got too unwieldy, they rebooted it for what we now call SeaMonkey. When what would later be called SeaMonkey's codebase got too unwieldy, they rebooted it for what we now call Firefox. Is it perhaps time for another reboot?
The backend work done for FF4 is good and much appreciated, but the it sounds like the team is resting on its laurels again: it thinks the work on the basics is done. Standards support is still not where it needs to be, yet they're working on fluff like site-specific browsers. It sounds like it's time for someone to go back to the basics again: just a browser in the core, with a good extension model for people to hack all these things into for people who actually want them.
Knuth's books are awesome, not just for the content (which would itself be a bargain at quadruple the price) but also for the sheer intimidation factor.
However, I've got to admit: the volumes I'm most looking forward to -5, 6, and 7- are yet to come. This bothers me, because with the way Volume 4 keeps growing, I'm no longer convinced that he's going to live long enough to finish the series, not because of any slowness on his part but because the work just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Has he made arrangements for others to finish the series in case the worst happens?
There are enough free and/or open-source censorware packages out there that banning companies from selling their own solutions isn't going to do very much. At best, it stands to induce the makers of these open-source packages to close up their licenses. Somewhat worse on the scale would be if these countries started writing their own filters. Worst of all would be if they start buying things like Green Dam from countries where suppression of information is not just accepted but outright valued.
In other words, the current situation sucks, but it sucks less than most of the alternatives, and the only truly better alternative -where censorware is banned worldwide for all purposes- is never going to happen. At least transactions which take place in the open are known quantities.
The old idea that people working in some specific profession produce nothing of value to society.
I take it you've just come back from Mars: currently, "producing nothing of value to society" would be such a massive improvement for the finance sector that even I wouldn't begrudge them a bonus...
...and the scapegoating continues: finding a single group to blame for problems that are, in reality, far more complex. The financial sector doesn't even hold most of the blame, much less all of it: they made some very bad mistakes, and certainly hold some of the blame, but not more than the politicians, the ordinary lenders, the people and businesses who knowingly took on far more than they could handle, the debt-abusers, and many others.
we still produce enough great minds that we can spare some of them -enough, in fact, to accommodate all who want it-
Not if you ask recruiters in many industries.
...and the high unemployment rate, even among the college-educated, is rather powerful evidence that said reviewers are spouting BS. Their problems are not coming from a shortage of minds.
What is it with the "breakthroughs"?
Ask the person who wrote the original article, who harps on the breakthroughs to explain why his big bad scapegoats are doing an eeeeeevil thing by "greedily" recruiting smart people.
The old idea that people working in some specific profession produce nothing of value to society. How many times over the years has it been used to blame innocent people for society's problems, usually in preparation for a movement to purge the scapegoats?
Or, to put it another way, should we be saying this of geeks who go into teaching, especially at the primary level? It is true that they're unlikely to have the time (and, in this case, resources) to invent The Next Big Thing or make The Big Breakthrough. But truth be told, even for those people who go into engineering or research, how many people ever manage that? The answer: not enough that a few more minds working on the problem are likely to make much of a difference. Even in today's increasingly anti-intellectual society, we still produce enough great minds that we can spare some of them -enough, in fact, to accommodate all who want it- to go off and do other things than research and invention. And even if we did not, those minds are not wasted. Society still benefits when those minds go into other fields, just in different ways.
Overseas workers (and rural Midwest workers) are not, as a group, significantly more or less skilled or productive than their urban US counterparts. However, they don't have to be: just by being as good, they provide considerably more value, because the cost of labor is lower. This is where the real problem for urban US workers is: they aren't any better, yet they demand more, and that is why they cannot compete.
Or at least, that's how the corporate world sees it, and are they wrong? You can talk about ideology and economic-slash-political aesthetics, but how do you refute the math? Do this last, and you'll end offshoring. Otherwise, the businesses will continue pointing out that this is what they do to survive: they get the best value for their labor dollars, and that just isn't to be found in the urban US.
The other option for Nintendo would have been to tack on a laptop style battery which wouldn't work for a portable game system.
No, the other option was for Nintendo to accept that the technology for a 3D gaming handheld wasn't ready yet, and either scale back the system to something suitable for a handheld or, better yet, let the DS continue to ride its market dominance and hope that the 3D technology improved to something with reasonable power consumption in the meantime.
You know kids are spoiled when they have a mobile gaming system that is 3D and think that 4.5 hours of battery is short!
They're not spoiled, they're just concerned that this is style-over-substance. Battery life is arguably the most important feature a portable system can have, because if the thing won't turn on when you want to play, nothing else matters: you've got an expensive brick. Popping in a new battery is not an acceptable substitute, because it means paying even more money for something the system should have had built in.
Seriously, they should wait to kick off this IE6-must-die campaign until IE9 is released (which is, admittedly, supposed to be Real Soon Now). That way they could offer a version of IE that's actually more or less on par with the other browsers they mention. IE8 is a major improvement over its predecessors, but it's still a clear step down.
Basically, yeah. She committed a gross breach of professionalism, and the First Amendment neither can nor should save her from the just consequences of her actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Not being distinctive has never stopped Microsoft from doing, well, pretty much anything in the past. Why is it stopping them now, I wonder?
Anyway, there's no question that bad government can run a country into the ground because of poor management and corruption. Why couldn't a good government make a positive economic difference?
Because of the inherent conflict of interest: in an ideal economy, people's dependency on the government is greatly reduced, and therefore, so too is its power. The "positive economic difference" cannot be maintained without that power, and so things collapse.
Basically GPL is a violation of my rights to publ,ish source code and make money off of it.
If you want to make money off of what you publish, you are free to do so. One specific business model is verboten -namely, closing the code- but that is only one business model among many. A number of companies are doing quite fine making money off of open-source code, and they do so in a number of different ways. The only thing stopping you from doing this same thing is that you don't want to. That's your prerogative, of course, but you have no grounds to complain that you are being prevented from making money.
No one has the right to force me to release my developed code for free.
By default, no. The GPL is an agreement, not a law. You yourself give the authors of GPL software the right to force you to open your code when you agreed to use their software: those are the terms of the agreement. If you don't want to agree, that's fine: just don't use GPL'd code, and you're golden.
It is a companies right to protect their IP...
Completely correct. This is why you should not violate the IP rights of the author of GPL'd source code by closing it. If you don't like those terms, fine; don't use GPL'd source code.
...and GPL prevents that.
Completely false. In fact, in order to make it work for you, you're going to have to protect your IP. You will, however, not be allowed to tread on the IP rights of the authors of the code you are selling: not your own, and not anyone else's. If you are uncomfortable with this, all you have to do is not use GPL'd code.
All free softare if truly free should be GPL.
Um... did you miss some words in your sentence here? It doesn't make sense in the context of the rest of your post.
Please stop spreading the "Wii = Gamecube" lie. I know it's not giving you those marginally-sharper pictures that the marketers have somehow convinced you improve your HD games so much, but to say that makes it no different form its predecessor is absurd.
For all the good that tolerance and openness has done, the realization that one group of people is not inherently 'better' than any other does have its not-so-pleasant consequences too, and in particular it tends to not turn out well for those traditionally favored. We're dealing with one such case now. In this case, when one can do things just as well anywhere on the globe as in America, American workers just plain don't provide good value for the labor dollars being spent. In IT and manufacturing, one can get the same productivity (in terms of both amount and quality of product) or even better elsewhere at considerably better rates, and in manufacturing the difference is often so large that it even covers the overhead of shipping the finished product "back" to the target market. Why wouldn't a business jump on that? Like anyone else, they have little choice but to maximize the value they get for their money; whether or not it is good, it is what they do to survive.
There are fields where this equation doesn't hold: namely, what I call "location-tied fields" where the work needs to be done at or very near the place where its end products will finally go. Customer service is something of a counterintuitive example here, but it holds: natively speaking the language of one's target market is too huge of an advantage to ignore, as anyone who has had to deal with outsourced call centers can attest. Skilled manual labor (i.e. the trades) almost universally falls into this category as well: you cannot work unless you can work onsite. But with very few exceptions, location-tied fields don't get a lot of respect in the US, and this isn't just a matter of pay: these jobs are never considered even when politicians cry out for adding more "good jobs" to the economy. The only real exceptions to this are the fields of medicine and law, both of which are location-tied (you can't treat a patient unless you are with the patient, and while it is technically possible to practice law in places other than where one lives the complexities of jurisdiction make it quite difficult) yet make so much money as to essentially buy their way past the stigma.
This doesn't bode well for the US, and in particular for "born-Americans" (a group I'm defining as people born into American culture or steeped in it as an insider from an extremely young age, as opposed to immigrants, isolated cultural groups within the US, or non-Americans) in general. The value for the jobs that born-Americans respect just isn't in America anymore, and the jobs with value in America are not thought worth considering by born-Americans. The answers to this include either a greater focus on location-tied work (which in turn will require more respect for such work) or a correction in the cost of non-location-tied work to bring it closer to its value, but nobody really wants to do either of these things. Where, then, will their jobs come from?
I mean, just look at how well it worked out for Ixion.
Oh, wait...
One country criminalizes speech. The other country criminalizes theft. Forgive me if I see enough of a difference as to not only rule out hypocrisy, but make China's argument look ridiculous.
This is an interesting wrapper around MIME, but it is not HTTP in any way. Honestly, it's more like an "embrace-and-extend" in the Microsoft sense. It is backward-incompatible in ways that are inconsistent with its stated philosophy of bandwidth savings (and in ways which break the most basic HTTP semantics), and it throws gratuitous binary into the wrapper while using FUD to justify its presence (notably the specter of "security problems"). This is sad, because it actually does contain some much-needed improvements to HTTP, such as TLS-only, compression-by-default, and header compression. But it's not an extension, because that implies backward-compatibility: it's a replacement, and one with certain other design decisions that are questionable at best.
Some questions in particular:
1) Why break the request-line and status-line? This is the major compatibility-killer, and it adds to the bandwidth consumed by the protocol in ways directly counter to the concept of saving bandwidth. To call requests and responses "virtually unchanged" from HTTP is disingenuous when the most basic syntactic requirements for both of these things is completely different: they are in fact completely different, not virtually unchanged: what you've unchanged is MIME.
2) Why binary for the wrappers? The specter of security issues via incorrect parsing is true as far as it goes, but by no means insurmountable, and the bandwidth savings are minimal at best. In exchange, the spec becomes considerably harder to debug (and thus to implement) and to extend further as needed by future requirements.
There probably isn't such a thing as a truly good way to go, but there are degrees of suck. I can think of worse ways to go than ALS, but not many.
IIRC, the West coast is on the other side of the same plate system as the points in Japan that have been having these quakes. I'm not sure if this works for or against it -I'm not a seismologist- but it does seem to be cause for concern.
The Shinnosuke arc rocked, but are you sure many people are going to get this?
When Mozilla 5's codebase got too unwieldy, they rebooted it for what we now call SeaMonkey. When what would later be called SeaMonkey's codebase got too unwieldy, they rebooted it for what we now call Firefox. Is it perhaps time for another reboot?
The backend work done for FF4 is good and much appreciated, but the it sounds like the team is resting on its laurels again: it thinks the work on the basics is done. Standards support is still not where it needs to be, yet they're working on fluff like site-specific browsers. It sounds like it's time for someone to go back to the basics again: just a browser in the core, with a good extension model for people to hack all these things into for people who actually want them.
Knuth's books are awesome, not just for the content (which would itself be a bargain at quadruple the price) but also for the sheer intimidation factor.
However, I've got to admit: the volumes I'm most looking forward to -5, 6, and 7- are yet to come. This bothers me, because with the way Volume 4 keeps growing, I'm no longer convinced that he's going to live long enough to finish the series, not because of any slowness on his part but because the work just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Has he made arrangements for others to finish the series in case the worst happens?
There are enough free and/or open-source censorware packages out there that banning companies from selling their own solutions isn't going to do very much. At best, it stands to induce the makers of these open-source packages to close up their licenses. Somewhat worse on the scale would be if these countries started writing their own filters. Worst of all would be if they start buying things like Green Dam from countries where suppression of information is not just accepted but outright valued.
In other words, the current situation sucks, but it sucks less than most of the alternatives, and the only truly better alternative -where censorware is banned worldwide for all purposes- is never going to happen. At least transactions which take place in the open are known quantities.
Does that make it right?
The old idea that people working in some specific profession produce nothing of value to society.
I take it you've just come back from Mars: currently, "producing nothing of value to society" would be such a massive improvement for the finance sector that even I wouldn't begrudge them a bonus...
...and the scapegoating continues: finding a single group to blame for problems that are, in reality, far more complex. The financial sector doesn't even hold most of the blame, much less all of it: they made some very bad mistakes, and certainly hold some of the blame, but not more than the politicians, the ordinary lenders, the people and businesses who knowingly took on far more than they could handle, the debt-abusers, and many others.
we still produce enough great minds that we can spare some of them -enough, in fact, to accommodate all who want it-
Not if you ask recruiters in many industries.
...and the high unemployment rate, even among the college-educated, is rather powerful evidence that said reviewers are spouting BS. Their problems are not coming from a shortage of minds.
What is it with the "breakthroughs"?
Ask the person who wrote the original article, who harps on the breakthroughs to explain why his big bad scapegoats are doing an eeeeeevil thing by "greedily" recruiting smart people.
The old idea that people working in some specific profession produce nothing of value to society. How many times over the years has it been used to blame innocent people for society's problems, usually in preparation for a movement to purge the scapegoats?
Or, to put it another way, should we be saying this of geeks who go into teaching, especially at the primary level? It is true that they're unlikely to have the time (and, in this case, resources) to invent The Next Big Thing or make The Big Breakthrough. But truth be told, even for those people who go into engineering or research, how many people ever manage that? The answer: not enough that a few more minds working on the problem are likely to make much of a difference. Even in today's increasingly anti-intellectual society, we still produce enough great minds that we can spare some of them -enough, in fact, to accommodate all who want it- to go off and do other things than research and invention. And even if we did not, those minds are not wasted. Society still benefits when those minds go into other fields, just in different ways.
Overseas workers (and rural Midwest workers) are not, as a group, significantly more or less skilled or productive than their urban US counterparts. However, they don't have to be: just by being as good, they provide considerably more value, because the cost of labor is lower. This is where the real problem for urban US workers is: they aren't any better, yet they demand more, and that is why they cannot compete.
Or at least, that's how the corporate world sees it, and are they wrong? You can talk about ideology and economic-slash-political aesthetics, but how do you refute the math? Do this last, and you'll end offshoring. Otherwise, the businesses will continue pointing out that this is what they do to survive: they get the best value for their labor dollars, and that just isn't to be found in the urban US.
The other option for Nintendo would have been to tack on a laptop style battery which wouldn't work for a portable game system.
No, the other option was for Nintendo to accept that the technology for a 3D gaming handheld wasn't ready yet, and either scale back the system to something suitable for a handheld or, better yet, let the DS continue to ride its market dominance and hope that the 3D technology improved to something with reasonable power consumption in the meantime.
You know kids are spoiled when they have a mobile gaming system that is 3D and think that 4.5 hours of battery is short!
They're not spoiled, they're just concerned that this is style-over-substance. Battery life is arguably the most important feature a portable system can have, because if the thing won't turn on when you want to play, nothing else matters: you've got an expensive brick. Popping in a new battery is not an acceptable substitute, because it means paying even more money for something the system should have had built in.
Seriously, they should wait to kick off this IE6-must-die campaign until IE9 is released (which is, admittedly, supposed to be Real Soon Now). That way they could offer a version of IE that's actually more or less on par with the other browsers they mention. IE8 is a major improvement over its predecessors, but it's still a clear step down.
Call me when they finish Sumomo.
So you're going to ask a bunch of people too cheap to buy games to fund your legal defense?
But hey, maybe I'll send him a million or two.
Zimbabwean.
Cash on delivery.
Basically, yeah. She committed a gross breach of professionalism, and the First Amendment neither can nor should save her from the just consequences of her actions.