Yeah. I just picked up the Compaq Presario R3240US, basically the same thing.. Athlon 64 3200+, 512M DDR, 60gig HD, DVD+RW.. and a crappy crappy GeForce 440 Go. Sigh.
For the price, I still can't complain, as the screen, processor, and DVD+RW drive are all a bit nicer than you'd expect at that range, and the physical construction is superb, but there'll be no hot 3d gaming for me on it.
Well, if you want to talk about 'early adopter' folks, I remember the very first RealAudio beta.. it ran on Solaris/SunOS, back before there was much of a Windows TCP/IP customer base (back in 1995, yo!).
And no, there wasn't anything in the way of commercial spam or hide the link or whatever.. it was just a binary streaming audio player, and it actually worked.
So I'll forgive Real for their recent transgressions and thank them for supporting Linux.. especially considering their Linux client never did any of the adware/spyware/hide-the-link crap that the Windows client did.
Are you sure the mental process is considered a forbidden use of the patent? That's not at all clear to me.. I imagine that distributing a machine that implements the patent, or profiting from the execution of the patent on a commercial scale (a la the Amazon 1-click patent) would be required in order for there to be an issue.
I grant that you can extend the edge case to what seems like a nonsensical result, but it's not clear that a judge or jury would actually do so.
That said, how does your argument about mental processes versus implemented computational processes differ from me going over the plotline to the Harry Potter novels in my head and me publishing my own Harry Potter ripoff novel? The difference is that in the one case it's all in my head, and in the second case, I'm publishing a work for distribution that either brings me income on J. K. Rowling's property or which may, arguably, decrease her income.
Patent is like copyright, it generally only becomes an issue when distribution is involved.
Lawyers make big bucks because the law is designed to work in fuzzy situations, with room for interpretation and argument. I imagine a lawyer faced with your question would simply say that a patent for an algorithmic process comes into effect when a judge (or jury) says it comes into effect.
No, that is apparently a lie (or a delusion), because you then apparently go on to attempt to argue in favor of them.
Oddly, the words 'software patent' appears nowhere in my post beyond the sentence you quoted. "Objects of economic commerce" is a far weaker and more abstract statement than 'software patents, rah rah rah!', after all.
I do not advocate in any way for the current patent system as it is being applied to software, where so many patents cover processes that would be obvious to any intelligent programmer if you would but describe the general problem area. But I might indeed appreciate patents on software if they were granted, say, at a rate of 0.1% - 1% of the current rate. Microsoft gaining 3 to 30 patents a year worries me much less than their gaining 3000.
I have no real problem with something as novel and as involved as the original MP3 process being patented, for instance. Perhaps I'm simply ignorant of the prior state of the art in psychoacoustic modeling and compression, but so far as I can tell, MP3 brought something truly new into the world that others had not developed despite there having been plenty of time and motivation to do so. I can certainly see the benefit of allowing a patent on that, for a limited period of time.
As I said above, if something is _truly_ novel and unobvious, then it should be possible for it to be an item of commerce.. everything beyond that is you reading into my words.
As to the rest of your argument, I would agree and disagree in part. To the extent that the world is simulatable, either in our heads or in a complex computer system, almost any physical invention can be modeled to some level of fidelity. The distinction between physical object and algorithm can indeed blur in those cases, and a machine part that is made of metal and a machine part that is made of software may not be so very different in the end.
I abhor software patents as much as (if not more than) the next Slashdot devotee, but we don't actually work to pay taxes.
We work to obtain scarce goods. And no matter what technology does, there will _always_ be scarce goods. Real estate. Food cooked in a certain style, available in a certain place (real estate, again). Garbage collection. Military defense.
Technology makes it possible to make an indefinite number of copies of any arbitrary pattern of bits at so close to zero marginal cost as makes no difference, but it doesn't have the same effect on other scarce goods. Without artificial scarcity in bit patterns (or in ideas that get turned into bit patterns), those bit patterns cannot be used in trade for the really scarce goods.
That's economics, but if you think that sounds in any way wishy washy, think of it as physics. It's reality that you can't avoid, no matter how hard you try.
Free software and a limitation on software patents makes sense for many reasons, but those have to do with users taking maximum economic efficiency out of that zero marginal cost, rather than pumping up a giant chokepoint on the economy like Microsoft. Bit patterns and ideas of a truly unusual level of originality, unobviousness (even in the face of a transformative technology like the Internet that makes all kinds of things suddenly obvious) and technical complexity generally should be able to be matters of economic commerce, otherwise those people creating ideas and bit patterns will ultimately fail to be able to afford real estate.
I'm sure I don't have to tell you that when a patent application arrives on an examiner's desk, the basic operating procedure is to assume up front that every last single claim of that application is going to be rejected. In fact, examiners are in the business of rejecting. Allowing a claim is an incredible exception that basically ONLY happens after months of communications with lawyers and excruciating analysis. To an examiner, allowing a claim is admitting defeat; but it can't be helped. Sometimes the factory makes a defect, sometimes you deploy software with a bug, sometimes a train crashes.
Oh? What percentage of patent claims are rejected? How much investigation does USPTO do outside of the bounds of its own patent database in determining whether something is novel and non obvious? Patenting displaying pictures by date sounds like the real innovation is in being ballsy enough to file for monopoly protection on such an obvious technical design..
As I understand the statistics, half of the patents that are contested are ultimately thrown out, at something like an average in $2 million in litigation costs by the contester. If half of the challenged patents don't stand up to scrutiny, is USPTO really doing appropriate due diligence in approving patents?
Rather than ranting, I think we'd all love to hear some inside insights into these kinds of questions.
Actually, the 'Java 2 Standard Edition Version 1.2' crap came out of Sun's contract with Microsoft, which required Microsoft to ship any class libraries that Sun included in a 1.x release.
I couldn't find a copy of Sun's contract with Microsoft, wherein this language could be found, but I did find an old copy of Sun's complaint against Microsoft which touches on some of the terms of the contract.
The Java versioning madness was all about keeping Microsoft on the hook for supporting new releases. That said, Sun has _always_ had squirrely release numbering. SunOS/Solaris is a prime case in point, Microsoft contract or no.
Many U.S. firms are not only devaluing intellectual property via outsourcing, but are also embracing business strategies to devalue (and if necessary, eradicate) their competitor's intellectual property.
Yes, Microsoft has been doing that forever. IE, anyone?
A lot of the passion involved in the Open Source community is a reaction to seeing the keys to everyone's computing kingdom held by a single company that has the power of life or death over just about any other software company it chooses to do battle with. If an entity with disproportionate market power is to be free to destroy the sale value of its competitors software, unchecked by effective antitrust policing, why shouldn't a community effort do the same?
Unless you want to argue that it should be illegal to give anything into community availability, there's very little point in making this kind of argument. There's no IBM or HP who is, out of bleeding sympathy for Microsoft, going to decline to take advantage of the Open Source ecology.
Software is so easy to make (all you need is IQ, time, and a computer) and so ridiculously easy to duplicate and propagate that any software company that depends on selling bits rather than service is likely to have a hard time of it in the long run.
Patents modify this picture, by recreating scarcity. The question will be whether the advantages of patented algorithms will overcome a population's natural desire to avoid getting locked into a monopoly treadmill. Que Sera Sera
I've had a Sony Clié SJ-30 for a year and a half, and I love it! It is an excellent size for my hand and pocket, it has a nice, bright 320x320 color display, a jogwheel for scrolling through pages, and a memory stick slot for plenty of storage.
I use Weasel Reader for reading Gutenberg Etexts, Mobipocket Reader for reading etexts from Baen books, as well as Plucker for web clippings. I also carry along Ultralingua dictionaries so I can look up words when reading French language Gutenberg etexts (ahoy, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea!)
My Sony makes a fantastic e-book reader.. I probably use it for that function as much as for anything else. At 320x320, the screen is easy to read, the high-res fonts are very comfortable, and the backlight is great. It fits easily into my pocket, and I carry it wherever I go. It's USB based, and I sync documents to it from my Red Hat 9 Linux system without problems.
Honestly, any modern Palm OS based device should have USB and a good 320x320 screen, and any of them that you look at should make a good EReader. The Sony's may still be particularly good with their jogwheel, however.
Judging from http://techinfo.toyota.com's
2004 Prius responder guide, Toyota has been quite responsible in routing the cables under the floor pan, where emergency responders are unlikely to need to go. The system is also designed with a relay powered by the 12 volt auxiliary battery that the car's computer has to enable in order for the high voltage lines to be energized. If the car deploys its air bags, that relay is designed to open, disconnecting the high voltage pack from the rest of the car.
In other words, it doesn't sound as though Toyota are being morons about the whole thing.
Yup. I had got my Amiga 1000 in late '85, and it came with EA's Kaleidoscope demo, ABasiC, and that was about it. I had some fun programming in ABasiC before EA finally made with Seven Cities of Gold, Archon, and the like.
No. Metacomco produced the original Amiga basic, known as 'ABasic', which shipped with Amiga OS 1.0/1.1, I believe. Starting at 1.2 (or thereabouts), Commodore replaced ABasic with Microsoft's AmigaBasic.
AmigaBasic was just about a straight port of their Macintosh Basic, and it didn't do nearly as nice a job in supporting the Amiga's sound chip as ABasic did. It was quite slow, as well. The only thing it really did better was windowing under Intuition.
Metacomco's ABasic even included a command line editing feature based on that included by Microsoft in TRS-80 Level II Basic.. now that's some good eating!
The point was that there's no way to tell what the solar output was prior to the invention of these detectors, and tiny changes will result in large climactic shifts over long periods of time.
Surely, but it is possible to tell how much Carbon loading we're adding to the atmosphere, and it is possible to measure the additional warming caused by those emissions.
Your point is that we should not be concerned about the significant climate forcing we are applying to the planet through our carbon burning because who knows what the Sun is up to?
You know that's a wildly simplistic argument and that real scientists do measure and consider such effects in trying to determine the error bars for the planet's climate over the short to medium term, right?
I'm disappointed that ACAP never really seemed to go anywhere. Back when Netscape was overturning the industry with their 'open standards' approach to everything, people were talking about ACAP as 'the missing link' for completely portable client configuration for email systems.
Except that's not what the patent is about. Enlightenment's preview pager is much closer, but even that is not identical to what Microsoft is claiming.
The problem is that it doesn't matter how small the advance is that Microsoft patents.. they have so many resources and so many patents that any real competitor (as opposed a paper-house like Eolas) will cross-license. Free software, however, is just fucked. By design.
I've collaborated with the Intersect Alliance team recently to improve the userland audit daemon support, and I know a fellow at NASA who is also doing work to improve the in-kernel behavior of the system.
Snare looks like pretty good stuff, we'd love to see it integrated with SELinux and made available as a kernel configuration option.
Many thanks for intelligently engaging in the discussion. Rather rare for Slashdot, obviously. Your comments are quite apposite, in fact, and I don't disagree with much of what you say here.
However, your argument as to putting programmers out of work..
Then, you dump it on the market, licensed with the anti-corporate GPL instead of the business-friendly MIT/BSD license. I cannot add value to it by adding my own, self-funded software to it to make a better product without giving away my self-funded software to all my competitors.
No, but you might be able to add value to your business through the use of that software. Your argument about not being able to add competitive advantage when everyone else is able to get the same resource at no cost is true enough, but the integration and development effort you would undertake to put it to use internally in your business can serve as competitive advantage.
I take your point, GPL'ed software clearly makes it hard for software companies in any competitive area. It doesn't necessarily make it hard for the vast majority of other types of business, though, and many of them have been known to hire programmers. I would say that the GPL might make it difficult to be a software entrepreneur in certain areas of the industry. Others, such as the hit-driven games market, not so much, perhaps.
Your programmers, unfortunate though they may be to be in a field in which there is GPL'ed software to contend with, may enjoy the decrease in various product costs due to the increased efficiency that manufacturers and service companies can enjoy through the use of GPL'ed software.
That's not a comforting thought, I understand. The situation does seem very closely analagous to the outsourcing question, but the negative effects seem more closely drawn to software entrepreneurs, and not all programmers as a class.
The question is just how the benefits to programmers (and citizens) at large of low-cost access to GPL'ed software use compare against the costs to software entrepeneurs, and whether those software entrepreneurs would have had much better luck contending against competitive software written by Microsoft in the event that your software obtained any significant notoriety. It sometimes seems that a big part of any software company's business plan is to get bought out by Microsoft or by a business selling complements, as you suggest.
Thank you again for a good discussion, you sound like a good and intelligent businessperson. I wish you well.
Might I remind you that the GPL exists only to eliminate "immoral" closed-source software (and thus the choice to use it), and its mechanism is its viral nature. This is so obvious and overt that I can't believe it's necessary to make this point.
Might I remind you that this is bullshit. Linus didn't choose the GPL to eliminate immoral closed-source software, and we didn't choose the GPL for software we wrote to do so, either. Attempting to tarnish everyone who has ever used the license with the RMS-is-a-fanatic brush is quite the non-sequitor itself.
The Internet Bubble happened, and it had economic ramifications (salary inflation, etc.), yet it was not economically rational. An "irrational exuberance" (thanks, Alan Greenspan) led otherwise intelligent people to abandon common fiscal sense in pursuit of wealth. Here, an irrational belief in the utopianist propaganda of the FSF has programmers throwing themselves into the sea like lemmings -- and what's even worse than the Internet Bubble, cutting off each other's air supply (thanks, Bill? Jim? Joachim?).
You say it's irrational, I say it's not irrational. If we're going to leave it at such bald statements, I don't see this discussions being very productive. I've given some suggestions as to properly selfish motivations for GPL'ing software, and to why the economics of the situation can rationally drive free software.
We don't live in a world in which all software has commercial sale value. We just don't. The transaction costs for selling software are too high, and the ease with which that software can be copied without payment is so profound that it costs significant money to build an infrastructure to enable and enforce payments. That leaves lots of talented programmers available who write software that may be of enough value to download, use, and improve, even if they couldn't make money selling it if they tried.
Selling software against the network effects of a dominant vendor like Microsoft is extremely damn hard. I'd like my software to be used, and I think it's likely to be helpful to extremely technically competent systems administrators, in addition to solving a necessary problem for my own employer. Why shouldn't we allow people to download it, learn from it, use it, think about it as they design new software? My employer has certainly gotten enough use value out of GPL'ed software that we have downloaded and deployed in the past, and they get a custom-engineered solution to their problem in the form of my code in the present. What would it profit us to keep our software locked in-house?
I submit to you that my behavior, and that of my employer, is wholly rational in this context, and is not aimed at putting all programmers out of work. If another programmer, somewhere (anywhere) in the world takes my software and improves it to the degree that someone who might choose a commercial product can instead substitute my software, and if my employer can take the benefit of that improvement and use it to our own benefit, then the GPL has done its job properly for us.
If you're going to argue that the GPL is irrational, you are going to have to argue why each person or team that has contributed to Linux should not have expended that incremental effort to improve a product for themselves as well as the community of other Linux users. Should a user who has an urge to be able to use a specific device on their computer feel obligated to create their own operating system and sell it? Or should they write a 5 line patch and send it to Linus?
If writing that patch is economically rational (and I'd argue that it is), and if HP, IBM, and other companies funding Linus at ODSL to shepherd the developmental process is rational (and I'd argue that it is), then ultimately it seems that everyone is acting in their rational self-interest. If you feel otherwise, I'd like to hear you argue why that person should not have submitted that patch, or why IBM should not fund ODSL, rather than baldly asserting irrationality.
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Yeah. I just picked up the Compaq Presario R3240US, basically the same thing.. Athlon 64 3200+, 512M DDR, 60gig HD, DVD+RW.. and a crappy crappy GeForce 440 Go. Sigh.
For the price, I still can't complain, as the screen, processor, and DVD+RW drive are all a bit nicer than you'd expect at that range, and the physical construction is superb, but there'll be no hot 3d gaming for me on it.
Well, if you want to talk about 'early adopter' folks, I remember the very first RealAudio beta.. it ran on Solaris/SunOS, back before there was much of a Windows TCP/IP customer base (back in 1995, yo!).
And no, there wasn't anything in the way of commercial spam or hide the link or whatever.. it was just a binary streaming audio player, and it actually worked.
So I'll forgive Real for their recent transgressions and thank them for supporting Linux.. especially considering their Linux client never did any of the adware/spyware/hide-the-link crap that the Windows client did.
You use Windows, you take your chances, right?
Are you sure the mental process is considered a forbidden use of the patent? That's not at all clear to me.. I imagine that distributing a machine that implements the patent, or profiting from the execution of the patent on a commercial scale (a la the Amazon 1-click patent) would be required in order for there to be an issue.
I grant that you can extend the edge case to what seems like a nonsensical result, but it's not clear that a judge or jury would actually do so.
True enough. See the European Union's Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions for some discussion of ways to limit software patents in just the sort of direction you're implying.
That said, how does your argument about mental processes versus implemented computational processes differ from me going over the plotline to the Harry Potter novels in my head and me publishing my own Harry Potter ripoff novel? The difference is that in the one case it's all in my head, and in the second case, I'm publishing a work for distribution that either brings me income on J. K. Rowling's property or which may, arguably, decrease her income.
Patent is like copyright, it generally only becomes an issue when distribution is involved.
Lawyers make big bucks because the law is designed to work in fuzzy situations, with room for interpretation and argument. I imagine a lawyer faced with your question would simply say that a patent for an algorithmic process comes into effect when a judge (or jury) says it comes into effect.
Nobody said the law was pretty, of course.
No, that is apparently a lie (or a delusion), because you then apparently go on to attempt to argue in favor of them.
Oddly, the words 'software patent' appears nowhere in my post beyond the sentence you quoted. "Objects of economic commerce" is a far weaker and more abstract statement than 'software patents, rah rah rah!', after all.
I do not advocate in any way for the current patent system as it is being applied to software, where so many patents cover processes that would be obvious to any intelligent programmer if you would but describe the general problem area. But I might indeed appreciate patents on software if they were granted, say, at a rate of 0.1% - 1% of the current rate. Microsoft gaining 3 to 30 patents a year worries me much less than their gaining 3000.
I have no real problem with something as novel and as involved as the original MP3 process being patented, for instance. Perhaps I'm simply ignorant of the prior state of the art in psychoacoustic modeling and compression, but so far as I can tell, MP3 brought something truly new into the world that others had not developed despite there having been plenty of time and motivation to do so. I can certainly see the benefit of allowing a patent on that, for a limited period of time.
As I said above, if something is _truly_ novel and unobvious, then it should be possible for it to be an item of commerce.. everything beyond that is you reading into my words.
As to the rest of your argument, I would agree and disagree in part. To the extent that the world is simulatable, either in our heads or in a complex computer system, almost any physical invention can be modeled to some level of fidelity. The distinction between physical object and algorithm can indeed blur in those cases, and a machine part that is made of metal and a machine part that is made of software may not be so very different in the end.
I abhor software patents as much as (if not more than) the next Slashdot devotee, but we don't actually work to pay taxes.
We work to obtain scarce goods. And no matter what technology does, there will _always_ be scarce goods. Real estate. Food cooked in a certain style, available in a certain place (real estate, again). Garbage collection. Military defense.
Technology makes it possible to make an indefinite number of copies of any arbitrary pattern of bits at so close to zero marginal cost as makes no difference, but it doesn't have the same effect on other scarce goods. Without artificial scarcity in bit patterns (or in ideas that get turned into bit patterns), those bit patterns cannot be used in trade for the really scarce goods.
That's economics, but if you think that sounds in any way wishy washy, think of it as physics. It's reality that you can't avoid, no matter how hard you try.
Free software and a limitation on software patents makes sense for many reasons, but those have to do with users taking maximum economic efficiency out of that zero marginal cost, rather than pumping up a giant chokepoint on the economy like Microsoft. Bit patterns and ideas of a truly unusual level of originality, unobviousness (even in the face of a transformative technology like the Internet that makes all kinds of things suddenly obvious) and technical complexity generally should be able to be matters of economic commerce, otherwise those people creating ideas and bit patterns will ultimately fail to be able to afford real estate.
Very, thank you.
I'm sure I don't have to tell you that when a patent application arrives on an examiner's desk, the basic operating procedure is to assume up front that every last single claim of that application is going to be rejected. In fact, examiners are in the business of rejecting. Allowing a claim is an incredible exception that basically ONLY happens after months of communications with lawyers and excruciating analysis. To an examiner, allowing a claim is admitting defeat; but it can't be helped. Sometimes the factory makes a defect, sometimes you deploy software with a bug, sometimes a train crashes.
Oh? What percentage of patent claims are rejected? How much investigation does USPTO do outside of the bounds of its own patent database in determining whether something is novel and non obvious? Patenting displaying pictures by date sounds like the real innovation is in being ballsy enough to file for monopoly protection on such an obvious technical design..
As I understand the statistics, half of the patents that are contested are ultimately thrown out, at something like an average in $2 million in litigation costs by the contester. If half of the challenged patents don't stand up to scrutiny, is USPTO really doing appropriate due diligence in approving patents?
Rather than ranting, I think we'd all love to hear some inside insights into these kinds of questions.
Actually, the 'Java 2 Standard Edition Version 1.2' crap came out of Sun's contract with Microsoft, which required Microsoft to ship any class libraries that Sun included in a 1.x release.
I couldn't find a copy of Sun's contract with Microsoft, wherein this language could be found, but I did find an old copy of Sun's complaint against Microsoft which touches on some of the terms of the contract.
The Java versioning madness was all about keeping Microsoft on the hook for supporting new releases. That said, Sun has _always_ had squirrely release numbering. SunOS/Solaris is a prime case in point, Microsoft contract or no.
I'm a huge fan of iftop, a Curses-based interactive network load monitor.
Similarly, there's also ApacheTop, which does something similar based on monitoring of the Apache HTTP server's logs.
Well, you did notice that it is a FreeBSD developer recommending this?
Many U.S. firms are not only devaluing intellectual property via outsourcing, but are also embracing business strategies to devalue (and if necessary, eradicate) their competitor's intellectual property.
Yes, Microsoft has been doing that forever. IE, anyone?
A lot of the passion involved in the Open Source community is a reaction to seeing the keys to everyone's computing kingdom held by a single company that has the power of life or death over just about any other software company it chooses to do battle with. If an entity with disproportionate market power is to be free to destroy the sale value of its competitors software, unchecked by effective antitrust policing, why shouldn't a community effort do the same?
Unless you want to argue that it should be illegal to give anything into community availability, there's very little point in making this kind of argument. There's no IBM or HP who is, out of bleeding sympathy for Microsoft, going to decline to take advantage of the Open Source ecology.
Software is so easy to make (all you need is IQ, time, and a computer) and so ridiculously easy to duplicate and propagate that any software company that depends on selling bits rather than service is likely to have a hard time of it in the long run.
Patents modify this picture, by recreating scarcity. The question will be whether the advantages of patented algorithms will overcome a population's natural desire to avoid getting locked into a monopoly treadmill. Que Sera Sera
Oh. They have an installer?
I don't see a lot of that sort of thing on Linux. ;-)
I've had a Sony Clié SJ-30 for a year and a half, and I love it! It is an excellent size for my hand and pocket, it has a nice, bright 320x320 color display, a jogwheel for scrolling through pages, and a memory stick slot for plenty of storage.
I use Weasel Reader for reading Gutenberg Etexts, Mobipocket Reader for reading etexts from Baen books, as well as Plucker for web clippings. I also carry along Ultralingua dictionaries so I can look up words when reading French language Gutenberg etexts (ahoy, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea!)
My Sony makes a fantastic e-book reader.. I probably use it for that function as much as for anything else. At 320x320, the screen is easy to read, the high-res fonts are very comfortable, and the backlight is great. It fits easily into my pocket, and I carry it wherever I go. It's USB based, and I sync documents to it from my Red Hat 9 Linux system without problems.
Honestly, any modern Palm OS based device should have USB and a good 320x320 screen, and any of them that you look at should make a good EReader. The Sony's may still be particularly good with their jogwheel, however.
Judging from http://techinfo.toyota.com's 2004 Prius responder guide, Toyota has been quite responsible in routing the cables under the floor pan, where emergency responders are unlikely to need to go. The system is also designed with a relay powered by the 12 volt auxiliary battery that the car's computer has to enable in order for the high voltage lines to be energized. If the car deploys its air bags, that relay is designed to open, disconnecting the high voltage pack from the rest of the car.
In other words, it doesn't sound as though Toyota are being morons about the whole thing.
Yup. I had got my Amiga 1000 in late '85, and it came with EA's Kaleidoscope demo, ABasiC, and that was about it. I had some fun programming in ABasiC before EA finally made with Seven Cities of Gold, Archon, and the like.
No. Metacomco produced the original Amiga basic, known as 'ABasic', which shipped with Amiga OS 1.0/1.1, I believe. Starting at 1.2 (or thereabouts), Commodore replaced ABasic with Microsoft's AmigaBasic.
AmigaBasic was just about a straight port of their Macintosh Basic, and it didn't do nearly as nice a job in supporting the Amiga's sound chip as ABasic did. It was quite slow, as well. The only thing it really did better was windowing under Intuition.
Metacomco's ABasic even included a command line editing feature based on that included by Microsoft in TRS-80 Level II Basic.. now that's some good eating!
Sheesh. This is a template troll, guys. Check out http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6081.
Honestly, it's so you can't even moderate a troll down successfully anymore.
The point was that there's no way to tell what the solar output was prior to the invention of these detectors, and tiny changes will result in large climactic shifts over long periods of time.
Surely, but it is possible to tell how much Carbon loading we're adding to the atmosphere, and it is possible to measure the additional warming caused by those emissions.
Your point is that we should not be concerned about the significant climate forcing we are applying to the planet through our carbon burning because who knows what the Sun is up to?
You know that's a wildly simplistic argument and that real scientists do measure and consider such effects in trying to determine the error bars for the planet's climate over the short to medium term, right?
Those are the burns where the skin blackens and peels back from the bone.
I'd say she deserved a break that day.
I'm disappointed that ACAP never really seemed to go anywhere. Back when Netscape was overturning the industry with their 'open standards' approach to everything, people were talking about ACAP as 'the missing link' for completely portable client configuration for email systems.
Except that's not what the patent is about. Enlightenment's preview pager is much closer, but even that is not identical to what Microsoft is claiming.
The problem is that it doesn't matter how small the advance is that Microsoft patents.. they have so many resources and so many patents that any real competitor (as opposed a paper-house like Eolas) will cross-license. Free software, however, is just fucked. By design.
I presume you have taken a look at Snare?
I've collaborated with the Intersect Alliance team recently to improve the userland audit daemon support, and I know a fellow at NASA who is also doing work to improve the in-kernel behavior of the system.
Snare looks like pretty good stuff, we'd love to see it integrated with SELinux and made available as a kernel configuration option.
Many thanks for intelligently engaging in the discussion. Rather rare for Slashdot, obviously. Your comments are quite apposite, in fact, and I don't disagree with much of what you say here.
However, your argument as to putting programmers out of work..
Then, you dump it on the market, licensed with the anti-corporate GPL instead of the business-friendly MIT/BSD license. I cannot add value to it by adding my own, self-funded software to it to make a better product without giving away my self-funded software to all my competitors.
No, but you might be able to add value to your business through the use of that software. Your argument about not being able to add competitive advantage when everyone else is able to get the same resource at no cost is true enough, but the integration and development effort you would undertake to put it to use internally in your business can serve as competitive advantage.
I take your point, GPL'ed software clearly makes it hard for software companies in any competitive area. It doesn't necessarily make it hard for the vast majority of other types of business, though, and many of them have been known to hire programmers. I would say that the GPL might make it difficult to be a software entrepreneur in certain areas of the industry. Others, such as the hit-driven games market, not so much, perhaps.
Your programmers, unfortunate though they may be to be in a field in which there is GPL'ed software to contend with, may enjoy the decrease in various product costs due to the increased efficiency that manufacturers and service companies can enjoy through the use of GPL'ed software.
That's not a comforting thought, I understand. The situation does seem very closely analagous to the outsourcing question, but the negative effects seem more closely drawn to software entrepreneurs, and not all programmers as a class.
The question is just how the benefits to programmers (and citizens) at large of low-cost access to GPL'ed software use compare against the costs to software entrepeneurs, and whether those software entrepreneurs would have had much better luck contending against competitive software written by Microsoft in the event that your software obtained any significant notoriety. It sometimes seems that a big part of any software company's business plan is to get bought out by Microsoft or by a business selling complements, as you suggest.
Thank you again for a good discussion, you sound like a good and intelligent businessperson. I wish you well.
Might I remind you that the GPL exists only to eliminate "immoral" closed-source software (and thus the choice to use it), and its mechanism is its viral nature. This is so obvious and overt that I can't believe it's necessary to make this point.
Might I remind you that this is bullshit. Linus didn't choose the GPL to eliminate immoral closed-source software, and we didn't choose the GPL for software we wrote to do so, either. Attempting to tarnish everyone who has ever used the license with the RMS-is-a-fanatic brush is quite the non-sequitor itself.
The Internet Bubble happened, and it had economic ramifications (salary inflation, etc.), yet it was not economically rational. An "irrational exuberance" (thanks, Alan Greenspan) led otherwise intelligent people to abandon common fiscal sense in pursuit of wealth. Here, an irrational belief in the utopianist propaganda of the FSF has programmers throwing themselves into the sea like lemmings -- and what's even worse than the Internet Bubble, cutting off each other's air supply (thanks, Bill? Jim? Joachim?).
You say it's irrational, I say it's not irrational. If we're going to leave it at such bald statements, I don't see this discussions being very productive. I've given some suggestions as to properly selfish motivations for GPL'ing software, and to why the economics of the situation can rationally drive free software.
We don't live in a world in which all software has commercial sale value. We just don't. The transaction costs for selling software are too high, and the ease with which that software can be copied without payment is so profound that it costs significant money to build an infrastructure to enable and enforce payments. That leaves lots of talented programmers available who write software that may be of enough value to download, use, and improve, even if they couldn't make money selling it if they tried.
Selling software against the network effects of a dominant vendor like Microsoft is extremely damn hard. I'd like my software to be used, and I think it's likely to be helpful to extremely technically competent systems administrators, in addition to solving a necessary problem for my own employer. Why shouldn't we allow people to download it, learn from it, use it, think about it as they design new software? My employer has certainly gotten enough use value out of GPL'ed software that we have downloaded and deployed in the past, and they get a custom-engineered solution to their problem in the form of my code in the present. What would it profit us to keep our software locked in-house?
I submit to you that my behavior, and that of my employer, is wholly rational in this context, and is not aimed at putting all programmers out of work. If another programmer, somewhere (anywhere) in the world takes my software and improves it to the degree that someone who might choose a commercial product can instead substitute my software, and if my employer can take the benefit of that improvement and use it to our own benefit, then the GPL has done its job properly for us.
If you're going to argue that the GPL is irrational, you are going to have to argue why each person or team that has contributed to Linux should not have expended that incremental effort to improve a product for themselves as well as the community of other Linux users. Should a user who has an urge to be able to use a specific device on their computer feel obligated to create their own operating system and sell it? Or should they write a 5 line patch and send it to Linus?
If writing that patch is economically rational (and I'd argue that it is), and if HP, IBM, and other companies funding Linus at ODSL to shepherd the developmental process is rational (and I'd argue that it is), then ultimately it seems that everyone is acting in their rational self-interest. If you feel otherwise, I'd like to hear you argue why that person should not have submitted that patch, or why IBM should not fund ODSL, rather than baldly asserting irrationality.