Well, there is also the problem that is the central point of the linked article -- namely, you can't guarantee that you've rounded your float correctly. If you require correct rounding in all circumstances, you cannot use a float, no matter how clever you try to be about it. That is, unless you manage to out-clever everyone else who's ever tried to solve this problem. (not to say it's impossible, but for most programmers, it's probably better to find a library that's designed for accurate rounding)
Ok.. Having spent a significant effort over the years learning to play the classical guitar, though, I beg to differ. The score only gives you part of the performance, the rest is due to the artistry of the performer. I am pretty good at hitting the notes, but just doing that leads to a really boring, flat performance. The good performers use much deeper interpretive skills than I am capable of, and that's what it takes to really make music.
However, as the sibling poster pointed out, reasonable people can disagree on what it means to be art. I guess we do. Hey, it's a free country and you're free to be wrong, nyah nyah! (just kidding):-)
Yep, I think we agree. Whether or not someone is an artist or whether something is art depends almost entirely on the opinion of the viewer. There is a measure of artfulness in nearly any skill that requires judgement. Whether performing a symphony, writing a concerto, or making a sandwich, there is some degree of artistry.
So would you argue that the many many artists who are singers and performers only, not song writers, are not really artists? That rules out the VAST majority of musicians. Not only the cookie-cutter pop artists, either. How many symphony violinists spend their time performing their own music? There's been a very traditional divide between composer and performer. For music in general, I think your viewpoint is extremely rare.
However, I think you're specifically talking about modern popular music. For this, there's a better history of singer/songwriter since it's all based on blues, jazz, and folk, which focused on personal music instead of composed music. I think you'll find more sympathy for your view in this realm. Still, there's a lot more to playing someone else's song than just hitting the notes. Interpretation is often more important than technical ability, and can completely rewrite a song, even with the same basic melodies and lyrics. Compare, for example, the many versions of Bob Dylan's "Knockin on Heaven's Door." It's hard to view the GnR cover, e.g., as a mere mimicking of the song he wrote.
So, in my opinion, creation is not limited to writing the music. "Merely" playing it offers plenty of opportunity to display creativity.
I wouldn't say it's so obviously false. I haven't looked at the software on a Tivo, but I bet the actual changes to GPL software are not that significant. More likely, they have their own proprietary apps that run on top that do all the stuff you'd really want to duplicate.
I understand what you're saying about the value, but I don't feel it is a level of control that is justified. There's nothing anywhere in the GPL that requires the new authors make it easy to use their changes. Just having the code available is enough to disclose what they are doing, and in my mind, that's enough. There's no need that they even distribute the hardware freely (as in widely) in the first place.
Anyway, as you say, the existing version of the license will continue to exist and to be used widely. Good. I can see the value in the v3 additions to some, but it's not something I would opt for. What's unfortunate for those who feel the way I do is that it means it's likely there will not be further developments on DRM-less versions of the license. Oh well.
You ignored his very apt observation that you are still free to find another source for the hardware that will run the Tivo software and run it on that. There's nothing particularly unique about the Tivo hardware -- you can build it yourself for a few hundred bucks and be free to run anything you want on it. Complete with Tivo's additions since they give you the source.
I've got to say, I agree with the other guy. You have access to everything that Tivo has done to the source code. The fact that it won't run on their hardware is unfortunate, but they haven't taken anything away from you. You are still free to take the source and port it back to any other hardware you like. Yeah that sucks, but it's a hardware problem, not a software problem.
While this is a more secure approach, I see two problems. First, although the inconvenience is objectively a small price to pay for the additional security, few people see security issues objectively. The thinking is "well it hasn't been hacked yet so it must be secure." As a result, a change that adds inconvenience with no benefit other than increased security will not be welcomed. I don't think this is insurmountable, though.
The other problem is that a scheme like this requires that someone determine what privileges a particular application needs. You cannot trust the application to do this, obviously. I don't see a good way for the OS to know what privileges are needed. Really, I think this requires a technically sophisticated administrator for the machine. That may work well for businesses or high-security environments, but it's not going to fly at home, where most machines are administered by someone who knows enough to insert a CD and run install but not much else -- and that's the optimistic characterization.
Yeah... well, to be completely honest, I hadn't quite made it to six figs, but I would have had I stayed out my last year (left half way through the year). I was lucky and walked into high-paying jobs after my master's, but like so many people fortunate enough to come into relatively easy money, I was a lot less frugal than I wish I'd been. My standard of living has not declined nearly as much as my income, which is a good indicator that I wasn't very wise. I was at least smart enough to come out with a positive net worth, though, so I guess I managed better than some. However, it kills me when I think that I could have put away a lot more of that income than I did...
Oh well, all things considered, I'm pretty lucky to get to learn this lesson this way. Hopefully it'll serve me well should I ever get my income back up to that level.:-) Good luck with your program as well!
I also took time off after school. I got an SB in physics and a master's in electrical engineering, then spent about 4 years working. After that experience, decided I really wanted to go on in physics and am now a couple years in to my PhD.
It's not an easy thing to do, though. It's not easy to switch from 6 figures to a grad student stipent. It's very different being good at working to being good at grad school and it can be frustrating to feel like you've got more experience but are still junior. Plus, it's tricky to live a life and still be looking at 3 or 4 years of school when you'll be 30 next year. If you want a family and kids... well, you better think about whether you're willing to have them while you're still in school.
Anyway, it's not for everybody. The allure of an income is pretty strong. However, if your desire to go get a PhD is not strong enough to overcome that, it's not a real tragedy not to get one. It's not something everyone needs to do, and if you're doing well without one, no big loss.
Open source software is mostly designed based on what's technically reasonably easy, not marketing. This makes for simpler and more nimble codebases.
This, of course, can be as much a curse as it can be a blessing. Some very important features are hard to code and not at all rewarding to the programmer. For example, an easy-to-use beginner GUI...
Right on! Green beans aren't green beans without a healthy dose of bacon mixed in! And who here would even consider eating some heavily boiled (forget steaming, that's for filthy hippies) broccoli without an equal part of cheez sauce? No one who's a full-blooded American patriot, that's for sure!
Give me liberty, or give me death! (The cholesterol makes sure of that!)
Why do you feel the need to start your otherwise intelligent response with a sigh? Do you really have to try to belittle those to whom you respond? This isn't the first time this discussion has come up, and we all know we're not posting ideas that have never been presented before. If you're tired of the conversation then go away, don't be a dick.
Technical sophistication can work in the publics favour, as much as it can the government.
I'm not arguing against technological development, I'm suggesting that we need to be careful about how it's used because it can be used against us. I've worked on a number RFID systems, which are a good example of a technology that has potentially threatening uses, so I'm clearly not trying to thwart the advances that might present risks.
Were [sic] were you all when the Sony Bono act was being passed? Certainly a lot weren't protecting their fair use rights in the first place.
Well, I personally was a sophomore in college. Old enough to be involved, but I was not yet very politically aware. Does that disqualify me from future debates on the issue? I wasn't even born for the 1976 Copyright Act's passage, so I guess I was doomed from the start.
the danger isn't from the occasional "subpoena" but the constant feedback loop that everyone's subjected to
I'm not sure what you mean by the "feedback loop." Can you clarify?
I'm not a huge fan of sippery slope arguments (although I do think the sentiment is often in the right place), but do you think we need to wait until things are as bad as they are in 1984 before reacting? The real government may not be as authoritarian as the one in the book, but a major element that allowed that in the book to enforce its rules was the existence of the surveillance technologies. We are clearly at or very near a point that matches the technical sophistication in the book.
We need to be careful to keep this technology from being used for ill. When something that's "kind of bad" is proposed, we need to react STRONGLY. Rights have a way of being chipped away and it's usually through violent conflict that these rights are regained. Better to protect them in the first place.
Further, it doesn't really matter who it is that's doing the surveillance. If Walmart has the information, it's only a subpoena from being in Uncle Sam's hands...
Bank of America has absolutely ridiculous minimum balances. Go to almost any other bank and you can open a CD of any term with more like $1000 to $3000 minimum.
The hard part in this is finding the right primitives to combine when your programs "mate." Generally, evolutionary algorithms work well when you've almost solved the problem and need to optimize a reasonable number of parametric details. If you need more than this, the search space is so large that you'll never get reasonable convergence.
It's possible that it did tell me that it was permanent, I don't recall exactly (this was 2-3 years ago). In the context I expected that deleting a playlist deleted just the playlist. I couldn't believe that it would actually delete the files that make up that playlist. Maybe I'll look at it again some time, but I don't normally do very sophisticated things with my music.
Actually, the thing I really want is an Amarok-like interface that works well on a laptop with a small disk. I don't have space to copy all my files over, so I connect to a Samba share that has my music collection when I'm at home. I haven't tried hard with Linux, I've mostly been using Windows lately, but everything seems to want to have a permanent connection to the library so it can index it and assume all the files are there. iTunes is particularly bad, as it wants to index it, and then if those files are unavailable, it gives you no warning until you select a file to be played. Then, the only way I could find to remove all the dead links was to purge the entire database, which sucks. Others (Songbird at least) were a little better, but still didn't just work the way I wanted. Actually, I should look back at Amarok because I haven't tried it in a while...
But if it doesn't work, xmms does what I need, even if it's kind of klunky. Anyway, thanks for the reply.
I loved amaroK right up until it ate a bunch of my flac files.
Well, technically I deleted them, I guess. What happened is that amaroK started showing doubles of all my playlists (I create one for each album when I rip it). The second copy was an obviously corrupt version, usually with only odd or even numbered tracks. When I came across these annoyances, I deleted the corrupt playlist. After doing this for a while, I found that deleting the playlist actually deleted the media files as well, without nearly enough of a warning about this! Argh!
So, sure, I bear some of the responsibility as I should probably have checked sooner. However, I still have a bad taste in my mouth and this experience has strengthened my paranoia against trusting complex apps that offer to manage files for me. I'm back to xmms...
I love kde tho. Now if only I could figure out how to get my volume keys on my laptop to connect to events (they don't throw the usual keyboard events -- as far as I can tell, they don't throw events at all..)
What you say is true, but whether n^2 or n is a better approximation to n.log(n) starts to depend on how big you assume n to be. If all you need is enough superlinearity to get the phase transition in network usefulness, then the distinction may be moot. "Absolutely" was the wrong word there, I really meant he was definitely correct. Absolutely, he was off in his math and therefore he was "absolutely" incorrect, but correct enough to take to the bank...
Not if we're talking about asymptotic limits, as we are here. We're looking at the large n limit, when n is far from 0. Constant factors, scaling, etc, are thrown out. That's why we call Metcalfe's Law n^2 instead of n*(n-1)/2 (which, incidentally, also gives 0 at n=1, but that part is ignored).
According to the article (and common sense, because Metcalfe is not a short-sighted fool), Metcalfe acknowledges that his original reason for stating his "law" was simply to illustrate that even though small networks might not be interesting, once a certain size was reached, they would become compelling. For this, the distinction between n^2 and n.log(n) is pretty irrelevant -- the significant feature is that both are superlinear (as the article notes). Metcalfe was absolutely correct.
This is not to say he was unique in recognizing this, or that it'd be surprising for someone invested in selling networks to claim they'll become important. The point is he was not attempting to carefully quantify the scaling effects of networking. Rather, he had an instinct that said networks will be big when they get big. The quickest back-of-the-envelope estimate of the scaling law says n.(n-1)~n^2, so he used that for his talk.
When networks started to catch on, someone (the name is in the article but I'm too lazy to go back and look it up) grabbed ahold of this tidbit and named it Metcalfe's Law. Doing anything quantitative with this is ridiculous. It's obvious to everyone involved, Metcalfe included, that his "law" was just the simplest superlinear curve, not some carefully constructed value function. Even the new estimate -- n.log(n) -- is on pretty crude footing. I'm sure you can find a good analysis that gives this result, but there is so much ambiguity in what the value function should actually measure that it's hard to know you're doing the right thing.
Basically, Metcalfe was right. Networks grow in value faster than they grow in node size. His "Law" may be wrong, but it was just a heuristic to begin with. Anyone basing a business model on the details of that law deserved to have their bubble burst.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there is also the problem that is the central point of the linked article -- namely, you can't guarantee that you've rounded your float correctly. If you require correct rounding in all circumstances, you cannot use a float, no matter how clever you try to be about it. That is, unless you manage to out-clever everyone else who's ever tried to solve this problem. (not to say it's impossible, but for most programmers, it's probably better to find a library that's designed for accurate rounding)
Ok.. Having spent a significant effort over the years learning to play the classical guitar, though, I beg to differ. The score only gives you part of the performance, the rest is due to the artistry of the performer. I am pretty good at hitting the notes, but just doing that leads to a really boring, flat performance. The good performers use much deeper interpretive skills than I am capable of, and that's what it takes to really make music.
:-)
However, as the sibling poster pointed out, reasonable people can disagree on what it means to be art. I guess we do. Hey, it's a free country and you're free to be wrong, nyah nyah! (just kidding)
Yep, I think we agree. Whether or not someone is an artist or whether something is art depends almost entirely on the opinion of the viewer. There is a measure of artfulness in nearly any skill that requires judgement. Whether performing a symphony, writing a concerto, or making a sandwich, there is some degree of artistry.
So would you argue that the many many artists who are singers and performers only, not song writers, are not really artists? That rules out the VAST majority of musicians. Not only the cookie-cutter pop artists, either. How many symphony violinists spend their time performing their own music? There's been a very traditional divide between composer and performer. For music in general, I think your viewpoint is extremely rare.
However, I think you're specifically talking about modern popular music. For this, there's a better history of singer/songwriter since it's all based on blues, jazz, and folk, which focused on personal music instead of composed music. I think you'll find more sympathy for your view in this realm. Still, there's a lot more to playing someone else's song than just hitting the notes. Interpretation is often more important than technical ability, and can completely rewrite a song, even with the same basic melodies and lyrics. Compare, for example, the many versions of Bob Dylan's "Knockin on Heaven's Door." It's hard to view the GnR cover, e.g., as a mere mimicking of the song he wrote.
So, in my opinion, creation is not limited to writing the music. "Merely" playing it offers plenty of opportunity to display creativity.
That's true, though the GPL has the advantage of having been written and pored over by lawyers and being guaranteed GPL-compatible.
I wouldn't say it's so obviously false. I haven't looked at the software on a Tivo, but I bet the actual changes to GPL software are not that significant. More likely, they have their own proprietary apps that run on top that do all the stuff you'd really want to duplicate.
I understand what you're saying about the value, but I don't feel it is a level of control that is justified. There's nothing anywhere in the GPL that requires the new authors make it easy to use their changes. Just having the code available is enough to disclose what they are doing, and in my mind, that's enough. There's no need that they even distribute the hardware freely (as in widely) in the first place.
Anyway, as you say, the existing version of the license will continue to exist and to be used widely. Good. I can see the value in the v3 additions to some, but it's not something I would opt for. What's unfortunate for those who feel the way I do is that it means it's likely there will not be further developments on DRM-less versions of the license. Oh well.
You ignored his very apt observation that you are still free to find another source for the hardware that will run the Tivo software and run it on that. There's nothing particularly unique about the Tivo hardware -- you can build it yourself for a few hundred bucks and be free to run anything you want on it. Complete with Tivo's additions since they give you the source.
I've got to say, I agree with the other guy. You have access to everything that Tivo has done to the source code. The fact that it won't run on their hardware is unfortunate, but they haven't taken anything away from you. You are still free to take the source and port it back to any other hardware you like. Yeah that sucks, but it's a hardware problem, not a software problem.
While this is a more secure approach, I see two problems. First, although the inconvenience is objectively a small price to pay for the additional security, few people see security issues objectively. The thinking is "well it hasn't been hacked yet so it must be secure." As a result, a change that adds inconvenience with no benefit other than increased security will not be welcomed. I don't think this is insurmountable, though.
The other problem is that a scheme like this requires that someone determine what privileges a particular application needs. You cannot trust the application to do this, obviously. I don't see a good way for the OS to know what privileges are needed. Really, I think this requires a technically sophisticated administrator for the machine. That may work well for businesses or high-security environments, but it's not going to fly at home, where most machines are administered by someone who knows enough to insert a CD and run install but not much else -- and that's the optimistic characterization.
.. and sell their products in nondescript brown paper bags? I think they've got that part under control.
Yeah... well, to be completely honest, I hadn't quite made it to six figs, but I would have had I stayed out my last year (left half way through the year). I was lucky and walked into high-paying jobs after my master's, but like so many people fortunate enough to come into relatively easy money, I was a lot less frugal than I wish I'd been. My standard of living has not declined nearly as much as my income, which is a good indicator that I wasn't very wise. I was at least smart enough to come out with a positive net worth, though, so I guess I managed better than some. However, it kills me when I think that I could have put away a lot more of that income than I did...
:-) Good luck with your program as well!
Oh well, all things considered, I'm pretty lucky to get to learn this lesson this way. Hopefully it'll serve me well should I ever get my income back up to that level.
I also took time off after school. I got an SB in physics and a master's in electrical engineering, then spent about 4 years working. After that experience, decided I really wanted to go on in physics and am now a couple years in to my PhD.
It's not an easy thing to do, though. It's not easy to switch from 6 figures to a grad student stipent. It's very different being good at working to being good at grad school and it can be frustrating to feel like you've got more experience but are still junior. Plus, it's tricky to live a life and still be looking at 3 or 4 years of school when you'll be 30 next year. If you want a family and kids... well, you better think about whether you're willing to have them while you're still in school.
Anyway, it's not for everybody. The allure of an income is pretty strong. However, if your desire to go get a PhD is not strong enough to overcome that, it's not a real tragedy not to get one. It's not something everyone needs to do, and if you're doing well without one, no big loss.
Right on! Green beans aren't green beans without a healthy dose of bacon mixed in! And who here would even consider eating some heavily boiled (forget steaming, that's for filthy hippies) broccoli without an equal part of cheez sauce? No one who's a full-blooded American patriot, that's for sure!
Give me liberty, or give me death! (The cholesterol makes sure of that!)
have to try to belittle those to whom you respond? This isn't the first time this discussion has come up, and we all know we're not posting ideas that have never been presented before. If you're tired of the conversation then go away, don't be a dick.
I'm not arguing against technological development, I'm suggesting that we need to be careful about how it's used because it can be used against us. I've worked on a number RFID systems, which are a good example of a technology that has potentially threatening uses, so I'm clearly not trying to thwart the advances that might present risks.
Well, I personally was a sophomore in college. Old enough to be involved, but I was not yet very politically aware. Does that disqualify me from future debates on the issue? I wasn't even born for the 1976 Copyright Act's passage, so I guess I was doomed from the start.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "feedback loop." Can you clarify?
I'm not a huge fan of sippery slope arguments (although I do think the sentiment is often in the right place), but do you think we need to wait until things are as bad as they are in 1984 before reacting? The real government may not be as authoritarian as the one in the book, but a major element that allowed that in the book to enforce its rules was the existence of the surveillance technologies. We are clearly at or very near a point that matches the technical sophistication in the book.
We need to be careful to keep this technology from being used for ill. When something that's "kind of bad" is proposed, we need to react STRONGLY. Rights have a way of being chipped away and it's usually through violent conflict that these rights are regained. Better to protect them in the first place.
Further, it doesn't really matter who it is that's doing the surveillance. If Walmart has the information, it's only a subpoena from being in Uncle Sam's hands...
Bank of America has absolutely ridiculous minimum balances. Go to almost any other bank and you can open a CD of any term with more like $1000 to $3000 minimum.
The hard part in this is finding the right primitives to combine when your programs "mate." Generally, evolutionary algorithms work well when you've almost solved the problem and need to optimize a reasonable number of parametric details. If you need more than this, the search space is so large that you'll never get reasonable convergence.
Thanks, I will check 'em out.
It's possible that it did tell me that it was permanent, I don't recall exactly (this was 2-3 years ago). In the context I expected that deleting a playlist deleted just the playlist. I couldn't believe that it would actually delete the files that make up that playlist. Maybe I'll look at it again some time, but I don't normally do very sophisticated things with my music.
Actually, the thing I really want is an Amarok-like interface that works well on a laptop with a small disk. I don't have space to copy all my files over, so I connect to a Samba share that has my music collection when I'm at home. I haven't tried hard with Linux, I've mostly been using Windows lately, but everything seems to want to have a permanent connection to the library so it can index it and assume all the files are there. iTunes is particularly bad, as it wants to index it, and then if those files are unavailable, it gives you no warning until you select a file to be played. Then, the only way I could find to remove all the dead links was to purge the entire database, which sucks. Others (Songbird at least) were a little better, but still didn't just work the way I wanted. Actually, I should look back at Amarok because I haven't tried it in a while...
But if it doesn't work, xmms does what I need, even if it's kind of klunky. Anyway, thanks for the reply.
I loved amaroK right up until it ate a bunch of my flac files.
Well, technically I deleted them, I guess. What happened is that amaroK started showing doubles of all my playlists (I create one for each album when I rip it). The second copy was an obviously corrupt version, usually with only odd or even numbered tracks. When I came across these annoyances, I deleted the corrupt playlist. After doing this for a while, I found that deleting the playlist actually deleted the media files as well, without nearly enough of a warning about this! Argh!
So, sure, I bear some of the responsibility as I should probably have checked sooner. However, I still have a bad taste in my mouth and this experience has strengthened my paranoia against trusting complex apps that offer to manage files for me. I'm back to xmms...
I love kde tho. Now if only I could figure out how to get my volume keys on my laptop to connect to events (they don't throw the usual keyboard events -- as far as I can tell, they don't throw events at all..)
Lighten up, Francis.
What you say is true, but whether n^2 or n is a better approximation to n.log(n) starts to depend on how big you assume n to be. If all you need is enough superlinearity to get the phase transition in network usefulness, then the distinction may be moot. "Absolutely" was the wrong word there, I really meant he was definitely correct. Absolutely, he was off in his math and therefore he was "absolutely" incorrect, but correct enough to take to the bank...
Not if we're talking about asymptotic limits, as we are here. We're looking at the large n limit, when n is far from 0. Constant factors, scaling, etc, are thrown out. That's why we call Metcalfe's Law n^2 instead of n*(n-1)/2 (which, incidentally, also gives 0 at n=1, but that part is ignored).
According to the article (and common sense, because Metcalfe is not a short-sighted fool), Metcalfe acknowledges that his original reason for stating his "law" was simply to illustrate that even though small networks might not be interesting, once a certain size was reached, they would become compelling. For this, the distinction between n^2 and n.log(n) is pretty irrelevant -- the significant feature is that both are superlinear (as the article notes). Metcalfe was absolutely correct.
This is not to say he was unique in recognizing this, or that it'd be surprising for someone invested in selling networks to claim they'll become important. The point is he was not attempting to carefully quantify the scaling effects of networking. Rather, he had an instinct that said networks will be big when they get big. The quickest back-of-the-envelope estimate of the scaling law says n.(n-1)~n^2, so he used that for his talk.
When networks started to catch on, someone (the name is in the article but I'm too lazy to go back and look it up) grabbed ahold of this tidbit and named it Metcalfe's Law. Doing anything quantitative with this is ridiculous. It's obvious to everyone involved, Metcalfe included, that his "law" was just the simplest superlinear curve, not some carefully constructed value function. Even the new estimate -- n.log(n) -- is on pretty crude footing. I'm sure you can find a good analysis that gives this result, but there is so much ambiguity in what the value function should actually measure that it's hard to know you're doing the right thing.
Basically, Metcalfe was right. Networks grow in value faster than they grow in node size. His "Law" may be wrong, but it was just a heuristic to begin with. Anyone basing a business model on the details of that law deserved to have their bubble burst.