In this day of C++/Java/XML/insert-other-orthodoxy-here, it's good
to have someone like Chuck Moore around
I fail to see how replacing today's orthodoxy with Forth orthodoxy is
any great step forward. Differently languages have different expressive
purposes. Would you rather code a web-log report tool in Perl or Forth?
Moore side steps the problem by saying that text-processing problems don't
appeal to him. That doesn't invalidate the existance of such problems.
I think Forth has it's place. I've used it and found it effective for
certain problems. But to say I remember my shock at learning that Fortran compiled into Assembler,
that then had to be assembled. A language that can be translated into another
is clearly unnecessary borders on stupidity. An assembler simply translates into binary, why
not skip both steps and bring back the panel switches a la the MITS Altair?
Basically, Moore has simply found an assembly language for a virtual machine
that works for him. He called it Forth, and is now spending his time building
hardware that matches that virtual machine.
You are correct, I was responding to the critique. But as I read the OAL, it still appears flawed.
For example, IANAL, but the scope of public performance appears to be completely undefined. If I release the song FOO on a MP3, does public performance mean playback of that particular MP3 only? Does it mean some band can perform the song live as long as the quality of their sound system doesn't exceed that of the original encoding?
I think this is a good issue, and I commend them for starting a public discussion, but I think it's far to complex to be dealt with satisfactorily in the few paragraphs they have written.
Well, if Glass is correct in his summary, then I would have to say that
the very first bullet point:
You cannot allow free copying of a recording but keep the rights to
the song that was performed in the recording.
represents a fatal flaw. This would imply that you could not release
a "teaser" MP3 , say one ripped in a lower audio quality, and
still retain your other copyrights to the song. That seems shortsighted
and unfair.
Well, it is, assuming you're trying to make the kind of generalization
that the
original paper was trying to make. The original author took a randomly
selected bunch of programmers who claimed to know either Java, C, or C++
and assigned them the task. In comparison, Mr.
Gat's paper was based on a call to a bunch of dedicated LISPers. whose
expertise one could reasonably expect to be much higher than someone who
might have taken a LISP programming class N years ago.
You really can't compare the two papers. Either you get "experts"
on both sides, or you get randomly chosen programmers on both sides, but
not a mix.
the Turing Machine, is really a thought experiment that has very little to do with sitting down at a computer and hacking away at it.
Well aren't you Mr. Informed? The Turing Machine is far more than a thought experiment, it is a mechanism for evaluating what is and is not computable.
He also (for what it's worth) had true hacker credentials. IIRC, he disdained the assembler for the ACE, which he helped design, preferring to do the base 36 data manipulation directly in his head.
Re:HP repeats the Apollo debacle
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 1
Excellent analysis.
The only people that benefit from this are the execs at Compaq. What a coup. They managed to see the company before anyone realized that the attempt to merge a PC-clone maker, a dying mini-computer manufacturer, and an niche player with obsolete software wasn't exactly a roaring success.
HP's vaunted "corporate culture" will be lost in the backwash and the US economy will be stuck with another mega-corp that exists out of sheer inertia.
and this is reinforced strongly if you actually look at the winners. Note that the film winner is Crouching Tiger.... There's no way that could be construed as science fiction.
If he's really concerned, he could spend that money on lobbying efforts
and on educating the public.
No, he's much smarter than that. By withholding (note that he
hasn't canceled or revoked the grant) the money, he's created an incredible
amount of press and discussion, probably far more than he could spend on
fattening up congresscritters and their lobbyists.
Plus, he can renew the debate at any time by giving the grant money to
a university in Europe instead of to Stanford, which would really pack a
politcal punch. I think he's a pretty smart guy, he gets the lobbying and
press relations for free and can still spend the money on the research he
originally intended to support.
The article mentions "potentially lower costs" but doesn't
give any target prices or rationale for why the costs would be lower.
The next gen 802.11 (the.a spec) will run at over 50Mb/sec, at prices
not that much higher than the original 802.11b services. Who's going to
pay for a mere 2x improvement in an untested technology unless the costs
are very significantly lower?
I think people over-estimate the speed at which things are done. "Internet time" is dying with the dot-coms. Building a complex product requires a fair amount of lead time. The external APIs will be in place long before the product is bug-free enough to ship. (Well, maybe not the way Microsoft does things.)
I see your point, but by doing this your are handing them a 99% monopoly over office tools.
I mean why would any "normal" user download StarOffice when they already got MS-Office?
Well, as of 1997 data, MS already had a 95% monopoly in office tools. And no one is making money on StarOffice so it's not hurting any competitor.
Since any appropriate punishment should a) hurt, b) be relevant to the issue at hand, and c) take future actions into account, I propose the following.
1) Microsoft should be forced to bundle Word and Excel with every desktop copy of Windows.
The rationale here is that MS claims they simply want to improve the OS by bundling. Well, every desktop user needs these features, but MS has never bundled these applications -- why should they, since they have a de facto monopoly on word processing and spreadsheets, they just continue to rake in the dough. This punishment makes them practice what they preach and punishes them by depriving them of the revenue from Word and Excel.
2) Microsoft may continue to bundle applications or "new features" but they must publicly announce what applications are to be bundled and give reasonable feature descriptions of those applications at least two years before they appear in any release.
This addresses future behavior. Competitors will have a heads up, and will be able to decided whether they want to continue to compete or choose to modify their products to highlight differences between their offering and that of Microsoft.
Note: I'm not saying this happened in this particular instance, I'm
only describing a hypothetical case.
Imagine a virus or worm whose job it is not to participate in DDOS attacks,
but to post to Usenet. The virus infects a machine, and waits to be contacted
by someone who wants to distribute copyrighted material, but doesn't want
to get caught. At some pre-arranged signal, the virus recieves or acquires
the material, then posts it ot Usenet.
From all available evidence, the material would be coming from the targeted
user's account, and this user would potentially get nailed, like the guy
in the story, but he would have a heck of a time explaining why all the
records from his ISP showed that he was indeed responsible.
This kind of action, without due process, really needs to be eliminated.
A lot of people will regard this as generic Microsoft bashing, but I
think there's a least a grain of reasonableness in this suggestion. If you
look at the product recalls that happen all the time in the non-virutal
world (e.g., cars, baby strollers), you see that the producers of those
products do bear some responsibility for their work.
So far, the software industry has managed to avoid much of that responsibility,
but we are rapidly creating a world where people (and even lives) depend
on it. As such, software manufactures should be held accountable when poor
design or shoddy workmanship are rampant.
As other posters have pointed out, dynamic documents can be extremely useful.
What I don't understand is, why continue using technologies with known flaws when reasonable solutions already exist? There has been a lot of work put into the security features of Java. If you don't like the language, why not at least leverage the research put into to creating a safe "sandbox" for execution.
it's been more cost effective in most cases to buy your own cpu than to lease it from a grid
It seems like there are cases when this is not always true. The one that comes to mind immediately is the researcher who needs to tackle a very large problem but only needs those resources for a short time. The grid would be ideal for that.
It also seems that another reason that earlier distrubuted computing ideas didn't pan out was due to communications bottlenecks, e.g., the cost of farming out my compiles to 100 machines rather than running the compiler 100 times on one machine has a lot to do with the time spent sending the bits back and forth. If everyone on the grid (in a few years time) has a fiber connection and a guaranteed set of resources, then this problem is minimized.
Is it ok to break laws you don't personally care for?
Well, for certain definitions of the word OK. It is one of the more effective ways of getting a bad law examined.
For example, if there is a law against stealing chickens, and I steal a chicken and am subsequently arrested for it, the underlying law will be at issue in the case. It is unlikely that society will be unduly perturbed, however and the law will remain in effect.
OTOH, you may recall that John Scopes was actually convicted of teaching Darwinism, contrary to the law passed in Tennessee in 1925. The subsequent uproar, however, caused the nullification of the bad law.
I believe there is a long history of laws being broken for this purpose, that is, strictly to challenge the validity of the law.
Nope. MS wasn't that smart. Though they could have made a bunch of money, take a gander at this quote from Wired.
(Three years later, Maffei also admitted to me that although Microsoft had bought $150 million in Apple shares as part of the deal - "We invested in the company when people had lost faith," Gates would boast - he had hedged Microsoft's bet by simultaneously shorting the stock.)
California illustrates this. The same stupid democrats who caused the problem there by partial deregulation now want to put price caps in place.
Will someone please moderate this to ignorant. The deregulation was put into place during a Republican administration with the full support of the industries being deregulated.
Although it is most certainly distasteful, it is (under current law) their right to do so.
Ignoring the semantic right/privilege issue, it seems to me that a case could be made for the schools having a "right" to make copies in the manner they did.
IANAL and all, but it seems to me that one of the primary reasons for the fair use provisions of copyright law was to allow schools to make multiple copies of items they could not afford as long as it was for educational purposes and it did not strongly impact the potential sales of the items.
Stagecast Creator is a program designed expressly for teaching programming concepts to kids. It uses the concept of simulation rather than programming per se, but the characters, behaviors, and variables translate readily into the programming domain once the kids are familiar with the concept of "teaching the computer."
Unlike Logo and Squeak, Creator does not require the students to wrestle with syntax. All programming is done visually. A short tour shows what it's like.
It's written in Java so it should available on almost any platform.
Slashdot Mirror
In this day of C++/Java/XML/insert-other-orthodoxy-here, it's good to have someone like Chuck Moore around
I fail to see how replacing today's orthodoxy with Forth orthodoxy is any great step forward. Differently languages have different expressive purposes. Would you rather code a web-log report tool in Perl or Forth? Moore side steps the problem by saying that text-processing problems don't appeal to him. That doesn't invalidate the existance of such problems.
I think Forth has it's place. I've used it and found it effective for certain problems. But to say
I remember my shock at learning that Fortran compiled into Assembler, that then had to be assembled. A language that can be translated into another is clearly unnecessary
borders on stupidity. An assembler simply translates into binary, why not skip both steps and bring back the panel switches a la the MITS Altair? Basically, Moore has simply found an assembly language for a virtual machine that works for him. He called it Forth, and is now spending his time building hardware that matches that virtual machine.
You are correct, I was responding to the critique. But as I read the OAL, it still appears flawed.
For example, IANAL, but the scope of public performance appears to be completely undefined. If I release the song FOO on a MP3, does public performance mean playback of that particular MP3 only? Does it mean some band can perform the song live as long as the quality of their sound system doesn't exceed that of the original encoding?
I think this is a good issue, and I commend them for starting a public discussion, but I think it's far to complex to be dealt with satisfactorily in the few paragraphs they have written.
Well, if Glass is correct in his summary, then I would have to say that the very first bullet point:
represents a fatal flaw. This would imply that you could not release a "teaser" MP3 , say one ripped in a lower audio quality, and still retain your other copyrights to the song. That seems shortsighted and unfair.
I don't think that's a fatal flaw
Well, it is, assuming you're trying to make the kind of generalization that the original paper was trying to make. The original author took a randomly selected bunch of programmers who claimed to know either Java, C, or C++ and assigned them the task. In comparison, Mr. Gat's paper was based on a call to a bunch of dedicated LISPers. whose expertise one could reasonably expect to be much higher than someone who might have taken a LISP programming class N years ago.
You really can't compare the two papers. Either you get "experts" on both sides, or you get randomly chosen programmers on both sides, but not a mix.
From the memorial page It is fittingly ironic that not one single major computing company was willing to support this project
I, for one, would dearly know who was asked to support/contribute and what their excuses were for not doing so.
the Turing Machine, is really a thought experiment that has very little to do with sitting down at a computer and hacking away at it.
Well aren't you Mr. Informed? The Turing Machine is far more than a thought experiment, it is a mechanism for evaluating what is and is not computable.
He also (for what it's worth) had true hacker credentials. IIRC, he disdained the assembler for the ACE, which he helped design, preferring to do the base 36 data manipulation directly in his head.
Excellent analysis.
The only people that benefit from this are the execs at Compaq. What a coup. They managed to see the company before anyone realized that the attempt to merge a PC-clone maker, a dying mini-computer manufacturer, and an niche player with obsolete software wasn't exactly a roaring success.
HP's vaunted "corporate culture" will be lost in the backwash and the US economy will be stuck with another mega-corp that exists out of sheer inertia.
or fantasy
and this is reinforced strongly if you actually look at the winners. Note that the film winner is Crouching Tiger.... There's no way that could be construed as science fiction.
If he's really concerned, he could spend that money on lobbying efforts and on educating the public.
No, he's much smarter than that. By withholding (note that he hasn't canceled or revoked the grant) the money, he's created an incredible amount of press and discussion, probably far more than he could spend on fattening up congresscritters and their lobbyists.
Plus, he can renew the debate at any time by giving the grant money to a university in Europe instead of to Stanford, which would really pack a politcal punch. I think he's a pretty smart guy, he gets the lobbying and press relations for free and can still spend the money on the research he originally intended to support.
Hmmmm. My cookie for this page: "What people have been reduced to are mere 3-D representations of their own data." -- Arthur Miller
The article mentions "potentially lower costs" but doesn't give any target prices or rationale for why the costs would be lower.
The next gen 802.11 (the .a spec) will run at over 50Mb/sec, at prices
not that much higher than the original 802.11b services. Who's going to
pay for a mere 2x improvement in an untested technology unless the costs
are very significantly lower?
In this industry two years is a very long time.
I think people over-estimate the speed at which things are done. "Internet time" is dying with the dot-coms. Building a complex product requires a fair amount of lead time. The external APIs will be in place long before the product is bug-free enough to ship. (Well, maybe not the way Microsoft does things.)
I see your point, but by doing this your are handing them a 99% monopoly over office tools. I mean why would any "normal" user download StarOffice when they already got MS-Office?
Well, as of 1997 data, MS already had a 95% monopoly in office tools. And no one is making money on StarOffice so it's not hurting any competitor.
Since any appropriate punishment should a) hurt, b) be relevant to the issue at hand, and c) take future actions into account, I propose the following.
1) Microsoft should be forced to bundle Word and Excel with every desktop copy of Windows.
The rationale here is that MS claims they simply want to improve the OS by bundling. Well, every desktop user needs these features, but MS has never bundled these applications -- why should they, since they have a de facto monopoly on word processing and spreadsheets, they just continue to rake in the dough. This punishment makes them practice what they preach and punishes them by depriving them of the revenue from Word and Excel.
2) Microsoft may continue to bundle applications or "new features" but they must publicly announce what applications are to be bundled and give reasonable feature descriptions of those applications at least two years before they appear in any release.
This addresses future behavior. Competitors will have a heads up, and will be able to decided whether they want to continue to compete or choose to modify their products to highlight differences between their offering and that of Microsoft.
...but the owner was innocent?
Imagine a virus or worm whose job it is not to participate in DDOS attacks, but to post to Usenet. The virus infects a machine, and waits to be contacted by someone who wants to distribute copyrighted material, but doesn't want to get caught. At some pre-arranged signal, the virus recieves or acquires the material, then posts it ot Usenet.
From all available evidence, the material would be coming from the targeted user's account, and this user would potentially get nailed, like the guy in the story, but he would have a heck of a time explaining why all the records from his ISP showed that he was indeed responsible.
This kind of action, without due process, really needs to be eliminated.
A lot of people will regard this as generic Microsoft bashing, but I think there's a least a grain of reasonableness in this suggestion. If you look at the product recalls that happen all the time in the non-virutal world (e.g., cars, baby strollers), you see that the producers of those products do bear some responsibility for their work.
So far, the software industry has managed to avoid much of that responsibility, but we are rapidly creating a world where people (and even lives) depend on it. As such, software manufactures should be held accountable when poor design or shoddy workmanship are rampant.
As other posters have pointed out, dynamic documents can be extremely useful.
What I don't understand is, why continue using technologies with known flaws when reasonable solutions already exist? There has been a lot of work put into the security features of Java. If you don't like the language, why not at least leverage the research put into to creating a safe "sandbox" for execution.
it's been more cost effective in most cases to buy your own cpu than to lease it from a grid
It seems like there are cases when this is not always true. The one that comes to mind immediately is the researcher who needs to tackle a very large problem but only needs those resources for a short time. The grid would be ideal for that.
It also seems that another reason that earlier distrubuted computing ideas didn't pan out was due to communications bottlenecks, e.g., the cost of farming out my compiles to 100 machines rather than running the compiler 100 times on one machine has a lot to do with the time spent sending the bits back and forth. If everyone on the grid (in a few years time) has a fiber connection and a guaranteed set of resources, then this problem is minimized.
Is it ok to break laws you don't personally care for?
Well, for certain definitions of the word OK. It is one of the more effective ways of getting a bad law examined.
For example, if there is a law against stealing chickens, and I steal a chicken and am subsequently arrested for it, the underlying law will be at issue in the case. It is unlikely that society will be unduly perturbed, however and the law will remain in effect.
OTOH, you may recall that John Scopes was actually convicted of teaching Darwinism, contrary to the law passed in Tennessee in 1925. The subsequent uproar, however, caused the nullification of the bad law.
I believe there is a long history of laws being broken for this purpose, that is, strictly to challenge the validity of the law.
Well, how long before they figure out that they don't need content at all? Seems like 100% banner ads would be really, really, effective.
Nope. MS wasn't that smart. Though they could have made a bunch of money, take a gander at this quote from Wired.
(Three years later, Maffei also admitted to me that although Microsoft had bought $150 million in Apple shares as part of the deal - "We invested in the company when people had lost faith," Gates would boast - he had hedged Microsoft's bet by simultaneously shorting the stock.)
California illustrates this. The same stupid democrats who caused the problem there by partial deregulation now want to put price caps in place.
Will someone please moderate this to ignorant. The deregulation was put into place during a Republican administration with the full support of the industries being deregulated.
Although it is most certainly distasteful, it is (under current law) their right to do so.
Ignoring the semantic right/privilege issue, it seems to me that a case could be made for the schools having a "right" to make copies in the manner they did.
IANAL and all, but it seems to me that one of the primary reasons for the fair use provisions of copyright law was to allow schools to make multiple copies of items they could not afford as long as it was for educational purposes and it did not strongly impact the potential sales of the items.
Probably they use a trie or the related Patricia tree. These are very space efficient and relatively fast.
Stagecast Creator is a program designed expressly for teaching programming concepts to kids. It uses the concept of simulation rather than programming per se, but the characters, behaviors, and variables translate readily into the programming domain once the kids are familiar with the concept of "teaching the computer."
Unlike Logo and Squeak, Creator does not require the students to wrestle with syntax. All programming is done visually. A short tour shows what it's like.
It's written in Java so it should available on almost any platform.