Yeah, that $200 subscription is great and all, but just tell me, how do you get it to work in Canada, or Australia, or any of the many other places where people have TiVos and can't get the service? I'd love to have the service, but getting listings for Boondox, Arkansas isn't going to do me much good.
I can appreciate that TiVo doesn't want to have to support an old version of their software, and doesn't want people in the US to avoid using their service. But I don't think it's fair to turn a functional digital VCR into a really big paperweight, when the only way to make the unit functional again is to move to the US.
Re:Still no answer to my question
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 2
And in the spirit of truly recursive acronyms (GNU -> GNU's Not Unix), they should have the answer to that be "Yes, there is a FAQ on the GPL, you can read it at [this link]". Of course that link would be a self-referential link...
Well "AIM" is the full acronym of their software, so you'd probably have to have a full Windows title, like "windows95" or "windowsxp". However this does mean that if I were to create a domain called "windowsxpfixes.com" that had a list of tweaks or fixes to Windows XP (assuming of course it doesn't run perfectly out of the box) that MS could snatch my domain.
That sounds pretty scary. It might even mean that if I created a domain called "xpenhancer.com" to sell a multiple-desktop tool for Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft could legally take the domain away.
Note that nothing here says that Aimster claimed to be made by the same people who made AOL Instant Messenger. The mere fact that the name incoporated the name of related software was enough.
This ruling could have huge ranging implications. Think of how many computer fan websites there are out there that use the name of the product in them.
www.matroxusers.com,
www.amdzone.com,
www.voodooextreme.com,
www.geforcefaq.com...
Since these are normally fan sites it's in the best interest of the companies with the related trademarks to ket the fans express themselves, but what if company XXX comes out with a crappy product and XXXtweak.com trashes it in a review?
This is pretty scary stuff. In the past it seems to me that most of the domain names taken from someone were non-commercial ones that often were squatting on the name. But now what can you do? If you have a domain name that insults a company, they can take it. If you make a product designed for use with another product they can take your name. If you don't make a product at all and you're careless they can take it. Who is safe?
I can see it in the news tomorrow:
Popular Linux enthusiast website "Slashdot.org" will be forced to find a new domain name. A lawyer for Megacorp explained: "The syntax for using commands in our environment is well known to require a command keyset of a slash followed by a dot. Our customers were being confused by the "slashdot" website, assuming it was a reference for our command syntax. These people, who admit to being hackers, appropriated the domain name with no regard for our users' confusion. Thanks to the American Justice System we have been able to restore the rightful use of our domain. We just want to reassure our users that despite the misuse of our domain name by these Linux hackers, our software has not been infected with the GPL virus."
Gravity is many orders of magnitude less powerful than the other fundamental forces, but at least in our experience gravity is also the only force that is always attractive. It is also one of the forces that has a measurable impact at distances beyond a few angstroms.
If you charge up a baloon with static electricity you can see just how strong the other major fundamental forces are. The number of electrons you're moving around is tiny, but it's enough to overwhelm every single proton, neutron and electron being pulled by gravity. The fact that gravity has a measureable impact isn't anything spooky, it's just the sum of a lot of very weak interactions with no opposing interactions.
Well said!. Not to mention the other problems with natural growth cycles. Most animal populations without natural predators grow to meet their food supply. In the absense of a predator they often briefly go beyond their limits and then without enough food to go around the population crashes. With animals this cycle can continue for a while, growth, then crash, again and again. Hopefully humans are smart enough to override their biological urges and reduce the population to a sustainable level.
That means ignoring biological urges to have kids, ignoring the Catholic church, and not working so hard to keep everybody alive, and instead working to improve the quality of life for everybody.
Webbink has approached the commission about making a couple of changes in the model UCITA. One proposed change would recognize Free Software and Open Source licenses in the law, to "acknowledge they exist in the firmament of computer software licenses," he says.
So with the GPL officially recognized as a valid license under the law a lot of GPL related concerns are greatly diminished. That doesn't necessarily mean that there can't be loopholes, but it does mean that it's going to be a lot harder for someone to say "The GPL isn't a valid license"
His example: A Linux programmer purchasing a popular word-processing program and using its source code to port it to Linux. With Red Hat's proposal, UCITA would allow such reverse engineering and override any prohibitions in the word-processor's license agreement.
That's a step in the right direction. I think reverse engineering should be allowed no matter what. But then again, the more commercial companies try to limit how their software can be used, distributed, modified, copied or examined, the more people are driven to free software.
One argument I've seen against Open Source before is "There's nobody to sue if it blows up and costs you thousands of dollars". And that's true for sure with the GPL, as it says, it comes with no warranty.
But insurance companies routinely insure against flooding, earthquakes (and these days even alien abduction). Are there any that will insure against Apache blowing up? If not, there should be. It would be a steal for them. Charge $20 a year that version XXX of Apache is insured against flaws YYY and ZZZ. This wouldn't include anything the administrator does to screw it up (like driver's insurance doesn't insure you if you trick out the brakes on your car). I'm sure the insurance rates would be far lower than the equivalent cost of buying IIS from Microsoft, and it would be a struggle to win a court case against Microsoft, whereas an insurer would have to pay out if you did nothing wrong.
Just an idea bubble.
Oh, and one more thing. All these people who talked about wanting to have someone to sue if things went bad -- why didn'tcha sue Microsoft when their faulty software allowed the various email virii to propagate? If that wasn't Microsoft's fault, what will be? Windows crashing? Word files getting corrupt? I personally can't recall anyone ever successfully suing MS over faulty software -- I can't even remember anyone trying...
How to fight this? Explain that the GPL puts no restriction on the use of the software. If you can get GPL software you are free to use it as you see fit. The only things the GPL restricts are copying, distribution and modification.
On the other hand Commercial software, especially Microsoft software has harsh limits on how it can be used. Hence the term "End User License Agreement". Tell 'em they'll never have to click through one of those for an Open Source product.
Next mention that the only way you'll be affected by the GPL is if you want to copy, distribute or modify GPL software. You can use a GPLed editor like GNU Emacs on a GPLed system like Linux to write proprietary software if that's what you want to do. If you're not writing software that links with or uses GPLed code, selling or giving away GPLed software you don't have to worry.
Explain that when Microsoft's code leaves their building it's "hands off". You can look, but you can't touch or even show other people. Their "shared source software" is at best a learning tool for other people. At worst it's a means of trying to get cheap student labour to find and fix their bugs for them.
As for standards, explain that Microsoft is infamous for embracing a standard then extending it so that nothing works with it. Explain that this would be fine if it weren't for their monopoly which basically makes an open standard into a Microsoft standard. Tell them that by its very nature, Open Source software is open standard. If you want to know how something works, just look at the source.
Finally explain that the only reason Bill Gates and Microsoft can give so much money away is that they've made such obscene profits on their software. Explain how if an Open Source company were on 95% of desktops it would never have that kind of power because everything it made would be open and freely available. Explain how many eyes make bugs shallow. Then say "if you love something, set it free". *grin*
Bah, I work in Ontario too. People like me are still in high enough demand that if an employer demands more than 40 I'll find a new employer. The main thing this bill does is allow me to accept a job that requires 50 hours a week for more money if I want it.
Harris is an ass but I generally prefer the freedom to take a 50 hour-a-week job if I want it.
Yes, but posts that are wrong are low quality. They take away from the real issue and either confuse people or make them have to waste their time responding to the statement. This is particularly troublesome when it's an early post in a hot button issue like this one. Instead of wasting discussion time and space with posts that are incorrectly marked "informative" when they're in fact untrue moderators should be able to undo this moderation with their counter "untrue" or "wrong" moderation.
The problem is that no other moderation fits the bill. They're not "offtopic" because they're talking about the right things. They're not intentional "flamebait" because often the poster believes what he/she's posting. They're "overrated", but not because the issue isn't interesting, but the poster made a mistake.
Is there anything in slashcode that doubles the number of moderators when "GPL" and "Violation" appear in the same article title? If not there sure should be.
Just a warning people, get your facts straight, count to 10 and think about what you're doing before you do something about this. The author of this diary had a really unfortunate encounter with a really annoying Sony employee who most likely doesn't represent the official company's position. Unless you're in a position to verify that there has been a GPL violation don't go off flaming Sony. If you can prove it then follow the steps on the GNU site.
If indeed Sony is violating the GPL, maybe we can convince IBM (who is apparently all about Linux these days) to put their money where their mouth is and give some of the financial muscle needed to take on another huge corporation.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. Obviously in this case things worked out in this case, I'm talking about the more general cases.
The main problems I see with Lisp aren't problems with the language, they're with how widely it's used. This affects 2 areas most:
The availability of programmers who know it
The availability of 3rd party libraries and tools
If I went up to my boss and suggested we do our core products in Lisp he'd almost certainly reject the idea. Even if we had a few programmers who knew Lisp really well, if someone quit or we needed to expand, finding people who knew Lisp well enough to join the team would be really tough. Plus we do a lot of things in languages with huge libraries of useful code. It sounds like these guys avoided this problem by not having to hire new people and by concentrating on an area where they didn't need many external libraries.
If I'm going to write a tool to use on my own I'll do it in whatever I feel like using. Perl for text manipulation, C for speed, Java for cross platform stuff, PHP for web stuff... As soon as the project becomes big enough I have to worry about whether other people around me know enough of the language I'm using to contribute. And if I'm going to write a client-side GUI program I'm going to do all I can to avoid using low-level GUI API calls if I can just use a wrapper library.
Something doesn't have to be very popular to be good (i.e. Linux), but for certain things popularity is important (i.e. availability of Linux games).
And I admit I can read procedural code in nearly any language (not Perl) easier than I can read Lisp. A big part of that is due to my having more experience with procedural languages, but I think some of it is just the nature of the language. I think most people would find that it's much easier to keep track of the level of indentation than the depth of parentheses (but hey, maybe that's just me).
They don't have to deal with The Terminator, aka Arnold Schwarzenegger. (These are MP3's of prank calls using some movie clips, they're great.) I really admire the tech support people here who kept their cool and kept trying to help despite Arnie's insolence.
(See more fun non-tech support prank calls at http://badlinks.brutal.com/arnie/. The limo driver is one of the best. To get the links to work you might have to manually change spaces to "%20"s)
I know a bit of Lisp -- I love Emacs and wanted to be able to customize it more, so I played around with Lisp. I learned enough to do some pretty cool things, and learning Lisp has taught me a lot about programming in general...
But I'm not convinced that Lisp is the "highest level language of all high-level languages" or "the most powerful of all high-level languages". In a sense that is probably VB. It is the one that removes the programmer from the actual workings of the CPU the most. Unfortunately it's also a language that's horribly designed in a lot of ways. I think Lisp has some very powerful features like macros that other languages lack, but it loses out in other areas.
Lisp code is hard to read for most programmers, one big reason for this is that the condition in a conditional statement can be 10 lines long, and 5 parentheses deep. Because of this, finding a bug in a Lisp program could take longer than finding on in a procedural program. Secondly not many people speak Lisp. Like Esperanto, something can be wonderfully designed but if it isn't widely used it's not going to be too useful.
I think the main reason their software was so successful was that Paul Graham et al. were extremely good coders developing in a high level language they knew very well, that was well suited to what they were trying to do. This story isn't about Lisp being used for a kick-ass user interface or a 3d engine because (IMHO) Lisp isn't as well suited to those things.
As has been said many a time before -- "Use the appropriate tool for the task at hand".
Anyhow, having said all that, could someone who knows Lisp better than me explain what it is about Lisp that makes it so good for AI? I've always heard that but being pretty far removed from that field I've never seen any cool Lisp AI code.
Except sometimes there's no room for "cute" people. If you have a hard deadline in 30 minutes and something breaks, you need someone who can quickly find the problem and fix it. You don't need someone who needs his/her hand held.
Also, some people who are competent but not curious aren't really "professionals". They're more like clock-punchers. They come in, do their bit, but instead of being motivated by career or money, they're more interested in getting out to have a beer with buddies after work or something. Sometimes that's fine, but they often don't make the best managers, unlike the "professionals".
All kidding aside, you don't need passion to do a job. But in most jobs having a passion means you can do it far better than someone without. This is especially the case with jobs that require a lot of thinking. But it applies to coal miners and janitors too. If you're a coal miner and you just operate the machines, that's great, but what if you really pay attention to the mine walls and think you see a large coal vein? Or if you're a janitor and you work thinking "what I do is important. keeping things clean makes the people who work here happy and that makes me feel great". I'd rather my janitor thought those thoughts than "if I can get this job done quicker I can go have a beer sooner".
I would be wary hiring someone with no outside interests -- afterall they'd probably have trouble fitting in socially... but if you were hiring someone, wouldn't you prefer someone who was passionate about a job rather than someone who just wanted beer money?
You probably weren't interviewing for a position as a Java coder were ya?:)
See, that would be the type of answer I'd love. It shows a wide range of experiences, knowledge that a hammer isn't the right tool for every job, and also shows that you weren't just going to kiss up to someone to get a job.
Yes, she had used all the technologies, but only that. It sounded like in the past she had only followed directions and never experimented with anything. It sounded like she had used the technologies but had no curiosity. I guess when I said "she seemed to understand the technology well" really meant "she knew the names of the IDEs she had used, and the name of the databases she had used". Her understanding was very narrow, but she seemed to know certain things well. She said he had worked with XML, so I asked her what parser she had used and she said "I don't know, the one my husband gave me".
This was only one answer but the answers to the other questions were no better. Basically it sounded like she had experience programming but no experience doing anything that wasn't specifically assigned to her.
Now sometimes it might be ok to hire someone with experience in the right technologies but no creativity, curiosity or interest in the technology, but not around here. We have only vague deadlines, vague requirements, and almost no supervision.
Basically my office is like Junkyard Wars. We often get vague requirements that we can solve however we see fit, often in a really tight timeline. The folks who seem to do best on junkyard wars aren't the certified mechanics or PhD's, they're the "car hackers", the guys who are toying with blowtorches and wrenches for fun.
My company (which incidentally is in Canada) is currently looking to hire some Java developers, and as a guy who knows Java I was asked to sit in on an interview today and ask some questions. I asked a few technical questions, tried to get a feel for how well the jobseeker knew Java, OO principles, and that sort of thing. What I heard was pretty good -- she had used all the same technologies we use, and seemed to understand the technology well, but she didn't seem to have much passion about it.
I took the opportunity to ask her what she really liked doing, and what she thought were the exciting things happening in Java... and she didn't have an answer. All she mentioned was how Java's lack of pointers and garbage collection makes it more forgiving than C++. Because of her lack of real interest in the technology I really couldn't recommend her.
I think to most "geeks" this is all pretty obvious. The more you play with computers, the more you learn, and the more diverse the experiences you can draw on when solving a problem. Most of the time managers understand this -- the exception seems to be big companies that seem to value predictable programmers over their creative (but sometimes more unpredictable) peers.
I've always been able to produce my best work in companies where I had the most freedom to be myself. Sometimes I have a bad day and produce almost nothing. When it's one of those days I often don't even try to program. I know that if I did I'd invariably have to go back and fix it. On the other hand when I'm on a roll I can go through lunch and stay late without even realizing it. Mostly I can get away with that here -- my boss understands because he's the same way. But unfortunately the non-geeks don't always get it. When I have a bad day I still have to show up and look like I'm working, just to keep up appearances. The main problem is that while the IT types get it, the rest of the company doesn't.
So my question is: if we all know that the best coders do it for fun, and are hairy, unpredictable people who have bad days, how do we convince the non-geeks to let us do things in our chaotic way?
Now I know you can go after the police for malicious prosecution, and I know people have sued to recover court costs before. Could something like that be used to go after companies that file obvious patents that have been in use for a long time?
Say you're an independant coder, and you create a way to check if a file is current using checksums, and you use it on your personal web site, never thinking about it. Years later a company patents exactly what you're doing.
A normal reaction might be to yell and scream about how you were already doing it and how the patent is worthless. What about if you instead copied their product, using their supposedly patented technology. Seeing that, they'd come after you for patent violations. You could then show you were using the algorithm for much longer than them. Then, after you won the case, you could sue them to recover the costs associated with defending the case.
I dunno, maybe some variation on this might work. It sure would be nice to be able to turn the screws on the screwers.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer liscensed in your jurisdiction or in any other jurisdiction. I'm not a lawyer at all, and I'm probably not even in your country. If I were in your jurisdiction and were a lawyer I'd probably not want to give out free legal advice anyhow... but who knows what I'd do, cuz I'd probably be pretty depressed at being a lawyer.
Are you kidding? These days it's easy to get money! Venture capitalists are just throwing money after people who have even a vague business plan!
First you need to get a flashy management team, create a company with a name ending in.com, and mention Linux, P2P or B2B if possible. I'd say something like "linuxp2pweb.com", then just go out there with a big money bag and start taking VC money. It's a no-lose situation. Nobody expects web companies to make money yet anyhow. If that many people are visiting your site then it must be a good thing, and will eventually make money somehow, right?
Of course, with all that money you'll need to advertise to bring in even more people to your site. Note: it doesn't matter if each visitor costs you money, because the secret is you'll make it all back in volume. The best way to get people to notice you is to create a flashy ad and air it during the superbowl. Sure it's expensive, but you have to spend money to make money, right? The best ads are the ones targeted to gen-x-ers. Make sure to avoid mentioning anything about your site other than your domain name -- anything else is sure to be ignored by the viewers.
Meanwhile you need to hire more people to proactively grow the mindshare of your site while leveraging your fundamental skillset. Ideally everyone you hire should be under 23. Any older than that and they'll bring along too much baggage and obsess about "standards", "security" and "planning".
Anyhow, good luck (like you'll need it). You couldn't be entering this business at a better time!
I took Engineering Physics in university so I'm no stranger to advanced math. I know the fundamental theories they're breaking things down to, but this is still some hard stuff to understand. For instance:
Axiom ax-2 4
Description: Axiom of Distribution. One of the 3 axioms of propositional calculus. It distributes an antecedent over two consequents.
Assertion
Ref Expression
ax-2 |- ((j -> (y -> c)) -> ((j -> y) -> (j -> c)))
If the goal is to really make this stuff understandable I think they need to provide some much more basic examples in the style of: If you have 3 apples and I give you 2 more apples, how many apples do you have?
I think for the above axiom an equivalent would be:
j: it is raining
y: the ground is wet
c: there are puddles on the ground
If it is raining then if the ground is wet there are puddles on the ground.
If the above is true then:
If it's true that if it is raining then the ground is wet, it's true that if it's raining then there are puddles on the ground.
This basically says: if whenever the ground is wet there are puddles, and whenever it rains the ground is wet, then whenever it rains the ground will be wet and there will be puddles.
I used to work somewhere where we were talking to Sony about working with them, we found out they're not interested unless you're going to be selling something like a million units of something. (It's been a while so I can't remember the exact details).
If your market is small enough, the huge fish won't care. If it's going to be a huge market then either go with a company that can get a lot of VC funding, or go with a huge company.
Patents sometimes make it possible for small companies to compete, but only if that small company can find $10,000 to get the patent, or the $50,000 to defend that patent. So that's not really a "small" company anymore. And it will only work if that patent doesn't depend on one of the tens of thousands of patents that one of the big companies already owns.
Basically, if Sony wants your market they'll find a way to get it, patent or no patent. I personally can't remember the last time a tiny little company used a patent to fight off a big company.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that $200 subscription is great and all, but just tell me, how do you get it to work in Canada, or Australia, or any of the many other places where people have TiVos and can't get the service? I'd love to have the service, but getting listings for Boondox, Arkansas isn't going to do me much good.
I can appreciate that TiVo doesn't want to have to support an old version of their software, and doesn't want people in the US to avoid using their service. But I don't think it's fair to turn a functional digital VCR into a really big paperweight, when the only way to make the unit functional again is to move to the US.
And in the spirit of truly recursive acronyms (GNU -> GNU's Not Unix), they should have the answer to that be "Yes, there is a FAQ on the GPL, you can read it at [this link]". Of course that link would be a self-referential link...
Well "AIM" is the full acronym of their software, so you'd probably have to have a full Windows title, like "windows95" or "windowsxp". However this does mean that if I were to create a domain called "windowsxpfixes.com" that had a list of tweaks or fixes to Windows XP (assuming of course it doesn't run perfectly out of the box) that MS could snatch my domain.
That sounds pretty scary. It might even mean that if I created a domain called "xpenhancer.com" to sell a multiple-desktop tool for Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft could legally take the domain away.
Note that nothing here says that Aimster claimed to be made by the same people who made AOL Instant Messenger. The mere fact that the name incoporated the name of related software was enough.
This ruling could have huge ranging implications. Think of how many computer fan websites there are out there that use the name of the product in them. www.matroxusers.com, www.amdzone.com, www.voodooextreme.com, www.geforcefaq.com... Since these are normally fan sites it's in the best interest of the companies with the related trademarks to ket the fans express themselves, but what if company XXX comes out with a crappy product and XXXtweak.com trashes it in a review?
This is pretty scary stuff. In the past it seems to me that most of the domain names taken from someone were non-commercial ones that often were squatting on the name. But now what can you do? If you have a domain name that insults a company, they can take it. If you make a product designed for use with another product they can take your name. If you don't make a product at all and you're careless they can take it. Who is safe? I can see it in the news tomorrow:
Gravity is many orders of magnitude less powerful than the other fundamental forces, but at least in our experience gravity is also the only force that is always attractive. It is also one of the forces that has a measurable impact at distances beyond a few angstroms.
If you charge up a baloon with static electricity you can see just how strong the other major fundamental forces are. The number of electrons you're moving around is tiny, but it's enough to overwhelm every single proton, neutron and electron being pulled by gravity. The fact that gravity has a measureable impact isn't anything spooky, it's just the sum of a lot of very weak interactions with no opposing interactions.
In the first world, yes, but that's not the case in developing nations.
Well said!. Not to mention the other problems with natural growth cycles. Most animal populations without natural predators grow to meet their food supply. In the absense of a predator they often briefly go beyond their limits and then without enough food to go around the population crashes. With animals this cycle can continue for a while, growth, then crash, again and again. Hopefully humans are smart enough to override their biological urges and reduce the population to a sustainable level.
That means ignoring biological urges to have kids, ignoring the Catholic church, and not working so hard to keep everybody alive, and instead working to improve the quality of life for everybody.
So with the GPL officially recognized as a valid license under the law a lot of GPL related concerns are greatly diminished. That doesn't necessarily mean that there can't be loopholes, but it does mean that it's going to be a lot harder for someone to say "The GPL isn't a valid license"
That's a step in the right direction. I think reverse engineering should be allowed no matter what. But then again, the more commercial companies try to limit how their software can be used, distributed, modified, copied or examined, the more people are driven to free software.
One argument I've seen against Open Source before is "There's nobody to sue if it blows up and costs you thousands of dollars". And that's true for sure with the GPL, as it says, it comes with no warranty.
But insurance companies routinely insure against flooding, earthquakes (and these days even alien abduction). Are there any that will insure against Apache blowing up? If not, there should be. It would be a steal for them. Charge $20 a year that version XXX of Apache is insured against flaws YYY and ZZZ. This wouldn't include anything the administrator does to screw it up (like driver's insurance doesn't insure you if you trick out the brakes on your car). I'm sure the insurance rates would be far lower than the equivalent cost of buying IIS from Microsoft, and it would be a struggle to win a court case against Microsoft, whereas an insurer would have to pay out if you did nothing wrong.
Just an idea bubble.
Oh, and one more thing. All these people who talked about wanting to have someone to sue if things went bad -- why didn'tcha sue Microsoft when their faulty software allowed the various email virii to propagate? If that wasn't Microsoft's fault, what will be? Windows crashing? Word files getting corrupt? I personally can't recall anyone ever successfully suing MS over faulty software -- I can't even remember anyone trying...
How to fight this? Explain that the GPL puts no restriction on the use of the software. If you can get GPL software you are free to use it as you see fit. The only things the GPL restricts are copying, distribution and modification.
On the other hand Commercial software, especially Microsoft software has harsh limits on how it can be used. Hence the term "End User License Agreement". Tell 'em they'll never have to click through one of those for an Open Source product.
Next mention that the only way you'll be affected by the GPL is if you want to copy, distribute or modify GPL software. You can use a GPLed editor like GNU Emacs on a GPLed system like Linux to write proprietary software if that's what you want to do. If you're not writing software that links with or uses GPLed code, selling or giving away GPLed software you don't have to worry.
Explain that when Microsoft's code leaves their building it's "hands off". You can look, but you can't touch or even show other people. Their "shared source software" is at best a learning tool for other people. At worst it's a means of trying to get cheap student labour to find and fix their bugs for them.
As for standards, explain that Microsoft is infamous for embracing a standard then extending it so that nothing works with it. Explain that this would be fine if it weren't for their monopoly which basically makes an open standard into a Microsoft standard. Tell them that by its very nature, Open Source software is open standard. If you want to know how something works, just look at the source.
Finally explain that the only reason Bill Gates and Microsoft can give so much money away is that they've made such obscene profits on their software. Explain how if an Open Source company were on 95% of desktops it would never have that kind of power because everything it made would be open and freely available. Explain how many eyes make bugs shallow. Then say "if you love something, set it free". *grin*
Any other suggestions?
Bah, I work in Ontario too. People like me are still in high enough demand that if an employer demands more than 40 I'll find a new employer. The main thing this bill does is allow me to accept a job that requires 50 hours a week for more money if I want it.
Harris is an ass but I generally prefer the freedom to take a 50 hour-a-week job if I want it.
Yes, but posts that are wrong are low quality. They take away from the real issue and either confuse people or make them have to waste their time responding to the statement. This is particularly troublesome when it's an early post in a hot button issue like this one. Instead of wasting discussion time and space with posts that are incorrectly marked "informative" when they're in fact untrue moderators should be able to undo this moderation with their counter "untrue" or "wrong" moderation.
The problem is that no other moderation fits the bill. They're not "offtopic" because they're talking about the right things. They're not intentional "flamebait" because often the poster believes what he/she's posting. They're "overrated", but not because the issue isn't interesting, but the poster made a mistake.
Is there anything in slashcode that doubles the number of moderators when "GPL" and "Violation" appear in the same article title? If not there sure should be.
Just a warning people, get your facts straight, count to 10 and think about what you're doing before you do something about this. The author of this diary had a really unfortunate encounter with a really annoying Sony employee who most likely doesn't represent the official company's position. Unless you're in a position to verify that there has been a GPL violation don't go off flaming Sony. If you can prove it then follow the steps on the GNU site.
If indeed Sony is violating the GPL, maybe we can convince IBM (who is apparently all about Linux these days) to put their money where their mouth is and give some of the financial muscle needed to take on another huge corporation.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. Obviously in this case things worked out in this case, I'm talking about the more general cases.
The main problems I see with Lisp aren't problems with the language, they're with how widely it's used. This affects 2 areas most:
If I went up to my boss and suggested we do our core products in Lisp he'd almost certainly reject the idea. Even if we had a few programmers who knew Lisp really well, if someone quit or we needed to expand, finding people who knew Lisp well enough to join the team would be really tough. Plus we do a lot of things in languages with huge libraries of useful code. It sounds like these guys avoided this problem by not having to hire new people and by concentrating on an area where they didn't need many external libraries.
If I'm going to write a tool to use on my own I'll do it in whatever I feel like using. Perl for text manipulation, C for speed, Java for cross platform stuff, PHP for web stuff... As soon as the project becomes big enough I have to worry about whether other people around me know enough of the language I'm using to contribute. And if I'm going to write a client-side GUI program I'm going to do all I can to avoid using low-level GUI API calls if I can just use a wrapper library.
Something doesn't have to be very popular to be good (i.e. Linux), but for certain things popularity is important (i.e. availability of Linux games).
And I admit I can read procedural code in nearly any language (not Perl) easier than I can read Lisp. A big part of that is due to my having more experience with procedural languages, but I think some of it is just the nature of the language. I think most people would find that it's much easier to keep track of the level of indentation than the depth of parentheses (but hey, maybe that's just me).
They don't have to deal with The Terminator, aka Arnold Schwarzenegger. (These are MP3's of prank calls using some movie clips, they're great.) I really admire the tech support people here who kept their cool and kept trying to help despite Arnie's insolence.
(See more fun non-tech support prank calls at http://badlinks.brutal.com/arnie/. The limo driver is one of the best. To get the links to work you might have to manually change spaces to "%20"s)
I know a bit of Lisp -- I love Emacs and wanted to be able to customize it more, so I played around with Lisp. I learned enough to do some pretty cool things, and learning Lisp has taught me a lot about programming in general...
But I'm not convinced that Lisp is the "highest level language of all high-level languages" or "the most powerful of all high-level languages". In a sense that is probably VB. It is the one that removes the programmer from the actual workings of the CPU the most. Unfortunately it's also a language that's horribly designed in a lot of ways. I think Lisp has some very powerful features like macros that other languages lack, but it loses out in other areas.
Lisp code is hard to read for most programmers, one big reason for this is that the condition in a conditional statement can be 10 lines long, and 5 parentheses deep. Because of this, finding a bug in a Lisp program could take longer than finding on in a procedural program. Secondly not many people speak Lisp. Like Esperanto, something can be wonderfully designed but if it isn't widely used it's not going to be too useful.
I think the main reason their software was so successful was that Paul Graham et al. were extremely good coders developing in a high level language they knew very well, that was well suited to what they were trying to do. This story isn't about Lisp being used for a kick-ass user interface or a 3d engine because (IMHO) Lisp isn't as well suited to those things.
As has been said many a time before -- "Use the appropriate tool for the task at hand".
Anyhow, having said all that, could someone who knows Lisp better than me explain what it is about Lisp that makes it so good for AI? I've always heard that but being pretty far removed from that field I've never seen any cool Lisp AI code.
Except sometimes there's no room for "cute" people. If you have a hard deadline in 30 minutes and something breaks, you need someone who can quickly find the problem and fix it. You don't need someone who needs his/her hand held.
Also, some people who are competent but not curious aren't really "professionals". They're more like clock-punchers. They come in, do their bit, but instead of being motivated by career or money, they're more interested in getting out to have a beer with buddies after work or something. Sometimes that's fine, but they often don't make the best managers, unlike the "professionals".
Lemme guess, you work at Microsoft?
All kidding aside, you don't need passion to do a job. But in most jobs having a passion means you can do it far better than someone without. This is especially the case with jobs that require a lot of thinking. But it applies to coal miners and janitors too. If you're a coal miner and you just operate the machines, that's great, but what if you really pay attention to the mine walls and think you see a large coal vein? Or if you're a janitor and you work thinking "what I do is important. keeping things clean makes the people who work here happy and that makes me feel great". I'd rather my janitor thought those thoughts than "if I can get this job done quicker I can go have a beer sooner".
I would be wary hiring someone with no outside interests -- afterall they'd probably have trouble fitting in socially... but if you were hiring someone, wouldn't you prefer someone who was passionate about a job rather than someone who just wanted beer money?
You probably weren't interviewing for a position as a Java coder were ya? :)
See, that would be the type of answer I'd love. It shows a wide range of experiences, knowledge that a hammer isn't the right tool for every job, and also shows that you weren't just going to kiss up to someone to get a job.
Yes, she had used all the technologies, but only that. It sounded like in the past she had only followed directions and never experimented with anything. It sounded like she had used the technologies but had no curiosity. I guess when I said "she seemed to understand the technology well" really meant "she knew the names of the IDEs she had used, and the name of the databases she had used". Her understanding was very narrow, but she seemed to know certain things well. She said he had worked with XML, so I asked her what parser she had used and she said "I don't know, the one my husband gave me".
This was only one answer but the answers to the other questions were no better. Basically it sounded like she had experience programming but no experience doing anything that wasn't specifically assigned to her.
Now sometimes it might be ok to hire someone with experience in the right technologies but no creativity, curiosity or interest in the technology, but not around here. We have only vague deadlines, vague requirements, and almost no supervision.
Basically my office is like Junkyard Wars. We often get vague requirements that we can solve however we see fit, often in a really tight timeline. The folks who seem to do best on junkyard wars aren't the certified mechanics or PhD's, they're the "car hackers", the guys who are toying with blowtorches and wrenches for fun.
My company (which incidentally is in Canada) is currently looking to hire some Java developers, and as a guy who knows Java I was asked to sit in on an interview today and ask some questions. I asked a few technical questions, tried to get a feel for how well the jobseeker knew Java, OO principles, and that sort of thing. What I heard was pretty good -- she had used all the same technologies we use, and seemed to understand the technology well, but she didn't seem to have much passion about it.
I took the opportunity to ask her what she really liked doing, and what she thought were the exciting things happening in Java... and she didn't have an answer. All she mentioned was how Java's lack of pointers and garbage collection makes it more forgiving than C++. Because of her lack of real interest in the technology I really couldn't recommend her.
I think to most "geeks" this is all pretty obvious. The more you play with computers, the more you learn, and the more diverse the experiences you can draw on when solving a problem. Most of the time managers understand this -- the exception seems to be big companies that seem to value predictable programmers over their creative (but sometimes more unpredictable) peers.
I've always been able to produce my best work in companies where I had the most freedom to be myself. Sometimes I have a bad day and produce almost nothing. When it's one of those days I often don't even try to program. I know that if I did I'd invariably have to go back and fix it. On the other hand when I'm on a roll I can go through lunch and stay late without even realizing it. Mostly I can get away with that here -- my boss understands because he's the same way. But unfortunately the non-geeks don't always get it. When I have a bad day I still have to show up and look like I'm working, just to keep up appearances. The main problem is that while the IT types get it, the rest of the company doesn't.
So my question is: if we all know that the best coders do it for fun, and are hairy, unpredictable people who have bad days, how do we convince the non-geeks to let us do things in our chaotic way?
Now I know you can go after the police for malicious prosecution, and I know people have sued to recover court costs before. Could something like that be used to go after companies that file obvious patents that have been in use for a long time?
Say you're an independant coder, and you create a way to check if a file is current using checksums, and you use it on your personal web site, never thinking about it. Years later a company patents exactly what you're doing.
A normal reaction might be to yell and scream about how you were already doing it and how the patent is worthless. What about if you instead copied their product, using their supposedly patented technology. Seeing that, they'd come after you for patent violations. You could then show you were using the algorithm for much longer than them. Then, after you won the case, you could sue them to recover the costs associated with defending the case.
I dunno, maybe some variation on this might work. It sure would be nice to be able to turn the screws on the screwers.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer liscensed in your jurisdiction or in any other jurisdiction. I'm not a lawyer at all, and I'm probably not even in your country. If I were in your jurisdiction and were a lawyer I'd probably not want to give out free legal advice anyhow... but who knows what I'd do, cuz I'd probably be pretty depressed at being a lawyer.
Are you kidding? These days it's easy to get money! Venture capitalists are just throwing money after people who have even a vague business plan!
First you need to get a flashy management team, create a company with a name ending in .com, and mention Linux, P2P or B2B if possible. I'd say something like "linuxp2pweb.com", then just go out there with a big money bag and start taking VC money. It's a no-lose situation. Nobody expects web companies to make money yet anyhow. If that many people are visiting your site then it must be a good thing, and will eventually make money somehow, right?
Of course, with all that money you'll need to advertise to bring in even more people to your site. Note: it doesn't matter if each visitor costs you money, because the secret is you'll make it all back in volume. The best way to get people to notice you is to create a flashy ad and air it during the superbowl. Sure it's expensive, but you have to spend money to make money, right? The best ads are the ones targeted to gen-x-ers. Make sure to avoid mentioning anything about your site other than your domain name -- anything else is sure to be ignored by the viewers.
Meanwhile you need to hire more people to proactively grow the mindshare of your site while leveraging your fundamental skillset. Ideally everyone you hire should be under 23. Any older than that and they'll bring along too much baggage and obsess about "standards", "security" and "planning".
Anyhow, good luck (like you'll need it). You couldn't be entering this business at a better time!
I took Engineering Physics in university so I'm no stranger to advanced math. I know the fundamental theories they're breaking things down to, but this is still some hard stuff to understand. For instance:
If the goal is to really make this stuff understandable I think they need to provide some much more basic examples in the style of: If you have 3 apples and I give you 2 more apples, how many apples do you have?
I think for the above axiom an equivalent would be:
j: it is raining
y: the ground is wet
c: there are puddles on the ground
If it is raining then if the ground is wet there are puddles on the ground.
If the above is true then:
If it's true that if it is raining then the ground is wet, it's true that if it's raining then there are puddles on the ground.
This basically says: if whenever the ground is wet there are puddles, and whenever it rains the ground is wet, then whenever it rains the ground will be wet and there will be puddles.
Then again, it is a Monday.
And the average cost of getting something patented is about $10,000. That'll buy an awful lot of lawyering.
I used to work somewhere where we were talking to Sony about working with them, we found out they're not interested unless you're going to be selling something like a million units of something. (It's been a while so I can't remember the exact details).
If your market is small enough, the huge fish won't care. If it's going to be a huge market then either go with a company that can get a lot of VC funding, or go with a huge company.
Patents sometimes make it possible for small companies to compete, but only if that small company can find $10,000 to get the patent, or the $50,000 to defend that patent. So that's not really a "small" company anymore. And it will only work if that patent doesn't depend on one of the tens of thousands of patents that one of the big companies already owns.
Basically, if Sony wants your market they'll find a way to get it, patent or no patent. I personally can't remember the last time a tiny little company used a patent to fight off a big company.