If you read Gates' comments (and Mundie's comments as well) charitably, they are saying something reasonable: basic government and academic research should be licensed under terms that are open to proprietary development models (e.g., public domain, BSD), and in particular should not be GPLd, since that forecloses proprietary development. His example of TCP/IP is a bad one, since that isn't s/w, but a standard, but I suppose he means the TCP/IP stack incorporated into Windows.... Since that was developed originally at Berkeley and was BSD, it meets his criteria for good public policy.
This all sounds reasonable except:
It's not clear whether any actual problem with universities GPLing software and thus precluding proprietary development exists, so it's a bit silly to make the argument
Chairman Bill's comments aren't particularly objectionable here (he actually makes the point of distinguishing open source from GPL), but are in a context of a pattern of deliberately confusing GPL with open source
Chairman Bill's comments (while again not particularly objectionable here), are in a context of misleading precisely how GPL is viral (Ballmer's comments in particular make it seem as though developing software on or for Linux precludes you from releasing that software under a proprietary license)
I take this as a "good cop" interview to make what Microsoft is saying seem reasonable, while letting the misleading things Mundie and Ballmer are saying still hang out there. Of course, MS has poisoned the water so much that people haven't even read what Mr. Bill has said, and are leaping to damn it with all the appropriate arguments mustered against Ballmer. As you sow, so shall you reap...
But you wouldn't say that if you could read ancient Greek (I assume that's what you meant, not modern Greek). If you could, you would be happy that there need be no longer a half-dozen ideosyncratic methods for encoding ancient Greek, with equally ideosyncratic input methods. All you are really saying is: if I don't need it no-one does. And I don't see how a character set allowing faithful encoding of Greek characters and diacritics places any special burdens on you, who don't need to use them....
Or perhaps you are being very subtly sarcastic? Or trolling?
that an implementation of STL (the MS implementation, one presumes) at the time the book was written was immature. The above post makes it seem as though Kernighan and Pike were frothing in their denunciation of C++.
One of the emerging trends in academic "out there" approaches to software engineering has been moving patterns from architecture (sofware and housing) to behavioral practice, of which this is a negative example. For positive examples, there is an intesting website I ran across the other day about a concept called "Extreme Programming". This concept wouldn't scale to the sort of distributed development done for OSS, but portions of it might. In any case, documenting robust positive patterns for OSS development sounds like an interesting project.
For something as non-traditional as Ars Digital University, why require a BS (any BS) and a certain SAT score?
Aren't some of the likely participants in such a program high school dropouts or college dropouts who have used self-study and self-initiative to get them where they need to go? Likely, don't they already own SICP and use it for self-study? Aren't they the people who already learned Oracle from the docs? Etc? Perhaps they scored reasonably high on their SATs but found university stultifying and boring? Perhaps they scored poorly on their SATs (poor test takers, perhaps) but have been highly successful in independent technology consulting.
Aren't these the types you want? Bright, highly motivated self-learners who could take advantage of a non-traditional approach to CS education? Or do you really want only those people who have already done well in traditional approaches (and why don't traditional CS schools already work well for them?)
People have already mentioned Gutenburg as an example of how digital libraries can change the experience of reading. Likewise, www.perseus.tufts.edu is another such example: all of the major classical authors, in Latin and Greek, with English translations, linked dictionaries (with morphological searches!!), commentaries, etc. For anyone who has tried reading Greek, unless one is a completely fluent, books are an encumbrance (try reading Plato on the plane, when you have to lug a dictionary, a grammer, and a commentary -- of course you can't read the Perseus texts yet on the plane, but someday you will be able to).
The exciting thing will come when/if Perseus becomes the locus for classical scholarship, publishing preprints (a la LANL) or e-journals with hyperlinks to source texts.
OTOH, there is a dark side to mindless promoting of e-texts to the exclusion of books:
Until resolutions improve considerably, reading an electronic book is a poor substitute for the "real thing."
Even if resolutions approach or surpass ink, not all books will be digitized. Much of our cultural heritage will be accessible only in paper form in institutions such as the library of congress
Paper is a much better archive form than any electronic storage medium now existing (bit rot, changing media, etc.)
Nicholson Baker published an article in the New Yorker a number of years ago, exposing the e-sins of the SF public library, which literally trashed books while moving to a hip wired new facility which didn't fit all of the holdings of the library. Likewise, Baker explored the loss of paper card catalogs in moving to electronic catalogs. The point is not to be a Luddite, but to understand the limitations of technology as well as the benefits, and have a healthy respect for what paper has been able to do over the past 2500 years.
Whethter or not this was the specific issue with LinuxCare (if, indeed, there is an issue) revenue recognition is the beast the gores many a company: I think it is what undid the stock value of MicroStrategies. The issue is that what seems quite natural in many cases is not legal.
It is often the case that you get a contract for services, and get money in hand for that contract. The tendency is to recognize that money as revenue. Unfortunately, you can't recognize the revenue until you actually perform and bill the work. It gets even more complicated when get money up front for software which you haven't yet delivered. Part of that money up front should be assumed development services, which you can recognize while you perform the development, part is product revenue which you can recognize when you ship. (Note: IANAL or Accountant)
There was an interesting article in the WSJ today about how lawyers are increasingly using the legal system to fight for social causes (Nazi reparations, tobacco, guns, etc.), seeing it as the only possible solution in the absence of real governmental leadership on these issues.
While one may sympathize with the viewpoints of the individual lawyers, this sort of thing only serves to show how far the idea of a law-governed society has degenerated. A law-governed society does not attempt to legally determine every action: rather, it attempts to make public the common-sense customs governing society. It's the customs, not the laws, which are important: the laws are there to provide an objective, public check on the ability of the state, or of individuals, to subvert the common-sense customs and conventions.
When you subsitute legalese for law (understood as formally stated common-sense), and you then attempt the impossible, which is to make that legalese define all behavior, the underpinnings of society (the rule of law) as a whole are undercut and perverted.
Similar to this are laptop keyboards with the little stick-mice. It takes a while to get used to them, but once you are, using the mouse while typing becomes second nature.
For those who haven't seen them, the mouse is a little stick between the G, H, and B keys. It sticks up just a bit above the keys. The Left mouse button is just below the space-bar, the Right is below the left. I push the left mouse button with the tip of my right thumb, and the right button with my right thumb-knuckle. It takes a while to get used to it, and some people never do, but when you know how to do it, using the mouse becomes second nature, and it is very hard to go back to "regular" mice.
Interesting take on seeing Linux as being parasitic on the Microsoft-engendered near monopoly of ix86 architectures. It's very easy to survive when you can run on nearly every machine anyone purchases. Still, what will take Linux to the next level won't necessarily be the Intel factor, but the fact that Linux scales to next generation server and user usage niches. I think the future of Linux is more in the watchamacallit digital TV-VCR thing, and in the Cobalt-type machines, rather than on the traditional server and desktop.
I like the idea of developing component models in an anarchic, evolutionary way. I don't mean to say that the development of KOM/OpenParts is anarchic, but that looking at both Gnome and KDE, you are both throwing models out there, and not all of them will survive.
My hope is that a standard will grow out of both projects, since I feel is that while desktop environments should not be standard (KDE, Gnome, etc. should all be out there and flourishing), component object models should be standard. So how do you standardize while "competing" with Gnome? Or am I wrong, and standardization is not necessary here? If a later standard component model is agreed to, can you afford to rewrite KDE, or will this essentially mean throwing the whole thing away? Are you backing yourself into a corner with KDE2?
Perhaps you will have noticed this other URL. I studied some Turkish some years ago, for a trip there, and while I can't read it, it does seem to me to be a close counterpart to the English version, and contains all of the same political and social commentary.
I agree that there is a good deal of stylistic variation on the English version. There are also differences in transliteration of Turkish words (Türkiye comes out Turkey some places, Tirkiye, in other places), etc. The most likely explaination is tht Mr. Cagri wrote the text in Turkish, and several different people helped in the translation to English.
The fact that there is a Turkish version which looks to be well composed, seems to be a good indication that this is not a hoax.
I don't really get all this IPO madness enough to put down money (feels like playing roulette). I didn't say Cobalt is a good investment, just a better one than RedHat (but market hype makes all the difference, doesn't it?)
While RedHat is building brand identity in the Linux distribution space, I believe Cobalt is in the business space that ultimately will change the world: turning the server into a commodity.
If the basis for stock price/market valuation for an Internet/dot-com/etc. is really based on expectation of ability to significantly change the computing world a la Netscape (rather than mere celebrity value), I would bet my money on Cobalt rather than RedHat.
I find the implication that Linux is overcomercialized somewhat ironic, since the BSD license is supposed to be more friendly to comercial use.
The contrast between BSD and Linux is the contrast between the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Clearly, Linux development is more anarchic, and one might expect that BSD would have some temporary advantages because of that. However, Richard Gabriel wrote an interesting essay, Worse is Better, explaining why C and Unix had overtaken Lisp, etc. The title is somewhat facetious but the observation is a fine one. The key point (missed, I think, by Gabriel), is not that the weaknesses of C vs. Lisp contributed to its success, but that the "get it working, then get it right" nature, and the openness of C and Unix let it evolve and reach perfection faster than striving for absolute perfection right off would have.
Both approaches have a good deal of merit, and one is not more right than the other. However, I would suspect that Linux will advance at a faster rate than BSD. Perhaps not always in useful directions, perhaps not always doing the One Right Thing, but over time, it will get there.
I assumed "meta" was Greek, but it could be Latin. meta, -ae is a turning post for a race, so Transmeta could be "Beyond the mark", though if you go beyond the mark, you have generally lost the race. All Greek: tranes-metis: Clear council.
If you translate the name Transmeta, what does it mean?
Like the company, the phrase is entirely vague: "Above the beyond."
Wrong. (Doesn't anyone study Latin and Greek anymore?)
trans is Latin, and means across, beyond. meta is Greek, and means with, among, beyond, after, next. (Don't ask me how it got to mean both with/among and beyond/after.) I assume the name is supposed to mean "Beyond the next"
Hypertrans or Supermeta would mean "Above the beyond", to the extent it would mean anything.
Who buys SAP R/3 on Linux? Anyone with the money for really huge traditional rollouts of SAP (Anderson comes in and re-engineers your processes aroud SAP for $5M) doesn't want to put SAP on a Linux box. (Besides, that market is well saturated these days). Where I see the market is for:
Small and mid-tier companies, with a standardized implementation and integrated support services (application, OS and hardware)
3rd party application hosting using the 3-tier R/3 versions.
What we need to see to make the first happen is SAP and consulting firms positioning Linux SAP boxes like appliances: reliable, high performance, low maintenance. This implies built-in support, or pass through support contracts to the Linuxcares of the world.
I personally use LyX for all my non-business word processing. It always does The Right Thing, allows you to get a sense for the structure and organization of your document (which I've always had trouble doing with plain Latex or SGML), but discourages/prevents using ad hoc formatting. It is essentially a visual tool for writing Latex (or DocBook or Literate Programming): its paradigm is WYSIWYM: What you see is what you mean. www.lyx.org.
What one might do is put generic APIs into Mozilla which can be used with any software, and some mechanism for writing and registering interfaces to specific programs. This is a Better Way To Do It, anyway, and avoids any export problems involved in actually imbedding the software.
There is clearly a difference in egregiousness between someone putting a me-to moderation to make a post +5 when it deserves to be +2, and downgrading an appropriate post, because it expresses an unpopular opinion.
I have some issues with the current Meta Moderation (should be M^2 or M**2, no?).
Problems are:
Fair/Unfair works well for negative moderation, but not for positive moderation. (Appropriate/Inappropriate would be better).
Negative moderation should be more important to M2 than positive moderation, but, at least in the sample of 10 I had, it was mostly positive moderation I was meta moderating. Should be 80/20, I think.
I may feel that moderating a post to +2 was appropriate, pass on the moderation to +3 and +4, and feel that +5 was entirely inappropriate. That's the only sort of decision that really makes sense for M2ing positive moderation, but you currently don't have the information to do that. Having the effect of the moderation visible (+4->+5, e.g.) would be helpful.
I have personally used my moderation points to moderate up posts I felt were inappropriately moderated down, but I would hate to see an M2er M2 me down because of that. Again, having some indication of the effects and context of moderation would be helpful.
Whew..., the meta discussion gets difficult to phrase. I like M2, but I do think it needs the tweaks suggested.
Slashdot Mirror
This all sounds reasonable except:
- It's not clear whether any actual problem with universities GPLing software and thus precluding proprietary development exists, so it's a bit silly to make the argument
- Chairman Bill's comments aren't particularly objectionable here (he actually makes the point of distinguishing open source from GPL), but are in a context of a pattern of deliberately confusing GPL with open source
- Chairman Bill's comments (while again not particularly objectionable here), are in a context of misleading precisely how GPL is viral (Ballmer's comments in particular make it seem as though developing software on or for Linux precludes you from releasing that software under a proprietary license)
I take this as a "good cop" interview to make what Microsoft is saying seem reasonable, while letting the misleading things Mundie and Ballmer are saying still hang out there. Of course, MS has poisoned the water so much that people haven't even read what Mr. Bill has said, and are leaping to damn it with all the appropriate arguments mustered against Ballmer. As you sow, so shall you reap...Or perhaps you are being very subtly sarcastic? Or trolling?
that an implementation of STL (the MS implementation, one presumes) at the time the book was written was immature. The above post makes it seem as though Kernighan and Pike were frothing in their denunciation of C++.
One of the emerging trends in academic "out there" approaches to software engineering has been moving patterns from architecture (sofware and housing) to behavioral practice, of which this is a negative example. For positive examples, there is an intesting website I ran across the other day about a concept called "Extreme Programming". This concept wouldn't scale to the sort of distributed development done for OSS, but portions of it might. In any case, documenting robust positive patterns for OSS development sounds like an interesting project.
Aren't some of the likely participants in such a program high school dropouts or college dropouts who have used self-study and self-initiative to get them where they need to go? Likely, don't they already own SICP and use it for self-study? Aren't they the people who already learned Oracle from the docs? Etc? Perhaps they scored reasonably high on their SATs but found university stultifying and boring? Perhaps they scored poorly on their SATs (poor test takers, perhaps) but have been highly successful in independent technology consulting.
Aren't these the types you want? Bright, highly motivated self-learners who could take advantage of a non-traditional approach to CS education? Or do you really want only those people who have already done well in traditional approaches (and why don't traditional CS schools already work well for them?)
The exciting thing will come when/if Perseus becomes the locus for classical scholarship, publishing preprints (a la LANL) or e-journals with hyperlinks to source texts.
OTOH, there is a dark side to mindless promoting of e-texts to the exclusion of books:
- Until resolutions improve considerably, reading an electronic book is a poor substitute for the "real thing."
- Even if resolutions approach or surpass ink, not all books will be digitized. Much of our cultural heritage will be accessible only in paper form in institutions such as the library of congress
- Paper is a much better archive form than any electronic storage medium now existing (bit rot, changing media, etc.)
Nicholson Baker published an article in the New Yorker a number of years ago, exposing the e-sins of the SF public library, which literally trashed books while moving to a hip wired new facility which didn't fit all of the holdings of the library. Likewise, Baker explored the loss of paper card catalogs in moving to electronic catalogs. The point is not to be a Luddite, but to understand the limitations of technology as well as the benefits, and have a healthy respect for what paper has been able to do over the past 2500 years.It is often the case that you get a contract for services, and get money in hand for that contract. The tendency is to recognize that money as revenue. Unfortunately, you can't recognize the revenue until you actually perform and bill the work. It gets even more complicated when get money up front for software which you haven't yet delivered. Part of that money up front should be assumed development services, which you can recognize while you perform the development, part is product revenue which you can recognize when you ship. (Note: IANAL or Accountant)
legimus on Perseus
legamus on Perseus
You are thinking of the wrong lego... but I'll stop now, really.
ludo is Latin for "I play", of which the plural is ludimus "we play".
While one may sympathize with the viewpoints of the individual lawyers, this sort of thing only serves to show how far the idea of a law-governed society has degenerated. A law-governed society does not attempt to legally determine every action: rather, it attempts to make public the common-sense customs governing society. It's the customs, not the laws, which are important: the laws are there to provide an objective, public check on the ability of the state, or of individuals, to subvert the common-sense customs and conventions.
When you subsitute legalese for law (understood as formally stated common-sense), and you then attempt the impossible, which is to make that legalese define all behavior, the underpinnings of society (the rule of law) as a whole are undercut and perverted.
Just add a 'cello, and 2 violins.
For those who haven't seen them, the mouse is a little stick between the G, H, and B keys. It sticks up just a bit above the keys. The Left mouse button is just below the space-bar, the Right is below the left. I push the left mouse button with the tip of my right thumb, and the right button with my right thumb-knuckle. It takes a while to get used to it, and some people never do, but when you know how to do it, using the mouse becomes second nature, and it is very hard to go back to "regular" mice.
Interesting take on seeing Linux as being parasitic on the Microsoft-engendered near monopoly of ix86 architectures. It's very easy to survive when you can run on nearly every machine anyone purchases. Still, what will take Linux to the next level won't necessarily be the Intel factor, but the fact that Linux scales to next generation server and user usage niches. I think the future of Linux is more in the watchamacallit digital TV-VCR thing, and in the Cobalt-type machines, rather than on the traditional server and desktop.
My hope is that a standard will grow out of both projects, since I feel is that while desktop environments should not be standard (KDE, Gnome, etc. should all be out there and flourishing), component object models should be standard. So how do you standardize while "competing" with Gnome? Or am I wrong, and standardization is not necessary here? If a later standard component model is agreed to, can you afford to rewrite KDE, or will this essentially mean throwing the whole thing away? Are you backing yourself into a corner with KDE2?
I agree that there is a good deal of stylistic variation on the English version. There are also differences in transliteration of Turkish words (Türkiye comes out Turkey some places, Tirkiye, in other places), etc. The most likely explaination is tht Mr. Cagri wrote the text in Turkish, and several different people helped in the translation to English.
The fact that there is a Turkish version which looks to be well composed, seems to be a good indication that this is not a hoax.
I don't really get all this IPO madness enough to put down money (feels like playing roulette). I didn't say Cobalt is a good investment, just a better one than RedHat (but market hype makes all the difference, doesn't it?)
While RedHat is building brand identity in the Linux distribution space, I believe Cobalt is in the business space that ultimately will change the world: turning the server into a commodity.
If the basis for stock price/market valuation for an Internet/dot-com/etc. is really based on expectation of ability to significantly change the computing world a la Netscape (rather than mere celebrity value), I would bet my money on Cobalt rather than RedHat.
The contrast between BSD and Linux is the contrast between the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Clearly, Linux development is more anarchic, and one might expect that BSD would have some temporary advantages because of that. However, Richard Gabriel wrote an interesting essay, Worse is Better, explaining why C and Unix had overtaken Lisp, etc. The title is somewhat facetious but the observation is a fine one. The key point (missed, I think, by Gabriel), is not that the weaknesses of C vs. Lisp contributed to its success, but that the "get it working, then get it right" nature, and the openness of C and Unix let it evolve and reach perfection faster than striving for absolute perfection right off would have.
Both approaches have a good deal of merit, and one is not more right than the other. However, I would suspect that Linux will advance at a faster rate than BSD. Perhaps not always in useful directions, perhaps not always doing the One Right Thing, but over time, it will get there.
I assumed "meta" was Greek, but it could be Latin. meta, -ae is a turning post for a race, so Transmeta could be "Beyond the mark", though if you go beyond the mark, you have generally lost the race. All Greek: tranes-metis: Clear council.
Like the company, the phrase is entirely vague: "Above the beyond."
Wrong. (Doesn't anyone study Latin and Greek anymore?)
trans is Latin, and means across, beyond. meta is Greek, and means with, among, beyond, after, next. (Don't ask me how it got to mean both with/among and beyond/after.) I assume the name is supposed to mean "Beyond the next"
Hypertrans or Supermeta would mean "Above the beyond", to the extent it would mean anything.
- Small and mid-tier companies, with a standardized implementation and integrated support services (application, OS and hardware)
- 3rd party application hosting using the 3-tier R/3 versions.
What we need to see to make the first happen is SAP and consulting firms positioning Linux SAP boxes like appliances: reliable, high performance, low maintenance. This implies built-in support, or pass through support contracts to the Linuxcares of the world.I personally use LyX for all my non-business word processing. It always does The Right Thing, allows you to get a sense for the structure and organization of your document (which I've always had trouble doing with plain Latex or SGML), but discourages/prevents using ad hoc formatting. It is essentially a visual tool for writing Latex (or DocBook or Literate Programming): its paradigm is WYSIWYM: What you see is what you mean. www.lyx.org.
What one might do is put generic APIs into Mozilla which can be used with any software, and some mechanism for writing and registering interfaces to specific programs. This is a Better Way To Do It, anyway, and avoids any export problems involved in actually imbedding the software.
Perhaps there should be a scale for M^2:
-5, -3, -1, 0, +1, +3, +5
Problems are:
- Fair/Unfair works well for negative moderation, but not for positive moderation. (Appropriate/Inappropriate would be better).
- Negative moderation should be more important to M2 than positive moderation, but, at least in the sample of 10 I had, it was mostly positive moderation I was meta moderating. Should be 80/20, I think.
- I may feel that moderating a post to +2 was appropriate, pass on the moderation to +3 and +4, and feel that +5 was entirely inappropriate. That's the only sort of decision that really makes sense for M2ing positive moderation, but you currently don't have the information to do that. Having the effect of the moderation visible (+4->+5, e.g.) would be helpful.
- I have personally used my moderation points to moderate up posts I felt were inappropriately moderated down, but I would hate to see an M2er M2 me down because of that. Again, having some indication of the effects and context of moderation would be helpful.
Whew..., the meta discussion gets difficult to phrase. I like M2, but I do think it needs the tweaks suggested.