Actually I'm not sure taxing users is necessarily ludicrous when compared to the artificiality of DRMing content. This is what happens with Universities, the BBC etc. - it rather depends doesn't it?
Remember the Mono project? It sounds like you picked up the spin from these people.
Despite instant rebuttal this "Dotnet is standard" claim got plenty of airtime and repeats on Slashdot, either in the form of de Icaza's breezy and tendentious "status reports" or from individuals whose notion of being helpful to FOSS was to encourage ever more brain-dead cloning.
To repeat the clarification, C# and the CLR are ECMA standards and are thought to be free of patent liabilities whereas the other 90% of the Dotnet API is not. And thanks to the clarification from MS themselves, the whole Mono thing is now pushing up the daisies.
Interesting references to Aldous's output. Can't help feeling that I would find some of them wearing a bit less well that Huxley I's works though...
Aldous's brother Julian was more in the rationalist tradition and was well known to radio audiences in the 1940s and 50s here. Here's a pic of him on the great man's knee.
Well I can recommend him without reservation, he is much more readable than Darwin, or more readable than the Origin at least. As H.L. Mencken says (quoted on Amazon) he was "perhaps the greatest virtuoso of plain English who has ever lived". It's astonishing how he rarely puts a foot wrong though he had so much less material to work with than modern day naturalists: birds must have evolved from dinosaurs, evolution could operate at a cosmic scale etc. (see recent/. stories for confirmation!)
There's a good biography by Adrian Desmond but good collections of essays are harder to find. I have one from a US university (that omits the one quoted above) but now can't find it again on Amazon US; Amazon UK have quite a few in print though.
A view of the debate from back then can be enlightening. For example, a recent review of Dawkins' God Delusion in the NY Review of Books took him to task for "merely" repeating the same points as the Victorians, but a more accurate criticism would be that he failed even to do this. The reviewer mistakenly thinks that half-way house positions on intelligent design (e.g. that god designed various initial patterns for lifeforms) are a modern phenomenon whereas in fact you can read that Huxley had an early run-in on exactly this ground with Richard Owen and his archetypes. Needless to say he came off best, this time thanks to his painstaking studies of embryology.
He may have disagreed with it (you're thinking of disutopian rants in BNW?) but whether he repudiated it successfully or not is a matter of opinion of course...
And grandad might have been flattered to be described as typically 19th century, though I'm sure he was convinced he was a rebel at the time.
Indeed, but I hope you won't be offended if I suggest that T H Huxley put it better in 1892. (Quoted at length because the last bit is both amusing and still relevant, unfortunately).
"From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and people.
These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of right action.
History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have attained to any agreement about these matters, or that history indicates a widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice, with the onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their adherents delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with criminality, deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity."
Fine, but where we are now is that if the influence of the EU wanes we will be even further under the control of the British Patent Office.
Remember that it was the UK PO who were the prime movers in the attempt to railroad the EU parliament into accepting the most egregious form software patent legislation. Resisting this is probably among the most useful things Europarl has ever done.
Linus actual view is that he has "a particular dislike for DRM technology" according to this news report. His Kernel list posting on the subject is hardly encouraging.
I happen to agree that there are valid scenarios for Trusted Computing but disempowering the user is not among them. This is an imposition of Vista and not a consequence of buying a DVD.
Yes the failure to dissolve both houses precipitated the crisis (Whitlam instead requested an election for half the Senate), but actual dissolution didn't happen until afterwards; in fact it wasn't decided upon until after the govt was dismissed. So presenting the double dissolution as the cause is pretty tortured logic.
This is utter nonsense, it was entirely the GG's initiative. He represents the Queen completely, for her even to have been consulted would have been a breach of protocol.
And I've no idea what you mean by "double dissolution" as a cause, perhaps you mean dissolution was the effect?
Is ODSL funded by Red Hat as well? Seems to have a Novell slant, to the extent of (ludicrously) claiming that cross-platform development is "finally" available with Mono 1.2. Like it wasn't with Java?
Anyone care to estimate how many companies put Linux in place to run Mono vs. Java?
Aye indeed. I seem to remember working on some OS way back that did have disk scheduling, which seems essential in most ordinary business aps (otherwise a low priority app can bring a high priority one to a standstill by disk hogging). Might have been MVS or AS/400, or maybe Stratus VOS... anyway I remember being surprised that Unix was being considered as a replacement platform when it couldn't do this.
Looking briefly at the Vista description, it sounds like there might be some milage in trying to implement a more generic scheduler for Linux rather than separate ones for regular CPU, CPU/GPU and I/O - that seems a bit clunky. A general scheduler would support an integrated priority "profile" including real-time constraints and be extensible to cover other resources such as a database or similar service. I'm sure someone's had a go at something like this...
Yes, it is essential to avoid Matshita drives, however it can be tricky as I believe they may be the only source of 1/3 height units used in small laptops.
Anyway, I just escaped having one inflicted on me as part of a Sony SZ and bought an Asus W3J with a Toshiba/Samsung drive instead.
Applications for FOSS platforms are either going to be developed in Java or Mono. The idea that they're going to be developed in Dotnet and "ported" is and always was a mirage.
Now why would I pick Mono for Linux when I have Java?
Will be interesting to see to what extent Mono's brain-dead cloning precipitated this deal. One wonders whether Samba and OpenOffice (!) really were concerns or whether they were just mentioned as padding so that Mono didn't stand out.
Mono allows very few things to run on free software platforms that were not expressly written for Mono, brings nothing not already available with Java or Python and hands direction of technical policy to Microsoft.
Nevertheless, Mono is as lazy and blatant a rip-off of chunks of Dotnet as it is possible to contrive, so if Microsoft choose to make use of the large number of patent lawyers they have hired recently I think it's possible to guess what might be an open goal for them.
Yawn. For those not under the influence of Miguel's Kool-Aid, the reference above clearly refers to C Sharp and CLI only, and does not cover the vast bulk of the Dotnet API.
Guess it must be over 3 years now that you guys have been being pulled up for this one on/., but I guess there will always be enough new stooges to make it worthwhile huh?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I'm not sure taxing users is necessarily ludicrous when compared to the artificiality of DRMing content. This is what happens with Universities, the BBC etc. - it rather depends doesn't it?
Bingo! Hmm, are all the other posts redundant now?
A deduction of impeccable, if not overly taxing, logic.
.NET (circa 2005)
However, Mono's claim was never that it would be ahead of Dotnet, but always that it was equivalent:
Mono is an open source implementation of
Mono is built on open standards etc.
of course it never was, is not, and never will be - that is the objection.
Microsoft would always be in the driving seat and other implementations also-rans that would never be certified by software makers.
But this is all academic now that the patent threats which many of us predicted four years ago have materialized.
Remember the Mono project? It sounds like you picked up the spin from these people.
Despite instant rebuttal this "Dotnet is standard" claim got plenty of airtime and repeats on Slashdot, either in the form of de Icaza's breezy and tendentious "status reports" or from individuals whose notion of being helpful to FOSS was to encourage ever more brain-dead cloning.
To repeat the clarification, C# and the CLR are ECMA standards and are thought to be free of patent liabilities whereas the other 90% of the Dotnet API is not. And thanks to the clarification from MS themselves, the whole Mono thing is now pushing up the daisies.
Interesting references to Aldous's output. Can't help feeling that I would find some of them wearing a bit less well that Huxley I's works though...
Aldous's brother Julian was more in the rationalist tradition and was well known to radio audiences in the 1940s and 50s here. Here's a pic of him on the great man's knee.
Well I can recommend him without reservation, he is much more readable than Darwin, or more readable than the Origin at least. As H.L. Mencken says (quoted on Amazon) he was "perhaps the greatest virtuoso of plain English who has ever lived". It's astonishing how he rarely puts a foot wrong though he had so much less material to work with than modern day naturalists: birds must have evolved from dinosaurs, evolution could operate at a cosmic scale etc. (see recent /. stories for confirmation!)
There's a good biography by Adrian Desmond but good collections of essays are harder to find. I have one from a US university (that omits the one quoted above) but now can't find it again on Amazon US; Amazon UK have quite a few in print though.
A view of the debate from back then can be enlightening. For example, a recent review of Dawkins' God Delusion in the NY Review of Books took him to task for "merely" repeating the same points as the Victorians, but a more accurate criticism would be that he failed even to do this. The reviewer mistakenly thinks that half-way house positions on intelligent design (e.g. that god designed various initial patterns for lifeforms) are a modern phenomenon whereas in fact you can read that Huxley had an early run-in on exactly this ground with Richard Owen and his archetypes. Needless to say he came off best, this time thanks to his painstaking studies of embryology.
He may have disagreed with it (you're thinking of disutopian rants in BNW?) but whether he repudiated it successfully or not is a matter of opinion of course...
And grandad might have been flattered to be described as typically 19th century, though I'm sure he was convinced he was a rebel at the time.
Well I never knew that. I wonder who would be qualified to arbitrate in any contractual dispute? ;-)
"From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and people.
These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of right action.
History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have attained to any agreement about these matters, or that history indicates a widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice, with the onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their adherents delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with criminality, deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity."
Fine, but where we are now is that if the influence of the EU wanes we will be even further under the control of the British Patent Office.
Remember that it was the UK PO who were the prime movers in the attempt to railroad the EU parliament into accepting the most egregious form software patent legislation. Resisting this is probably among the most useful things Europarl has ever done.
I happen to agree that there are valid scenarios for Trusted Computing but disempowering the user is not among them. This is an imposition of Vista and not a consequence of buying a DVD.
Yes the failure to dissolve both houses precipitated the crisis (Whitlam instead requested an election for half the Senate), but actual dissolution didn't happen until afterwards; in fact it wasn't decided upon until after the govt was dismissed. So presenting the double dissolution as the cause is pretty tortured logic.
This is utter nonsense, it was entirely the GG's initiative. He represents the Queen completely, for her even to have been consulted would have been a breach of protocol.
And I've no idea what you mean by "double dissolution" as a cause, perhaps you mean dissolution was the effect?
Is ODSL funded by Red Hat as well? Seems to have a Novell slant, to the extent of (ludicrously) claiming that cross-platform development is "finally" available with Mono 1.2. Like it wasn't with Java?
Anyone care to estimate how many companies put Linux in place to run Mono vs. Java?
Aye indeed. I seem to remember working on some OS way back that did have disk scheduling, which seems essential in most ordinary business aps (otherwise a low priority app can bring a high priority one to a standstill by disk hogging). Might have been MVS or AS/400, or maybe Stratus VOS... anyway I remember being surprised that Unix was being considered as a replacement platform when it couldn't do this.
Looking briefly at the Vista description, it sounds like there might be some milage in trying to implement a more generic scheduler for Linux rather than separate ones for regular CPU, CPU/GPU and I/O - that seems a bit clunky. A general scheduler would support an integrated priority "profile" including real-time constraints and be extensible to cover other resources such as a database or similar service. I'm sure someone's had a go at something like this...
Yes, it is essential to avoid Matshita drives, however it can be tricky as I believe they may be the only source of 1/3 height units used in small laptops.
Anyway, I just escaped having one inflicted on me as part of a Sony SZ and bought an Asus W3J with a Toshiba/Samsung drive instead.
I think you missed his point.
Applications for FOSS platforms are either going to be developed in Java or Mono. The idea that they're going to be developed in Dotnet and "ported" is and always was a mirage.
Now why would I pick Mono for Linux when I have Java?
You realise that you've just discarded what was the original justification of the Mono project?
Without portability of applications from Windows to Mono, de Icaza's fig-leaf is blown away and we all might as well have stuck with Java.
Not any more, or were you expecting that once the project had real value MS would be supporting Mono?
The current project page.
Will be interesting to see to what extent Mono's brain-dead cloning precipitated this deal. One wonders whether Samba and OpenOffice (!) really were concerns or whether they were just mentioned as padding so that Mono didn't stand out.
Mono allows very few things to run on free software platforms that were not expressly written for Mono, brings nothing not already available with Java or Python and hands direction of technical policy to Microsoft.
Nevertheless, Mono is as lazy and blatant a rip-off of chunks of Dotnet as it is possible to contrive, so if Microsoft choose to make use of the large number of patent lawyers they have hired recently I think it's possible to guess what might be an open goal for them.
You can choose to ignore this etc. etc.
If the standard is "definitely constrained" to C Sharp and CLI, why did you try to claim otherwise?
Why is it necessary to repeatedly correct Mono advocates on this point?
Surely people can decide for themselves whether a language and a VM add up to "massive infrastructure" or not?
Yawn. For those not under the influence of Miguel's Kool-Aid, the reference above clearly refers to C Sharp and CLI only, and does not cover the vast bulk of the Dotnet API.
/., but I guess there will always be enough new stooges to make it worthwhile huh?
Guess it must be over 3 years now that you guys have been being pulled up for this one on
So the drooling Miguelites are out in force...
mindless copying can get boring after a while I guess...