They have to pay for servers and bandwidth, so it's understandable that they want to charge. However, it would be really nice if we could come up with true peer-to-peer collaborative filtering for E-mail. It's a harder problem, but it could obviate MAPS both as a bandwidth bottleneck and as a single point of legal attack.
Clearly they have a legitimate complaint against KDE. US Trademark law was on Adobe's side,
That's not so clear to me. I don't think "killustrator" is confusingly similar to "Adobe Illustrator". Even if it were, "killustrator" is not a commercial product that is for sale, so it is questionable whether trademark law even applies to it. And, of course, it is German trademark law, not US trademark law that applies in this case.
Adobe should have contacted the author of "killustrator" quietly and asked him nicely to change the name of his program.
you have to pay taxes even if you live and work in another country. If anybody living in the US has a savings account overseas, they have to pay taxes on that as well. If other property owned by Hughes Electronics is generally taxable in LA county, I don't see why their satellites would be any different.
The prescription is the same though: immediate radical new government regulations, a reduction in industry, expensive new pollution control requirements, and forcing people to live lifestyles they haven't voluntarily chosen.
When people grow up they discover that life is like that. The presence of other people and the presence of the real world forces us to "live lifestyles" that we haven't voluntarily chosen. Communities impose rules on their members. That's true for a bunch of college roommates as much as for a traditional, God-fearing US small town. It's also true for the international community of nations. Even if global warming and its ill consequences weren't so well proven, the fact that lots of nations are concerned about it alone should be reason enough for the US to cooperate.
By teaching Microsoft software to their students, schools are creating a dependency on Microsoft software. And Microsoft software is expensive. This is not like a drug to treat a disease, it's like an addiction to an expensive recreational drug: the drug itself creates the dependency.
It's good to hold schools responsible for copyright violations. Maybe if they begin to see the true cost of what they condemn their students to using, they'll think about using other, more affordable software. I'm not (just) talking about free software, but even some competition in the commercial software market would be nice. Atari, Amiga, Apple, etc., all used to be used in schools because they were a lot cheaper than PCs. But with the hardware being cheap and the software being pirated, Windows just ended up dominating.
Print-on-demand or book-on-demand isn't exactly new. Take a look here or here or here.
It sounds like what Marsh did is integrate the copier and an automatic binding machine. That's a nice incremental improvement and may make something like that more accessible to smaller book stores.
But I would ask another question: why do digitally delivered books have to be bound like traditional books? There are a lot of binding systems in widespread use that work just fine with no cutting, no trimming, no glue, etc.
Between us, I do not have the pretention to being familiar with the past 40+ years of systems research in itselft and/or the state of the art in all subjects.
I think that's at the heart of the problem: more open source developers need to spend more time getting familiar with the history of the field, and they need to think more about their choices. For open source, we vote with our feet. And if too many people aren't well informed or don't think much about their choices, the wrong projects will get all the support simply because they have good PR or push some hot-button issue.
I think that when a good idea shows itself (like.NET in this case), the open source community is by far the best at imitating it and making it better.
So, in the spirit of more reflection, for starters, here is a question to ponder: why didn't the open source community exhibit the same fervor about Java?
So, please be concrete: what ideas do you think are "innovative" in.NET? Please compare and contrast those with some of the key milestones in the history of computer systems research. In fact, just some examples of where you think C#/.NET innovates over Java would be interesting.
In the O'Reilly article, the author says that Miguel is open minded. [...] With an open mind you realize that vi and Emacs don't come even close to a fully integrated development environment.
Indeed. And the question is not why some people still don't get it, the real question is why it took the people on the Gnome project until 2001 to realize this. After all, the programming environment and language technology represented by C#/.NET predates the Gnome project by decades. Why didn't they have an open mind at the beginning?
And, equally important, why is their (and your) vision still limited to copying Microsoft? Are they (and you) simply not familiar with the past 40+ years of systems research, or the state of the art?
"Five years ago, we [open source developers] had the high ground in technical tools," said de Icaza. "We had better tools and a better development environment than Windows developers had. Now, with.NET, I see that the roles have changed and Windows developers have much better tools than we have.
This is a pretty depressing statement because it is so blatantly false all around. Five years ago, de Icaza chose to use tools for Gnome that were primitive even back then: C, make, autoconf, etc. You don't have to get very advanced to do better than that. C++ was around. GNUStep was around. Modula-3 was around. Eiffel was around. There were several mature, high-level GUI toolkits. Visual C++ was better integrated and easier to set up than GNU Emacs even back then. Five years ago, there were already numerous high level, open source languages with excellent debuggers and excellent environments. If Icaza would have wanted something better, he had the choices then. Instead, he chose primitive tools back then and stuck with them, and now that Microsoft adopts C# he finally calls those tools what they are: primitive.
According to de Icaza, the interesting thing about SharpDevelop is that the environment is really complete in only a few lines of code. It's really amazing when you compare the code size to other projects.
Again, de Icaza missed a big opportunity. As one of the leaders of the Gnome project, he could have caused adoption of this kind of "amazing" technology on Linux a couple of years ago in the form of Java. Whether he agreed with Sun's implementation strategy for Java or not, the Java language and runtime is not importantly different from C# and.NET, and Gnome could have altered it in whatever way they liked. Yet, Gnome kept on focussing on laboriously and slowly hacking C code and basically making fun of high level languages.
As far as I'm concerned, the Gnome project established its course long ago: they don't lead, they merely follow Microsoft (and something similar can be said for KDE). Maybe that's good enough to keep Linux alive as a credible alternative to Microsoft, but it really isn't very interesting to me. If open source becomes dominated by clones of Microsoft software that's two years behind the market leader, I might as well just use the real thing.
The only glimmer of hope is that the adoption of anything more high level than C by an open source project as large and central as Gnome can only improve things in the open source world. It's a good first step, whether the something being adopted is Java or C#. Maybe that will finally break the stranglehold that primitive tools and extreme conservatism have had on this community. It's kind of sad that it took Microsoft to do this, since they invented none of this technology, but--whatever it takes, I guess.
Re:good idea killed by .com madness
on
Webvan Out Of Gas
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· Score: 2
Well, it worked before the 50's because many people didn't have cars. In the 50's, you had stay-at-home wives with cars and lots of time (if I may oversimplify), comparatively little congestion, and cheap gas. So, you didn't need home delivery. In the 00's, we have lots busy two job couples with no time for anything, expensive gas, and very congested highways. So, what didn't make much sense in the 50's may well make sense again.
This is pretty sad. Having groceries delivered makes a lot of sense: it saves gas, time, and hassles. And given today's standardized, prepackaged products and nondescript fresh fruits and vegetables, there isn't much point in selecting merchandise yourself anymore anyway.
But it takes time for people to change their habits. If you are a.com that bets on make-it-or-break-it in three years, that's not going to work.
Web ordering of groceries and home delivery should have started locally and in specialty populations: homebound individuals, company groceries, busy upscale single professionals (BUSPs?), people living in Manhattan, etc.
Companies can and should make sure every step along the way that they break even. Then, their user populations will naturally tend to expand as more and more people discover the convenience and habits adjust. A tie-in with cheap handhelds for making grocery lists in the kitchen (where the computer normally isn't) would also have helped.
I hope Peapod will be able to stick with it and that others will not be scared away by this. Webvan failed because they wanted to grow too fast; the idea was and is fundamentally sound.
I never really liked Lego. But Meccano/Erector Set also seemed pretty limited. To me, the most interesting construction toy was Fischer Technik. It offered many more options for building mechanical devices than either Lego or Meccano, and it offered analog and digital control circuitry, as well as computer interfaces, long before Lego. Fischer Technik is still a great system for prototyping and is actually used in industry for that purpose.
Re:scripting languages are a dime a dozen
on
Why not Ruby?
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· Score: 2
Larry Wall wanted a common interface and a more rational data model to tie them together with. From a broken but standardized scripting language to a cleaner syntax stolen from `c' and two of the best tools' tricks built directly in was athe basic plan there. Building on sh would have made it a nightmare.
That seems like a strawman. Larry could have built on any number of existing scripting languages, interpreted languages, and syntaxes. Whether he deliberately ignored prior art or just didn't know about it, I don't know. But it seems pretty clear that he took a kind of perverse pleasure in combining the most oddball elements of sed, awk, sh, and C syntax.
[...a good scripting language implementation that takes full advantage of C++.]
Which language would you recommend we start from? To make it work well would require some nasty bolting-on in some languages.
Huh? Why would implementing Perl6 or Python3 in C++ require some "nasty bolting-on"? God knows, the current implementations of those languages are messy enough internally that they could benefit from some abstractions.
What does Ruby really offer as a compelling reason to change?
I dunno, why do you ask me? I think Python and Perl are already superfluous, let alone Ruby. I think the only reason for using them is that they are widely available and have user communities. Technically, as far as I'm concerned, they seem to be much less efficient implementations of the interpreted dynamic languages we already had in the 1970's and 1980's
.5M and 15y seems excessive, but it also looks like a criminal prosecution, so those are probably the maximum penalties for what he's been charged with. If convicted, I would imagine the real sentence would be much less.
Of course: it's legal blackmail. "Well, Mr. X, you can either sign a confession here and get probation and a $20k fine, or you can have your day in court and, regardless of whether you are guilty or not, we'll be able to confuse the jury enough to convict you and put you away for 15 years. Which will it be?"
The ever spiralling maximum penalties in the US are achieving what they were designed to: they are reducing the court's work by getting people to plea bargain. The same principle is, of course, applied by courts in China, Central America, Turkey, except they usually still use somewhat cruder measures. The inquisition and the Salem witch trials were good at it, too.
scripting languages are a dime a dozen
on
Why not Ruby?
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· Score: 2
We have Tcl/Tk, Python, Ruby, Lua, Perl, PHP, AWK, VB, JavaScript, and Bash, and those are only the major ones.
To me, the real question is why people keep reinventing the wheel. Technically, none of those languages break any ground compared to their predecessors of 30 years ago. In fact, on the whole, they are simply slowly retracing the early evolution of Lisp and Smalltalk. Perl and Python could have started out being as good as Perl 5.6 and Python 2.1 if they had built on what had come before.
In any case, I use Python for any kind of complex scripting and Perl as a replacement for many simple shell scripts. Lua is great for embedding because it's so compact. If Python didn't exist, I would probably be using Ruby, but Python 2.1 cleans up most of the rough corners of earlier versions of Python (scoping, etc.).
What I think is missing is a good scripting language implementation that takes full advantage of C++. Perl, Python, and Ruby (?) are C-based and require laborious manual bookkeeping when interfacing with C/C++ code (Swig helps but isn't a complete solution). The implementations themselves would also benefit from C++'s abstraction facilities.
Well, if there is no express or implied purchase contract for the box, you don't own it. So, it would seem sensible for them to be able to get it back eventually.
My DSL equipment belongs to me, even though I didn't pay a cent for it: the contract with my provider gave me a discount equal to the purchase price for signing up for a year.
It takes almost twice the time and money to build plants in CA as any other state, because of heavy regulation.
The problem with that argument (even if the facts were accurate) is that power companies didn't just fail to build power plants in CA, they failed to build power plants in other western states as well. So, it can't be CA environmental regulations that are at the root of the problem.
The other problem with that argument is that the capacity in 2001 is adequate. Power became scarce because sellers of power found it profitable to make it so, not because there is an absolute shortage.
Very true. I hope you understand, however, that it was the power companies that lobbied for this kind of deregulation. Power companies wanted to fix consumer rates because they thought they'd be able to buy power really cheap on the open market and charge consumers way above market rate for a couple of years. As it turns out, the fixed rates worked the other way and they ended up going bankrupt.
In different words, the power crisis and bankruptcies in California are a result of industry-friendly regulation accidentally backfiring.
many years of extreme *environmental* regulation
There is no evidence whatsoever that environmental regulations have anything to do with the power crisis in California. In fact, the state government had been pleading for years with power companies to build extra capacity, and they just weren't interested because they didn't want to drive down prices further.
And it looks like in a couple of years, there is going to be a power glut, since already more projects are planned than even Cheney claims are necessary.
Californians already know that: California has been doing well compared to the rest of the US on energy conservation, and responded particularly well to the recent outages, averting a number of blackouts. If US industry would get with it and produce more energy efficient appliances, cars, and building materials, Californians could go a lot further--the demand in California is there.
And, of course, in many European countries, people have a higher standard of living and nicer homes than what people in the US have, at considerably lower per-capita power consumption.
The sun is a great nuclear reactor, the interior of the earth is a great, partially decay-driven, heating system, and my gas fired boiler is great for giving me hot water in the morning. And I would like all those processes to stay where they are: safely enclosed and at a safe distance. Or do you light a fire on your living room floor every morning?
Slashdot Mirror
They have to pay for servers and bandwidth, so it's understandable that they want to charge. However, it would be really nice if we could come up with true peer-to-peer collaborative filtering for E-mail. It's a harder problem, but it could obviate MAPS both as a bandwidth bottleneck and as a single point of legal attack.
That's not so clear to me. I don't think "killustrator" is confusingly similar to "Adobe Illustrator". Even if it were, "killustrator" is not a commercial product that is for sale, so it is questionable whether trademark law even applies to it. And, of course, it is German trademark law, not US trademark law that applies in this case.
Adobe should have contacted the author of "killustrator" quietly and asked him nicely to change the name of his program.
Sorry, make that: If you are a US citizen or green card holder, you have to pay US income taxes even if you live and work in another country.
you have to pay taxes even if you live and work in another country. If anybody living in the US has a savings account overseas, they have to pay taxes on that as well. If other property owned by Hughes Electronics is generally taxable in LA county, I don't see why their satellites would be any different.
When people grow up they discover that life is like that. The presence of other people and the presence of the real world forces us to "live lifestyles" that we haven't voluntarily chosen. Communities impose rules on their members. That's true for a bunch of college roommates as much as for a traditional, God-fearing US small town. It's also true for the international community of nations. Even if global warming and its ill consequences weren't so well proven, the fact that lots of nations are concerned about it alone should be reason enough for the US to cooperate.
It's good to hold schools responsible for copyright violations. Maybe if they begin to see the true cost of what they condemn their students to using, they'll think about using other, more affordable software. I'm not (just) talking about free software, but even some competition in the commercial software market would be nice. Atari, Amiga, Apple, etc., all used to be used in schools because they were a lot cheaper than PCs. But with the hardware being cheap and the software being pirated, Windows just ended up dominating.
It sounds like what Marsh did is integrate the copier and an automatic binding machine. That's a nice incremental improvement and may make something like that more accessible to smaller book stores.
But I would ask another question: why do digitally delivered books have to be bound like traditional books? There are a lot of binding systems in widespread use that work just fine with no cutting, no trimming, no glue, etc.
I think that's at the heart of the problem: more open source developers need to spend more time getting familiar with the history of the field, and they need to think more about their choices. For open source, we vote with our feet. And if too many people aren't well informed or don't think much about their choices, the wrong projects will get all the support simply because they have good PR or push some hot-button issue.
I think that when a good idea shows itself (like .NET in this case), the open source community is by far the best at imitating it and making it better.
So, in the spirit of more reflection, for starters, here is a question to ponder: why didn't the open source community exhibit the same fervor about Java?
So, please be concrete: what ideas do you think are "innovative" in .NET? Please compare and contrast those with some of the key milestones in the history of computer systems research. In fact, just some examples of where you think C#/.NET innovates over Java would be interesting.
Indeed. And the question is not why some people still don't get it, the real question is why it took the people on the Gnome project until 2001 to realize this. After all, the programming environment and language technology represented by C#/.NET predates the Gnome project by decades. Why didn't they have an open mind at the beginning?
And, equally important, why is their (and your) vision still limited to copying Microsoft? Are they (and you) simply not familiar with the past 40+ years of systems research, or the state of the art?
This is a pretty depressing statement because it is so blatantly false all around. Five years ago, de Icaza chose to use tools for Gnome that were primitive even back then: C, make, autoconf, etc. You don't have to get very advanced to do better than that. C++ was around. GNUStep was around. Modula-3 was around. Eiffel was around. There were several mature, high-level GUI toolkits. Visual C++ was better integrated and easier to set up than GNU Emacs even back then. Five years ago, there were already numerous high level, open source languages with excellent debuggers and excellent environments. If Icaza would have wanted something better, he had the choices then. Instead, he chose primitive tools back then and stuck with them, and now that Microsoft adopts C# he finally calls those tools what they are: primitive.
According to de Icaza, the interesting thing about SharpDevelop is that the environment is really complete in only a few lines of code. It's really amazing when you compare the code size to other projects.
Again, de Icaza missed a big opportunity. As one of the leaders of the Gnome project, he could have caused adoption of this kind of "amazing" technology on Linux a couple of years ago in the form of Java. Whether he agreed with Sun's implementation strategy for Java or not, the Java language and runtime is not importantly different from C# and .NET, and Gnome could have altered it in whatever way they liked. Yet, Gnome kept on focussing on laboriously and slowly hacking C code and basically making fun of high level languages.
As far as I'm concerned, the Gnome project established its course long ago: they don't lead, they merely follow Microsoft (and something similar can be said for KDE). Maybe that's good enough to keep Linux alive as a credible alternative to Microsoft, but it really isn't very interesting to me. If open source becomes dominated by clones of Microsoft software that's two years behind the market leader, I might as well just use the real thing.
The only glimmer of hope is that the adoption of anything more high level than C by an open source project as large and central as Gnome can only improve things in the open source world. It's a good first step, whether the something being adopted is Java or C#. Maybe that will finally break the stranglehold that primitive tools and extreme conservatism have had on this community. It's kind of sad that it took Microsoft to do this, since they invented none of this technology, but--whatever it takes, I guess.
Well, it worked before the 50's because many people didn't have cars. In the 50's, you had stay-at-home wives with cars and lots of time (if I may oversimplify), comparatively little congestion, and cheap gas. So, you didn't need home delivery. In the 00's, we have lots busy two job couples with no time for anything, expensive gas, and very congested highways. So, what didn't make much sense in the 50's may well make sense again.
But it takes time for people to change their habits. If you are a .com that bets on make-it-or-break-it in three years, that's not going to work.
Web ordering of groceries and home delivery should have started locally and in specialty populations: homebound individuals, company groceries, busy upscale single professionals (BUSPs?), people living in Manhattan, etc. Companies can and should make sure every step along the way that they break even. Then, their user populations will naturally tend to expand as more and more people discover the convenience and habits adjust. A tie-in with cheap handhelds for making grocery lists in the kitchen (where the computer normally isn't) would also have helped.
I hope Peapod will be able to stick with it and that others will not be scared away by this. Webvan failed because they wanted to grow too fast; the idea was and is fundamentally sound.
I never really liked Lego. But Meccano/Erector Set also seemed pretty limited. To me, the most interesting construction toy was Fischer Technik. It offered many more options for building mechanical devices than either Lego or Meccano, and it offered analog and digital control circuitry, as well as computer interfaces, long before Lego. Fischer Technik is still a great system for prototyping and is actually used in industry for that purpose.
That seems like a strawman. Larry could have built on any number of existing scripting languages, interpreted languages, and syntaxes. Whether he deliberately ignored prior art or just didn't know about it, I don't know. But it seems pretty clear that he took a kind of perverse pleasure in combining the most oddball elements of sed, awk, sh, and C syntax.
[ ...a good scripting language implementation that takes full advantage of C++.]
Which language would you recommend we start from? To make it work well would require some nasty bolting-on in some languages.
Huh? Why would implementing Perl6 or Python3 in C++ require some "nasty bolting-on"? God knows, the current implementations of those languages are messy enough internally that they could benefit from some abstractions.
What does Ruby really offer as a compelling reason to change?
I dunno, why do you ask me? I think Python and Perl are already superfluous, let alone Ruby. I think the only reason for using them is that they are widely available and have user communities. Technically, as far as I'm concerned, they seem to be much less efficient implementations of the interpreted dynamic languages we already had in the 1970's and 1980's
Of course: it's legal blackmail. "Well, Mr. X, you can either sign a confession here and get probation and a $20k fine, or you can have your day in court and, regardless of whether you are guilty or not, we'll be able to confuse the jury enough to convict you and put you away for 15 years. Which will it be?"
The ever spiralling maximum penalties in the US are achieving what they were designed to: they are reducing the court's work by getting people to plea bargain. The same principle is, of course, applied by courts in China, Central America, Turkey, except they usually still use somewhat cruder measures. The inquisition and the Salem witch trials were good at it, too.
To me, the real question is why people keep reinventing the wheel. Technically, none of those languages break any ground compared to their predecessors of 30 years ago. In fact, on the whole, they are simply slowly retracing the early evolution of Lisp and Smalltalk. Perl and Python could have started out being as good as Perl 5.6 and Python 2.1 if they had built on what had come before.
In any case, I use Python for any kind of complex scripting and Perl as a replacement for many simple shell scripts. Lua is great for embedding because it's so compact. If Python didn't exist, I would probably be using Ruby, but Python 2.1 cleans up most of the rough corners of earlier versions of Python (scoping, etc.).
What I think is missing is a good scripting language implementation that takes full advantage of C++. Perl, Python, and Ruby (?) are C-based and require laborious manual bookkeeping when interfacing with C/C++ code (Swig helps but isn't a complete solution). The implementations themselves would also benefit from C++'s abstraction facilities.
Well, if there is no express or implied purchase contract for the box, you don't own it. So, it would seem sensible for them to be able to get it back eventually.
But if you actually own the device, you can use it and modify it. So, basically, you have a limited license to the patented invention.
My DSL equipment belongs to me, even though I didn't pay a cent for it: the contract with my provider gave me a discount equal to the purchase price for signing up for a year.
The problem with that argument (even if the facts were accurate) is that power companies didn't just fail to build power plants in CA, they failed to build power plants in other western states as well. So, it can't be CA environmental regulations that are at the root of the problem.
The other problem with that argument is that the capacity in 2001 is adequate. Power became scarce because sellers of power found it profitable to make it so, not because there is an absolute shortage.
A similar technique is DNA sequencing using scanning-tunneling microscopes and atomic force microscopes. Here is a Google search, and here is an article from 1992.
Very true. I hope you understand, however, that it was the power companies that lobbied for this kind of deregulation. Power companies wanted to fix consumer rates because they thought they'd be able to buy power really cheap on the open market and charge consumers way above market rate for a couple of years. As it turns out, the fixed rates worked the other way and they ended up going bankrupt.
In different words, the power crisis and bankruptcies in California are a result of industry-friendly regulation accidentally backfiring.
many years of extreme *environmental* regulation
There is no evidence whatsoever that environmental regulations have anything to do with the power crisis in California. In fact, the state government had been pleading for years with power companies to build extra capacity, and they just weren't interested because they didn't want to drive down prices further.
And it looks like in a couple of years, there is going to be a power glut, since already more projects are planned than even Cheney claims are necessary.
And, of course, in many European countries, people have a higher standard of living and nicer homes than what people in the US have, at considerably lower per-capita power consumption.
The sun is a great nuclear reactor, the interior of the earth is a great, partially decay-driven, heating system, and my gas fired boiler is great for giving me hot water in the morning. And I would like all those processes to stay where they are: safely enclosed and at a safe distance. Or do you light a fire on your living room floor every morning?