Briefly, BT is regulated by Oftel. However when BT says "this is hard to do" Oftel says "OK, how long will it take you". This is not a recipie for getting things done that BT doesn't want.
In this case BT has two major cash cows: leased lines (GBP 1000/month for 64kbits) and per-minute charging on voice and ISDN lines (a penny a minute upwards). Oftel, the EU, the UK government and just about everybody else want to knock these cows on the head because they are blocking the widespread uptake of the Internet. BT wants to keep them.
This has manifested itself in two main ways:
BT has been blocking the growth of cheap ADSL for years, arguing that its very difficult to do. It's also blocking co-location of DSLAMs by competitors on the grounds that crosstalk problems are very difficult to solve. Oftel is not arguing with this, or at least not very loudly.
Its been blocking any kind of unmetered tariff. This is what bit AltaVista. BT originally tried to introduce its own "surf unlimited" package with unmetered connection to BT Internet (its own ISP). Oftel cried foul, and declared that if BT was going to give BT Internet an unmetered package then it had to give the same package to any other ISP. BT duly promised to do so, and has since put the introduction date back several times. Alta Vista have just got fed up with waiting.
The only dodgy thing that AV did do was to pretend that their service was up and running with 10,000 users. The Register has the story so far.
I rather like cubes. They give me enough sound insulation to work on my own (and if the neigbours get noisy I stick on the headphones and play an MP3). Or if I need to talk about something to my neigbour then I stick my head over the partition and chat. Neither is a problem.
Where cubicles do become a problem is when they are small and regimented. We have had an opportunity to specify our next office space ourselves, and we've gone for cubicles arranged in samll groups with floor space in between. I think we're getting the groups in different colours too, so that there is a sense of place to the cubicles and you can say to a visitor "Joe? He's in the Blue block on the left".
(Whether this thing will ever actually get built is another question).
The best paper I've seen is here. Its a bit old (1996), but has lots of useful info.
Briefly, the main problems are the "ghost" of the old data, track misalignment leaving part of the old data on the side of a track, and bad sectors which are marked off by the drive electronics. There are also issues with drives that promise to write the data to the store immeditately, but in fact just cache it.
The only thing you can do is overwrite with random data several times in the hope that this will be enough.
Too true. Of course, the way to Make Money Fast is to spot the next big language before anyone else does, and become an expert in it. Write some free software in it or something, so it can go on your CV. Then when the curve goes exponential and all the job adverts are offering training in the language, you can name your price.
Hmmm. Anyone got any historical data on Python popularity?
I've spent the last several years trying to explain to colleagues why they should start using another obscure-but-good language, Eiffel, to no avail. Here is what I have learned. Note that this is not about the pros and cons of particular languages or paradigms, its about the way the programming language industry actually works.
The language industry is dominated by network effects. There are major costs with using a minority language, and for an individual project these completely outweigh the benefits, even when the benefits are very large. Hence it is generally far better to stay with a majority language. The costs of a minority language include:
Support. Sure, you can get a GPL compiler for most languages, but on a project you don't want to have your coders digging into the code trying to fix a bug, you want them writing code. Support is something you outsource.
Performance. Every minority language claims to be faster than C, but often isn't in practice. Whatever the truth, C and C++ are at least known quantities. Maybe the minority language will be faster, maybe slower. If its faster, well gee so what. If its slower then you have a major problem.
Tool support. These days even small projects start by drawing UML diagrams and then converting these automatically into class templates. CASE tool vendors don't support minority languages. Ditto for testing and documentation tools. Little things like tying your compiler to your configuration control manager might potentially be major headaches. Again, its more risk that the PM can do without.
Nobody ever got fired for buying C/C++/Java. If you are a PM this is a major issue. Every language is going to bring some headaches, but if you have chosen a minority language then these headaches can be turned into an excuse for project failure, and hence for hanging you out to dry.
Trained staff in a minority language are going to be rare. This does not necessarily make them more expensive (nobody else wants them), but it does make recruitment much harder and more uncertain. Alternatively you have to train all your existing people in the new language. And for Functional Languages its not just another syntax, its a whole new way of thinking. The industry went through this with OO languages, and many PMs have vivid memories of reams of non-OO obfuscated C++ written by a bunch of C hackers who had been sent on a one week C++ course. Getting your head around a new paradigm can take months, and this is time that the project just does not have.
So, overall the PMs want to go with popular languages, not for PHM reasons, but for entirely rational local reasons. But rational local decisions turn into globally arbitrary decisions, as the entire herd gallops off in a random direction chosen only because most of the herd thought that most of the herd were headed that way.
The lesson of this is that if you want to introduce a language, you don't concentrate on making it a good language, you try to persuade the herd of programmers, PMs and tool vendors that your language is the Next Big Thing. The important point here is not how much the language will do for productivity, quality and cost, it is to create the perception that everyone else thinks that this language will be the next big thing.
There are two ways to do this. One way is to tackle the whole industry at once. For an object lesson in how to do this, see Java. For an object lesson in how not to do it, see Eiffel. Believe me, I know all about this. I have spent a long time giving presentations extolling the technical virtues of Eiffel, only to have my audience say "y Yes, but in the Real World....". In the Real World what counts is the network effects. And you know what? My audiences were right. It has taken me a long time to realise this.
The other more interesting and more promising way to introduce a new language is to identify a niche market and attack that. Once you have taken over your niche you can expand to nearby niches and start to build momentum. Python is doing exactly this in web serving, for example. Web serving is a good niche because lots of people do it, and productivity and quality generally count for more than raw performance. Projects also tend to be small, so experiments are not the Career Limiting Moves they are for large projects. Education can also be a useful niche if you can afford to take the long view, which is how Pascal, Basic and Unix got started.
Bob Cringely has missed the point. The US Government is not going to shut down the Internet: it would be an incrediably dumb and damaging thing to do. The whole conspiracy theory falls over at that point.
The issue is the lack of independent inspection of what is in this Carnivore box. The ISP only has the FBI's word that it is not doing any improper snooping. Who knows what else it might be scanning for.
Reno has promised to check things out, but even granting her good intentions she is at the mercy of reports prepared by her underlings.
If such boxes are to be built and installed then the software they run should be open to inspection and the precise description of the files to be snooped should be part of the warrant. (I take it these things do need a warrant....)
Well, MS have just hammered yet another nail into their own coffin with this sidegrade.
Has BillG really forgotten that either the appeal court or the Supremes are going to be asked to judge his actions? That one of the main reasons for the original breakup order is that MS has shown a long-term incorrigiable pattern of behaviour? Doesn't he realise that more of the same is not going to help his case?
And by "low income" I mean a village of subsistance farmers.
We tend to see a lot of starving peasants on TV, because the only time that peasants become interesting to TV reporters is when they are starving or cutting down rain forests. But in fact only a tiny proportion of peasants around the world are starving at any given time.
What keeps them as peasants though, and what will ensure that sooner or later Famine will come riding through on his horse, is ignorance. Ignorance of medical care, national and global politics, markets, effective horticulture. Its difficult for us information-rich to imagine just what a limitation it is. Its difficult for them to imagine as well, because frequently they don't know either.
But on the other hand, there have been any number of schemes which parachute some high tech into the middle of a mud hut village. The Aid Workers arrive in their Land Rovers, drop off the kit, take a few pictures and leave. Six months later the kit breaks down and nobody knows what to do about it. Traditionally this has been done with water pumps. In the future it could just as easily be computers.
On the other hand, the image of a bright teenager cobbling together a village computer out of discarded bits has a lot more to recommend it. That, ironically, is a lot more sustainable and a lot cheaper. But its also too random. Somewhere in between must lie a rational policy which gets computers and the necessary educational and support infrastructure into place.
One day there will be an African Reneissance. I just hope I live to see it.
Then she gets her friend Christine to publish to usenet (or whatever) "Hey look: Alice xor Bob = Secrets!"
This is the vulnerable point in every such scheme I've seen. The "recipe" which gives you the decrypted data has to be held in an identifiable location, and that location is therefore vulnerable to being shut down. Whilst the law seems pretty undecided on whether HTML linking is equivalent to publication, I'm pretty certain that this much more specialised kind of link is going to be counted as the publication. A better way of describing it might be as the "key" to the data. Either way, thats the weak link in the whole scheme.
On the subject of the various forms of abuse, any system which can withstand the unfriendly attentions of a dictatorship will be wide open to this kind of abuse, because our police have to abide by civil liberties while those in a dictatorship can ignore them. Hence if you can use it to publish banned data in a dictatorship then you can always use it to publish banned data in a democracy.
The real way around this problem is to site the servers in democracies and then design protocols to make it very difficult to block access from the dictatorships short of shutting down foreign access altogether. This is probably best done through proxy servers that tunnel secure data through HTTP.
I dislike the use of PIs to dig up dirt, but there are occasions where they (and their tactics) are morally justifiable. In this case they were obviously investigating links between MS and one of its tame lobbying organisations. Given the history of MS "Astroturf" efforts, it is reasonable to suspect that something underhand may be going on between MS and this organisation. If so, and if it has a bearing on the ongoing legal case, then it makes sense to do a bit of digging.
I suppose my basic criterion would be that any evidence uncovered would be admissable in court.
ISTR Richard Feynman on the BBC interview he did many years ago telling a story about his father, Melvil (sp?)
Basically, Melvil couldn't swim. But one day he read a book on swimming, and then went down to the sea and swam about 20 yards. The point, which was not lost on his children, was that you could learn to do stuff by reading a book.
Some time ago I wrote an essay on a related subject, basically suggesting that source be freely distributed, users be charged, and the money distributed to the authors in proportion to their contribution. It was discussed on Slashdot, my home page was slashdotted, and it was forgotten about.
So, how would this fit in with the concepts of Gated Communities? I don't actually see much problem with letting people have the source: keeping it locked up does nothing to prevent piracy. Most companies I know are fairly careful about licensing the software they use, and organisations exist to police this.
The big problem with working on non-OSS software, such as Sun stuff, is that someone else gets to keep all the profits. This sucks. But if you get either an up-front payment or a share in the profits from the software you are working on, then would that make more sense? How would it be if, say, Sun started paying $10 per accepted bugfix (where "accepted" means "integrated into their codebase"), and unless you sell your patch or whatever to the company you get to keep the rights to it? Would people here find that kind of model acceptable? Would you be attracted to projects run this way? I'm interested in opinions.
Spafford's point was that before you can trust a system you have to know what you are trusting it to do. Simply saying "the right thing", or even "the right thing according to POSIX", isn't enough.
To describe this you generally start off with what you don't want it to do. Examples include "kill someone" or "let someone write to a file without authorisation". Then you have to say exactly what you mean by that (e.g. how might the system kill someone, and what constitutes "authorisation"), and before you know where you are you have a document several hundred pages long, much of which should be Z or VDM. Then you need to check that for any holes.
Then you have to prove that the system fulfils these requirements. Now a full formal proof of this is going to be a larger project than the original software by an order of magnitude, even with today's automated support. So the only feasible solution is to write the software very carefully. You have to identify each piece of code that might cause a non-spec event to occur, and then explain how it prevents any execution which might be outside the spec. And since this is important, you have to leave an audit trail behind so that potential clients (who are going to be staking lives and fortunes on your software) can see that you have done this properly. Unless you do all this, your system cannot be trusted.
(Aside: you also have messy recursive problems with trusting your development tools and hardware)
Put it this way. We all know Linux is reliable, right? But would you stake your life, or even your house, on keeping your Linux box up continuously for the next 12 months? I sure wouldn't. I wouldn't even do that with BSD. There are a few bits of software I would do that with, but... they were all written to these kinds of standards.
No matter how you slice it, this stuff requires a lot of hard work and bureaucracy. The question of "who will watch the watchers" is particularly germaine to the creation of trusted software.
Yes, Metcalfe's law is that the value is the square of N. But we haven't reduced N, just the links. Instead of one network of N links we now have two networks of N/2 links. Each of the two networks is worth 1/4 of the original, making a total value 1/2 of the original.
OK, its pretty obvious that obscenity is in the mind of the beholder, not the computer. So computers can't spot this stuff.
But I can imagine a program which tracks the average flesh tone score for pictures over time. If the moving average goes over a certain threshold then a dialog box pops up on the sysadmins screen telling him that Joe in cubicle 69 may be abusing company bandwidth, click here for a list of the suspicious URLs. Or, as it might be, sends an email to Junior's father. The key point is that this stuff can work as part of a monitoring system that uses human judgement for the final bit, rather than being a blocking solution.
Companies do have a legitimate need to monitor this stuff. Quite apart from the abuse of company resources, companies who allow employees to download and view sexually explicit materials can find themselves on the wrong end of a big discrimination lawsuit.
If this can happen then it will become the killer response to the "Linux will fork just like Unix did" argument.
At present KDE and Gnome are the classic fork nightmare situation: two incompatible worlds which cannot interoperate. If the developers can bring good interoperation then the rift will be healed. This will demonstrate that the forces for convergence in free software outweigh the forces for divergence, unlike in commercial software, and hence present yet another good reason for using free software.
In addition, both Gnome and KDE components exhibit network value effects. By Metcalfe's Law, dividing a network in two halves its value. So (assuming that Gnome and KDE have roughly equal value), allowing them to interoperate will double the combined value.
Pure wibble. Anarchy rejects the notion of authority, both in the Capitalist sense of having a boss and in the socialist sense of "A meets with B to decide what C gives to D".
Does it reject the notion of property? If so then what if I want to drive a car somewhere? How is the limited supply of cars allocated? Or does no-one have a car?
If Anarchism does not reject proerty then who enforces property laws? What if I want to make a contract exchanging my labour for property? Am I prevented from doing so? If I am prevented then I have lost freedom rather than gained it, and if I am allowed to make such a contract then we arrive at untrammeled free market capitalism in one short jump.
Surely this could be prosecuted under computer misuse laws. Mattel are plainly guilty of using many computers for unauthorised purposes (to whit, sending them adverts). If this usage was not authorised then it leads to both criminal and civil liability in most countries (except the Phillipines).
Any lawyers want to put a class action suit together?
Whilst I agree with you (I run AtGuard, partly for this reason) its not complete protection. All the software has to do is look like a web browser or Telnet client and the firewall will probably let it through.
Paul.
Sorry, but I don't see that this is very useful.
on
Berlin 0.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 4
The two biggest things that Berlin seems to add are alpha transparency and 3d rotation of windows. Alpha transparency could be added to X (I'm not sure how easily), but transparent windows are harder to read than non-transparent, because the background is just visual noise. So its no big deal either. And the rotating windows look to be good only for cool demos. Can anyone think of real uses for this stuff?
Their Berlin vs X document makes a big thing of pixel independence, but I see this as a disadvantage. Present displays, and future ones for that matter, still have pixels that are big enough to see, and the difference between a 1 pixel line and a 2 pixel line is significant. As a result I'm not ready to go for pure non-pixel metrics yet, although I grant that they are increasingly useful.
I also worry a bit about the CPU/GPU overhead of all this stuff, although I grant that this is a pretty short term concern. Modern high-end graphics cards can do this stuff at the necessary speeds without problems, so its only 2-3 years until the bog-standard consumer PCs have this capability.
there are plenty of other companies out there that still believe in proprietary code, closed source, restrictive licenses and all the rest.
As Elrond (IIRC) said, "If any of the wise should, with this ring, overthrow Sauron, he would set himself up in his place, and yet another Dark Lord would arise".
More seriously, whilst I agree with your main point, the Fall of Microsoft would create enough space for the competitors, including free software, to grow and take over its space. Right now we are the best placed member of the competition to do this.
although I have built a lot of really cool networks, in the grand scheme of things it means nothing
In the "Grand Scheme of Things" humanity probably means nothing. We're just a lifeform that happens to have evolved sentience and produced technology. But "meaning" something? What would we mean, and to whom? Its a silly question.
Try not to worry about the indifference of the Universe; its too depressing. Concentrate on enjoying life. Help others to enjoy it. The only meaning we have found is in one another.
Slashdot Mirror
The ISP you refer to is Telewest. AIUI their unmetered offer is only for people connecting via their own telephone network, which doesn't involve BT.
If you are in Telewest's service area then this is great: go for it. (I like my Cable Modem too). But outside their area you are stuffed.
(Actually I think NTL offer a similar deal.)
Paul.
Briefly, BT is regulated by Oftel. However when BT says "this is hard to do" Oftel says "OK, how long will it take you". This is not a recipie for getting things done that BT doesn't want.
In this case BT has two major cash cows: leased lines (GBP 1000/month for 64kbits) and per-minute charging on voice and ISDN lines (a penny a minute upwards). Oftel, the EU, the UK government and just about everybody else want to knock these cows on the head because they are blocking the widespread uptake of the Internet. BT wants to keep them.
This has manifested itself in two main ways:
The only dodgy thing that AV did do was to pretend that their service was up and running with 10,000 users. The Register has the story so far.
Paul.
Where cubicles do become a problem is when they are small and regimented. We have had an opportunity to specify our next office space ourselves, and we've gone for cubicles arranged in samll groups with floor space in between. I think we're getting the groups in different colours too, so that there is a sense of place to the cubicles and you can say to a visitor "Joe? He's in the Blue block on the left".
(Whether this thing will ever actually get built is another question).
Paul.
Briefly, the main problems are the "ghost" of the old data, track misalignment leaving part of the old data on the side of a track, and bad sectors which are marked off by the drive electronics. There are also issues with drives that promise to write the data to the store immeditately, but in fact just cache it.
The only thing you can do is overwrite with random data several times in the hope that this will be enough.
Paul.
Hmmm. Anyone got any historical data on Python popularity?
Paul.
The language industry is dominated by network effects. There are major costs with using a minority language, and for an individual project these completely outweigh the benefits, even when the benefits are very large. Hence it is generally far better to stay with a majority language. The costs of a minority language include:
So, overall the PMs want to go with popular languages, not for PHM reasons, but for entirely rational local reasons. But rational local decisions turn into globally arbitrary decisions, as the entire herd gallops off in a random direction chosen only because most of the herd thought that most of the herd were headed that way.
The lesson of this is that if you want to introduce a language, you don't concentrate on making it a good language, you try to persuade the herd of programmers, PMs and tool vendors that your language is the Next Big Thing. The important point here is not how much the language will do for productivity, quality and cost, it is to create the perception that everyone else thinks that this language will be the next big thing.
There are two ways to do this. One way is to tackle the whole industry at once. For an object lesson in how to do this, see Java. For an object lesson in how not to do it, see Eiffel. Believe me, I know all about this. I have spent a long time giving presentations extolling the technical virtues of Eiffel, only to have my audience say "y Yes, but in the Real World....". In the Real World what counts is the network effects. And you know what? My audiences were right. It has taken me a long time to realise this.
The other more interesting and more promising way to introduce a new language is to identify a niche market and attack that. Once you have taken over your niche you can expand to nearby niches and start to build momentum. Python is doing exactly this in web serving, for example. Web serving is a good niche because lots of people do it, and productivity and quality generally count for more than raw performance. Projects also tend to be small, so experiments are not the Career Limiting Moves they are for large projects. Education can also be a useful niche if you can afford to take the long view, which is how Pascal, Basic and Unix got started.
Paul.
The issue is the lack of independent inspection of what is in this Carnivore box. The ISP only has the FBI's word that it is not doing any improper snooping. Who knows what else it might be scanning for.
Reno has promised to check things out, but even granting her good intentions she is at the mercy of reports prepared by her underlings.
If such boxes are to be built and installed then the software they run should be open to inspection and the precise description of the files to be snooped should be part of the warrant. (I take it these things do need a warrant....)
Paul.
Has BillG really forgotten that either the appeal court or the Supremes are going to be asked to judge his actions? That one of the main reasons for the original breakup order is that MS has shown a long-term incorrigiable pattern of behaviour? Doesn't he realise that more of the same is not going to help his case?
Paul.
We tend to see a lot of starving peasants on TV, because the only time that peasants become interesting to TV reporters is when they are starving or cutting down rain forests. But in fact only a tiny proportion of peasants around the world are starving at any given time.
What keeps them as peasants though, and what will ensure that sooner or later Famine will come riding through on his horse, is ignorance. Ignorance of medical care, national and global politics, markets, effective horticulture. Its difficult for us information-rich to imagine just what a limitation it is. Its difficult for them to imagine as well, because frequently they don't know either.
But on the other hand, there have been any number of schemes which parachute some high tech into the middle of a mud hut village. The Aid Workers arrive in their Land Rovers, drop off the kit, take a few pictures and leave. Six months later the kit breaks down and nobody knows what to do about it. Traditionally this has been done with water pumps. In the future it could just as easily be computers.
On the other hand, the image of a bright teenager cobbling together a village computer out of discarded bits has a lot more to recommend it. That, ironically, is a lot more sustainable and a lot cheaper. But its also too random. Somewhere in between must lie a rational policy which gets computers and the necessary educational and support infrastructure into place.
One day there will be an African Reneissance. I just hope I live to see it.
Paul.
This is the vulnerable point in every such scheme I've seen. The "recipe" which gives you the decrypted data has to be held in an identifiable location, and that location is therefore vulnerable to being shut down. Whilst the law seems pretty undecided on whether HTML linking is equivalent to publication, I'm pretty certain that this much more specialised kind of link is going to be counted as the publication. A better way of describing it might be as the "key" to the data. Either way, thats the weak link in the whole scheme.
On the subject of the various forms of abuse, any system which can withstand the unfriendly attentions of a dictatorship will be wide open to this kind of abuse, because our police have to abide by civil liberties while those in a dictatorship can ignore them. Hence if you can use it to publish banned data in a dictatorship then you can always use it to publish banned data in a democracy.
The real way around this problem is to site the servers in democracies and then design protocols to make it very difficult to block access from the dictatorships short of shutting down foreign access altogether. This is probably best done through proxy servers that tunnel secure data through HTTP.
Paul.
I suppose my basic criterion would be that any evidence uncovered would be admissable in court.
Paul.
ISTR Richard Feynman on the BBC interview he did many years ago telling a story about his father, Melvil (sp?)
Basically, Melvil couldn't swim. But one day he read a book on swimming, and then went down to the sea and swam about 20 yards. The point, which was not lost on his children, was that you could learn to do stuff by reading a book.
Paul.
So, how would this fit in with the concepts of Gated Communities? I don't actually see much problem with letting people have the source: keeping it locked up does nothing to prevent piracy. Most companies I know are fairly careful about licensing the software they use, and organisations exist to police this.
The big problem with working on non-OSS software, such as Sun stuff, is that someone else gets to keep all the profits. This sucks. But if you get either an up-front payment or a share in the profits from the software you are working on, then would that make more sense? How would it be if, say, Sun started paying $10 per accepted bugfix (where "accepted" means "integrated into their codebase"), and unless you sell your patch or whatever to the company you get to keep the rights to it? Would people here find that kind of model acceptable? Would you be attracted to projects run this way? I'm interested in opinions.
Paul.
To describe this you generally start off with what you don't want it to do. Examples include "kill someone" or "let someone write to a file without authorisation". Then you have to say exactly what you mean by that (e.g. how might the system kill someone, and what constitutes "authorisation"), and before you know where you are you have a document several hundred pages long, much of which should be Z or VDM. Then you need to check that for any holes.
Then you have to prove that the system fulfils these requirements. Now a full formal proof of this is going to be a larger project than the original software by an order of magnitude, even with today's automated support. So the only feasible solution is to write the software very carefully. You have to identify each piece of code that might cause a non-spec event to occur, and then explain how it prevents any execution which might be outside the spec. And since this is important, you have to leave an audit trail behind so that potential clients (who are going to be staking lives and fortunes on your software) can see that you have done this properly. Unless you do all this, your system cannot be trusted.
(Aside: you also have messy recursive problems with trusting your development tools and hardware)
Put it this way. We all know Linux is reliable, right? But would you stake your life, or even your house, on keeping your Linux box up continuously for the next 12 months? I sure wouldn't. I wouldn't even do that with BSD. There are a few bits of software I would do that with, but... they were all written to these kinds of standards.
No matter how you slice it, this stuff requires a lot of hard work and bureaucracy. The question of "who will watch the watchers" is particularly germaine to the creation of trusted software.
Paul.
Paul.
See RISKS for details.
Paul.
But I can imagine a program which tracks the average flesh tone score for pictures over time. If the moving average goes over a certain threshold then a dialog box pops up on the sysadmins screen telling him that Joe in cubicle 69 may be abusing company bandwidth, click here for a list of the suspicious URLs. Or, as it might be, sends an email to Junior's father. The key point is that this stuff can work as part of a monitoring system that uses human judgement for the final bit, rather than being a blocking solution.
Companies do have a legitimate need to monitor this stuff. Quite apart from the abuse of company resources, companies who allow employees to download and view sexually explicit materials can find themselves on the wrong end of a big discrimination lawsuit.
Paul.
At present KDE and Gnome are the classic fork nightmare situation: two incompatible worlds which cannot interoperate. If the developers can bring good interoperation then the rift will be healed. This will demonstrate that the forces for convergence in free software outweigh the forces for divergence, unlike in commercial software, and hence present yet another good reason for using free software.
In addition, both Gnome and KDE components exhibit network value effects. By Metcalfe's Law, dividing a network in two halves its value. So (assuming that Gnome and KDE have roughly equal value), allowing them to interoperate will double the combined value.
Paul.
Paul.
Does it reject the notion of property? If so then what if I want to drive a car somewhere? How is the limited supply of cars allocated? Or does no-one have a car?
If Anarchism does not reject proerty then who enforces property laws? What if I want to make a contract exchanging my labour for property? Am I prevented from doing so? If I am prevented then I have lost freedom rather than gained it, and if I am allowed to make such a contract then we arrive at untrammeled free market capitalism in one short jump.
Paul.
Any lawyers want to put a class action suit together?
Paul.
Paul.
Their Berlin vs X document makes a big thing of pixel independence, but I see this as a disadvantage. Present displays, and future ones for that matter, still have pixels that are big enough to see, and the difference between a 1 pixel line and a 2 pixel line is significant. As a result I'm not ready to go for pure non-pixel metrics yet, although I grant that they are increasingly useful.
I also worry a bit about the CPU/GPU overhead of all this stuff, although I grant that this is a pretty short term concern. Modern high-end graphics cards can do this stuff at the necessary speeds without problems, so its only 2-3 years until the bog-standard consumer PCs have this capability.
Paul.
As Elrond (IIRC) said, "If any of the wise should, with this ring, overthrow Sauron, he would set himself up in his place, and yet another Dark Lord would arise".
More seriously, whilst I agree with your main point, the Fall of Microsoft would create enough space for the competitors, including free software, to grow and take over its space. Right now we are the best placed member of the competition to do this.
Paul.
In the "Grand Scheme of Things" humanity probably means nothing. We're just a lifeform that happens to have evolved sentience and produced technology. But "meaning" something? What would we mean, and to whom? Its a silly question.
Try not to worry about the indifference of the Universe; its too depressing. Concentrate on enjoying life. Help others to enjoy it. The only meaning we have found is in one another.
Paul.