Babylon 5 showed me that it doesn't matter how insanely popular a show is, it won't last.
WTF are you talking about? Babylon 5 was going to be a five-year show from the start, and it ran for all 5 seasons. It ended after that not because it got canceled by network types, but because the story was over.
Microsoft announced Tuesday that plans for.Net Server, aka "Longhorn" have been scraped and they will instead focus on the the release after that, code-named "Foghorn".
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying:
"Fortunately, ah keep mah feathers numbered, for just such an ahmergency."
I'll suggest a reason why certain manufacturers might not want to release driver sources. Suppose you have two competing products. One is a rather complex hardward based implemetation. The other is a rather simplistic hardware design with most of the functions implemented in software. WinModems come to mind but there are other "devices" where this can be done as well.
In a hypothetical design, if the vast majority of the functions can be moved to software, then even though the end users THINK they are buying a hardware solution they really are buying a software solution. This implies that if the "drivers" are open sourced, then the competition can easily match the product simply by assembling a primative hardware support card. The fewer functions actually implememnted in hardware the cheaper it is to build the card.
Perhaps. But in this case, I'd claim that you aren't a hardware manufacturer at all; you're a software manufacturer with an unusually elaborate dongle.:-)
2. The situation with embedded products is even more complicated (as somebody pointed out) because we actually do ship a GPL code - we ship the device which runs GPL Linux kernel.
I believe that was me. I do have a wee bit of experience in this, as I work for a company that does a lot of embedded work, and I'm one of the two guys who writes all the company's device drivers. We've even shipped modified GPL drivers from Linux in many of our systems (we modified a GPL ethernet card driver to work under VenturCom's RTX extensions).
P.P.S. To all these who never worked for a hardware company and believe that the company can opensource it's drivers - well, one simple example : NVIDIA Detonator 3 driver increased the performance by 30% IIRC. Don't you think that ATI would love to look at the source code ?
I believe this is probably a hit on me, since you replied to one of my postings on this subject by pointing me to this message. However, as stated above, I do work for a hardware company (writing device drivers, no less), and my question still stands.
First off, the example you state is useless for the exact reason that its a proprietary driver: we have no way of knowing what caused the increase. It could well be that certian hardware features for the tested card were not turned on in previous versions of the driver, due to the hardware being ready before the software was. I know that's happened with nVidia video drivers in the past.
I'm guessing from your answer that you are worried about loosing a competitive advantage against a close competitor. I suppose that's possible, depending on your business. But who says you'd loose? It could be that your competitors actually have the superior software.
But more to the point, why should you have to worry who has the better software? If your business is primarly hardware, should you really be trying to compete with software? That isn't your company's core competency.
But, as I mentioned in my other message, I don't really know enough about your business to say. I know it wouldn't hurt *our* business in the slightest. But then, our hardware typically costs over a million dollars when all put together (Flight Sims). You are probably in a different situation.
Please refrain from giving answers like 'all code should be GPL'
So exactly what is the problem with making your drivers (on Linux only) GPL? You are in the hardware business, not the software business, right? What nightmare scenario are you avoiding by not allowing folks to tweak and redistribute drivers for your hardware? The drivers aren't going to work for anyone very well until they fork over money for the hardware the drivers go with.
As the copyright holder, you'd still have the right to redistribute the drivers on other platforms under whatever other license you want.
It depends on exactly how you plan on distributing your product to your users. Is the entire thing, including the system w/ Linux on it itself being distributed, or just your device (and its drivrers on a separate disk or whatnot)?
I tried to give them a few examples of companies distributing binary only drivers (NVIDIA and Rational) but was told that these companies do not distribute binary only drivers - they only allow you to download them from a web site (which is not an option for an embedded product).
Since they make the user intstall the software, they force the user to agree to a EULA. Typically an EULA will trade you the right to run the software for a promise to not reverse-engineer anything, disasemble anything, and all sorts of other stuff you'd normally be entitled to do with something you bought.
If your distribution method would not typically involve end-users running an installer (and thus being forced to agree to a EULA), I could see where the lawyers might have qualms.
Since I'm not actually a lawyer, here's a supporting quote from someone who is: Eben Moglen of the FSF:
The (GPL) license does not require anyone to accept it in order to acquire, install, use, inspect, or even experimentally modify GPL'd software. All of those activities are either forbidden or controlled by proprietary software firms, so they require you to accept a license, including contractual provisions outside the reach of copyright, before you can use their works.
Read the full article at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html
The report also no makes no differentation between Open Source Software like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Apache; and Free Software which generally always refers to software under the GPL or LGPL. Like Linux, gcc, or GNATS.
A minor point here. When they mentioned "GNAT", they did not mean "GNATS". They were referring to the Gnu Ada compiler (Gnat), not to the unfortunately named Gnu bug tracking system (GNATS).
Gnat is one of many commonly used Ada compilers. It is unique in that it, along with its entire supporting tool suite, is Free Software.
This paper just seems very timely. As someone who is just about finished undergoing the quintessential undergrad experience in CS I think this paper hits a lot of nail square on their heads. Too many schools are hung up on the formal side of things without ever tying them back to the actual root of everything which is programming and this cannot be denied.
I should hope your CS I class emphasised the formal side of things! You have to get the basic mechanics down on anything, before you try to move on to the art. Before a basketball coach teaches you defensive reads and give-and-goes, you first have to learn to dribble. Before a volleyball coach works on plays and play calling, the players have to learn to bump, set, and hit properly.
That's hilarious. I tried to read it too, and lost it right where you did. Your descriptions are pretty much dead on.
BTW: On number 7, I think they meant self-consistent. I'm guessing they were attempting to cast Gödel's Theorem in a purely Computer Science light, then pass it off as some kind of original insight. Neat trick if you can pull it off. But how many folks interested in computer science enough to slog 7 pages into this drek will be unfamilar enough with Gödel's Theorem to fall for it?
From the FAQ [ud.com]:
A: No. The results of this study are the intellectual property of the University of Oxford and the National Foundation for Cancer Research, who will make the scientific findings of this project available to the greater scientific community.
Urp. Your right. What I said still goes for Folding (or at least did when I looked into it in depth 6 months ago).
Damn. I tried a quick look through the FAQ's , but didn't find this entry. My assumption that it would be like Folding hosed me. NFCR is a great charity too.
Who cares if this ever produces real results or not? It doesn't matter. It's the search that is important. Human beings striving for something new, working hard to discover whether they are truly not alone in the universe. I consider that to be an outstanding effort and achievement, even if we never find ET. I am proud to donate my computer's spare CPU cycles to such a noble effort.
God, that sounds so cheesy to go back and read it. But there it is. There's not much in the world today I get to feel good about. SETI@Home is definitely one of them.
If you want another such experience, I highly suggest (if you can get to the central Florida area), to go watch a space shuttle launch in person. The feeling you get watching (and feeling) those big rockets go up, surrounded by hundreds of other people from all over the world, is almost impossible for someone of my meager writing abilities to describe. Its like you are watching the hopes and dreams of all of humanity take flight.
Night launches are even more impressive. The entire sky lights up in the east like the dawn. (It goes up from an inlet over the water from you). You really have to wonder at the power that puppy is putting out. Watching it on TV is just not comparable.
Its enough to nearly make one happy to pay one's taxes.:-)
The cancer project [ud.com] is being run through United Devices. This is a non-profit project and the data being generated will not be sold to a for-profit firm.
This is misleading. Any results you turn up belong to "United Devices and its customers and partners". Folding and Genome are even more explicit, in that data you process belongs to Stanford and the drug companies bankrolling them.
So basicly you are giving drug companies free use of your computer, with no compensation and no restricutions whatsoever for how they will use the lucrative discoveries you generate for them.
Past history indicates they will probably price what the afluent US insurance market will bear, leaving poor disease sufferers in 3rd world countries to die. That's certainly their (legal) right. But if I'm gonna donate my computer time for free, I want it to be for something a wee bit more noble than enriching drug company stockholders.
I'd advise against that; he's wrong. He's probably just transferring his desire to avoid using Fortran into an unsupported belief that it will go away.
I certianly have similar desires myself (I took Fortran off my resume 10 years ago so I'd never be the poor sap stuck using it). But I don't share his delusions.
I question the claim that Fortran compilers are somehow inherently good at optimizing code.
:-) I took a graduate level course in compiler optimization, where I got to question that claim almost daily.
What I discovered from the course is that Fortran compilers are really good at optimizing, in general. There are two main reasons for this.
Reason one is some inherent qualities of the language, chiefly its lack of pointers. When your language supports pointers in the unrestricted way C++ and C do, suddenly any object can be aliased at any time. This makes it damn tough to optimize things.
However, languages that are strict with pointer usage, and stricter than Fortran on the results of other constructs, could in theory be even easier to optimize than Fortran. Ada, Java, and the various Wirth languages come to mind.
But theory really matters little. Fortran's big advantage over those other languages is in practice. Fortran users are doing hairy numerical processing, where they need all the optimization possible, and are willing to pay for it. Thus extreme efforts get put into optimizing Fortran compilers, and most of the research into optimization theory is funded by Fortran users.
Isn't Fortran completely irrelevant in the 21st century anyways?
Absolutely not!!! NASA uses it to slam probes into Mars.
I hope this gets modded up as funny (because it is). However, I feel compelled to point out two things:
Fortran is indeed in wide use still. I know the Flight Simulator business is chock full of it. I'd suspect anything that involves a lot of number crunching and has been done for more than 5 years has a lot of it done in Fortran.
The mars probe actually had an unusual amount of non-Fortran code in it. It had a great deal of AI software in it, which makes a bit of sense when you consider that you can't exactly have someone sitting in Houston trying to control it with a joystick in realtime. The ping time to Mars is just brutal.:-)
So Fortran may have taken us to the Moon, but it takes an expert system to slam probes into Mars.
Who is going to protect my right(I'm a recording artist) to make a living off of my work? I depend on sales of my cd's, not on the number of copies of my work in existence!
What "right" are you referring to? The constitution certainly gives you no such right. Congress may, at its discretion, provide temporary copying monopolies when it judges that this will have the effect of promoting science or "useful arts". But there is absolutely no basis for claiming that you have some kind of "right" to this consideration.
For that matter, what "my work" are you referring to? If its the creative effort you are talking about, I can certianly respect that. But if its the result, then it was never "yours" to begin with. In this country, no one owns an idea, and that includes a song and/or its lyrics. You may be granted the exclusive copying concession ("copyright") temporarily, but that's it.
As for your inability to support yourself without the monopoly copying concession, loads of musicians are doing that today. Additionally, tremendous amounts of music (and many would say the best ever) was created before copyright was ever even thought of. Back then there were entire >100 piece orchestras to be paid too, and yet, they managed to eat and create. So I really fail to see how your lack of business acumen is my problem.
Hmmmm....If this law were to be passed, would it give me the the right to legally hack the systems of any company or organization that supports web browsing? After all, web browsers are making a copy of my homepage.
Sure, posting a web page might be considered to be giving implicit permission. But I could always put a notice at the top of my webpage (in lawyer-sized type of course) denying that permission to anyone but myself. Then I just need to look at my web server's logs to see what networks I'm leagally allowed to hack.:-)
But there are others who don't share your convictions about property rights and are currently attempting to march me into the woods for political re-education.
But we don't confiscate people's property and pass it out because people want it for free.
They both need to be marched into the woods for legal re-education. Copyright has nothing to do with property rights. All it represents is that someone has a temporary government-granted monopoly on copying a work. Someone does not "own" the work itself just because they have been granted the copying monopoly.
I understand the copying industry's desire to cast it in this light. After all, property law is much stronger than the actual copyright law they really fall under. In fact, they wouldn't be doing their jobs if they didn't try and twist the truth like this. But that doesn't mean we have to swallow it.
A bit. But its a really bad analogy in general, because a work of art can be bad, but never wrong. Software can easily be both, neither, or one of each.
The best analogy I've seen is Brook's analogy to building great Cathedrals. Typically lots of different people have to work together to build it (perhaps over several "generations"). Its important that its astheticly appealing, well structured, and that the roof stays on in a storm.
Many argue that the reason software costs are the way they are is to make up for the revinue lost do to Software Piracy.
Errr...you are answering the wrong question. Its "Why does software cost so much to create?", not "Why does software cost so much to buy off the shelf at Babbages?".
We are talking about a book on Program Management here, not a book on Marketing and Economics.
If the list truly was a faq, top of the list, to my mind (well, okay, second to 'what the hell are you thinking') would be 'how do you pronounce gnu/linux?'
If memory serves, RMS pronounced it guh-new-slash-linux; if I remember correctly, there's yet another compelling reason to pronounce it with a silent gnu.
I agree. If you read the whole FAQ, you'll come across a part where they explain why "Gnu Linux" isn't acceptable. Since there's no way to tell the difference in conversation without somehow pronouncing the '/', I'm guessing the One True Way would have to be the way you remember RMS doing it.
From reading over the other postings, it looks like I am about the most rabid RMS admirer out here today. But even I will never say "Gnu slash Linux". A construction that awkward won't accomplish anything but distract both me and my listner from the point I'm trying to get across. In short; its a crappy name.
Perhaps this is OK for RMS, as he doesn't ever talk about Linux when that relationship isn't the point he's trying to get across. So the awkwardness of the construction actually makes you stop and think right where he wants you to. But most of us have other reasons for talking about it.
I'd consider calling it "Linux Gnu", which seems to solve the problem he had with "Gnu Linux". But I'd be the only person in the world doing it, and thus noone would have a clue what I'm talking about.
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WTF are you talking about? Babylon 5 was going to be a five-year show from the start, and it ran for all 5 seasons. It ended after that not because it got canceled by network types, but because the story was over.
Apparently, her Mac isn't doing much better.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying:
"Fortunately, ah keep mah feathers numbered, for just such an ahmergency."
Perhaps. But in this case, I'd claim that you aren't a hardware manufacturer at all; you're a software manufacturer with an unusually elaborate dongle.
I believe that was me. I do have a wee bit of experience in this, as I work for a company that does a lot of embedded work, and I'm one of the two guys who writes all the company's device drivers. We've even shipped modified GPL drivers from Linux in many of our systems (we modified a GPL ethernet card driver to work under VenturCom's RTX extensions).
I believe this is probably a hit on me, since you replied to one of my postings on this subject by pointing me to this message. However, as stated above, I do work for a hardware company (writing device drivers, no less), and my question still stands.
First off, the example you state is useless for the exact reason that its a proprietary driver: we have no way of knowing what caused the increase. It could well be that certian hardware features for the tested card were not turned on in previous versions of the driver, due to the hardware being ready before the software was. I know that's happened with nVidia video drivers in the past.
I'm guessing from your answer that you are worried about loosing a competitive advantage against a close competitor. I suppose that's possible, depending on your business. But who says you'd loose? It could be that your competitors actually have the superior software.
But more to the point, why should you have to worry who has the better software? If your business is primarly hardware, should you really be trying to compete with software? That isn't your company's core competency.
But, as I mentioned in my other message, I don't really know enough about your business to say. I know it wouldn't hurt *our* business in the slightest. But then, our hardware typically costs over a million dollars when all put together (Flight Sims). You are probably in a different situation.
So exactly what is the problem with making your drivers (on Linux only) GPL? You are in the hardware business, not the software business, right? What nightmare scenario are you avoiding by not allowing folks to tweak and redistribute drivers for your hardware? The drivers aren't going to work for anyone very well until they fork over money for the hardware the drivers go with.
As the copyright holder, you'd still have the right to redistribute the drivers on other platforms under whatever other license you want.
Since they make the user intstall the software, they force the user to agree to a EULA. Typically an EULA will trade you the right to run the software for a promise to not reverse-engineer anything, disasemble anything, and all sorts of other stuff you'd normally be entitled to do with something you bought.
If your distribution method would not typically involve end-users running an installer (and thus being forced to agree to a EULA), I could see where the lawyers might have qualms.
Since I'm not actually a lawyer, here's a supporting quote from someone who is: Eben Moglen of the FSF
Read the full article at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html
A minor point here. When they mentioned "GNAT", they did not mean "GNATS". They were referring to the Gnu Ada compiler (Gnat), not to the unfortunately named Gnu bug tracking system (GNATS).
Gnat is one of many commonly used Ada compilers. It is unique in that it, along with its entire supporting tool suite, is Free Software.
Oh well...I guess all is well.
I should hope your CS I class emphasised the formal side of things! You have to get the basic mechanics down on anything, before you try to move on to the art. Before a basketball coach teaches you defensive reads and give-and-goes, you first have to learn to dribble. Before a volleyball coach works on plays and play calling, the players have to learn to bump, set, and hit properly.
That's hilarious. I tried to read it too, and lost it right where you did. Your descriptions are pretty much dead on.
BTW: On number 7, I think they meant self-consistent. I'm guessing they were attempting to cast Gödel's Theorem in a purely Computer Science light, then pass it off as some kind of original insight. Neat trick if you can pull it off. But how many folks interested in computer science enough to slog 7 pages into this drek will be unfamilar enough with Gödel's Theorem to fall for it?
EBCDIC has won yet another chess game against the Grim Reaper.
Urp. Your right. What I said still goes for Folding (or at least did when I looked into it in depth 6 months ago).
Damn. I tried a quick look through the FAQ's , but didn't find this entry. My assumption that it would be like Folding hosed me. NFCR is a great charity too.
Hopefully I'll get modded way down.
If you want another such experience, I highly suggest (if you can get to the central Florida area), to go watch a space shuttle launch in person. The feeling you get watching (and feeling) those big rockets go up, surrounded by hundreds of other people from all over the world, is almost impossible for someone of my meager writing abilities to describe. Its like you are watching the hopes and dreams of all of humanity take flight.
Night launches are even more impressive. The entire sky lights up in the east like the dawn. (It goes up from an inlet over the water from you). You really have to wonder at the power that puppy is putting out. Watching it on TV is just not comparable.
Its enough to nearly make one happy to pay one's taxes.
This is misleading. Any results you turn up belong to "United Devices and its customers and partners". Folding and Genome are even more explicit, in that data you process belongs to Stanford and the drug companies bankrolling them.
So basicly you are giving drug companies free use of your computer, with no compensation and no restricutions whatsoever for how they will use the lucrative discoveries you generate for them.
Past history indicates they will probably price what the afluent US insurance market will bear, leaving poor disease sufferers in 3rd world countries to die. That's certainly their (legal) right. But if I'm gonna donate my computer time for free, I want it to be for something a wee bit more noble than enriching drug company stockholders.
I'd advise against that; he's wrong. He's probably just transferring his desire to avoid using Fortran into an unsupported belief that it will go away.
I certianly have similar desires myself (I took Fortran off my resume 10 years ago so I'd never be the poor sap stuck using it). But I don't share his delusions.
I took a graduate level course in compiler optimization, where I got to question that claim almost daily.
What I discovered from the course is that Fortran compilers are really good at optimizing, in general. There are two main reasons for this.
Reason one is some inherent qualities of the language, chiefly its lack of pointers. When your language supports pointers in the unrestricted way C++ and C do, suddenly any object can be aliased at any time. This makes it damn tough to optimize things.
However, languages that are strict with pointer usage, and stricter than Fortran on the results of other constructs, could in theory be even easier to optimize than Fortran. Ada, Java, and the various Wirth languages come to mind.
But theory really matters little. Fortran's big advantage over those other languages is in practice. Fortran users are doing hairy numerical processing, where they need all the optimization possible, and are willing to pay for it. Thus extreme efforts get put into optimizing Fortran compilers, and most of the research into optimization theory is funded by Fortran users.
I hope this gets modded up as funny (because it is). However, I feel compelled to point out two things:
So Fortran may have taken us to the Moon, but it takes an expert system to slam probes into Mars.
What "right" are you referring to? The constitution certainly gives you no such right. Congress may, at its discretion, provide temporary copying monopolies when it judges that this will have the effect of promoting science or "useful arts". But there is absolutely no basis for claiming that you have some kind of "right" to this consideration.
For that matter, what "my work" are you referring to? If its the creative effort you are talking about, I can certianly respect that. But if its the result, then it was never "yours" to begin with. In this country, no one owns an idea, and that includes a song and/or its lyrics. You may be granted the exclusive copying concession ("copyright") temporarily, but that's it.
As for your inability to support yourself without the monopoly copying concession, loads of musicians are doing that today. Additionally, tremendous amounts of music (and many would say the best ever) was created before copyright was ever even thought of. Back then there were entire >100 piece orchestras to be paid too, and yet, they managed to eat and create. So I really fail to see how your lack of business acumen is my problem.
Hmmmm....If this law were to be passed, would it give me the the right to legally hack the systems of any company or organization that supports web browsing? After all, web browsers are making a copy of my homepage.
:-)
Sure, posting a web page might be considered to be giving implicit permission. But I could always put a notice at the top of my webpage (in lawyer-sized type of course) denying that permission to anyone but myself. Then I just need to look at my web server's logs to see what networks I'm leagally allowed to hack.
(Howard Coble)
and
(Howard Berman)
They both need to be marched into the woods for legal re-education. Copyright has nothing to do with property rights. All it represents is that someone has a temporary government-granted monopoly on copying a work. Someone does not "own" the work itself just because they have been granted the copying monopoly.
I understand the copying industry's desire to cast it in this light. After all, property law is much stronger than the actual copyright law they really fall under. In fact, they wouldn't be doing their jobs if they didn't try and twist the truth like this. But that doesn't mean we have to swallow it.
...run Ada 83 programs.
Dang! A better question would be: What am I doing here, rather than sitting at home with Diablo II and a hex editor.
Ebay, here I come...
A bit. But its a really bad analogy in general, because a work of art can be bad, but never wrong. Software can easily be both, neither, or one of each.
The best analogy I've seen is Brook's analogy to building great Cathedrals. Typically lots of different people have to work together to build it (perhaps over several "generations"). Its important that its astheticly appealing, well structured, and that the roof stays on in a storm.
Errr...you are answering the wrong question. Its "Why does software cost so much to create?", not "Why does software cost so much to buy off the shelf at Babbages?".
We are talking about a book on Program Management here, not a book on Marketing and Economics.
I agree. If you read the whole FAQ, you'll come across a part where they explain why "Gnu Linux" isn't acceptable. Since there's no way to tell the difference in conversation without somehow pronouncing the '/', I'm guessing the One True Way would have to be the way you remember RMS doing it.
From reading over the other postings, it looks like I am about the most rabid RMS admirer out here today. But even I will never say "Gnu slash Linux". A construction that awkward won't accomplish anything but distract both me and my listner from the point I'm trying to get across. In short; its a crappy name.
Perhaps this is OK for RMS, as he doesn't ever talk about Linux when that relationship isn't the point he's trying to get across. So the awkwardness of the construction actually makes you stop and think right where he wants you to. But most of us have other reasons for talking about it.
I'd consider calling it "Linux Gnu", which seems to solve the problem he had with "Gnu Linux". But I'd be the only person in the world doing it, and thus noone would have a clue what I'm talking about.