The problem I have with the name of the Movie is the same one I have with the mission: it really sounds like a name that belongs on one of those pornos that rips off the basic premise of a movie, but somehow always ends up involving a delivery guy showing up to the wrong house....
Look at their compatibility policies during the period before the IBM PC became dominant
I think if you want to talk about a company's reputation, you should stick to the things the company did in the last 20 years... one generation is a fair line to draw. After all, I'd like to think that people who know me now and knew me in college are willing to forget my crazy ways back then.
"Apple's history isn't as bad as MS', but it's not as good as Sun's"
Huh?
Ok, Apple is no white knight, but this is just silly.
Sun dropped a BSD with proprietary extentions for a proprietary SysV which they open sourced only after getting their asses handed to them in the small to mid-range server market by the likes of Red Hat.
Apple dropped a proprietary OS (MacOS) for a BSD with proprietary extensions in order to better take advantage of the technological advances in the (financially failed) NeXT platform.
Sun has launched a massive anti-Linux PR campaign.
Apple has never even really mentioned other open source platforms.
I have a hard time reading your post. I assume English is not your first language, so just correct me I intepret it wrong.
"Ok, your post will be moderated Informative or Insignt. But I can't fully agree you."
Well, of course, that doesn't mean that I'm not being either insightful or informative. Same goes for you. Debate can be insightful on all sides, can't it?
"Systems like the hollywood system or the blizzard system are very corrosive"
Sure, I agree with that (except I'm not sure we can reasonably call it "the Blizzard system"... if anything Blizzard is an island of quality game design amid a sea of status quo mediocrity). But keep in mind that Hollywood has and continues to produce some stunning films. They're rare, but they exist, and they continue to move the state of the art forward. IMHO, Ghandi, The Shawshank Redemption, Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Memento, The Matrix, Fight Club, The Third Man (which I just watched the other day), Star Wars, Amadeus and many others make it all worth it. I'd rather have 100 bad films and one gem every year than no gems, and I'm not optimistic enough to think that all of these folks would be turning out gems if Hollywood didn't exist. Most of them would be turning out much cheaper crap.
"Newbies become money oriented, instead of creativity oriented"
That has nothing to do with Hollywood, that has to do with success. The same thing has happened to Indian theater recently (or so I hear). It's just a matter of the pressures that money places on art. Tell me that commercial advertising doesn't do the same thing to still art. It's just one of the obsticles that makes truly great art worthy of note.
Common Lisp (!) was created by amalgamating several other variations of LISP into an ANSI standard that was ratified in 1994."
This thread is starting to tread into language-war territory, and I don't want to go there, but suffice to say that Common LISP (as described in the 1994 standard) is the descendent of several forms of LISP which stem from roughly the same time period as C and FORTRAN give-or-take 20 years. K&R C is not ANSI C, but we still describe the C language of today (C9X) as being "30 years old". So too, we describe Common LISP as being at least as old as the LISP dialects that were merged and extended to create it in the first place.
"CL has also had [...features...] Throw in [...features...] and you now can now see why many people like it."
That's great. I like it quite a lot myself. If you thought this was some kind of anti-Common LISP rant of mine, you are sorely mistaken! I work for a company that uses Common LISP commercially, and it pays my bills. I was talking about appropriate choice of languages to introduce programmers to certain concepts. For that specific, narrow purpose, I was suggesting that CL was at least not the only choice (and IMHO, not the best choice).
footnote: I do not speak for my company. If my above comments made you think that I do, please disabuse yourself of such notions.
Yep, I agree. I was referncing that macro article only to point to something for the sake of this conversation. I understand there are some excellent "so you want to learn to program" books for scheme, but I already knew C, BASIC and Modula-2 when I came across scheme for the first time.
Someday I have to go back and really LEARN scheme.
Ob Geek Dig: "As a side note, slashdotters might disagree that people want "boring" sex I think the reality is that most people grandstand on this issue; I'd wager that the majority of people feel comfortable having relativity boring sex"
I think most Slashdotters would feel comfortable having sex... "realtively boring" or not.;-)
As for the article, I agree with him in part. The industry is starting to show its age, and the "blockbuster" has arived. This does NOT mean that good games with innovative concepts are gone, it just means that the really good an creative ones don't have the financial backing any more. Look for the games that don't quite have the best graphics (can't afford a team of artists), and aren't for sale in the mall stores (probably online only) to be the next wave of innovative games.
Of course, Doom was only for sale online, and it was astoundingly innovative, so not a LOT has changed.
Re:My first exposure to list ( and a mirror of boo
on
Practical Common Lisp
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· Score: 3, Informative
First off, let me say that I'm new to Haskell, and learning it, Python and (as of last night) Fortress at the same time, so I'm far from an expert.
"Lisp can generally be made faster than Haskell"
Certainly, and I'm not saying Haskell makes a good language for day-to-day coding. I'm just saying that it's a good place to learn functional programming.
"Haskell uses lazy evaluation. Lisp uses strict evaluation unless you explicitly ask for lazy evaluation."
For those who do not understand this point, it's worth going into. In C, when you say:
c = foo() + bar();
you call functioan foo and bar, add their results, and store that result in c. In Haskell a similar construct would store in c the information required to call foo and bar at a later time when/if you needed the value of c, but of course, if you just add c to another value, you just create a more complex result, you still don't invoke foo or bar.
This is a very powerful concept, but can also lead to surprising results if you are used to programming in non-lazy languages.
I appologize about macros. I have had only brief exposure to Haskell, and knew that it had macros, so (it being a functional language and all) I just assumed that that meant macros ala LISP. Clearly I was wrong.
Overall, I wasn't trying to start a language war. I have a great deal of respect for Common LISP. It is, however, huge and quirky, so I generally don't tend to direct people at it who just want to learn functional programming. That's a bit like giving someone an F-18 to learn how to fly.
Re:My first exposure to list ( and a mirror of boo
on
Practical Common Lisp
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If you find LISP interesting, Haskell might also be of interest.
Recent interest in Haskell has exploded because of the implementation of Pugs in GHC. Pugs is a compiler / interpreter prototype for Perl 6, which is also a functional language, borrowing many concepts from LISP and smalltalk (as well as just about every other popular research or practical programming language).
Re:This is not a troll, but a query...
on
Practical Common Lisp
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· Score: 5, Interesting
1) macros will blow your mind. Read Paul Grahams' 'On Lisp' 2) takes bottom-up programming to the extreme. Really does help, but takes a while to get used to. 3) Much better to develop in...interact with the interpreter, compile individual functions and run them, change variables in a running image...
Of course, these things are true of most any functional language. IMHO, LISP is a poor choice as a starter language if you're looking for the above wins. I would start with Haskell or Scheme and move on to LISP once you had your bearings.
Common LISP is a very old language (not as old as LISP, of course), full of the same kinds of pitfalls that any language its age or older shows (e.g. C, FORTRAN, etc). It is best to start with younger languages and work your way back.
This is just the subjunctive mood; it's certainly in contemporary use.
You're correct, it's a shortened form of "as if it were so", which is really what I meant. The word "were" is being used in a way that is archaic: implying the subjunctive without any helper to indicate such, which we almost always use in modern English. You would not expect, "the way we were" to mean, "the way we might have been," but "the way we used to be."
So, while you are correct, you're also missing a larger point: the usage of "were" in that sentence is archaic, and yet the phrase is acceptable. At one point in the past, we started saying "as it were" instead of "an it were", and that was incorrect for some period of time too.
Language changes usually start with the least educated. They have fewer pre-conceptions, so they refine their usage based on the culture they find themselves in, the ease of use of certain constructs and influences from other languages. Of course, because these changes come from the least educated parts of society, we who have been taught that there is a "right way" to speak, resist them until their usage becomes so common that we can no longer pretend that they are not part of our language.
Thus, it's rather silly to say that common usage is wrong... common usage IS our langauge, and anything else is just the trappings of elitism.
"The phrase "as of late" is often used in sports, when refering to recent trends. That doesn't make it right."
There's no "right" when it comes to language. There's different people's opinions and then there are different group's opinions.
Quick quiz: which is right about English, the US, Australia or the UK? What about north-eastern US vs south-eastern US? At what point does "incorrect usage" become a dialect? Is it based on number of speakers? If so, how many? 10? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000?
How long does a phrase like "as of late" have to be used before it is correct? Certainly "as it were" was not always correct... at some point it became an accepted phrase, but that was a gradual process, and there was no defining moment when "English changed". Before that the correct phrase would have been "an it were", and now that usage of "were" is archaic... but "as it were" is still acceptable usage.
People tend to point to reference works, but reference works change and adapt to usage, so they FOLLOW the trends of common usage, not define them.
Stop trying to pretend that there's one English langauge, and just cope with the concepts of common usage and dialect. It's much easier that way.
"looks like Microsoft ran the screenshots up the metaphoric flagpole and didn't like the salutes"
Didn't like it?! You must be joking!
Think of it this way:
MS Exec 1: We need to get the word out about Longhorn. We want people to see it! MS Exec 2: Well, how does Apple get out the word about each release? MS Exec 1: They leak rumors and then sue anyone who publishes them... oh... right!
It's not a new tactic, but it never really gets old either....
What's more, the word is very often used in sports, when refering to titles and standings. Given the topic is a comapny that made it big partially as a result of a suberbowl add, this seems apropos.
Of course it's almost certainly a hoax, but these are always fun to read. If you ever played EverQuest, there's a very similar bit about the clueless ebayer who thought the game would be easy as long as you yelled at people a lot;-)
Document every subroutine/method/macro/functional unit
If you find yourself having to document a free-standing chunk of code, consider modularizing
Write system/functional/etc. documentation seperately (in the same file in some langauges, but NEVER IN THE CODE) to give yourself a chance to abstract the concepts that the code represents.
Add inline comments to free-staning code without modularizing, only when the reader's assumptions might be violated (e.g. I tend to document my use of POSIX time routines because they LOOK like Y2K bugs, but are not).
When documenting routines, include the meaning of parameters and the meaning of the return value (if any) as well as the general function of the routine
Avoid globals where possible, but document each when used
Keep documentation well formatted so that it does not obstruct code visually.
Following these rules, I have never produced code which someone who knew the language I was programming in could not read and understand. When I write Perl code and use some large Schwartzian Transform, someone who does not know Perl might be confused, but I can't really stop and document every line of code for everyone who doesn't know the language. If I'm doing something particularly hairy that might not look sane to a reader who knows the language, then I comment it.
There's code that I wrote 15 years ago that someone came to me a few years ago to ask about using in a college class, so I guess it works out ok;-)
I think that the metric so far has been that things likely to make the installation of x.y*2.z difficult on an x.y.z-1 system, or were likely to require a few iterations of integration and testing were deferred until z.y*2+1.0 was forked.
" That trailer makes the Star Wars III trailer look like a stupid cartoon."
Considering that the stupid cartoons made the third movie seem like it almost might be cool, I suppose that's ok...;-)
Seriously, I'm looking forward to both movies this year. SW3 because it has a (slim) chance of being the payoff that makes 1 and 2 worth the time and money spent, and Serenity because I want Fox to have a good long think about the chance they ruined. >:-)
Re:more censorship, unimpressed
on
Google TrustRank
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· Score: 1
"But then GE, GM or Unilever don't set themselves up for it such s, with sanctimonious crap like Do No Evil as a corporate mission statement. Larry and Sergey may as well walk around with a "kick me here" sign stapled to their asses."
Well, then I guess that's the sad state that they have to find themselves in. Keep in mind that you're reading a very important document. If the company did not put that in writing prior to their public offering, then they would be lible to their stockholders for crippling the business by not "being evil". Yes, you can be taken to court and lose millions because you applied ethics.
Google's form S-1 (also called a "Red Herring", this is the document you must file with the SEC to describe your company to potential public investors) includes:
DON'T BE EVIL
Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served--as shareholders and in all other ways--by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.
They MUST list this in their S-1, which is a public document, or they risk massive loss from stockholder lawsuits if their internal policy of avoiding the pitfalls of trading ethics for short-term gains caused a noticably short-term loss.
Re:more censorship, unimpressed
on
Google TrustRank
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"so when google desides what's trusted for us, what is good content and what isnt, are they still not being "evil"?
Yes.
Why is it that everyone is constantly striving to find Google's evil? Ranking the relevancy of pages to a search is Google's job. By ranking spam as relevant to my search they have failed. Using the concept of a web of trust to establish relevancy is a fairly obvious solution and has well established analogs in other fields (e.g. PKI).
If you're looking for evil, try GE, GM, or Unilever. Google doesn't even begin to rank on the evil-o-meter.
Stallman's contributions are vast, and worthy of note, so let's explore them a bit:
He wrote emacs.
He wrote gcc.
He wrote gdb.
He contributed to most if not all of the core GNU projects.
If you use a (and I'll use his term here, just this once), GNU/Linux system, you use a whole lot of software which descends directly from code he wrote.
As a programmer / standards guy, I credit him with ensuring that alloca made it into C, that POSIX didn't get "too stupid", and with rationalizing the POSIX command-line standards with a workable long options syntax.
As a contributor to the concept of free software, I credit him with the term and with the concept of copyleft, as embodied in the GPL (but not with the concept of free software in general, which was well under way before he chose to be its champion)
Stallman was an in some respects continues to be one of my heros and role models... but mostly only when it comes to the purely technical.
"if these documents really could have had significant sway in terms of the court case."
You are confusing this with a criminal case where the police seize evidence. This is a civil case, so there is a discovery process.
SCO (the party that filed the complaint in the first place) can do whatever they like with their documents, but every time they pull a stunt like this, their chances of winning this case (which were pretty much limited to litigation risk from the start) drop by an order of magnitude, and the chances that the judge will simply throw the case out of court go up to compensate. Ultimately, they could even be charged with a criminal offense, depending on how blatant it is that they did this to obscure the facts, as opposed to simple incompetence.
To look at it the other way around, imagine how awful it would be if, every time someone sued your company, your books were seized. I can just see the denial-of-service type attacks now. Want to cripple IBM? Sue them just before they file their taxes!;-)
"in ten years, we will all be thanking RMS for his foresight - or lamenting that too few people took him seriously enough to avert disaster..."
Keep in mind that people were saying that about RMS 20 years ago.
Also keep in mind that giving away your software was not RMS's idea.
Also keep in mind that the GPL was not the first free sofware license.
RMS was just the loudest proponent of what many at the time saw as a logical progression, and that progression has continued on dispite RMS's constant attempts to change the course of the river or claim its bends as his own personal expression.
His constant droning on serves to impress himself and those who are not aware of the history. Mind you, I still have great respect for his code, I just think that he should go back to writing code and stop trying to play politician. He's good at one of those.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem I have with the name of the Movie is the same one I have with the mission: it really sounds like a name that belongs on one of those pornos that rips off the basic premise of a movie, but somehow always ends up involving a delivery guy showing up to the wrong house....
Look at their compatibility policies during the period before the IBM PC became dominant
I think if you want to talk about a company's reputation, you should stick to the things the company did in the last 20 years... one generation is a fair line to draw. After all, I'd like to think that people who know me now and knew me in college are willing to forget my crazy ways back then.
"Apple's history isn't as bad as MS', but it's not as good as Sun's"
Huh?
Ok, Apple is no white knight, but this is just silly.
Sun dropped a BSD with proprietary extentions for a proprietary SysV which they open sourced only after getting their asses handed to them in the small to mid-range server market by the likes of Red Hat.
Apple dropped a proprietary OS (MacOS) for a BSD with proprietary extensions in order to better take advantage of the technological advances in the (financially failed) NeXT platform.
Sun has launched a massive anti-Linux PR campaign.
Apple has never even really mentioned other open source platforms.
How is Sun's track record "good", here?
I have a hard time reading your post. I assume English is not your first language, so just correct me I intepret it wrong.
"Ok, your post will be moderated Informative or Insignt. But I can't fully agree you."
Well, of course, that doesn't mean that I'm not being either insightful or informative. Same goes for you. Debate can be insightful on all sides, can't it?
"Systems like the hollywood system or the blizzard system are very corrosive"
Sure, I agree with that (except I'm not sure we can reasonably call it "the Blizzard system"... if anything Blizzard is an island of quality game design amid a sea of status quo mediocrity). But keep in mind that Hollywood has and continues to produce some stunning films. They're rare, but they exist, and they continue to move the state of the art forward. IMHO, Ghandi, The Shawshank Redemption, Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Memento, The Matrix, Fight Club, The Third Man (which I just watched the other day), Star Wars, Amadeus and many others make it all worth it. I'd rather have 100 bad films and one gem every year than no gems, and I'm not optimistic enough to think that all of these folks would be turning out gems if Hollywood didn't exist. Most of them would be turning out much cheaper crap.
"Newbies become money oriented, instead of creativity oriented"
That has nothing to do with Hollywood, that has to do with success. The same thing has happened to Indian theater recently (or so I hear). It's just a matter of the pressures that money places on art. Tell me that commercial advertising doesn't do the same thing to still art. It's just one of the obsticles that makes truly great art worthy of note.
So the concern here is that reproducing their work takes time and effort that is only aided in part by their source code?
Isn't that a heck of a head-start?
" Common LISP is a very old language
Common Lisp (!) was created by amalgamating several other variations of LISP into an ANSI standard that was ratified in 1994."
This thread is starting to tread into language-war territory, and I don't want to go there, but suffice to say that Common LISP (as described in the 1994 standard) is the descendent of several forms of LISP which stem from roughly the same time period as C and FORTRAN give-or-take 20 years. K&R C is not ANSI C, but we still describe the C language of today (C9X) as being "30 years old". So too, we describe Common LISP as being at least as old as the LISP dialects that were merged and extended to create it in the first place.
And excellent refernce can be found on lisp.org's history page.
"CL has also had [...features...] Throw in [...features...] and you now can now see why many people like it."
That's great. I like it quite a lot myself. If you thought this was some kind of anti-Common LISP rant of mine, you are sorely mistaken! I work for a company that uses Common LISP commercially, and it pays my bills. I was talking about appropriate choice of languages to introduce programmers to certain concepts. For that specific, narrow purpose, I was suggesting that CL was at least not the only choice (and IMHO, not the best choice).
footnote: I do not speak for my company. If my above comments made you think that I do, please disabuse yourself of such notions.
Yep, I agree. I was referncing that macro article only to point to something for the sake of this conversation. I understand there are some excellent "so you want to learn to program" books for scheme, but I already knew C, BASIC and Modula-2 when I came across scheme for the first time.
Someday I have to go back and really LEARN scheme.
Ob Geek Dig: "As a side note, slashdotters might disagree that people want "boring" sex I think the reality is that most people grandstand on this issue; I'd wager that the majority of people feel comfortable having relativity boring sex"
;-)
I think most Slashdotters would feel comfortable having sex... "realtively boring" or not.
As for the article, I agree with him in part. The industry is starting to show its age, and the "blockbuster" has arived. This does NOT mean that good games with innovative concepts are gone, it just means that the really good an creative ones don't have the financial backing any more. Look for the games that don't quite have the best graphics (can't afford a team of artists), and aren't for sale in the mall stores (probably online only) to be the next wave of innovative games.
Of course, Doom was only for sale online, and it was astoundingly innovative, so not a LOT has changed.
First off, let me say that I'm new to Haskell, and learning it, Python and (as of last night) Fortress at the same time, so I'm far from an expert.
"Lisp can generally be made faster than Haskell"
Certainly, and I'm not saying Haskell makes a good language for day-to-day coding. I'm just saying that it's a good place to learn functional programming.
"Haskell uses lazy evaluation. Lisp uses strict evaluation unless you explicitly ask for lazy evaluation."
For those who do not understand this point, it's worth going into. In C, when you say:
c = foo() + bar();
you call functioan foo and bar, add their results, and store that result in c. In Haskell a similar construct would store in c the information required to call foo and bar at a later time when/if you needed the value of c, but of course, if you just add c to another value, you just create a more complex result, you still don't invoke foo or bar.
This is a very powerful concept, but can also lead to surprising results if you are used to programming in non-lazy languages.
I appologize about macros. I have had only brief exposure to Haskell, and knew that it had macros, so (it being a functional language and all) I just assumed that that meant macros ala LISP. Clearly I was wrong.
As for Scheme, here's a reference that discussses schemem macros
Overall, I wasn't trying to start a language war. I have a great deal of respect for Common LISP. It is, however, huge and quirky, so I generally don't tend to direct people at it who just want to learn functional programming. That's a bit like giving someone an F-18 to learn how to fly.
If you find LISP interesting, Haskell might also be of interest.
Recent interest in Haskell has exploded because of the implementation of Pugs in GHC. Pugs is a compiler / interpreter prototype for Perl 6, which is also a functional language, borrowing many concepts from LISP and smalltalk (as well as just about every other popular research or practical programming language).
Common LISP is a very old language (not as old as LISP, of course), full of the same kinds of pitfalls that any language its age or older shows (e.g. C, FORTRAN, etc). It is best to start with younger languages and work your way back.
"as it were"
This is just the subjunctive mood; it's certainly in contemporary use.
You're correct, it's a shortened form of "as if it were so", which is really what I meant. The word "were" is being used in a way that is archaic: implying the subjunctive without any helper to indicate such, which we almost always use in modern English. You would not expect, "the way we were" to mean, "the way we might have been," but "the way we used to be."
So, while you are correct, you're also missing a larger point: the usage of "were" in that sentence is archaic, and yet the phrase is acceptable. At one point in the past, we started saying "as it were" instead of "an it were", and that was incorrect for some period of time too.
Language changes usually start with the least educated. They have fewer pre-conceptions, so they refine their usage based on the culture they find themselves in, the ease of use of certain constructs and influences from other languages. Of course, because these changes come from the least educated parts of society, we who have been taught that there is a "right way" to speak, resist them until their usage becomes so common that we can no longer pretend that they are not part of our language.
Thus, it's rather silly to say that common usage is wrong... common usage IS our langauge, and anything else is just the trappings of elitism.
"The phrase "as of late" is often used in sports, when refering to recent trends. That doesn't make it right."
There's no "right" when it comes to language. There's different people's opinions and then there are different group's opinions.
Quick quiz: which is right about English, the US, Australia or the UK? What about north-eastern US vs south-eastern US? At what point does "incorrect usage" become a dialect? Is it based on number of speakers? If so, how many? 10? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000?
How long does a phrase like "as of late" have to be used before it is correct? Certainly "as it were" was not always correct... at some point it became an accepted phrase, but that was a gradual process, and there was no defining moment when "English changed". Before that the correct phrase would have been "an it were", and now that usage of "were" is archaic... but "as it were" is still acceptable usage.
People tend to point to reference works, but reference works change and adapt to usage, so they FOLLOW the trends of common usage, not define them.
Stop trying to pretend that there's one English langauge, and just cope with the concepts of common usage and dialect. It's much easier that way.
Didn't like it?! You must be joking!
Think of it this way:It's not a new tactic, but it never really gets old either....
What's more, the word is very often used in sports, when refering to titles and standings. Given the topic is a comapny that made it big partially as a result of a suberbowl add, this seems apropos.
Of course it's almost certainly a hoax, but these are always fun to read. If you ever played EverQuest, there's a very similar bit about the clueless ebayer who thought the game would be easy as long as you yelled at people a lot ;-)
- Document every subroutine/method/macro/functional unit
- If you find yourself having to document a free-standing chunk of code, consider modularizing
- Write system/functional/etc. documentation seperately (in the same file in some langauges, but NEVER IN THE CODE) to give yourself a chance to abstract the concepts that the code represents.
- Add inline comments to free-staning code without modularizing, only when the reader's assumptions might be violated (e.g. I tend to document my use of POSIX time routines because they LOOK like Y2K bugs, but are not).
- When documenting routines, include the meaning of parameters and the meaning of the return value (if any) as well as the general function of the routine
- Avoid globals where possible, but document each when used
- Keep documentation well formatted so that it does not obstruct code visually.
Following these rules, I have never produced code which someone who knew the language I was programming in could not read and understand. When I write Perl code and use some large Schwartzian Transform, someone who does not know Perl might be confused, but I can't really stop and document every line of code for everyone who doesn't know the language. If I'm doing something particularly hairy that might not look sane to a reader who knows the language, then I comment it.There's code that I wrote 15 years ago that someone came to me a few years ago to ask about using in a college class, so I guess it works out ok
I think that the metric so far has been that things likely to make the installation of x.y*2.z difficult on an x.y.z-1 system, or were likely to require a few iterations of integration and testing were deferred until z.y*2+1.0 was forked.
" That trailer makes the Star Wars III trailer look like a stupid cartoon."
;-)
Considering that the stupid cartoons made the third movie seem like it almost might be cool, I suppose that's ok...
Seriously, I'm looking forward to both movies this year. SW3 because it has a (slim) chance of being the payoff that makes 1 and 2 worth the time and money spent, and Serenity because I want Fox to have a good long think about the chance they ruined. >:-)
Well, then I guess that's the sad state that they have to find themselves in. Keep in mind that you're reading a very important document. If the company did not put that in writing prior to their public offering, then they would be lible to their stockholders for crippling the business by not "being evil". Yes, you can be taken to court and lose millions because you applied ethics.
Google's form S-1 (also called a "Red Herring", this is the document you must file with the SEC to describe your company to potential public investors) includes:They MUST list this in their S-1, which is a public document, or they risk massive loss from stockholder lawsuits if their internal policy of avoiding the pitfalls of trading ethics for short-term gains caused a noticably short-term loss.
"so when google desides what's trusted for us, what is good content and what isnt, are they still not being "evil"?
Yes.
Why is it that everyone is constantly striving to find Google's evil? Ranking the relevancy of pages to a search is Google's job. By ranking spam as relevant to my search they have failed. Using the concept of a web of trust to establish relevancy is a fairly obvious solution and has well established analogs in other fields (e.g. PKI).
If you're looking for evil, try GE, GM, or Unilever. Google doesn't even begin to rank on the evil-o-meter.
"well, i've never used emacs"
Stallman's contributions are vast, and worthy of note, so let's explore them a bit:
He wrote emacs.
He wrote gcc.
He wrote gdb.
He contributed to most if not all of the core GNU projects.
If you use a (and I'll use his term here, just this once), GNU/Linux system, you use a whole lot of software which descends directly from code he wrote.
As a programmer / standards guy, I credit him with ensuring that alloca made it into C, that POSIX didn't get "too stupid", and with rationalizing the POSIX command-line standards with a workable long options syntax.
As a contributor to the concept of free software, I credit him with the term and with the concept of copyleft, as embodied in the GPL (but not with the concept of free software in general, which was well under way before he chose to be its champion)
Stallman was an in some respects continues to be one of my heros and role models... but mostly only when it comes to the purely technical.
"if these documents really could have had significant sway in terms of the court case."
;-)
You are confusing this with a criminal case where the police seize evidence. This is a civil case, so there is a discovery process.
SCO (the party that filed the complaint in the first place) can do whatever they like with their documents, but every time they pull a stunt like this, their chances of winning this case (which were pretty much limited to litigation risk from the start) drop by an order of magnitude, and the chances that the judge will simply throw the case out of court go up to compensate. Ultimately, they could even be charged with a criminal offense, depending on how blatant it is that they did this to obscure the facts, as opposed to simple incompetence.
To look at it the other way around, imagine how awful it would be if, every time someone sued your company, your books were seized. I can just see the denial-of-service type attacks now. Want to cripple IBM? Sue them just before they file their taxes!
"in ten years, we will all be thanking RMS for his foresight - or lamenting that too few people took him seriously enough to avert disaster..."
Keep in mind that people were saying that about RMS 20 years ago.
Also keep in mind that giving away your software was not RMS's idea.
Also keep in mind that the GPL was not the first free sofware license.
RMS was just the loudest proponent of what many at the time saw as a logical progression, and that progression has continued on dispite RMS's constant attempts to change the course of the river or claim its bends as his own personal expression.
His constant droning on serves to impress himself and those who are not aware of the history. Mind you, I still have great respect for his code, I just think that he should go back to writing code and stop trying to play politician. He's good at one of those.