The Technican Element 3 test wasn't more difficult than the Novice Element 1 and 2 together, so Technican became the lowest license class when they stopped having to take Element 1.
The change to 13 WPM was in 1936, and was specifically to reduce the number of Amateur applicants. It was 10 WPM before that. ARRL asked for 12.5 WPM in their filing, FCC rounded the number because they felt it would be difficult to set 12.5 on the Instructograph and other equipment available for code practice at the time.
It was meant to keep otherwise-worthy hams out of the hobby. And then we let that requirement keep going for 60 years.
The Indianapolis cop episode was back in 2009. It wasn't the first time we've had intruders, and won't be the last, and if you have to reach back that long for an example, the situation can't be that bad. It had nothing to do with code rules or NGOs getting their operators licenses.
A satphone is less expensive than a trained HF operator. Iridium costs $30 per month and $0.89 per minute to call another Iridium phone. That's the over-the-counter rate. Government agencies get a better rate than that. And the phone costs $1100, again that's retail not the government rate, less than an HF rig with antenna and tower will cost any public agency to install.
You think it's a big deal to lobby against paid operators because there will be objections? How difficult do you think it was to reform the code regulations? Don't you think there were lots of opposing comments?
And you don't care about young people getting into Amateur Radio. That's non-survival thinking.
Fortunately, when the real hams go to get something done, folks like you aren't hard to fight, because you don't really do much other than whine and send in the occassional FCC comment. Do you know I even spoke in Iceland when I was lobbying against the code rules? Their IARU vote had the same power as that of the U.S., and half of the hams in the country came to see me. That's how you make real change.
Yep, there are a lot of flashing lights and beeps sending code in the computer world. I still hear phones using "... --..." to indicate an incoming SMS.
OpenSSL has first-to-market advantage, and anyone who hasn't evaluated the quality differences will choose the simpler license. Plus there are other alternatives, like Amazon's new SSL-in-5000-lines which is also gift-licensed.
The time for OpenSSL to dual-license was when it was the only available alternative to entirely proprietary implementations. That might indeed have funded a quality improvement.
I don't know a thing about the quality of GnuTLS or the Amazon thing. I've seen enough of the insides of OpenSSL to know it's not pretty, but am not a crypto guy and this don't work on it.
Re:Few people understand the economics
on
On Being Pro-GPL
·
· Score: 1
Maintaining FIPS compliance did not make anything easier. It's essentially a prohibition on bug repair, as you have to recertify afterward. But the people who wanted FIPS were the only ones who were actually paying for someone to work on OpenSSL.
I don't think any of the other Free Software projects ever tried to be FIPS certified.
Re:Lawsuits and licenses are not the problem
on
On Being Pro-GPL
·
· Score: 1
If you are one of the infringed parties, I'd be happy to talk with you about what your options are. bruce at perens dot com or +1 510-4PERENS (I'm not there today, but it will take a message). I am not a lawyer but I work with the good ones and can bring them into the conversation if necessary.
Re:Few people understand the economics
on
On Being Pro-GPL
·
· Score: 1
As a community we've managed to almost completely ignore that because of their use of dual-licensing, MySQL made 1.1 Billion dollars after 9 years in business, and that for a database that was written by one person, and the code base remained available under the GPL.
IMO, 1.1 Billion dollars is pretty damn impressive. Especially if you get paid that to make Free Software. Heck, sign me up!
Oracle was a bad actor, and Monty is now leading further development of that same code base under the GPL. But it did not have to be that way.
Re:Few people understand the economics
on
On Being Pro-GPL
·
· Score: 1
How do you prove damages or have the right to settle violations if you don't have copyright?
If you have been doing enough work to justify getting paid for the software, you have an ample amount of your own copyrighted work to base your claim upon. If you haven't done that much work, what are you suing for?
You can also get a grant of the right to sue from your contributors. You can include in the agreement how you will apportion damages: for example you could take the ratio of your lines of modified code checked in vs. that of contributed code checked in, and give that portion of damages to FSF.
I have the front panel of Pixar's VAX 780, which was used to render the Genesis Effect scene using the old Reyes renderer. I think we only started calling it Renderman when it was put up for public sale.
Re:Few people understand the economics
on
On Being Pro-GPL
·
· Score: 1
You do have to get either copyright assignment or the right to relicense from your contributors, if you have contributors, or the whole scheme doesn't work. But maybe you get enough money to pay them some.
Yes, writing Morse Code Software is one of the creative and educational things you can do with Morse code.
It took me 60 days to get to 20 WPM, working for a long time every day.
In contrast, it took a lot less time to write an interrupt-driven, terminate-and-stay-resident Morse Code sounder program in 6502 assembler. And I learned the instruction set, too.
I'm not saying you don't want to do either. It just doesn't belong on the test.
Lawsuits and licenses are not the problem
on
On Being Pro-GPL
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I help GPL violators clean up their act, it's my main business.
Every one has had a total lack of due diligence. I will come in and find that they have violated the licenses of 21 proprietary software companies (this is a real customer example) by integrating their code into their main product, just like the GPL code. Some of them only had an "evaluation" license, some not even that, some wildly violated the terms of any license they got.
Most of them are in silicon valley. They seem to have the attitude that they will clean up their legal problems when they're rich, and nothing but getting their product out of the door matters until then.
They don't ask me to feel sorry for them. I bill them a lot, and in the end, they're clean and legal.
Few people understand the economics
on
On Being Pro-GPL
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Gift-style licensing like BSD licensing is for when you want everyone to use your code so badly that you don't care what they do with it. If you have an economic reason for that, fine. But it can create harm if you don't have your economics straight. Heartbleed was an economic failure of gift-style licensing. Very wealthy companies used OpenSSL and didn't contribute to its maintenance. There was some astronomical amount of economic damage in result. I think we all would have been better off had OpenSSL been dual-licensed and paid for by some folks, even if it had fewer users that way. And maybe that way its original developers would not have had to go to work for RSA, who prohibited them from ever touching their old code again. That's why we still have Eric Young's old, old license with the attribution clause nobody else uses any longer. He can't touch it.
GPL IMO does work best with dual licensing, because people who just hate the GPL can get what they want, and pay for making more Free Software. But if you don't care about money and don't want to use dual licensing, the growth effect you get from GPL is a lot better than making yourself some very rich company's unpaid employee by giving them all possible rights except for a very limited attribution.
Some people should pay. Some should get stuff for free. They aren't in general the same people, and they self-classify.
Yes, I know about the NAVAIDs, but they identify at 5 WPM and the airman's charts print the dots and dashes next to the waypoint. And there might still be runway aids that say a few letters, also at 5 WPM, but it's always the same letters for left and right and the outer, middle, and inner marker. Pilots learn the sounds for each.
When I was a Technician licensee, all of the repeaters were populated mostly by Technician licensees, and identified much faster than any of them could copy. So it was clear the Morse tone (erroneously called a "CW" ID because it wasn't Constant Wave) was there for a legal requirement only. But most of the repeaters could identify in phone, too. Back in NY, we had WR2ACD identify with the voice of the famous CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, who was of course KB2GSD.
I remember in about 1979 having a conversation with someone who was convinced of the superiority of EBCDIC, and really disappointed that ASCII had become the standard. I think he died a long time ago. I wonder what he would have thought of Unicode?
I am told that Bill Cross, the FCC staffer then in charge of Amateur Radio, had this displayed on his office wall. It was, of course, very different from the usual FCC comment. I was trying to make a point of how antique Morse was.
The Novice license stopped being the path to entry once the no-code Technician licensing started. There was indeed an ITU requirement, but it was at the behest of IARU, not as the requirement of any government. Similarly, FCC actually raised code speed requirements at the behest of ARRL. Shore stations had moved to phone and teletype decades before. Most ships no longer employed radio operators, but left that duty to other staff who only used phone. There was only a token continuing monitoring of Morse ship transmissions, now entirely gone.
There was one pro-code guy who pleaded with me to allow Amateur Radio to "die with dignity". If nothing else did, that convinced me that the pro-code folks could see the end coming and would accept it as long as it came after they died. Amateur licensing was declining fast, operators were dying faster than new ones got licenses, and we could see the end of Amateur Radio would come in a few decades at most..
Now there are more hams than ever, and Amateur Radio is healthy. When I say "We won", it means "Amateur Radio won". It's too bad we had to fight our own old guys.
There isn't really any reason for government agencies and NGOs to use Amateur Radio. They have satellite phones, etc. But if it really bothers you, why not lobby against allowing compensation for operators? I'd join that bandwagon.
I lobbied to end the requirement for an examination of the ability to decode Morse code with your ear and brain. Until 2007, the U.S. Federal Government required it before they would license all but the lowest grade of Amateur Radio hobbyists.
As part of my lobbying effort, I successfully passed a test for receiving code at 20 words per minute, and then subsequently refused to use the code on the air. 20 WPM is so fast that you have to decode by the sound of each character, you don't have enough time to pick out the individual dots and dashes.
The sound triangulated was in cryogenic liquid oxygen at 50 PSI. The speed of sound in that is approximately 1 kilometer per second.This paper is about calculating the exact speed. Elon talked in the conference about reading telemetry with millisecond accuracy. But this would yield only 1 meter resolution.
Re: Try Stack Overflow and --synclines
on
GCC 5.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
That's not the way it works. When cross-compiling, configure runs on the host. It tests that things compile. It doesn't test that they run.
Re: Try Stack Overflow and --synclines
on
GCC 5.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Roger,
This is great. It does look like a 1:1 mapping to what we expect autoconf to do, except neater and maintainable.
The only problem with selling this to GNU folks is that it would make CMake a prerequisite to everything. But I think it's worth it. And then there's inertia. And the language isn't as pretty as we'd like.
Slashdot Mirror
The Technican Element 3 test wasn't more difficult than the Novice Element 1 and 2 together, so Technican became the lowest license class when they stopped having to take Element 1.
The change to 13 WPM was in 1936, and was specifically to reduce the number of Amateur applicants. It was 10 WPM before that. ARRL asked for 12.5 WPM in their filing, FCC rounded the number because they felt it would be difficult to set 12.5 on the Instructograph and other equipment available for code practice at the time.
It was meant to keep otherwise-worthy hams out of the hobby. And then we let that requirement keep going for 60 years.
The Indianapolis cop episode was back in 2009. It wasn't the first time we've had intruders, and won't be the last, and if you have to reach back that long for an example, the situation can't be that bad. It had nothing to do with code rules or NGOs getting their operators licenses.
A satphone is less expensive than a trained HF operator. Iridium costs $30 per month and $0.89 per minute to call another Iridium phone. That's the over-the-counter rate. Government agencies get a better rate than that. And the phone costs $1100, again that's retail not the government rate, less than an HF rig with antenna and tower will cost any public agency to install.
You think it's a big deal to lobby against paid operators because there will be objections? How difficult do you think it was to reform the code regulations? Don't you think there were lots of opposing comments?
And you don't care about young people getting into Amateur Radio. That's non-survival thinking.
Fortunately, when the real hams go to get something done, folks like you aren't hard to fight, because you don't really do much other than whine and send in the occassional FCC comment. Do you know I even spoke in Iceland when I was lobbying against the code rules? Their IARU vote had the same power as that of the U.S., and half of the hams in the country came to see me. That's how you make real change.
Yep, there are a lot of flashing lights and beeps sending code in the computer world. I still hear phones using "... -- ..." to indicate an incoming SMS.
You're welcome. So you never licensed? It's not too late to join the fun.
OpenSSL has first-to-market advantage, and anyone who hasn't evaluated the quality differences will choose the simpler license. Plus there are other alternatives, like Amazon's new SSL-in-5000-lines which is also gift-licensed.
The time for OpenSSL to dual-license was when it was the only available alternative to entirely proprietary implementations. That might indeed have funded a quality improvement.
I don't know a thing about the quality of GnuTLS or the Amazon thing. I've seen enough of the insides of OpenSSL to know it's not pretty, but am not a crypto guy and this don't work on it.
Maintaining FIPS compliance did not make anything easier. It's essentially a prohibition on bug repair, as you have to recertify afterward. But the people who wanted FIPS were the only ones who were actually paying for someone to work on OpenSSL.
I don't think any of the other Free Software projects ever tried to be FIPS certified.
If you are one of the infringed parties, I'd be happy to talk with you about what your options are. bruce at perens dot com or +1 510-4PERENS (I'm not there today, but it will take a message). I am not a lawyer but I work with the good ones and can bring them into the conversation if necessary.
As a community we've managed to almost completely ignore that because of their use of dual-licensing, MySQL made 1.1 Billion dollars after 9 years in business, and that for a database that was written by one person, and the code base remained available under the GPL.
IMO, 1.1 Billion dollars is pretty damn impressive. Especially if you get paid that to make Free Software. Heck, sign me up!
Oracle was a bad actor, and Monty is now leading further development of that same code base under the GPL. But it did not have to be that way.
If you have been doing enough work to justify getting paid for the software, you have an ample amount of your own copyrighted work to base your claim upon. If you haven't done that much work, what are you suing for?
You can also get a grant of the right to sue from your contributors. You can include in the agreement how you will apportion damages: for example you could take the ratio of your lines of modified code checked in vs. that of contributed code checked in, and give that portion of damages to FSF.
I have the front panel of Pixar's VAX 780, which was used to render the Genesis Effect scene using the old Reyes renderer. I think we only started calling it Renderman when it was put up for public sale.
As it should be. You're welcome.
You do have to get either copyright assignment or the right to relicense from your contributors, if you have contributors, or the whole scheme doesn't work. But maybe you get enough money to pay them some.
Yes, writing Morse Code Software is one of the creative and educational things you can do with Morse code.
It took me 60 days to get to 20 WPM, working for a long time every day.
In contrast, it took a lot less time to write an interrupt-driven, terminate-and-stay-resident Morse Code sounder program in 6502 assembler. And I learned the instruction set, too.
I'm not saying you don't want to do either. It just doesn't belong on the test.
I help GPL violators clean up their act, it's my main business.
Every one has had a total lack of due diligence. I will come in and find that they have violated the licenses of 21 proprietary software companies (this is a real customer example) by integrating their code into their main product, just like the GPL code. Some of them only had an "evaluation" license, some not even that, some wildly violated the terms of any license they got.
Most of them are in silicon valley. They seem to have the attitude that they will clean up their legal problems when they're rich, and nothing but getting their product out of the door matters until then.
They don't ask me to feel sorry for them. I bill them a lot, and in the end, they're clean and legal.
Gift-style licensing like BSD licensing is for when you want everyone to use your code so badly that you don't care what they do with it. If you have an economic reason for that, fine. But it can create harm if you don't have your economics straight. Heartbleed was an economic failure of gift-style licensing. Very wealthy companies used OpenSSL and didn't contribute to its maintenance. There was some astronomical amount of economic damage in result. I think we all would have been better off had OpenSSL been dual-licensed and paid for by some folks, even if it had fewer users that way. And maybe that way its original developers would not have had to go to work for RSA, who prohibited them from ever touching their old code again. That's why we still have Eric Young's old, old license with the attribution clause nobody else uses any longer. He can't touch it.
GPL IMO does work best with dual licensing, because people who just hate the GPL can get what they want, and pay for making more Free Software. But if you don't care about money and don't want to use dual licensing, the growth effect you get from GPL is a lot better than making yourself some very rich company's unpaid employee by giving them all possible rights except for a very limited attribution.
Some people should pay. Some should get stuff for free. They aren't in general the same people, and they self-classify.
You must have missed the joke: "Some of our digital communications use only one digit!"
Yes, I know about the NAVAIDs, but they identify at 5 WPM and the airman's charts print the dots and dashes next to the waypoint. And there might still be runway aids that say a few letters, also at 5 WPM, but it's always the same letters for left and right and the outer, middle, and inner marker. Pilots learn the sounds for each.
When I was a Technician licensee, all of the repeaters were populated mostly by Technician licensees, and identified much faster than any of them could copy. So it was clear the Morse tone (erroneously called a "CW" ID because it wasn't Constant Wave) was there for a legal requirement only. But most of the repeaters could identify in phone, too. Back in NY, we had WR2ACD identify with the voice of the famous CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, who was of course KB2GSD.
Actually it has QWERTY :-)
I remember in about 1979 having a conversation with someone who was convinced of the superiority of EBCDIC, and really disappointed that ASCII had become the standard. I think he died a long time ago. I wonder what he would have thought of Unicode?
I drive an automobile. It has an internal-combustion engine.
My computer keyboard has QUERTY.
I think there's a century behind both of those things, isn't there?
I am told that Bill Cross, the FCC staffer then in charge of Amateur Radio, had this displayed on his office wall. It was, of course, very different from the usual FCC comment. I was trying to make a point of how antique Morse was.
The Novice license stopped being the path to entry once the no-code Technician licensing started. There was indeed an ITU requirement, but it was at the behest of IARU, not as the requirement of any government. Similarly, FCC actually raised code speed requirements at the behest of ARRL. Shore stations had moved to phone and teletype decades before. Most ships no longer employed radio operators, but left that duty to other staff who only used phone. There was only a token continuing monitoring of Morse ship transmissions, now entirely gone.
There was one pro-code guy who pleaded with me to allow Amateur Radio to "die with dignity". If nothing else did, that convinced me that the pro-code folks could see the end coming and would accept it as long as it came after they died. Amateur licensing was declining fast, operators were dying faster than new ones got licenses, and we could see the end of Amateur Radio would come in a few decades at most..
Now there are more hams than ever, and Amateur Radio is healthy. When I say "We won", it means "Amateur Radio won". It's too bad we had to fight our own old guys.
There isn't really any reason for government agencies and NGOs to use Amateur Radio. They have satellite phones, etc. But if it really bothers you, why not lobby against allowing compensation for operators? I'd join that bandwagon.
The Pixar code base came from Lucasfilm, and went back to the 1970's. Some of that code is still in use.
I lobbied to end the requirement for an examination of the ability to decode Morse code with your ear and brain. Until 2007, the U.S. Federal Government required it before they would license all but the lowest grade of Amateur Radio hobbyists.
As part of my lobbying effort, I successfully passed a test for receiving code at 20 words per minute, and then subsequently refused to use the code on the air. 20 WPM is so fast that you have to decode by the sound of each character, you don't have enough time to pick out the individual dots and dashes.
We won.
The sound triangulated was in cryogenic liquid oxygen at 50 PSI. The speed of sound in that is approximately 1 kilometer per second.This paper is about calculating the exact speed. Elon talked in the conference about reading telemetry with millisecond accuracy. But this would yield only 1 meter resolution.
That's not the way it works. When cross-compiling, configure runs on the host. It tests that things compile. It doesn't test that they run.
Roger,
This is great. It does look like a 1:1 mapping to what we expect autoconf to do, except neater and maintainable.
The only problem with selling this to GNU folks is that it would make CMake a prerequisite to everything. But I think it's worth it. And then there's inertia. And the language isn't as pretty as we'd like.
Can you see any other possible objections?
Thanks
Bruce