Every teccie knows that the universe is held together by gaffer tape, and the only problem has been to find the link between gaffer tape and dark matter.
If relativity does away with dark matter, well fine, but the cosmologists are missing the key issue here. All this means is that now we have to find the link between relativity and gaffer tape.
GPL supports marketters, vs. developers profit
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Nessus Closes Source
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· Score: 1
using the GPL as it was intended, to prevent vendor lock-in
That's one of the good part of the GPL (it has many), as intended. But it also has unintended consequences which are bad.
Where in the GPL does it say "Code re-marketers will make higher profits than developers"? Nowhere. Yet, there is a cost associated with developing a package, but people who merely copy and market a GPL package bear none of that cost. Consequently, the GPL favors pure marketting companies at the expense of developers who also try to market their product. The developers will always lose out, simply because they have higher costs.
In order to be fair to developers, the GPL would need to carry an additional clause which stated: "The GPL is not concerned with marketting, but respects any marketting conditions required by the author(s) of the software as long as such conditions are compatible with the GPL. THIS LICENSE IS VOID IF SUCH CONDITIONS ARE NOT MET."
I'm skeptical whether that will work or not, but we'll see. I'm rooting for them, and not because I play the game (I don't)
Try it briefly, and you'll see why they are extremely likely to succeed. There are five key reasons why I think it's almost guaranteed, by design:
They are creating an ever-growing CAPTIVE audience, unlike any other MMOG-type game. The audience is captive because of the lack of monthly subscription costs. After all, once you've purchased the extremely cheap game pack (just 18 UK pounds from play.com), why would you delete it? You're captive for good (in principle), even if you don't play it, as you'll still have GW announcements on your mental radar. In marketting terms, that's a goldmine.
They have utterly eradicated all the horrors that plague more conventional MMOGs, like kill stealing, camping, camp stealing, xp grinding, LFG waiting, getting mobs trained on you, and many others. This makes people who have experienced those problems before appreciate GW for eternity.
They are unique in providing a game which supports the solo gamer totally brilliantly (the henchmen concept is terrific), and the casual gamer as well (no LFG timesink because of henchies, and a trillion short but rewarding quests to do). Yet somehow, ie. through the sheer brilliance of the design, they've managed to make it equally excellent for team players, and for the non-casual hardcore. It's hard not to be impressed.
The design of the game is such that there is a MINISCULE loading on servers. (It's almost tempting to call it a P2P game mediated through a central transport proxy.) As a result, their server requirements must be massively less than for any conventional MMOG, which means that their no-subscription business model isn't sucked dry by huge platform hardware, admin, and support costs. This approach is wonderfully scalable both from a technical and a business perspective. (I work in platform scaling, so I know a scalable design when I see it.)
And finally, the hardcore element. It's probably fair to say that Guild Wars is one of the hardest online games in existence if you want it to be, but very easy if you don't. In other words, if you decide to fully assimilate and understand the hundreds of skills of your primary and secondary profession and how they interact with and how they counter those of your opponents then the game is extremely challanging.
It's mind-bogglingly complex to be fully aware of the professions of those you are fighting and what skills they are using, to counter them appropriately, while at the same time managing your energy reserve, and looking out for your team. This is nothing like a straight turns-based MMOG like EQ, where once you engage combat, the outcome is largely decided as long as you don't do something dumb. GW is fast and furious --- no tank taunt to trivialize the gaming in PvE, and effective foe AI so that the healer always gets it first, just like human players do.
If you've absorbed the above, you'll realize that PvP in Guild Wars is either fantastically brilliant (if you like PvP) or appallingly dreadful (if you're a PvE-only fan), because GW's PvP is trully player-skill-based: ie. the best man/woman wins, regardless of equipment. This is why the Koreans own GW's PvP space --- they work hard to understand the game, and it's their human skill/experience as players that makes them use the in-game skills so devastatingly. (America comes a beleagered and very battered second, and the chewed up and splattered remains of Europe a very distant third.)
In summary, Guild Wars can't fail, not by rights anyway. It will fail only if not enough people hear about it, or if its totally excellent developers leave the company. (No, I don't work there, I'm just an appreciative player, completed it on main.):-))
It's actually a lot worse than you and the parent suggest.
If DRM inhibits the casual, non-profit copier, but does nothing to stop organized crime from making and selling copies by the hundreds of thousands, then DRM is on-balance favoring organized commercial piracy.
But it goes even further than that. By reducing private copying, DRM creates a much larger market for the copies made by organized crime. There is nothing the high volume criminal piracy rings must love more than the RIAA/MPAA's strong curtailing of amateur copying.
As many have said before, the RIAA's extortion tactics smell very much like organized crime. Given that their efforts support actual organized crime so well, it really makes you wonder...
Be sure to read the section "Misconceptions about Gödel's theorems" and the subsequent discussion.
Anti-logic advocates frequently cite Godel as implying that logic is irrelevant and pointless, usually as a precursor to getting their own unfounded opinions considered without any hard sanity checks. It's pretty sad.
Mankind progresses by axiomatizing lower level concepts and virtualizing higher-level ones for discussion, and this works for mathematics as well. As a result, Godel and Russell constrain our mathematics and logic (and scientific progress) about as much as the Halting Problem constrains computing.
Ie. not at all for the practice of science-based engineering, and for the theorists it's just another interesting constraint to add. The sky is not falling.
Bertrand Russel tried to put mathematics on an immovable foundation of theory and logic, sadly it turned out to be impossible.
I don't think that you got very far with Bertrand Russell.
The higher-order issues he identified caused just a temporary hiccup in the development of logic. While undoubtedly fundamental, that problem paraphrases best as "There are hidden depths to this", rather than as "All is lost".
Godel applies, as always. You don't apply a theory outside of its domain of discourse, not if you know what you're doing anyway.
Russell showed that the domain of logic gets tangled if you use it to think about itself. Well (with hindsight) that is no surprise at all. The expert logician recognizes the necessary boundary, and virtualizes the outer domain before it can be handled by the inner domain logic.
Russell is doing just fine, thank you. Almost the entirety of mankind's technological world is founded on the logic which you describe as "impossible".
A theory in natural sciences attempts to describe an existing physical system, and a theory in synthetic sciences (like mathematics) describes a non-physical system which can be brought into existence by exact implementation of the details of its theory.
Neither of the above apply to evolving a system through iterated development or evolution, directed only by practical constraints, which is what Linus and the kernel community are doing. This makes the analogy with theories in science less than helpful.
Linus should be talking more about "fixed points" than about theories. Specs are fixed points which introduce some stability into a shifting world, and they are good both for those who want solid products and those who want to live at the bleeding edge alike. After all, when at the bleeding edge, you still want your tools to work reliably.
That said, the future of mankind (in computing) will have to replace the current ad hoc mess by hard synthetic science and engineering in due course, and therefore theory and logic will become central. However, we're not even on the first rung of the ladder in that respect.
Linus has limited engineering future vision
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Linus Says No to 'Specs'
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"software was written to match theory, not reality"
That was very blinkered and unfortunate statement by Linus. While he portrays himself as a "practical engineer", the truth is that he is not flying the flag of professional engineering, but supporting some kind of ill-conceived ideal of ad hoc amateurism.
The world of computing is in crisis. After 40 years of 'pro' development, computing is still a human-driven craft instead of the extremely precise arm of engineering that it could so easily have become through its well-defined subject matter.
While Linus has contributed immensely to the world by delivering a wonderful engineering tool as well as a great end-user product, he is also extending the software crisis through unfortunate remarks like that one. The "reality" which he so seems to praise is THE PROBLEM in software engineering, and not something to be endorsed or supported.
If the world continued along Linus's desired path of "reality" vs theory, the current mess will know no end, and the metaphorical bridges of computer science will still be falling down in the year 3,000.
Mankind's future in computing must build on immoveable foundations of theory and logic if it is to progress into a realm where machines of IQs in the millions work at our behest. Advocating some sort of ad hoc "practical" computing barbarism is very short-sighted, dangerous, and regressive.
Practically everyone who responded to the parent post focussed on the 9-5 timekeeping or on the number of hours worked. That wasn't the point being made at all, but the fact that the majority of IT workers are expected (by a very large majority of companies) to commute in to work, and that puts load on the transport infrastructure.
The rush hours around 9am and 5pm aren't the only points of the day that matter. Driving at any time of the day has a wear and tear effect on the tarmac for example.
If you want to keep public infrastructure costs low (and you should want that if you're a big employer but don't intend to contribute pro rata to those costs), then telecommuting + occasional hotdesking ought to be offered to all employees who want it, and indeed strongly encouraged as the standard way of working in IT.
They want power, by having people and companies dependent on local infrastructure.
And they want money through taxes, which equates to power for them to implement whatever *they* want. The near-zero regard that politicians have for the wishes of the people who elected them is almost universal.
I hope Google tell them to take a running jump.
The issue of Google not contributing to the building of extra transport infrastructure for 4000 jobs is easily handled, and it's not just specific to Google. All large corporations should be expected to make good use of teleworking and office hot-desking wherever it is desired by the workforce and feasible in the business, as it certainly is in IT. In a networked age, a company's whole IT staff driving in at 9am and home at 5pm is just plain nuts.
In responsibility, this will be a step back, as I am currently in a management role
That is a stunning statement from my perspective, stunning in the worst possible way. It presupposes that a technical role carries less responsibility than a managerial one, which is a terrible indictment of how you perceive relationships in the workplace. It certainly doesn't reflect my approach to responsibility in software and systems engineering in any place where I have worked professionally.
Perhaps it reflects the outlook of some hypothetical 9-5 techie who couldn't care less what he does in the office, but it's not an outlook that is at all common. Quite the opposite: it is usually the middle management that is 9-5, and the technical people slug their guts out around the clock. While hours beyond the call of duty do not mean everything, nevertheless they do imply dedication and responsibility.
Of course, management always thinks that it is at the top of the pyramid of responsibility and authority, even in a company whose business is entirely technical and where the actual wealth creators are the technical people. Well, it's up to every professional technical person to disabuse them of that. It can be tough and confrontational, but it is also rewarding in the long run to be recognized for carrying out a key and indispensible engineering role.
My answer to your question is simple: do the job that you find most rewarding and fulfilling. If you were a bum-on-seat tech laborer with zero authority and no responsibility in a company run by managers who treat their techies as menial labor, then not only should you flee the technical positions, but abandon the company in its entirety.
Q. "Would an average software developer with an average education and average experience in computing ever need to refer to Eolas' patent on plug-ins, either directly or indirectly, in order to introduce optional functionality into an application?"
A. "No."
In fact, no software developer of any standing would need the information allegedly protected by the patent, because it is 100% obvious. And if you don't need the information in a patent, either directly or indirectly, then clearly the patent does not contribute the technical novelty which is allegedly being infringed. It has not offered the claimed item of value to the commonweal through its publication.
Given the above, nothing else in this case is relevant. Regardless of the form of words on the application, there can be no rational claim of infringement of a protected invention here, because the likelihood that the patent played any part whatsoever in the development of the allegedly infringing products is zero.
A patent is meant to provide a short-term monopoly so that the patent holder can *PRODUCE* his invention without immediately losing out to competitors on publication of the details. It has no other purpose.
So where is Eolas' product, which this patent is supposed to protect?
Of course, every man and his dog will point out that the above does not reflect how patents are used in today's world, at least in the US. Well bully for you, that's the hub of the problem, and Eolas is just a symptom.
W3C should have known better than to engage in the game, instead of vigorously showing that the game is utterly nonsensical and ridiculous when applied to this area, in which W3C's technical expertise is not contestable by a mere USPTO examiner.
The very clearly reasoned and yet utterly unreasonable legal position that you describe illustrates admirably why the law is held in such low regard these days and lawyers are viewed as bloodsucking scum.
Strategies, counter-strategies, technicalities, 10 million stages to the legal "game", and every move achieving almost nothing except a transfer of money into the wallets of lawyers. Absolutely wonderful.
Meanwhile, sight is lost of whether the alleged wrongdoings actually constitute a loss for the plaintiff, rather than free advertising no different to that in radio broadcasting. All that matters for you and your colleagues is that the divine handle of law continue to be cranked, regardless of whether it is right or wrong.
WebHostingGuy, your ex-profession is morally bankrupt.
And it's really an MMO, not just a CORPG like Guild Wars?
So you actually *LIKE* the traditional MMOG features of kill stealing, camping, camp stealing, repeated dying from being trained, days waiting for your mob to spawn, mind-numbing xp grind, near-zero loot drop rates, etc etc? Oh, and paying a subscription to enjoy your suffering.
The way to make money off P2P is not to offer P2P services (a direct invitation for lawyers and other scum to line their pockets), but to *use* P2P to distribute your own data for next to nothing.
It's a terrific delivery mechanism with an enormous benefit/cost ratio, so why not make that the basis of your business by delivering your own material over it, or delivering content belonging to other less technical providers under contract? You would be legally in the clear, while benefitting from absolutely minimal networking costs.
ESR is pro-business, at the expense of individuals
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RMS Previews GPL3 Terms
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· Score: 2, Interesting
ESR's position against Free Software has always seemed slightly irrational (or at least unjustified) to me, but I always put it down to no more than him trying to get some more limelight for his Open Software efforts. That would be unfortunate, but no biggie.
But now that he has publicly gone anti-GPL by saying that it is no longer needed, I think that ESR is finally showing his true colours.
In a world where Free+Open Software ruled the roost (we're not quite there yet), the only people for whom the GPL might no longer be needed are those people who have an army of paid-up lawyers behind them, in other words, the corporations. Everyone else would get screwed by the first well-financed litigious bloodsucker that comes along and markets the software without respecting its authors' desired freedoms.
So, it's pretty simple: ESR is pro-business, and actively desires individuals to be powerless and trodden underfoot in the corporate rush for profits.
That's pretty bad, not far off from being "evil". I must say, I didn't really expect that from ESR.
It's no surprise that the PR suits responded. But that needn't be the end of the story.
Now it's the dev's turn. Come on guys, answer the questions properly, ie. technically. You're in a position of strength anyway, the suits probably don't want to lose more of you to NCsoft (well, not if they have a clue anyway), so if you approach it in a constructive fashion there shouldn't be any fireworks.
And if there are, well, perhaps it's not the right company to work for after all.
You're the key people, remember that. The suits are two a penny, and you ought to remind them of that occasionally.
This whole issue, and 10 thousand other similar ones, stems from the irrelevance of copyright in the digital age.
If something online is generally accessible, it's inherently copiable, and denying the legal right to copy it becomes effectively unenforceable unless you are one of those who tries to sweep back the tide and sue individuals by the million.
Copyright needs to be replaced by Republication Right. Copying itself then becomes legal in all circumstances, for all content that is accessible. (Notice that DRM'd content is not accessible by copying, so the copying itself can be perfectly legal since it does not release the content.)
And then the lawyers can go chase only those who republish content without the Republication Right to do so, which makes much more sense.
- Use an authority-at-the-leaves, power-at-the-root type of architecture, ie. like DNS. It's the only way it'll scale to MMOG-type numbers in multiplayer events, while still allowing people to control their own worlds and not get "Ludlow'd" by critics nor "Slashdotted" by popularity.
- Make the root servers no more than multi-world caches, accepting client logins, and sucking content from their authoritative leaf node worlds on demand. No doubt universities and then later corporations will start offering big iron services to handle the root load, but as mere caches, they will have no say on (nor responsibility for) the world content.
- Start by defining an extensible leaf-to-cache and cache-to-client protocol. This is absolutely mandatory, because there will be no fixed points in this evolving, distributed environment, and no possibility of dropping the system offline for a global upgrade.
- Don't expect it to be easy. But, if everything you do is extensible and distributed, then the power of a million eager world builders will prevail.:-)
Ludlow's experience is not surprising. Every online games company on Earth plays god, believing that they have the sole right to direct the evolution of "their" world despite the fact that 90% of its value comes from the synergy of its players.
It doesn't seem to register with these corporations that without the interaction between gamers, all they have is a Massively Single-Player Offline Game, and that all their servers and networks and GMs and content providers just burn up dollars as a recurring cost and provide no return at all. More so than in any other producer-consumer relationship, the players in MMOGs are priceless. Yet, their desires are so often ignored.
This isn't going to change, as it's in the nature of company management to want to control. Until someone finally produces the prototype of that open and distributed metaverse that everyone is always talking about, the Ludlow experience will be repeated, time and again.
Second Life may be the closest to an acceptable platform that we have experienced so far, but if anyone annoyed Linden Labs in the same way that Ludlow annoyed the owners of TSO, you can pretty much guarantee that he would be murdered yet again.
Only a distributed world will be free of that, and even then, coercion from those who dislike what you are doing will still exist.
It's nice to see bands standing up for their public against the wishes of their labels.
Yeah, while still taking Sony's money and saying that it is "impossible" to change the system, and therefore supporting its continuation.
Let's be honest here. They don't WANT to change the system, because they like Sony's cash too much.
If they were genuine about being pro-fan, there is a hell of a lot that they could do about the situation.
For a start they could tell Sony to sod off with the copy protection, or they'll go with another publisher. If Sony threatens them with litigation on the basis of the contract signed, then get together with other artists in the same situation and run a class action on the basis of such contracts being in restraint of trade.
Sony (and other labels) are just distributors and promotors in this day and age when you can have a billion-track studio at home for peanuts, and hire in your mastering experts for a session. Yet, the labels want to own it all, for eternity. Bollocks.
It's time that bands did something about it, or be branded money-grabbing hypocrits. The power to bring down the system is in their hands. Currently the majority just have no interest in using that power and getting rid of the old machine.
I read one of the links above, comparing Python and Lua, but it doesn't talk about sandboxes. Does Lua have one or does it just do multiple interpreters?
Both of those apply. As Lua is fully reentrant and tiny, you can have any number of Lua VMs active concurrently in a program, and they're all naturally disjoint from each other.
In addition, Lua execution is inherently sandboxed with respect to the operating system because the base interpreter provides no system functions at all, and so it can affect only its own internal state. You need Lua's standard libraries before you can do file operations etc with it, but those libraries are available only if the designer chose to link them in to your executable, so the sandboxing is unbreakable "by default", bugs excepted.
Diametrically opposed to the above, many other Lua executables exist which contain dynamic loaders to allow the interpreter to be extended on the fly with arbitrary code, ie. to provide high functionality rather than sandboxing.
Lua can be pretty much anything you want it to be. The base VM just gives you efficient and flexible scripting, and imposes no usage policy at all.
Re your point about Tcl, that language suffers from its string orientation when applied to gaming, although it's fine for embedding as a simple configuration language. Lua is stunningly fast, so its use in games goes far beyond mere configuration and UI scripting, right into the hearts of engines.
There's some serious excitement fragility in this thread.
The only way in which a geek could not be excited by PS3 is through either not having read the specs or not believing that Sony will deliver on them. (The latter view is perfectly legit.)
Pure hype is of course pure crap and every geek needs to be wise to it, but you're an informed bunch, you can analyse the hype and see for yourselves the truth (or otherwise) behind it.
I'm a researcher in concurrency and parallism. dating waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back to the days of the transputer, and I can tell you that (i) the Cell model is good, (ii) it's looking great from an open O/S perspective since the German Linux dev team is working wonders on the IBM Cell blade, and (iii) if Sony delivers only a fraction of the claimed functionality in the PS3, it will still be meteoric.
So, for technically-oriented geeks, this whole issue is utterly clearcut, and the Xbox 360 is just a sideshow. The fact that PS3 will run the dozens of thousand of PS2 games while Xbox 360 is not backwards compatible to Xbox1 is merely a side issue.
The more hardware the better, but there isn't a serious contest here.
Coming out on Nov 22 is actually pretty good timing.
It's not just good, it's terrific timing! MS are damn brilliant at marketting.
The problem is that everyone's so dismayed at the crappiness of the 360 machine, even the Xbox supporters. (I have an Xbox1 and I love it, I consider myself a supporter. It's my main CD player and secondary DVD player, and it works great. And I think I have an Xbox game somewhere too. Oh yeah, it's MechAssault, for launching Linux.)
3 cores is good in principle, but they're awfully slow, and the ATI graphics...:-((((((((((
I guess I'll buy one if I find the money (let's not talk about the price, eww), but I find it hard to put myself in the boots of a non-geek and still find a reason to buy this machine. A PS2 simply has no rival atm, and the PS3 is looking utterly deadly. Hell, it would look deadly even if it didn't play the dozens of thousands of PS2 titles out there.
There's just no contest atm, but I wish MS well anyway (the Xbox1 was great hardware).
Slashdot Mirror
TFA is just plain silly.
Every teccie knows that the universe is held together by gaffer tape, and the only problem has been to find the link between gaffer tape and dark matter.
If relativity does away with dark matter, well fine, but the cosmologists are missing the key issue here. All this means is that now we have to find the link between relativity and gaffer tape.
using the GPL as it was intended, to prevent vendor lock-in
That's one of the good part of the GPL (it has many), as intended. But it also has unintended consequences which are bad.
Where in the GPL does it say "Code re-marketers will make higher profits than developers"? Nowhere. Yet, there is a cost associated with developing a package, but people who merely copy and market a GPL package bear none of that cost. Consequently, the GPL favors pure marketting companies at the expense of developers who also try to market their product. The developers will always lose out, simply because they have higher costs.
In order to be fair to developers, the GPL would need to carry an additional clause which stated: "The GPL is not concerned with marketting, but respects any marketting conditions required by the author(s) of the software as long as such conditions are compatible with the GPL. THIS LICENSE IS VOID IF SUCH CONDITIONS ARE NOT MET."
Try it briefly, and you'll see why they are extremely likely to succeed. There are five key reasons why I think it's almost guaranteed, by design:
It's mind-bogglingly complex to be fully aware of the professions of those you are fighting and what skills they are using, to counter them appropriately, while at the same time managing your energy reserve, and looking out for your team. This is nothing like a straight turns-based MMOG like EQ, where once you engage combat, the outcome is largely decided as long as you don't do something dumb. GW is fast and furious --- no tank taunt to trivialize the gaming in PvE, and effective foe AI so that the healer always gets it first, just like human players do.
If you've absorbed the above, you'll realize that PvP in Guild Wars is either fantastically brilliant (if you like PvP) or appallingly dreadful (if you're a PvE-only fan), because GW's PvP is trully player-skill-based: ie. the best man/woman wins, regardless of equipment. This is why the Koreans own GW's PvP space --- they work hard to understand the game, and it's their human skill/experience as players that makes them use the in-game skills so devastatingly. (America comes a beleagered and very battered second, and the chewed up and splattered remains of Europe a very distant third.)
In summary, Guild Wars can't fail, not by rights anyway. It will fail only if not enough people hear about it, or if its totally excellent developers leave the company. (No, I don't work there, I'm just an appreciative player, completed it on main.)
It's actually a lot worse than you and the parent suggest.
...
If DRM inhibits the casual, non-profit copier, but does nothing to stop organized crime from making and selling copies by the hundreds of thousands, then DRM is on-balance favoring organized commercial piracy.
But it goes even further than that. By reducing private copying, DRM creates a much larger market for the copies made by organized crime. There is nothing the high volume criminal piracy rings must love more than the RIAA/MPAA's strong curtailing of amateur copying.
As many have said before, the RIAA's extortion tactics smell very much like organized crime. Given that their efforts support actual organized crime so well, it really makes you wonder
Be sure to read the section "Misconceptions about Gödel's theorems" and the subsequent discussion.
Anti-logic advocates frequently cite Godel as implying that logic is irrelevant and pointless, usually as a precursor to getting their own unfounded opinions considered without any hard sanity checks. It's pretty sad.
Mankind progresses by axiomatizing lower level concepts and virtualizing higher-level ones for discussion, and this works for mathematics as well. As a result, Godel and Russell constrain our mathematics and logic (and scientific progress) about as much as the Halting Problem constrains computing.
Ie. not at all for the practice of science-based engineering, and for the theorists it's just another interesting constraint to add. The sky is not falling.
Bertrand Russel tried to put mathematics on an immovable foundation of theory and logic, sadly it turned out to be impossible.
I don't think that you got very far with Bertrand Russell.
The higher-order issues he identified caused just a temporary hiccup in the development of logic. While undoubtedly fundamental, that problem paraphrases best as "There are hidden depths to this", rather than as "All is lost".
Godel applies, as always. You don't apply a theory outside of its domain of discourse, not if you know what you're doing anyway.
Russell showed that the domain of logic gets tangled if you use it to think about itself. Well (with hindsight) that is no surprise at all. The expert logician recognizes the necessary boundary, and virtualizes the outer domain before it can be handled by the inner domain logic.
Russell is doing just fine, thank you. Almost the entirety of mankind's technological world is founded on the logic which you describe as "impossible".
A theory in natural sciences attempts to describe an existing physical system, and a theory in synthetic sciences (like mathematics) describes a non-physical system which can be brought into existence by exact implementation of the details of its theory.
Neither of the above apply to evolving a system through iterated development or evolution, directed only by practical constraints, which is what Linus and the kernel community are doing. This makes the analogy with theories in science less than helpful.
Linus should be talking more about "fixed points" than about theories. Specs are fixed points which introduce some stability into a shifting world, and they are good both for those who want solid products and those who want to live at the bleeding edge alike. After all, when at the bleeding edge, you still want your tools to work reliably.
That said, the future of mankind (in computing) will have to replace the current ad hoc mess by hard synthetic science and engineering in due course, and therefore theory and logic will become central. However, we're not even on the first rung of the ladder in that respect.
"software was written to match theory, not reality"
That was very blinkered and unfortunate statement by Linus. While he portrays himself as a "practical engineer", the truth is that he is not flying the flag of professional engineering, but supporting some kind of ill-conceived ideal of ad hoc amateurism.
The world of computing is in crisis. After 40 years of 'pro' development, computing is still a human-driven craft instead of the extremely precise arm of engineering that it could so easily have become through its well-defined subject matter.
While Linus has contributed immensely to the world by delivering a wonderful engineering tool as well as a great end-user product, he is also extending the software crisis through unfortunate remarks like that one. The "reality" which he so seems to praise is THE PROBLEM in software engineering, and not something to be endorsed or supported.
If the world continued along Linus's desired path of "reality" vs theory, the current mess will know no end, and the metaphorical bridges of computer science will still be falling down in the year 3,000.
Mankind's future in computing must build on immoveable foundations of theory and logic if it is to progress into a realm where machines of IQs in the millions work at our behest. Advocating some sort of ad hoc "practical" computing barbarism is very short-sighted, dangerous, and regressive.
Practically everyone who responded to the parent post focussed on the 9-5 timekeeping or on the number of hours worked. That wasn't the point being made at all, but the fact that the majority of IT workers are expected (by a very large majority of companies) to commute in to work, and that puts load on the transport infrastructure.
The rush hours around 9am and 5pm aren't the only points of the day that matter. Driving at any time of the day has a wear and tear effect on the tarmac for example.
If you want to keep public infrastructure costs low (and you should want that if you're a big employer but don't intend to contribute pro rata to those costs), then telecommuting + occasional hotdesking ought to be offered to all employees who want it, and indeed strongly encouraged as the standard way of working in IT.
They want power, by having people and companies dependent on local infrastructure.
And they want money through taxes, which equates to power for them to implement whatever *they* want. The near-zero regard that politicians have for the wishes of the people who elected them is almost universal.
I hope Google tell them to take a running jump.
The issue of Google not contributing to the building of extra transport infrastructure for 4000 jobs is easily handled, and it's not just specific to Google. All large corporations should be expected to make good use of teleworking and office hot-desking wherever it is desired by the workforce and feasible in the business, as it certainly is in IT. In a networked age, a company's whole IT staff driving in at 9am and home at 5pm is just plain nuts.
In responsibility, this will be a step back, as I am currently in a management role
That is a stunning statement from my perspective, stunning in the worst possible way. It presupposes that a technical role carries less responsibility than a managerial one, which is a terrible indictment of how you perceive relationships in the workplace. It certainly doesn't reflect my approach to responsibility in software and systems engineering in any place where I have worked professionally.
Perhaps it reflects the outlook of some hypothetical 9-5 techie who couldn't care less what he does in the office, but it's not an outlook that is at all common. Quite the opposite: it is usually the middle management that is 9-5, and the technical people slug their guts out around the clock. While hours beyond the call of duty do not mean everything, nevertheless they do imply dedication and responsibility.
Of course, management always thinks that it is at the top of the pyramid of responsibility and authority, even in a company whose business is entirely technical and where the actual wealth creators are the technical people. Well, it's up to every professional technical person to disabuse them of that. It can be tough and confrontational, but it is also rewarding in the long run to be recognized for carrying out a key and indispensible engineering role.
My answer to your question is simple: do the job that you find most rewarding and fulfilling. If you were a bum-on-seat tech laborer with zero authority and no responsibility in a company run by managers who treat their techies as menial labor, then not only should you flee the technical positions, but abandon the company in its entirety.
Q. "Would an average software developer with an average education and average experience in computing ever need to refer to Eolas' patent on plug-ins, either directly or indirectly, in order to introduce optional functionality into an application?"
A. "No."
In fact, no software developer of any standing would need the information allegedly protected by the patent, because it is 100% obvious. And if you don't need the information in a patent, either directly or indirectly, then clearly the patent does not contribute the technical novelty which is allegedly being infringed. It has not offered the claimed item of value to the commonweal through its publication.
Given the above, nothing else in this case is relevant. Regardless of the form of words on the application, there can be no rational claim of infringement of a protected invention here, because the likelihood that the patent played any part whatsoever in the development of the allegedly infringing products is zero.
A patent is meant to provide a short-term monopoly so that the patent holder can *PRODUCE* his invention without immediately losing out to competitors on publication of the details. It has no other purpose.
So where is Eolas' product, which this patent is supposed to protect?
Of course, every man and his dog will point out that the above does not reflect how patents are used in today's world, at least in the US. Well bully for you, that's the hub of the problem, and Eolas is just a symptom.
W3C should have known better than to engage in the game, instead of vigorously showing that the game is utterly nonsensical and ridiculous when applied to this area, in which W3C's technical expertise is not contestable by a mere USPTO examiner.
The very clearly reasoned and yet utterly unreasonable legal position that you describe illustrates admirably why the law is held in such low regard these days and lawyers are viewed as bloodsucking scum.
Strategies, counter-strategies, technicalities, 10 million stages to the legal "game", and every move achieving almost nothing except a transfer of money into the wallets of lawyers. Absolutely wonderful.
Meanwhile, sight is lost of whether the alleged wrongdoings actually constitute a loss for the plaintiff, rather than free advertising no different to that in radio broadcasting. All that matters for you and your colleagues is that the divine handle of law continue to be cranked, regardless of whether it is right or wrong.
WebHostingGuy, your ex-profession is morally bankrupt.
And it's really an MMO, not just a CORPG like Guild Wars?
So you actually *LIKE* the traditional MMOG features of kill stealing, camping, camp stealing, repeated dying from being trained, days waiting for your mob to spawn, mind-numbing xp grind, near-zero loot drop rates, etc etc? Oh, and paying a subscription to enjoy your suffering.
Guild Wars is not for you then.
The way to make money off P2P is not to offer P2P services (a direct invitation for lawyers and other scum to line their pockets), but to *use* P2P to distribute your own data for next to nothing.
It's a terrific delivery mechanism with an enormous benefit/cost ratio, so why not make that the basis of your business by delivering your own material over it, or delivering content belonging to other less technical providers under contract? You would be legally in the clear, while benefitting from absolutely minimal networking costs.
ESR's position against Free Software has always seemed slightly irrational (or at least unjustified) to me, but I always put it down to no more than him trying to get some more limelight for his Open Software efforts. That would be unfortunate, but no biggie.
But now that he has publicly gone anti-GPL by saying that it is no longer needed, I think that ESR is finally showing his true colours.
In a world where Free+Open Software ruled the roost (we're not quite there yet), the only people for whom the GPL might no longer be needed are those people who have an army of paid-up lawyers behind them, in other words, the corporations. Everyone else would get screwed by the first well-financed litigious bloodsucker that comes along and markets the software without respecting its authors' desired freedoms.
So, it's pretty simple: ESR is pro-business, and actively desires individuals to be powerless and trodden underfoot in the corporate rush for profits.
That's pretty bad, not far off from being "evil". I must say, I didn't really expect that from ESR.
It's no surprise that the PR suits responded. But that needn't be the end of the story.
Now it's the dev's turn. Come on guys, answer the questions properly, ie. technically. You're in a position of strength anyway, the suits probably don't want to lose more of you to NCsoft (well, not if they have a clue anyway), so if you approach it in a constructive fashion there shouldn't be any fireworks.
And if there are, well, perhaps it's not the right company to work for after all.
You're the key people, remember that. The suits are two a penny, and you ought to remind them of that occasionally.
This whole issue, and 10 thousand other similar ones, stems from the irrelevance of copyright in the digital age.
If something online is generally accessible, it's inherently copiable, and denying the legal right to copy it becomes effectively unenforceable unless you are one of those who tries to sweep back the tide and sue individuals by the million.
Copyright needs to be replaced by Republication Right. Copying itself then becomes legal in all circumstances, for all content that is accessible. (Notice that DRM'd content is not accessible by copying, so the copying itself can be perfectly legal since it does not release the content.)
And then the lawyers can go chase only those who republish content without the Republication Right to do so, which makes much more sense.
Some more pointers for your design:
:-)
- Use an authority-at-the-leaves, power-at-the-root type of architecture, ie. like DNS. It's the only way it'll scale to MMOG-type numbers in multiplayer events, while still allowing people to control their own worlds and not get "Ludlow'd" by critics nor "Slashdotted" by popularity.
- Make the root servers no more than multi-world caches, accepting client logins, and sucking content from their authoritative leaf node worlds on demand. No doubt universities and then later corporations will start offering big iron services to handle the root load, but as mere caches, they will have no say on (nor responsibility for) the world content.
- Start by defining an extensible leaf-to-cache and cache-to-client protocol. This is absolutely mandatory, because there will be no fixed points in this evolving, distributed environment, and no possibility of dropping the system offline for a global upgrade.
- Don't expect it to be easy. But, if everything you do is extensible and distributed, then the power of a million eager world builders will prevail.
Ludlow's experience is not surprising. Every online games company on Earth plays god, believing that they have the sole right to direct the evolution of "their" world despite the fact that 90% of its value comes from the synergy of its players.
It doesn't seem to register with these corporations that without the interaction between gamers, all they have is a Massively Single-Player Offline Game, and that all their servers and networks and GMs and content providers just burn up dollars as a recurring cost and provide no return at all. More so than in any other producer-consumer relationship, the players in MMOGs are priceless. Yet, their desires are so often ignored.
This isn't going to change, as it's in the nature of company management to want to control. Until someone finally produces the prototype of that open and distributed metaverse that everyone is always talking about, the Ludlow experience will be repeated, time and again.
Second Life may be the closest to an acceptable platform that we have experienced so far, but if anyone annoyed Linden Labs in the same way that Ludlow annoyed the owners of TSO, you can pretty much guarantee that he would be murdered yet again.
Only a distributed world will be free of that, and even then, coercion from those who dislike what you are doing will still exist.
It's nice to see bands standing up for their public against the wishes of their labels.
Yeah, while still taking Sony's money and saying that it is "impossible" to change the system, and therefore supporting its continuation.
Let's be honest here. They don't WANT to change the system, because they like Sony's cash too much.
If they were genuine about being pro-fan, there is a hell of a lot that they could do about the situation.
For a start they could tell Sony to sod off with the copy protection, or they'll go with another publisher. If Sony threatens them with litigation on the basis of the contract signed, then get together with other artists in the same situation and run a class action on the basis of such contracts being in restraint of trade.
Sony (and other labels) are just distributors and promotors in this day and age when you can have a billion-track studio at home for peanuts, and hire in your mastering experts for a session. Yet, the labels want to own it all, for eternity. Bollocks.
It's time that bands did something about it, or be branded money-grabbing hypocrits. The power to bring down the system is in their hands. Currently the majority just have no interest in using that power and getting rid of the old machine.
I read one of the links above, comparing Python and Lua, but it doesn't talk about sandboxes. Does Lua have one or does it just do multiple interpreters?
Both of those apply. As Lua is fully reentrant and tiny, you can have any number of Lua VMs active concurrently in a program, and they're all naturally disjoint from each other.
In addition, Lua execution is inherently sandboxed with respect to the operating system because the base interpreter provides no system functions at all, and so it can affect only its own internal state. You need Lua's standard libraries before you can do file operations etc with it, but those libraries are available only if the designer chose to link them in to your executable, so the sandboxing is unbreakable "by default", bugs excepted.
Diametrically opposed to the above, many other Lua executables exist which contain dynamic loaders to allow the interpreter to be extended on the fly with arbitrary code, ie. to provide high functionality rather than sandboxing.
Lua can be pretty much anything you want it to be. The base VM just gives you efficient and flexible scripting, and imposes no usage policy at all.
Re your point about Tcl, that language suffers from its string orientation when applied to gaming, although it's fine for embedding as a simple configuration language. Lua is stunningly fast, so its use in games goes far beyond mere configuration and UI scripting, right into the hearts of engines.
There's some serious excitement fragility in this thread.
The only way in which a geek could not be excited by PS3 is through either not having read the specs or not believing that Sony will deliver on them. (The latter view is perfectly legit.)
Pure hype is of course pure crap and every geek needs to be wise to it, but you're an informed bunch, you can analyse the hype and see for yourselves the truth (or otherwise) behind it.
I'm a researcher in concurrency and parallism. dating waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back to the days of the transputer, and I can tell you that (i) the Cell model is good, (ii) it's looking great from an open O/S perspective since the German Linux dev team is working wonders on the IBM Cell blade, and (iii) if Sony delivers only a fraction of the claimed functionality in the PS3, it will still be meteoric.
So, for technically-oriented geeks, this whole issue is utterly clearcut, and the Xbox 360 is just a sideshow. The fact that PS3 will run the dozens of thousand of PS2 games while Xbox 360 is not backwards compatible to Xbox1 is merely a side issue.
The more hardware the better, but there isn't a serious contest here.
Coming out on Nov 22 is actually pretty good timing.
... :-((((((((((
It's not just good, it's terrific timing! MS are damn brilliant at marketting.
The problem is that everyone's so dismayed at the crappiness of the 360 machine, even the Xbox supporters. (I have an Xbox1 and I love it, I consider myself a supporter. It's my main CD player and secondary DVD player, and it works great. And I think I have an Xbox game somewhere too. Oh yeah, it's MechAssault, for launching Linux.)
3 cores is good in principle, but they're awfully slow, and the ATI graphics
I guess I'll buy one if I find the money (let's not talk about the price, eww), but I find it hard to put myself in the boots of a non-geek and still find a reason to buy this machine. A PS2 simply has no rival atm, and the PS3 is looking utterly deadly. Hell, it would look deadly even if it didn't play the dozens of thousands of PS2 titles out there.
There's just no contest atm, but I wish MS well anyway (the Xbox1 was great hardware).