> In other words, he wants programmers to become
> the Janitors of this world (not that there is
> anything wrong with being a janitor.)
> If all software can be distributed freely, then
> there is no money to be had writing software.
> None. Nada. All you can make money on
> is support/service, which isn't working so
> well for Redhat right now.
Actually, what he (and most computer scientists) want is for programmers to become software engineers, in the same sense as civil engineers. Software is infastructure now, but most of it's awful, mostly because of propietary software. There are still pleny of civil engineers, even though they're required to disclose the plans for the bridges they build. The vast majority of software development today is custom jobs for use inside a corporation anyway. But when the CE builds the bridge, if it needs repairs, or expansion, whatever, later, the CE doesn't have to do them himself; any other CE can read the plans and do them. This is a Public Good, and infastructure software shouldn't be any different.
As for free redistribution: as long as the other freedoms are preserved, I have no objection to limiting (re)distribution to patches. Forbidding the user to distribute their fixes and changes too severely limits the utility of the source, IMHO.
What's the relation between the two new products being released and the six that have been released in the US? (Tenchi OVA, Tenchi Universe, Tenchi in Tokyo, and the three movies.) It sounds like at least one other OVA hasn't made it here to the US; is Tenchi GXP the third TV series?
The parent post wasn't talking about computer systems, it was talking about crypto systems. And there are well known perfect algorithms -- like one-time pads -- and well known exponentially difficult algorigthms -- the proven public-key algorithms. (e.g. DES, AES)
> Would you give all potential attackers a complete list of your computers, all the software they run, and schematics for your internal network? Would you send them your ruleset on your firewall? Of course not! And keeping this information obscure is security through obscurity.
Why not? If you're running OpenBSD, what do you have to fear?:)
If you _depend on_ your firewall rulesets to remain secret for security, you have no security. Anyone with enough patience will crack your ruleset, if it's vulnerable. The article points out that obscurity only enchances security when your system can be shown secure without it -- that your firewall rulesets are correct.
It's chickenshit like this that gives alternate vendors the best `ins' to challenge Microsoft. Although as much as I'd like to see Free software step in, I rather doubt many schools have the people (person, if small enough) to take advantage; but I wouldn't mind Apple getting back to its golden age, where IBM and its PCs were a distant nightmare on the horizon in K-12 education...
I wouldn't normally object to retrogaming (tasty Bard's Tale I IIGS), but having seen how many old games are being re-released (Gradius III & IV on a PS2? How about Silpheed? I still have the original Sierra disks I used to play on my IIGS! For irony, how about using a PS2 to play a PS1 game that emulates the Atari 2600 so you can pretend to have an arcade machine, but without the trackball!), it seems like a lot of it's being done because nobody thinks they can make games as good in such a limited space. In other words, they know they've become eye-candy manufacturers.
Yet Searle did not prove that there is more to semantics than syntactic manipulation! How do you propose to distinguish between the 'Chinese room' and a trained translator?
... is the primary disease which package managers propose to remedy. I would suggest creating `autopkg', a tool like autoconf and automake, which is used to automate the production of packages (start with.rpm,.deb, and.tgz, perhaps). This way maintainers could just 'gmake distribution' when they announce a release and the packages would be built automagically. More importantly, however, would be autopkg's ability to fetch shared libraries required during the build and recursively make them. Finally, if incompatible libraries are found, the installation process should wrap its binaries in scripts which set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the necessary compatibility libraries (/usr/lib/compat) -- and they should be linked to _specifically by version_, so that different versions of compability libraries don't fight with each other.
I'd think that speakers like these would be more useful for surround sound: you can cover you walls or (car) windows with permanent installations. Another big win would be temporary set ups; take along five sheets of paper and some masking tape.
Had they done their extensions in a way that remained compatible with Sun's or IBM's VM, I wouldn't have minded so much -- it may have spurred Sun to make a better product -- but they didn't. Extension is fine -- nVidia's version of OpenGL, for instance -- but incompability is not (AFAIK, straight OpenGL calls will work fine with nVidia's library).
is going to happen eventually, and opportunities like this one are irrestible to the cash-strapped Russian space program. I think NASA is opposed because they're desperately trying to protect their position that the space station is a purely scientific resource worth all the money we've spent on it. Quite frankly, I rather doubt it; the spin-offs will almost certainly be more valuable, like they were for the Apollo program, and commercial travel to space will be one of them.
The BSD license allows open-source products to be used in close-sourced products, and the GPL does not. (That is, the GPL is 'viral' -- anything using GPL'd code must be released under GPL-compliant license -- but the BSD license is not.)
One of the things a good C/S education (from college, usually) can do is help you side-step/many/ of the common newbie errors, and expose you to about many of the elegant ideas that Very Smart People have come up with over the last fifty or so years. Writing code is an artistic endevaour, but whether you use photoshop (vb) or mix your own paints (assembler) knowing about perspective (efficient algorithms) is going to help you.
You make your gas there. Same way we're going to get astronauts back from Mars. (No atmosphere, but once you get up to speed, it's only a matter time to go far enough out pick up a large chunk of ice from Saturn and bring it into some orbit more amenable to mining.) The outward flight could be solar sails, save yourself some fuel. Finding out something's mass is easy -- try to move it. Design around a target mass, say, 1000 kg. You don't really need to worry that much about size since there's no reason to keep the mass inside your craft.
Oddly enough, the IA-64 will run legacy x86 code in emulation. Which means that even if AMD's x86-64 chips (the Hammer series, IIRC) are slower at the same price than then Intel's IA-64, they'll have the speed advantage for running the your software for a year or two. Quite frankly, the IA-64 is not shaping up to be a desktop chip any time soon anyway -- Intel's releasing the Pentium 4 for a reason.
The key objection is that if you go to a subscription model for open-source software, you still have the source after your contract expires. Under a closed-source subscription model, you can be cut off from your data; Microsoft is under no obligation to provide you with their file specs, and in most cases, doesn't. At least when you/own/ the software, you can keep using it indefinitely.
Personally, I haven't bought any commercial software aside from games in four years, so I don't particularly/care/ what Microsoft does.
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> In other words, he wants programmers to become
> the Janitors of this world (not that there is
> anything wrong with being a janitor.)
> If all software can be distributed freely, then
> there is no money to be had writing software.
> None. Nada. All you can make money on
> is support/service, which isn't working so
> well for Redhat right now.
Actually, what he (and most computer scientists) want is for programmers to become software engineers, in the same sense as civil engineers. Software is infastructure now, but most of it's awful, mostly because of propietary software. There are still pleny of civil engineers, even though they're required to disclose the plans for the bridges they build. The vast majority of software development today is custom jobs for use inside a corporation anyway. But when the CE builds the bridge, if it needs repairs, or expansion, whatever, later, the CE doesn't have to do them himself; any other CE can read the plans and do them. This is a Public Good, and infastructure software shouldn't be any different.
As for free redistribution: as long as the other freedoms are preserved, I have no objection to limiting (re)distribution to patches. Forbidding the user to distribute their fixes and changes too severely limits the utility of the source, IMHO.
-_Quinn
What's the relation between the two new products being released and the six that have been released in the US? (Tenchi OVA, Tenchi Universe, Tenchi in Tokyo, and the three movies.) It sounds like at least one other OVA hasn't made it here to the US; is Tenchi GXP the third TV series?
-_Quinn
> Show me a perfect system...
:)
OK -- one not connected to the Internet.
The parent post wasn't talking about computer systems, it was talking about crypto systems. And there are well known perfect algorithms -- like one-time pads -- and well known exponentially difficult algorigthms -- the proven public-key algorithms. (e.g. DES, AES)
> Would you give all potential attackers a complete list of your computers, all the software they run, and schematics for your internal network? Would you send them your ruleset on your firewall? Of course not! And keeping this information obscure is security through obscurity.
Why not? If you're running OpenBSD, what do you have to fear?
If you _depend on_ your firewall rulesets to remain secret for security, you have no security. Anyone with enough patience will crack your ruleset, if it's vulnerable. The article points out that obscurity only enchances security when your system can be shown secure without it -- that your firewall rulesets are correct.
-_Quinn
They did. --use-compress-program PROGRAM.
-_Quinn
It's chickenshit like this that gives alternate vendors the best `ins' to challenge Microsoft. Although as much as I'd like to see Free software step in, I rather doubt many schools have the people (person, if small enough) to take advantage; but I wouldn't mind Apple getting back to its golden age, where IBM and its PCs were a distant nightmare on the horizon in K-12 education...
-_Quinn
So Linux now has an AIX-class FS and threads library... what else do they need?
-_Quinn
I wouldn't normally object to retrogaming (tasty Bard's Tale I IIGS), but having seen how many old games are being re-released (Gradius III & IV on a PS2? How about Silpheed? I still have the original Sierra disks I used to play on my IIGS! For irony, how about using a PS2 to play a PS1 game that emulates the Atari 2600 so you can pretend to have an arcade machine, but without the trackball!), it seems like a lot of it's being done because nobody thinks they can make games as good in such a limited space. In other words, they know they've become eye-candy manufacturers.
Have the genre-busters just been slipping by me?
-_Quinn
Yet Searle did not prove that there is more to semantics than syntactic manipulation! How do you propose to distinguish between the 'Chinese room' and a trained translator?
-_Quinn
while I laugh enough to short out my keyboard with spittle at everyone who laughed at me for sticking it out in college.
-_Quinn
-_Quinn
I'd think that speakers like these would be more useful for surround sound: you can cover you walls or (car) windows with permanent installations. Another big win would be temporary set ups; take along five sheets of paper and some masking tape.
-_Quinn
Because they're expressions describing `regular languages,' any language (collection of strings) which can be recognized by a finite automata.
-_Quinn
Had they done their extensions in a way that remained compatible with Sun's or IBM's VM, I wouldn't have minded so much -- it may have spurred Sun to make a better product -- but they didn't. Extension is fine -- nVidia's version of OpenGL, for instance -- but incompability is not (AFAIK, straight OpenGL calls will work fine with nVidia's library).
-_Quinn
is going to happen eventually, and opportunities like this one are irrestible to the cash-strapped Russian space program. I think NASA is opposed because they're desperately trying to protect their position that the space station is a purely scientific resource worth all the money we've spent on it. Quite frankly, I rather doubt it; the spin-offs will almost certainly be more valuable, like they were for the Apollo program, and commercial travel to space will be one of them.
-_Quinn
The BSD license allows open-source products to be used in close-sourced products, and the GPL does not. (That is, the GPL is 'viral' -- anything using GPL'd code must be released under GPL-compliant license -- but the BSD license is not.)
-_Quinn
I wonder... 'Wagon Train in Space' worked so well for the first series: what show will they copy now?
-_Quinn
Kuro5hin story reposted to Slashdot! (MLP)
Dog Bites Man! (Culture)
Why Rusty Rulez! (Op-Ed)
Sounds like S/390. :)
-_Quinn
One of the things a good C/S education (from college, usually) can do is help you side-step /many/ of the common newbie errors, and expose you to about many of the elegant ideas that Very Smart People have come up with over the last fifty or so years. Writing code is an artistic endevaour, but whether you use photoshop (vb) or mix your own paints (assembler) knowing about perspective (efficient algorithms) is going to help you.
-_Quinn
It's no brainer that if printing text is important to you, you're using [La|Te]TeX -> dvi -> PostScript -- which works best on a UNIX, hands down.
Color printing is bit tougher, but that's why Kinko's (et al) is open 24 hours...
-_Quinn
You make your gas there. Same way we're going to get astronauts back from Mars. (No atmosphere, but once you get up to speed, it's only a matter time to go far enough out pick up a large chunk of ice from Saturn and bring it into some orbit more amenable to mining.) The outward flight could be solar sails, save yourself some fuel. Finding out something's mass is easy -- try to move it. Design around a target mass, say, 1000 kg. You don't really need to worry that much about size since there's no reason to keep the mass inside your craft.
-_Quinn
Oddly enough, the IA-64 will run legacy x86 code in emulation. Which means that even if AMD's x86-64 chips (the Hammer series, IIRC) are slower at the same price than then Intel's IA-64, they'll have the speed advantage for running the your software for a year or two. Quite frankly, the IA-64 is not shaping up to be a desktop chip any time soon anyway -- Intel's releasing the Pentium 4 for a reason.
-_Quinn
Hey! Don't forget Moxy Fruvous! :)
-_Quinn
Er, last time /I/ checked, if I were running AIM and ICQ /on the same box/ I still couldn't talk to myself. (Or to more than one person simultaneously.)
-_QUinn
The key objection is that if you go to a subscription model for open-source software, you still have the source after your contract expires. Under a closed-source subscription model, you can be cut off from your data; Microsoft is under no obligation to provide you with their file specs, and in most cases, doesn't. At least when you /own/ the software, you can keep using it indefinitely.
/care/ what Microsoft does.
Personally, I haven't bought any commercial software aside from games in four years, so I don't particularly
-_Quinn