Have you seen the license? This is just another way of going around the same block again. The lesson is, don't trust or support any commercial entity with Web standards, whether it be AOL, Allaire, Macromedia or any other. Trust only genuinely open community projects and genuinely open not-for-profits.
Just for the record, C was created by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. Primarily Ritchie, I believe
Which is to say, they took Martin Richards' BCPL, stripped out the virtual machine, added a pre-processor, and called it a new language. Stripping out the virtual machine was an advance that set computing back about thirty years.
C is still the high-level language that produces the fastest code.*
Which is an interesting definition of high level language. It's also contentious; good LISP compilers beat good C compilers on a wide range of problems, and no matter how difficult you think it, LISP is a high level language.
I don't know where you get that "poor performance" thing from. In my experience Perl is at least as fast as PHP, without mod_perl even
In that case you haven't any experience worth talking about. If you run PERL scripts as CGIs without mod_perl, then you have the full overhead of starting up the PERL interpreter for each service. This is much the same as writing CGI in Java and starting up a new JVM for each service - yes, you can do it on a very lightly loaded site, but it isn't good engineering.
No CGI scripts - no matter what language they're written in - can compete with in-process technologies, whether it be Servlets (my personal choice), PHP, or mod_perl. CGI is just inherently inefficient, and the larger the binary you have to start each time, the more inefficient it is. PERL is a pretty big binary.
Browsing from a PDA would be the most painful experience I can imagine... Screen is way too small
I beg to differ. It is too small for some of sites
If the site can't adapt itself to a palmtop screen, that's poor Web design, not a fault of the palmtop. The specifications for the Web were carefully designed to be device (and resolution) independsnt.
Communism is where you must share what you have produced, with a gun to your head. If you refuse, you are thrown into jail or killed.
It's amazing how ignorant Americans are about politics. The former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics never claimed to be a Communist state; it claimed to be a state which aspired to, and sought to work towards, Communism. The particular flavour of Communism which it sought to work towards was Marxist, but Marx didn't invent Communism as an idea; it had wide currency in his period (see e.g the Paris Commune, and comtemporary papers by Anarchist theorist, Peter Kropotkin).
In Marx's time Communism was already over a thousand years old, and had been a feature of many of the heretical groups of the middle ages, and of extreme factions during the English Civil War
So, in summary, 'Communism' does not mean the Soviet system; 'Communism' does not mean Marxism-Leninism; and 'Communism' does not mean having a gun held to your head.
Is Open Source a communist idea? Yes, I'm perfectly sure it is. But it is most certainly not a Soviet idea or a Marxist idea.
Everybody places the gears in PRNDL order. Unless GM wants to get sued by a lot of people, they must place the pedals clutch, break and gas from left to right in that order.
Well, the rest of the world knows that Merkins are stupid, and can't learn new things. In the rest of the world, where most cars do not have automatic transmissions, some have reverse on the left of the gate, some on the right. Some have a lift collar to select reverse, some have a push down to select reverse, some have no safety lock mechanism. Most have the gear shift on the floor, some have it on the dashboard, some have it on the steering column. Some have four forward gears, some five, some six; most 4x4s have at least ten, usually with an additional manually operated transfer box. Any non-American driver can get into any of these vehicles and drive it without retraining.
So I think, really, your example does not work - except, perhaps, for Merkins.
The #1 problem with Robot Wars- only the house robots get to have cool weapons!
The competitors themselves are very much restricted in weapons design, resulting in very wimpy 'bots that seldom do any real damage.
This is, indeed, a problem. We were working on the design of a weapon which would inject a two-part, structural chemical foam into other robots to burst them apart, but this is banned by the rules. So is enough flame to do any damage to anything, so are untethered projectiles, so is even water (again, we thought injecting salt water into an opponent could do quite interesting things to its electrics...).
But the most irritating rule of all is that if you do any damage to the house robots, you have to pay for it! I thought Hypno-Disk was being very wussy last year in not attacking the house 'bots, but having read that I understand why. For those who haven't seen it, Hypno-Disk does not send it's opponents home in packing cases. If they can find bits big enough to fit in a shoe box, they're lucky.
Actually, in addition to RobotWars (which I find hugely enjoyable), the BBC has run a Robot Olympics event for two years running now, and some of that has been very enjoyable too. It has included
swimming
rope climbing
short and long distance races for several different classes including walkers
maze solving
football
Having said that, I'm currently in a RobotWars team...
Jon Postel, of course. IANA, to the rest of you. RIP; all those people who criticised him while he was alive and doing the job by himself should look at how much worse it's being done by an expensive, unaccountable beaurocracy now he's dead.
Had a beer with Jon in Geneva, six months before he died...
Linux isn't always the answer. But if the question is 'how do we avoid software audits being imposed on us by our suppliers', or 'how do we avoid unfair and damaging software license provisions', then Open Sourceis the answer; and at this moment Linux is the most widely used Open Source OS.
So would you like to retrain the 1000's of employees my company has on how to use KDE
Oh, hey, come of it. How many average Windows users sat down in front of KDE would actually notice any difference? While I wouldn't claim it's a good thing, KDE is so like Windows that 90% of users would never even guess they'd been switched.
Netscape? Don't make me laugh. Mozilla? I like it, but it still crashes within 15 minutes.
Sad but (more or less) true. Konqueror, on the other hand, is now pretty stable, does 95% of things right, and is very close to being a thoroughly satisfactory browser.
Re:Bluetooth - necessary in 802.11 world?
on
Bluetooth Bombs
·
· Score: 2
Oh, goodie, a standards compliant Web site. On this machine I have:
Netscape 4.7 with Shockwave Flash plugin
Mozilla M18
Konqueror 2.1
StarOffice 5.2
Lynx
w3m
None of them can render the site properly or allow you to browse it. Only Netscape and Mozilla can see anything at all, and Mozilla can't get past the first page. These are the people we're trusting to develop interoperable technology?
Re:Bluetooth - necessary in 802.11 world?
on
Bluetooth Bombs
·
· Score: 2
The incompatibilities are because of the usual crap between countries and companies. Part of the same reason that we have competing incompatible regional cellular networks. Hopefully it'll get fixed to the point where it's "good enough".
America has competing incompatible regional cellular networks. Japan has iMode (arguably the best). The rest of the world has GSM. I can take my phone to anywhere from Albania to Zimbabwe, and it will work.
There's no need to mention any nasty foreigners, they don't count. There's no need to mention people like Zuse, Turing, and Flowers, or machines like Colossus, Baby (better known as the Manchester Mk 1), or LEO. After all, they probably didn't really exist. They're just all myths made up by jealous, ignorant foreigners trying to pretend that America is not the sole, universal creator of all that is good or useful in the world. All hail the glorious United States of America.
Just at the time I gave up being an academic ('Savant Fellow in Computing', no less) to start my first startup, the Department of Mathematics at the University at which I worked was moved in to the School of Computing. I said at the time, and I still say, that that is like putting the Department of English Literature into the School of Penmaking.
A computer is a tool. Its use, like its construction, is a technique. In the early days of computing it made sense to pull together multidisciplinary teams from mathematics, physics, philosophy and engineering together to make the things work in the first place. That's been done.
There are still interesting things to be done in Physics and Engineering which may, in the fullness of time, lead to better hardware, and there are still interesting things being done in Mathematics, Linguistics and Philosophy which will, in the fullness of time, lead to better software.
But there is fundamentally no such thing as Computer Science.
We run our own internal Jabber server simply so as to prevent confidential material passing through an untrusted third party's server; it works fine for us. In principle if we wanted to jabber with people outside the company we could open it up, but so far we haven't wanted to.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about the nature of what we're doing - or at least what I'm doing, lately, and I think we are talking revolution here.
Background: I'm a middle aged CTO of a small software company. A year and a half ago we open sourced (BSD license) some of our core components, partly because we thought we might get some more exposure that way, and partly because we use a lot of open source stuff and it felt like time to give some back.
Recently I needed a basic component. I could get it, but it was proprietary, so we couldn't distribute it with the open source stuff we'd already put out. So I developed it from the start as an open source component, and already I've had patches contributed by half a dozen different people who are using it and finding it useful. By making it open, by inviting collaboration, I've had a lot of the work done for me.
And what that made me think about was artificial scarcity.
During the Irish potato famine, Ireland exported record quantities of wheat. During the Ethiopian famine in the Eighties, Ethiopia was exporting water melons to Europe - you could by them in the supermarkets. Food was not scarce, people just couldn't afford to buy it. The scarcity wasn't real. It was artificial scarcity created by 'market economics'. What's this got to do with software? Hang on...
Glaxo (and other pharmacutical companies) are trying to prevent the South African government from allowing cheaper, 'generic', anti-AIDS drugs. 10% of the population of South Africa is HIV positive. In other African states the figures are worse. Over one hundred million africans have HIV or AIDS. They don't have drugs to ease their suffering, because they can't afford them. But the drugs are cheap to make. They're only expensive to buy because the industry is using its patents to create an artificial scarcity. A hundred million people are suffering and dying to enhance the profits of the drug companies. What has this to do with software? Hang on...
Classical economic theory says that the price of a good varies inversely with it's scarcity. Goods which are extremely rare - like caviar, or diamonds - are expensive. Goods which are extremely abundant - like farmed salmon, or sand - are cheap. But digital information goods - computer programs, or digital recordings of music or movies - cost nothing to reproduce. Inherently, they are infinitely abundant.
I can make one copy of Apache for every person on the planet, and it costs (almost) nothing.
I can make one copy of Microsoft Office for every person on the planet, and the copying costs (almost) nothing.
The natural price of software goods, according to classical economics, is near zero.
Just now, people pay a lot of money for a copy of Microsoft Office. Microsoft are able to charge that money because of artificial scarcity, just like Glaxo can charge for their AIDS drugs. But Microsoft can't sell IIS for lots of money, because there isn't artificial scaricty in high-quality Web servers.
As projects like KOffice get better, so there won't be artificial scarcity in quality office software, and Microsoft won't be able to charge so much.
There are real costs in developing software, but the generosity of a community acting together can absorb the costs, and publich the source code for free. Similarly there are real (and larger) costs in developing new drugs. But the principles of common community action and common generosity can, taken over the community with an interest in the cure of diseases, absorb those costs too.
Open Source does not only have to apply to software. It can apply to every product where commercial interests try to create artificial scarcities by controlling access to information. The next revolution may well be open source medicines. Chemists, clinicians and health administrators could collaborate over the net to develop new medicines which anyone could make for no more than the cost of the ingredients.
The point is that many - perhaps most - people are creative. We like to see the things we create being used to help other people. No one individual can afford the time to invent a cure for cancer, any more than any one person can afford the time to create a new operating system. But the net allows people to collaborate and contribute the quanta of time, energy and talent that they can afford to give, and now we've got a free operating system.
Software is an almost pure case of the sorts of things that can be developed by co-operative generosity. It costs relatively little to acquire the tools to co-operate in a software development project. It costs a little more to get into co-operative development of hardware, or medicines, or some kinds of engineering, and so these things will follow more slowly. But the example has been given, and I'm convinced these things will be given.
Taken together, open collaborative projects in different economic areas will inevitably challenge the morality under which it is ethically acceptable to create artificial scarcities which cause suffering. The world will change as a result of what we, as hackers, are doing now, and it will change for the better. We are talking about a revolution here.
I strongly agree with this. People who want to replace X generally don't understand X. X is far and away the most powerful and flexible windowing system available on any computing platform today. Certainly it isn't the prettiest. It isn't it's job to be pretty. X provides a framework in which you can provide your own window managers, widget sets, and so on. If the window managers aren't pretty enough, that isn't X's fault. Write your own. Make them better.
Dammit, X has supported non-rectangular shaped windows since 1986, but try opening a round window in either KDE or Gnome, and what happens?
X has a few deficiencies in the multimedia area. These can be fixed. It's got to take less work to fix them than to replace X. Meantime, creating a new competing windowing layer is not going to unify the Linux desktop - Linux is not like that. Many people will stick to X anyway, some because they use programs which were written for it, some because they appreciate it's qualities, some (not many!) because they're too conservative to change. So what you'll get is more diversity, not less.
Not of course that diversity is bad. Diversity is good. And one of these days there will be a competing windowing layer that is better than X (if windows don't just become irrelevent before then). But if you think that X is bad, you're the wrong person to write a windowing layer, because you fundamentally don't understand the problems.
Couldn't UK businesses also file patents in the US that US companies would have to honor? That way, US companies would be limited by the US's stupid patent system while all the companies in the UK would have free reign.
Such as the BT patent on hyperlinking[1], for example? As the example shows, this has been going on for a long time.
It can only be good for us. We can compete against US companies in our home market, and they can't compete against us in their home market. Software patents are a bad thing. They are bad for software companies. Getting rid of them is good for software companies. This is a great victory (for which we in the UK software industry have campaigned hard), and the sooner the US follows our example, the better... for the US.
[1] yes, of course that patent should never have been granted... like all other software patents.
utilizing secrets stolen by illegally reverse-engineering other stuff, then are you violating MPAA plans?
<thinks> Another parochial Merkin
</thinks>
What if the reverse engineering were done overseas, say in (just as an example) Norway? What would be illegal about that? Or did you think the DMCA somehow covered the whole planet?
Just because you bought the disc, don't expect to use it in some way in which its owners don't approve
[my emphasis]
Where I come from, If I bought the disk I own it, and the people who sold it to me can go whistle if I do something they don't like with it. But Merka, of course, is the land of the free...
... and although I haven't finished it's certainly a very good (and very thought provoking) read. Recommended - especially to pass on to your manager/parent/partner/colleague to help them to understand where you are coming from.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you seen the license? This is just another way of going around the same block again. The lesson is, don't trust or support any commercial entity with Web standards, whether it be AOL, Allaire, Macromedia or any other. Trust only genuinely open community projects and genuinely open not-for-profits.
Which is to say, they took Martin Richards' BCPL, stripped out the virtual machine, added a pre-processor, and called it a new language. Stripping out the virtual machine was an advance that set computing back about thirty years.
Which is an interesting definition of high level language. It's also contentious; good LISP compilers beat good C compilers on a wide range of problems, and no matter how difficult you think it, LISP is a high level language.
In that case you haven't any experience worth talking about. If you run PERL scripts as CGIs without mod_perl, then you have the full overhead of starting up the PERL interpreter for each service. This is much the same as writing CGI in Java and starting up a new JVM for each service - yes, you can do it on a very lightly loaded site, but it isn't good engineering.
No CGI scripts - no matter what language they're written in - can compete with in-process technologies, whether it be Servlets (my personal choice), PHP, or mod_perl. CGI is just inherently inefficient, and the larger the binary you have to start each time, the more inefficient it is. PERL is a pretty big binary.
If the site can't adapt itself to a palmtop screen, that's poor Web design, not a fault of the palmtop. The specifications for the Web were carefully designed to be device (and resolution) independsnt.
It's amazing how ignorant Americans are about politics. The former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics never claimed to be a Communist state; it claimed to be a state which aspired to, and sought to work towards, Communism. The particular flavour of Communism which it sought to work towards was Marxist, but Marx didn't invent Communism as an idea; it had wide currency in his period (see e.g the Paris Commune, and comtemporary papers by Anarchist theorist, Peter Kropotkin).
In Marx's time Communism was already over a thousand years old, and had been a feature of many of the heretical groups of the middle ages, and of extreme factions during the English Civil War
So, in summary, 'Communism' does not mean the Soviet system; 'Communism' does not mean Marxism-Leninism; and 'Communism' does not mean having a gun held to your head.
Is Open Source a communist idea? Yes, I'm perfectly sure it is. But it is most certainly not a Soviet idea or a Marxist idea.
Well, the rest of the world knows that Merkins are stupid, and can't learn new things. In the rest of the world, where most cars do not have automatic transmissions, some have reverse on the left of the gate, some on the right. Some have a lift collar to select reverse, some have a push down to select reverse, some have no safety lock mechanism. Most have the gear shift on the floor, some have it on the dashboard, some have it on the steering column. Some have four forward gears, some five, some six; most 4x4s have at least ten, usually with an additional manually operated transfer box. Any non-American driver can get into any of these vehicles and drive it without retraining.
So I think, really, your example does not work - except, perhaps, for Merkins.
This is, indeed, a problem. We were working on the design of a weapon which would inject a two-part, structural chemical foam into other robots to burst them apart, but this is banned by the rules. So is enough flame to do any damage to anything, so are untethered projectiles, so is even water (again, we thought injecting salt water into an opponent could do quite interesting things to its electrics...).
But the most irritating rule of all is that if you do any damage to the house robots, you have to pay for it! I thought Hypno-Disk was being very wussy last year in not attacking the house 'bots, but having read that I understand why. For those who haven't seen it, Hypno-Disk does not send it's opponents home in packing cases. If they can find bits big enough to fit in a shoe box, they're lucky.
Having said that, I'm currently in a RobotWars team...
Jon Postel, of course. IANA, to the rest of you. RIP; all those people who criticised him while he was alive and doing the job by himself should look at how much worse it's being done by an expensive, unaccountable beaurocracy now he's dead.
Had a beer with Jon in Geneva, six months before he died...
Linux isn't always the answer. But if the question is 'how do we avoid software audits being imposed on us by our suppliers', or 'how do we avoid unfair and damaging software license provisions', then Open Source is the answer; and at this moment Linux is the most widely used Open Source OS.
Oh, hey, come of it. How many average Windows users sat down in front of KDE would actually notice any difference? While I wouldn't claim it's a good thing, KDE is so like Windows that 90% of users would never even guess they'd been switched.
Sad but (more or less) true. Konqueror, on the other hand, is now pretty stable, does 95% of things right, and is very close to being a thoroughly satisfactory browser.
Oh, goodie, a standards compliant Web site. On this machine I have:
None of them can render the site properly or allow you to browse it. Only Netscape and Mozilla can see anything at all, and Mozilla can't get past the first page. These are the people we're trusting to develop interoperable technology?
America has competing incompatible regional cellular networks. Japan has iMode (arguably the best). The rest of the world has GSM. I can take my phone to anywhere from Albania to Zimbabwe, and it will work.
There's no need to mention any nasty foreigners, they don't count. There's no need to mention people like Zuse, Turing, and Flowers, or machines like Colossus, Baby (better known as the Manchester Mk 1), or LEO. After all, they probably didn't really exist. They're just all myths made up by jealous, ignorant foreigners trying to pretend that America is not the sole, universal creator of all that is good or useful in the world. All hail the glorious United States of America.
A computer is a tool. Its use, like its construction, is a technique. In the early days of computing it made sense to pull together multidisciplinary teams from mathematics, physics, philosophy and engineering together to make the things work in the first place. That's been done.
There are still interesting things to be done in Physics and Engineering which may, in the fullness of time, lead to better hardware, and there are still interesting things being done in Mathematics, Linguistics and Philosophy which will, in the fullness of time, lead to better software.
But there is fundamentally no such thing as Computer Science.
We run our own internal Jabber server simply so as to prevent confidential material passing through an untrusted third party's server; it works fine for us. In principle if we wanted to jabber with people outside the company we could open it up, but so far we haven't wanted to.
Background: I'm a middle aged CTO of a small software company. A year and a half ago we open sourced (BSD license) some of our core components, partly because we thought we might get some more exposure that way, and partly because we use a lot of open source stuff and it felt like time to give some back.
Recently I needed a basic component. I could get it, but it was proprietary, so we couldn't distribute it with the open source stuff we'd already put out. So I developed it from the start as an open source component, and already I've had patches contributed by half a dozen different people who are using it and finding it useful. By making it open, by inviting collaboration, I've had a lot of the work done for me.
And what that made me think about was artificial scarcity.
During the Irish potato famine, Ireland exported record quantities of wheat. During the Ethiopian famine in the Eighties, Ethiopia was exporting water melons to Europe - you could by them in the supermarkets. Food was not scarce, people just couldn't afford to buy it. The scarcity wasn't real. It was artificial scarcity created by 'market economics'. What's this got to do with software? Hang on...
Glaxo (and other pharmacutical companies) are trying to prevent the South African government from allowing cheaper, 'generic', anti-AIDS drugs. 10% of the population of South Africa is HIV positive. In other African states the figures are worse. Over one hundred million africans have HIV or AIDS. They don't have drugs to ease their suffering, because they can't afford them. But the drugs are cheap to make. They're only expensive to buy because the industry is using its patents to create an artificial scarcity. A hundred million people are suffering and dying to enhance the profits of the drug companies. What has this to do with software? Hang on...
Classical economic theory says that the price of a good varies inversely with it's scarcity. Goods which are extremely rare - like caviar, or diamonds - are expensive. Goods which are extremely abundant - like farmed salmon, or sand - are cheap. But digital information goods - computer programs, or digital recordings of music or movies - cost nothing to reproduce. Inherently, they are infinitely abundant.
I can make one copy of Apache for every person on the planet, and it costs (almost) nothing.
I can make one copy of Microsoft Office for every person on the planet, and the copying costs (almost) nothing.
The natural price of software goods, according to classical economics, is near zero.
Just now, people pay a lot of money for a copy of Microsoft Office. Microsoft are able to charge that money because of artificial scarcity, just like Glaxo can charge for their AIDS drugs. But Microsoft can't sell IIS for lots of money, because there isn't artificial scaricty in high-quality Web servers.
As projects like KOffice get better, so there won't be artificial scarcity in quality office software, and Microsoft won't be able to charge so much.
There are real costs in developing software, but the generosity of a community acting together can absorb the costs, and publich the source code for free. Similarly there are real (and larger) costs in developing new drugs. But the principles of common community action and common generosity can, taken over the community with an interest in the cure of diseases, absorb those costs too.
Open Source does not only have to apply to software. It can apply to every product where commercial interests try to create artificial scarcities by controlling access to information. The next revolution may well be open source medicines. Chemists, clinicians and health administrators could collaborate over the net to develop new medicines which anyone could make for no more than the cost of the ingredients.
The point is that many - perhaps most - people are creative. We like to see the things we create being used to help other people. No one individual can afford the time to invent a cure for cancer, any more than any one person can afford the time to create a new operating system. But the net allows people to collaborate and contribute the quanta of time, energy and talent that they can afford to give, and now we've got a free operating system.
Software is an almost pure case of the sorts of things that can be developed by co-operative generosity. It costs relatively little to acquire the tools to co-operate in a software development project. It costs a little more to get into co-operative development of hardware, or medicines, or some kinds of engineering, and so these things will follow more slowly. But the example has been given, and I'm convinced these things will be given.
Taken together, open collaborative projects in different economic areas will inevitably challenge the morality under which it is ethically acceptable to create artificial scarcities which cause suffering. The world will change as a result of what we, as hackers, are doing now, and it will change for the better. We are talking about a revolution here.
Dammit, X has supported non-rectangular shaped windows since 1986, but try opening a round window in either KDE or Gnome, and what happens?
X has a few deficiencies in the multimedia area. These can be fixed. It's got to take less work to fix them than to replace X. Meantime, creating a new competing windowing layer is not going to unify the Linux desktop - Linux is not like that. Many people will stick to X anyway, some because they use programs which were written for it, some because they appreciate it's qualities, some (not many!) because they're too conservative to change. So what you'll get is more diversity, not less.
Not of course that diversity is bad. Diversity is good. And one of these days there will be a competing windowing layer that is better than X (if windows don't just become irrelevent before then). But if you think that X is bad, you're the wrong person to write a windowing layer, because you fundamentally don't understand the problems.
Such as the BT patent on hyperlinking[1], for example? As the example shows, this has been going on for a long time.
It can only be good for us. We can compete against US companies in our home market, and they can't compete against us in their home market. Software patents are a bad thing. They are bad for software companies. Getting rid of them is good for software companies. This is a great victory (for which we in the UK software industry have campaigned hard), and the sooner the US follows our example, the better... for the US.
[1] yes, of course that patent should never have been granted... like all other software patents.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's the first time I've heard that; can you provide a reference? I thought this was stictly Merkin nonsense.
<thinks>
Another parochial Merkin </thinks>
What if the reverse engineering were done overseas, say in (just as an example) Norway? What would be illegal about that? Or did you think the DMCA somehow covered the whole planet?
[my emphasis]
Where I come from, If I bought the disk I own it, and the people who sold it to me can go whistle if I do something they don't like with it. But Merka, of course, is the land of the free...
... and although I haven't finished it's certainly a very good (and very thought provoking) read. Recommended - especially to pass on to your manager/parent/partner/colleague to help them to understand where you are coming from.