Society is built on exchange. One particular form of exchange that we're genetically wired for is reciprocal altruism: speculative generosity with expectation of future payoff.
Your comments have made clear to me a fundamental difference between GPL and proprietary software. The difference rests in what the developer of the software expects in terms of a future payoff. Microsoft (or any major software company) develops software will the expectation of monetary revenues. GPL developers write code in the expectation of future software they can use for free. Is it just me or are these two options the extremes of possibility? Isn't there some middle ground where the future payoff could feed the developers stomach, as well as his head?
I much prefer the licensing that Caucho.com has put on Resin. In it, you're only required to pay for the product if you're going to make money off of it. On the other hand, if you're some university lifer who hacks together a great technical document repository, you don't have to pay.
In this scenario, Caucho has decided that their future payoff, either money or free software/services, is determined by their customers. This, I'll call it payoff based licensing (PBL), seems much more pragmatic than the extremist options presented by either Microsoft or GPL. Users of Caucho's software can decide if they want to use it independent of the ideological dogma of the software developer.
Microsoft and GPL are simply sharing opposite ends of the same bed. If you want true altruism, then look towards BSD style licenses that don't impose any restrictions on how you use the software. If you have no restrictions in the license, then you have nothing to enforce. Microsoft and GPL on the other hand, have to be concerned about parasitism (piracy and illegal use) since they are concerned about a future payoff.
Therefore, any large group must evolve a technology of trust. If it doesn't do so, it will fall victim to rampant parasitism, which will cause inefficiency, which will eventually bring stagnation and failure to compete -- that is, death.
The trust you speak of is between the software developer and his/her customer. The developer trusts that in giving the software to the customer, (s)he will receive a future payoff in return. Microsoft and GPL have the same issue in terms of depending on trust and hoping they will see the future payoff. Of course, they diverge some in how they might go enforcing their licenses should the need arise, but the concept is the same nonetheless.
The GPL is similar to proprietary software licensing except that it demands a different future payoff. This and other systems in which the future payoff is rigid and fixed, IMHO, will have a disadvantage to PBL schemes that allow the customer to dynamically determine the payoff based on use. I wouldn't expect any of these systems to die off, but I would expect PBL systems to gain much more market share in the coming years.
The best part about an MBA is that you'll learn about how to do cost/benefit analysis and evaluate good business plans.
Umm, Nico, all the busted dot-coms with poor business plans were lead by legions of MBA's. And ironically, the most successful computer businesses are being run by those who never even received their undergraduate degree.
You know, I just returned from JavaOne and I was surprised. For a language that has only been around for about 5 or so years, Java has seen tremendous growth and acceptance. JavaOne, the annual developer's conference for Java, already sees 20,000+ participants making it the second largest computer conference after Comdex. Sun reports that there are over 3 million Java developers. Whatever you may think about Java, you must admit that this embracing of the language by developers is impressive.
But why are people flocking to the language? My belief is they are motivated by the fact that it is the Grand Unification Language. Java, through design or accident, has acquired features that make it easy to use many different aspects of programming. Let's walk through some of these:
Easily write simple Hello World app - similar to many languages
OS portability - similar to many shell languages such as Perl, Korn, etc.
Hardware portability - similar to C, C++ and others except that Java is also running on smart cards, cell phones, pda's and Sony recently announced it will run on the Playstation 2
Socket based networking - similar to C, C++ and Perl
Object based networking - similar to CORBA, COM+
2D Graphics - similar to X, MFC, Tk
3D Graphics - similar to OpenGL
No pointers - similar to scripting languages such as Php3, Perl, etc. Except that Java has much more advanced use of object references and garbage collection
Scripting capability - similar to Php3, asp, Perl
Client side vs. Server side VM optimization - similar to ? - Sun's recent HotSpot JVM's run in either client side mode or server side mode. As you can imagine, each is optimized to running fast for their particular environment.
Threading - similar to Ada
Self documenting - similar to ? - javadoc, in my opinion, is the killer feature for Java. The fact that I can easily document my classes in a standard html format means that others can quickly learn about them and use them more effectively. Php3 has done a good job documenting their language on their web site, which is one of the many reasons why they are so successful. Budding language authors take note: including an easy documentation system with your language will increase the speed of acceptance by others.
Take your favorite language and see how many of the features it has built in. Obviously, all of the features listed above are available by third party vendors for languages like C. However, having them part of the core language lowers the barrier to entry for newbies to try things out.
So back to your question about whether Java should be the underpinning of a CS education. If your goal is for the students to learn about how software interacts with the hardware and how to use resources effectively, then Assembly is the way to go - this was the underpinning of my own education. If instead, you want to give them a solid base from which they can branch out and experiment in a myriad set of directions, then unquestionably Java is the answer.
As you might imagine, a bird will scatter radio waves differently than a cloud or B-2 bomber. Using multiple sensors tied together with a processing engine, they can intrepret the signals and distinguish between the organic and non-organic bombers.
The part of the article I thought was most interesting was:
"It will be a symbolic step," he says, "of life from Earth, leaving Earth, and growing somewhere else." And when this little plant grows on Mars, he believes, it's going to be a major awakening of our interest in our future in space.
Umm IANAP (I am not a psychic), but do they REALLY believe this plant will survive?
It's my understanding that Martian conditions are pretty harsh - what with the lack of water, oxygen, high radiation, etc. How exactly do they expect these plants to survive without life support systems propping them up?
Personally I would be amazed if plant lived, because you don't see antartica covered with mustard plants. Now perhaps they should first drop their jelly-mustard seeds over the south pole and see how they fare before sending them to Mars.
No, but there is an excellent book by Carl Sagan, entitled, The Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark.
Sagan does an excellent job in justifying the use of the scientific method to evaluate claims such as those made by Chiu.
Alex is right in saying that many did not believe in Einstein and Tesla. But the fact that Einstein was eventually proven correct does not mean that every person making a claim is just a misunderstood genius. Sagan works through many different types of *alternative* sciences, providing examples of how he would apply the scientific method towards separating the wheat from the chaff.
Sagan's book is a must read. For me, it's up there with The Selfish Gene by Dawkins.
Personally I use ADSL (Avian Digital Subscriber Line). With this protocol, you don't worry about whether the lines between you and the telco are copper or fiber. The birds don't really care, just as long as they can sit on them.
But watch out for DoS attacks on this protocol. They're particularly nasty as pointed out by Hitchcock in his prescient masterpiece, The Birds. Most DoS attacks target your network, but these packets go after your hardware and YOU!
Some people always want what they don't have ...
on
GPL FAQ
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· Score: 2
The basis of the open source movement is providing the source code along with the binaries. A couple of the main reasons for doing this is to allow people to make bug fixes and add new features.
In general I have found that the popular open source products have above average quality and have many useful features. Having access to the source code is nice, but for me it generally hasn't been needed.
On the other hand, I've found that popular commercial software products tend to have lower than average quality, but are feature rich. For these products, I would love to have the source code so that I could fix the one or two showstoppers that just irritate the f*ck out of me.
I find it nicely ironic that in the times I need access to the source code, it is unavailable to me. And the times that it is easily accessible, I don't really need it.
So here's a question that's kind of rolling around inside my head: how many of you have actually looked at and modified the source code of 2 or more open source products?
Sifting through the zillions of bits and finding something useful is a little trickier.
If they're successful at this, perhaps they can then help me with my inbox. My friends and coworkers keeping clogging up my mailbox, keeping me from the messages about "Making $5 mil in 30 days working from home on the Internet" and "Sexy Co-eds want you!"
Don't my friends understand that I could extremely wealthy *and* have bodacious nymphs at my side... if only I could get to reading their messages! *Sigh*
Finally, a justifiable killer app for p2p
on
Swarmcast GPLed
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· Score: 2
This is a great idea! It'll let high traffic sites like kernel.org distribute the work out to others. I mean it's nice that they have a 100 Mbit pipe thanks to donated bandwidth, but now they can more optimally use it by allowing users to share portions of files between each other.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with this system also. Security, lowering the bar for newbies and other problems have been brought up in other posts. I won't rehash them here.
However, this will go a long way towards helping the open source community more easily share files -- without requiring that you beg some private money making companies to donate bandwidth. And that in my mind outweighs some of the negatives.
I especially like that they forbade sharing any files for which you don't have a copyright. Yes, I'm sure some people were thinking of using this for mp3's, warez, etc, but that would have killed the general acceptance of what is a great way to scale file downloading.
You must be using Internet Explorer. I noticed that when I try to access sites that don't respond (virtualdub's site was heavily loaded and wasn't responding to me earlier), IE will instead pop up a site I had previously viewed. Usually this happens to be one of my own sites.
Pretty weird if you ask me, although, I definitely prefer the current behavior over some dark plot by Bill to take me to msn.com -- that would really suck!
Slashdot Mirror
Some good points. Here are a couple of details which help add perspective:
Your comments have made clear to me a fundamental difference between GPL and proprietary software. The difference rests in what the developer of the software expects in terms of a future payoff. Microsoft (or any major software company) develops software will the expectation of monetary revenues. GPL developers write code in the expectation of future software they can use for free. Is it just me or are these two options the extremes of possibility? Isn't there some middle ground where the future payoff could feed the developers stomach, as well as his head?
I much prefer the licensing that Caucho.com has put on Resin. In it, you're only required to pay for the product if you're going to make money off of it. On the other hand, if you're some university lifer who hacks together a great technical document repository, you don't have to pay.
In this scenario, Caucho has decided that their future payoff, either money or free software/services, is determined by their customers. This, I'll call it payoff based licensing (PBL), seems much more pragmatic than the extremist options presented by either Microsoft or GPL. Users of Caucho's software can decide if they want to use it independent of the ideological dogma of the software developer.
Microsoft and GPL are simply sharing opposite ends of the same bed. If you want true altruism, then look towards BSD style licenses that don't impose any restrictions on how you use the software. If you have no restrictions in the license, then you have nothing to enforce. Microsoft and GPL on the other hand, have to be concerned about parasitism (piracy and illegal use) since they are concerned about a future payoff.
The trust you speak of is between the software developer and his/her customer. The developer trusts that in giving the software to the customer, (s)he will receive a future payoff in return. Microsoft and GPL have the same issue in terms of depending on trust and hoping they will see the future payoff. Of course, they diverge some in how they might go enforcing their licenses should the need arise, but the concept is the same nonetheless.
The GPL is similar to proprietary software licensing except that it demands a different future payoff. This and other systems in which the future payoff is rigid and fixed, IMHO, will have a disadvantage to PBL schemes that allow the customer to dynamically determine the payoff based on use. I wouldn't expect any of these systems to die off, but I would expect PBL systems to gain much more market share in the coming years.
The best part about an MBA is that you'll learn about how to do cost/benefit analysis and evaluate good business plans.
Umm, Nico, all the busted dot-coms with poor business plans were lead by legions of MBA's. And ironically, the most successful computer businesses are being run by those who never even received their undergraduate degree.
Oh, umm, nevermind.
You know, I just returned from JavaOne and I was surprised. For a language that has only been around for about 5 or so years, Java has seen tremendous growth and acceptance. JavaOne, the annual developer's conference for Java, already sees 20,000+ participants making it the second largest computer conference after Comdex. Sun reports that there are over 3 million Java developers. Whatever you may think about Java, you must admit that this embracing of the language by developers is impressive.
But why are people flocking to the language? My belief is they are motivated by the fact that it is the Grand Unification Language. Java, through design or accident, has acquired features that make it easy to use many different aspects of programming. Let's walk through some of these:
Take your favorite language and see how many of the features it has built in. Obviously, all of the features listed above are available by third party vendors for languages like C. However, having them part of the core language lowers the barrier to entry for newbies to try things out.
So back to your question about whether Java should be the underpinning of a CS education. If your goal is for the students to learn about how software interacts with the hardware and how to use resources effectively, then Assembly is the way to go - this was the underpinning of my own education. If instead, you want to give them a solid base from which they can branch out and experiment in a myriad set of directions, then unquestionably Java is the answer.
Just my $0.02, keep the change.
The secret to life is sex, cars or computers
As you might imagine, a bird will scatter radio waves differently than a cloud or B-2 bomber. Using multiple sensors tied together with a processing engine, they can intrepret the signals and distinguish between the organic and non-organic bombers.
The part of the article I thought was most interesting was:
Umm IANAP (I am not a psychic), but do they REALLY believe this plant will survive?
It's my understanding that Martian conditions are pretty harsh - what with the lack of water, oxygen, high radiation, etc. How exactly do they expect these plants to survive without life support systems propping them up?
Personally I would be amazed if plant lived, because you don't see antartica covered with mustard plants. Now perhaps they should first drop their jelly-mustard seeds over the south pole and see how they fare before sending them to Mars.
No, but there is an excellent book by Carl Sagan, entitled, The Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark.
Sagan does an excellent job in justifying the use of the scientific method to evaluate claims such as those made by Chiu.
Alex is right in saying that many did not believe in Einstein and Tesla. But the fact that Einstein was eventually proven correct does not mean that every person making a claim is just a misunderstood genius. Sagan works through many different types of *alternative* sciences, providing examples of how he would apply the scientific method towards separating the wheat from the chaff.
Sagan's book is a must read. For me, it's up there with The Selfish Gene by Dawkins.
Some want immortality, I just want sex, cars or computers
*Jinkies* Do the math (he was 19 in 1990, it's now 2001, carry the 1, integrate by parts) and he's only 30 years old right now!
He must have put the rings on the wrong fingers, reversed the polarity and is actually increasing his aging!
Want to know the secret to the life? It's all about sex, cars or computers.
Personally I use ADSL (Avian Digital Subscriber Line). With this protocol, you don't worry about whether the lines between you and the telco are copper or fiber. The birds don't really care, just as long as they can sit on them.
But watch out for DoS attacks on this protocol. They're particularly nasty as pointed out by Hitchcock in his prescient masterpiece, The Birds. Most DoS attacks target your network, but these packets go after your hardware and YOU!
The basis of the open source movement is providing the source code along with the binaries. A couple of the main reasons for doing this is to allow people to make bug fixes and add new features.
In general I have found that the popular open source products have above average quality and have many useful features. Having access to the source code is nice, but for me it generally hasn't been needed.
On the other hand, I've found that popular commercial software products tend to have lower than average quality, but are feature rich. For these products, I would love to have the source code so that I could fix the one or two showstoppers that just irritate the f*ck out of me.
I find it nicely ironic that in the times I need access to the source code, it is unavailable to me. And the times that it is easily accessible, I don't really need it.
So here's a question that's kind of rolling around inside my head: how many of you have actually looked at and modified the source code of 2 or more open source products?
If they're successful at this, perhaps they can then help me with my inbox. My friends and coworkers keeping clogging up my mailbox, keeping me from the messages about "Making $5 mil in 30 days working from home on the Internet" and "Sexy Co-eds want you!"
Don't my friends understand that I could extremely wealthy *and* have bodacious nymphs at my side ... if only I could get to reading their messages! *Sigh*
This is a great idea! It'll let high traffic sites like kernel.org distribute the work out to others. I mean it's nice that they have a 100 Mbit pipe thanks to donated bandwidth, but now they can more optimally use it by allowing users to share portions of files between each other.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with this system also. Security, lowering the bar for newbies and other problems have been brought up in other posts. I won't rehash them here.
However, this will go a long way towards helping the open source community more easily share files -- without requiring that you beg some private money making companies to donate bandwidth. And that in my mind outweighs some of the negatives.
I especially like that they forbade sharing any files for which you don't have a copyright. Yes, I'm sure some people were thinking of using this for mp3's, warez, etc, but that would have killed the general acceptance of what is a great way to scale file downloading.
Just my $ 0.02 worth.
You must be using Internet Explorer. I noticed that when I try to access sites that don't respond (virtualdub's site was heavily loaded and wasn't responding to me earlier), IE will instead pop up a site I had previously viewed. Usually this happens to be one of my own sites.
Pretty weird if you ask me, although, I definitely prefer the current behavior over some dark plot by Bill to take me to msn.com -- that would really suck!
BTW, is your page GPL'd or LGPL'd?
This is one ghetto I wouldn't mind living in!