I recently completed a postgraduate course on "organisational behaviour", which is the field from where the justification for these personality tests is supposed to originate.
It turns out that there is no objective justification for the tests. The texts were quite clear that little if any benefit can be derived from subjecting individuals to such tests, as the tests were only ever designed to measure populations. While the aggregate score across many people might have meaning, a single individual's results are meaningless. Being subject to such a test is a useful indicator that the prospective employer you are interviewing has a clueless HR department.
It was interesting doing a few job interviews with large companies after having completed the course. It was soooo tempting to answer each question with a page number from the text.
For the same reason it isn't illegal for you to chew with your mouth open, also a natural and disconcerting action.
How would you like me to deny your right to food (there's a fundamental human right if there ever was one), all because I felt squeamish about the way you eat? Now why do you deny a baby its rights?
No, bottle feeding isn't an option. Formula is basically processed food for babies and carries many of the negatives of processed food for adults. It should only be used as a last resort. Expressing then feeding from a bottle, without a reason, exposes both the baby and mother to needless risk of infection and other complications.
In their favour, an electric motor is much more energy efficient than an internal combustion engine. 20% seems to be the maximum for a practical internal combustion engine. Electric motors should easily be able to reach 90% efficiency, with the record being 98% efficiency. Thus that 4.5 litres of petrol (1.2 US gallons of gas) becomes 20 litres. Not too bad for a first attempt, given that a small car (eg. Toyoto Echo/Yaris) typically takes 30-35 litres of petrol on a fill.
Yaris and their ilk aren't the model of efficiency in their design. Surely it wouldn't be too hard to make a Yaris type car use 35% less energy, resulting in a capacitor powered electric car with similar range to a petrol equivalent?
Max Burnet's ACS biography mentions a possible ACMS site at Mt Penang. Did that fall through, or is it still a possibility? While not an ACMS member I'm an interested observer and sympathiser since I worked with some of this equipment at DSTO (and worked with you too on the Macquarie/CSIRO WLAN collaboration). You will be able to glean my identity from my "homepage" link above.
Max Burnett is a founding member of the Australian Computing Museum Society and I think you will find the PDP9, and probably most of the rest, are part of its collection and that Mr Burdett is storing them since the ACMS does not have a permanent home. They were possibly collected by Mr Burnett in the first place and donated to the society, but they would still be part of the ACMS collection. Any ACMS members care to fill in the details?
Presumably you too could join the ACMS and after a while have a house full of vintage computers too!:-)
There is a donation form on their website, with details of a bank account into which money can be deposited. Someone needs a paypal (or equivalent) account?
The closest Australia has to a Space Agency is the Australian Space Research Institute. It falls into the category of a serious amateur effort, staffed by volunteers and funded by donations. Underfunded Australian research programs tend to hit above their weight with innovative solutions, simply because they don't have the money to pay for a more conventional solution.
The same could be said of the designers of the A380 jumbo jet. They could have used a piece of paper and a 6H pencil but they they would have come up against the constraint that it is physically impossible to do the required calculations in a reasonable time. It's why people use automated tools. While not in the same league as an A380, the coin still embodies calculations which are involved enough that they could not be done manually. For example, the calculations involved in rendering the illustration using a variable width font on a curved path. Sure he could have licked his finger, held it up in the wind and guessed at a correct rendering, but he would not have achieved the same effect as he did with the tools he used.
I agree with you but for different reasons. The judges would have been oblivious to the fact the free software was used to design the coin. They gave the award based in the design in front of them, uninfluenced by its means of production. The artist won 100% based on his design. Hence the first part of my comment.
Tool selection is part of the behind the scenes design process. The free software tools contributed to the artist's ability to realise his design. He might have been able to do it without free software, but would have had to divert effort from being creative into forcing the tools to do his will. Being able to afford the tools for the job is part of it, but I think a larger issue is that free software provided the customisability to get the job done.
This is why I think it's an excellent example: he won the prize entirely though his own resourcefulness, but free software allowed his resourcefulness to go places it otherwise could not have.
Observation: Funny that I just came out with words to the effect of "where do you want to go today?", the old MS slogan. The important thing is not the question, but the answer. Some software will let you go lots of places. The excellent case in point, the example of the coin, has demonstrated that free software's answer is "wherever you want to go".
This guy won due to superior design, not due to the fact that he used free software. The free software is in the background, contributing but almost incidental to the final product. That's how is should be though. Free software released the artist from the constraints of having to fit in with someone else's idea of what software or technology he should be allowed to use, leaving him free to be creative and follow his own unique path.
What's people's real world experience of Freenet? Does it work and is it usable? Is it truly secure from government intervention and monitoring? If this proposal goes ahead it will be the thing that prompts me to install Freenet and badger all my friends into joining too.
I just happened to be involved in the university project that produced this patent. The patent was filed before I got involved, so I can't comment on the perceived obviousness at the time of filing (or any other aspect of the filing). From personal experience, in 1995 most people I spoke to about what I was doing didn't "get" it and questioned why anyone would bother doing such a thing. It's hard to tell how much of that was due to the technology being non-obvious, or how much was due to applications being non-obvious.
It's interesting that there is only one name in common between the list of authors on the patent and the paper, and that person isn't the lead author on the paper. I guess that might be because the paper is about the second implementation. The first implementation, on which the patent is presumably based, was done in software in non-real time (burst mode). If judging obviousness, it would be worth comparing with the HiperLAN project and the work that went into it.
The problem in Australia is that every model of car that gets registered must undergo a crash test, and significant modifications count a as new model. That rules out one off conversions. You have to build at least two and hand one over to the authorities to get totaled. An expensive exercise.
Doctors Karl Kruszelnicki and Kevin Varvell are giving an LHC lecture at the University of Sydney tonight. 7pm at the Footbridge Theatre. Varvell is a contributor to the ATLAS detector. Kruszelnicki is always fun. It includes a live cross to CERN. The lecture was to be in the school of Physics but has had to be transferred to a larger venue due to popular demand.
"Unlike the genome and proteome, the glycome and lipidome are not directly encoded by DNA. Nevertheless, the glycome and the lipidome contribute to the pathogenesis and severity of an increasing number of diseases,..."
The whole point of the author's paper is that we need to understand more than the molecules which make generic material if we are to understand disease. The significance of the number 68 is that it is greater than the number of molecules involved in generics.
In a FOSS world, processor instruction set is of relatively minor importance. Change the processor and all one does is recompile the code, possibly, but probably not, with minor tweaks. In an open source world VIA would be free to break away from the x86 instruction set and compete in an unfettered manner with Intel.
Another view is that everything is a code in a noisy environment, so there is no way to talk about "the underlying device" as it itself is just another type of coding. Magnetic recording can be viewed as a way of encoding information onto the underlying (thermal) noisy matter. There is some very deep stuff happening in information theory. Let's take the empty universe as a noisy channel. Now every structure in the universe (including you and me) becomes information encoded over the empty universe. One gets the feeling that any "ultimate theory" won't be expressed in terms of forces and fields but some underlying, unifying, concept of information.
Backing up Bruce's reasoning with a more selfish point of view.
If you develop and get given money then you have received your payment, irrespective of what license you choose. If you develop and don't get given money then the GPL "pays" you in the form of reciprocal freedom.
If you don't use the GPL you have to be prepared to receive no "payment" for your work, taking comfort in the fact that there is no personal cost to you when others benefit from your work. You have to enjoy developing software for a hobby or you should go and find a more worthy charity to contribute to. It's a personal choice.
There is a worse scenario if your software has a community attached to it and you care about the continuity of your community. If you don't use the GPL you have to be prepared for a third party to co-opt your community, by embracing your software, extending it, luring your community away with the extensions then refusing to share the extensions with the community. In this way you and the community are locked out of further development, even though to technically own most of the software. Maybe your community is loyal enough to stick around, maybe not. I would guess developers would stick around longer than users, though in the case of networked software (most software?) Metcalfe's Law ensures that the developers will follow the user community. In this case you have incurred a personal cost by not using the GPL.
The first reason makes me lean towards copyleft licenses, such as the GPL. The second reason means I will only work (unpaid) inside the GPL, unless there is no other option.
There are all sorts of other altruistic reasons to to use the GPL, but the GPL can be justified without resorting to them.
Try the Funway into Electronics series from Dick Smith or the Short Circuit Series from Jaycar. They are written to be simple enough for kids but are actually soundly based and suitable as a first step for adults. Each project aims to demonstrate a principle, includes explanation and builds on previous projects to form a short course. The books are the most important thing. The mentioned shops sell accompanying kits but the components are all generic and can be picked up at any electronics store around the world.
Funway was my first exposure to electronics and today I am a professional electrical engineer (with a few intervening steps required).
Congratulations on getting into production. It's a first brick in the wall of shifting the free software philosophy across to hardware.
The proprietary FPGA tool chain is an interesting problem for free hardware. The effort in reverse engineering and writing a free design flow for existing FPGAs would probably be more than building an FPGA from scratch.
For this reason I've always thought the first "gnuASIC" should be an FPGA. The open graphic people shouldn't be the one to do it though. It's hard enough to keep near the bleeding edge of graphics/FPGA card design without incurring the extra delay of developing an FPGA chip from scratch. What is needed is for a second group of people to step forward to develop the gnuFPGA. This FPGA could then be the foundation for other projects, such as Open Graphics.
Of course the question is then what of proprietary ASIC processes and libraries? Maybe the ultimate solution is to put a monumental effort into reprap and get it to the point where it can build an integrated circuit? We will then have truly free (as in freedom) ASICs.
See hundreds of years ago the equivalent to space exploration was sending a ship around the world. The UK was a leader in this effort. In 1770 a guy called Cook discovered a place called Australia and in 1788 a colonising fleet was sent from the UK to this new world. The new colony succeeded beyond the UK's wildest dreams. It's inhabitants evolved into bronzed, suntanned titans, with physical and mental capabilities beyond anything the UK was remotely capable of. Worst of all they repeatedly whopped the UK at all sports. The final straw was when the Australian colony sent back this thing called Neighbours and destroyed the Queen's English, the foundation of the UK's national identity, culture and pride.
I would question whether the MPL offers greater protection than the GPL. My understanding is that the limit on protection is the extent of copyright law, not the terms of the license, with both the GPL and MPL extending their protection to the limit of copyright law. If the MPL claims to protect further than this then it is probably bluffing since copyright doesn't extend to everything that is derived from a source file.
I suspect the reason for the FSF's "probably not" answer is that copyright does not cover purely functional works. It is intended to cover creative works. Source code is protected in that the programmer is an "artist" and the source is their creation. A bitstream or netlist exists to link two processes together and so there is an argument that they are functional rather than creative and thus fall outside copyright. Lack of protection is not a limitation of the GPL but of copyright law.
I wrote the section of the OpenCores FAQ that the story refers to so I can give a little background history.
The FAQ answer was the result of an extended discussion on the OpenCores mailing lists about the best license to use. We didn't come up with a definitive answer and the GPL, LGPL, modified BSD recommendation was aimed at reducing license proliferation while giving people a choice between copyleft and non-copyleft. The MIT license was judged to be close enough to the modified BSD license (also noted by OSI) that we could just choose one of them. Reducing proliferation was an issue since people were experimenting with different homebrewed licenses with potential to fragment the community.
Open and Free licensing is still a murky issue for hardware as much of hardware falls outside of copyright. In so far as copyright applies (schematics, bitstreams, source code,...) it was decided that licenses such as the GPL could be applied. It is still not clear by what legal mechanism a hardware manufacturer can be forced to disclose the "open" portions of a system.
For example say someone builds an integrated circuit using GPLd VHDL from the OpenCores website. The chip might be covered by circuit layout rights but it is questionable whether copyright is applicable. It seems unclear that the GPL can be applied to a chip. A system such as a circuit board is even murkier since it is not covered by circuit layout rights and being a functional system might fall outside copyright (despite manufacturers plastering their boards with the copyright symbol). Any copyright could also be circumvented by rerunning an autorouter with a different seed to generate a different pattern of PCB tracks.
It will be very interesting to see what conclusion Eben Moglen, Mary Lou Jepsen and so on come to now that the OLPC and Pixel Qi have prompted the Free Software community to seriously examine the underpinnings of Free Hardware. A number of years ago Richard Stallman was of the view that Free Hardware was outside the mission of the FSF and freedom for hardware was not relevant since the difficulty of manufacturing was a greater barrier to freedom than the law.
You have the story slightly wrong. The grease was put into the bearings of railway cars carrying the tanks. Not the tanks themselves. The tanks were stranded and the railway line blocked. Yes, it is an interesting story.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently completed a postgraduate course on "organisational behaviour", which is the field from where the justification for these personality tests is supposed to originate.
It turns out that there is no objective justification for the tests. The texts were quite clear that little if any benefit can be derived from subjecting individuals to such tests, as the tests were only ever designed to measure populations. While the aggregate score across many people might have meaning, a single individual's results are meaningless. Being subject to such a test is a useful indicator that the prospective employer you are interviewing has a clueless HR department.
It was interesting doing a few job interviews with large companies after having completed the course. It was soooo tempting to answer each question with a page number from the text.
For the same reason it isn't illegal for you to chew with your mouth open, also a natural and disconcerting action.
How would you like me to deny your right to food (there's a fundamental human right if there ever was one), all because I felt squeamish about the way you eat? Now why do you deny a baby its rights?
No, bottle feeding isn't an option. Formula is basically processed food for babies and carries many of the negatives of processed food for adults. It should only be used as a last resort. Expressing then feeding from a bottle, without a reason, exposes both the baby and mother to needless risk of infection and other complications.
In their favour, an electric motor is much more energy efficient than an internal combustion engine. 20% seems to be the maximum for a practical internal combustion engine. Electric motors should easily be able to reach 90% efficiency, with the record being 98% efficiency. Thus that 4.5 litres of petrol (1.2 US gallons of gas) becomes 20 litres. Not too bad for a first attempt, given that a small car (eg. Toyoto Echo/Yaris) typically takes 30-35 litres of petrol on a fill.
Yaris and their ilk aren't the model of efficiency in their design. Surely it wouldn't be too hard to make a Yaris type car use 35% less energy, resulting in a capacitor powered electric car with similar range to a petrol equivalent?
Max Burnet's ACS biography mentions a possible ACMS site at Mt Penang. Did that fall through, or is it still a possibility? While not an ACMS member I'm an interested observer and sympathiser since I worked with some of this equipment at DSTO (and worked with you too on the Macquarie/CSIRO WLAN collaboration). You will be able to glean my identity from my "homepage" link above.
Max Burnett is a founding member of the Australian Computing Museum Society and I think you will find the PDP9, and probably most of the rest, are part of its collection and that Mr Burdett is storing them since the ACMS does not have a permanent home. They were possibly collected by Mr Burnett in the first place and donated to the society, but they would still be part of the ACMS collection. Any ACMS members care to fill in the details?
Presumably you too could join the ACMS and after a while have a house full of vintage computers too! :-)
There is a donation form on their website, with details of a bank account into which money can be deposited. Someone needs a paypal (or equivalent) account?
The closest Australia has to a Space Agency is the Australian Space Research Institute. It falls into the category of a serious amateur effort, staffed by volunteers and funded by donations. Underfunded Australian research programs tend to hit above their weight with innovative solutions, simply because they don't have the money to pay for a more conventional solution.
The same could be said of the designers of the A380 jumbo jet. They could have used a piece of paper and a 6H pencil but they they would have come up against the constraint that it is physically impossible to do the required calculations in a reasonable time. It's why people use automated tools. While not in the same league as an A380, the coin still embodies calculations which are involved enough that they could not be done manually. For example, the calculations involved in rendering the illustration using a variable width font on a curved path. Sure he could have licked his finger, held it up in the wind and guessed at a correct rendering, but he would not have achieved the same effect as he did with the tools he used.
I agree with you but for different reasons. The judges would have been oblivious to the fact the free software was used to design the coin. They gave the award based in the design in front of them, uninfluenced by its means of production. The artist won 100% based on his design. Hence the first part of my comment.
Tool selection is part of the behind the scenes design process. The free software tools contributed to the artist's ability to realise his design. He might have been able to do it without free software, but would have had to divert effort from being creative into forcing the tools to do his will. Being able to afford the tools for the job is part of it, but I think a larger issue is that free software provided the customisability to get the job done.
This is why I think it's an excellent example: he won the prize entirely though his own resourcefulness, but free software allowed his resourcefulness to go places it otherwise could not have.
Observation: Funny that I just came out with words to the effect of "where do you want to go today?", the old MS slogan. The important thing is not the question, but the answer. Some software will let you go lots of places. The excellent case in point, the example of the coin, has demonstrated that free software's answer is "wherever you want to go".
This guy won due to superior design, not due to the fact that he used free software. The free software is in the background, contributing but almost incidental to the final product. That's how is should be though. Free software released the artist from the constraints of having to fit in with someone else's idea of what software or technology he should be allowed to use, leaving him free to be creative and follow his own unique path.
What's people's real world experience of Freenet? Does it work and is it usable? Is it truly secure from government intervention and monitoring? If this proposal goes ahead it will be the thing that prompts me to install Freenet and badger all my friends into joining too.
I just happened to be involved in the university project that produced this patent. The patent was filed before I got involved, so I can't comment on the perceived obviousness at the time of filing (or any other aspect of the filing). From personal experience, in 1995 most people I spoke to about what I was doing didn't "get" it and questioned why anyone would bother doing such a thing. It's hard to tell how much of that was due to the technology being non-obvious, or how much was due to applications being non-obvious.
It's interesting that there is only one name in common between the list of authors on the patent and the paper, and that person isn't the lead author on the paper. I guess that might be because the paper is about the second implementation. The first implementation, on which the patent is presumably based, was done in software in non-real time (burst mode). If judging obviousness, it would be worth comparing with the HiperLAN project and the work that went into it.
The problem in Australia is that every model of car that gets registered must undergo a crash test, and significant modifications count a as new model. That rules out one off conversions. You have to build at least two and hand one over to the authorities to get totaled. An expensive exercise.
Doctors Karl Kruszelnicki and Kevin Varvell are giving an LHC lecture at the University of Sydney tonight. 7pm at the Footbridge Theatre. Varvell is a contributor to the ATLAS detector. Kruszelnicki is always fun. It includes a live cross to CERN. The lecture was to be in the school of Physics but has had to be transferred to a larger venue due to popular demand.
Bzzzt! Point three is wrong.
To quote the paper in Nature:
The whole point of the author's paper is that we need to understand more than the molecules which make generic material if we are to understand disease. The significance of the number 68 is that it is greater than the number of molecules involved in generics.
In a FOSS world, processor instruction set is of relatively minor importance. Change the processor and all one does is recompile the code, possibly, but probably not, with minor tweaks. In an open source world VIA would be free to break away from the x86 instruction set and compete in an unfettered manner with Intel.
Another view is that everything is a code in a noisy environment, so there is no way to talk about "the underlying device" as it itself is just another type of coding. Magnetic recording can be viewed as a way of encoding information onto the underlying (thermal) noisy matter. There is some very deep stuff happening in information theory. Let's take the empty universe as a noisy channel. Now every structure in the universe (including you and me) becomes information encoded over the empty universe. One gets the feeling that any "ultimate theory" won't be expressed in terms of forces and fields but some underlying, unifying, concept of information.
Backing up Bruce's reasoning with a more selfish point of view.
If you develop and get given money then you have received your payment, irrespective of what license you choose. If you develop and don't get given money then the GPL "pays" you in the form of reciprocal freedom.
If you don't use the GPL you have to be prepared to receive no "payment" for your work, taking comfort in the fact that there is no personal cost to you when others benefit from your work. You have to enjoy developing software for a hobby or you should go and find a more worthy charity to contribute to. It's a personal choice.
There is a worse scenario if your software has a community attached to it and you care about the continuity of your community. If you don't use the GPL you have to be prepared for a third party to co-opt your community, by embracing your software, extending it, luring your community away with the extensions then refusing to share the extensions with the community. In this way you and the community are locked out of further development, even though to technically own most of the software. Maybe your community is loyal enough to stick around, maybe not. I would guess developers would stick around longer than users, though in the case of networked software (most software?) Metcalfe's Law ensures that the developers will follow the user community. In this case you have incurred a personal cost by not using the GPL.
The first reason makes me lean towards copyleft licenses, such as the GPL. The second reason means I will only work (unpaid) inside the GPL, unless there is no other option.
There are all sorts of other altruistic reasons to to use the GPL, but the GPL can be justified without resorting to them.
Try the Funway into Electronics series from Dick Smith or the Short Circuit Series from Jaycar. They are written to be simple enough for kids but are actually soundly based and suitable as a first step for adults. Each project aims to demonstrate a principle, includes explanation and builds on previous projects to form a short course. The books are the most important thing. The mentioned shops sell accompanying kits but the components are all generic and can be picked up at any electronics store around the world.
Funway was my first exposure to electronics and today I am a professional electrical engineer (with a few intervening steps required).
Congratulations on getting into production. It's a first brick in the wall of shifting the free software philosophy across to hardware.
The proprietary FPGA tool chain is an interesting problem for free hardware. The effort in reverse engineering and writing a free design flow for existing FPGAs would probably be more than building an FPGA from scratch.
For this reason I've always thought the first "gnuASIC" should be an FPGA. The open graphic people shouldn't be the one to do it though. It's hard enough to keep near the bleeding edge of graphics/FPGA card design without incurring the extra delay of developing an FPGA chip from scratch. What is needed is for a second group of people to step forward to develop the gnuFPGA. This FPGA could then be the foundation for other projects, such as Open Graphics.
Of course the question is then what of proprietary ASIC processes and libraries? Maybe the ultimate solution is to put a monumental effort into reprap and get it to the point where it can build an integrated circuit? We will then have truly free (as in freedom) ASICs.
See hundreds of years ago the equivalent to space exploration was sending a ship around the world. The UK was a leader in this effort. In 1770 a guy called Cook discovered a place called Australia and in 1788 a colonising fleet was sent from the UK to this new world. The new colony succeeded beyond the UK's wildest dreams. It's inhabitants evolved into bronzed, suntanned titans, with physical and mental capabilities beyond anything the UK was remotely capable of. Worst of all they repeatedly whopped the UK at all sports. The final straw was when the Australian colony sent back this thing called Neighbours and destroyed the Queen's English, the foundation of the UK's national identity, culture and pride.
The UK resolved "never again".
:-)
I would question whether the MPL offers greater protection than the GPL. My understanding is that the limit on protection is the extent of copyright law, not the terms of the license, with both the GPL and MPL extending their protection to the limit of copyright law. If the MPL claims to protect further than this then it is probably bluffing since copyright doesn't extend to everything that is derived from a source file.
I suspect the reason for the FSF's "probably not" answer is that copyright does not cover purely functional works. It is intended to cover creative works. Source code is protected in that the programmer is an "artist" and the source is their creation. A bitstream or netlist exists to link two processes together and so there is an argument that they are functional rather than creative and thus fall outside copyright. Lack of protection is not a limitation of the GPL but of copyright law.
I wrote the section of the OpenCores FAQ that the story refers to so I can give a little background history.
...) it was decided that licenses such as the GPL could be applied. It is still not clear by what legal mechanism a hardware manufacturer can be forced to disclose the "open" portions of a system.
The FAQ answer was the result of an extended discussion on the OpenCores mailing lists about the best license to use. We didn't come up with a definitive answer and the GPL, LGPL, modified BSD recommendation was aimed at reducing license proliferation while giving people a choice between copyleft and non-copyleft. The MIT license was judged to be close enough to the modified BSD license (also noted by OSI) that we could just choose one of them. Reducing proliferation was an issue since people were experimenting with different homebrewed licenses with potential to fragment the community.
Open and Free licensing is still a murky issue for hardware as much of hardware falls outside of copyright. In so far as copyright applies (schematics, bitstreams, source code,
For example say someone builds an integrated circuit using GPLd VHDL from the OpenCores website. The chip might be covered by circuit layout rights but it is questionable whether copyright is applicable. It seems unclear that the GPL can be applied to a chip. A system such as a circuit board is even murkier since it is not covered by circuit layout rights and being a functional system might fall outside copyright (despite manufacturers plastering their boards with the copyright symbol). Any copyright could also be circumvented by rerunning an autorouter with a different seed to generate a different pattern of PCB tracks.
It will be very interesting to see what conclusion Eben Moglen, Mary Lou Jepsen and so on come to now that the OLPC and Pixel Qi have prompted the Free Software community to seriously examine the underpinnings of Free Hardware. A number of years ago Richard Stallman was of the view that Free Hardware was outside the mission of the FSF and freedom for hardware was not relevant since the difficulty of manufacturing was a greater barrier to freedom than the law.
Some versions of the LEON and any of the forty one processors on this page.
You have the story slightly wrong. The grease was put into the bearings of railway cars carrying the tanks. Not the tanks themselves. The tanks were stranded and the railway line blocked. Yes, it is an interesting story.