SCSL released code isn't very useful, because of heavy licensing restrictions. About the only thing it is definitely useful for is security analysis. That's an improvement, certainly - you don't need to take their word for it that it's secure, you can check the source code yourself.
But remember, they also have released stuff as true open source, like http://jakarta.apache.org which they donated to the Apache Software Foundation. There are quite a few projects springing up on there, actually, but the orginal ones they donated were jakarta-tomcat (implementation of the servlet spec), jakarta-tools, and Ant (cool build tool, much easier to use than Make!). That alone deserves some kudos IMO.
It's a shame that a lot of the free stuff on Alphaworks is not open source at all, and indeed comes with a license even more restrictive than for Microsoft production products - must destroy the products after 60 days, evaluation use only, etc.
Correction to my previous post: these results aren't cached at all, except maybe on the Yahoo server itself (and when you press the Back button on some browsers). But caching them inbetween the server and the browser could be even more efficient.
Distributing the searches is a waste of resources, IMHO you should distribute the indexing mechanism and centralise the searching.
No, certain searches should be distributed as well. How many cluebies search for "sex" or "MP3s" on Yahoo every day? Many. What are the results going to be? More or less exactly the same (low-quality) results each time.
Yet these results aren't cached at all because the results of CGI scripts or servlets or other dymanic content providers aren't cached, according to the HTTP specification. This is a big waste. We need smarter protocols, and this idea might be a step in the right direction.
1) An obvious point: if a site itself decides which queries to respond to, there'll be a lot of spamming the index. Doesn't anybody remember the fate of the [meta] tags?
They're still there, and still used correctly by some sites.
There is already a lot of spamming of search engines. And the search engines often aren't that good at weeding out the spammers. Perhaps collaborative trust-based filtering is the way to go. Something like this: Anyone can register a vote for a filter, and the individual filterings are also rated by everyone (meta-moderation in other words). Those with the highest Karma and no reputation of censoring things - and eventually, those most knowlegable in the area and/or those of similar political disposition to the user in question - will tend to be trusted by other users.
(2) This search technology essentially turns a search into an advertising stream. Since the site decides what to return, it'll return a blurb instead of a context around the match. And if the site can returns graphics and not just text strings... oh, my! Advertising banners as search results! Joy.
In some cases, this could actually drive users away. But yes, it is a problem. Filtering would be a good idea here too. The server software could come with a warning attached - "You MUST provide an ALT text alternative to any images, otherwise you will drive away viewers who choose to block images in search results."
(3) The results are going to be dependent on the location of the query. Same question asked from a machine in California is likely to return different results if asked from a machine in Germany (especially with low timeouts). This isn't horrible, but not all that good. In particular, it means that I cannot tell other people "Search for 'foo', you'll find the site I am talking about on the first page".
Well, this already happens. You get different results depending on which search engine or directory you choose.
"Many political organizations' online brands are weak because they have a history of not being objective providers of information, but it is not too late to attempt to recast their brands."
[incredulous look] Come on! What do you expect? Republicans to start saying "Actually, the Democrats have some good ideas". Please explain why these ideas of yours are not total fantasy, as regards political party sites.
The cost of operating the welfare state (at least in the UK - I don't know about the states) is enormous, and growing
Ask yourself, why don't we ever hear about the enormous cost of the military industrial complex? We only ever hear about the "enormous" cost of the welfare state. So enormous, in fact, that even though the US and Britain are wealthier than ever before, somehow they've allegedly lost the ability to afford an adequate safety net.
Why? Because the government won't tax the rich, that's why.
I'm so sick of listening to these company boys trying to think that they can fix the problem by just inventing another proprietary form of content delivery.
It's ridiculous as well because, in the final analysis, big-time, er, illicit duplicaters [trying to avoid the word "pirate" here - oops], can just resort to using specialised hardware to copy the audio and video after it's been converted to the final output format (e.g. signals coming out of the video or sound card), whatever encryption or restricted-access system you use. Of course, in a lot of cases you don't even need to go to that extreme. CDs can be ripped, DVDs can be bit-for-bit copied, and Realplayer streams can be saved to disk using certain software.
I think that's what he means, yes. Although even some Java IDEs still encourage or require the use of "brittle" co-ordinate-based positioning in their GUI builders.
Fortunately Sun has signalled their intention to open source Forte (Community Edition at least) under the Mozilla Public License - I'm really looking forward to that (although they said it would be ready in April 2000!). It's cross-platform (almost pure Java I believe, apart from the installer) and it would probably give you 80-90% of the code that you would need to write an IDE with support for other languages than Java (in my ill-informed opinion).
It's what's known as an "opportunity cost" - money lost from lost opportunities. That's very real, and it can be cited in a court case (although apparently it wasn't thought to be a strong argument here).
You're sort of right. QC can be emulated on traditional computers in principle, but not in practice when the computations get large - it would take too long.
(1) - in a way, yeah. I've been helping out users on an open source mailing list for the past couple of months - just got offered a job on the strength of my replies!:-D I don't think I had a conscious intention for that to happen though.;)
Indeed, I even suspect that the programmers involved may even have pointed the finger at the wrong culprit, when the error was in their own code. I've done the same thing myself enough times.
What he wants is a world where EVERYTHING is free.
No - it doesn't look like you read the article very carefully. On the one hand he dislikes the free software movement because it doesn't directly reward coders (he doesn't think free is necessarily good), and then - as you rightly pointed out - he complains when fixes don't come for free, contradicting himself!
However, he does at times lump the whole free software movement together as a monolithic entity. I resent that. I contribute to free software, but I do not share Richard Stallman's extreme viewpoints, and there are many other's like me. I think Mr. Meyer should have made this more clear.
It is also striking that Meyer claims at the outset that he will stay away from controversy - and then proceeds to embroil himself in it! Gun control is, of course, extremely controversial. While I agree that Eric Raymond is a morally dubious character and should not necessarily be quoted or cited in glowing terms, Meyer's argument here strays slightly too far on the side of ad hominem (that is, criticising Raymond's political opinions to cast doubt on the free software positions he espouses) - even while he acknowledges that bad people can have some good opinions.
Finally, the general message that people should be rewarded for their efforts, no matter how enormous this reward becomes, is certainly open to question. The fact that Bill Gates possesses more wealth than serveral entire countries merits some moral condemnation, I believe. If people were not starving and dying of easily and cheaply preventable diseases at this very moment, extremes of inequality might be less outrageous - but, alas, people are starving and dying at this very moment.
I cannot help but think that the aforementioned distortions - the first one a very offensive distortion - and the writing of the article as a whole, are motivated partly by personal financial considerations, over and above what Mr. Meyer will presumably be paid for the article itself. ("Ad hominem" is not a cut-and-dried issue!:-) )
His type of socialism breeds the worst kind of unnecessary, almost universal poverty.
Oh, right, and the US embargo has nothing to do with it. Okay.
Obviously starving people to death to get them to change their political system is perfectly ethically acceptable. After all, the US has been doing it for ten years to Iraq as well. Let's just heap all the blame on Castro and Hussein, because of course the US government has the most saintliest of intentions, doesn't it - just looking out for "democracy". The very idea that the US government could starve an entire nation to supress alternatives to capitalism is just laughable.
Nah. They had a process, it just wasn't followed. You can't write a process to fit all types of human stupidity. Nothing is foolproof.
The example is slightly relevant because it illustrates that people sometimes have a strange reluctance to fire incompetent employees. They shouldn't have. (Barring extraordinary circumstances, of course.)
So basically you're saying, even when the guy is obviously a moron, don't blame the person, blame the process??? Come on!
I had a computing teacher at school who was totally incompetent. He had a business school degree with a fraction in computing (which I suspect he failed). Lots of us students asked the head of department to fire him. I even asked the teacher himself to resign, to his face.
But the head of department just said "nothing we can do, he's on contract". Er... shouldn't there be some provision for gross misconduct (i.e. not teaching) in the contract??
By stark contrast, a pair of teachers at a neighbouring school were caught in sexual liason on a videotape which was mistakenly shown to the kids. Nothing particularly bad about that, didn't harm the kids (they probably just found it hilarious). But both were "asked" to resign, and did so.
So when there's a public image problem, you can boot long-standing teachers - but when there's a complete absence of ability to teach - then you have to protect the incompetent teacher's job?? That makes no sense.
Well, you might be right. But don't forget, many users and even sysadmins (as demonstrated by the LoveBug fiasco) are too stupid to realise that that functionality should be configurable at all, much less to turn it off. So, one crucial requirement for any email client with that kind of power is turn it off in the default configuration!
Slashdot Mirror
True, but one can hope that that's a temporary problem. Just throw enough people at it. It's not a broken platform, just broken implementations.
But remember, they also have released stuff as true open source, like http://jakarta.apache.org which they donated to the Apache Software Foundation. There are quite a few projects springing up on there, actually, but the orginal ones they donated were jakarta-tomcat (implementation of the servlet spec), jakarta-tools, and Ant (cool build tool, much easier to use than Make!). That alone deserves some kudos IMO.
It's a shame that a lot of the free stuff on Alphaworks is not open source at all, and indeed comes with a license even more restrictive than for Microsoft production products - must destroy the products after 60 days, evaluation use only, etc.
Correction to my previous post: these results aren't cached at all, except maybe on the Yahoo server itself (and when you press the Back button on some browsers). But caching them inbetween the server and the browser could be even more efficient.
No, certain searches should be distributed as well. How many cluebies search for "sex" or "MP3s" on Yahoo every day? Many. What are the results going to be? More or less exactly the same (low-quality) results each time.
Yet these results aren't cached at all because the results of CGI scripts or servlets or other dymanic content providers aren't cached, according to the HTTP specification. This is a big waste. We need smarter protocols, and this idea might be a step in the right direction.
They're still there, and still used correctly by some sites.
There is already a lot of spamming of search engines. And the search engines often aren't that good at weeding out the spammers. Perhaps collaborative trust-based filtering is the way to go. Something like this: Anyone can register a vote for a filter, and the individual filterings are also rated by everyone (meta-moderation in other words). Those with the highest Karma and no reputation of censoring things - and eventually, those most knowlegable in the area and/or those of similar political disposition to the user in question - will tend to be trusted by other users.
(2) This search technology essentially turns a search into an advertising stream. Since the site decides what to return, it'll return a blurb instead of a context around the match. And if the site can returns graphics and not just text strings... oh, my! Advertising banners as search results! Joy.
In some cases, this could actually drive users away. But yes, it is a problem. Filtering would be a good idea here too. The server software could come with a warning attached - "You MUST provide an ALT text alternative to any images, otherwise you will drive away viewers who choose to block images in search results."
(3) The results are going to be dependent on the location of the query. Same question asked from a machine in California is likely to return different results if asked from a machine in Germany (especially with low timeouts). This isn't horrible, but not all that good. In particular, it means that I cannot tell other people "Search for 'foo', you'll find the site I am talking about on the first page".
Well, this already happens. You get different results depending on which search engine or directory you choose.
"Many political organizations' online brands are weak because they have a history of not being objective providers of information, but it is not too late to attempt to recast their brands."
[incredulous look] Come on! What do you expect? Republicans to start saying "Actually, the Democrats have some good ideas". Please explain why these ideas of yours are not total fantasy, as regards political party sites.
No wait, don't bother, I'm being rhetorical.
Ask yourself, why don't we ever hear about the enormous cost of the military industrial complex? We only ever hear about the "enormous" cost of the welfare state. So enormous, in fact, that even though the US and Britain are wealthier than ever before, somehow they've allegedly lost the ability to afford an adequate safety net.
Why? Because the government won't tax the rich, that's why.
It's ridiculous as well because, in the final analysis, big-time, er, illicit duplicaters [trying to avoid the word "pirate" here - oops], can just resort to using specialised hardware to copy the audio and video after it's been converted to the final output format (e.g. signals coming out of the video or sound card), whatever encryption or restricted-access system you use. Of course, in a lot of cases you don't even need to go to that extreme. CDs can be ripped, DVDs can be bit-for-bit copied, and Realplayer streams can be saved to disk using certain software.
Fortunately Sun has signalled their intention to open source Forte (Community Edition at least) under the Mozilla Public License - I'm really looking forward to that (although they said it would be ready in April 2000!). It's cross-platform (almost pure Java I believe, apart from the installer) and it would probably give you 80-90% of the code that you would need to write an IDE with support for other languages than Java (in my ill-informed opinion).
No, I don't expect you to understand.
That's not true. Heinlein's "Job - A Comedy of Justice" was a brilliant anti-religious novel.
Anyway, what the hell is CAW? I'm serious, I've never heard of it.
No - it doesn't look like you read the article very carefully. On the one hand he dislikes the free software movement because it doesn't directly reward coders (he doesn't think free is necessarily good), and then - as you rightly pointed out - he complains when fixes don't come for free, contradicting himself!
Ah! Now I understand the ice-cap melting effect!!! When they explain global warming on TV they rarely mention the difference between the two poles!
Mr. Meyer makes some insightful points.
:-) )
However, he does at times lump the whole free software movement together as a monolithic entity. I resent that. I contribute to free software, but I do not share Richard Stallman's extreme viewpoints, and there are many other's like me. I think Mr. Meyer should have made this more clear.
It is also striking that Meyer claims at the outset that he will stay away from controversy - and then proceeds to embroil himself in it! Gun control is, of course, extremely controversial. While I agree that Eric Raymond is a morally dubious character and should not necessarily be quoted or cited in glowing terms, Meyer's argument here strays slightly too far on the side of ad hominem (that is, criticising Raymond's political opinions to cast doubt on the free software positions he espouses) - even while he acknowledges that bad people can have some good opinions.
Finally, the general message that people should be rewarded for their efforts, no matter how enormous this reward becomes, is certainly open to question. The fact that Bill Gates possesses more wealth than serveral entire countries merits some moral condemnation, I believe. If people were not starving and dying of easily and cheaply preventable diseases at this very moment, extremes of inequality might be less outrageous - but, alas, people are starving and dying at this very moment.
I cannot help but think that the aforementioned distortions - the first one a very offensive distortion - and the writing of the article as a whole, are motivated partly by personal financial considerations, over and above what Mr. Meyer will presumably be paid for the article itself. ("Ad hominem" is not a cut-and-dried issue!
Oh, right, and the US embargo has nothing to do with it. Okay.
Obviously starving people to death to get them to change their political system is perfectly ethically acceptable. After all, the US has been doing it for ten years to Iraq as well. Let's just heap all the blame on Castro and Hussein, because of course the US government has the most saintliest of intentions, doesn't it - just looking out for "democracy". The very idea that the US government could starve an entire nation to supress alternatives to capitalism is just laughable.
[sarcasm]
The example is slightly relevant because it illustrates that people sometimes have a strange reluctance to fire incompetent employees. They shouldn't have. (Barring extraordinary circumstances, of course.)
So basically you're saying, even when the guy is obviously a moron, don't blame the person, blame the process??? Come on!
I had a computing teacher at school who was totally incompetent. He had a business school degree with a fraction in computing (which I suspect he failed). Lots of us students asked the head of department to fire him. I even asked the teacher himself to resign, to his face.
But the head of department just said "nothing we can do, he's on contract". Er... shouldn't there be some provision for gross misconduct (i.e. not teaching) in the contract??
By stark contrast, a pair of teachers at a neighbouring school were caught in sexual liason on a videotape which was mistakenly shown to the kids. Nothing particularly bad about that, didn't harm the kids (they probably just found it hilarious). But both were "asked" to resign, and did so.
So when there's a public image problem, you can boot long-standing teachers - but when there's a complete absence of ability to teach - then you have to protect the incompetent teacher's job?? That makes no sense.
Moderate this up!
Though obviously MS is the prime culprit here, that goes without saying.