So, with.Net, Microsoft is at once, avoiding going down with the DOJ verdict by jumping ship from the business of selling software as manufactured-product, to selling software as a service, which is the increasing trend anyway.
You could have said the same thing for newspapers->radio, or radio->TV, or TV->internet...etc. The issues aren't new. There are benefits and drawbacks. Hopefully we can draw the lines in the correct places so that we get the most benefits with the lowest percentage of misuse/abuse/whatever. This is the whole crime and security question in general. If we wanted to be absolutely safe from each other we'd all be locked up.
Isn't the NSA "five years ahead" or somesuch with regards to various technologies? I wouldn't really be surprised to discover decades-old installations which have technology that wasn't supposed to exist at the time.
Damn, me too. If Microsoft wants to spend its time and money training and giving away surplus hardware and software, by all means, LET it. Better to get free hardware and software of the proprietary kind, rather than get none at all (which is my guess what OSS companies will be able to provide - they're still trying to figure out how to make a profit in the first place). Don't cut off the nose to spite the face.
Will somebody please explain to me what this movie has to do with Open Source, and why there are biographies of John Hall and Miguel de Icaza, on the site? Is this movie modeled on real events or something? That site is just incoherent.
If being white means you suck, relatively, then you deserve not to be hired. Nobody wants to watch a whole bunch of white guys play a game poorly.
But anyway, I think sports figures get insanely exorbitant amounts of money, regardless of their race. I just can't fathom giving somebody an amount of money larger than some small countries' GNP, just to run around a field or bounce a ball. Only in the USA.
You're right, it's not a race issue. It's a class/socio-economic status issue. It just seems conservatives like to label is at a race issue so they can make the obvious argument that minority preferences are just as bad as racism in the first place. As conservatives clearly point out by picking well-to-do, business-owning, minorities, as examples, it's all about class, not the color of your skin. Unfortunately, there is a great correlation between being a minority and being poor. So we shouldn't be saying "Oh, we screwed black people for decades and decades, let's give them a free ride for a while". We should instead be observing that, despite a healthy sized middle class, there is an increasing polarization and gap between the extremely wealthly and the extremely poor in this country. The salary gap between head of company and lowest worker has been growing in orders of magnitude in this century. For the wealthiest country in the world we have a startling amount of poverty, child poverty, poor education, and poor health care. All these factors filter up (poor, unhealthy, uneducated people, regardless of skin color, have a hard time moving up). We can't just slap an affirmitive action bandaid on the top to hide the symptoms. We have to heal the disease.
Does OS X even support SMP? Although there is a FreeBSD smp project, they expect support only by mid-2001, and even say:
Due to FreeBSD's history, this is much like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and as such, the intermediate results aren't pretty in many ways. We are specifically not attempting to rewrite the kernel from scratch, nor are we on a crusade to fix all the architectural nits currently present in the kernel. In fact, we expect to leave a trail of architectural nits that will still be evident in many ways when FreeBSD 5.0 is released. This is a pragmatic project rather than a theoretical one; we need to have the kernel working and stable in under a year, so time restraints require that we be realistic about what to do when.
Subversion looks to be a promising, well thought out, version control system, incorporating the major features of CVS, but also adding and simplifying/clarifying/refining some features (directories can be versioned also, finally; merging and ancestry is also cleaned up and simplified).
http://subversion.tigris.org/
A detailed design doc describing the various layers, and example diagrams of branching and merging, and various other goodies is at:
http://subversion.tigris.org/svn-design.html
CVS is just barely good 'nuff...but it really feels incredibly hackish. I think it's about time there is a well thought out version control system, built from the ground up, independent of any legacy stuff like RCS.
Yes, but since the late 1800s corporations themselves have been considered "persons", under the 14th Amendment which sought to make clear that any person or group of persons (say, black slaves) born or naturalized in the United States, had full rights as a citizen. Corporate lawyers figured that stockholders of a corporation were indeed "groups of persons", and so fought to get corporations status as persons. Fortunately for them, industrial America was on a corporate crack-high at the time, and thought this was A-OK.
http://www.iiipublishing.com/afd/Coperson.htm
Here's what Jefferson had to say about patents:
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,)
that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their
inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to
their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of
any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be
singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to
inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the
subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate
property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law,
indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men
equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who
occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property
goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is
given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if
an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of
natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If
nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps
it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into
the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess
himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses
the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who
receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without
lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light
without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to
another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man,
and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and
benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire,
expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any
point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our
physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society
may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an
encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but
this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of
the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly,
it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until
wecopied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law,
gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other
countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and
personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought
that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to
society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse
monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful
devices.
Who said *trade* anything? Buying (with currency) and bartering (with other objects) is not the *only* way to obtain something. Why hell, you can grow it yourself, for one. People have been doing that for centuries. You can also perform some service to society. In some cultures I'm sure simply being a doctor or a holy man or a council member (etc., etc.) entitles you to certain things. Or the society can be constructed in such a manner that everybody gets a certain amount of minimal services (socialism/communism). We do this with Social Security - everybody chips in a bit because Helping Old People is a Good Thing.
It all depends on the society/form of government/economic system. I guess, in a pure free market, yes necessity=money. But in a lot of places, where people might just get by without totally commoditizing themselves, I can concieve that people might actually invent stuff for the sole purpose of wanting to, or fulfilling a personal need, other than generating money. Of course if you are *dependent* on selling your services, you will only provide services that actually sell!
I don't think the patent system is totally evil. I think it is necessary, but in its current incarnation has just far overreached it's original purpose (giving *incentive* but no more!). Safety-net is more like guaranteed-profit-net.
Re:Inefficienct but useable and can do more
on
Perl and .NET
·
· Score: 2
I think.NET is basically for entirely Microsoft shops, and other hangers-on, who want to graduate from native legacy code, into the WORA/web/standards universe, under Microsoft's protection.
Where I work, we've been big into Java, J2EE, CORBA, and XML for a while...so it's nothing new to us.
Which brings up the question of a hacker/programmer ethic. When med students graduate they have to take the Hippocratic oath. Sure, maybe it's not legally binding...but at least it is something on their conscience.
Given that those with programming expertise now weild (or at least *appear* to weild, to others) a lot of power...does it make sense to sort of teach these ethics, as is done in medical ethics?
What about a standards body that sets out what distributions can be called "standard"? For example, sure, Red Hat provides a server and workstation install. But what does that *mean*? Is it the same as a server or workstation install in SuSE, or Debian? I am not a unix guru by any means, but I have been a user for a while. And as a user, I am totally overwhelmed by a plethora of cryptic applications of whose purpose I have no clue. Just look in/bin, or/usr/bin...can you name and describe every single two and three letter executable in there? When I select a server install, does that mean I want 5 different server implementations for each protocol? If I select workstation does that mean I want every single useless X app ever created to be installed for me?
Until there is some standard users are left to sort through the chaff. In the end you could say that it is the network/server administrator's job to decide what should be installed...but I'm sure administrators don't want to do this job, and perhaps create custom distributions, either. And that still leaves out the person at home whose sick of the cost and problems of Windows, and wants to check out this whole Linux thing.
Choice is not unequivocally good. *Meaningful* choice is.
I have always sort of thought that if rich "western" countries want to help "underdeveloped" countries, they should do it in a way that is the least interfering. E.g., simply giving money to the country to let *it* figure out what it wants to do (yes, yes, that is given a somewhat democratic non-corrupt government...). This is as opposed to forcing the government to adopt certain policies, or letting western industry come in to exploit and pollute the country.
Being a native Zambian...what are your opinions on this sort of imperialistic industrialization of underdeveloped countries? I don't know much about Zambia, or other African nations, but Africa was once host to large and prosperous civilizations. Why, in the last few hundred years, has Africa appeared to devolve into a "third world" state?
I ask these questions, because as people of non-western underdeveloped states, some unfortunately on the recieving end of western "help", know, there are significant trade-offs and certainly penalties for allowing western influence and control, and embracing the global economy. Is the west wrongheadedly (or in many cases intentionally) influencing poorer countries for the worse, or for their own benefit, or to remake them in its image? Or am I just a crank, and the west is really percieved as some saintly benefactor who is just enriching and saving these countries?
(Yes, I use a lot of quotes around things that people have inherent assumptions about but probably shouldn't)
This is good...when I took the course, the language being used was Pascal, and at the time that was probably appropriate. In fact I am still partial to Pascal, and Object Pascal, to this day. The very next year, they switched to C++, and I thought I missed out by just one year. However, in retrospect I'm sort of glad that I didn't start learning with C++. I think Java is a pretty decent starting language. The traditional "starting languages", like Basic and traditional Pascal are all but obsolete, and non-object-oriented. Java allows students to get up and running, programming in a VM, isolated from the nastiness that steepens the curve for learning a native language. But it also allows students to learn something really practical that they can graduate into real work with. Java ain't just for applets. It's really big in the "enterprise" - basically the backend that runs the internals of companies. And you could probably even strip it down to teach plain procedural programming, so that students are not completely lost when he/she sees C for the first time.
Yeah, I was just thinking about this very thing, while writing some email in WordStar on my Amiga, and listening to MP3s on my portable wax cylindar player, on my morning zeppelin commute to work.
which of course forces you to wait until the request times out and you get an ugly broken image
better yet, just write a very tiny http server which, upon any http traffic whatsoever, returns a 1-pixel transparent gif (or png) i suppose. You'll be amazed at how much better sites look without flashing crap ads.
And how many people consciously apply formal mathematics on a communication basis? For the large part it is solely reserved for math problems, which, probably counter to many mathemeticians' opinions, most people don't interpret the whole world as! Just like most people don't interpret the whole world as a programming or logic problem to be solved algorithmically. We are wetware. We do strange fuzzy things like "feel" and "sense". We have moods. We think and behave irrationally. Trying to stuff us into some rigid formal box is just futile. We *want* to point and grunt dammit! Perhaps for you and I it may seem naturally to express ideas and wishes in concise semantic-rich arcane syntax, but to most people it doesn't. We have to realize that we are just as much a product of computing as computing is a product of humans. Would you have had the same opinion before computers were even invented (physically throwing away this file is so primitive! Why can't we just say "R.M. slash-cabinet-slash-reports-slash-two-thousand-dot -12"...it's SOOO much easier)? They would have thrown you in the loony bin.
I program in Java a lot, and I'd just like to say (not to slight any other languages, or plug Java too much), that Java's strong point, currently, really is its back-end enterprise-ish stuff: CORBA, EJB, RMI, Servlets/JSP, messaging, etc. etc. Actually one of the deficits of Java so far, is that it is pretty weak on the client end (although I think Swing is a pretty good GUI toolkit)...it's just not there performance-wise yet. I also realize that there are some subtle and not-so-subtle limitations (some intentional) in the language, and I would hardly suggest it for everything...although with the number of technologies it supports mushrooming as it is, it may just do (yeah, you can use Java for tons of things, although there are better solutions around for many, e.g. device drivers).
I tend to think of it as "C++ Light" + binary portability.
Well that's my 2 cents.
(BTW, I used to do a lot of Pascal and Object Pascal (a language that I still like a lot) programming, and I used to do a tiny bit of C/C++ programming, but I'm badly out of practice now that I'm in cushy Java-land; I have two Peter Norton x86 assembly books sitting on my desk which I have been trying to learn something from, but so far it's been like squeezing water from a stone;)
Slashdot Mirror
So, with .Net, Microsoft is at once, avoiding going down with the DOJ verdict by jumping ship from the business of selling software as manufactured-product, to selling software as a service, which is the increasing trend anyway.
You could have said the same thing for newspapers->radio, or radio->TV, or TV->internet...etc. The issues aren't new. There are benefits and drawbacks. Hopefully we can draw the lines in the correct places so that we get the most benefits with the lowest percentage of misuse/abuse/whatever. This is the whole crime and security question in general. If we wanted to be absolutely safe from each other we'd all be locked up.
Isn't the NSA "five years ahead" or somesuch with regards to various technologies? I wouldn't really be surprised to discover decades-old installations which have technology that wasn't supposed to exist at the time.
Damn, me too. If Microsoft wants to spend its time and money training and giving away surplus hardware and software, by all means, LET it. Better to get free hardware and software of the proprietary kind, rather than get none at all (which is my guess what OSS companies will be able to provide - they're still trying to figure out how to make a profit in the first place). Don't cut off the nose to spite the face.
Am I missing the point? The screenshots look nothing like aqua...
Will somebody please explain to me what this movie has to do with Open Source, and why there are biographies of John Hall and Miguel de Icaza, on the site? Is this movie modeled on real events or something? That site is just incoherent.
Damn, I'd paint myself black for a raise to 80k...
If being white means you suck, relatively, then you deserve not to be hired. Nobody wants to watch a whole bunch of white guys play a game poorly.
But anyway, I think sports figures get insanely exorbitant amounts of money, regardless of their race. I just can't fathom giving somebody an amount of money larger than some small countries' GNP, just to run around a field or bounce a ball. Only in the USA.
You're right, it's not a race issue. It's a class /socio-economic status issue. It just seems conservatives like to label is at a race issue so they can make the obvious argument that minority preferences are just as bad as racism in the first place. As conservatives clearly point out by picking well-to-do, business-owning, minorities, as examples, it's all about class, not the color of your skin. Unfortunately, there is a great correlation between being a minority and being poor. So we shouldn't be saying "Oh, we screwed black people for decades and decades, let's give them a free ride for a while". We should instead be observing that, despite a healthy sized middle class, there is an increasing polarization and gap between the extremely wealthly and the extremely poor in this country. The salary gap between head of company and lowest worker has been growing in orders of magnitude in this century. For the wealthiest country in the world we have a startling amount of poverty, child poverty, poor education, and poor health care. All these factors filter up (poor, unhealthy, uneducated people, regardless of skin color, have a hard time moving up). We can't just slap an affirmitive action bandaid on the top to hide the symptoms. We have to heal the disease.
somewhat offtopic but...
Subversion looks to be a promising, well thought out, version control system, incorporating the major features of CVS, but also adding and simplifying/clarifying/refining some features (directories can be versioned also, finally; merging and ancestry is also cleaned up and simplified).
http://subversion.tigris.org/
A detailed design doc describing the various layers, and example diagrams of branching and merging, and various other goodies is at:
http://subversion.tigris.org/svn-design.html
CVS is just barely good 'nuff...but it really feels incredibly hackish. I think it's about time there is a well thought out version control system, built from the ground up, independent of any legacy stuff like RCS.
Yes, but since the late 1800s corporations themselves have been considered "persons", under the 14th Amendment which sought to make clear that any person or group of persons (say, black slaves) born or naturalized in the United States, had full rights as a citizen. Corporate lawyers figured that stockholders of a corporation were indeed "groups of persons", and so fought to get corporations status as persons. Fortunately for them, industrial America was on a corporate crack-high at the time, and thought this was A-OK.
http://www.iiipublishing.com/afd/Coperson.htm
Here's what Jefferson had to say about patents:
Who said *trade* anything? Buying (with currency) and bartering (with other objects) is not the *only* way to obtain something. Why hell, you can grow it yourself, for one. People have been doing that for centuries. You can also perform some service to society. In some cultures I'm sure simply being a doctor or a holy man or a council member (etc., etc.) entitles you to certain things. Or the society can be constructed in such a manner that everybody gets a certain amount of minimal services (socialism/communism). We do this with Social Security - everybody chips in a bit because Helping Old People is a Good Thing.
It all depends on the society/form of government/economic system. I guess, in a pure free market, yes necessity=money. But in a lot of places, where people might just get by without totally commoditizing themselves, I can concieve that people might actually invent stuff for the sole purpose of wanting to, or fulfilling a personal need, other than generating money. Of course if you are *dependent* on selling your services, you will only provide services that actually sell!
I don't think the patent system is totally evil. I think it is necessary, but in its current incarnation has just far overreached it's original purpose (giving *incentive* but no more!). Safety-net is more like guaranteed-profit-net.
I think .NET is basically for entirely Microsoft shops, and other hangers-on, who want to graduate from native legacy code, into the WORA/web/standards universe, under Microsoft's protection.
Where I work, we've been big into Java, J2EE, CORBA, and XML for a while...so it's nothing new to us.
Which brings up the question of a hacker/programmer ethic. When med students graduate they have to take the Hippocratic oath. Sure, maybe it's not legally binding...but at least it is something on their conscience.
Given that those with programming expertise now weild (or at least *appear* to weild, to others) a lot of power...does it make sense to sort of teach these ethics, as is done in medical ethics?
What about a standards body that sets out what distributions can be called "standard"? For example, sure, Red Hat provides a server and workstation install. But what does that *mean*? Is it the same as a server or workstation install in SuSE, or Debian? I am not a unix guru by any means, but I have been a user for a while. And as a user, I am totally overwhelmed by a plethora of cryptic applications of whose purpose I have no clue. Just look in /bin, or /usr/bin...can you name and describe every single two and three letter executable in there? When I select a server install, does that mean I want 5 different server implementations for each protocol? If I select workstation does that mean I want every single useless X app ever created to be installed for me?
Until there is some standard users are left to sort through the chaff. In the end you could say that it is the network/server administrator's job to decide what should be installed...but I'm sure administrators don't want to do this job, and perhaps create custom distributions, either. And that still leaves out the person at home whose sick of the cost and problems of Windows, and wants to check out this whole Linux thing.
Choice is not unequivocally good. *Meaningful* choice is.
Ok, I am Mr. Technology-Skeptical Curmudgeon,
I have always sort of thought that if rich "western" countries want to help "underdeveloped" countries, they should do it in a way that is the least interfering. E.g., simply giving money to the country to let *it* figure out what it wants to do (yes, yes, that is given a somewhat democratic non-corrupt government...). This is as opposed to forcing the government to adopt certain policies, or letting western industry come in to exploit and pollute the country.
Being a native Zambian...what are your opinions on this sort of imperialistic industrialization of underdeveloped countries? I don't know much about Zambia, or other African nations, but Africa was once host to large and prosperous civilizations. Why, in the last few hundred years, has Africa appeared to devolve into a "third world" state?
I ask these questions, because as people of non-western underdeveloped states, some unfortunately on the recieving end of western "help", know, there are significant trade-offs and certainly penalties for allowing western influence and control, and embracing the global economy. Is the west wrongheadedly (or in many cases intentionally) influencing poorer countries for the worse, or for their own benefit, or to remake them in its image? Or am I just a crank, and the west is really percieved as some saintly benefactor who is just enriching and saving these countries?
(Yes, I use a lot of quotes around things that people have inherent assumptions about but probably shouldn't)
And now Iraqi engineers are plagued with the dilemma: play, or reverse engineer?
This is good...when I took the course, the language being used was Pascal, and at the time that was probably appropriate. In fact I am still partial to Pascal, and Object Pascal, to this day. The very next year, they switched to C++, and I thought I missed out by just one year. However, in retrospect I'm sort of glad that I didn't start learning with C++. I think Java is a pretty decent starting language. The traditional "starting languages", like Basic and traditional Pascal are all but obsolete, and non-object-oriented. Java allows students to get up and running, programming in a VM, isolated from the nastiness that steepens the curve for learning a native language. But it also allows students to learn something really practical that they can graduate into real work with. Java ain't just for applets. It's really big in the "enterprise" - basically the backend that runs the internals of companies. And you could probably even strip it down to teach plain procedural programming, so that students are not completely lost when he/she sees C for the first time.
Yeah, I was just thinking about this very thing, while writing some email in WordStar on my Amiga, and listening to MP3s on my portable wax cylindar player, on my morning zeppelin commute to work.
which of course forces you to wait until the request times out and you get an ugly broken image
better yet, just write a very tiny http server which, upon any http traffic whatsoever, returns a 1-pixel transparent gif (or png) i suppose. You'll be amazed at how much better sites look without flashing crap ads.
And how many people consciously apply formal mathematics on a communication basis? For the large part it is solely reserved for math problems, which, probably counter to many mathemeticians' opinions, most people don't interpret the whole world as! Just like most people don't interpret the whole world as a programming or logic problem to be solved algorithmically. We are wetware. We do strange fuzzy things like "feel" and "sense". We have moods. We think and behave irrationally. Trying to stuff us into some rigid formal box is just futile. We *want* to point and grunt dammit! Perhaps for you and I it may seem naturally to express ideas and wishes in concise semantic-rich arcane syntax, but to most people it doesn't. We have to realize that we are just as much a product of computing as computing is a product of humans. Would you have had the same opinion before computers were even invented (physically throwing away this file is so primitive! Why can't we just say "R.M. slash-cabinet-slash-reports-slash-two-thousand-dot -12"...it's SOOO much easier)? They would have thrown you in the loony bin.
What are you talking about? That's the American way!
I program in Java a lot, and I'd just like to say (not to slight any other languages, or plug Java too much), that Java's strong point, currently, really is its back-end enterprise-ish stuff: CORBA, EJB, RMI, Servlets/JSP, messaging, etc. etc. Actually one of the deficits of Java so far, is that it is pretty weak on the client end (although I think Swing is a pretty good GUI toolkit)...it's just not there performance-wise yet. I also realize that there are some subtle and not-so-subtle limitations (some intentional) in the language, and I would hardly suggest it for everything...although with the number of technologies it supports mushrooming as it is, it may just do (yeah, you can use Java for tons of things, although there are better solutions around for many, e.g. device drivers).
;)
I tend to think of it as "C++ Light" + binary portability.
Well that's my 2 cents.
(BTW, I used to do a lot of Pascal and Object Pascal (a language that I still like a lot) programming, and I used to do a tiny bit of C/C++ programming, but I'm badly out of practice now that I'm in cushy Java-land; I have two Peter Norton x86 assembly books sitting on my desk which I have been trying to learn something from, but so far it's been like squeezing water from a stone