Although the content is currently the same, the real URL of my Jin website is http://www.jinchess.com (could an editor please fix it - I think it can handle the residual slashdotting).
I'll now get back to reading everyone's comments and reply where I can:-)
Tangentially en topic, but this is a good chance to post my article which slashdot has rejected twice now:
I am the developer of Jin, a client for chess servers, licensed under the GPL. About 6 months ago I was contacted by the Internet Chess University, asking for a commercial license for Jin. After negotiations failed, IChessU decided to nevertheless use Jin, but did not release the full source code of the client they built. I have contacted both the FSF and the EFF, but they were unable to help me because they are not licensed to practice law in Israel (both I, and the owners of IChessU are Israeli). I have no intention of dropping the issue, but I am now stuck with paying a lawyer out of my own pocket, which is very limited. Read the whole story.
The question is then, what kind of protection does the GPL really give the small-time FOSS developer, who can't afford fancy lawyer to enforce it? What does this mean for such developers?
My question is; is it possible for a piece of information to be completely destroyed?
Of course. In fact, the laws of thermodynamics say that every piece of information (in a closed system) will eventually be destroyed, as entropy reaches maximum.
As of 1999, Battle.net was "the only profitable online gaming service in existence," according to Greg Costikyan in an article for Salon.com. "How? Advertising. 30+ million ad impressions in one month alone."
The Internet Chess Club was founded in 1995 and (I understand) has been profitable pretty much all the time since then. It also gets its money directly from subscribers and not advertisements, which seems more impressive to me.
Disclaimer: I'm an ICC admin (although a reasonably recent one).
Without a doubt, the best Quest I have ever played is Star Control 2. Its source code has recently been released and ported to modern platforms, too, now known as The Ur-Quan Masters.
Disclaimer: I deny all responsibility for the days/weeks of "wasted" time if you decide to download this game.
In real life, the amount of force needed to break a neck seems to exceed the amoount of force that a SUV traveling at 35 mph imparts to a stopped vehicle at a stoplight. Whiplash is the usual outcome of a multi ton vehicle traveling at 35 mph.
Umm you got your physics wrong. The mass of the hitting vehicle has little to do with the force applied to the neck of the driver that was hit. I could bore you with formulas, but a good way to demonstrate that you are wrong is examine the case of an infinitiely massive "SUV" hitting a vehicle at a low speed. Do you think the force exerted on the vehicle's driver will be infinite? This doesn't happen because what determines that force is the acceleration of the vehicle hit (F=ma, where the m is the mass of the driver being hit, not the SUV!), which in turn depends on the change in velocity of the vehicle hit (which in our imaginary case will be the velocity of the SUV) and the amount of time it takes to accelerate to that velocity (assuming constant acceleration) -- a=v/t. That time doesn't depend on the mass of the hitting vehicle, but on the type of the impact. Car manufacturers spend a lot of time making sure that cars, when hit, would absorb the momentum slowly, making sure it takes the car a lot of time to accelerate to its final speed, making the maximal exerted force as small as possible.
A 5 gram bullet moving at approximately 900 m/s has no where near the same energy delivered.
True, but again, everything depends on the final velocity of the person being hit and the time it takes him to accelerate to it. If he accelerates from 0 to 2 m/s in 5 milliseconds then his acceleration is 400 m/s^2 (40g), which is probably enough to break something. The numbers are made up, of course, and are probably wrong, but I'm not showing your result is wrong - just the proof.
Yeah, great idea, a one-pixel-at a time revealing image in a lossy format. Why do people never learn that screenshots are meant to be in a lossless format?
Look at Open Office. Great idea, lousy implementation. Apart from the cost, what benefit does it have over Microsoft Office? There's nothing new in it, nothing innovative.
Look at LyX instead.
You've picked the wrong product to find serious innovation in. OpenOffice (and other office suites) is meant to provide an easy transition from Word (and its proprietary format). It would be outright stupid to do any serious innovation in it because that would increase the learning curve and defeat the purpose of an easy transition.
This is all well and nice, but the halting problem is just one small example of an undecideable problem. In fact, every nontrivial, semantic problem about computer programs is undecideable ("semantic" means that the answer only depends on what the program does as opposed to depending on the program itself. "nontrivial" means that the answer isn't the same for all queries).
This narrows the set of decideable problems to ones that are either:
Non semantic - does this program compile? Does this program use recursion? etc. But then we've been solving such problems (automatically) for a long time.
Trivial - these really aren't interesting problems.
Not about computer programs - but we're talking about computer program verification here, so these programs may not be written in a Turing complete language. There are interesting non Turing complete languages (regular expressions for example), but they're not something you can write "real" programs in.
Basically, the point is that by restricting yourself to something verifiable you've restricted yourself way too much.
Maybe you'd care to expand on those two words to explain why you don't think that there are classes of computational processes for which classes of specification can be proven as met, or why you don't think this is useful...
There most certainly are such classes and classes, but the proving cannot be automated (except for non turing-complete languages). A computer can verify that a "proof" is indeed a proof, but it cannot produce such a proof itself.
Perhaps if every binary came along with a proof of its correctness, a verifying tool could check that the proof is correct. This would, however, just shift the burden to the developers, who would have to prove everything they write is correct. Maybe some language or tool could make proving correctness easier, but I don't see how it could make it significantly so, since, again, it could never be automated (and I take something that can't be automated to be difficult).
No you can't - if you could claim it's entirely your own, you could also change the license to anything else. The original author remains the copyright owner of his code - you cannot claim you wrote it.
FICS is not dead. ICC does have its advantages over a free server though (and even more over one you run yourself) - GM games/lectures, prize tournaments, an expert anti-computer-cheating team etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Although the content is currently the same, the real URL of my Jin website is http://www.jinchess.com (could an editor please fix it - I think it can handle the residual slashdotting). I'll now get back to reading everyone's comments and reply where I can :-)
Tangentially en topic, but this is a good chance to post my article which slashdot has rejected twice now:
I am the developer of Jin, a client for chess servers, licensed under the GPL. About 6 months ago I was contacted by the Internet Chess University, asking for a commercial license for Jin. After negotiations failed, IChessU decided to nevertheless use Jin, but did not release the full source code of the client they built. I have contacted both the FSF and the EFF, but they were unable to help me because they are not licensed to practice law in Israel (both I, and the owners of IChessU are Israeli). I have no intention of dropping the issue, but I am now stuck with paying a lawyer out of my own pocket, which is very limited. Read the whole story.
The question is then, what kind of protection does the GPL really give the small-time FOSS developer, who can't afford fancy lawyer to enforce it? What does this mean for such developers?
My question is; is it possible for a piece of information to be completely destroyed?
Of course. In fact, the laws of thermodynamics say that every piece of information (in a closed system) will eventually be destroyed, as entropy reaches maximum.
As of 1999, Battle.net was "the only profitable online gaming service in existence," according to Greg Costikyan in an article for Salon.com. "How? Advertising. 30+ million ad impressions in one month alone."
The Internet Chess Club was founded in 1995 and (I understand) has been profitable pretty much all the time since then. It also gets its money directly from subscribers and not advertisements, which seems more impressive to me.
Disclaimer: I'm an ICC admin (although a reasonably recent one).
Did anyone else find the number 3,141 interesting? Is that a coincidence, or is there a good reason?
Expect a massive migration away from compressed formats, for example - JPEGs going to PNGs and TIFFs.
PNG is usually compressed (there's an option for it to be uncompressed, but for all practical purposes, there are no uncompressed PNGs in the wild).
What you are (probably) talking about is lossy (JPEG) vs. lossless (PNG) compression.
Boy will they be upset when they find out Apple doesn't make any money on iTunes. Might set a bad precedent for future endeavors though.
Not if he never touched the brakes.
Again, I shall plug my own anti-phishing Firefox extension: http://www.maryanovsky.com/sasha/smokedsalmon/.
It currently does the following:
It's not particularly useful at the moment though, because the database is empty :-)
http://www.maryanovsky.com/sasha/smokedsalmon/
You have to admit it has the best name :-)
Without a doubt, the best Quest I have ever played is Star Control 2. Its source code has recently been released and ported to modern platforms, too, now known as The Ur-Quan Masters.
Disclaimer: I deny all responsibility for the days/weeks of "wasted" time if you decide to download this game.
Will it be available in China?
Yes, but only as Goobentu.
Yes, and Apple has been near its 52-week high for about two and a half years and pushing their all-time-high for about a year.
but surely the MacBook should have one?
Do not surrender into the temptation. There is no MacBook. There is only Powerbook.
In real life, the amount of force needed to break a neck seems to exceed the amoount of force that a SUV traveling at 35 mph imparts to a stopped vehicle at a stoplight. Whiplash is the usual outcome of a multi ton vehicle traveling at 35 mph.
Umm you got your physics wrong. The mass of the hitting vehicle has little to do with the force applied to the neck of the driver that was hit. I could bore you with formulas, but a good way to demonstrate that you are wrong is examine the case of an infinitiely massive "SUV" hitting a vehicle at a low speed. Do you think the force exerted on the vehicle's driver will be infinite? This doesn't happen because what determines that force is the acceleration of the vehicle hit (F=ma, where the m is the mass of the driver being hit, not the SUV!), which in turn depends on the change in velocity of the vehicle hit (which in our imaginary case will be the velocity of the SUV) and the amount of time it takes to accelerate to that velocity (assuming constant acceleration) -- a=v/t. That time doesn't depend on the mass of the hitting vehicle, but on the type of the impact. Car manufacturers spend a lot of time making sure that cars, when hit, would absorb the momentum slowly, making sure it takes the car a lot of time to accelerate to its final speed, making the maximal exerted force as small as possible.
A 5 gram bullet moving at approximately 900 m/s has no where near the same energy delivered.
True, but again, everything depends on the final velocity of the person being hit and the time it takes him to accelerate to it. If he accelerates from 0 to 2 m/s in 5 milliseconds then his acceleration is 400 m/s^2 (40g), which is probably enough to break something. The numbers are made up, of course, and are probably wrong, but I'm not showing your result is wrong - just the proof.
Yeah, great idea, a one-pixel-at a time revealing image in a lossy format. Why do people never learn that screenshots are meant to be in a lossless format?
Look at Open Office. Great idea, lousy implementation. Apart from the cost, what benefit does it have over Microsoft Office? There's nothing new in it, nothing innovative.
Look at LyX instead.
You've picked the wrong product to find serious innovation in. OpenOffice (and other office suites) is meant to provide an easy transition from Word (and its proprietary format). It would be outright stupid to do any serious innovation in it because that would increase the learning curve and defeat the purpose of an easy transition.
Umm, no, actually it is you who seems to be confused.
Here's a summary (from the page linked above):
Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:
Oh, and I think you're a bit confused about Goedel, but then so am I, so I won't comment on it ;-)
This is all well and nice, but the halting problem is just one small example of an undecideable problem. In fact, every nontrivial, semantic problem about computer programs is undecideable ("semantic" means that the answer only depends on what the program does as opposed to depending on the program itself. "nontrivial" means that the answer isn't the same for all queries).
This narrows the set of decideable problems to ones that are either:
Basically, the point is that by restricting yourself to something verifiable you've restricted yourself way too much.
Maybe you'd care to expand on those two words to explain why you don't think that there are classes of computational processes for which classes of specification can be proven as met, or why you don't think this is useful...
There most certainly are such classes and classes, but the proving cannot be automated (except for non turing-complete languages). A computer can verify that a "proof" is indeed a proof, but it cannot produce such a proof itself.
Perhaps if every binary came along with a proof of its correctness, a verifying tool could check that the proof is correct. This would, however, just shift the burden to the developers, who would have to prove everything they write is correct. Maybe some language or tool could make proving correctness easier, but I don't see how it could make it significantly so, since, again, it could never be automated (and I take something that can't be automated to be difficult).
Verifying compiler? Correctness proving tools? Two words - Halting Problem.
Hopefully they will plug the server hole. As it stands right now, the GPL makes no sense for server-side applications.
No you can't - if you could claim it's entirely your own, you could also change the license to anything else. The original author remains the copyright owner of his code - you cannot claim you wrote it.
FICS is not dead. ICC does have its advantages over a free server though (and even more over one you run yourself) - GM games/lectures, prize tournaments, an expert anti-computer-cheating team etc.