It is a pity that ESR let himself carry away in his response. While I can understand that he got emotionally involved when reading Bezroukov's article, I think, he had better switched off his computer, spent a day doing something relaxing, and then gone back to write his answer.
All this should, however, not distract from the fact that the objective part of his rebuttal of Bezroukov's article is very much to the point. Like him, I am suprised that Bezroukov's article made it through the reviewing of First Monday (but maybe their reviewing is generally weak, I don't know). Having reviewed many scientific papers myself, I don't understand how an article that is loaded with obvious flamebait, is misinterpreting some of its references, and is lacking a convincing internal development can be accepted for publication.
Chilli
PS: While it may be a pity that ESR wrote an emotionally loaded response, I think, everybody should keep in mind that in the end this is his personal responce to the article. Like everybody else he has a right to defend himself verbally in public. That doesn't make him less important or less insightful...it only shows that he is a human being with emotions.
While it may be true that some/many girls see computers differently, it is not that they just see it as a tool. They are just interested in exploring other aspects that's all. At least that's what I figure from talking to them.
Although I am male;-) I see your point about not wanting to go to LUG meetings because there won't be many other females around. It's a similar problem in CS classes, CS conferences, etc. My wife has a degree in computing and she often complains about this problem.
It is of course a bit of a chicken-egg problem. The only idea I have about increasing the number of women at LUG meetings is that all the men who know women interested in computers should make more an effort to actively invite the women instead of just waiting for them to come. (It is a pretty weak idea, I know.)
I am actually pretty sure that their are substantially more women interested in and working with computers than is apparent from LUG meetings or posts at/. So, this is to all lurking women: Increase your visibility! (I know at least one who is lurking a lot and not posting enough:-)
The reaction from the officials (and the Japanese news outlets) is not surprising; the goverment of any country would downplay the incident. The really bad thing in Japan is that ignoring a problem is the number one approach to problem solving for many (most?) people. And it works great with radiation! You don't see, you don't hear, you don't smell it; it's only in your head anyway - and if you die 20 years later from cancer, you can always blame your smoking co-workers.
Chilli - less than 100km away from that shit
PS: It is also no contradiction here to have a kindergarten next to a dioxin emitting waste plant - on the contrary, the kids playing in the contaminated area give everything a much lighter athmosphere (and they probably got a much higher dose while there were being breast fed anyway)
The really sad thing is that the people in charge at Corel probably think they are embracing OSS, while they actually are completely clueless. They probably read CatB already many times and still don't get it *sigh*
I don't even want to start talking about the stupidity of alienating the same developers who's code they plan to sell. Their real problem is that they are ignoring Linus' Law:Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Or as ESR states a bit more lengthy,
Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
In CatB, ESR continues by pointing out ``Here, I think, is the core difference underlying the cathedral-builder and bazaar styles. [..] In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena -- or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door.''
Just for the record, it is harakiri. Hara means stomach and kiri is the stem of the verb kiru, to cut.
The interesting thing is that when you swap the two Chinese characters used to write harakiri in the Japanese script, they are not pronounced kirihara, but seppuku and, amazingly, still mean the same. However, if I recall correctly, the latter is a more elegant way of expressing the act.
From my experience in Europe and Japan, this is largely a North American problem. So far, the use of Windows at the universities that I know in Europe and Japan is mainly on the client side - often for administrative staff and other users that need a simple interface. The servers are mostly Sun's and other Unix machines (no system administrator in his or her right mind would throw Solaris out for NT - ok, maybe at gun point;-) Linux on PCs is increasingly used as a cheap client alternative.
Nevertheless, there have been incidents like M$ attempt to get the German state Northrhine-Westfalia to exclusively use M$ software in schools (not universities, as far as I know). There is, however, heavy opposition.
Chilli
Re:The Original Decoder Ring - Another solution
on
Nitrozac Answers
·
· Score: 1
Oops...I could have saved two more parenthesis and make the inner term
((+).(+ -48).(2*))
Chilli
Re:The Original Decoder Ring - Another solution
on
Nitrozac Answers
·
· Score: 1
As many of you probably learned in some CS course, all computation is essentially a matter of getting your lambda terms right - so here we go:
It's a little longer than the Perl version, but therefore satifies a nice static type system and is actually quite easy to formally prove correct. So, now if you only knew which language it is...ok, a hint: It is the same one used to write the killer entries in this years ICFP programming contest (check the preliminary results).
Chilli
PS: If anybody is wondering where the lambdas are or why there are no variables, the above code is essentially in point free notation, ie, a bunch of functions combined in the right way.
IMHO, open source has always also been about portability. The whole point about sharing code is to avoid duplicating work and to get a team of developers that is as broad as possible. It is not by coincidence that Linux and FreeBSD are the most portable OSs on the planet.
Non-portable code is a kludge - temporarily acceptable, but a Bad Thing in the long run.
Sure, Troll Tech has the right to choose whatever license they like for their product, but they have to live with the consequences of their choice. And at the moment that means that an application written in GTK+ is easier to port than one written in Qt - with all the consequences..
Yes there is a port. It even runs The GIMP. When browsing through the source, I also saw a lot of #ifs dealing with Win32-specific problems. So, GTK+ is truely cross-platform.
Sure you need good software to make a good system, but in the end it is the administrator who makes the difference. So, at least we know who to blame;-)
This is exactly why I would never ever do anything but trivial conversion over something like a hotmail account. Sure, sombody could hack into my box, but a hotmail account is just begging for it.
So how EXACTLY do I feed my family then? Explain that one.
Simple. Write a research grant proposal outlining what kind of cool new compression algorithm you are going to develop and how it will benefit the rest of society (at least those using computers).
Mathematicians can't patent their proofs either, still they seldom starve these days. A compression algorithm* is a discrete mathematical structure anyway, which you can easily decribe as a set of discrete functions. Hmmm...maybe I should patent addition...
Chilli
*Remember, I am (like Unisys) talking algorithms not implementations.
There is a nice online tutorial (the language definition is, of course, also online).and if you are capable of reading German, there is a second tutorial - and after you have got a hang of the basics, some of the academic papers papers may not seem as weird as before;-)
Haskell has some sophisticated (and of course free) compilers, but for learning the language and for small applications, the interpreter Hugs is IMHO more suitable.
Chilli
PS: Though Haskell is a super-cool language, unfortunately, it also does not magically solve the program of parallel programming - the programmer still has to devise algorithms that contain suitable parallelism (IMHO, this is not a problem of the programming language, but a fundamental restriction given todays - and probably also tomorrows - machine architectures).
I assume, not too many are clicking on the "Japanese page is here" link. Which is a pity, as it is common on bilingual Web-pages in Japan that the Japanese pages have more information than the English ones (that's not to protect the information, but because it is an awful lot of work for the average Japanese to write English).
So, here some more information for the Japanese-impaired;-)
In Japan, they offer pre-installation service for laptops and desktops if you order more than 10 machines; interestingly, not only for Linux, but also for FreeBSD (not too surprising, as FreeBSD is quite popular in Japan). IMHO this means that they really have some people with technical expertise working on that project.
If I understand correctly, they also plan to develop machines that have Linux pre-installed for normal sales.
Furthermore, they plan to develop utilities (not further specified) and drivers of their own.
They also want to offer free and commercial user support and plan to create a training centre.
There is already information on the DynaBookSS PORTEGE 3300CT PAP330xx and LibrettoSS 1010CT PAL101xx available. Are they sold outside Japan?
Seems to be a pretty honest attempt to cooperate, which IMO should be acknowledged by supporting them.
Chilli
PS: I am sorry for any inaccuracies, but I am neither a native speaker of English nor Japanese.
I think, the really important point here is that Linux development should not get distracted by marketing hype.
When M$ comes up with some pointless test set, should we really care about it? Sure, the community can make a point out of showing M$ (and the world) that we can beat M$ any time; M$ comes up with a challenge and we tweak the software until we beat them. But is it worth it?
Linux is lean and mean, because its development is largely driven by technical, not marketing factors. Could this be the beginning of an attempt to drag the Linux community into the same marketing-driven development that leads to the bloated software sold by M$?
That was the dream 10 years ago. By now we know that even in a functional or logic language (like Lisp, Prolog, Haskell, ML, Mercury, you name it) the implicit parallelism is good for a handful of processors at best. For massively parallel systems you need programs that are specifically designed for parallel execution and that is hard work (nothing that a compiler can do).
A good language makes it easier for the programmer to specify parallelism and easier for the compiler to exploit the parallelism, but in the end, it is a matter of program design (and I wouldn't hope for a significant change of this situation in the near future).
Chilli
PS: I happen to know, as I have written a PhD thesis and a number of research papers in this area. (You can get the stuff from my Web page, if you are interested. There is also a compiler project targeting massively parallel systems.)
The problem with the type of calculation that they use to predict the performance of the machine is that, given todays state of the art in parallel computing, a machine with a million processors doing 10 operations per second is not the same as 10 processors doing a million operations per second each.
Your average C program has very little implicit parallelism (= parallelism not explicitly introduced by using some library of parallel operations or so). Even the best compilers on this planet won't make these programs run much faster on a massively parallel computer than on a single processor (on the contrary, the additional communication overhead can easily make the execution slower with each processor that you add).
Remember what a fuzz it has been to make the Linux kernel perform well on SMPs with more than two or three processors; how do you want to make this scale to tousands and millions of parallel processing units? BTW, the last company that went for many small (and slow) processing units instead of a few very fast ones was Thinking Machines (the machine was called CM-2). Do a search on the Web to see where they are now...
Chilli
PS: Such a machine can be useful for some things, called embarrassingly parallel problems/algorithms in the parallel computing community.
If I lose my creative work product however, be it C/C++ code or Word/Excel/PPT docs, that's a loss of many, potentially very many man-hours of work.
Sorry, but if someone doesn't keep back ups of the stuff and stores her/his programs in RCS, CVS, or some such, its about time for a virus to hit the HD.
Miguel is right. There is no point in complaining that RH 6.0 is too expensive or that their installer sucks. They have to make money and will price their products to maximize their profit and they will design their installer such that they get many users. They would be stupid if they won't.
All this just means they are a company that has to make money, but it is completely useless to judge a company by these criteria. The crucial point is whether they open source (preferably GPL) all the software that they write, i.e., whether they contribute back to the community.
So far, they seem to be pretty good at that. They fund the development of GPLed code. As long as they do this, what is the problem if they charge a bit more for a CD. This only means that all the non-programmers and non-documentation writers give, indirectly, something back to the community.
Chilli
PS: And if you don't like their installer, why not write a better one?
Slashdot Mirror
All this should, however, not distract from the fact that the objective part of his rebuttal of Bezroukov's article is very much to the point. Like him, I am suprised that Bezroukov's article made it through the reviewing of First Monday (but maybe their reviewing is generally weak, I don't know). Having reviewed many scientific papers myself, I don't understand how an article that is loaded with obvious flamebait, is misinterpreting some of its references, and is lacking a convincing internal development can be accepted for publication.
Chilli
PS: While it may be a pity that ESR wrote an emotionally loaded response, I think, everybody should keep in mind that in the end this is his personal responce to the article. Like everybody else he has a right to defend himself verbally in public. That doesn't make him less important or less insightful...it only shows that he is a human being with emotions.
The nerds are the cutting edge - at least on the net.
Chilli
Chilli
Chilli
It is of course a bit of a chicken-egg problem. The only idea I have about increasing the number of women at LUG meetings is that all the men who know women interested in computers should make more an effort to actively invite the women instead of just waiting for them to come. (It is a pretty weak idea, I know.)
I am actually pretty sure that their are substantially more women interested in and working with computers than is apparent from LUG meetings or posts at /. So, this is to all lurking women: Increase your visibility! (I know at least one who is lurking a lot and not posting enough :-)
Chilli
Chilli - less than 100km away from that shit
PS: It is also no contradiction here to have a kindergarten next to a dioxin emitting waste plant - on the contrary, the kids playing in the contaminated area give everything a much lighter athmosphere (and they probably got a much higher dose while there were being breast fed anyway)
PSS: Why do you think, I am cynic?
I don't even want to start talking about the stupidity of alienating the same developers who's code they plan to sell. Their real problem is that they are ignoring Linus' Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Or as ESR states a bit more lengthy,
In CatB, ESR continues by pointing out ``Here, I think, is the core difference underlying the cathedral-builder and bazaar styles. [..] In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena -- or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door.''Chilli *crying*
The interesting thing is that when you swap the two Chinese characters used to write harakiri in the Japanese script, they are not pronounced kirihara, but seppuku and, amazingly, still mean the same. However, if I recall correctly, the latter is a more elegant way of expressing the act.
Chilli
PS: A little education is never off topic ;-)
Nevertheless, there have been incidents like M$ attempt to get the German state Northrhine-Westfalia to exclusively use M$ software in schools (not universities, as far as I know). There is, however, heavy opposition.
Chilli
((+).(+ -48).(2*))
Chilli
interact(map(toEnum.foldl(((+).(+ -48)).(2*))0.map fromEnum).words)
It's a little longer than the Perl version, but therefore satifies a nice static type system and is actually quite easy to formally prove correct. So, now if you only knew which language it is...ok, a hint: It is the same one used to write the killer entries in this years ICFP programming contest (check the preliminary results).
Chilli
PS: If anybody is wondering where the lambdas are or why there are no variables, the above code is essentially in point free notation, ie, a bunch of functions combined in the right way.
Chilli
Non-portable code is a kludge - temporarily acceptable, but a Bad Thing in the long run.
Sure, Troll Tech has the right to choose whatever license they like for their product, but they have to live with the consequences of their choice. And at the moment that means that an application written in GTK+ is easier to port than one written in Qt - with all the consequences..
Chilli
Chilli
Chilli
Chilli
Simple. Write a research grant proposal outlining what kind of cool new compression algorithm you are going to develop and how it will benefit the rest of society (at least those using computers).
Mathematicians can't patent their proofs either, still they seldom starve these days. A compression algorithm* is a discrete mathematical structure anyway, which you can easily decribe as a set of discrete functions. Hmmm...maybe I should patent addition...
Chilli
*Remember, I am (like Unisys) talking algorithms not implementations.
Haskell has some sophisticated (and of course free) compilers, but for learning the language and for small applications, the interpreter Hugs is IMHO more suitable.
Chilli
PS: Though Haskell is a super-cool language, unfortunately, it also does not magically solve the program of parallel programming - the programmer still has to devise algorithms that contain suitable parallelism (IMHO, this is not a problem of the programming language, but a fundamental restriction given todays - and probably also tomorrows - machine architectures).
So, here some more information for the Japanese-impaired ;-)
- In Japan, they offer pre-installation service for laptops and desktops if you order more than 10 machines; interestingly, not only for Linux, but also for FreeBSD (not too surprising, as FreeBSD is quite popular in Japan). IMHO this means that they really have some people with technical expertise working on that project.
- If I understand correctly, they also plan to develop machines that have Linux pre-installed for normal sales.
- Furthermore, they plan to develop utilities (not further specified) and drivers of their own.
- They also want to offer free and commercial user support and plan to create a training centre.
- There is already information on the DynaBookSS PORTEGE 3300CT PAP330xx and LibrettoSS 1010CT PAL101xx available. Are they sold outside Japan?
Seems to be a pretty honest attempt to cooperate, which IMO should be acknowledged by supporting them.Chilli
PS: I am sorry for any inaccuracies, but I am neither a native speaker of English nor Japanese.
When M$ comes up with some pointless test set, should we really care about it? Sure, the community can make a point out of showing M$ (and the world) that we can beat M$ any time; M$ comes up with a challenge and we tweak the software until we beat them. But is it worth it?
Linux is lean and mean, because its development is largely driven by technical, not marketing factors. Could this be the beginning of an attempt to drag the Linux community into the same marketing-driven development that leads to the bloated software sold by M$?
Chilli
A good language makes it easier for the programmer to specify parallelism and easier for the compiler to exploit the parallelism, but in the end, it is a matter of program design (and I wouldn't hope for a significant change of this situation in the near future).
Chilli
PS: I happen to know, as I have written a PhD thesis and a number of research papers in this area. (You can get the stuff from my Web page, if you are interested. There is also a compiler project targeting massively parallel systems.)
Your average C program has very little implicit parallelism (= parallelism not explicitly introduced by using some library of parallel operations or so). Even the best compilers on this planet won't make these programs run much faster on a massively parallel computer than on a single processor (on the contrary, the additional communication overhead can easily make the execution slower with each processor that you add).
Remember what a fuzz it has been to make the Linux kernel perform well on SMPs with more than two or three processors; how do you want to make this scale to tousands and millions of parallel processing units? BTW, the last company that went for many small (and slow) processing units instead of a few very fast ones was Thinking Machines (the machine was called CM-2). Do a search on the Web to see where they are now...
Chilli
PS: Such a machine can be useful for some things, called embarrassingly parallel problems/algorithms in the parallel computing community.
Sorry, but if someone doesn't keep back ups of the stuff and stores her/his programs in RCS, CVS, or some such, its about time for a virus to hit the HD.
Chilli
All this just means they are a company that has to make money, but it is completely useless to judge a company by these criteria. The crucial point is whether they open source (preferably GPL) all the software that they write, i.e., whether they contribute back to the community.
So far, they seem to be pretty good at that. They fund the development of GPLed code. As long as they do this, what is the problem if they charge a bit more for a CD. This only means that all the non-programmers and non-documentation writers give, indirectly, something back to the community.
Chilli
PS: And if you don't like their installer, why not write a better one?
Chilli