A quick look at XL shows some interesting things to me. It has support for constrained genericity, programming by contract, the option of using indentation based block structuring or semicolons and end, what looks like a nicely structured rewriting capability that can be used to extend the language for supporting intentional programming, and a few other nice features.
I did not see support for "iterators" mentioned directly, but if the extension mechanism is strong enough that should be doable.
I'll be taking a careful look at it myself. These are some very powerful features. (Sather had many of these and was (in my experience) the best language I've ever used.) If C# had only put in decent syntax for some of these things I could have been persuaded that Microsoft was not the SAOE (Software Axis Of Evil), but they didn't.
Perhaps these nice people would be interested in getting added to the email lists of (for instance) that poor man in Nigeria. Or maybe they need more Viagra or a Larger Male Personal Copulatory Device.
I should apologize in advance for this. But what the hell.
I know I'm going to get flamed and mod'ed into oblivion for this, but seriously, what's the big
deal about The Matrix? Why do people lash out viciously at movies that actually make an attempt
a real depth (LOTR), while simultaneously holding up the Matrix as the cinematic "Gold Standard?" I mean, sure, it's a moderately interesting story, but does it need more than 10 minutes to be told? Sure, some interesting fights happen along the way, and the effects are great, but are there subtle metaphors, philosophical references, and character dualities (besides the obvious Keanu=Christ thing, obviously) that I'm missing?
Why do people bitch and complain that LOTR was too much gobbledygook (translation: they didn't understand, and hate movies that challenge them to think about it anywhere beyond the concession
stand on their way out), then act like The Matrix is this untouchable masterpiece?
There's this bunch of machines. They're evil. They has to be destroyed. That's where we left off after the first one. "Matrix Revisited" and 3 hours later, that's STILL where we are. Still got those evil thingies. Still has to be destroyed.
Why is this such amazing work, while Peter Jackson's out-of-the-book conclusion to LOTR is seen
as hack-work?
I don't get it. I'm not a Matrix fanboy, but I watched the first one, and I'll watch the second
and third (when they reach TV). But there's really nothing cool to discuss about them, is there? The LOTR movies work because there are so many different interpretations of what they mean and
how they all interrelate, and it's fun to discuss. But, as far as I can tell, the Matrix trilogy "is what it is," isn't it? They lay the whole story out there in front of you, and hold your hand. They don't challenge you to try and figure out what Neo really represents, or if maybe, just maybe, the good NEEDS the evil to give it a purpose to exist? The LOTR suggests these kinds of
things, but the Matrix seems to shy completely away from them, afraid of challenging (and alienating) their audience.
I suspect that the most your web designer got out of the books was a cool poster.
Your front page certainly does not show that the designer paid much attention to the ideas in the books. The animated gif from hell at the right side is seriously distracting to the viewer. I think a closer reading of Tufte would probably lead to the inference that this is exactly the kind of junky graphics that he dislikes the most.
The lack of clear navigation tools on the front page doesn't help, nor does the fact that there are at least three things the viewer might check to get to "products". That the page does not display well in Firebird (at least on my machine) is another problem.
Finally, the Flash demo offers lots of glitz but little real information.
Maybe you need to buy the new edition and reread it all - a bit more carefully this time.
Once the originals of the memos have been presented in court don't they become something that anyone can read as part of the court record? If so at the least the EFF could post the court transcripts and make the memos public that way.
Jess is really a java embedded version of CLIPS which is still available for free at this site.
I think the licensing issues are annoying enough - I could get an academic license as I teach at a university, but when (a while back while I was "under" employed) I tried to get a version so I could do some experiments (I wanted to try using it as a bit of support software for a volunteer organization even) and maybe use it in classes at some future point and discovered the licensing was going to make that impossible.
Oh well. Count me down as someone who will not even discuss Jess as a possibility in my classes.
When I upgrade linux on my computer, I copy (usually using scp, but also at one point or another I've used ftp, email and even a cheezy web based file saving program I wrote)/etc/fstab,/etc/passwd and the like to another computer over the network.
Then I do the upgrade and copy back those files.
Is this in violation of the patent if I do it now?
I've done it before, but evidently it does not count as prior art, nor as being obvious to someone in the field. (I didn't publish it.)
As I said in my last post on the subject, the USPTO and their overlords need large doses of antipsychotics.
Can't you can patent something without a working implementation?
If so can you get a patent without even having a functional version of something? And then use that patent to quash someone else who produces a working version at the same time but files for a patent a day or two later?
Can you thus patent something without a working version? That is, just patent the general ideas, never bother to actually go though the process of making it work, and use those general ideas to claim fees from someone who does actually make it work.
And you can do this even if the process would be obvious to someone versed in the field?
Yah, this is sane. Reasonable. Logical.
I think the brains behind this are demonstrating a serious need for massive quantities of anti-psychotic drugs.
"If you want the liberal take on things you can listen to NPR, read the New York or LA Times, or tune into ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN and/or MSNBC. Do these networks present some of the right's arguments? Yes they do, but for the most part you get a liberal slant."
It may look like a "liberal slant" in relationship to what the serious right wing nuts believe, but it is hardly liberal in any real sense. The NY Times and NPR seem to me to work pretty hard to remain objective and CNN, MSNBC and other are relatively conservative. I watched a very nicely slanted (pro-conservative) push poll on CNN today that was, of course, presented as a "lets find out what people are thinking" poll even when the question itself seriously biased the potential answers.
It is a sign of how conservative (and for the most part unthinkingly so) the US has become that news organizations like the NY Times and NPR that try to provide objective journalism (however hard that is in practice) are tarred as being ickily "liberal".
More disturbing though is that it is a poor indication of the state of American education that so many Americans seem incapable of distinguishing the difference.
Increasingly I'm finding that whois (through any number of domain registrars) by command line or on the web, is returning no information at all. Or information that is of no use. (Like email at fake addresses, fake phone numbers and the like.)
And the fact that the organization holding the ".org" domain (ISOC) is completely unwilling to chase down.org spammers, scammers and sleazeballs is all the more annoying. Their response to me
when I tried to complain about a spammer using a.org domain (with no whois info) as a hideyhole was (in essence) "Yes, we want the.org domain to be for non profits and the like, but we won't do anything about it, no matter how nasty the people are who are using the name."
Then too the glider gun might be a better logo for the GPL, expressing the "viral" nature of the license by showing it firing "infectious bullets" around at all and sundry.
I've been hearing "emergent phenomena" used to describe behavior of systems that appears to be systematic but arises from the simple rules that govern the system in a non-obvious way.
So the emergent aspect has nothing to do with "violate"-ing the rules that start things in motion and more to do with the fact that the behavior comes about because of those rules, but is not something that an observer would easily anticipate or derive from considering the rules at a low level. (See, for instance this page in which "emergent phenomena" are defined as those best predicted through simulation. )
But, its always possible that the phrase has taken on a different meaning in the last few weeks, so I'll have to go find out.
While I don't think this would have any effect under current law, I think it might be worth trying to make something like this into law. That is, find a way to make works available only with DRM or through a license covered by something other than copyright.
Since DRM often removes the "First Sale" kinds of rights from the consumer, this seems only reasonable.
I think something like seven years would be a nice timeframe. That is DRM protected works would be no longer protected by law after seven years have elapsed. This is probably not unreasonable for most of the companies involved - movies, popular music and the like are often only really valuable for a year or two, so seven years gives them ample protection. After that they'd be in the public domain.
It does raise complex questions though - suppose someone publishes a work in small quantity (say a dozen copies) and copyrights that, then releases a mass market version that is DRM protected. What rules cover it?
I suspect though that a combination of the complexity of the rules required, the power of the big corporations and the general lack of interest in the people evidenced by "our" legislators would result in something worse than what we have now.
Yup, and set it so it will explode when issued the right command by radio so you can enforce sheepish conformity ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H, appropriate behavior.
Its simple enough. Most users are too lazy (or willfully ignorant) to understand that it is their computer and that they should get to decide how it works. They've been well trained in this attitude by computer/os manufacturers all over, and by so many web sites.
This is not helped by soi-disant "computer literacy" courses (really "illiteracy") that teach how to do silly things in word processors but don't teach anything that has to do with real computer literacy - like how to take charge of your computer.
So most users wont "Say NO!". They're too well (and willingly) brainwashed by those who want to keep them as unthinking consumers.
If SCO demands money from all and sundry then all the small linux users could sue them - might not all win, but the lawsuits would drain a pile of SCO's money quickly.
By saying that the small fish can not pay, even must not pay, they're denying them all the ability to take them to court - they won't have standing to sue as they have no interest.
Big companies are likely to say "corporate license for $1,000,000? Hmm, it would cost at least that in lawyers fees to fight it (at multi-hundreds of bucks per billable hour that kind of fee doesn't take long) - lets pay up." And thus not sue. So SCO makes money with little legal exposure or risk. (Plus half the people in the big companies they're trying to get money from are probably friends, lovers, fellow-travellers, fellow-conspirators, fellow-[fill-in-the-blankety-blanks] and the like and are all too willing to spend stockholders dollars on their friends in the full expectation that their friends will spend their stockholders dollers on them in return.)
As usual IAAL,TWAGOSOT (I Aint A Lawyer, Take With A Grain Of Salt Or Three).
Penn and Teller had a short lived program on one of the cable networks in which they exposed frauds and sleazeballs and the like. If I remember correctly they could not call the people liars or con artists as that would leave them open to being sued. They could, however, call them other things though like shitheads and the like.
So maybe these folks would prefer that we just refer to their junk as "shitware".
Dungware, crapola-ware, aint-worth-a-damn-ware, fartware, stinkware - surely with a good imagination we can come up with something that suits the product yet is not actionable.
I am a professor of computer science with a long time interest incomputer security and related matters (though I do not publish or research primarily in that field).
I find that the legal climate concerning publications about computer security is becoming such that research in this area is increasingly being put in jeopardy. In large part this comes about as a result ofthe DMCA, but the problems that the DMCA cause are being exacerbated by companies issuing gag orders on publications that they find embarrassing or annoying. Should this be allowed to continue, fundamental research in the area ofcomputer security may well become an underground activity - with prior restraint on publication, gag orders on publications that do make it out and severe penalties on those who support or condone such publications or even such research even at second hand.
I urge Swarthmore to contest this legal threat and to continue to support academic freedom on all levels.
It certainly looks like UCSD's notion of education is "bash students over the head with lawyers".
As someone who sometimes purports to be a college professor type, I must admit that I'm finding colleges and universities to be increasingly ways to ensure conformity, obedience and completely uncritical thinking. And all this time I had thought it was about encourging individuality, independence and critical thinking. No wonder tenure committees dont like me.
Firstly : because their business plan looks more like a way to get enough profit so that the CEO can grab a pile of cash and run and less like any kind of real plan for future earnings.
Secondly : their business practices are at best sleazy and at worst illegal. They've make extortionate claims against people who have no connection with their business whatever.
Finally : they've managed to irritate, annoy and generally make seriously cranky a large number of the people that they should be playing nice with if they expect to sell any OS software in the future.
You may end up with a fun question to answer :
How will you explain to your investors the fact that you lost $50 Million on this company?
Or worse yet:
How were the decision makers at your company persuaded to make this investment knowing full well that SCO was an empty shell? And was this decision smart, ethical and legal?
I think the transmeta has a lot of potential in many ways. Being able (in software) to morph the instruction stream should make it possible to build a "native" (or as native as transmeta ever is) JVM or other virtual machine. (Has this been done yet? If not, is there a good reason?)
Even better, with a fast interchip connection network, building a cluster of these things could be very nice indeed. (There was a comment about a transmeta cluster a day or two ago that was quite interesting.)
Even better and better, its not hard to imagine a portable machine running with a long lived battery, low power disks and multiple transmeta processors that turn on and join in when needed.
In another story, random members of the families of high ranking Verisign executives were asked about their days. "We spend so much time on the phone now that we have little free time." was a frequently heard complaint. "But I guess we can't get on the Do Not Call list really as the callers all seem to be doing polls and they're all about Verisign. I a bit of responsibility to answer their questions because of my family relationship."
Those interviewed said they'd never been bothered by ending up at one of the Verisign pages. "DNS? whats DNS?" one respondent said. Another said that the nice systems geeks from Verisign had set up their computers and had told them that the household would be getting "Special DNS service". Evidently this special service goes directly to special Verisign servers in order to help those connected with the company to be able to reach the network even when there were problems with other DNS servers.
Slashdot Mirror
I did not see support for "iterators" mentioned directly, but if the extension mechanism is strong enough that should be doable.
I'll be taking a careful look at it myself. These are some very powerful features. (Sather had many of these and was (in my experience) the best language I've ever used.) If C# had only put in decent syntax for some of these things I could have been persuaded that Microsoft was not the SAOE (Software Axis Of Evil), but they didn't.
Perhaps these nice people would be interested in getting added to the email lists of (for instance) that poor man in Nigeria. Or maybe they need more Viagra or a Larger Male Personal Copulatory Device.
I know I'm going to get flamed and mod'ed into oblivion for this, but seriously, what's the big deal about The Matrix? Why do people lash out viciously at movies that actually make an attempt a real depth (LOTR), while simultaneously holding up the Matrix as the cinematic "Gold Standard?" I mean, sure, it's a moderately interesting story, but does it need more than 10 minutes to be told? Sure, some interesting fights happen along the way, and the effects are great, but are there subtle metaphors, philosophical references, and character dualities (besides the obvious Keanu=Christ thing, obviously) that I'm missing?
Why do people bitch and complain that LOTR was too much gobbledygook (translation: they didn't understand, and hate movies that challenge them to think about it anywhere beyond the concession stand on their way out), then act like The Matrix is this untouchable masterpiece?
There's this bunch of machines. They're evil. They has to be destroyed. That's where we left off after the first one. "Matrix Revisited" and 3 hours later, that's STILL where we are. Still got those evil thingies. Still has to be destroyed.
Why is this such amazing work, while Peter Jackson's out-of-the-book conclusion to LOTR is seen as hack-work?
I don't get it. I'm not a Matrix fanboy, but I watched the first one, and I'll watch the second and third (when they reach TV). But there's really nothing cool to discuss about them, is there? The LOTR movies work because there are so many different interpretations of what they mean and how they all interrelate, and it's fun to discuss. But, as far as I can tell, the Matrix trilogy "is what it is," isn't it? They lay the whole story out there in front of you, and hold your hand. They don't challenge you to try and figure out what Neo really represents, or if maybe, just maybe, the good NEEDS the evil to give it a purpose to exist? The LOTR suggests these kinds of things, but the Matrix seems to shy completely away from them, afraid of challenging (and alienating) their audience.
Am I wrong? What gives?
Martha Stewart is a Democrat (or at least has donated a pile of money to democrats over the years).
Your front page certainly does not show that the designer paid much attention to the ideas in the books. The animated gif from hell at the right side is seriously distracting to the viewer. I think a closer reading of Tufte would probably lead to the inference that this is exactly the kind of junky graphics that he dislikes the most.
The lack of clear navigation tools on the front page doesn't help, nor does the fact that there are at least three things the viewer might check to get to "products". That the page does not display well in Firebird (at least on my machine) is another problem.
Finally, the Flash demo offers lots of glitz but little real information.
Maybe you need to buy the new edition and reread it all - a bit more carefully this time.
Once the originals of the memos have been presented in court don't they become something that anyone can read as part of the court record? If so at the least the EFF could post the court transcripts and make the memos public that way.
The only sane thing I could come up with.
I think the licensing issues are annoying enough - I could get an academic license as I teach at a university, but when (a while back while I was "under" employed) I tried to get a version so I could do some experiments (I wanted to try using it as a bit of support software for a volunteer organization even) and maybe use it in classes at some future point and discovered the licensing was going to make that impossible.
Oh well. Count me down as someone who will not even discuss Jess as a possibility in my classes.
Then I do the upgrade and copy back those files.
Is this in violation of the patent if I do it now?
I've done it before, but evidently it does not count as prior art, nor as being obvious to someone in the field. (I didn't publish it.)
As I said in my last post on the subject, the USPTO and their overlords need large doses of antipsychotics.
If so can you get a patent without even having a functional version of something? And then use that patent to quash someone else who produces a working version at the same time but files for a patent a day or two later?
Can you thus patent something without a working version? That is, just patent the general ideas, never bother to actually go though the process of making it work, and use those general ideas to claim fees from someone who does actually make it work.
And you can do this even if the process would be obvious to someone versed in the field?
Yah, this is sane. Reasonable. Logical.
I think the brains behind this are demonstrating a serious need for massive quantities of anti-psychotic drugs.
Oh thats right. Its "Legal".
It may look like a "liberal slant" in relationship to what the serious right wing nuts believe, but it is hardly liberal in any real sense. The NY Times and NPR seem to me to work pretty hard to remain objective and CNN, MSNBC and other are relatively conservative. I watched a very nicely slanted (pro-conservative) push poll on CNN today that was, of course, presented as a "lets find out what people are thinking" poll even when the question itself seriously biased the potential answers.
It is a sign of how conservative (and for the most part unthinkingly so) the US has become that news organizations like the NY Times and NPR that try to provide objective journalism (however hard that is in practice) are tarred as being ickily "liberal".
More disturbing though is that it is a poor indication of the state of American education that so many Americans seem incapable of distinguishing the difference.
And the fact that the organization holding the ".org" domain (ISOC) is completely unwilling to chase down .org spammers, scammers and sleazeballs is all the more annoying. Their response to me
when I tried to complain about a spammer using a .org domain (with no whois info) as a hideyhole was (in essence) "Yes, we want the .org domain to be for non profits and the like, but we won't do anything about it, no matter how nasty the people are who are using the name."
More complex certainly, but more fun to watch.
Then too the glider gun might be a better logo for the GPL, expressing the "viral" nature of the license by showing it firing "infectious bullets" around at all and sundry.
I've been hearing "emergent phenomena" used to describe behavior of systems that appears to be systematic but arises from the simple rules that govern the system in a non-obvious way.
So the emergent aspect has nothing to do with "violate"-ing the rules that start things in motion and more to do with the fact that the behavior comes about because of those rules, but is not something that an observer would easily anticipate or derive from considering the rules at a low level. (See, for instance this page in which "emergent phenomena" are defined as those best predicted through simulation. )
But, its always possible that the phrase has taken on a different meaning in the last few weeks, so I'll have to go find out.
Since DRM often removes the "First Sale" kinds of rights from the consumer, this seems only reasonable.
I think something like seven years would be a nice timeframe. That is DRM protected works would be no longer protected by law after seven years have elapsed. This is probably not unreasonable for most of the companies involved - movies, popular music and the like are often only really valuable for a year or two, so seven years gives them ample protection. After that they'd be in the public domain.
It does raise complex questions though - suppose someone publishes a work in small quantity (say a dozen copies) and copyrights that, then releases a mass market version that is DRM protected. What rules cover it?
I suspect though that a combination of the complexity of the rules required, the power of the big corporations and the general lack of interest in the people evidenced by "our" legislators would result in something worse than what we have now.
Yup, and set it so it will explode when issued the right command by radio so you can enforce sheepish conformity ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H, appropriate behavior.
There's also a TeX to PDF converter called pdftex .
And, of course, pdf is really just a wrapper around Postscript so its pretty easy to convert Postscript to PDF.
This is not helped by soi-disant "computer literacy" courses (really "illiteracy") that teach how to do silly things in word processors but don't teach anything that has to do with real computer literacy - like how to take charge of your computer.
So most users wont "Say NO!". They're too well (and willingly) brainwashed by those who want to keep them as unthinking consumers.
If SCO demands money from all and sundry then all the small linux users could sue them - might not all win, but the lawsuits would drain a pile of SCO's money quickly.
By saying that the small fish can not pay, even must not pay, they're denying them all the ability to take them to court - they won't have standing to sue as they have no interest.
Big companies are likely to say "corporate license for $1,000,000? Hmm, it would cost at least that in lawyers fees to fight it (at multi-hundreds of bucks per billable hour that kind of fee doesn't take long) - lets pay up." And thus not sue. So SCO makes money with little legal exposure or risk. (Plus half the people in the big companies they're trying to get money from are probably friends, lovers, fellow-travellers, fellow-conspirators, fellow-[fill-in-the-blankety-blanks] and the like and are all too willing to spend stockholders dollars on their friends in the full expectation that their friends will spend their stockholders dollers on them in return.)
As usual IAAL,TWAGOSOT (I Aint A Lawyer, Take With A Grain Of Salt Or Three).
So maybe these folks would prefer that we just refer to their junk as "shitware".
Dungware, crapola-ware, aint-worth-a-damn-ware, fartware, stinkware - surely with a good imagination we can come up with something that suits the product yet is not actionable.
I find that the legal climate concerning publications about computer security is becoming such that research in this area is increasingly being put in jeopardy. In large part this comes about as a result ofthe DMCA, but the problems that the DMCA cause are being exacerbated by companies issuing gag orders on publications that they find embarrassing or annoying. Should this be allowed to continue, fundamental research in the area ofcomputer security may well become an underground activity - with prior restraint on publication, gag orders on publications that do make it out and severe penalties on those who support or condone such publications or even such research even at second hand.
I urge Swarthmore to contest this legal threat and to continue to support academic freedom on all levels.
As someone who sometimes purports to be a college professor type, I must admit that I'm finding colleges and universities to be increasingly ways to ensure conformity, obedience and completely uncritical thinking. And all this time I had thought it was about encourging individuality, independence and critical thinking. No wonder tenure committees dont like me.
Funding SCO may not be too smart.
Firstly : because their business plan looks more like a way to get enough profit so that the CEO can grab a pile of cash and run and less like any kind of real plan for future earnings.
Secondly : their business practices are at best sleazy and at worst illegal. They've make extortionate claims against people who have no connection with their business whatever.
Finally : they've managed to irritate, annoy and generally make seriously cranky a large number of the people that they should be playing nice with if they expect to sell any OS software in the future.
You may end up with a fun question to answer :
How will you explain to your investors the fact that you lost $50 Million on this company?
Or worse yet:
How were the decision makers at your company persuaded to make this investment knowing full well that SCO was an empty shell? And was this decision smart, ethical and legal?
Even better, with a fast interchip connection network, building a cluster of these things could be very nice indeed. (There was a comment about a transmeta cluster a day or two ago that was quite interesting.)
Even better and better, its not hard to imagine a portable machine running with a long lived battery, low power disks and multiple transmeta processors that turn on and join in when needed.
In another story, random members of the families of high ranking Verisign executives were asked about their days. "We spend so much time on the phone now that we have little free time." was a frequently heard complaint. "But I guess we can't get on the Do Not Call list really as the callers all seem to be doing polls and they're all about Verisign. I a bit of responsibility to answer their questions because of my family relationship."
Those interviewed said they'd never been bothered by ending up at one of the Verisign pages. "DNS? whats DNS?" one respondent said. Another said that the nice systems geeks from Verisign had set up their computers and had told them that the household would be getting "Special DNS service". Evidently this special service goes directly to special Verisign servers in order to help those connected with the company to be able to reach the network even when there were problems with other DNS servers.