Long, wordy, buzz-word heavy article with a little bit of interesting content buried deep inside. I wish I hadn't bothered to read it.
In case you haven't, but are thinking you might: you can run machines that are never down, even when software is being updated, if you use a few tricks. I knew most of the one's they mentioned already, and use them on my company website, which is far from downtime-proof, but has a 3-year uptime so far: call my software maintenence status "fairly sturdy".
If you're interested in upgrading to software maintenance status "bulletproof", then read something about fault-tolerant computing in Erlang. You'll learn more that way.
I agree, but a lot of people want to keep anonymous refereeing, and its hard to do that well whilst keeping an effective separation of editors and referees from particular journals.
There's been a lot of discussion at Lambda the Ultimate about the relationship of publishing and scientific organsiations like the ACM to the interests of the theoretically switched-on hacker community. See, eg. this thread on Journals and Papers.
Good link. WP also has an article about Ancient Egyptian, which it states is is part of the Afro-Asiatic group of languages and is related to Berber and Semitic (languages such as Arabic and Hebrew), so it appears that the distance between Akkadian (also a Semitic language) and Ancient Egyptian languages is not all that great, presumable much less than either of those two languages to Latin.
I don't know of any convincing evidence in that direction with respect to normal programming styles, but Siskind's Stalin compiler is a high-level (ie. its source language is scheme R4RS) compiler that performs extremely well when given code hand-optimised to make use of the compiler's brutally effective optimiser. To make the point, Siskind rewrote several standard UNIX utilities in Stalin and benchmarkes their performance: his code ran in about 25% of the time of those in the standard BSD distribution of the time.
If you fancy tinkering around with operating system internals, it's hard to do better than OSKit.
This is very true; I'd go further and say if you want to experiment with OSes, want the result to be usable, but don't want to implement the boring but difficult to get right bits, you can't do better than OSkit. Check out Christopher Browne's Novel OS work page for leads to cool things.
In short, thefreedictionary.com is using Wikipedia content more or less as intended, but is using Javascript to bypass the spirit, if not the word of the syndication license, and is in partial violation of the GFDL. As such, it is rated middling amongst violaters of the wikiepdia syndication license. Most wikipedians do not object to syndicated content getting higher rankings, if they are achieved fair and square.
Not necessarily: if you have the money to spare the existence of a handful of such licenses in the right hands could complicate future attempts to try SCO-like tactics in the future, in the unlikely case that SCO gets an outcome to its suit that is less than totally humiliating for it.
LWN seems to think much the same thing about SCO property in the linux kernel in the now free issue: LWN-28aug03 (scroll down to "This week's SCO fun").
First, it means the RIAA etc. have to go after many
small fish rather than a few large fish. But, second, it simplifies the case for the RIAA when they do take these actions.
The author seems to have a bee in his bonnet about
using name munging. While it is inelegant, there is
the virtue of simplicity in the arrangement, and the
important issue is what sort of risks name munging creates for programmers. The Common LISP module¯o system has shown that name munging need not be problematic in practice.
On the other hand, the interface to namespaces can be a liability in terms of complexity and hurdles to learning.
Does Gancarz think the advent of linux and large
open source projects provides anything for the
UNIX philosophers to learn from, or is his book
meant to be old wisdom for the new kids? It's hard
to tell from the review.
UNIX = Commercial way of thinking and doing business from a software standpoint, extended to the hardware aspect (by tieing the commercial, closed software to certain hardware). The old way, it is no doubt dying.
It's amusing how the right-wing believes there to be
a systematic left-wing bias in the media, and the
left-wing believes that the mainstream media
distort the news to serve the oligarchical interests of the giant corporations, ie. systematic right-wing bias. I guess that's why the left and right can
unite so easily on this issue.
I recommend Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media as a resource (from a left-wing perspective) on media bias: it's not the whole truth, but it's probably the best thing written on the subject.
I recommend that people *don't* file a complaint
using the form. A large number of similar complaints, based on the same small set of facts,
and mostly with misstatements of fact and little reflection or care taken
in composition, are *not* going to impress the
people at the SEC who have to process these forms.
A much better idea is to put our heads together,
compose a decent letter, and then put it to one of the online petition sites (eg. PetitionOnline).
Slashdot Mirror
Long, wordy, buzz-word heavy article with a little bit of interesting content buried deep inside. I wish I hadn't bothered to read it.
In case you haven't, but are thinking you might: you can run machines that are never down, even when software is being updated, if you use a few tricks. I knew most of the one's they mentioned already, and use them on my company website, which is far from downtime-proof, but has a 3-year uptime so far: call my software maintenence status "fairly sturdy".
If you're interested in upgrading to software maintenance status "bulletproof", then read something about fault-tolerant computing in Erlang. You'll learn more that way.
Greg's wiki page is at Logic Books at print.google.com page.
I posted a story on this to LtU.
See Greg Restall, who has summarised some available logic texts at his wikie.
Which CC license? CC-by (the attribution only license)?
I agree, but a lot of people want to keep anonymous refereeing, and its hard to do that well whilst keeping an effective separation of editors and referees from particular journals.
There's been a lot of discussion at Lambda the Ultimate about the relationship of publishing and scientific organsiations like the ACM to the interests of the theoretically switched-on hacker community. See, eg. this thread on Journals and Papers.
Good link. WP also has an article about Ancient Egyptian, which it states is is part of the Afro-Asiatic group of languages and is related to Berber and Semitic (languages such as Arabic and Hebrew), so it appears that the distance between Akkadian (also a Semitic language) and Ancient Egyptian languages is not all that great, presumable much less than either of those two languages to Latin.
I don't know of any convincing evidence in that direction with respect to normal programming styles, but Siskind's Stalin compiler is a high-level (ie. its source language is scheme R4RS) compiler that performs extremely well when given code hand-optimised to make use of the compiler's brutally effective optimiser. To make the point, Siskind rewrote several standard UNIX utilities in Stalin and benchmarkes their performance: his code ran in about 25% of the time of those in the standard BSD distribution of the time.
Are you the same Chris with whom I chatted following an LtU thread?
And in the US you have no data protection rights. California's laws are advanced for f***'s sake!
Thinking aloud: are neurons more or less intelligent/sophisticated than modern robots?
This is very true; I'd go further and say if you want to experiment with OSes, want the result to be usable, but don't want to implement the boring but difficult to get right bits, you can't do better than OSkit. Check out Christopher Browne's Novel OS work page for leads to cool things.
In short, thefreedictionary.com is using Wikipedia content more or less as intended, but is using Javascript to bypass the spirit, if not the word of the syndication license, and is in partial violation of the GFDL. As such, it is rated middling amongst violaters of the wikiepdia syndication license. Most wikipedians do not object to syndicated content getting higher rankings, if they are achieved fair and square.
Not necessarily: if you have the money to spare the existence of a handful of such licenses in the right hands could complicate future attempts to try SCO-like tactics in the future, in the unlikely case that SCO gets an outcome to its suit that is less than totally humiliating for it.
LWN seems to think much the same thing about SCO property in the linux kernel in the now free issue: LWN-28aug03 (scroll down to "This week's SCO fun").
Nice quote (the first, that is), who was the wise man?
Vital background reading on this is Larry Solum's posts on "Copynorms", especially his analysis of the RIAA strategy.
On the other hand, the interface to namespaces can be a liability in terms of complexity and hurdles to learning.
In either case I'd like to see more analysis.
Does Gancarz think the advent of linux and large open source projects provides anything for the UNIX philosophers to learn from, or is his book meant to be old wisdom for the new kids? It's hard to tell from the review.
Perhaps you have heard of BSD Unix...?
How seriously do you think Sun's recent commitment to free software should be taken?
I recommend Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media as a resource (from a left-wing perspective) on media bias: it's not the whole truth, but it's probably the best thing written on the subject.
I recommend that people *don't* file a complaint using the form. A large number of similar complaints, based on the same small set of facts, and mostly with misstatements of fact and little reflection or care taken in composition, are *not* going to impress the people at the SEC who have to process these forms. A much better idea is to put our heads together, compose a decent letter, and then put it to one of the online petition sites (eg. PetitionOnline).