What are the realistic outcomes of the W3C/RAND process? Bruce Perens has argued that RAND actually discriminates against open source, and argued for RF (Royalty Free) in its place, but several well-informed people say that the W3C is unlikely to adopt RF. If RAND is not ND (Non-Discriminatory) and RF is not acceptable to the W3C, what else could happen?
I used to be a representative on the Library committee for the science library at Oxford University. The annual subscription to journals cost almost one million pounds (I think this was in 1995), with the subscription costs for some specialist journals as much as 10,000 UKP per year. I am fairly sure that the median price for printed journals at any reasonably well-stocked science library will be well over $200 per year.
Ashcroft opposed the DMCA originally. I haven't heard anything in support of it from him since (that doesn't mean much, I havn't followed US politics closely since I left the US in January), though he is obliged to enforce it.
Linus starting the 2.5 branch officially is a good sign that he considers the current revision of 2.4 to be stable enough not to be the main focus of work.
Doug Bagley makes an open invitation for readers to suggest improvements to the code he has written.
I agree that the results cannot be considered definitive, but they are very far from "completely worthless". It is as important how a programming language fares in the hands of its average programmers as in the hands of its gurus.
You really have missed Gibson's point. His point is, how much worse the situation will be if most DDoS attacks are spoofed. Then one can't do what he did (i.e. contact the ISPs of the zombie machines).
AFAIK, the only way to spoof IP addresses in Windows is to install a new networking stack, and that is difficult to do in the kind of generic way that zombie clients work, for reasons Gibson discusses in an article at his site.
Certainly. Nonetheless the FSF still agree with the OSI in calling the MIT-style licenses `free' even though they think it does not protect software freedom as well as the GPL.
I can forsee Miscrosoft doing this to win support for the new technology, getting everyone to play by their rules, and then release some new standard based off the old, but this time it will be proprietary.
I thought about this, but I think it will be hard for MS: MS have enough difficulty convincing existing Windows users upgrading to new versions of the operating system, it will be far harder for them to convince non-MS users to upgrade to a new version of.NET. (Sun has big difficulties coaxing people to upgrade their JREs, for instance).
A bigger difference is that people come to depend upon shared libraries, and you can expect the open source.NET libraries to be a tiny fraction of the total. Committing to be a wholly-open-source.NET developer will involve a lot of self-discipline.
How do people think about the differences between Sun and MS with respect to openness? I really don't have an opinion on who is better (ie. less benightedly awful).
In terms of which licenses are open but not free, the only substantive difference is that free software is slightly more demanding in what kinds of restrictions you may put on use (as opposed to modification and redistribution) (both allow very few).
The differences between the lists of licenses considered open and free respectively by the OSI and FSF are trifling, and turn on what I consider to tiny differences of legal interpretation (Inflammatory opinion: Moglen always seems to lean towards paranoia, eg. in refusing to judge whether the license which Python 2.1 is distributed under is compatible with GPL).
The announcement is that Red Hat are showing a profit for the first time: they certainly will have shown positive cashflow already (ie. cash going into their money accounts minus cash going out) when they were floated.
...and of course it is a net win for the USA when said recipients of aid and fundamentalist propaganda go to war against their heathen brethren and buy lots of American arms.
The Economist has been running stories about open source responses to Mundies' claims, see last week's story. Idon't think the NY Times is capable of doing a good story on this.
I'm a Kaskell fan, but I can't agree with a lot of this. Haskell's syntax is a convoluted mess, as is its module system. Monads are theoretically very nice, but they intrdouce horrible maintainence issues. The best Haskell compiles to slower code than the best LISP compilers, possibly *much* slower. It is very hard to predict performance with a lazy evaluating language, so it is not suitable for writing an OS in.
Lazy evaluation, currying, type inference and pattern matching are all attractive features, but I think Haskell has some fair way to go, and, with the exception of currying, all of these can be introduced as extensions to LISP or Scheme.
The nice thing about the LISP/scheme dynamically typed system is that it is pretty much complete (given the existence of macros). One can add object orientation, lazy evaluation, complex numbers, matrix types, even type inference, without changing the basic language. Wheras strongly typed languages always are in need of extensions. C++ isn't so bad, but then it isn't really strongly typed (the definition is that one can never encounter a run-time type error).
I don't think that managed comment section could claim common carrier status in any case. I agree that there is an important point of principle here, but you have to choose your battles. By withdrawing the post, they can protect the anonymity of ACs. I think that is a more important matter.
Quite agreed about weak lambda forms; but the garbage collection scheme is rather an embarassment. Reference counting doesn't work, for cyclic data structures, and these can arise in Python programs.
Mmm, well, I don't think SunOS can really be marked up as a BSD success, Solaris really isn't BSD (I lived through a SunOS to Solaris changeover). NeXT is a bit of a BeOS - nice idea, works well, but not adopted. BSD/OS I don't know - what is it?
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What are the realistic outcomes of the W3C/RAND process? Bruce Perens has argued that RAND actually discriminates against open source, and argued for RF (Royalty Free) in its place, but several well-informed people say that the W3C is unlikely to adopt RF. If RAND is not ND (Non-Discriminatory) and RF is not acceptable to the W3C, what else could happen?
I used to be a representative on the Library committee for the science library at Oxford University. The annual subscription to journals cost almost one million pounds (I think this was in 1995), with the subscription costs for some specialist journals as much as 10,000 UKP per year. I am fairly sure that the median price for printed journals at any reasonably well-stocked science library will be well over $200 per year.
The US tries to uphold freedom within its own borders. It is only freedom in other countries that the US does not tolerate.
Ashcroft opposed the DMCA originally. I haven't heard anything in support of it from him since (that doesn't mean much, I havn't followed US politics closely since I left the US in January), though he is obliged to enforce it.
Linus starting the 2.5 branch officially is a good sign that he considers the current revision of 2.4 to be stable enough not to be the main focus of work.
I agree that the results cannot be considered definitive, but they are very far from "completely worthless". It is as important how a programming language fares in the hands of its average programmers as in the hands of its gurus.
AFAIK, the only way to spoof IP addresses in Windows is to install a new networking stack, and that is difficult to do in the kind of generic way that zombie clients work, for reasons Gibson discusses in an article at his site.
Certainly. Nonetheless the FSF still agree with the OSI in calling the MIT-style licenses `free' even though they think it does not protect software freedom as well as the GPL.
I thought about this, but I think it will be hard for MS: MS have enough difficulty convincing existing Windows users upgrading to new versions of the operating system, it will be far harder for them to convince non-MS users to upgrade to a new version of .NET. (Sun has big difficulties coaxing people to upgrade their JREs, for instance).
A bigger difference is that people come to depend upon shared libraries, and you can expect the open source .NET libraries to be a tiny fraction of the total. Committing to be a wholly-open-source .NET developer will involve a lot of self-discipline.
How do people think about the differences between Sun and MS with respect to openness? I really don't have an opinion on who is better (ie. less benightedly awful).
Well, a conformance suite would be a help. That's something that I would think that Microsoft ought to just about be able to open source.
Also a promise that open source implementations won't be hit by law suits for any patents MS might hold on the standards.
The differences between the lists of licenses considered open and free respectively by the OSI and FSF are trifling, and turn on what I consider to tiny differences of legal interpretation (Inflammatory opinion: Moglen always seems to lean towards paranoia, eg. in refusing to judge whether the license which Python 2.1 is distributed under is compatible with GPL).
The announcement is that Red Hat are showing a profit for the first time: they certainly will have shown positive cashflow already (ie. cash going into their money accounts minus cash going out) when they were floated.
...and of course it is a net win for the USA when said recipients of aid and fundamentalist propaganda go to war against their heathen brethren and buy lots of American arms.
This is a *client side* implementation of smart tags, with a default set of smart tags provided by Microsoft. Read the article.
These miscarriages of justice have a habit of happening to people the Church of Scientology views as enemies (and not just in the US).
The Economist has been running stories about open source responses to Mundies' claims, see last week's story. Idon't think the NY Times is capable of doing a good story on this.
Why would nuclear phycisists know anything about the effect of radiation on the human body?
I'm a Kaskell fan, but I can't agree with a lot of this. Haskell's syntax is a convoluted mess, as is its module system. Monads are theoretically very nice, but they intrdouce horrible maintainence issues. The best Haskell compiles to slower code than the best LISP compilers, possibly *much* slower. It is very hard to predict performance with a lazy evaluating language, so it is not suitable for writing an OS in.
Lazy evaluation, currying, type inference and pattern matching are all attractive features, but I think Haskell has some fair way to go, and, with the exception of currying, all of these can be introduced as extensions to LISP or Scheme.
The nice thing about the LISP/scheme dynamically typed system is that it is pretty much complete (given the existence of macros). One can add object orientation, lazy evaluation, complex numbers, matrix types, even type inference, without changing the basic language. Wheras strongly typed languages always are in need of extensions. C++ isn't so bad, but then it isn't really strongly typed (the definition is that one can never encounter a run-time type error).
I don't think that managed comment section could claim common carrier status in any case. I agree that there is an important point of principle here, but you have to choose your battles. By withdrawing the post, they can protect the anonymity of ACs. I think that is a more important matter.
Quite agreed about weak lambda forms; but the garbage collection scheme is rather an embarassment. Reference counting doesn't work, for cyclic data structures, and these can arise in Python programs.
Most users never need to install drivers.
I think that, if you are comfortable with the command line, then you will not tend to explore the alternatives. That doesn't mean they are not there.
The reference you cite states compassion as the root of Jain vegetarianism, which is the response to suffering.
Exploitative? I thought the issue was about animal suffering.
Mmm, well, I don't think SunOS can really be marked up as a BSD success, Solaris really isn't BSD (I lived through a SunOS to Solaris changeover). NeXT is a bit of a BeOS - nice idea, works well, but not adopted. BSD/OS I don't know - what is it?