good job on the generic implementation, but...
on
F# - A New .Net language
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Looks like they did a good job on the generics support in their runtime. In particular, unlike batch C++ compilers, they delay generation of specialized code until it's needed. That gives you the efficiency of C++ (no boxing, for example) without the bloat. This is what Sun should have done. Instead, Java has a half-baked and not type-safe genericity hack. Even the more complex proposals for Java genericity have been more limited in comparison.
Let's just hope that the specification and implementation strategy for.NET genericity will be open. While there doesn't seem to be anything terribly sophisticated or novel in it, Microsoft could conceivably have applied for a bunch of patents and may try to keep efforts like the Mono project from implementing this.
As for F# itself, it seems to be a closed-source distribution only, which makes it uninteresting except as a technology demonstration. Microsoft almost certainly has no intention of supporting it commercially, making it effectively an orphaned, single-platform, non-evolving system. Even if it were a commercial product, lack of an open source distribution would make the chances of its adoption nearly zero.
Re:Star Trek TNG on the "New" TNN
on
Trek Prop Collecting
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There is a growing trend amoung 15 to 25 year old hicks who are into country music to watch ST:TNG episodes,
There are worse things "15 to 25 year old hicks" could watch than a show that teaches them some degree of tolerance and responsibility.
Just because NASA gives money to somebody to research something doesn't mean it's not a crackpot idea. They set up a project to try to verify Podkletnov's horse manure [slashdot.org], too, didn't they?
At least Podkletnov's horse manure is experimentally testable. That's more than can be said for the horse manure produced by physicists who have retreated into areas where they are safe from any experimental verifiability--like cosmologists or string theorists.
Windows doesn't have "root", it has an "Administrator" account. They are substantially different (I think Microsoft's security scheme is considerably worse and more difficult to secure).
The RedHat folks are right about one thing: the best defense against a patent suit is to hold the patent yourself.
That view is common but incorrect. A public disclosure of the invention is much cheaper and just as good for defending yourself against an infringement claim.
If RedHat spends the money on patenting something, that means that they indent to either sue people or to keep people from practicing what they patented.
They could also argue that their patent collection is not conceptually different from the GPL itself.
It is conceptually quite different: GPL'ed software comes with a binding, perpetual commitment to keeping the free software free. RedHat's patents come with only a promise that can be withdrawn at any time.
Of course they can't make it binding in perpetuity, because the laws they're referring to are moving targets, and if patent laws change, or court interpretations of them change, Redhat may have to change its patent policy just to maintain the same good intention that it had before.
If their intentions are good, they can always give people additional licensing choices later. Committing today to letting GPL'ed programs use their patents in perpetuity would not change that.
Yes, there's a potential for future abuse, but this is unavoidable.
Oh, it is quite avoidable. And it is quite necessary. RedHat is a corporation, and their legal responsibility is to maximize shareholder profit. Unless they make binding commitments now, that may well entail using those patents against free software in the future.
It's not possible to approve LGPL without opening up a hole that allows J. Random Megacorp to make an LGPL licensed librhpatents.so, which lets them use the patents with closed source proprietary apps.
And your point is what exactly?
RedHat can, after all, use their patents in their proprietary software. So, it's OK for RedHat to (potentially) make proprietary software and be considered defenders of open source but not for others? Sorry, that's a deal I'm not willing to accept.
There may be good uses for software patents in defense of free software. But RedHat hasn't demonstrated that they are using software patents that way.
Unfortunately, running out of oil doesn't mean running out of fossil fuel. Even if we run out of oil (and that's a big if), there are huge amounts of coal and gas.
Running out of fossil fuel would be the best thing that could happen to us because it would force even the most corrupt politicians and greedy corporations to face the facts. Sadly, we won't run out; we will be able to do almost unlimited damage to the environment and the planet. If you think a 100% rise in carbon dioxide might perhaps not be so dangerous, what about a 1000% or 3000% rise?
These hybrids are simply a temporary gimmick to move users over to a restrictive format. If consumers go for it, the audio CD format will die within 5-10 years.
As for the "better audio quality", that's just nonsense. You can record all you want, people's ears just aren't getting better. Vinyl was already pretty close to what even discriminating audiophiles could hear. CD is a little better and a lot more convenient. From the end-user's point of view, new audio disc formats add almost nothing when it comes to quality.
Get a laptop. They come with a built-in UPS, and the power management is tightly integrated with the BIOS. They also tend to be pretty energy efficient.
One file per mail message is the right thing to do. That lets you use standard UNIX tools for manipulating mail and it gives you convenient locking semantics. And the hierarchical UNIX file system structure, together with links, matches mail semantics nearly perfectly.
Of course, with traditional UNIX file systems, this is a bit slow. The thing to do is to fix the file system, not to kludge ever more complex mail formats on top of it. ReiserFS goes much of the way; we now also need some system calls to open and read multiple files with a single call.
Until file systems catch up, one kludge is as good as another. UNIX mbox format is at least simple, so I stick with that.
"Currently some courts may assess damages on the money that a counterfeiter has made," said Peets, "so a counterfeiter with a compilation of software worth $10,000 on one DVD but who sells it for $10 may be fined on the basis of that $10 profit."
This is a tricky and dangerous detail. Right now, if Microsoft rips of a GPL program, they may get penalized based on the money they have made from it. Under these proposed rules, Microsoft could rip off GPL programs with impunity because their penalty would be nil (since the GPL retail price would be zero). This is clearly not acceptable.
If we are going to have penalties on copyright infringement, they should be based on a percentage of the net worth of the infringer, not on some imaginary retail value dreamed up by a marketing department. That way, the penalty is comparably painful to whoever infringes.
Windows and Office are only as widely used as they are because many people either pirate it or get it thrust upon them with their PC. If they actually had to shell out $500, you can bet many people would switch to OpenOffice on Linux.
So, I'm all for the BSA enforcing Microsoft's licensing rigorously. Together with the antitrust and un-bundling pressure on Microsoft, this may lead to a more competitive market again.
Sure, it was. Before the 20th century, almost all content was somehow created manually, and if it could be created manually, it could be copied manually even faster. Music and plays were performed without royalty payments. Artists and sculptors would copy the works of others, change it slightly, and present it as their own. Writers would rewrite a story slightly and republish it to the masses. Publishers would republish writings and music. Copyists would copy paintings. In the process, people honed their skills, stories matured, and artistic ideas circulated widely without being controlled by big companies.
Today, doing anything like that would be both professional suicide and be subject to severe penalties.
Back then, artists had to do new stuff constantly in order to make a living--no living off royalties. The US flaunted European copyrights because Americans felt that they needed cheap access to content in order to get their country educated.
By comparison, for a consumer to copy someone's CD or sheet music today is tame. We don't even consider the possibility that allowing artists to copy the works of others liberally might be a better way. We should.
This lack of effective protection from this piracy is the greatest threat to incentives to create digital works and distribute them over the Internet.
People like Adkinson keep repeating this claim ad nauseam without any facts to back it up.
As far as I can tell, the tightening and extension of copyright law over the 20th century is correlated with a deterioration in quality art. Many of the greatest works of history were created without the benefits of copyright protection. Many great works of art would, in fact, violate copyright if today's copyright laws had been in effect at the time because they are the highly evolved end product of a long line of copies, with incremental improvements at each step. Much of creativity involves craftsmanship, and craftsmanship requires copying and recreation before creativity can be achieved.
So, some facts, please. If the government grants 100+ year monopolies to people and corporations, I'd like to see some evidence that this is beneficial to the rest of us. Because, Adkinson's ideological mumblings to the contrary, copyrights are not "property rights"--they are limited rights granted by the government only because they are beneficial to society.
That's a bit of an elitist position... my family and circle of friends are mostly well-educated and intelligent, but that doesn't mean they understand the choices they have in browser selection or options. John Q. Public needs to be watched out for a bit more than those of us who do know better.
I dunno--I find your position a bit more elitist than mine. I mean, it doesn't take a CS degree to select an option in a dialog box or to use a different browser. If popup ads annoy John Q. Public too much, then John Q. Public can figure out how to turn them off easily (maybe by asking friends). And both the popup ads themselves and the mechanisms for turning them off are entirely under the control of software vendors, so John Q. Public can vote with his dollars by not buying software that annoys him too much. Isn't that the minimum we should be able to expect from every adult?
so anyone who holds a copyright (including you or I) can engage in price discrimination.
Copyright does not absolve you from fair business practices. Furthermore, copyright could, in principle, be revoked for specific creations if it is not found to be in the public interest.
With the doctrine of first sale and ownership of DVD players, your reasoning also doesn't really justify the industry's attempts at controlling the players.
Sure, it isn't nice to pop up dozens of pages when people mistype web
addresses. But if you aren't completely clueless (like the guys at
the FTC apparently are), you should be using a web browser that
doesn't allow that sort of thing to happen.
I just find the precedent that someone gets fined $1.8M for having
domains that are kind of similar to the domains that some big
companies have scary. A figure that large seems to come out of thin
air. I mean, who got harmed? The advertisers got their money's
worth, and no kid is going to confuse the product of
"cartoonnetwork.com" with a bunch of big breasted women.
Particularly chilling is that WIPO
considered registration of "guinesssucks.com" a trademark
violation in his case (trademarks are only intended to identify a
specific product; they are not intended to let trademark owners
control what people say about the product).
I think this is a dangerous threat to free speech. Sure, this
particular guy isn't particularly nice. But what if you or I want to
create a web site "sony-service-sucks.com", where we exchange
grievances about Sony service and perhaps organize a class action
lawsuit? What if your domain name happens to be confusingly similar
to someone's trademark and they don't consider your business
legitimate and have the legal dollars to "prove" it?
Trademark holders are trying to expand their right from being able to merely control that a trademark refers without confusion to their product to a right of complete control of who uses the trademark under what circumstances in any domain, and to prohibit any kind of negative speech about their product. And they are succeeding. That should worry us all.
Patents have nothing to do with free, open or closedness licencing. They are merely to do with a system whose intention is to prove who invented what first.
No. First-to-invent has no relevance to patents at all: if you invent something first but don't disclose it, it's irrelevant that you invented it first. Second, in order to establish that you invented something for the purpose of defending against other patents, a disclosure is sufficient.
Patents are about establishing a limited monopoly on technology. You are right that that can be used for good or for bad. But the responsibility is on RedHat to explain themselves to the community clearly, at least if they want to continue to receive support from the community.
It seems to me like the "method and apparatus for atomic file look-up" is an old technique. See, for example, Stanford's Cache Kernel, which is entirely built around the idea of the kernel keeping caches (address space translation, file name translation, etc.) and faulting to user mode processes.
What have they got to lose? Their default action is to go bankrupt, but they can do that with or without the contract. Nobody who signed for the contract is going to be held personally responsible.
If they sign the contract, they keep competitors from using the spectrum, they keep a tiny chance open of actually using it for its intended purpose, and they have the option of lobbying and bribing their way into using it for other, more lucrative purposes.
Companies aren't behaving ethically, they do whatever they can get away with. The institution to put a stop to this is the FCC: if Iridium doesn't look like a plausible candidate for using the spectrum in its intended way, the FCC should give the spectrum to someone else.
That won't help. The US will claim that other nations who don't implement US policies are havens for pirates. Then, they will try to impose sanctions under WIPO and WTO rules. And the media companies, which are global anyway, will lobby politicians in Europe to follow suit.
The US may be the most susceptible to such nonsense, but once the US falls, the rest of the world falls as well. Just look at what happened with patents and copyrights.
Iridium signed up for providing satellite phone service. If Iridium doesn't want to build those satellite services, fine, they should be let out of the contract. Then, the regulators should decide whether that spectrum should be kept in reserve for future satellite services or whether it should be made available for terrestrial services, or whether the decision should be up to the market. Once the policy has been decided, then there should be competitive bidding on that spectrum.
Iridium originally got that spectrum under the conditions they got it because they promised satellite service. If they are not going to provide that, there is no reason to give them a lucrative government handout of spectrum for terrestrial uses.
An analogy would be that the government gives a company a piece of land for $1 under the condition that the company turns the land into a park. A few years later, that company hits financial problems and says "oh, wouldn't it be so much more profitable to put a factory here".
Human space travel is enormously expensive and yields little more scientific benefits than an equivalent robotic mission. And for the cost of sending a single man to Mars, we can send many unmanned, robotic probes, not just to Mars but to many planets and moons.
Robotic probes would still lead to the development of better launch and propulsion systems, so even going the robotic path, we would acquire the capabilities that make manned space travel affordable. In the long run, the use of robotic probes would not hold back manned exploration very much, but it would yield much more scientific data in the short run.
This is yet another instance where companies think that the public has some obligation to preserve an outdated and inefficient business model. If advertisers don't see the market as profitable anymore because of PVR, then they should please get out of the business. Others will use the spectrum that they vacate for new purposes.
I think we are better off without manipulative visual content that makes people fat, drunk, and go into debt anyway. The sad thing is that advertising works, even if you know what it is doing. Nobody is completely immune from it. The only way to be safe from advertising is not to watch it.
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Let's just hope that the specification and implementation strategy for .NET genericity will be open. While there doesn't seem to be anything terribly sophisticated or novel in it, Microsoft could conceivably have applied for a bunch of patents and may try to keep efforts like the Mono project from implementing this.
As for F# itself, it seems to be a closed-source distribution only, which makes it uninteresting except as a technology demonstration. Microsoft almost certainly has no intention of supporting it commercially, making it effectively an orphaned, single-platform, non-evolving system. Even if it were a commercial product, lack of an open source distribution would make the chances of its adoption nearly zero.
There are worse things "15 to 25 year old hicks" could watch than a show that teaches them some degree of tolerance and responsibility.
At least Podkletnov's horse manure is experimentally testable. That's more than can be said for the horse manure produced by physicists who have retreated into areas where they are safe from any experimental verifiability--like cosmologists or string theorists.
Windows doesn't have "root", it has an "Administrator" account. They are substantially different (I think Microsoft's security scheme is considerably worse and more difficult to secure).
That view is common but incorrect. A public disclosure of the invention is much cheaper and just as good for defending yourself against an infringement claim.
If RedHat spends the money on patenting something, that means that they indent to either sue people or to keep people from practicing what they patented.
They could also argue that their patent collection is not conceptually different from the GPL itself.
It is conceptually quite different: GPL'ed software comes with a binding, perpetual commitment to keeping the free software free. RedHat's patents come with only a promise that can be withdrawn at any time.
If their intentions are good, they can always give people additional licensing choices later. Committing today to letting GPL'ed programs use their patents in perpetuity would not change that.
Yes, there's a potential for future abuse, but this is unavoidable.
Oh, it is quite avoidable. And it is quite necessary. RedHat is a corporation, and their legal responsibility is to maximize shareholder profit. Unless they make binding commitments now, that may well entail using those patents against free software in the future.
And your point is what exactly?
RedHat can, after all, use their patents in their proprietary software. So, it's OK for RedHat to (potentially) make proprietary software and be considered defenders of open source but not for others? Sorry, that's a deal I'm not willing to accept.
There may be good uses for software patents in defense of free software. But RedHat hasn't demonstrated that they are using software patents that way.
Running out of fossil fuel would be the best thing that could happen to us because it would force even the most corrupt politicians and greedy corporations to face the facts. Sadly, we won't run out; we will be able to do almost unlimited damage to the environment and the planet. If you think a 100% rise in carbon dioxide might perhaps not be so dangerous, what about a 1000% or 3000% rise?
As for the "better audio quality", that's just nonsense. You can record all you want, people's ears just aren't getting better. Vinyl was already pretty close to what even discriminating audiophiles could hear. CD is a little better and a lot more convenient. From the end-user's point of view, new audio disc formats add almost nothing when it comes to quality.
Get a laptop. They come with a built-in UPS, and the power management is tightly integrated with the BIOS. They also tend to be pretty energy efficient.
Of course, with traditional UNIX file systems, this is a bit slow. The thing to do is to fix the file system, not to kludge ever more complex mail formats on top of it. ReiserFS goes much of the way; we now also need some system calls to open and read multiple files with a single call.
Until file systems catch up, one kludge is as good as another. UNIX mbox format is at least simple, so I stick with that.
This is a tricky and dangerous detail. Right now, if Microsoft rips of a GPL program, they may get penalized based on the money they have made from it. Under these proposed rules, Microsoft could rip off GPL programs with impunity because their penalty would be nil (since the GPL retail price would be zero). This is clearly not acceptable.
If we are going to have penalties on copyright infringement, they should be based on a percentage of the net worth of the infringer, not on some imaginary retail value dreamed up by a marketing department. That way, the penalty is comparably painful to whoever infringes.
So, I'm all for the BSA enforcing Microsoft's licensing rigorously. Together with the antitrust and un-bundling pressure on Microsoft, this may lead to a more competitive market again.
Sure, it was. Before the 20th century, almost all content was somehow created manually, and if it could be created manually, it could be copied manually even faster. Music and plays were performed without royalty payments. Artists and sculptors would copy the works of others, change it slightly, and present it as their own. Writers would rewrite a story slightly and republish it to the masses. Publishers would republish writings and music. Copyists would copy paintings. In the process, people honed their skills, stories matured, and artistic ideas circulated widely without being controlled by big companies.
Today, doing anything like that would be both professional suicide and be subject to severe penalties.
Back then, artists had to do new stuff constantly in order to make a living--no living off royalties. The US flaunted European copyrights because Americans felt that they needed cheap access to content in order to get their country educated.
By comparison, for a consumer to copy someone's CD or sheet music today is tame. We don't even consider the possibility that allowing artists to copy the works of others liberally might be a better way. We should.
People like Adkinson keep repeating this claim ad nauseam without any facts to back it up.
As far as I can tell, the tightening and extension of copyright law over the 20th century is correlated with a deterioration in quality art. Many of the greatest works of history were created without the benefits of copyright protection. Many great works of art would, in fact, violate copyright if today's copyright laws had been in effect at the time because they are the highly evolved end product of a long line of copies, with incremental improvements at each step. Much of creativity involves craftsmanship, and craftsmanship requires copying and recreation before creativity can be achieved.
So, some facts, please. If the government grants 100+ year monopolies to people and corporations, I'd like to see some evidence that this is beneficial to the rest of us. Because, Adkinson's ideological mumblings to the contrary, copyrights are not "property rights"--they are limited rights granted by the government only because they are beneficial to society.
I dunno--I find your position a bit more elitist than mine. I mean, it doesn't take a CS degree to select an option in a dialog box or to use a different browser. If popup ads annoy John Q. Public too much, then John Q. Public can figure out how to turn them off easily (maybe by asking friends). And both the popup ads themselves and the mechanisms for turning them off are entirely under the control of software vendors, so John Q. Public can vote with his dollars by not buying software that annoys him too much. Isn't that the minimum we should be able to expect from every adult?
Copyright does not absolve you from fair business practices. Furthermore, copyright could, in principle, be revoked for specific creations if it is not found to be in the public interest.
With the doctrine of first sale and ownership of DVD players, your reasoning also doesn't really justify the industry's attempts at controlling the players.
I just find the precedent that someone gets fined $1.8M for having domains that are kind of similar to the domains that some big companies have scary. A figure that large seems to come out of thin air. I mean, who got harmed? The advertisers got their money's worth, and no kid is going to confuse the product of "cartoonnetwork.com" with a bunch of big breasted women.
Particularly chilling is that WIPO considered registration of "guinesssucks.com" a trademark violation in his case (trademarks are only intended to identify a specific product; they are not intended to let trademark owners control what people say about the product).
I think this is a dangerous threat to free speech. Sure, this particular guy isn't particularly nice. But what if you or I want to create a web site "sony-service-sucks.com", where we exchange grievances about Sony service and perhaps organize a class action lawsuit? What if your domain name happens to be confusingly similar to someone's trademark and they don't consider your business legitimate and have the legal dollars to "prove" it?
Trademark holders are trying to expand their right from being able to merely control that a trademark refers without confusion to their product to a right of complete control of who uses the trademark under what circumstances in any domain, and to prohibit any kind of negative speech about their product. And they are succeeding. That should worry us all.
No. First-to-invent has no relevance to patents at all: if you invent something first but don't disclose it, it's irrelevant that you invented it first. Second, in order to establish that you invented something for the purpose of defending against other patents, a disclosure is sufficient.
Patents are about establishing a limited monopoly on technology. You are right that that can be used for good or for bad. But the responsibility is on RedHat to explain themselves to the community clearly, at least if they want to continue to receive support from the community.
It seems to me like the "method and apparatus for atomic file look-up" is an old technique. See, for example, Stanford's Cache Kernel, which is entirely built around the idea of the kernel keeping caches (address space translation, file name translation, etc.) and faulting to user mode processes.
If they sign the contract, they keep competitors from using the spectrum, they keep a tiny chance open of actually using it for its intended purpose, and they have the option of lobbying and bribing their way into using it for other, more lucrative purposes.
Companies aren't behaving ethically, they do whatever they can get away with. The institution to put a stop to this is the FCC: if Iridium doesn't look like a plausible candidate for using the spectrum in its intended way, the FCC should give the spectrum to someone else.
The US may be the most susceptible to such nonsense, but once the US falls, the rest of the world falls as well. Just look at what happened with patents and copyrights.
Iridium originally got that spectrum under the conditions they got it because they promised satellite service. If they are not going to provide that, there is no reason to give them a lucrative government handout of spectrum for terrestrial uses.
An analogy would be that the government gives a company a piece of land for $1 under the condition that the company turns the land into a park. A few years later, that company hits financial problems and says "oh, wouldn't it be so much more profitable to put a factory here".
Robotic probes would still lead to the development of better launch and propulsion systems, so even going the robotic path, we would acquire the capabilities that make manned space travel affordable. In the long run, the use of robotic probes would not hold back manned exploration very much, but it would yield much more scientific data in the short run.
I think we are better off without manipulative visual content that makes people fat, drunk, and go into debt anyway. The sad thing is that advertising works, even if you know what it is doing. Nobody is completely immune from it. The only way to be safe from advertising is not to watch it.