Yes, you do believe that others are irrational, and that's because they often are. That's how bubbles in the {stock,tulip,etc} market get started and grow.
It can work like that in the short term. Of course nobody believes that Nasdaq can keep doubling indefinitely; all that's required is they think the 'law' will hold over the next few years. But I don't think anyone is likely to believe that nowadays.
Actually, that 'law' is its own explanation. If people believe that Nasdaq doubles every three years, they'll tend to act on that belief and (if a large enough number of people get involved) it becomes self-fulfilling.
Of course, you could also ask: 'I don't have any children, so why pay extra to fund education I'm not using?'. If access to information, like basic education, is considered essential then it makes sense to charge a flat rate for everyone, no matter how much use they're making of it. That is especially true if the mechanisms for charging on a per-use or access-control basis end up reducing the value of the information they are intended to meter.
Having charges based on usage provides incentive to create useful new content - the more popular your work is, the more money you get. But a similar market incentive can work in systems where there is a flat charge and the authors of content are paid according to how much it is used.
A problem is that people cannot 'vote up' the importance of individual item. Something which is used by only a few people but very important to those people can be provided under a per-unit charging system, simply by having a high price per unit. But if content authors are just paid on a boneheaded scheme such as per bit downloaded, or per copy of a 'work' downloaded, there is no possibility for the market to rate one work as more important than another (as opposed to just more popular).
The cost of producing pr0n or Dr Dre is just the same whether you look at it or not. When you pay your electricity bill, you pay more for using more units, because those units cost money to produce. But with information, the only cost is a one-off to produce the information, there are no marginal costs (apart from bandwidth, which can be charged for separately). So there is no automatic case for per-unit charging.
It may well be that charging according to usage is the best way of extracting money from consumers and giving incentives to producers, but then it may not be. If someone decides not to download some information because it has a per-unit charge, nobody benefits. The user doesn't get the information, and the producer doesn't get any money. But it would have been possible for the user to get the information without any cost to the producer.
There's a lot of GPLed software out there, and it's not possible to mix and match GPLed and APSLed code in a single program. For example, you may not port device drivers between (GPLed) Linux and (APSLed) Darwin without special permission from the copyright holders.
It's caffè lattè (although nobody really cares which way round you write the accents) and pronounced - well imagine saying 'merry' but without the 'rry'. (or rather, imagine a British person saying 'merry'... urghh.)
The link you give seems to be a native Windows port. But you can also compile and run (IIRC) the original X11/Unix version under Windows using Cygwin. You will need an X server.
Exactly. If IBM uses software patents mainly as a defence against being sued by other patent-holders, then they have little to lose from a situation where software patents are not enforceable. They wouldn't be able to sue others over software, but likewise others couldn't sue them; so no need to accumulate stockpiles of questionable patents as a deterrent. (Hiring fewer lawyers => less overhead => more profit.)
OTOH, maybe they like to have the 'nuclear option' available. Just think what would happen if IBM started enforcing its thousands of patents on things like cut and paste.
It's not so much that IBM accumulates software patents that is the problem - they have a need to defend themselves. It's the lobbying to extend the totally broken US-style swpat system to other places that I find objectionable.
Perhaps IBM will reconsider their strongly pro-software-patent policy. They were the ones who started this nonsense in the US and have lobbied for its extension to other parts of the world.
OTOH, pro-swpat attitudes often come from a company's legal department, which has a life of its own separate from what the techies think, so I wouldn't be too hopeful.
Re:Sounds really intuitive, no no, really.
on
3D GUI Project
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· Score: 2
You can minimize mouse movement by having pop-up rather than pull-down menus. In other words, when you press the 'menu' mouse button, the menu appears *in the current location* rather than at the top of the window or top of the screen. Most Windows apps have pop-up menus, but they're limited to context-sensitive stuff only. I'd prefer to have the whole menu bar accessible in this way, with an additional 'Context' item for operations on the thing you clicked on.
If the months are numbered from zero, the days should be too. Hence Zeroday (or Noughtday), Oneday, etc. However, the ordinal numbers in English start from 'first', so Firstday, Secondday and so on would also be possible.
I don't see why a ordering has to be assigned to the seven days of the week at all. Look at the current arguments over whether Sunday or Monday is the first day of the week. (My preferred choice: Monday is day 1, Tuesday is 2... but Sunday is 0.) It would be better to say that the seven days always repeat in the same order, but there is no 'beginning' or 'end' to the cycle. Unless you can date the creation of the world to the nearest day.
Yes, if you are the copyright holder you can put whatever conditions you like on your software. The best thing to do if you feel the GPL is too restrictive is to say:
'You may distribute this software under the terms of the GPL, but I also grant the following extra permissions: blah blah blah.'
The blah could be whatever you like, allowing unmodified copies to be distributed in binary-only form, etc. But people who still want to use straight GPL can do so, and your code can be incorporated in other GPLed software. (Although the result would probably have to be plain-old-GPL without your extra permissions.)
Whatever happens, do not make up your own licence. There are far too many already.
A while ago the KDE people ported the GIMP to Qt, calling it KIMP. Because of the GPL not allowing linking with non-GPLed libraries, they were unable to distribute it. But now that Qt is GPLed, they could do so. I wonder if KDE is still interested in having a KDE-ized version of the GIMP?
At doc.ic.ac.uk, the second year students get a lab exercise to modify Minix (which is, of course, a microkernel design). Last year it was adding a new kernel task for debugging and a user process which sends messages to this task to step through programs and set breakpoints. The number of layers a system call goes through is rather scary. Still, it's no worse than on Linux or any other complex OS, just more explicit.
It's not cost, it's *hassle*. If you want to plug in an extra node, you just do it. No need to phone up (insert software vendor) to buy another 'Flexible Licensing Extension Pack' or to sign another contract. And no need to worry about random audits and threats from anti-piracy organizations.
If you look at the 8086 instruction set there are lots of instructions in there which are part of '8080 compatibility mode'. But another poster pointed out that this is source (assembly language) compatibility, not binary compatibility. Still, some automated translation ought to be possible.
'Damage'? Is the Pentium IV fully 386-compatible or not? (Hint: it is.)
There's no harm in running 386 (or even 8086) code on any modern Intel x86 processor. They make a lot of effort to keep them 100% compatible - that's why the x86 architecture sucks (relative to other architectures that don't have such burdensome compatibility requirements, and considering the amount of effort put in). Heck, you could even put the CPU into 8080 compatibility mode and run CP/M on it at ridiculous speeds (not sure about this - is the '8080 mode' 100% compatible?)
It wouldn't even run that slowly, not for most tasks anyway. Fancy stuff like MMX, SIMD, and other extensions are used for graphics and for some tasks like RAID checksums, but not used much on a normal workstation. Pentium-optimized code runs twice as fast *at best* and usually the difference is more like ten per cent.
As a Linux user, one comment Mr de Raadt made surprised me:
As to the "original" you talk about, there is no original. OpenBSD uses it's own components. I don't know what packages you are talking about. cat is cat. ftpd is ftpd. tar is tar.
In Linuxland, cat is GNU cat, tar is GNU tar, httpd comes from the Apache project, rpm comes from Red Hat, and so on. There is always an upstream maintainer for any particular package and no distributor (AFAIK) tries to maintain its 'own' releases of things. If a bug is found, the fix tries to swim upstream to the breeding ground, where it can add itself to the gene pool for future releases of all distributions. (Alas, I do not have a ten-man team auditing my comments for dodgy metaphors.)
I suppose it makes sense in a way to have your own codebase, especially if you are concentrating more on security than on adding new features. You have control over every line of code that goes in, and you don't mind missing out on new versions of stuff that is released. Also, if your original 'upstream source' is a group of people you split acrimoniously from, you might prefer not to rely on them. (Although I can't help feeling that if the OpenBSD and NetBSD people made more of an effort to commonize code in both directions, the feud wouldn't have lasted as long. This sort of thing going on between two Linux distros - eg Mandrake and RedHat - would be unthinkable.)
But not relying on an upstream maintainer for packages does not mean you can't contribute your fixes back. All the BSDs originate from a common code base, right? There must surely be at least 95% common code in the shell and shell utilities (which change relatively slowly), even if the kernels have diverged. So what effort do they make to avoid reinventing the wheel? And when OpenBSD fixes a set of bugs, do they report them to the maintainers of the original package?
Perhaps the problem would be that they couldn't agree on who should be the original source. Imagine if NetBSD claimed that they were now the 'official' maintainers of BSD make, for example. Would OpenBSD accept that? Perhaps some neutral 'BSD Foundation', with support from all three free BSDs, could take over maintenance of the common or fairly-common BSD code. Or somebody from Berkeley (Bill Joy perhaps?) could make a ceremonial proclamation.
BTW, I always use the printer-friendly version (if there is one) for ordinary Web browsing.
The BBC's website has a CGI script Betsie which automatically generates an 'accessible' version of a web page. But this is not an ideal solution, it would be better to write the page in an accessible way to start with. HTML-linters like Bobby, Weblint, and Tidy, not to mention just validating properly with nsgmls, can help here. Also read the W3C's accessibility guidelines.
But I don't mean to rant too much on the web purist's favourite topic of alt tags and not using tables for layout. I mean, it's not as if I even use Lynx for browsing. One thing I would like to have is a clear sense of real people behind the site. This means having a contact address (or at least a link to a contact page) on every page, and where appropriate, other meta-data like which department is responsible for this page, where the information comes from, when it was last updated, and so on.
Also try to make your URLs last a reasonably long time (i.e. not like microsoft.com, for anyone familiar with that site). This means that people can bookmark a site containing useful information and go back to the same page later. It also helps search engines.
Finally, it might be a good idea to support SSL connections and get a certificate, possibly signed by the government itself. That way people can feel reassured that 'the bad guys' aren't getting in the way.
I'd be cool to have a 'small Linux' distribution running on standard desktop PCs which used this kind of thing.
There are 'small' distros already but they tend to work by picking older and smaller versions of everything - kernel 1.0 etc. I'm thinking of something which is up-to-date but based on the 'lite' versions of software such as Qt/Embedded.
We're getting to the point where an old PC is pretty much equivalent - in screen space, processing power and memory - to a palmtop. So it seems sensible to backport things from palmtops to PCs.
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It's called a _method_, for goodness' sake. Methodology is the study of methods.
(and method is the shorter of the two words, so there's no excuse not to use it... unless you are trying to obfuscate by using long words.)
Yes, you do believe that others are irrational, and that's because they often are. That's how bubbles in the {stock,tulip,etc} market get started and grow.
It can work like that in the short term. Of course nobody believes that Nasdaq can keep doubling indefinitely; all that's required is they think the 'law' will hold over the next few years. But I don't think anyone is likely to believe that nowadays.
Actually, that 'law' is its own explanation. If people believe that Nasdaq doubles every three years, they'll tend to act on that belief and (if a large enough number of people get involved) it becomes self-fulfilling.
Of course, you could also ask: 'I don't have any children, so why pay extra to fund education I'm not using?'. If access to information, like basic education, is considered essential then it makes sense to charge a flat rate for everyone, no matter how much use they're making of it. That is especially true if the mechanisms for charging on a per-use or access-control basis end up reducing the value of the information they are intended to meter.
Having charges based on usage provides incentive to create useful new content - the more popular your work is, the more money you get. But a similar market incentive can work in systems where there is a flat charge and the authors of content are paid according to how much it is used.
A problem is that people cannot 'vote up' the importance of individual item. Something which is used by only a few people but very important to those people can be provided under a per-unit charging system, simply by having a high price per unit. But if content authors are just paid on a boneheaded scheme such as per bit downloaded, or per copy of a 'work' downloaded, there is no possibility for the market to rate one work as more important than another (as opposed to just more popular).
The cost of producing pr0n or Dr Dre is just the same whether you look at it or not. When you pay your electricity bill, you pay more for using more units, because those units cost money to produce. But with information, the only cost is a one-off to produce the information, there are no marginal costs (apart from bandwidth, which can be charged for separately). So there is no automatic case for per-unit charging.
It may well be that charging according to usage is the best way of extracting money from consumers and giving incentives to producers, but then it may not be. If someone decides not to download some information because it has a per-unit charge, nobody benefits. The user doesn't get the information, and the producer doesn't get any money. But it would have been possible for the user to get the information without any cost to the producer.
There's a lot of GPLed software out there, and it's not possible to mix and match GPLed and APSLed code in a single program. For example, you may not port device drivers between (GPLed) Linux and (APSLed) Darwin without special permission from the copyright holders.
It's caffè lattè (although nobody really cares which way round you write the accents) and pronounced - well imagine saying 'merry' but without the 'rry'. (or rather, imagine a British person saying 'merry'... urghh.)
And as part of the phrase 'caffe latte'?
Is there a pronunciation guide for all this bizarre coffee jargon?
The link you give seems to be a native Windows port. But you can also compile and run (IIRC) the original X11/Unix version under Windows using Cygwin. You will need an X server.
Exactly. If IBM uses software patents mainly as a defence against being sued by other patent-holders, then they have little to lose from a situation where software patents are not enforceable. They wouldn't be able to sue others over software, but likewise others couldn't sue them; so no need to accumulate stockpiles of questionable patents as a deterrent. (Hiring fewer lawyers => less overhead => more profit.)
OTOH, maybe they like to have the 'nuclear option' available. Just think what would happen if IBM started enforcing its thousands of patents on things like cut and paste.
It's not so much that IBM accumulates software patents that is the problem - they have a need to defend themselves. It's the lobbying to extend the totally broken US-style swpat system to other places that I find objectionable.
Perhaps IBM will reconsider their strongly pro-software-patent policy. They were the ones who started this nonsense in the US and have lobbied for its extension to other parts of the world.
OTOH, pro-swpat attitudes often come from a company's legal department, which has a life of its own separate from what the techies think, so I wouldn't be too hopeful.
You can minimize mouse movement by having pop-up rather than pull-down menus. In other words, when you press the 'menu' mouse button, the menu appears *in the current location* rather than at the top of the window or top of the screen. Most Windows apps have pop-up menus, but they're limited to context-sensitive stuff only. I'd prefer to have the whole menu bar accessible in this way, with an additional 'Context' item for operations on the thing you clicked on.
If the months are numbered from zero, the days should be too. Hence Zeroday (or Noughtday), Oneday, etc. However, the ordinal numbers in English start from 'first', so Firstday, Secondday and so on would also be possible.
I don't see why a ordering has to be assigned to the seven days of the week at all. Look at the current arguments over whether Sunday or Monday is the first day of the week. (My preferred choice: Monday is day 1, Tuesday is 2... but Sunday is 0.) It would be better to say that the seven days always repeat in the same order, but there is no 'beginning' or 'end' to the cycle. Unless you can date the creation of the world to the nearest day.
Yes, if you are the copyright holder you can put whatever conditions you like on your software. The best thing to do if you feel the GPL is too restrictive is to say:
'You may distribute this software under the terms of the GPL, but I also grant the following extra permissions: blah blah blah.'
The blah could be whatever you like, allowing unmodified copies to be distributed in binary-only form, etc. But people who still want to use straight GPL can do so, and your code can be incorporated in other GPLed software. (Although the result would probably have to be plain-old-GPL without your extra permissions.)
Whatever happens, do not make up your own licence. There are far too many already.
A while ago the KDE people ported the GIMP to Qt, calling it KIMP. Because of the GPL not allowing linking with non-GPLed libraries, they were unable to distribute it. But now that Qt is GPLed, they could do so. I wonder if KDE is still interested in having a KDE-ized version of the GIMP?
At doc.ic.ac.uk, the second year students get a lab exercise to modify Minix (which is, of course, a microkernel design). Last year it was adding a new kernel task for debugging and a user process which sends messages to this task to step through programs and set breakpoints. The number of layers a system call goes through is rather scary. Still, it's no worse than on Linux or any other complex OS, just more explicit.
It's not cost, it's *hassle*. If you want to plug in an extra node, you just do it. No need to phone up (insert software vendor) to buy another 'Flexible Licensing Extension Pack' or to sign another contract. And no need to worry about random audits and threats from anti-piracy organizations.
If you look at the 8086 instruction set there are lots of instructions in there which are part of '8080 compatibility mode'. But another poster pointed out that this is source (assembly language) compatibility, not binary compatibility. Still, some automated translation ought to be possible.
'Damage'? Is the Pentium IV fully 386-compatible or not? (Hint: it is.)
There's no harm in running 386 (or even 8086) code on any modern Intel x86 processor. They make a lot of effort to keep them 100% compatible - that's why the x86 architecture sucks (relative to other architectures that don't have such burdensome compatibility requirements, and considering the amount of effort put in). Heck, you could even put the CPU into 8080 compatibility mode and run CP/M on it at ridiculous speeds (not sure about this - is the '8080 mode' 100% compatible?)
It wouldn't even run that slowly, not for most tasks anyway. Fancy stuff like MMX, SIMD, and other extensions are used for graphics and for some tasks like RAID checksums, but not used much on a normal workstation. Pentium-optimized code runs twice as fast *at best* and usually the difference is more like ten per cent.
As a Linux user, one comment Mr de Raadt made surprised me:
In Linuxland, cat is GNU cat, tar is GNU tar, httpd comes from the Apache project, rpm comes from Red Hat, and so on. There is always an upstream maintainer for any particular package and no distributor (AFAIK) tries to maintain its 'own' releases of things. If a bug is found, the fix tries to swim upstream to the breeding ground, where it can add itself to the gene pool for future releases of all distributions. (Alas, I do not have a ten-man team auditing my comments for dodgy metaphors.)
I suppose it makes sense in a way to have your own codebase, especially if you are concentrating more on security than on adding new features. You have control over every line of code that goes in, and you don't mind missing out on new versions of stuff that is released. Also, if your original 'upstream source' is a group of people you split acrimoniously from, you might prefer not to rely on them. (Although I can't help feeling that if the OpenBSD and NetBSD people made more of an effort to commonize code in both directions, the feud wouldn't have lasted as long. This sort of thing going on between two Linux distros - eg Mandrake and RedHat - would be unthinkable.)
But not relying on an upstream maintainer for packages does not mean you can't contribute your fixes back. All the BSDs originate from a common code base, right? There must surely be at least 95% common code in the shell and shell utilities (which change relatively slowly), even if the kernels have diverged. So what effort do they make to avoid reinventing the wheel? And when OpenBSD fixes a set of bugs, do they report them to the maintainers of the original package?
Perhaps the problem would be that they couldn't agree on who should be the original source. Imagine if NetBSD claimed that they were now the 'official' maintainers of BSD make, for example. Would OpenBSD accept that? Perhaps some neutral 'BSD Foundation', with support from all three free BSDs, could take over maintenance of the common or fairly-common BSD code. Or somebody from Berkeley (Bill Joy perhaps?) could make a ceremonial proclamation.
The way to do something in Europe is to respond to the European Commission's consultation on software patents. Hurry!
BTW, I always use the printer-friendly version (if there is one) for ordinary Web browsing.
The BBC's website has a CGI script Betsie which automatically generates an 'accessible' version of a web page. But this is not an ideal solution, it would be better to write the page in an accessible way to start with. HTML-linters like Bobby, Weblint, and Tidy, not to mention just validating properly with nsgmls, can help here. Also read the W3C's accessibility guidelines.
But I don't mean to rant too much on the web purist's favourite topic of alt tags and not using tables for layout. I mean, it's not as if I even use Lynx for browsing. One thing I would like to have is a clear sense of real people behind the site. This means having a contact address (or at least a link to a contact page) on every page, and where appropriate, other meta-data like which department is responsible for this page, where the information comes from, when it was last updated, and so on.
Also try to make your URLs last a reasonably long time (i.e. not like microsoft.com, for anyone familiar with that site). This means that people can bookmark a site containing useful information and go back to the same page later. It also helps search engines.
Finally, it might be a good idea to support SSL connections and get a certificate, possibly signed by the government itself. That way people can feel reassured that 'the bad guys' aren't getting in the way.
I'd be cool to have a 'small Linux' distribution running on standard desktop PCs which used this kind of thing.
There are 'small' distros already but they tend to work by picking older and smaller versions of everything - kernel 1.0 etc. I'm thinking of something which is up-to-date but based on the 'lite' versions of software such as Qt/Embedded.
We're getting to the point where an old PC is pretty much equivalent - in screen space, processing power and memory - to a palmtop. So it seems sensible to backport things from palmtops to PCs.