Re:The problem with USB 2.0
on
USB 2.0 For Linux
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· Score: 3, Informative
And not to put too fine a point on the excellent comment that "it needs a computer to function" -- USB puts *ALL* intelligence in the USB host.. i.e. the computer. If you're Intel, this sounds like a good thing. If you're an embedded developer with anything resembling a processor, it can actually rather suck.
You see, the USB bus basically requires that the host POLL the client devices, with all of the problems that entails. E.g. the USB device's driver polling frequency determines the latency by which the host can accept an update of client state, and since polling itself requires client processing bandwidth to handle, polling faster sucks more client bandwidth. Moreover, polling sucks cycles even if there is nothing to tell the host!
USB is great as a simple desktop bus facility since it does permit cheap implementation of things like keyboards, mice, etc. But for high-rate communication between embedded devices USB is just awful.
Re:Cartoon Shading, and Dreamcast vs. PS2.
on
The New Zelda
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· Score: 2
[...]both the Dreamcast and the Gamecube are Turing complete...
Life as an embedded programmer: "I don't believe it! The CPU on this thing is a Turing Machine!" "Uh, you mean Turing complete, right?" "NO! A freaking Turing Machine, with paper tape and all. Talk about design by buzzword bingo. Can GCC even be retargeted to a Turing machine? And what about devices, how do I communicate with them.... oh, wait, there's a paper tape multiplexer.....
<sound of teeth grinding>.... this is gonna be a loooong dev cycle..."
They're going to realize their new console is the same as the Dell high end gaming box.
What, and that the GameCube is the "same" as a high-end Mac because it has a PowerPC chip? If someone is such a haaard-coooore PC gamer, why are they messing with consoles anyhow? Oh, yeah, stability and available game titles. Same as everyone else.
BTW, I punted on a Dell system "recommended" for gaming. Excluding monitor and speakers, a Dimension 4100 comes to $1058. Personally, I have better uses for $759 than to give it to Dell.
Oh, and since you haven't been following, the process of "porting" a game from XBox to Windows is not that far away from just recompiling plus a QA cycle. Moreover, what's the market motivation for MS? Not much, especially since MS then takes a large QA burden away from third-party developers and unto itself. Better to let the 3rd party devs do the easy port and pay for their own QA cycles.
If you object to having to have a "licensed" playback device to use this media, by all means don't buy anything that uses this scheme.
That's all fine and well, but the fact of the matter is that the international populace at large essentially has had a new form of media infrastructure rammed down its throat, without sufficient information on the consequences thereof. Here in the U.S., due to our broken decision to allow software patenting, this presents a particular problem.
From a traditional corporate IP perspective, Dolby's request seems reasonable. Yet it is absurd as regards its effect on our experience interacting with established media forms.
We'd be fairly offended to wake up one day to discover that we could no longer read books any way we liked because of corporate collusion to push a new proprietary licensed format. (e.g. *bing* sorry, eReader GPS indicates that you are out of the licensed territory for this book. Reporting you to the police. Have a nice day!)
DVD's are, at their essence, just more media. No matter that it's digital video, which can only exist with the aid of technology -- it's still just information intended for human consumption.
So the question becomes: is this just a phase where, while new technology is invented, we will end up yielding public IP rights to the corporations providing us with new media forms? I think that's a slippery slope, as there will *always* be new technology. As long as corporations can keep creating new tech while obsoleting old tech, they can remain in control of IP distribution without any additional legislative effort on their part. Moreover, it represents power and control I'm not comfortable with giving to anyone, much less a corporation.
On the other side, there's the argument that there needs to exist an incentive system, or else such technologies wouldn't get developed and seeded into the marketplace in the first place. I'm as yet unconvinced of the validity this argument...
.
You're making the mistake of personifying a corporation. It's bad enough when done as a matter of law and/or legal precedent, and worse when we start to think of corporations as people.
Sony is a very large company, dare I say a 'megacorp'. The 99th hand does not necessarily know what the 101st hand is doing, and may well be in competition with it. Sony actually has a track record of some divisions of the company coming out with products that trump another part of the company. The best example that comes to mind is that of digital video cameras from a few years back. The Consumer video division's bottom of the line "no frills except what pro/semi-pro film and video people want" model *completely* trumped the entire Pro video division's lineup of small digicams, and was cheaper to boot. One division of the company had made another's entire product line moot with but one innovative product.
So the deal is this: those working in the consumer electronics division probably actively dislike the whole copy protection business, as it threatens their potential market size and ability to design and market new products that might allow copying (ala Tivo, etc.). The ownz-all-da-media-rights side of the company naturally has other ideas, mostly surrounding protection of their back and forthcoming catalogs of titles.
Beautifully put. The social phenomenon you're referring to is sometimes called a "Kuhn-ian Revolution" after Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Kuhn plotted out the social and psychological patterns of scientific revolutions, from rejection to doubt to acceptance of new theories. This book is a must-read for those interested in the social progress of scientific endeavor.
On the other side of the coin, various authors (both psychologists and theologians) have theories of stages of psychological progress. One of these stages is inevitably a dogmatic phase, in which the dogmatic individual actively needs (in a psychological sense) a strictly disciplined environment/worldview. For a person in this phase, the flexibility to toss out an old worldview for a new one, to shift the entire ruleset, simply isn't possible. Scott Peck's Further Along The Road Less Travelled discusses one perspective on this sort of developmental theory.
Re:HDTV is dead. Long live HDTV
on
The Joys of HDTV
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· Score: 2
... with multiplexed NTSC and data services to boost their bottom lines.
Maybe the data services will "boost bottom lines" somehow, but I fail to see how multiplexed NTSC will do squat for broadcast profits. The problem is this: you can't create more eyeballs (or more consumer spending dollars per eyeball) by simply having more channels. Creating more channels isn't going to make advertiser's pockets deeper, either. If anyone has a viable theory of how broadcasters will do better than break-even with this (and I think they could even lose money), I'd love to hear it...
There is an interesting contrast to be made here. There's obviously a problem with the sort of prima donna who has actively destructive habits. E.g. acts in an unprofessional manner towards coworkers, doesn't follow "egoless" programming practices, or is otherwise immature in the workplace -- that boatload of alleged talent notwithstanding.
On the other hand, there are those who happen to be good programmers, but who are really hard-core computer scientists and/or software engineers. In such cases management fails utterly to understand why they work and act differently than the rest of the rank and file programmers. In days of yore, they might have achived the word "Analyst" somewhere in their title, but distinctions other than "Senior" and "Principal" seem passe these days. The basic nature of such an individual's contributions to a project are often far, far different than the rank 'n file... but both are seen as "programmers". So the question is: how to effectively educate management and set expectations under such circumstances to avoid an unwarranted "prima donna" tag due to miscommunication about the nature of one's work?
The penalty *IS* the point. This proposed penalty is not just "a little steep". At face value, this easily appears to be cruel and unusual punishment. 15 years in jail? Give me a break. When drunk drivers who put *lives* at risk don't get that sort of time, much less financial penalty, (especially on a first offense!), this becomes an abuse of the law and of law enforcement.
Actually, generics are Under Development. See Jun Furuse's page below for details. There will be some time to hash around with the theory and implementation (as with the merger of O'Caml and Jacques Garrigue's O'Labl work in O'Caml 3.x), and barring major roadblocks, I would expect to see G'Caml functionality in a future major release of O'Caml.
There's another way for corporations to view the GPL. Consider that for most companies (except Microsoft) acquisition, maintenance, and/or development of an OS platform (either as users or to develop product for sale) is a cost center. It sucks up resources (money, admins, developer-hours, etc) to provide basic infrastructure.
Companies are already realizing this in many appliance and embedded markets. Considerable numbers of such devices coming out that use a variant of Linux or some other open source OS (e.g. eCos for small-footprint embedded realtime kernel needs.) This distributes the development cost over the entire user base of these pieces of infrastructure code, and often eliminates per-seat (for development) and per-user (for distribution) licensing costs.
The problem with the GPV is that it is not a true form of sharing, but a coercive one.
Let's examine this 'coercion' you speak of. You clearly mean it in a personally invasive (and trollish, IMO) manner:
Sharing at gunpoint isn't sharing, it's theft.
Precisely how is the GPL 'coercive' in this manner? Did RMS beat you up in grade school or something? I fail to see how a developer would ever be forced to use the GPL if not utilizing GPL'ed code for a project. Oh wait! I get it: you're a greedy fscker who wants to be able to take from developers who have authored GPL'ed code without honoring their request as is their right as authors under copyright law that you reciprocate if you use their work.
So next question: Seriously, how do you feel about commercial software? Some authors require that you pay for their work, and don't even get source. Are you also angry about this choice of distribution terms?
As near as I can tell (and this is your fault, for ranting without explaining), your real problem is that non-GPL developers aren't producing source code that you (or others) can use for non-reciprocal gains (e.g. proprietary extension, etc.). You are whining because the 'cost' by your philosophy, is too high. I'm sorry, but if it's that important to you, you'll just have to write it all non-GPL. Then we can put Chip's hypothesis to the test!
This has little to do with creative juices. Disney is out to make money. In their animated work, the machine works like this: take a classic (aka 'proven') story, tweak it to their satisfaction, and release it under their own animation style and direction (and usually too much spontaneous breaking into song for my taste...;-).
This process is so institutionalized it's even got a name: "Disneyficiation".
The fact that they've taken to poaching story concepts from much more recent manga and anime works is perhaps somewhat depressing, but no different in style than Snow White. They even did it to themselves: IMO, Fantasia 2000 was mostly a Disneyfied knock-off of the original!
IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOUR FIRST-YEAR LANGUAGE IS NEVER USED AGAIN IN YOUR LIFE. As a CS major, you should learn many languages of several paradigms to some extent or another. C++ is an awful first-year language, and I'm very happy to see instruction move to Java. The reasons are the same as why most schools during the procedural era used Pascal or Modula-2 for the first year, then ramped up to C for third semester and beyond. The idea is that good languages emphasize extremely important design concepts early on, with a minimum of distraction. FWIW, I think that C was orders of magnitude better than C++ in this regard yet...
Largely due to a misguided OO-fad pressure, university CS departments forgot their reasons reasons against C in the first year and adopted C++. The argument often went "but it's a relevant language, and industry wants it!" Thus academia, like many companies at the time, made an unprepared mass transition to C++ (in the mid-90's more than 67% of departments used C++ in the first year). Thus the pedagogical issues with C were compounded by the added complexities and pitfalls of C++. Worse, virtually none of the new C++ instructors had any clue about how to leverage the OO paradigm whatsoever. At best, they taught "Modula-C", and at worst you got students in senior level OS classes asking "do I need to write a class for this project?" Finally, the faculty teaching higher level classes in these departments generally didn't retrain either. What many CS students don't realize is that a good four-year program isn't just a disconncted collection of classes. The students should be gradually ramped up in their design and implementation skills throughout their program. But the faculty suddenly had a design (non-OO vs. OO language) and language (via gross misunderstanding of C++'s tools) disconnect with the students. Disaster.
Beyond all that, there are specific reasons to choose Java over C++ as a first year language. First: C++ has no object library, Java does. Yes, now after many years, it sort of has the standard template library, but for anyone with experience with languages like Smalltalk or Java, the STL is too little, too late. If you need further convincing, take a look at Brown University's first-year program, and what the students are able to accomplish both from a pedagogical standpoint and from a look-what-I-made! standpoint. The first year is run by Andy van Dam (yes, of Computer Graphics fame) and is a fantastic model for excellent OO instruction. Also check out University of Virginia's program -- and if you can get the opportunity to hear Jane Prey (on the Board of Directors of the ACM's Computer Science Education SIG) talk about their program, take it!
I taught a variety of CS classes over a period of several years, and was (am) very interested in the best techniques available for teaching our the mathematics and engineering of our discipline. All of this experience suggests that the introduction of C++ to the first year created a *major* problem for Computer Science -- I'm glad to finally see it phased out for a clearly better language.
Whether you agree with SPAM or not, it's a constitutionally protected right of the sender, just like gun ownership.
(Ob. disclaimer: IANAL)
I don't buy this. The argument against spam is NOT content based, or speaker based. It's recipient based. To my mind, spamming incorporates a sense of personal trespass or invasion of privacy. It seems that an anti-spam law falls in the same category of laws which deal with harassment, stalking, etc. Moreover, we already permit some sensible limitations on free speech -- notably libel and slander laws. While it is important to avoid slippery slopes which would eliminate free speech, we must also sometimes hack the social contract to patch bugs. 8-)
Is it hypocrisy or just duplicity? The corporate mindset illustrated here is quite consistent: make money by any means necessary. It would only be hypocritical if there were earnestly held beliefs that were contradictory. Last time I checked, PR spin doesn't count as "belief."
It seems that all of those indie artists on MP3.com just got sucked in by a big label. This is reminiscent of the ongoing pattern of indie labels being bought out (or fake indies being created by) the big labels.
While the legal and financial arrangements btw the artists and MP3.com haven't changed as a direct result of this acquisition, it will be interesting to see what Vivendi does on this count (*cough* screwtheartists *cough*) in coming months.
The only workable solution to this problem will be achieved through social means.
I'll go one step further and say the following: The only workable solution will be one that obeys the economics of the situation.
The economics of scarcity that permitted the media industries to grow into their present form has been changed irrevocably by digital technology. People are likely to continue to spend money on music and other media, but "how much money?" and "under what circumstances?" have become open questions. It's just gotta suck when your business model goes *poof*. 8-)
Meanwhile, on the Debian front...
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
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· Score: 4
.... we still have Mozilla "Stone Knives and Bearskins" M18-3 as our most current package.
It seems that the major roadblock is legal review of the crypto-in-main policy amendment. But of course, this proposal is 117 days old as of this writing... with no new news that I've been able to detect.
Computer programming languages are designed for the rigorous expression of solutions to problems. The nature of the problems so discussed and solved are practically unconstrained. In essence, any domain of human endeavor or interest that is sufficiently well understood (even if only approximately) to be described with the necessary detail may be addressed by a computer program.
except when you would have used a function pointer before.
Actually, this highlights (from the perspective of an embedded programmer) one of the biggest problems I have with C++. Personally, I have no problems getting good performance using C++ code... but this requires (IMO) far too much knowledge of the C++ compiler implementation. C requires some implementation knowledge to use effectively (e.g. strings are null-terminated arrays of char, etc.)... but in C++ there is just too much implementation-specific crap irrelevant to the programmer-as-designer's life.
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And not to put too fine a point on the excellent comment that "it needs a computer to function" -- USB puts *ALL* intelligence in the USB host.. i.e. the computer. If you're Intel, this sounds like a good thing. If you're an embedded developer with anything resembling a processor, it can actually rather suck.
You see, the USB bus basically requires that the host POLL the client devices, with all of the problems that entails. E.g. the USB device's driver polling frequency determines the latency by which the host can accept an update of client state, and since polling itself requires client processing bandwidth to handle, polling faster sucks more client bandwidth. Moreover, polling sucks cycles even if there is nothing to tell the host!
USB is great as a simple desktop bus facility since it does permit cheap implementation of things like keyboards, mice, etc. But for high-rate communication between embedded devices USB is just awful.
Life as an embedded programmer: "I don't believe it! The CPU on this thing is a Turing Machine!" "Uh, you mean Turing complete, right?" "NO! A freaking Turing Machine, with paper tape and all. Talk about design by buzzword bingo. Can GCC even be retargeted to a Turing machine? And what about devices, how do I communicate with them.... oh, wait, there's a paper tape multiplexer. ....
<sound of teeth grinding> .... this is gonna be a loooong dev cycle..."
8-)
BTW, I punted on a Dell system "recommended" for gaming. Excluding monitor and speakers, a Dimension 4100 comes to $1058. Personally, I have better uses for $759 than to give it to Dell.
Oh, and since you haven't been following, the process of "porting" a game from XBox to Windows is not that far away from just recompiling plus a QA cycle. Moreover, what's the market motivation for MS? Not much, especially since MS then takes a large QA burden away from third-party developers and unto itself. Better to let the 3rd party devs do the easy port and pay for their own QA cycles.
From a traditional corporate IP perspective, Dolby's request seems reasonable. Yet it is absurd as regards its effect on our experience interacting with established media forms. We'd be fairly offended to wake up one day to discover that we could no longer read books any way we liked because of corporate collusion to push a new proprietary licensed format. (e.g. *bing* sorry, eReader GPS indicates that you are out of the licensed territory for this book. Reporting you to the police. Have a nice day!)
DVD's are, at their essence, just more media. No matter that it's digital video, which can only exist with the aid of technology -- it's still just information intended for human consumption.
So the question becomes: is this just a phase where, while new technology is invented, we will end up yielding public IP rights to the corporations providing us with new media forms? I think that's a slippery slope, as there will *always* be new technology. As long as corporations can keep creating new tech while obsoleting old tech, they can remain in control of IP distribution without any additional legislative effort on their part. Moreover, it represents power and control I'm not comfortable with giving to anyone, much less a corporation.
On the other side, there's the argument that there needs to exist an incentive system, or else such technologies wouldn't get developed and seeded into the marketplace in the first place. I'm as yet unconvinced of the validity this argument... .
You're making the mistake of personifying a corporation. It's bad enough when done as a matter of law and/or legal precedent, and worse when we start to think of corporations as people.
Sony is a very large company, dare I say a 'megacorp'. The 99th hand does not necessarily know what the 101st hand is doing, and may well be in competition with it. Sony actually has a track record of some divisions of the company coming out with products that trump another part of the company. The best example that comes to mind is that of digital video cameras from a few years back. The Consumer video division's bottom of the line "no frills except what pro/semi-pro film and video people want" model *completely* trumped the entire Pro video division's lineup of small digicams, and was cheaper to boot. One division of the company had made another's entire product line moot with but one innovative product.
So the deal is this: those working in the consumer electronics division probably actively dislike the whole copy protection business, as it threatens their potential market size and ability to design and market new products that might allow copying (ala Tivo, etc.). The ownz-all-da-media-rights side of the company naturally has other ideas, mostly surrounding protection of their back and forthcoming catalogs of titles.
Kuhn plotted out the social and psychological patterns of scientific revolutions, from rejection to doubt to acceptance of new theories. This book is a must-read for those interested in the social progress of scientific endeavor.
On the other side of the coin, various authors (both psychologists and theologians) have theories of stages of psychological progress. One of these stages is inevitably a dogmatic phase, in which the dogmatic individual actively needs (in a psychological sense) a strictly disciplined environment/worldview. For a person in this phase, the flexibility to toss out an old worldview for a new one, to shift the entire ruleset, simply isn't possible. Scott Peck's Further Along The Road Less Travelled discusses one perspective on this sort of developmental theory.
There is an interesting contrast to be made here. There's obviously a problem with the sort of prima donna who has actively destructive habits. E.g. acts in an unprofessional manner towards coworkers, doesn't follow "egoless" programming practices, or is otherwise immature in the workplace -- that boatload of alleged talent notwithstanding.
On the other hand, there are those who happen to be good programmers, but who are really hard-core computer scientists and/or software engineers. In such cases management fails utterly to understand why they work and act differently than the rest of the rank and file programmers. In days of yore, they might have achived the word "Analyst" somewhere in their title, but distinctions other than "Senior" and "Principal" seem passe these days. The basic nature of such an individual's contributions to a project are often far, far different than the rank 'n file... but both are seen as "programmers". So the question is: how to effectively educate management and set expectations under such circumstances to avoid an unwarranted "prima donna" tag due to miscommunication about the nature of one's work?
The penalty *IS* the point. This proposed penalty is not just "a little steep". At face value, this easily appears to be cruel and unusual punishment. 15 years in jail? Give me a break. When drunk drivers who put *lives* at risk don't get that sort of time, much less financial penalty, (especially on a first offense!), this becomes an abuse of the law and of law enforcement.
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~furuse/generics/
There's another way for corporations to view the GPL. Consider that for most companies (except Microsoft) acquisition, maintenance, and/or development of an OS platform (either as users or to develop product for sale) is a cost center. It sucks up resources (money, admins, developer-hours, etc) to provide basic infrastructure.
Companies are already realizing this in many appliance and embedded markets. Considerable numbers of such devices coming out that use a variant of Linux or some other open source OS (e.g. eCos for small-footprint embedded realtime kernel needs.) This distributes the development cost over the entire user base of these pieces of infrastructure code, and often eliminates per-seat (for development) and per-user (for distribution) licensing costs.
Sorry folks, "non-GPL developers" should've been "GPL developers" in that sentence. And I even previewed. :-P
So next question: Seriously, how do you feel about commercial software? Some authors require that you pay for their work, and don't even get source. Are you also angry about this choice of distribution terms?
As near as I can tell (and this is your fault, for ranting without explaining), your real problem is that non-GPL developers aren't producing source code that you (or others) can use for non-reciprocal gains (e.g. proprietary extension, etc.). You are whining because the 'cost' by your philosophy, is too high. I'm sorry, but if it's that important to you, you'll just have to write it all non-GPL. Then we can put Chip's hypothesis to the test!
This has little to do with creative juices. Disney is out to make money. In their animated work, the machine works like this: take a classic (aka 'proven') story, tweak it to their satisfaction, and release it under their own animation style and direction (and usually too much spontaneous breaking into song for my taste... ;-).
This process is so institutionalized it's even got a name: "Disneyficiation".
The fact that they've taken to poaching story concepts from much more recent manga and anime works is perhaps somewhat depressing, but no different in style than Snow White. They even did it to themselves: IMO, Fantasia 2000 was mostly a Disneyfied knock-off of the original!
Largely due to a misguided OO-fad pressure, university CS departments forgot their reasons reasons against C in the first year and adopted C++. The argument often went "but it's a relevant language, and industry wants it!" Thus academia, like many companies at the time, made an unprepared mass transition to C++ (in the mid-90's more than 67% of departments used C++ in the first year). Thus the pedagogical issues with C were compounded by the added complexities and pitfalls of C++. Worse, virtually none of the new C++ instructors had any clue about how to leverage the OO paradigm whatsoever. At best, they taught "Modula-C", and at worst you got students in senior level OS classes asking "do I need to write a class for this project?" Finally, the faculty teaching higher level classes in these departments generally didn't retrain either. What many CS students don't realize is that a good four-year program isn't just a disconncted collection of classes. The students should be gradually ramped up in their design and implementation skills throughout their program. But the faculty suddenly had a design (non-OO vs. OO language) and language (via gross misunderstanding of C++'s tools) disconnect with the students. Disaster.
Beyond all that, there are specific reasons to choose Java over C++ as a first year language. First: C++ has no object library, Java does. Yes, now after many years, it sort of has the standard template library, but for anyone with experience with languages like Smalltalk or Java, the STL is too little, too late. If you need further convincing, take a look at Brown University's first-year program, and what the students are able to accomplish both from a pedagogical standpoint and from a look-what-I-made! standpoint. The first year is run by Andy van Dam (yes, of Computer Graphics fame) and is a fantastic model for excellent OO instruction. Also check out University of Virginia's program -- and if you can get the opportunity to hear Jane Prey (on the Board of Directors of the ACM's Computer Science Education SIG) talk about their program, take it!
I taught a variety of CS classes over a period of several years, and was (am) very interested in the best techniques available for teaching our the mathematics and engineering of our discipline. All of this experience suggests that the introduction of C++ to the first year created a *major* problem for Computer Science -- I'm glad to finally see it phased out for a clearly better language.
(Ob. disclaimer: IANAL)
I don't buy this. The argument against spam is NOT content based, or speaker based. It's recipient based. To my mind, spamming incorporates a sense of personal trespass or invasion of privacy. It seems that an anti-spam law falls in the same category of laws which deal with harassment, stalking, etc. Moreover, we already permit some sensible limitations on free speech -- notably libel and slander laws. While it is important to avoid slippery slopes which would eliminate free speech, we must also sometimes hack the social contract to patch bugs. 8-)
Is it hypocrisy or just duplicity? The corporate mindset illustrated here is quite consistent: make money by any means necessary. It would only be hypocritical if there were earnestly held beliefs that were contradictory. Last time I checked, PR spin doesn't count as "belief."
"News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
<sigh>
It seems that all of those indie artists on MP3.com just got sucked in by a big label. This is reminiscent of the ongoing pattern of indie labels being bought out (or fake indies being created by) the big labels.
While the legal and financial arrangements btw the artists and MP3.com haven't changed as a direct result of this acquisition, it will be interesting to see what Vivendi does on this count (*cough* screwtheartists *cough*) in coming months.
The economics of scarcity that permitted the media industries to grow into their present form has been changed irrevocably by digital technology. People are likely to continue to spend money on music and other media, but "how much money?" and "under what circumstances?" have become open questions. It's just gotta suck when your business model goes *poof*. 8-)
It seems that the major roadblock is legal review of the crypto-in-main policy amendment. But of course, this proposal is 117 days old as of this writing... with no new news that I've been able to detect.
Does anyone have a clue what the holdup is?
Computer programming languages are designed for the rigorous expression of solutions to problems. The nature of the problems so discussed and solved are practically unconstrained. In essence, any domain of human endeavor or interest that is sufficiently well understood (even if only approximately) to be described with the necessary detail may be addressed by a computer program.
I dunno, but that sounds like one of the best excuses for a geek party I've ever heard.
;-)
Heck, that might even be a big enough party to be called a "Conference."