C and C++ are "portable assembly". All the languages that you mentioned are inherently portable and cross-platform.
What Java has going over C and C++ is a useful large standard library framework. But heck, if you use say Qt, Mozilla's NSPR, Apache's APR, Glib, or something else as your C/C++ platform you'd have many of the same advantages that the Java library gives you.
Genocide is taking affirmative actions to cause another race's end. Unless you're arguing a conspiracy theory the West created HIV to kill all the Africans, this isn't genocide.
Also, the estimated number of people in Africa with HIV is 25 million. While a staggeringly huge number, it's not "hundreds of millions".
I don't want to see millions of people die slow, horrible deaths, but it's not like I'm killing them. A virus is.
Though, Office has been around for a long time and Openoffice hasn't, so I'm sure there will be lots of features and performance gains in the coming years for the latter. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on Openoffice.
That's not true at all. While OpenOffice is "only" maybe 5-6 years old now, it is built on top of the older StarOffice codebase, which has been in development since the mid-1980s. It's not like they started from scratch a few weeks ago...
What you're suggesting is that Microsoft might license tech from a company whose main product is a re-implemenation of the Microsoft Windows SDK for *NIX. If this happens, I'll either eat my hat or die of laughter. Oh the irony.
Your argument assumes a few things - most notably, that progress is linear and not sporadic and tangential. That if you want better computers, you should invest in better computers. But to accept that is to accept that interesting solutions to some hard, seemingly unrelated problem apply less well than dedicated research in that specialized domain. I don't accept that. Or that better computers are sufficient motivation in their own right. As an engineer, the carrot offered by space-age research has one heck of a better coolness factor than just earning another paycheck.
Pushing up against the limits often yields the most interesting ideas. And space is one of those big, cold limits that stoke the fires of our imaginations and our resourcefulness. The cube at Intel can't hold a candle.
Having a bunch of smart folks with a budget and a mission, sitting around in a room is a great investment, in large part because of its peripheral benefits. Not everything's planned. Not all development is linear. And not all significant discoveries are immediately relevant. Science for science's sake. Coz it's cool and we get to reap the benefits of its coolness.
That's only true if you can only accept Copyright + Capitalism as the only way (or best way) to reward all kinds of innovation. It may (or may not) be the case that IP infringement may lead to "insufficient" compensation, which in turn might stifle *future* innovation/production. I get this, but it can't possibly dis-incentivize past creations or affect how much it cost to produce them.
The crux of the situation is that a rivalrous system (the laws of supply and demand, as applied to information monopolies) is being artificially applied to a non-rivalrous product (information). It's putting a square peg into a round hole. Clearly, one doesn't want to disincentivize innovation - I want anything but that. But it's also clearly wrong to compare a good/service to an idea in the way you're doing.
As capitalism understands, the value of physical goods is in large part due to resource scarcity. Iron ore is valuable because there is a limited supply of it, and it takes time and workers to extract and refine it. A worker's time is valuable. An assembly line costs money. All of these things must be in place to create a company's first physical product and all subsequent "copies" of that product. The cost of producing your first Lexus is probably a billion dollars. The cost of producing every one after that is probably 20k dollars.
In an information society, you still need workers, facilities, and tools. These all still cost money and have value. The cost of producing the first copy of Microsoft Office 12 is probably a billion dollars. However, the cost of producing every one after that is 0 dollars (excluding marginal costs of bandwidth or physical media). The costs involved with physical replication and distribution are entirely irrelevant when applied to information. It's at least awkward - if not reprehensible - to apply an enconomic/distribution system based around rivalrous goods to non-rivalrous ones.
Your argument only holds water if all you can imagine is capitalism and copyright as the basis of an IP regime. While it's what we've got - and I haven't yet come across a better alternative - I'm unwilling to concede that this is the best we can possibly do.
If I take a block of cheese without paying, are there fewer blocks of cheese on the shelf for the next customer? Now, if I download a TV show without paying, are there fewer copies of that TV show online for the next guy?
Information is a non-rivalarous good. Cheese is a rivalrous good. Your extension to KFG's analogy is not apples to apples. The laws of supply and demand get wonky when supply is effectively unlimited (and effectively free, after the production costs involved leading up to the first copy)...
I'm confused by those who think that Google isn't unambiguously in the clear here. Not because they're doing it for a scholarly purpose. Or because they're only reproducing a terse portion of the work. Or not even because what Google is doing can't possibly affect these author's past decisions to create their works, and thus retroactively disincentivize their creation (ahem, Sonny Bono CTEA, I'm looking at you here...).
I think that if you're arguing those points, perhaps you're looking at this from a too-narrow perspective. Look outside of the box. Sure, Google might (or might not) win on the above points alone. But I don't think that Google is copying expressive works. Google is copying databases of words.
In the case of Rural v. Feist, the Court ruled that databases (in that case, telephone directories) were not entitled to copyright protection, as they contained little (if any) expressive content. Copyright protects expression fixed in a tangible media, and even then only within certain limitations.
Here, I believe that Google is treating otherwise expressive, copyrighted texts as databases, thus stripping them of their expressivity in the context of the texts' use. I think that the use of a derivitive work matters a great deal in determining that work's expressivity before the Court.
The search results page rendered by Google might have some expressiveness, and be copyrightable. The texts that Google OCR'd most likely are expressive and copyrightable. But Google's treatment of these texts as search indexes - reverse text lookup databases - is in itself not expressive. They're just unexpressive token sequences, capable of being searched. It is in the translation from meaningful, expressive words into an ordered sequence of cold, machine-searchable tokens that the work loses its expressivity. Note that this distinction would still attach copyright protection to things like eBooks, as the purpose of eBooks is to convey expressivity to a human reader via an electronic medium. The purpose of tokens is to convey an ordered sequence of words to an algorithm incapable of appreciating the work's expressivity or content in any way that we'd call "meaningful".
From that, we're left to conclude that the tokens "John Galt" appearing on page 1 of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" next to the tokens "Who is" is merely a fact, absent any inherent meaningful expressivity. And absent this expressivity, copyright doesn't attach to this sentence (which, fwiw, is probably considerably too short for copyright to attach to, anyway). Facts - even collections of facts - simply aren't protected under copyright law.
Google's Print project is just a fact retrieval system - in essence, no different from the index in the back of the book that they're OCR'ing. Copyright law needn't get involved, because it simply doesn't apply.
I'd recommend using the CVS version of AbiWord. It'll preserve almost all of your visual and semantic meaning using XHTML and CSS. This includes fairly complex things like endnotes, footnotes, tables, floating text boxes, etc.
While I happen to agree with you, the Feds don't. In 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed government-funded institutions to own the IP rights of the things they created (using public money).
The Feds are also increasingly using contractors to assemble and produce various sensitive information and products - a legal loophole that makes sure that the FOIA doesn't apply.
Just FWIW.
Re:OpenDocument for Spreadsheets
on
KOffice 1.4 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As Morten points out, their spreadsheet documentation is insufficient to build an implementation around.
However, the Nokia Maemo team will be helping AbiWord and Gnumeric improve their ODT import/export support[1]. For what it's worth, when I've been working on the SXW/ODT import/export in AbiWord, I only sparingly use the official specification, as it's too large and cumbersome to be of great use. It's so much easier to create interesting test cases and map those back to AbiWord's semantics. I imagine that the Nokia guys will be doing something similar when they add better ODT support in Gnumeric.
I wonder what their motivations are for working on this instead of helping out the gstreamer guys on swfdec. swfdec is licensed under the GPL and largely already works, including its Mozilla plugin. Even on non-x86 platforms.
Rather than making guesses as to whether legal efforts against Bram would be successful, he could've just waited a few weeks and found out for certain. A much safer bet (from a purely legal perspective) would've been to see how the Supreme Court Case MGM v. Grokster was decided. The ruling is due any day now (tm).
There is no indication that China will use or require GPL'd software to meet its goal. Further, it is unclear that things such as the Linux kernel, LibC, GNOME/KDE desktop, and etc. meet China's 50% "developed in China" requirement, as they were largely developed by Europeans and Americans. Unless they want to reinvent these wheels, which is their right to.
But simply because China *can* manufacture stuff and the US apparently can't, doesn't make it morally right for China to enact a "Made in China" law and morally wrong for the US to enact effectively exactly the same law. Besides, China's IP sector is about as built-up and robust as the US' manufacturing base is these days...
If it is ok for China to be paranoid about backdoors hidden in US-produced software, it is ok for the US to be paranoid about backdoors hidden in Chinese-produced hardware. It is that simple.
Just four days ago,/. ran a story about how China's government was only going to buy Chinese software. The +5 comments in that story tend toward this sentiment:
China has a much more paranoid outlook. Good for them.
Makes perfect sense for a variety of reasons to do this.
...
In this thread, we the +5's tend toward denouncing the US's choice to effectively do the same thing. Is there some method to the madness? I'm genuinely curious...
If you are a copyright holder, you've always been able to reassign copyright or relicense your work. This is not earth-shattering news just because it's a FOSS work being relicensed. Relicensing FOSS code is far more common than you'd think.
The good thing here is that the original work is still covered under the TOCs of its original FOSS license, so the original author and others can continue making improvements and otherwise maintain the software.
Using the FC3 printer configuration tool, I checked the "share this printer" box. It asked me to give the printer a name, which I did.
I went downstairs to my GF's Powerbook running OSX 10.3.x and told it that I would like to add a network printer. It found the printer that I had created. I clicked "print a test page" and everything "just worked." I don't see how it could get much easier.
New York: 8,115,135 people in city, 21,796,124 in metro 5,838 skyscrapers 800 km^2
Dubai: 674,100 people in city, 1,510,000 in metro 523 skyscrapers 3,885 km^2
So New York has 12x the people and 11x the skyscrapers in 1/5 the area. The 74 year old Empire State building is still 26m taller than your current tallest building and the world trade towers were so recently brought down were taller still. Dubai looks quaint compared to New York.
What I find it interesting is that a country with 1/4 the US's population and with a roughly equivalent standard of living represents a roughly equivalent percentage of the world's hacked PCs, even if the difference between the UK and US is within this poll's margin of error.
Is the US public that far behind in broadband connections? Is the UK public engaging in more risky computing practices? Are US ISPs blocking more 0wn3d boxes? Are the UK ISPs incompetent, overwhelmed, or more laisse-faire?
Could be. At least in a typical GPL case, the tables are turned with respect to the RIAA cases.
In a typical RIAA displute, the RIAA has deep pockets and ample lawyers. They're bringing a case against some poor schmoe. The schmoe isn't really profiting from the infringement. But it's in the schmoe's best interest to settle.
In a typical GPL dispute, some poor schmoe like me brings a case against a company with comparitively deep pockets and ample lawyers. The company's profiting from their infringement. But it's in the company's best-interests to settle.
That's not true at all. I've hashed it out with a few corporations over wvWare, my MSWord reading library. Usually the threat of action is enough to have the infringers quaking in their boots, and coax them into complaince. When it's not enough, you've got the FSF all-too willing to come to your aide:
Regarding these cases, Eben Moglen (the FSF's general legal counsel) once told me that the reason you've never seen a GPL violation case go to court is because it's always a slam-dunk case that will be decided in your favor; that it's always in the infringer's best interest to settle out of court. I don't know how self-serving that statement was, but it's worth pondering at least. It's been my experience, in any case.
If you believe that this has nothing at all to do with the First Amendment, I suggest that you re-read it and the substantive case law surrounding it. The relevant bit is highlighted:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Slashdot Mirror
C and C++ are "portable assembly". All the languages that you mentioned are inherently portable and cross-platform.
What Java has going over C and C++ is a useful large standard library framework. But heck, if you use say Qt, Mozilla's NSPR, Apache's APR, Glib, or something else as your C/C++ platform you'd have many of the same advantages that the Java library gives you.
Genocide is taking affirmative actions to cause another race's end. Unless you're arguing a conspiracy theory the West created HIV to kill all the Africans, this isn't genocide.
Also, the estimated number of people in Africa with HIV is 25 million. While a staggeringly huge number, it's not "hundreds of millions".
I don't want to see millions of people die slow, horrible deaths, but it's not like I'm killing them. A virus is.
That's not true at all. While OpenOffice is "only" maybe 5-6 years old now, it is built on top of the older StarOffice codebase, which has been in development since the mid-1980s. It's not like they started from scratch a few weeks ago...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
One suggestion is to AbiWord 2.4 on the command line. It's as simple as:
AbiWord --to=doc foo.odt
AbiWord --to=odt foo.doc
What you're suggesting is that Microsoft might license tech from a company whose main product is a re-implemenation of the Microsoft Windows SDK for *NIX. If this happens, I'll either eat my hat or die of laughter. Oh the irony.
Your argument assumes a few things - most notably, that progress is linear and not sporadic and tangential. That if you want better computers, you should invest in better computers. But to accept that is to accept that interesting solutions to some hard, seemingly unrelated problem apply less well than dedicated research in that specialized domain. I don't accept that. Or that better computers are sufficient motivation in their own right. As an engineer, the carrot offered by space-age research has one heck of a better coolness factor than just earning another paycheck.
Pushing up against the limits often yields the most interesting ideas. And space is one of those big, cold limits that stoke the fires of our imaginations and our resourcefulness. The cube at Intel can't hold a candle.
Having a bunch of smart folks with a budget and a mission, sitting around in a room is a great investment, in large part because of its peripheral benefits. Not everything's planned. Not all development is linear. And not all significant discoveries are immediately relevant. Science for science's sake. Coz it's cool and we get to reap the benefits of its coolness.
That's only true if you can only accept Copyright + Capitalism as the only way (or best way) to reward all kinds of innovation. It may (or may not) be the case that IP infringement may lead to "insufficient" compensation, which in turn might stifle *future* innovation/production. I get this, but it can't possibly dis-incentivize past creations or affect how much it cost to produce them.
The crux of the situation is that a rivalrous system (the laws of supply and demand, as applied to information monopolies) is being artificially applied to a non-rivalrous product (information). It's putting a square peg into a round hole. Clearly, one doesn't want to disincentivize innovation - I want anything but that. But it's also clearly wrong to compare a good/service to an idea in the way you're doing.
As capitalism understands, the value of physical goods is in large part due to resource scarcity. Iron ore is valuable because there is a limited supply of it, and it takes time and workers to extract and refine it. A worker's time is valuable. An assembly line costs money. All of these things must be in place to create a company's first physical product and all subsequent "copies" of that product. The cost of producing your first Lexus is probably a billion dollars. The cost of producing every one after that is probably 20k dollars.
In an information society, you still need workers, facilities, and tools. These all still cost money and have value. The cost of producing the first copy of Microsoft Office 12 is probably a billion dollars. However, the cost of producing every one after that is 0 dollars (excluding marginal costs of bandwidth or physical media). The costs involved with physical replication and distribution are entirely irrelevant when applied to information. It's at least awkward - if not reprehensible - to apply an enconomic/distribution system based around rivalrous goods to non-rivalrous ones.
Your argument only holds water if all you can imagine is capitalism and copyright as the basis of an IP regime. While it's what we've got - and I haven't yet come across a better alternative - I'm unwilling to concede that this is the best we can possibly do.
If I take a block of cheese without paying, are there fewer blocks of cheese on the shelf for the next customer? Now, if I download a TV show without paying, are there fewer copies of that TV show online for the next guy?
Information is a non-rivalarous good. Cheese is a rivalrous good. Your extension to KFG's analogy is not apples to apples. The laws of supply and demand get wonky when supply is effectively unlimited (and effectively free, after the production costs involved leading up to the first copy)...
I'm confused by those who think that Google isn't unambiguously in the clear here. Not because they're doing it for a scholarly purpose. Or because they're only reproducing a terse portion of the work. Or not even because what Google is doing can't possibly affect these author's past decisions to create their works, and thus retroactively disincentivize their creation (ahem, Sonny Bono CTEA, I'm looking at you here...).
I think that if you're arguing those points, perhaps you're looking at this from a too-narrow perspective. Look outside of the box. Sure, Google might (or might not) win on the above points alone. But I don't think that Google is copying expressive works. Google is copying databases of words.
In the case of Rural v. Feist, the Court ruled that databases (in that case, telephone directories) were not entitled to copyright protection, as they contained little (if any) expressive content. Copyright protects expression fixed in a tangible media, and even then only within certain limitations.
Here, I believe that Google is treating otherwise expressive, copyrighted texts as databases, thus stripping them of their expressivity in the context of the texts' use. I think that the use of a derivitive work matters a great deal in determining that work's expressivity before the Court.
The search results page rendered by Google might have some expressiveness, and be copyrightable. The texts that Google OCR'd most likely are expressive and copyrightable. But Google's treatment of these texts as search indexes - reverse text lookup databases - is in itself not expressive. They're just unexpressive token sequences, capable of being searched. It is in the translation from meaningful, expressive words into an ordered sequence of cold, machine-searchable tokens that the work loses its expressivity. Note that this distinction would still attach copyright protection to things like eBooks, as the purpose of eBooks is to convey expressivity to a human reader via an electronic medium. The purpose of tokens is to convey an ordered sequence of words to an algorithm incapable of appreciating the work's expressivity or content in any way that we'd call "meaningful".
From that, we're left to conclude that the tokens "John Galt" appearing on page 1 of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" next to the tokens "Who is" is merely a fact, absent any inherent meaningful expressivity. And absent this expressivity, copyright doesn't attach to this sentence (which, fwiw, is probably considerably too short for copyright to attach to, anyway). Facts - even collections of facts - simply aren't protected under copyright law.
Google's Print project is just a fact retrieval system - in essence, no different from the index in the back of the book that they're OCR'ing. Copyright law needn't get involved, because it simply doesn't apply.
I'd recommend using the CVS version of AbiWord. It'll preserve almost all of your visual and semantic meaning using XHTML and CSS. This includes fairly complex things like endnotes, footnotes, tables, floating text boxes, etc.
AbiWord --to=file.html file.doc
http://www.abisource.com/
While I happen to agree with you, the Feds don't. In 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed government-funded institutions to own the IP rights of the things they created (using public money).
The Feds are also increasingly using contractors to assemble and produce various sensitive information and products - a legal loophole that makes sure that the FOIA doesn't apply.
Just FWIW.
As Morten points out, their spreadsheet documentation is insufficient to build an implementation around.
/ 2005/Jun/0276.html
However, the Nokia Maemo team will be helping AbiWord and Gnumeric improve their ODT import/export support[1]. For what it's worth, when I've been working on the SXW/ODT import/export in AbiWord, I only sparingly use the official specification, as it's too large and cumbersome to be of great use. It's so much easier to create interesting test cases and map those back to AbiWord's semantics. I imagine that the Nokia guys will be doing something similar when they add better ODT support in Gnumeric.
[1] http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/13/ 1158208&tid=181&tid=3
I wonder what their motivations are for working on this instead of helping out the gstreamer guys on swfdec. swfdec is licensed under the GPL and largely already works, including its Mozilla plugin. Even on non-x86 platforms.
http://www.schleef.org/swfdec/
Rather than making guesses as to whether legal efforts against Bram would be successful, he could've just waited a few weeks and found out for certain. A much safer bet (from a purely legal perspective) would've been to see how the Supreme Court Case MGM v. Grokster was decided. The ruling is due any day now (tm).
There is no indication that China will use or require GPL'd software to meet its goal. Further, it is unclear that things such as the Linux kernel, LibC, GNOME/KDE desktop, and etc. meet China's 50% "developed in China" requirement, as they were largely developed by Europeans and Americans. Unless they want to reinvent these wheels, which is their right to.
But simply because China *can* manufacture stuff and the US apparently can't, doesn't make it morally right for China to enact a "Made in China" law and morally wrong for the US to enact effectively exactly the same law. Besides, China's IP sector is about as built-up and robust as the US' manufacturing base is these days...
If it is ok for China to be paranoid about backdoors hidden in US-produced software, it is ok for the US to be paranoid about backdoors hidden in Chinese-produced hardware. It is that simple.
Is this not fairly obvious?
In this thread, we the +5's tend toward denouncing the US's choice to effectively do the same thing. Is there some method to the madness? I'm genuinely curious...
If you are a copyright holder, you've always been able to reassign copyright or relicense your work. This is not earth-shattering news just because it's a FOSS work being relicensed. Relicensing FOSS code is far more common than you'd think.
The good thing here is that the original work is still covered under the TOCs of its original FOSS license, so the original author and others can continue making improvements and otherwise maintain the software.
Otherwise, move along. Nothing to see here.
Using the FC3 printer configuration tool, I checked the "share this printer" box. It asked me to give the printer a name, which I did.
I went downstairs to my GF's Powerbook running OSX 10.3.x and told it that I would like to add a network printer. It found the printer that I had created. I clicked "print a test page" and everything "just worked." I don't see how it could get much easier.
New York:
8,115,135 people in city, 21,796,124 in metro
5,838 skyscrapers
800 km^2
Dubai:
674,100 people in city, 1,510,000 in metro
523 skyscrapers
3,885 km^2
So New York has 12x the people and 11x the skyscrapers in 1/5 the area. The 74 year old Empire State building is still 26m taller than your current tallest building and the world trade towers were so recently brought down were taller still. Dubai looks quaint compared to New York.
What I find it interesting is that a country with 1/4 the US's population and with a roughly equivalent standard of living represents a roughly equivalent percentage of the world's hacked PCs, even if the difference between the UK and US is within this poll's margin of error.
Is the US public that far behind in broadband connections? Is the UK public engaging in more risky computing practices? Are US ISPs blocking more 0wn3d boxes? Are the UK ISPs incompetent, overwhelmed, or more laisse-faire?
The DMCA doesn't apply to Europe. Should he travel to the USA, he might end up like Dmitri from Elcomsoft, but right now, he's likely safe.
Could be. At least in a typical GPL case, the tables are turned with respect to the RIAA cases.
In a typical RIAA displute, the RIAA has deep pockets and ample lawyers. They're bringing a case against some poor schmoe. The schmoe isn't really profiting from the infringement. But it's in the schmoe's best interest to settle.
In a typical GPL dispute, some poor schmoe like me brings a case against a company with comparitively deep pockets and ample lawyers. The company's profiting from their infringement. But it's in the company's best-interests to settle.
That's not true at all. I've hashed it out with a few corporations over wvWare, my MSWord reading library. Usually the threat of action is enough to have the infringers quaking in their boots, and coax them into complaince. When it's not enough, you've got the FSF all-too willing to come to your aide:
o n.html
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-violati
Regarding these cases, Eben Moglen (the FSF's general legal counsel) once told me that the reason you've never seen a GPL violation case go to court is because it's always a slam-dunk case that will be decided in your favor; that it's always in the infringer's best interest to settle out of court. I don't know how self-serving that statement was, but it's worth pondering at least. It's been my experience, in any case.
If you believe that this has nothing at all to do with the First Amendment, I suggest that you re-read it and the substantive case law surrounding it. The relevant bit is highlighted:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.