I can add some perspective as someone who has received funds from VG Wort, because after all, this is all about people like me, right? The whole point is to protect the rights of copyright holders and ensure that they are adequately compensated for their work. So is it really worth it?
I co-authored some long-since-forgotten academic articles and a book back in my days as a graduate student. The articles appeared in some conference proceedings, and the book, as well as a couple of the articels, were published in the Lecture Notes series of the Springer Verlag. So my name got put on a list somewhere, and every year for about three or four years, a check from VG Wort came in the mail.
To put it briefly, I could have just as well done without it. I don't know how they determined how much money was dispersed to each individual, it was based on some formula that I never bothered to try to understand. At any rate, it was nothing to get rich on, maybe about a hundred marks or so if I remember correctly (this was back before the Euro). About enough to take a girl out on a nice dinner date, once a year. Which of course is nothing to sneeze at, especially if you're a student hustling to make ends meet and struggling for ways to impress a girl. But I could have just as well managed without it. (If she's worth it, you always find a way, you know; and one nice dinner in a year won't get you very far.)
More prolific authors get more money from VG Wort, since the money is based on how much you've published. But I doubt that the cash from VG Wort makes a whole lot of difference to people who make their living as authors; they have to get the vast part of their income by other means.
So if this is the benefit to society that is to be gained by making everyone pay an extra 12 Euros for each PC, I think it's obvious that we can just as well pass it up. Aside from all the philosophical debates about copyright law and whether it's fair and just to pay creators of content this way, the practical effects of the scheme are just not very significant. Why put this added burden on the buyers of PCs just so some student can take someone out once a year? It's better for everyone, economically and socially, to keep the prices of computer hardware down than to extend this meager benefit to copyright holders.
I was going to post this very argument, and here you've said exactly what I wanted to say.
So instead of just saying me too, let me add my perspective as an American who now lives in Germany. The way they run elections here was a real revelation to me. After a lifetime in a culture that is fascinated with high-tech solutions, and where high-tech is uncritically assumed to be better, I was amazed to see that a simple solution was clearly superior.
Voters are handed a piece of paper with the names of the candidates. They take it behind a privacy barrier and mark an 'X' in circles next to their candidates' names. Then they fold up the paper, seal it in an envelope, and drop the envelope through a slit in a box. Then at 6 PM, the envelopes are dumped out of the box and the votes are counted and re-counted by hand. Anyone who wants to can witness the counting.
With this system, a fiasco such as Florida in 2000 (or in a number of states in 2004, as I predict) simply cannot happen. The are far fewer possibilities for error, and the credibility of the result is much greater.
The problem in the US is cultural. The very idea that a low-tech solution could be better simply doesn't cross our minds. For some things in life, we really are better off with more computers and machinery, but for elections, we should just dump them all on the trash heap, all they do is compound mistakes.
I say who cares. Clinton lied, Bush lied, they learn how to do it from very early on in politics.
I care, you better care, and so should anybody else who cares about the USA.
Clinton lied about getting blow jobs from Monica Lewinsky in the White House, evidently because he hadn't told his wife and daughter about it. In fact, Hilary and Chelsea Clinton were the only people truly injured by what he did; but conservatives in America freaked out about it, and a partisan majority in the House impeached him. Ann Coulter wondered whether he should be impeached or assassinated.
Bush, however, lied about the reasons to start a war, in which presumably tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, and over a thousand American soldiers have died, bereaving their families and making orphans of their children. Bush's dishonesty is a moral abomination that has caused an enormous amount of death and suffering, with no end in the foreseeable future.
If you see some kind of moral equivalency between Clinton's lies and Bush's, then I have no choice but to wonder if you comprehend the value of human life.
The US and the World should have a ZERO tollerance policy towards genocide of any kind.
Interesting, Iraq under Saddam has often been called a brutal dictatorship, and Bush supporters like to cite that as an ex post facto justification for war, but the expression "genocide" has rarely been used.
Be that as it may, dictatorship or "genocide" were not given by Bush and Cheney as justifications for the war, and the American people were never given the opportunity to decide whether they would support a war on those grounds. They said it was because of WMD's and alleged connections to Al Qaeda, both of which have proven to be false. And what's worse, the Bush Adminisration may have been aware of the shakiness of their claims. Chances are, they realized that the American people would not have have supported a war to overthrow a dictator who was no threat to the US, so they decided to come up with something else, anything else, no matter how poorly supported by the facts.
If a "zero tolerance policy towards genocide" is the justification for war, then do you advocate US intervention in Sudan, which is widely regarded as a potential genocide in the making? Neither Bush nor Kerry support such a policy, as they both stated in the debate. I doubt that the American people would support such an action under present circumstances. Wouldn't you agree with Bush and Kerry that at applying other means of pressure in Sudan, such as enlisting the help of the Organization of African States, is a better way to start?
If overthrowing dictatorship is justification for war, to you support a military overthrow of North Korea? In fact, North Korea is worse than Iraq by far on all of the reasons given for invading Iraq: It is widely agreed that they really do have WMD's (four to seven nuclear weapons); and North Korea is one of the cruelest dictatorships the world has ever seen, where the people are in constant danger of starvation.
If overthrowing tyranny is justification for war, to you support a military overthrow of the People's Republic China? A communist dictatorship ruling a billion people?
If overthrowing dictators is the justification for war, the do you advocate war against almost all of South America, almost all of the Middle East, almost all of Africa, and almost all of Southeast Asia?
Are you aware that this world is filled almost to the brim with ruthless tyrannies? Indeed, we certainly should do whatever we can against it, but if the answer is that the US should go to war against any and every dictator in the world, then we would be at war with almost all of the world, almost all of the time.
And every time we go to war, assuming we succeed with the overthrow, in the aftermath we would be faced with just the sa
So, I suggest that if and when you read nonsense about Groklaw ("I used to love Groklaw, but now PJ [fill in the blank]"), just consider the likely source.
So, now if someone like me expresses the opinion (say on Slashdot) that PJ had been (and still is) doing a good job reporting and analyzing the SCO cases, but has flubbed miserably since she's tried to be an "pundit", then there's an obvious explanation: I must be a SCO astroturfer! Critical comments about PJ, clearly, can never have any merit whatsoever.
In fact, by writing this very post, I must be a SCO astroturfer right now! Whoda thunkit?
Re:Optimization at runtime vs. compile time
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Java Faster Than C++?
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Now, have you really thought this out?
Sure have, friend, so let me respond with another question: Did you read my post? It seems that you've completely missed the point.
First of all, I wasn't talking about Java and C++ so specifically, but rather about running byte code on a virtual machines vs. running machine code directly. When the VM is running byte code, it can profile the actual behavior of the program and optimize the sections that really are the slowest. A compiler that translates to machine code cannot do this, it can only guess at the best optimizations.
Let's turn the languages around. Suppose we write a VM in Java, which runs byte code compiled from C++ programs. Then it can profile the running C++ byte code and optimize the critical sections. A C++ compiler that translates directly to machine code cannot do that.
Understood this time?
Optimization at runtime vs. compile time
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Java Faster Than C++?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Whew, there's seems to be a lot of denial running through this thread. "An interpreted language just can't possibly be as fast or faster as a compiled language! So I just don't care what the empirical results say, no matter how badly or well done they are, it just can't possibly be!"
I think some of you are overlooking the fact that a VM running byte code is capable of doing optimizations that a compiled language just can't possibly do. A compiled language can only be optimized at compile time. Those optimizations may be very sophisticated, but they can never be any better than an educated guess about what's going to happen at runtime.
But a VM is capable of determining exactly what is happening at runtime; it doesn't have to guess. And thus it is able to optimize those sections of code that really are, in true fact, impacting performance most severely. In can do this by compiling those sections to machine code, thus exploiting precisely the advantage that a compiled language is alleged to have by its very nature. And other kinds of optimizations, the kind that a compiler traditionally does, can be performed on those sections as well.
Of course there are scenarios where runtime optimization doesn't win much, for example in a program that is run once on a small amount of data and then stopped, so that the profiler doesn't get much useful info to work with. This is why Java is more likely to have benefits like this in long-running server processes.
And of course a conscientious C++ programmer will run a profiler on his program on a lot of sample data, and go about optimizing the slowest parts. A conscientious Java programmer should do that too. But an interpreted language has the advantage that the VM can do a lot of that work for you, and always does it at runtime, which is when it really counts.
My undergraduate compiler class had only one homework assignment: write a compiler by the end of the semester. That gave us four months time. We got the grammar for an Algol-like language to be compiled, which was relatively standard and simple (but it did have runtime allocation of arrays, IIRC). And the work was spaced out over the course of the semester -- first we did the lexer, then the parser, then the code generator. But that was basically it, you got four months, go write the compiler or flunk, chump. (We had to write it in C.)
Not an easy assignment by any stretch, but we all got it done. I was an undergrad junior at the time, and there were juniors, seniors and grad students in the class as well. Don't ask me about the sleepless nights during the last week before the due date, I still remember it all too well.
Writing an OS is even harder than writing a compiler by an order of magnitude, and getting that done within a year may very well be too much for your average undergrad. But it's not the kind of thing that a young programmer couldn't possibly do if he's talented, hard-working and has a little experience. Ken Brown's suggestion that it just can't possibly be, which is a weak argument in any case, has no force at all.
I grew up in the US and have lived in Germany for nearly twenty years, and this is a story that has always amused me. It's a bit like the Americans and Soviets both insisting that they invented airplanes. In America I had always heard that ENIAC was the first computer, but almost as soon as I got here, I learned that the Germans simply take it for granted that Konrad Zuse invented the computer. Well, the geeks all do, or so it seems (your average German on the street probably has no clue, although quite a few of them have heard the story as well).
I imagine that the very idea that there's a controversy is bewildering on both sides, since both Americans and Germans have been told all their lives that their side was first.
This argument, re: corruption, is that Disney is keeping this down to aid the Bush campaign.
I think you're missing my point. The argument about corruption that I wanted to emphasize is that, if Moore's accusation is true and Disney is withholding a political film because the state governed by G.W. Bush's brother is threatening retaliation with tax policy, then it represents a very severe abuse of government power. It's the kind of thing Nixon used to do. At the very least, it ought to be investigated.
But that doesn't explain the reasons that Disney gave to Moore or his agent a year ago for refusing to distribute the film. It certainly doesn't refute the accusation.
As for bringing this all up just now, it could indeed be a publicity stunt. Hollywood types do sure like that kind of thing, and all of this controversy is certain to generate huge interest in the film. On the other hand, he could have been holding out to pressure them to decide otherwise. And after all, if the reasons for Disney's decision were sheer corruption, it would the best publicity that Moore could ask for, all the more reason for him to raise as much of a stink as he can. Wouldn't you?
No one in the thread has mentioned it so far, but there is a rumor that Disney pulled out of distribution of Moore's film because they feared losing tax breaks for its theme parks (Disney World) and hotels in Florida, where GWB's brother, Jeb Bush, is governor. Have a look here, for example.
According to Michael Moore, Michael Eisner expressed precisely this concern to his agent, Ari Emmanuel. The Disney corporation has denied it.
If this is true, it would be the worst kind of corporate and government malfeasance. If Disney made its decision for that reason, it would be a corporate cave-ins on par with CBS when it pulled the 60 Minutes report on Brown & Williamson (remember that movie with Pacino and Russell Crowe?). If someone in the Florida government made a threat of that kind, however subtly, it would be a severe case of corruption. If brother Jeb knew about it, it would warrant his impeachment, and if George W. Himself knew it, it would warrant his impeachment as well. In a democracy we cannot tolerate the abuse of government power, especially its power to tax, in order to stifle critical statements about political leaders.
A lot of ifs, I know, and maybe none of them will turn out to be true, but this accusation is so grave that it certainly calls for independent investigation. God knows, the Republicans clamored for special prosecutors during the Clinton era for a lot less than this. This question has to be fully cleared up, and let's not wait until after the election to do it.
PJ keeps asking me if I'm sick to my stomach yet. I will be if she keeps coming across with these scatter-brained tirades.
PJ, you work in the legal profession, and you seem to be coyly implying between the lines that Sun is guilty of some kind of license violation because of the way the GPL is or is not displayed. If you have an accusation to make, would you please come out and make it? Otherwise, you sound like some kind of goddamned SCO lawyer, obliquely raising charges through the press.
What's your candid opinion of legal professionals who use that kind of rhetoric? Me personally, it kinda makes me sick to my stomach.
The Microsoft JVM was fully compatible with Sun's JDK 1.1.
Provably untrue. Read on.
Sun merely disliked the MS implementation of java because it included extensions: Mainly the ability to deal with COM objects easily and the availability of an MS specific GUI api called AFC while Sun was developing JFC/Swing.
First of all, I've never heard that AFC constituted a basis of the lawsuit (I may be wrong). And most importantly, Sun didn't just "dislike" the extensions; they were forbidden by a contract that MS signed. MS's JVM failed the compatibility test suite, which it is required by contract to do, else the product cannot legally be called "Java". The MS JVM was incompatible in at least the following ways:
It had no implementation of JNI.
It had no implementation of RMI. (Instead they had the libraries for COM objects, as you mention; if they had those libraries in addition to RMI, it wouldn't have been a violation.)
About 50 fields and 50 methods in the packages java.awt, java.io and java.lang were altered.
Sun claimed such features could harm the portability of java. But extending a programming language is not a crime.
Not a crime, strictly speaking, because that would denote a violation of criminal law, but it was breach of contract, which is a violation of civil law. Microsoft signed a contract which said that they couldn't do this, and did it anyway, and for that they were duly punished by the court.
And you're blaming Sun! Incredible that Microsoft can thumb their noses at the law, and people go around blaming everyone but them.
The rationale for these requirements is to assure that Java is compatible across platforms, and MS's JVM would have surely have undermined Java as a cross-platform language. So I have to disagree with you, extending the language that way is not OK.
For instance OSX include a Java binding to its Coca GUI api and GCJ can be used to compile java to native code. Sun could also decide that theses extensions are harming Java and sue Apple or GNU.
Based on how badly you've gotten the facts so far, I assume you're making up this assertion out of thin air. Sun could only decide any such thing if there are contractural obligations forbidding such extensions. As long as the compatibility test suite is passed, then the JVM implementation is usually OK; AFAIK, extensions beyond that are not forbidden.
Developers are not dump [sic]. They can still use the core language/api if they wish to. But such extensions are often useful.
They sure are, but they can't use the core language or API if they're not there or significantly altered, as was the case in the MS JVM.
Good question, and it's about time to bring the subject up. On both Slashdot and Groklaw, a lot of people have got the idea in their heads that Sun will now join forces with MS to attack Linux, and yet all of the evidence of Sun's business initiatives suggest exactly the opposite. (I deeply respect PJ's skills in legal research, especially concerning the SCO case, but her post about the Sun/MS settlement was one of the most bizarre tirades I've ever seen. And I just noticed she put up another one today.)
People, where on Earth do you get this idea? As some have already pointed out, Sun is now getting close to the world's largest vendor of a Linux distribution, after the China and Walmart deals, and Linux is a supported platform for all of the Sun software products. From a business perspective, Sun doesn't seem to have much choice but to go with Linux. Back in the bad old days of Internet bubble, when everyone thought that they had a lot of money and that they had to spend a whole lot of it on Sun hardware, life was great in Santa Clara. But for years now, people have been looking for low-cost solutions in both hardware and software, and Sun didn't get it for too long, resulting in huge losses, layoffs, and a steep decline in stock price. They've got to stop the bleeding. Now they're going out of their way to come up with low-cost products, and Linux is a big part of it. What motive could they possibly have to change that now, especially after they just posted losses for the 10th time in 12 quarters?
As for the MS settlement, I have rarely seen such a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't response. Back when Sun filed the suit, there was a chorus of protest at Slashdot, outrage at any attempt to use the courtrooms in any way at all. "Build better products, dammit! They're trying to gain in the courts what they can't get in the market!" Those were the most common mantras. Now Sun has discontinued the suit and collected a settlement, and people in the same forums are responding with -- outrage, all over again! What exactly is Sun expected to do? Were they supposed to draw a trial out as long as possible, through years of appeals?
Moreover, everyone seems to be saying that Sun has capitulated to MS. I am the only one who suspects that it may be the other way around? Sun threatened to sue for over a billion to penalize MS for anti-competitive behavior toward Java. Now they're collecting about 2 billion, and have reached agreements about technical co-operation concerning Java, as well as.NET and network protocols and some other things. Doesn't that look as if MS did not expect to prevail, at least on the issues related to Java, and both sides gained from avoiding lengthy court proceedings? The two companies may begin co-operating on technical standards, and compete on products. Isn't this what we expect technology corporations to do?
So, let me take a guess and assume that the primary user is running with root level permissions?
No, you guessed wrong. Well, I suppose you can't prevent a naive user from doing this, but JDS is based on SuSE, and SuSE requires you to define a non-root user at install time, telling you noisily that this is the account you should be using most of the time. So chances are good that most novice users will end up doing the right thing (it seems to work for SuSE, at any rate).
I'd do all that standard stuff -- virus checks, updates, spyware blockers, and so on --, but if someone wants me to be responsible for the security of their box, I will refuse if they want to run Windows. Linux or MacOS X, sure. For Windows, they'll have to hire someone and pay the price.
I don't mean to be ideological about this, it's just that good security is an achievable goal on Linux and OSX boxen, it isn't really that hard if you know what to do about it, and I know what I would do. For Windows, there are just too many flaws and too many attacks out there in the wild, and I cannot in good conscience tell someone that I'm making their box safe. Maybe someone else can, but I won't try to do it for free.
Is there really any credible evidence of serious threats of violence against Darl McBride?
EasyTarget answered:
Well.. if you systematically piss of a very large and diverse group of people, in a country where guns are readily available and using maximum force (physical and legislative) to solve issues is considered normal, even laudable (witness the way your government and corporations behave and present themselves), what do you expect?
I think it would be much easier if this answer were simply written as "No". An inference followed by the rhetorical question "What do you expect?" is not credible evidence.
Credible evidence would be verifiable evidence of a death threat, by email or telephone for example, that cannot be dismissed as a crank. It would be real evidence of an actual event, not a surmise.
Darl McBride, chief executive of SCO Group Inc., says he sometimes carries a gun because his enemies are out to kill him. He checks into hotels under assumed names. An armed bodyguard protected him when he gave a speech last month at Harvard Law School.
I think we all know that Linux and open source advocates can get quite overheated in their advocacy, especially in email, so that it tends to damage the reputation of the whole community. It's quite common in Slashdot nowadays to see us reminding one another to keep cool and rational when we publicly criticize SCO and the other bad guys of the IT world.
But SCO has been trying to exploit this bad habit rather heavy-handedly lately, evidently to discredit their opponents and gain some sympathy. And now it's gotten to the point that SCO is unfairly exaggerating the tone of the criticism
Is there really any credible evidence of serious threats of violence against Darl McBride? To be sure, he's probably been suggested to more verbal abuse than even he deserves, but I think it's highly unlikely that there's been a threat of physical harm that should be taken seriously. It's awfully easy to blow your stack in email, but that's a long way away from actually doing something in the Real Universe. At any rate, Darl's levelling a very serious accusation that should not be made or taken lightly.
I suspect that Darl doesn't really think he needs a gun or an armed bodyguard. I think he thinks it's useful if other people think he needs a gun or an armed bodyguard.
Die SCO Group GmbH wird danach im geschaftlichen Verkehr, also gegenuber Kunden und Anwendern, kunftig nicht mehr behaupten, dass...
My translation: "The SCO Group GmbH will therefore no longer claim in business communications, that is toward customers and users, that..."
Anyone out there with some knowledge of German law who can explain that qualification: "in business communciations"? I'm wondering if SCO has a kind of loophole here. To be sure, it's fairly clear that they can't send threatening letters to companies or end users, and that's a Very Good Thing. But it sounds as if they might still be able to make statements in the press, for example, that are otherwise verboten according to this order.
Of course, one wonders why they would do that, but then why do they say any of the things they say? Go figure SCO. If they think there's some good reason to keep trying to intimidate people, does the order's restriction to "geschaftlichen Verkehr" give them a way to keep doing it?
I think ESR doesn't understand that there could be open-source implmentations of Java if only he wanted one (in fact, there are). The Java specs are public, and anyone can implement against them if they feel like it. In fact, this whole thing can be thrown back to ESR -- he has said that open source projects come into existence because someone somewhere needs to "scratch an itch". So if Eric has an itch, he's free to start scratching.
Maybe he's talking about opening up the specs, but what would that mean exactly? There's good reason to say that it's happened already. Sun flirted with the idea of turning the specs over to a standards body some years ago, but it soon became clear that Microsoft would try to influence any such organization and bastardize the language. Remember, cross-platform portability is one of the highest-priority features of Java, the main reason it's interesting at all for Sun and many other players, but it's precisely what Microsoft most urgently would try to destroy. About the same time, Microsoft created a version of the JVM shot through with Windows dependencies and lacking some libraries they were required to implement, all in violation of the license, for which they were duly bitch-slapped by the courts (a set of facts that many Slashdotters curiously like to overlook). Sun learned the hard way that they couldn't go along with any standards process that could endanger cross-platform portability.
So now there is the Java Community Process, over which Sun has only limited control, and in which organizations such as the Apache Group participate. Arguably, this is at least as open as the standards processes for many open-source projects. Anyone can access the code to Apache software and the Linux kernel, for example, but only voting members of the Apache Group decide what goes into and out of Apache software, and essentially Linus and his lieutenants decide what goes into Linux. The JCP has its faults, but being strictly proprietary or less open than most of the open-source projects are not among them.
Finally, I'd like to know the grounds for ESR's claim that Sun's alleged control of Java is "throttling acceptance of the language in the open-source community, ceding the field (and probably the future) to scripting-language competitors like Python and Perl." Java has one of the largest development communities in the world with lively activity among open-source developers -- think of Jakarta. And although Perl and Python developers tend to disintegrate into a blue rage when somebody says this, Java is the language of choice for a wide range of industry projects, including the most business-critical applications, and Perl and Python certainly are not. (Flame away if you like, flail against the windmills, rage impotently against the stubborn truth.) I think ESR's insinuation of a dim future for Java due to the displeasure of open source developers is just blowing smoke.
A database is a database, which should have nothing to do with user interaction. A web browser is at the presentation level, which is all about user interaction and should have nothing to do with the database.
If Oracle has been writing software that entangles database code with the presentation level, then they are mixing layers and producing appallingly unmaintainable code, and should stop doing that no later than immediately. On the other hand, if they are writing code that produces HTTP/HTML content in the presentation layer, then it doesn't matter which web browser is used to view it.
So why would anyone write software that is specifically "for Mozilla", especially a database vendor? They should just adhere to the HTTP/HTML standards in the presentation layer, so that anyone using a standards-compliant browser can view their content.
Of course, we are talking about Oracle, who has produced PL/SQL packages for generating HTML right out of the database, insist on using their own, outdated JRE's, and perhaps have generated M$-dependent web content. So maybe Oracle is just trying to tell us that they will start doing a couple of things a little bit less stupidly.
Slashdot Mirror
I can add some perspective as someone who has received funds from VG Wort, because after all, this is all about people like me, right? The whole point is to protect the rights of copyright holders and ensure that they are adequately compensated for their work. So is it really worth it?
I co-authored some long-since-forgotten academic articles and a book back in my days as a graduate student. The articles appeared in some conference proceedings, and the book, as well as a couple of the articels, were published in the Lecture Notes series of the Springer Verlag. So my name got put on a list somewhere, and every year for about three or four years, a check from VG Wort came in the mail.
To put it briefly, I could have just as well done without it. I don't know how they determined how much money was dispersed to each individual, it was based on some formula that I never bothered to try to understand. At any rate, it was nothing to get rich on, maybe about a hundred marks or so if I remember correctly (this was back before the Euro). About enough to take a girl out on a nice dinner date, once a year. Which of course is nothing to sneeze at, especially if you're a student hustling to make ends meet and struggling for ways to impress a girl. But I could have just as well managed without it. (If she's worth it, you always find a way, you know; and one nice dinner in a year won't get you very far.)
More prolific authors get more money from VG Wort, since the money is based on how much you've published. But I doubt that the cash from VG Wort makes a whole lot of difference to people who make their living as authors; they have to get the vast part of their income by other means.
So if this is the benefit to society that is to be gained by making everyone pay an extra 12 Euros for each PC, I think it's obvious that we can just as well pass it up. Aside from all the philosophical debates about copyright law and whether it's fair and just to pay creators of content this way, the practical effects of the scheme are just not very significant. Why put this added burden on the buyers of PCs just so some student can take someone out once a year? It's better for everyone, economically and socially, to keep the prices of computer hardware down than to extend this meager benefit to copyright holders.
I was going to post this very argument, and here you've said exactly what I wanted to say.
So instead of just saying me too, let me add my perspective as an American who now lives in Germany. The way they run elections here was a real revelation to me. After a lifetime in a culture that is fascinated with high-tech solutions, and where high-tech is uncritically assumed to be better, I was amazed to see that a simple solution was clearly superior.
Voters are handed a piece of paper with the names of the candidates. They take it behind a privacy barrier and mark an 'X' in circles next to their candidates' names. Then they fold up the paper, seal it in an envelope, and drop the envelope through a slit in a box. Then at 6 PM, the envelopes are dumped out of the box and the votes are counted and re-counted by hand. Anyone who wants to can witness the counting.
With this system, a fiasco such as Florida in 2000 (or in a number of states in 2004, as I predict) simply cannot happen. The are far fewer possibilities for error, and the credibility of the result is much greater.
The problem in the US is cultural. The very idea that a low-tech solution could be better simply doesn't cross our minds. For some things in life, we really are better off with more computers and machinery, but for elections, we should just dump them all on the trash heap, all they do is compound mistakes.
I care, you better care, and so should anybody else who cares about the USA.
Clinton lied about getting blow jobs from Monica Lewinsky in the White House, evidently because he hadn't told his wife and daughter about it. In fact, Hilary and Chelsea Clinton were the only people truly injured by what he did; but conservatives in America freaked out about it, and a partisan majority in the House impeached him. Ann Coulter wondered whether he should be impeached or assassinated.
Bush, however, lied about the reasons to start a war, in which presumably tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, and over a thousand American soldiers have died, bereaving their families and making orphans of their children. Bush's dishonesty is a moral abomination that has caused an enormous amount of death and suffering, with no end in the foreseeable future.
If you see some kind of moral equivalency between Clinton's lies and Bush's, then I have no choice but to wonder if you comprehend the value of human life.
Interesting, Iraq under Saddam has often been called a brutal dictatorship, and Bush supporters like to cite that as an ex post facto justification for war, but the expression "genocide" has rarely been used.
Be that as it may, dictatorship or "genocide" were not given by Bush and Cheney as justifications for the war, and the American people were never given the opportunity to decide whether they would support a war on those grounds. They said it was because of WMD's and alleged connections to Al Qaeda, both of which have proven to be false. And what's worse, the Bush Adminisration may have been aware of the shakiness of their claims. Chances are, they realized that the American people would not have have supported a war to overthrow a dictator who was no threat to the US, so they decided to come up with something else, anything else, no matter how poorly supported by the facts.
If a "zero tolerance policy towards genocide" is the justification for war, then do you advocate US intervention in Sudan, which is widely regarded as a potential genocide in the making? Neither Bush nor Kerry support such a policy, as they both stated in the debate. I doubt that the American people would support such an action under present circumstances. Wouldn't you agree with Bush and Kerry that at applying other means of pressure in Sudan, such as enlisting the help of the Organization of African States, is a better way to start?
If overthrowing dictatorship is justification for war, to you support a military overthrow of North Korea? In fact, North Korea is worse than Iraq by far on all of the reasons given for invading Iraq: It is widely agreed that they really do have WMD's (four to seven nuclear weapons); and North Korea is one of the cruelest dictatorships the world has ever seen, where the people are in constant danger of starvation.
If overthrowing tyranny is justification for war, to you support a military overthrow of the People's Republic China? A communist dictatorship ruling a billion people?
If overthrowing dictators is the justification for war, the do you advocate war against almost all of South America, almost all of the Middle East, almost all of Africa, and almost all of Southeast Asia?
Are you aware that this world is filled almost to the brim with ruthless tyrannies? Indeed, we certainly should do whatever we can against it, but if the answer is that the US should go to war against any and every dictator in the world, then we would be at war with almost all of the world, almost all of the time.
And every time we go to war, assuming we succeed with the overthrow, in the aftermath we would be faced with just the sa
So, now if someone like me expresses the opinion (say on Slashdot) that PJ had been (and still is) doing a good job reporting and analyzing the SCO cases, but has flubbed miserably since she's tried to be an "pundit", then there's an obvious explanation: I must be a SCO astroturfer! Critical comments about PJ, clearly, can never have any merit whatsoever.
In fact, by writing this very post, I must be a SCO astroturfer right now! Whoda thunkit?
Sure have, friend, so let me respond with another question: Did you read my post? It seems that you've completely missed the point.
First of all, I wasn't talking about Java and C++ so specifically, but rather about running byte code on a virtual machines vs. running machine code directly. When the VM is running byte code, it can profile the actual behavior of the program and optimize the sections that really are the slowest. A compiler that translates to machine code cannot do this, it can only guess at the best optimizations.
Let's turn the languages around. Suppose we write a VM in Java, which runs byte code compiled from C++ programs. Then it can profile the running C++ byte code and optimize the critical sections. A C++ compiler that translates directly to machine code cannot do that.
Understood this time?
Whew, there's seems to be a lot of denial running through this thread. "An interpreted language just can't possibly be as fast or faster as a compiled language! So I just don't care what the empirical results say, no matter how badly or well done they are, it just can't possibly be!"
I think some of you are overlooking the fact that a VM running byte code is capable of doing optimizations that a compiled language just can't possibly do. A compiled language can only be optimized at compile time. Those optimizations may be very sophisticated, but they can never be any better than an educated guess about what's going to happen at runtime.
But a VM is capable of determining exactly what is happening at runtime; it doesn't have to guess. And thus it is able to optimize those sections of code that really are, in true fact, impacting performance most severely. In can do this by compiling those sections to machine code, thus exploiting precisely the advantage that a compiled language is alleged to have by its very nature. And other kinds of optimizations, the kind that a compiler traditionally does, can be performed on those sections as well.
Of course there are scenarios where runtime optimization doesn't win much, for example in a program that is run once on a small amount of data and then stopped, so that the profiler doesn't get much useful info to work with. This is why Java is more likely to have benefits like this in long-running server processes.
And of course a conscientious C++ programmer will run a profiler on his program on a lot of sample data, and go about optimizing the slowest parts. A conscientious Java programmer should do that too. But an interpreted language has the advantage that the VM can do a lot of that work for you, and always does it at runtime, which is when it really counts.
No, none of that sissy stuff. %^)
All in straight-up C. We were required to implement a recursive-descent parser, so it couldn't have worked the way yacc does anyway.
My undergraduate compiler class had only one homework assignment: write a compiler by the end of the semester. That gave us four months time. We got the grammar for an Algol-like language to be compiled, which was relatively standard and simple (but it did have runtime allocation of arrays, IIRC). And the work was spaced out over the course of the semester -- first we did the lexer, then the parser, then the code generator. But that was basically it, you got four months, go write the compiler or flunk, chump. (We had to write it in C.)
Not an easy assignment by any stretch, but we all got it done. I was an undergrad junior at the time, and there were juniors, seniors and grad students in the class as well. Don't ask me about the sleepless nights during the last week before the due date, I still remember it all too well.
Writing an OS is even harder than writing a compiler by an order of magnitude, and getting that done within a year may very well be too much for your average undergrad. But it's not the kind of thing that a young programmer couldn't possibly do if he's talented, hard-working and has a little experience. Ken Brown's suggestion that it just can't possibly be, which is a weak argument in any case, has no force at all.
I grew up in the US and have lived in Germany for nearly twenty years, and this is a story that has always amused me. It's a bit like the Americans and Soviets both insisting that they invented airplanes. In America I had always heard that ENIAC was the first computer, but almost as soon as I got here, I learned that the Germans simply take it for granted that Konrad Zuse invented the computer. Well, the geeks all do, or so it seems (your average German on the street probably has no clue, although quite a few of them have heard the story as well).
I imagine that the very idea that there's a controversy is bewildering on both sides, since both Americans and Germans have been told all their lives that their side was first.
I think you're missing my point. The argument about corruption that I wanted to emphasize is that, if Moore's accusation is true and Disney is withholding a political film because the state governed by G.W. Bush's brother is threatening retaliation with tax policy, then it represents a very severe abuse of government power. It's the kind of thing Nixon used to do. At the very least, it ought to be investigated.
But that doesn't explain the reasons that Disney gave to Moore or his agent a year ago for refusing to distribute the film. It certainly doesn't refute the accusation.
As for bringing this all up just now, it could indeed be a publicity stunt. Hollywood types do sure like that kind of thing, and all of this controversy is certain to generate huge interest in the film. On the other hand, he could have been holding out to pressure them to decide otherwise. And after all, if the reasons for Disney's decision were sheer corruption, it would the best publicity that Moore could ask for, all the more reason for him to raise as much of a stink as he can. Wouldn't you?
No one in the thread has mentioned it so far, but there is a rumor that Disney pulled out of distribution of Moore's film because they feared losing tax breaks for its theme parks (Disney World) and hotels in Florida, where GWB's brother, Jeb Bush, is governor. Have a look here, for example.
According to Michael Moore, Michael Eisner expressed precisely this concern to his agent, Ari Emmanuel. The Disney corporation has denied it.
If this is true, it would be the worst kind of corporate and government malfeasance. If Disney made its decision for that reason, it would be a corporate cave-ins on par with CBS when it pulled the 60 Minutes report on Brown & Williamson (remember that movie with Pacino and Russell Crowe?). If someone in the Florida government made a threat of that kind, however subtly, it would be a severe case of corruption. If brother Jeb knew about it, it would warrant his impeachment, and if George W. Himself knew it, it would warrant his impeachment as well. In a democracy we cannot tolerate the abuse of government power, especially its power to tax, in order to stifle critical statements about political leaders.
A lot of ifs, I know, and maybe none of them will turn out to be true, but this accusation is so grave that it certainly calls for independent investigation. God knows, the Republicans clamored for special prosecutors during the Clinton era for a lot less than this. This question has to be fully cleared up, and let's not wait until after the election to do it.
... and so's my wife, Morgan Fairchild (whom I've slept with).
PJ keeps asking me if I'm sick to my stomach yet. I will be if she keeps coming across with these scatter-brained tirades.
PJ, you work in the legal profession, and you seem to be coyly implying between the lines that Sun is guilty of some kind of license violation because of the way the GPL is or is not displayed. If you have an accusation to make, would you please come out and make it? Otherwise, you sound like some kind of goddamned SCO lawyer, obliquely raising charges through the press.
What's your candid opinion of legal professionals who use that kind of rhetoric? Me personally, it kinda makes me sick to my stomach.
Provably untrue. Read on.
First of all, I've never heard that AFC constituted a basis of the lawsuit (I may be wrong). And most importantly, Sun didn't just "dislike" the extensions; they were forbidden by a contract that MS signed. MS's JVM failed the compatibility test suite, which it is required by contract to do, else the product cannot legally be called "Java". The MS JVM was incompatible in at least the following ways:
Have a look here.
Not a crime, strictly speaking, because that would denote a violation of criminal law, but it was breach of contract, which is a violation of civil law. Microsoft signed a contract which said that they couldn't do this, and did it anyway, and for that they were duly punished by the court.
And you're blaming Sun! Incredible that Microsoft can thumb their noses at the law, and people go around blaming everyone but them.
The rationale for these requirements is to assure that Java is compatible across platforms, and MS's JVM would have surely have undermined Java as a cross-platform language. So I have to disagree with you, extending the language that way is not OK.
Based on how badly you've gotten the facts so far, I assume you're making up this assertion out of thin air. Sun could only decide any such thing if there are contractural obligations forbidding such extensions. As long as the compatibility test suite is passed, then the JVM implementation is usually OK; AFAIK, extensions beyond that are not forbidden.
They sure are, but they can't use the core language or API if they're not there or significantly altered, as was the case in the MS JVM.
Good question, and it's about time to bring the subject up. On both Slashdot and Groklaw, a lot of people have got the idea in their heads that Sun will now join forces with MS to attack Linux, and yet all of the evidence of Sun's business initiatives suggest exactly the opposite. (I deeply respect PJ's skills in legal research, especially concerning the SCO case, but her post about the Sun/MS settlement was one of the most bizarre tirades I've ever seen. And I just noticed she put up another one today.)
People, where on Earth do you get this idea? As some have already pointed out, Sun is now getting close to the world's largest vendor of a Linux distribution, after the China and Walmart deals, and Linux is a supported platform for all of the Sun software products. From a business perspective, Sun doesn't seem to have much choice but to go with Linux. Back in the bad old days of Internet bubble, when everyone thought that they had a lot of money and that they had to spend a whole lot of it on Sun hardware, life was great in Santa Clara. But for years now, people have been looking for low-cost solutions in both hardware and software, and Sun didn't get it for too long, resulting in huge losses, layoffs, and a steep decline in stock price. They've got to stop the bleeding. Now they're going out of their way to come up with low-cost products, and Linux is a big part of it. What motive could they possibly have to change that now, especially after they just posted losses for the 10th time in 12 quarters?
As for the MS settlement, I have rarely seen such a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't response. Back when Sun filed the suit, there was a chorus of protest at Slashdot, outrage at any attempt to use the courtrooms in any way at all. "Build better products, dammit! They're trying to gain in the courts what they can't get in the market!" Those were the most common mantras. Now Sun has discontinued the suit and collected a settlement, and people in the same forums are responding with -- outrage, all over again! What exactly is Sun expected to do? Were they supposed to draw a trial out as long as possible, through years of appeals?
Moreover, everyone seems to be saying that Sun has capitulated to MS. I am the only one who suspects that it may be the other way around? Sun threatened to sue for over a billion to penalize MS for anti-competitive behavior toward Java. Now they're collecting about 2 billion, and have reached agreements about technical co-operation concerning Java, as well as
No, you guessed wrong. Well, I suppose you can't prevent a naive user from doing this, but JDS is based on SuSE, and SuSE requires you to define a non-root user at install time, telling you noisily that this is the account you should be using most of the time. So chances are good that most novice users will end up doing the right thing (it seems to work for SuSE, at any rate).
I'd do all that standard stuff -- virus checks, updates, spyware blockers, and so on --, but if someone wants me to be responsible for the security of their box, I will refuse if they want to run Windows. Linux or MacOS X, sure. For Windows, they'll have to hire someone and pay the price.
I don't mean to be ideological about this, it's just that good security is an achievable goal on Linux and OSX boxen, it isn't really that hard if you know what to do about it, and I know what I would do. For Windows, there are just too many flaws and too many attacks out there in the wild, and I cannot in good conscience tell someone that I'm making their box safe. Maybe someone else can, but I won't try to do it for free.
EasyTarget answered:
I think it would be much easier if this answer were simply written as "No". An inference followed by the rhetorical question "What do you expect?" is not credible evidence.
Credible evidence would be verifiable evidence of a death threat, by email or telephone for example, that cannot be dismissed as a crank. It would be real evidence of an actual event, not a surmise.
(Dammit, and I previewed the post twice!)
I think we all know that Linux and open source advocates can get quite overheated in their advocacy, especially in email, so that it tends to damage the reputation of the whole community. It's quite common in Slashdot nowadays to see us reminding one another to keep cool and rational when we publicly criticize SCO and the other bad guys of the IT world.
But SCO has been trying to exploit this bad habit rather heavy-handedly lately, evidently to discredit their opponents and gain some sympathy. And now it's gotten to the point that SCO is unfairly exaggerating the tone of the criticism
Is there really any credible evidence of serious threats of violence against Darl McBride? To be sure, he's probably been suggested to more verbal abuse than even he deserves, but I think it's highly unlikely that there's been a threat of physical harm that should be taken seriously. It's awfully easy to blow your stack in email, but that's a long way away from actually doing something in the Real Universe. At any rate, Darl's levelling a very serious accusation that should not be made or taken lightly.
I suspect that Darl doesn't really think he needs a gun or an armed bodyguard. I think he thinks it's useful if other people think he needs a gun or an armed bodyguard.
My translation: "The SCO Group GmbH will therefore no longer claim in business communications, that is toward customers and users, that
Anyone out there with some knowledge of German law who can explain that qualification: "in business communciations"? I'm wondering if SCO has a kind of loophole here. To be sure, it's fairly clear that they can't send threatening letters to companies or end users, and that's a Very Good Thing. But it sounds as if they might still be able to make statements in the press, for example, that are otherwise verboten according to this order.
Of course, one wonders why they would do that, but then why do they say any of the things they say? Go figure SCO. If they think there's some good reason to keep trying to intimidate people, does the order's restriction to "geschaftlichen Verkehr" give them a way to keep doing it?
I think ESR doesn't understand that there could be open-source implmentations of Java if only he wanted one (in fact, there are). The Java specs are public, and anyone can implement against them if they feel like it. In fact, this whole thing can be thrown back to ESR -- he has said that open source projects come into existence because someone somewhere needs to "scratch an itch". So if Eric has an itch, he's free to start scratching.
Maybe he's talking about opening up the specs, but what would that mean exactly? There's good reason to say that it's happened already. Sun flirted with the idea of turning the specs over to a standards body some years ago, but it soon became clear that Microsoft would try to influence any such organization and bastardize the language. Remember, cross-platform portability is one of the highest-priority features of Java, the main reason it's interesting at all for Sun and many other players, but it's precisely what Microsoft most urgently would try to destroy. About the same time, Microsoft created a version of the JVM shot through with Windows dependencies and lacking some libraries they were required to implement, all in violation of the license, for which they were duly bitch-slapped by the courts (a set of facts that many Slashdotters curiously like to overlook). Sun learned the hard way that they couldn't go along with any standards process that could endanger cross-platform portability.
So now there is the Java Community Process, over which Sun has only limited control, and in which organizations such as the Apache Group participate. Arguably, this is at least as open as the standards processes for many open-source projects. Anyone can access the code to Apache software and the Linux kernel, for example, but only voting members of the Apache Group decide what goes into and out of Apache software, and essentially Linus and his lieutenants decide what goes into Linux. The JCP has its faults, but being strictly proprietary or less open than most of the open-source projects are not among them.
Finally, I'd like to know the grounds for ESR's claim that Sun's alleged control of Java is "throttling acceptance of the language in the open-source community, ceding the field (and probably the future) to scripting-language competitors like Python and Perl." Java has one of the largest development communities in the world with lively activity among open-source developers -- think of Jakarta. And although Perl and Python developers tend to disintegrate into a blue rage when somebody says this, Java is the language of choice for a wide range of industry projects, including the most business-critical applications, and Perl and Python certainly are not. (Flame away if you like, flail against the windmills, rage impotently against the stubborn truth.) I think ESR's insinuation of a dim future for Java due to the displeasure of open source developers is just blowing smoke.
And so' my wife, Morgan Fairchild! (whom I've slept with ...)
A database is a database, which should have nothing to do with user interaction. A web browser is at the presentation level, which is all about user interaction and should have nothing to do with the database.
If Oracle has been writing software that entangles database code with the presentation level, then they are mixing layers and producing appallingly unmaintainable code, and should stop doing that no later than immediately. On the other hand, if they are writing code that produces HTTP/HTML content in the presentation layer, then it doesn't matter which web browser is used to view it.
So why would anyone write software that is specifically "for Mozilla", especially a database vendor? They should just adhere to the HTTP/HTML standards in the presentation layer, so that anyone using a standards-compliant browser can view their content.
Of course, we are talking about Oracle, who has produced PL/SQL packages for generating HTML right out of the database, insist on using their own, outdated JRE's, and perhaps have generated M$-dependent web content. So maybe Oracle is just trying to tell us that they will start doing a couple of things a little bit less stupidly.