The question is not if they can be efficient but what is the percentage of these projects that end up being complete fuckups as compared to number of such failed ventures in a private sector.
You'd be suprised at the number of companies who go belly up every year. The.com debacle was not a shining example of the successes of capitalism. Still, I believe in free market society, one where the wealth of the earth is an inheritance right for everybody. This way everyone gets to compete on a fair basis.
After all, everyone knows how Soviet state run economy ended up after 50 years of head on competition with US free market style society.
As far as I know, the Soviets had agencies who managed things directly. Is not the state the sole employer in a Marxist system? I doubt that they had a bidding system like the US.
It is a lie that government funded projects cannot be efficient. After all, we have roads, highways, bridges, etc... The bidding system is not perfect but it works and sometimes it works spectacularly well.
...but can anyone please tell me how a company such as mine, which has invested over $3 million in R&D, can possibly hope to recoup even 10% of this money by releasing the code under the GPL?
True but he only reason why you had to spend that money yourself is because you were hoping to take adavantage of existing IP laws. If these laws did not exist in the first place, you would not done so. Others in society would have gotten together and paid you to do it. If there is a need for something for the common good, society sould get together to make it happen. There is no reason to waste an amazing amount of money reinvinting the wheel every time one needs a new text editor or just because one is trying to circumvent someone else's IP. What a waste!
Just imagine if the quick sort algorithm was patented by its inventor. It would have done much more harm than good. Imagine if the technology behind the WWW was patented. This is one of the minor promise of free software: it eliminates the waste in human effort. It also encourages cooperation and good will among people. The world could surely use a little bit of that lately.
Again, though, Stallman was careful to point out that the advantages and intent of Free software had more to do with ethics and social good in a variety of fields than any particular bottom line. Closed software, he said, "causes psychosocial harm which affects the spirit of scientific cooperation. Progress in science crucially depends on people being able to work together. Nowadays you see scientists act as if they're in gangs at war with other little gangs of scientists... we're all held back."
I takes a tremendous amount of time an effort to write good software. I am not sure if RMS has addressed this issue but I think it's worth thinking about. In a labor-based economy where one's livelihood is dependent on one's labor, it is not easy to create free software without a source of income. I believe that free software should be subsidized by the government because it is as beneficial to society as roads and telephone lines. After all art is subsidized.
But we should not wait for government subsidies. You can support your favorite artist/inventor/programmer/organization by writing them a personal check now! All philanthropists and charitable organizations should take notice. The FSF should be the recipients of billions of dollars in subsidies and support from the government and industry.
Speech technology will not make keyboards obsolete any time soon (or ever) for one simple reason. I can type faster, and more accurately, than I can talk. This is not unusual among people who have used computers for 20 years or more.
What if you can say to your computer "Computer, call Mary and tell her I can't make it to her birthday party. Invent some plausible excuse or other"? or "Write a letter to the Gas company and ask them to explain the overcharge in my bill?" What if your computer could just take care of similar problems without needing you to ask?
Just a few thoughts about future possibilities down the road.
What kind of world are we living in where nobody trusts anybody and where everybody is spying on everybody? I use to fear a the rise of a centralized Big Brother à la 1984. Now I realize it's much worst than that. Thousands of little Big Brothers are sprouting everywhere to spy on your typing and click patterns, your gestures, your emails, your cultural interests, your purchases and your identity.
We can kiss our freedom goodbye! A society without mutual trust is a slave society and will not last long. Distrust can only engender bad will. If we, as a species, fail to snip this madness in the bud, we're fucked!!
"It is almost a car," or, "It might be a car," implying that there is a degree to which something might be a car."
This is nonsense IMO. "This is almost a car" is just as much a digital statement as "this is a car". The brain can be 100% positive about its own uncertainty.
As an aside, the spike trains generated by neurons are purely digital. Only the strength of synapses are analog and this strength can be easily simulated digitally by a sufficiently large integer. All this "analog is superior" crap is just that, crap.
"Even if everyone understood the concepts well enough (not everbody has got the same ability for abstraction), someone would have to write the most basic components, compilers,... "
Certainly but once that is done, there is no need to keep on working on it. It's like, how many times must one develop and re-write an OS? Once the core is done, that's it.
Almost all components can be made from a few elementary ones. Component fabrication can be automated. In fact, programming should consist of nothing but the composition of components from other components.
Computer programming is frustratingly primitive. There should be no such thing as a programming language. The problem is that the *algorithm* is the basis of all languages. Programming will not come of age until:
1) The algorithm (and things like methods or functions) is no longer seen as the basis of software. 2) Software is viewed as a subfield of communication. 3) Programs are considered collections of communicating entities or components working in parallel. 4) Components have plug-compatible, male/female connectors used for typed messages. 5) Anybody can create sofisticated applications using off-the-shelf, downloadable components that connect to each other automatically.
Sorry. OLE/ActiveX is not a good design for the following reasons:
1) It's too complex.
2) It has serious security problems due to the use of the variant structure which exposes the type of the information being transfered to potentially malicious interceptor programs.
3) It cannot be used to properly implement automatic snap-in conections within a compositional environment because it is not a true message passing model. A message passing model is inherently non-blocking.
4) It does not provide a symetrical male/female mechanism for connections. Complementary connectors are a must for automatic connector creation given either a pre-existing male or female connector. It would also automatically match the message type between sender and receiver. This would eliminate tons of errors.
5) It uses a reference count. This can lead to serious reliability problems if a connected object crashes or hangs.
All patent laws are stupid fascist laws and are designed to benefit a few and enslave the many. They do not promote innovation; they mostly promote a horrendous amount of reinvneting the wheel because it forces people to spend a considerable amount of money to circumvent existing patents. Knowledge should be as free as the air we breathe.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is not if they can be efficient but what is the percentage of these projects that end up being complete fuckups as compared to number of such failed ventures in a private sector.
.com debacle was not a shining example of the successes of capitalism. Still, I believe in free market society, one where the wealth of the earth is an inheritance right for everybody. This way everyone gets to compete on a fair basis.
You'd be suprised at the number of companies who go belly up every year. The
After all, everyone knows how Soviet state run economy ended up after 50 years of head on competition with US free market style society.
As far as I know, the Soviets had agencies who managed things directly. Is not the state the sole employer in a Marxist system? I doubt that they had a bidding system like the US.
It is a lie that government funded projects cannot be efficient. After all, we have roads, highways, bridges, etc... The bidding system is not perfect but it works and sometimes it works spectacularly well.
...but can anyone please tell me how a company such as mine, which has invested over $3 million in R&D, can possibly hope to recoup even 10% of this money by releasing the code under the GPL?
True but he only reason why you had to spend that money yourself is because you were hoping to take adavantage of existing IP laws. If these laws did not exist in the first place, you would not done so. Others in society would have gotten together and paid you to do it. If there is a need for something for the common good, society sould get together to make it happen. There is no reason to waste an amazing amount of money reinvinting the wheel every time one needs a new text editor or just because one is trying to circumvent someone else's IP. What a waste!
Just imagine if the quick sort algorithm was patented by its inventor. It would have done much more harm than good. Imagine if the technology behind the WWW was patented. This is one of the minor promise of free software: it eliminates the waste in human effort. It also encourages cooperation and good will among people. The world could surely use a little bit of that lately.
Again, though, Stallman was careful to point out that the advantages and intent of Free software had more to do with ethics and social good in a variety of fields than any particular bottom line. Closed software, he said, "causes psychosocial harm which affects the spirit of scientific cooperation. Progress in science crucially depends on people being able to work together. Nowadays you see scientists act as if they're in gangs at war with other little gangs of scientists ... we're all held back."
I takes a tremendous amount of time an effort to write good software. I am not sure if RMS has addressed this issue but I think it's worth thinking about. In a labor-based economy where one's livelihood is dependent on one's labor, it is not easy to create free software without a source of income. I believe that free software should be subsidized by the government because it is as beneficial to society as roads and telephone lines. After all art is subsidized.
But we should not wait for government subsidies. You can support your favorite artist/inventor/programmer/organization by writing them a personal check now! All philanthropists and charitable organizations should take notice. The FSF should be the recipients of billions of dollars in subsidies and support from the government and industry.
Speech technology will not make keyboards obsolete any time soon (or ever) for one simple reason. I can type faster, and more accurately, than I can talk. This is not unusual among people who have used computers for 20 years or more.
What if you can say to your computer "Computer, call Mary and tell her I can't make it to her birthday party. Invent some plausible excuse or other"? or "Write a letter to the Gas company and ask them to explain the overcharge in my bill?" What if your computer could just take care of similar problems without needing you to ask?
Just a few thoughts about future possibilities down the road.
What kind of world are we living in where nobody trusts anybody and where everybody is spying on everybody? I use to fear a the rise of a centralized Big Brother à la 1984. Now I realize it's much worst than that. Thousands of little Big Brothers are sprouting everywhere to spy on your typing and click patterns, your gestures, your emails, your cultural interests, your purchases and your identity.
We can kiss our freedom goodbye! A society without mutual trust is a slave society and will not last long. Distrust can only engender bad will. If we, as a species, fail to snip this madness in the bud, we're fucked!!
"It is almost a car," or, "It might be a car," implying that there is a degree to which something might be a car."
This is nonsense IMO. "This is almost a car" is just as much a digital statement as "this is a car". The brain can be 100% positive about its own uncertainty.
As an aside, the spike trains generated by neurons are purely digital. Only the strength of synapses are analog and this strength can be easily simulated digitally by a sufficiently large integer. All this "analog is superior" crap is just that, crap.
Louis Savain
"Even if everyone understood the concepts well enough (not everbody has got the same ability for abstraction), someone would have to write the most basic components, compilers, ... "
Certainly but once that is done, there is no need to keep on working on it. It's like, how many times must one develop and re-write an OS? Once the core is done, that's it.
Louis Savain
>And who creates those off-the-shelf components?
Almost all components can be made from a few elementary ones. Component fabrication can be automated. In fact, programming should consist of nothing but the composition of components from other components.
Louis Savain
All programming languages are bad including C++.
Computer programming is frustratingly primitive. There should be no such thing as a programming language. The problem is that the *algorithm* is the basis of all languages. Programming will not come of age until:
1) The algorithm (and things like methods or functions) is no longer seen as the basis of software.
2) Software is viewed as a subfield of communication.
3) Programs are considered collections of communicating entities or components working in parallel.
4) Components have plug-compatible, male/female connectors used for typed messages.
5) Anybody can create sofisticated applications using off-the-shelf, downloadable components that connect to each other automatically.
Louis Savain
"The M$ OLE system is not a bad design"
Sorry. OLE/ActiveX is not a good design for the following reasons:
1) It's too complex.
2) It has serious security problems due to the use of the variant structure which exposes the type of the information being transfered to potentially malicious interceptor programs.
3) It cannot be used to properly implement automatic snap-in conections within a compositional environment because it is not a true message passing model. A message passing model is inherently non-blocking.
4) It does not provide a symetrical male/female mechanism for connections. Complementary connectors are a must for automatic connector creation given either a pre-existing male or female connector. It would also automatically match the message type between sender and receiver. This would eliminate tons of errors.
5) It uses a reference count. This can lead to serious reliability problems if a connected object crashes or hangs.
There are other flaws but these will do.
Louis Savain
Computation is really communication.
All patent laws are stupid fascist laws and are designed to benefit a few and enslave the many. They do not promote innovation; they mostly promote a horrendous amount of reinvneting the wheel because it forces people to spend a considerable amount of money to circumvent existing patents. Knowledge should be as free as the air we breathe.