You quoted this 640K thing twice today. Can you please provide a reference? Did he say that at a conference? Over lunch? In an article? In a book? Or is it just BS someone made up?
I often hear about man-in-the-middle attacks in theory but I've heard of one in practice. Can someone point me to some documentation about an incident where data was compromised by a MITM?
IT is now infrastructure technology and a commodity item
What does that mean? It makes no sense. To start with, you are already stretching the meaning of commodity if you say "Intel-based PCs are a commodity". You certainly can't buy and sell them on an exchange. It certainly isn't the case that you can buy them without regard to the manufacturer (as you can, say, pork bellies). But you can understand how to stretch the meaning to make it reasonable: a desktop computer from IBM is roughly equivalent to one from Dell. You get ltitle business advantage buying one rather than the other.
But how the hell can you apply that logic to the whole IT field? Let's say a new vendor creates a software product for bioinformatics. It allows the visualization of something that was previously hard to understand. Nobody else has software like this and the algorithms and user interface are patented (boo! hiss!). How the heck can you argue that that software is "commodity?" It is one-of-a-kind (as most category-creating software is). It makes no sense to lump in this innovative, one-of-a-kind program with 3COM Ethernet cards and Logitech mice, call the whole category "IT" and say that it is a "commodity."
I'm annoyed that this poor thinking got so much press around the industry. It's as silly as the IT changes everything hype we heard during the 90s.
It seems to me that most algorithms are not invented in the private sector, but come out of places like academia. After all, if it were otherwise, shouldn't there be a lot of firms out there that specialize in doing nothing BUT researching algorithms?
No, because it is quite difficult to market an algorithm. Developer: "We've got this really cool way of sortng lists of strings." CIO: "Ummm...does it do spam filtering?" Developer: "I guess it could." CIO: "Call me back when it does." The valuable part is usually not inventing an algorithm, but discovering a problem that it solves. If you know what problem it solves, you might as well go to market with a software product that is a complete solution that a customer can buy. You'll make a lot more money than if you have to convince some middleman that your algorithm could make a ton of money if only somebody put it in a product.
I didn't say that artists were better than mathematicians. I said that everybody who is publically funded needs to demonstrate that their work is useful. Art is useful as art (i.e. engages the senses and triggers critical thought). Mathematics is demonstrably not very useful in this way because the more advanced it gets, the fewer people can follow it and appreciate its beauty (this is also true to an extent for modern art and yet the Tate Modern sees thousands of guests per year so modern art is not a complete failure). Or to put it another way: a mathematician could make a wonderful proof that is only understood (enjoyed) by one other person on the planet and that proof would nevertheless be a success becuase it would be available when someone needed to build on it a hundred years from now. Conversely, if a work of art interests only one other person then it is hardly worthy of public support.
I honestly think there are some things worth doing for the hell of it, not because they are useful.
Okay, how would you propose society decide when to fund these things that are worth doing just for the hell of it? Let's say I decide that it would be beautiful to quilt the most elaborate quilt in history but I don't intend to show anyone else. I'll create it, enjoy it and then destory it. Should the government fund it because I am creating or discovering beauty? If yes, the government is going to go break helping people to find their inner beauty. If no, then you obviously think that the work I create must be useful to society perhaps as art or philosophy or science or entertainment, but useful somehow. Similarly, mathematics must be useful to expect government support. Higher mathematics is clearly not a roaring success as a source of beauty or entertainment for 99% of the population so we must fund it on some other basis: as science or philosophy. Perhaps you are happy to fund it merely as a form of art but mathematicians would destroy the mathematics industry if they tried to sell it to the general public on that basis.
That said, it would be quite short-sighted to only fund mathematics that it immediately useful. We fund mathematics speculatively and hope that some percentage turns out to be useful in the long run.
Because they're able to create beauty, like artists and writers and musicians do.
This is a poor analogy. Artists, writers and musicians put their art works in places that the general public can find them. Society would never pay to create "beauty" that is impenetrable to almost anyone who does not spend full time in the field. Even "modern art" is shown in museums that millions of people go to every years. The better argument in defense of mathematics is its utility. I'm glad that mathematicians find beauty in what they do but I wouldn't offer to pay for it if I didn't think it was likely to be useful to me or my descendants.
That's not a "design mistake", it's just a major feature that hasn't been added yet. This will be remedied in a future version of Ruby.
First, it hardly matters whether it is "just" a design mistake or a missing feature. If he needs the feature and it isn't available, he can't use the language. Second, Unicode tends to have all kinds of implications deep into the implementation of a language. They touch reflection, language syntax, regular expressions, file system, pickling, I/O etc. You can call it "just" a "missing feature" but it is one big feature. I would be surprised if Ruby got proper (i.e. integrated) Unicode support before the pretty major rewrite that will also add native threads.
A "design mistake" would be something error-prone and impossible to fix, like Python using indentation as part of the syntax.
Yeah, many people who have not tried it say that. Turns out that it is less error-prone because it eliminates a whole class of bugs that result from parens that do not follow the indentation.
I don't see how your post disputes anything that was in the parent's post. Are you trying to say that doing something unethical is not really unethical if you can make a case that another person in the circumstance would also have done it?
Your post also very conveniently avoids considering a current grievance that natives have with modern day Americans.
That all said, I think that the parent post was itself a little bit out of context. Of course Europeans treated the native badly and that's why the South Park episode is funny. It twists your cultural expectations around.
Patents were never intended to protect ideas (an algorithm is also an idea), but to protect implementations (and investments done to create that implementation.
I do not think that this is correct. Patents are for inventions. Inventions are for ideas. As a perfect example, a new drug is nothing more than an idea about how to apply a chemical to a problem. But they are patentable. Business methods are now also patentable. Furthermore, it is well known that you can patent hardware without ever having "implemented" them, so your distinction is bogus. I would be interested if you could find even one reference to back up this ideas that you patent "implementations" not "ideas".
. After all, why should an idea written in C be patentable in that case, and one in English or some mathematical notation not?
Patents generally are written in English (in America at least). You submit some English and a few diagrams and you get a patent. You would seldom submit C code.
Software patents are bad because they are bad for the software industry. That has nothing to do with this false dichotomy.
Because it makes it easier for people to get along and not kill each other so much if they aren't always bickering over "my god can kick your god's ass!" type stuff.
Human beings will bicker over irrational things. Remember that in the cold war, the "good guys" were Christian and the "bad guys" were athiests. For some accounts of the crimes of athiests, follow this link.
And anyhow, human beings have found their religions to be incredibly resilient. They don't give them up because some new science is discovered. Many religous people are quite comfortable with evolution (e.g. the Pope). Religion will adapt to what it needs to in order to survive. Look at how religious views about civil rights (e.g. miscegenation) have changed as civil rights have gone mainstream.
The BSD license is ananthema to any coder who wants to make sure his/her code remains open. Pure and simple. Assuming I were any good at coding, I'd only work on a BSD if the problem was extremely Interesting. In other words, my interest would have to outweigh my reservation about providing MS, et. al, with the chance to gobble up my code in return for... nothing.
In my experience, most hackers don't care about licensing at all, and just use the license that goes with the software they care about. I've hung around Python development for years and never heard anyone say: "I'd get involved but I'm afraid Microsoft may co-opt Python and distribute it in a proprietary way." Who cares? You make software because you like making software and you want people to use it. If Microsoft distributes in binary with the operating system, great, more people can use it. Why should I mind Microsoft free-riding? Hell, I'm a free-rider myself. I've used both Linux and BSD without contributing a line of code. So what? Who cares. Why is it in different if Microsoft free-rides on open source code?
This presumes that we are putting aside the whole copyright is evil rhetoric...if you truly believe that then of course the GPL is the obvious license, but most hackers do not believe that.
This article has more plausible reasons for Linux being more popular than BSD: "If not for the AT&T lawsuit at the worst moment.... Because of that, people said, 'I don't want to go with BSD now.' That was the time Linux was gaining functionality."
This site is powered by something called "StoreBuilder." I love what StoreBuilder has to say about how they chose to use Amazon's XML over HTTP interface rather than the SOAP interface: "XML over HTTP, no SOAP interaction overheads"
And even if the original version of the story had been true, I could really care less about some museum pieces compared to the lives of the US and UK military, the Iraqi people, the Kurds, etc.
Why is it a question of comparing lives to museum pieces? You send a team of soldiers and they guard the museum. They are probably in less danger than they would be walking on the street where people take pot shots at them. Certainly less danger than grandstanding on top of a Saddam statue!
Yes, the GPL "ebodies the principles of Free software" but the Free Software Foundation recognizes many other licenses as Free. In particular, there are many license that are Free but non-viral, like the X license or the Python license. The FSF says: "The term ``open source'' software is used by some people to mean more or less the same thing as free software. However, their criteria are somewhat less strict; they have accepted some kinds of license restrictions that we have rejected as unacceptable."
If proprietary software vendors are the "looters" the intellectual efforts of those who can for the sake of those who cannot, it turns a lot of the corporate FUD on its head.
If you read the article you'll see that the looters are people who want to destroy open source (in particular SCO), not proprietary software vendors who want to take advantage of it. By definition they do not "hurt" it.
If not for its license (sorry, BSD license lovers), it might have stood a chance at the top spot in the Free OS world.
What do you think is wrong with the BSD license? The Apache license is similar and that didn't stop it from taking the "top spot" in the free web server world.
Not trying to be a troll here, but it just seems to me that if you were to take open sourced software and released it closed source, unless you did it in the US, you would be fine, right?
No, most countries have signed copyright treaties that mean that copyright is global. But beyond that, it is perfectly legal to release open source software as closed source if the license allows that. For instance the license for Python and Apache allow that. You must be thinking of the GPL.
But how can all those VCD Dealers in Malaysia get busted by the Motion Picture Association of AMERICA?
They can't. They get busted by their local police for breaking local copyright laws that are created in order to be in conformance with international treaties.
I think the real legal threat to open source is the fact there isn't a huge legal padding fee behind them, hence the Open/Free (yes they are the same) software, no money exchanged.
It is because you do not understand what Open Source and Free software are that you think that they are the same and that they are both equivalent to GPL when neither is.
If I decide to develop in let's say Python, C++ or C# if the code I write today needs to be ported to say AIX later I'm going to have to rewrite at least some of my code to make that happen.
I'm sorry. That's just incorrect. It depends on how you write your code, just as it does in Java. C/C++/Python allow you to write non-portable code and it is admittedly easier than it is in Java, but that's a feature, not a bug. Writing portable code is also easy if you use portable libraries. Please consider this post.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry dude. Slashdot's UI sucks.
You quoted this 640K thing twice today. Can you please provide a reference? Did he say that at a conference? Over lunch? In an article? In a book? Or is it just BS someone made up?
I often hear about man-in-the-middle attacks in theory but I've heard of one in practice. Can someone point me to some documentation about an incident where data was compromised by a MITM?
IT is now infrastructure technology and a commodity item
What does that mean? It makes no sense. To start with, you are already stretching the meaning of commodity if you say "Intel-based PCs are a commodity". You certainly can't buy and sell them on an exchange. It certainly isn't the case that you can buy them without regard to the manufacturer (as you can, say, pork bellies). But you can understand how to stretch the meaning to make it reasonable: a desktop computer from IBM is roughly equivalent to one from Dell. You get ltitle business advantage buying one rather than the other.
But how the hell can you apply that logic to the whole IT field? Let's say a new vendor creates a software product for bioinformatics. It allows the visualization of something that was previously hard to understand. Nobody else has software like this and the algorithms and user interface are patented (boo! hiss!). How the heck can you argue that that software is "commodity?" It is one-of-a-kind (as most category-creating software is). It makes no sense to lump in this innovative, one-of-a-kind program with 3COM Ethernet cards and Logitech mice, call the whole category "IT" and say that it is a "commodity."
I'm annoyed that this poor thinking got so much press around the industry. It's as silly as the IT changes everything hype we heard during the 90s.
It seems to me that most algorithms are not invented in the private sector, but come out of places like academia. After all, if it were otherwise, shouldn't there be a lot of firms out there that specialize in doing nothing BUT researching algorithms?
No, because it is quite difficult to market an algorithm. Developer: "We've got this really cool way of sortng lists of strings." CIO: "Ummm...does it do spam filtering?" Developer: "I guess it could." CIO: "Call me back when it does." The valuable part is usually not inventing an algorithm, but discovering a problem that it solves. If you know what problem it solves, you might as well go to market with a software product that is a complete solution that a customer can buy. You'll make a lot more money than if you have to convince some middleman that your algorithm could make a ton of money if only somebody put it in a product.
I didn't say that artists were better than mathematicians. I said that everybody who is publically funded needs to demonstrate that their work is useful. Art is useful as art (i.e. engages the senses and triggers critical thought). Mathematics is demonstrably not very useful in this way because the more advanced it gets, the fewer people can follow it and appreciate its beauty (this is also true to an extent for modern art and yet the Tate Modern sees thousands of guests per year so modern art is not a complete failure). Or to put it another way: a mathematician could make a wonderful proof that is only understood (enjoyed) by one other person on the planet and that proof would nevertheless be a success becuase it would be available when someone needed to build on it a hundred years from now. Conversely, if a work of art interests only one other person then it is hardly worthy of public support.
I honestly think there are some things worth doing for the hell of it, not because they are useful.
Okay, how would you propose society decide when to fund these things that are worth doing just for the hell of it? Let's say I decide that it would be beautiful to quilt the most elaborate quilt in history but I don't intend to show anyone else. I'll create it, enjoy it and then destory it. Should the government fund it because I am creating or discovering beauty? If yes, the government is going to go break helping people to find their inner beauty. If no, then you obviously think that the work I create must be useful to society perhaps as art or philosophy or science or entertainment, but useful somehow. Similarly, mathematics must be useful to expect government support. Higher mathematics is clearly not a roaring success as a source of beauty or entertainment for 99% of the population so we must fund it on some other basis: as science or philosophy. Perhaps you are happy to fund it merely as a form of art but mathematicians would destroy the mathematics industry if they tried to sell it to the general public on that basis.
That said, it would be quite short-sighted to only fund mathematics that it immediately useful. We fund mathematics speculatively and hope that some percentage turns out to be useful in the long run.
Because they're able to create beauty, like artists and writers and musicians do.
This is a poor analogy. Artists, writers and musicians put their art works in places that the general public can find them. Society would never pay to create "beauty" that is impenetrable to almost anyone who does not spend full time in the field. Even "modern art" is shown in museums that millions of people go to every years. The better argument in defense of mathematics is its utility. I'm glad that mathematicians find beauty in what they do but I wouldn't offer to pay for it if I didn't think it was likely to be useful to me or my descendants.
That's not a "design mistake", it's just a major feature that hasn't been added yet. This will be remedied in a future version of Ruby.
First, it hardly matters whether it is "just" a design mistake or a missing feature. If he needs the feature and it isn't available, he can't use the language. Second, Unicode tends to have all kinds of implications deep into the implementation of a language. They touch reflection, language syntax, regular expressions, file system, pickling, I/O etc. You can call it "just" a "missing feature" but it is one big feature. I would be surprised if Ruby got proper (i.e. integrated) Unicode support before the pretty major rewrite that will also add native threads.
A "design mistake" would be something error-prone and impossible to fix, like Python using indentation as part of the syntax.
Yeah, many people who have not tried it say that. Turns out that it is less error-prone because it eliminates a whole class of bugs that result from parens that do not follow the indentation.
I don't see how your post disputes anything that was in the parent's post. Are you trying to say that doing something unethical is not really unethical if you can make a case that another person in the circumstance would also have done it?
Your post also very conveniently avoids considering a current grievance that natives have with modern day Americans.
That all said, I think that the parent post was itself a little bit out of context. Of course Europeans treated the native badly and that's why the South Park episode is funny. It twists your cultural expectations around.
Patents were never intended to protect ideas (an algorithm is also an idea), but to protect implementations (and investments done to create that implementation.
I do not think that this is correct. Patents are for inventions. Inventions are for ideas. As a perfect example, a new drug is nothing more than an idea about how to apply a chemical to a problem. But they are patentable. Business methods are now also patentable. Furthermore, it is well known that you can patent hardware without ever having "implemented" them, so your distinction is bogus. I would be interested if you could find even one reference to back up this ideas that you patent "implementations" not "ideas".
. After all, why should an idea written in C be patentable in that case, and one in English or some mathematical notation not?
Patents generally are written in English (in America at least). You submit some English and a few diagrams and you get a patent. You would seldom submit C code.
Software patents are bad because they are bad for the software industry. That has nothing to do with this false dichotomy.
Because it makes it easier for people to get along and not kill each other so much if they aren't always bickering over "my god can kick your god's ass!" type stuff.
Human beings will bicker over irrational things. Remember that in the cold war, the "good guys" were Christian and the "bad guys" were athiests. For some accounts of the crimes of athiests, follow this link.
And anyhow, human beings have found their religions to be incredibly resilient. They don't give them up because some new science is discovered. Many religous people are quite comfortable with evolution (e.g. the Pope). Religion will adapt to what it needs to in order to survive. Look at how religious views about civil rights (e.g. miscegenation) have changed as civil rights have gone mainstream.
How about if we just take one galaxy at a time. When this one is full we'll worry about how to get to the next one. ;)
You upload data to the server through a web page and it sends it over the air to the watch.
The BSD license is ananthema to any coder who wants to make sure his/her code remains open. Pure and simple. Assuming I were any good at coding, I'd only work on a BSD if the problem was extremely Interesting. In other words, my interest would have to outweigh my reservation about providing MS, et. al, with the chance to gobble up my code in return for... nothing.
In my experience, most hackers don't care about licensing at all, and just use the license that goes with the software they care about. I've hung around Python development for years and never heard anyone say: "I'd get involved but I'm afraid Microsoft may co-opt Python and distribute it in a proprietary way." Who cares? You make software because you like making software and you want people to use it. If Microsoft distributes in binary with the operating system, great, more people can use it. Why should I mind Microsoft free-riding? Hell, I'm a free-rider myself. I've used both Linux and BSD without contributing a line of code. So what? Who cares. Why is it in different if Microsoft free-rides on open source code?
This presumes that we are putting aside the whole copyright is evil rhetoric...if you truly believe that then of course the GPL is the obvious license, but most hackers do not believe that.
This article has more plausible reasons for Linux being more popular than BSD: "If not for the AT&T lawsuit at the worst moment.... Because of that, people said, 'I don't want to go with BSD now.' That was the time Linux was gaining functionality."
You want infantrymen who at least have some familiarty with office and windows to try learning bash or mutt?
Why would a newbie doing word processing or email use bash or mutt? How about Open Office and Evolution?
This is completely pointless.
He said that the EFF should get patents for *two* reasons. You've argued that one of them is unnecessary. What about the other?
What about incoming messages?
This site is powered by something called "StoreBuilder." I love what StoreBuilder has to say about how they chose to use Amazon's XML over HTTP interface rather than the SOAP interface: "XML over HTTP, no SOAP interaction overheads"
And even if the original version of the story had been true, I could really care less about some museum pieces compared to the lives of the US and UK military, the Iraqi people, the Kurds, etc.
Why is it a question of comparing lives to museum pieces? You send a team of soldiers and they guard the museum. They are probably in less danger than they would be walking on the street where people take pot shots at them. Certainly less danger than grandstanding on top of a Saddam statue!
Yes, the GPL "ebodies the principles of Free software" but the Free Software Foundation recognizes many other licenses as Free. In particular, there are many license that are Free but non-viral, like the X license or the Python license. The FSF says: "The term ``open source'' software is used by some people to mean more or less the same thing as free software. However, their criteria are somewhat less strict; they have accepted some kinds of license restrictions that we have rejected as unacceptable."
If proprietary software vendors are the "looters" the intellectual efforts of those who can for the sake of those who cannot, it turns a lot of the corporate FUD on its head.
If you read the article you'll see that the looters are people who want to destroy open source (in particular SCO), not proprietary software vendors who want to take advantage of it. By definition they do not "hurt" it.
If not for its license (sorry, BSD license lovers), it might have stood a chance at the top spot in the Free OS world.
What do you think is wrong with the BSD license? The Apache license is similar and that didn't stop it from taking the "top spot" in the free web server world.
Not trying to be a troll here, but it just seems to me that if you were to take open sourced software and released it closed source, unless you did it in the US, you would be fine, right?
No, most countries have signed copyright treaties that mean that copyright is global. But beyond that, it is perfectly legal to release open source software as closed source if the license allows that. For instance the license for Python and Apache allow that. You must be thinking of the GPL.
But how can all those VCD Dealers in Malaysia get busted by the Motion Picture Association of AMERICA?
They can't. They get busted by their local police for breaking local copyright laws that are created in order to be in conformance with international treaties.
I think the real legal threat to open source is the fact there isn't a huge legal padding fee behind them, hence the Open/Free (yes they are the same) software, no money exchanged.
It is because you do not understand what Open Source and Free software are that you think that they are the same and that they are both equivalent to GPL when neither is.
If I decide to develop in let's say Python, C++ or C# if the code I write today needs to be ported to say AIX later I'm going to have to rewrite at least some of my code to make that happen.
I'm sorry. That's just incorrect. It depends on how you write your code, just as it does in Java. C/C++/Python allow you to write non-portable code and it is admittedly easier than it is in Java, but that's a feature, not a bug. Writing portable code is also easy if you use portable libraries. Please consider this post.