When were programmers involved with interface design?
Everywhere I've ever worked! At best there are design people who give advice but all of the basic paradigms tend to emanate from programmers.
I said: It doesn't automatically allow you to generate readable code.
You said: Why most the code be readable? Can you read the code spit out by a compiler? If it runs fast enough to make business sense, people will gladly treat it as a black box.
By "the code", I mean whatever formalism you use to tell the computer what you want done. Even given infintite computer power you need to describe what you want done. This is inevitably an intricate process. If we have AI then presumably you'd feed in hundreds of pages of documentation. If (as is more likely) we do not have AI by 2015 then we'll have to use logical formalisms like programming languages or logic languages. These may be represented graphically -- it doesn't matter -- you still need to "write" or "draw" them in a fashion that will allow for maintenance by someone else.
Computer programming is about describing complex manipulations of data to an essentially stupid machine. It can be graphical but it can never be "paint by numbers."
Your comment about code generators indicates to me that you don't understand the nature of programming. Code generators are an implementation technique and are thorougly irrelelvant. You can have a high level language that works through interpretation (like Java) or code generation (like Sather). Which technique the implementor uses is irrelevant when it comes to the question of how easy or hard the language is to use. More and more, code generation is losing favour because it slows the build process without offering a compensating advantage. (that's partly why Java is gaining popularity and Microsoft is now emulating it with C#)
Your idea that because programming is "graphical" it is necessarily "easy" is just as incorrect.
You are similarly incorrect about your view that "our" programming jobs will be moving to China and India soon. Suffice to say that there are not a fixed number of programming jobs that must be divided like a pie among programmers. Rather, there is an almost infinite backlog of things that business and society would like automated and a limited number of programmers to do the automation.
Today the thing to be automated is so-called "B2B" systems. Only a tiny fraction of the relatinships between corporations have been automated. Unfortunately this is an extremely difficult nut to crack for a variety of reasons. It will take thousands of smart programmers to do it. Once that is done we will live in a very different business environment and a new automation project will arise.
And let's not forget that the last automation project is not done yet. How many B2C services do you wish were available on the web but are not? I mean there are still programmers working on perfecting the operating system decades after its invention. Programmers (Western, Eastern and otherwise) have a very secure future.
This sounds just like Rifkin's "The End of Work" in which he lamented the decline of ordinary labor and the rise of the "symbolic analyst" class amidst predictions of economic doom and gloom. His book was written in, wait for it... 1995. Just a few years later the tech boom put us on cloud 9.
Did you read Katz's review? This book sounds nothing like Rifkin's (which I also read). Rifkin said work was going away. Beck didn't say that. He said it would be: "fluid, part-time, entrepeneurial, free-lance, self-directed". I dunno about you but that sure sounds like the work I've been doing lately! Beck says: "Skills can be suddenly devalued,". Any CICS programmers out there? "jobs obliterated," Enron anyone? "social and welfare safety nets eroded." The "End of Welfare as We Know It?"
I don't know if Beck's book is any good but it sounds nothing like Rifkin's and deserves to be judged on its own merits.
On top of that, get ready to be "Moore's law'd'" out of most other programming jobs you might be thinking of taking - by 2015 computers will be fast enough that point-and-drool paint-by-numbers tools will be available to rapidly and idiotically autogenerate most of the code you write today with no discernable performance loss.
Are you kidding? Moore's law doesn't touch the basic problems of computing. It doesn't help you design good user interfaces. It doesn't automatically allow you to generate readable code.
I'd suggest you go back and re-read the Mythical Man Month.
Let's say we ignore the MMM and presume that Moore's law will allow programming language innovations that will make us a hundred times or a thousand times more productive than we are today. All that will mean is that we will be asked to solve problems that are a hundred or a thousand times more difficult than the ones we solve today. Processes that are batch today will be real-time in the future. Processes that are centralized today will be decentralized in the future. Processes that work on gigabytes of data today will be asked to handle terabytes in the future. People have been predicting "paint by numbers" programming since the invention of COBOL. You're just the most recent alarmist.
Re:The first Slashdot troll post investigation
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KaZaa Suspends Downloads
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Let me suggest that you re-post this in a slashback where people have less of a dedication to being "on-topic". Also, perhaps there should be a thread once a month about Slashdot itself.
At what point will some create an analogy quick reference card for these people. This is so stupid I may have a stroke. How is this ANY different from sneaker netting a VHS tape? I know its technically a broadcast, but from a REALISTIC standpoint? Big deal, my neighbor just MIGHT be able to pick it up, or he could just ask to borrow a videotape.
Your neighbour has nothing to do with it. They are trying to "protect" digital content flowing around your house. There are already standards in place to "protect" digital content media (CSS) and content going over wires (DTCP). Now they are going to close the wireless "loophole."
After all, I could just run coax to all the TVs in a house. Is this somehow different because it's wireless???
I mean, whenever I buy a special package, i.e., a pay-per-view, I can watch it on all the TVs in the house...
This is about *digital* wireless. Perfect copies of movies and sound on the internet. The path from your coax to Morpheus is pretty circuitous and lossy. On the other hand, one could imagine a $100.00 "Morpheus box" that allows anyone on the Internet to listen in on any other Internet user's television shows and pay-per-views.
Is the problem specific to wireless? No. The article says that there are already "solutions" for wire-based digital content. "One existing specification, called Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP), defines a cryptographic protocol for safeguarding audio/video entertainment content against illegal copying, intercepting and tampering as it traverses high-performance digital buses, such as the IEEE1394 standard." "Trying to apply the DTCP -- which requires high-speed encryption and decryption at every digital interface -- over a wireless network is not easy, said Husson."
So the social "problem" they are solving is not unique to wireless. It is just that they believe that wireless requires a different solution for technical reasons.
I wouldn't have such a big beef if that's what they said they were going after, but they never explicitly say that's a problem. They probably don't want to admit that 802.11 and other wireless technologies tend to be very easy to hack, otherwise this wouldn't be a problem at all.
This has nothing to do with your neighbours hacking your signal. If it did, they would just fix WEP. It's about *DRM*. They want to put end-user invulnerable encryption on every wire or wireless link so that the end-user can only save the data they allow him/her to save.
Sorry, I'm just not seeing how wireless piracy is a big problem
It isn't that it is a problem. It's that Philips wants to develop digital broadcast technologies that will not piss Hollywood off. Hollywood's nightmare is that you could by a $50.00 device that sniffs the packets being sent from your wireless DVD or cable broadcast box to your wireless TV.
Is this a problem yet? No, of course not. But then MP3 ripping wasn't a problem when CDs were invented either. Now Hollywood wants to figure out the DRM issues but it is too late. The installed base of CD players is too large. Unfortunately, the big companies are now in a mode where they will not release new technology until after they feel like they've got the DRM security issues worked out.
If Philips doesn't move on this in advance of the demand then the initial market will be captured a tiny little company that doesn't care about DRM. Remember the first MP3 players?
Am I in favour of DRM technology? Absolutely not. But what they are trying to do makes sense from their point of view. And doing it sooner rather than later makes even more sense.
No, you're not a freak. I'm the same way. There is something about knowing you can watch it whenever you feel like that makes you never feel like watching it. Part of it is that I feel like I spent money on so I should watch more carefully than I would "regular" TV (e.g. surfing Slashdot over 802.11b while watching).
Never forget that the BSD and most other license are very weak at protecting our collective work in the current environment. Under BSD, any company could take our code, slightly change a protocol, patent it and sue the original authors,
That is simply not true. Unless their "slight change" introduces a new concept, there is nothing to patent. If it does introduce a new concept then it is the concept that is patented, not the particular software implementation that happens to build on BSD-based software. They could have patented the idea even without doing an implementation! The GPL is no protection against patents.
and even without patent it could sue for frivolous legal reasons or prevent any further work on the original source base.
The GPL is no protection against frivolous law suits either! I could sue you today for anything. GPL versus BSD has nothing to do with it.
Maybe they would not have created it, but then the author to whom you are replying isn't going to be able to use it anyway. He's going to have to switch over from using that closed-source crappy piece of shit software to something that he can actually use.
Or maybe there would just be no product in that category at all. Or maybe there would be a product but it would be even more lame. It depends on the situation.
Also, what you seem to be saying in your example of BSD vs. GPL is that you wanted to take some code from another author and put it in your own commercial software, right? Now, if that code had been GPL'd you wouldn't have been allowed to "steal" that code for use in a closed-source commercial software product, as you did with the BSD'd code, right?
There's no stealing. BSD-licenced code is made to be shared and reused. You can't steal it.
However, you neglected to think about the fact that you "could" have coded the feature yourself, but apparently were too lazy to do so.
No, laziness had nothing to do with it. Cost effectiveness was the issue.
Since you, apparently, are working for profit, why is it that you feel justified in taking advantage of the work of others without providing them with compensation?
Because in most cases they put their work out to be shared because they wanted other people to profit from it. When I put open source software out there I don't care if someone profits intellectually, financially, erotically or whatever. If they can get benefit from it, good for them!
To sum it all up, are you saying that you should be paid for freeloading?
I didn't make a statement about this one way or the other. I said simply that because of the license, my end-users would either get an extra feature or not get that feature. The original poster suggested that if some code had been GPLed then he would have had access to the source code to a product built with it. Another option is that the other product would simply not have been built. Or, as you point out, it might have been written from scratch in a proprietary fashion. Either way, he would not have benefited.
None of these would be insurmountable problems if I had the source, but the folks that did the conversion of XFree into RtX (and it isn't a trivial conversion, not just./configure --with-vxworks; make ) were not compelled to release their changes by the XFree license.
Are you confident that they would have actually created RtX if they could not close-source it? I know that I have been in the situation where I wanted to add a useful feature to a commercial product and a BSD-style license allowed me to do it (and thus make a better product) whereas a GPL-style license would have prohibited me and thus deprived my end-user from the "freedom" to use that feature.
And this does not happen precisely because the monopoly for "globalization" owned by large corporations (who do exactly what you have described) is protected by isolationism for everyone else.
Given our presence at the top of every food chain on the planet, we're in a rather vulnerable position because we could easily wipe out our food sources. I won't go down the doom route, but I'll simply say that it's _far_ from a foregone conclusion that humans will be around even a million years.
I don't think it makes sense to talk about humanity as if it were just another species when it comes to extincton. What other species sets up farms? Sure, we may wipe ourselves out, but not in a manner even remotely similar to the ways that the dinosaurs or other species were wiped out.
Probably because gold currently has almost no value by itself -- in most of countries its very limited local use in electronics and jewelry can't justify its price, therefore the price of gold itself is tied to the common currency, that happens to be a dollar.
You don't have to use gold then. Use steel or oil or whatever. A hunk of steel will buy you more land or labour in sub-saharan Africa than it will in America. So what?
If one will use some more usable way to measure the price (say, land located in similar conditions)
What are "similar conditions?" Is an apartment in Midtown worth the same as one in Los Angelos? Land is a poor currency precisely because it is immobile. Oil is a better one.
it would become apparent that dollar as internal currency of US and dollar as an international currency have completely different value.
That is not true at all. If you convert the dollar to oil, or gold, or steel at wholesale prices in the US, you will get roughly the same amount as you would get if you did the same thing across the border in Mexico or Canada. Of course there will be difference in prices in many things, such as food and housing. But there are massive differences in the cost of living even within the United States.
If there were a large difference in the value of a dollar "within" the US versus "outside" of the US then there would be a massive amount of currency moving from the place where it was valued to where it was not. People would move the dollar, buy some goods and then import or export the goods. This is in fact what happens in countries where the official external value for a dollar is different than the internal value.
Which is exactly why we ought to be looking to raise the standard of living in other countries, and overturn US monetary policy that artifically keeps the dollar capable of buying so much more overseas than it does here.
What does that mean? Let's step away from dollars for a second. If you take an ounce of gold it can buy much more (in terms of real estate, labour or most material products) in a poor country than in a rich company. Why wouldn't the same be true for dollars?
Why won't it happen? Because the corporations like the cheap labor markets. The people in those foriegn markets typically like the job opportunities, even at what you consider a paltry salary.
Sounds win-win!
And, the US population would almost certainly have to accept certain losses in order for outside standard of living to reach a parity level.
Why? When Japan and Germany got rich in the fifties and sixties, did that make the US poor?
Instead you'd rather make it harder for the rest of the world to do business with the US by assessing various tariffs and fees. So some day the other 90% of the world will wake and realize they don't need the US anymore.
I agree that tarrifs would be a mistake! It is also odd that the original poster talks about "duties in other industries." Duties are falling away left and right through WTO, NAFTA and other treaties.
It's like this with most industries, why not software? Levi's designs jeans here and gets poor workers in taiwan to make them in sweatshops. I'm not saying it's right, it's not, but that's the way American companies do business and make a profit.
Creating code is not like sewing jeans. No company ever makes exactly identical code twice. After all, that's what "cp" does. The coder constantly finds holes in the design (corner cases, poor choices, etc.) and must communicate with the designer and/or customers. It is incredibly expensive to elaborate the design so formally that there are no creative choices or questions left for the coders.
Before I hired Chinese coders I would want to know if they spoke excellent English, had high-bandwidth access to uncensored technical information sources (including mailng lists) in the West.
have a sneaking suspicion that when it is implemented, it'll wind up in first class -- which most of us almost never get to use.
If they can make money off of the cattle-class customers by charging them for the service, they'll do it!
Re:I would like to say Happy Birthday
on
Happy Birthday Perl!
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Seriously - what else can do system admin scripting(on many different systems), database programming, web programming, network programming, and do it all on just about any platform, not to mention virtually everything C, awk, sed and shell scripting can do.
Virtually every international treaty is a voluntary agreement. Any country that doesn't like the provisions is free to quit. Don't like the WTO? Well, don't sign it.
You are right but there are subtleties. Dictator A might run up a huge foreign debt. Then president B gets elected after the dictator is assasinated. The country is in debt and can be ordered to join international organizations like the IMF or WTO.
He was convinced the USA would collapse before 2000. I'm not so sure he was wrong... and I'm damned glad he didn't live to see this.
Difficulty with the buereaucracy at your local retailer = sign of the apocalypse? I don't understand why there is always a constituency that wants to view the US as being at its worse point ever. Put today's issues in the context of the civil rights movement, McCartyism, the Vietnam war and the civil war.
Anti-globalization activists are a group of diverse people who might or might not have the same goal, but they all have concerns with the current globalization. Yes, there are isolationists and yes, there are violent anarchists, but there are way more peaceful protesters and pro-humane-globalization people who deserve more than a little footnote in newspapers.
It is pretty hard to find anti-globalizers with a nuanced view of the world. In Canada they are lead by people like Maude Barlowe and David Orchard. These people have been leading an isolationist agenda for decades. They said NAFTA would be the end of Canada. Naomi Klein is the new kid on the block but her doom-mongering doesn't seem much more credible.
When the anti-globalization left can articulate a coherent view of an alternate system and promote that view through reason, not emotion, they will have a fighting chance. I'd love to hear their ideas. But 90% of the time when I talk to people about globalization, whether on the Internet or in real life, they are spouting economic theories that have been long-since discredited and generally have only thought through a tiny fraction of the relevant issues.
Globalization should not just be about trade. Our society, our world, is so much more than that.
Fine. So why are these people protesting the fact that one form of globalization (trade) is succeeding? Shouldn't they be working on the types of globalization (labour, mobility) that are failing rather than attacking the only success?
That was not the issue. I can't get things done fast in Python, Scheme or Java either, but I do get things done fast in Perl. Just Do It.
I've never met someone who was equally competent in Perl and Python and could only get things done fast in Perl. Anyhow, my point is merely that when you are talking up Perl's productivity it doesn't make sense to compare it to C. Choose a language in the same productivity class!
Slashdot Mirror
When were programmers involved with interface design?
Everywhere I've ever worked! At best there are design people who give advice but all of the basic paradigms tend to emanate from programmers.
I said: It doesn't automatically allow you to generate readable code.
You said: Why most the code be readable? Can you read the code spit out by a compiler? If it runs fast enough to make business sense, people will gladly treat it as a black box.
By "the code", I mean whatever formalism you use to tell the computer what you want done. Even given infintite computer power you need to describe what you want done. This is inevitably an intricate process. If we have AI then presumably you'd feed in hundreds of pages of documentation. If (as is more likely) we do not have AI by 2015 then we'll have to use logical formalisms like programming languages or logic languages. These may be represented graphically -- it doesn't matter -- you still need to "write" or "draw" them in a fashion that will allow for maintenance by someone else.
Computer programming is about describing complex manipulations of data to an essentially stupid machine. It can be graphical but it can never be "paint by numbers."
Your comment about code generators indicates to me that you don't understand the nature of programming. Code generators are an implementation technique and are thorougly irrelelvant. You can have a high level language that works through interpretation (like Java) or code generation (like Sather). Which technique the implementor uses is irrelevant when it comes to the question of how easy or hard the language is to use. More and more, code generation is losing favour because it slows the build process without offering a compensating advantage. (that's partly why Java is gaining popularity and Microsoft is now emulating it with C#)
Your idea that because programming is "graphical" it is necessarily "easy" is just as incorrect.
You are similarly incorrect about your view that "our" programming jobs will be moving to China and India soon. Suffice to say that there are not a fixed number of programming jobs that must be divided like a pie among programmers. Rather, there is an almost infinite backlog of things that business and society would like automated and a limited number of programmers to do the automation.
Today the thing to be automated is so-called "B2B" systems. Only a tiny fraction of the relatinships between corporations have been automated. Unfortunately this is an extremely difficult nut to crack for a variety of reasons. It will take thousands of smart programmers to do it. Once that is done we will live in a very different business environment and a new automation project will arise.
And let's not forget that the last automation project is not done yet. How many B2C services do you wish were available on the web but are not? I mean there are still programmers working on perfecting the operating system decades after its invention. Programmers (Western, Eastern and otherwise) have a very secure future.
This sounds just like Rifkin's "The End of Work" in which he lamented the decline of ordinary labor and the rise of the "symbolic analyst" class amidst predictions of economic doom and gloom. His book was written in, wait for it... 1995. Just a few years later the tech boom put us on cloud 9.
Did you read Katz's review? This book sounds nothing like Rifkin's (which I also read). Rifkin said work was going away. Beck didn't say that. He said it would be: "fluid, part-time, entrepeneurial, free-lance, self-directed". I dunno about you but that sure sounds like the work I've been doing lately! Beck says: "Skills can be suddenly devalued,". Any CICS programmers out there? "jobs obliterated," Enron anyone? "social and welfare safety nets eroded." The "End of Welfare as We Know It?"
I don't know if Beck's book is any good but it sounds nothing like Rifkin's and deserves to be judged on its own merits.
On top of that, get ready to be "Moore's law'd'" out of most other programming jobs you might be thinking of taking - by 2015 computers will be fast enough that point-and-drool paint-by-numbers tools will be available to rapidly and idiotically autogenerate most of the code you write today with no discernable performance loss.
Are you kidding? Moore's law doesn't touch the basic problems of computing. It doesn't help you design good user interfaces. It doesn't automatically allow you to generate readable code. I'd suggest you go back and re-read the Mythical Man Month.
Let's say we ignore the MMM and presume that Moore's law will allow programming language innovations that will make us a hundred times or a thousand times more productive than we are today. All that will mean is that we will be asked to solve problems that are a hundred or a thousand times more difficult than the ones we solve today. Processes that are batch today will be real-time in the future. Processes that are centralized today will be decentralized in the future. Processes that work on gigabytes of data today will be asked to handle terabytes in the future. People have been predicting "paint by numbers" programming since the invention of COBOL. You're just the most recent alarmist.
Let me suggest that you re-post this in a slashback where people have less of a dedication to being "on-topic". Also, perhaps there should be a thread once a month about Slashdot itself.
At what point will some create an analogy quick reference card for these people. This is so stupid I may have a stroke. How is this ANY different from sneaker netting a VHS tape? I know its technically a broadcast, but from a REALISTIC standpoint? Big deal, my neighbor just MIGHT be able to pick it up, or he could just ask to borrow a videotape.
Your neighbour has nothing to do with it. They are trying to "protect" digital content flowing around your house. There are already standards in place to "protect" digital content media (CSS) and content going over wires (DTCP). Now they are going to close the wireless "loophole."
After all, I could just run coax to all the TVs in a house. Is this somehow different because it's wireless??? I mean, whenever I buy a special package, i.e., a pay-per-view, I can watch it on all the TVs in the house...
This is about *digital* wireless. Perfect copies of movies and sound on the internet. The path from your coax to Morpheus is pretty circuitous and lossy. On the other hand, one could imagine a $100.00 "Morpheus box" that allows anyone on the Internet to listen in on any other Internet user's television shows and pay-per-views.
Is the problem specific to wireless? No. The article says that there are already "solutions" for wire-based digital content. "One existing specification, called Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP), defines a cryptographic protocol for safeguarding audio/video entertainment content against illegal copying, intercepting and tampering as it traverses high-performance digital buses, such as the IEEE1394 standard." "Trying to apply the DTCP -- which requires high-speed encryption and decryption at every digital interface -- over a wireless network is not easy, said Husson."
So the social "problem" they are solving is not unique to wireless. It is just that they believe that wireless requires a different solution for technical reasons.
I wouldn't have such a big beef if that's what they said they were going after, but they never explicitly say that's a problem. They probably don't want to admit that 802.11 and other wireless technologies tend to be very easy to hack, otherwise this wouldn't be a problem at all.
This has nothing to do with your neighbours hacking your signal. If it did, they would just fix WEP. It's about *DRM*. They want to put end-user invulnerable encryption on every wire or wireless link so that the end-user can only save the data they allow him/her to save.
Sorry, I'm just not seeing how wireless piracy is a big problem
It isn't that it is a problem. It's that Philips wants to develop digital broadcast technologies that will not piss Hollywood off. Hollywood's nightmare is that you could by a $50.00 device that sniffs the packets being sent from your wireless DVD or cable broadcast box to your wireless TV.
Is this a problem yet? No, of course not. But then MP3 ripping wasn't a problem when CDs were invented either. Now Hollywood wants to figure out the DRM issues but it is too late. The installed base of CD players is too large. Unfortunately, the big companies are now in a mode where they will not release new technology until after they feel like they've got the DRM security issues worked out.
If Philips doesn't move on this in advance of the demand then the initial market will be captured a tiny little company that doesn't care about DRM. Remember the first MP3 players?
Am I in favour of DRM technology? Absolutely not. But what they are trying to do makes sense from their point of view. And doing it sooner rather than later makes even more sense.
No, you're not a freak. I'm the same way. There is something about knowing you can watch it whenever you feel like that makes you never feel like watching it. Part of it is that I feel like I spent money on so I should watch more carefully than I would "regular" TV (e.g. surfing Slashdot over 802.11b while watching).
Never forget that the BSD and most other license are very weak at protecting our collective work in the current environment. Under BSD, any company could take our code, slightly change a protocol, patent it and sue the original authors,
That is simply not true. Unless their "slight change" introduces a new concept, there is nothing to patent. If it does introduce a new concept then it is the concept that is patented, not the particular software implementation that happens to build on BSD-based software. They could have patented the idea even without doing an implementation! The GPL is no protection against patents.
and even without patent it could sue for frivolous legal reasons or prevent any further work on the original source base.
The GPL is no protection against frivolous law suits either! I could sue you today for anything. GPL versus BSD has nothing to do with it.
Maybe they would not have created it, but then the author to whom you are replying isn't going to be able to use it anyway. He's going to have to switch over from using that closed-source crappy piece of shit software to something that he can actually use.
Or maybe there would just be no product in that category at all. Or maybe there would be a product but it would be even more lame. It depends on the situation.
Also, what you seem to be saying in your example of BSD vs. GPL is that you wanted to take some code from another author and put it in your own commercial software, right? Now, if that code had been GPL'd you wouldn't have been allowed to "steal" that code for use in a closed-source commercial software product, as you did with the BSD'd code, right?
There's no stealing. BSD-licenced code is made to be shared and reused. You can't steal it.
However, you neglected to think about the fact that you "could" have coded the feature yourself, but apparently were too lazy to do so.
No, laziness had nothing to do with it. Cost effectiveness was the issue.
Since you, apparently, are working for profit, why is it that you feel justified in taking advantage of the work of others without providing them with compensation?
Because in most cases they put their work out to be shared because they wanted other people to profit from it. When I put open source software out there I don't care if someone profits intellectually, financially, erotically or whatever. If they can get benefit from it, good for them!
To sum it all up, are you saying that you should be paid for freeloading?
I didn't make a statement about this one way or the other. I said simply that because of the license, my end-users would either get an extra feature or not get that feature. The original poster suggested that if some code had been GPLed then he would have had access to the source code to a product built with it. Another option is that the other product would simply not have been built. Or, as you point out, it might have been written from scratch in a proprietary fashion. Either way, he would not have benefited.
None of these would be insurmountable problems if I had the source, but the folks that did the conversion of XFree into RtX (and it isn't a trivial conversion, not just ./configure --with-vxworks; make ) were not compelled to release their changes by the XFree license.
Are you confident that they would have actually created RtX if they could not close-source it? I know that I have been in the situation where I wanted to add a useful feature to a commercial product and a BSD-style license allowed me to do it (and thus make a better product) whereas a GPL-style license would have prohibited me and thus deprived my end-user from the "freedom" to use that feature.
And this does not happen precisely because the monopoly for "globalization" owned by large corporations (who do exactly what you have described) is protected by isolationism for everyone else.
Anybody can set up an import/export company!
Given our presence at the top of every food chain on the planet, we're in a rather vulnerable position because we could easily wipe out our food sources. I won't go down the doom route, but I'll simply say that it's _far_ from a foregone conclusion that humans will be around even a million years.
I don't think it makes sense to talk about humanity as if it were just another species when it comes to extincton. What other species sets up farms? Sure, we may wipe ourselves out, but not in a manner even remotely similar to the ways that the dinosaurs or other species were wiped out.
Probably because gold currently has almost no value by itself -- in most of countries its very limited local use in electronics and jewelry can't justify its price, therefore the price of gold itself is tied to the common currency, that happens to be a dollar.
You don't have to use gold then. Use steel or oil or whatever. A hunk of steel will buy you more land or labour in sub-saharan Africa than it will in America. So what?
If one will use some more usable way to measure the price (say, land located in similar conditions)
What are "similar conditions?" Is an apartment in Midtown worth the same as one in Los Angelos? Land is a poor currency precisely because it is immobile. Oil is a better one.
it would become apparent that dollar as internal currency of US and dollar as an international currency have completely different value.
That is not true at all. If you convert the dollar to oil, or gold, or steel at wholesale prices in the US, you will get roughly the same amount as you would get if you did the same thing across the border in Mexico or Canada. Of course there will be difference in prices in many things, such as food and housing. But there are massive differences in the cost of living even within the United States.
If there were a large difference in the value of a dollar "within" the US versus "outside" of the US then there would be a massive amount of currency moving from the place where it was valued to where it was not. People would move the dollar, buy some goods and then import or export the goods. This is in fact what happens in countries where the official external value for a dollar is different than the internal value.
Which is exactly why we ought to be looking to raise the standard of living in other countries, and overturn US monetary policy that artifically keeps the dollar capable of buying so much more overseas than it does here.
What does that mean? Let's step away from dollars for a second. If you take an ounce of gold it can buy much more (in terms of real estate, labour or most material products) in a poor country than in a rich company. Why wouldn't the same be true for dollars?
Why won't it happen? Because the corporations like the cheap labor markets. The people in those foriegn markets typically like the job opportunities, even at what you consider a paltry salary.
Sounds win-win!
And, the US population would almost certainly have to accept certain losses in order for outside standard of living to reach a parity level.
Why? When Japan and Germany got rich in the fifties and sixties, did that make the US poor?
Instead you'd rather make it harder for the rest of the world to do business with the US by assessing various tariffs and fees. So some day the other 90% of the world will wake and realize they don't need the US anymore.
I agree that tarrifs would be a mistake! It is also odd that the original poster talks about "duties in other industries." Duties are falling away left and right through WTO, NAFTA and other treaties.
It's like this with most industries, why not software? Levi's designs jeans here and gets poor workers in taiwan to make them in sweatshops. I'm not saying it's right, it's not, but that's the way American companies do business and make a profit.
Creating code is not like sewing jeans. No company ever makes exactly identical code twice. After all, that's what "cp" does. The coder constantly finds holes in the design (corner cases, poor choices, etc.) and must communicate with the designer and/or customers. It is incredibly expensive to elaborate the design so formally that there are no creative choices or questions left for the coders.
Before I hired Chinese coders I would want to know if they spoke excellent English, had high-bandwidth access to uncensored technical information sources (including mailng lists) in the West.
have a sneaking suspicion that when it is implemented, it'll wind up in first class -- which most of us almost never get to use.
If they can make money off of the cattle-class customers by charging them for the service, they'll do it!Python, Tcl, Ruby, Scheme, ...
Virtually every international treaty is a voluntary agreement. Any country that doesn't like the provisions is free to quit. Don't like the WTO? Well, don't sign it.
You are right but there are subtleties. Dictator A might run up a huge foreign debt. Then president B gets elected after the dictator is assasinated. The country is in debt and can be ordered to join international organizations like the IMF or WTO.
He was convinced the USA would collapse before 2000. I'm not so sure he was wrong... and I'm damned glad he didn't live to see this.
Difficulty with the buereaucracy at your local retailer = sign of the apocalypse? I don't understand why there is always a constituency that wants to view the US as being at its worse point ever. Put today's issues in the context of the civil rights movement, McCartyism, the Vietnam war and the civil war.
"Yes, Python's iterators (generators, sorry) feel like an Icon bolt-on in comparison."
I really don't see anything bolted-on about Python's iterators or generators.
def inorder(t):
if t:
for x in inorder(t.left):
yield x
yield t.label
for x in inorder(t.right):
yield x
for node in inorder(t):
print node
Other scripting languages have really hit a wall in development because of the objectless syntax, but ruby, is a piece of work.
Yeah, I can see your point. The other languages have a totally objectless syntax!
Too bad they have all hit a wall.
Anti-globalization activists are a group of diverse people who might or might not have the same goal, but they all have concerns with the current globalization. Yes, there are isolationists and yes, there are violent anarchists, but there are way more peaceful protesters and pro-humane-globalization people who deserve more than a little footnote in newspapers.
It is pretty hard to find anti-globalizers with a nuanced view of the world. In Canada they are lead by people like Maude Barlowe and David Orchard. These people have been leading an isolationist agenda for decades. They said NAFTA would be the end of Canada. Naomi Klein is the new kid on the block but her doom-mongering doesn't seem much more credible.
When the anti-globalization left can articulate a coherent view of an alternate system and promote that view through reason, not emotion, they will have a fighting chance. I'd love to hear their ideas. But 90% of the time when I talk to people about globalization, whether on the Internet or in real life, they are spouting economic theories that have been long-since discredited and generally have only thought through a tiny fraction of the relevant issues.
Globalization should not just be about trade. Our society, our world, is so much more than that.
Fine. So why are these people protesting the fact that one form of globalization (trade) is succeeding? Shouldn't they be working on the types of globalization (labour, mobility) that are failing rather than attacking the only success?
That was not the issue. I can't get things done fast in Python, Scheme or Java either, but I do get things done fast in Perl. Just Do It.
I've never met someone who was equally competent in Perl and Python and could only get things done fast in Perl. Anyhow, my point is merely that when you are talking up Perl's productivity it doesn't make sense to compare it to C. Choose a language in the same productivity class!