but the assumption with books was that you were paying a good chunk toward the physical 'stuff' the book is made out of. With that cost gone, it would seem books should be dirt-cheap, but clearly they're not...
I never made that assumption for a second. Do you really think that a hardback novel costs something akin to $25 to make and distribute? If the costs were in the binding then they would bring out the hardback and paperback at the same time and let the customer choose. Instead they delay the paperback to push you towards the (relatively) overpriced hardback.
So where are the real costs? A book may take anywhere from a month to ten years to write. Ten years of a skilled labourer costs a million dollars. But more important, the occasional bestseller has to pay for all of the advances paid for unprofitable flops. In addition, there are substantial marketing costs to be heard above the noise.
Downloadability might actually cost the industry because people buy books to read "someday". But if every book is a download away, they won't buy speculatively anymore. They'll buy when they want to read. If my bookshelf is representative, that will represent a drop in sales for the publishers.
Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
on
Python 2.5 Released
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· Score: 1
You're confusing machine code with microcode (check wikipedia). But overall you miss my point which is that you haven't identifed any technique for people to decide how many layers deep of knowledge they should go. Python (topic of this thread) is not written in assembly code, so why should a Python programmer skip C and learn assembler? Or if you say that they should learn both, then why not go all of the way down to microcode or chip design? How are you drawing your arbritary line?
My opinion: programmers should learn one layer lower than whatever they program in day to day. (which is C for Ruby/Python/Java programmers) You need to know the layer below so you can decide when it is appropriate to dip down for more power or performance. Programmers should learn a few more layers below if and only if they are very interested in performance. But if you care a lot about performance, assembly is the wrong place to stop. You should really know some chip design to know about cache misses, predictive branching, cross-core locking etc.
Liberty includes the right to exclusively enjoy those things to which you have a proprietary interest (property right), by definition.
But who decides what things each of has an exclusive right to? The state defines property. The state defends property. The state oppresses me in my wish to enjoy the property that my neighbour claims is his. This is not in any sense an academic issue. I personally deny Paris Hilton has the right to inherit the results of the labour of the Hilton employees. But the state defends this "right" to the exclusion of the rest of us.
According to John Locke (who knew a bit about liberty):
There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue. Whence then, arose the idea of landed property?...
My answer: the state (which Libertarians despise) invented the idea of landed property.
It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.
I call that liberty.
But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.
A socialist can easily argue that property is an oppression of every human's right to equal enjoyment of the earth.
Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
on
Python 2.5 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
All programmers should study assembler. With an understanding of what kind of action is going on behind the scenes, programming makes a lot more sense.
Perhaps they should also learn microcode because without that, you won't know what's going on behind the scenes in Assembler. And then to understand the microcode, maybe you need to understand electronics. And to understand the electronics, you should understand physics. So all programmers should understand Maxwell's equation lest they not know what's going on "behind the scenes."
Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
on
Python 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I thought I dispelled this myth years ago.
Here is the story as presented by Paul Graham (a famous Lisp expert). Of the three languages he chooses to discuss, Java, Perl and Python, Python is considered cooler (if not more popular) than Perl and Perl cooler (if not more popular) than Java because Python is most like Lisp of the three. Unfortunately, Python is a sort of immature Lisp which may over time grow into its full Lisp-yness but why wait around when you could just be using Common Lisp today?
I'm sure if you are a Lisp programmer, it is a compelling story. Unfortunately it does not ring true.
Given the fact that Guile is more than just Scheme and that Scheme has very little traction as a scripting language, Guile is essentially "yet another scripting language" in competition with Python, Ruby and the rest. At one point there was a pipe dream that other languages would be compiled to Guile but that never materialized. In retrospect, Guile was a huge mistake for the FSF. Despite their long-term investment in Guile, Python is more popular for programming Gnome than Guile is. If the translation concept had worked then Guile might have been a reasonable project. But as your post demonstrates, since development actually began, Guile has essentially been just another Scheme implementation.
If you open the floodgates for the public, you'll just bring in an onslaught of stalkers (the newsfeed only makes things worse). There's already been quite the resentment for allowing high-schoolers to sign up for Facebook, what now for the common public?
I have no interest in or love for facebook. But I find it intensely irritating that people in this thread are not even reading nor responding to the Slashdot summary, much less the article:
For the average student at New York University, for instance, little changes. The only people who can browse his profile before were other NYU students and that will stay the same. The change simply allows for 500 new groups to form that all operate independently on the Facebook platform. No one can browse all 9 million registered users."
In other words, there will be 500 independent facebooks on the same software platform. Not a single unified one with stalkers and students together.
However, once cannot expect to write something in IronPython and have it run in regular (CPython). Most of the other Python forks/implementations just tweak Python to make it faster or work better for certain things. So they still run your regular Python code.
According to Jim, the creator of IronPython: "To drive our Python compatibility, we run a large portion of the standard Python regression test suite in addition to a large custom test suite we added that runs IronPython and CPython side-by-side to test for identical behavior whenever possible. Despite all of this work, there will still be differences between IronPython 1.0 and CPython. The most obvious difference is that IronPython is missing a number of standard C-based extension modules so things like "import bsddb" will fail. We maintain a detailed list of differences between the two implementations and aim to reduce the size of this list in every release."
None of the implementations of Python run every C-based extension module that pure Python does. But IronPython is already more compatible with CPython than Jython is.
If you write some IronPython stuff with with.Net using WinForms, well you just killed one of the best features of Python, cross-platform execution.
Well, "duh." But who has a gun to your head telling you to do that? Just pick up a standard Python book at the library and code in standard Python. How would you even LEARN about WinForms without learning that it was a Microsoft.NET thing?
And your point? All of Microsoft's.Net platform is not part of an ECMA spec. In fact, the most important parts of it, the framework, are not an ECMA spec. So just because Mono and IronPython adhere to the ECMA CLR spec doesn't mean they will work. IronPython was paid for by MS so if MS has anything put in IronPython that is MS-Only, like Winforms, etc. then IronPython has basically become MS-Only.
Yes. That's why I explained to you that IronPython adheres to the ECMA spec. WinForms is not part of the ECMA spec, so IronPython does not depend upon it. IronPython can ACCESS WinForms, just as Unix Python can access Gnome GUI stuff and Mac Python can access Cocoa. But Iron Python does not depend upon Winforms.
I actually find the multi-language of of the CLR to be a negative. I work at a fortune 500 and most of us use C# and/or Java. There are a few groups of "programmers" that have always been VB-only/ASP-Only "programmers"....
Surely this is a corporate policy problem and not a technology problem. There is no way to make a virtual machine that will only run one language. Even if you totally optimize it for a single language, someone can implement another language in that language. So you might as well make it work well for multiple languages.
I agree. I think Python is a good language and most importantly it is cross-platform. Why would someone want to kill Python by making it MS-Only?
How does adding a port of Python to.NET make Python "MS-Only." Development continues on at least three other Python impementations for different runtimes. It's like saying that the existence of Visual C++ makes C++ MS-Only. It increases, not decreases the scope of Python.
As far as getting this IronPython on Mono, I don't see it happening. I use Mono and it is pretty nice. Mono has.Net 1.1 complete and.Net 2.0 is pretty much there now too. I just don't see IronPython ever getting enough development behind it to get a port to Mono, especially with a "shared" source license.
Would you please stop talking out of your ass? IronPython does not need to be "ported" to Mono. Mono adheres to the ECMA CLR spec. IronPython adheres to the ECMA CLR spec. Any divergence is a bug. Most beta versions of IronPython do run on most beta versions of Mono and any incompatibility between the two in the final release versions will be considered a bug by one of the parties involved.
Furthermore, the IronPython license is very liberal. What aspect of it would prevent a port to Mono?
Look, the underlying issue happens to be this... if you are a minority voice in the community you will not be heard.
I'm curious what other collaborative exercises you have participated in where the voice of the minority is elevated above the voice of the majority. Does Brittanica seek out scientists who disagree with the mainstream theories (except for very specific articles on their alternative theories, which Wikipedia also supports)? Wikipedia gives you a chance to make your case. Would you know how to do that with Brittanica? Wikipedia is not perfect nor perfectable because humanity is not perfect nor perfectable. But it is nevertheless useful.
BTW, I'm surprised that you could not at least get the entry to support your position as a minority position. It is very typical in wikipedia to have paragraphs of the form: "Some believe that...". This allows the minority position to be referenced without being endorsed by the majority. "While most Wiccans practice magic, a few do not, and do not identify as witches." That sentence discusses minority positions on a minority religion.
Usually such a compromise can be crafted unless the combatants have serious axes to grind.
I would prefer to scale web servers with processes rather than threads to minimize the chances of one thread corrupting the shared memory pool. How does OSX process creation compare to that of Linux and the BSDs?
Isn't it implicitly sexist to make such a big deal out of the first woman in space?
No. Women (especially Iranian women) have greater hurdles to their accomplishment. So the article highlights that she's done something unique by overcoming those extra hurdles. It is only sexist to highlight this if one presumes that these hurdles are innate and not imposed. Second, such a media event could encourage young girls to reject sterotypes and study science and business. This could help increase the pool of engineers and entrepreneurs. Third, because men tend to be dominant in society, one tends to assume things like that the funders of the X-Prize are likely to be all men. Correcting this misperception helps to dispell the underlying stereotypes. So I think it is good to publicize this aspect.
The write to "reprogram" anything you possess comes from the very core notion that you by default OWN what you posess and that there is no class of property that you cannot choose to own. Sure you can lease a car or a house but it is just as commonplace and easy to own both of those outright and be COMPLETELY FREE to do with them what you please.
I own my iPod, but Apple does not have a responsibility to provide me with the tools to disassemble it, change it and reassemble it. Apple does not have to give me a schematic or microcode.
I own my lawn mower, but it also does not come with tools that allow me to change it. If I can figure it out by reverse engineering then so be it. If not, I'm out of luck.
Even my house did not come with blueprints (despite the considerable amount I paid for it). If I wanted to figure out what was going on, I had to rip out the walls.
Reverse engineering is a freedom with a long history. By all means, defend it. But please do not confuse it with an invented right that requires the creator of a product not just to allow you to change it but to spend time and money helping you do so. That is not a freedom: it is a burden. It is undoubtedly a transfer of power from the creators of software to the consumers of it, but some of us believe that the market should decide the appropriate balance of power in these situations and not an invented right. This invented power can transfer power from small software companies to big businesses just as it does from big software companies to consumers.
If I want more power over restauranteurs, should I invent a right to get the recipe for all food I eat?
I read the article, but it didn't make it very clear - what will be the advantages of paid use of their quantum computer? Unless it's going to be faster than other supercomputers, I can't see the point. Is there some other advantage I'm not aware of?
It is widely believed that if large-scale quantum computers can be built, they will be able to solve certain problems faster than any classical computer...
Integer factorization is believed to be computationally infeasible with an ordinary computer for large numbers that are the product of two prime numbers of roughly equal size (e.g., products of two 300-digit primes). By comparison, a quantum computer could solve this problem relatively easily. If a number has n bits (is n digits long when written in the binary numeral system), then a quantum computer with just over 2n qubits can use Shor's algorithm to find its factors. It can also solve a related problem called the discrete logarithm problem. This ability would allow a quantum computer to "break" many of the cryptographic systems in use today, in the sense that there would be a relatively fast (polynomial time in n) algorithm for solving the problem....
This dramatic advantage of quantum computers is currently known to exist for only those three problems: factoring, discrete logarithm, and quantum physics simulations. However, there is no proof that the advantage is real: an equally fast classical algorithm may still be discovered (though some consider this unlikely). There is one other problem where quantum computers have a smaller, though significant (quadratic) advantage. It is quantum database search, and can be solved by Grover's algorithm. In this case the advantage is provable. This establishes beyond doubt that (ideal) quantum computers are superior to classical computers.
From D-Wave's website:
For several decades, computer scientists have been trying to classify all of the problems we know of. Whenever a new problem comes up, it is placed in one of the existing categories of problems. These categories describe how difficult the problems within it are, and why.
One of the most interesting categories contains problems that are called NP-complete. These all have the feature that in order to solve the problem all possible solutions must be tried, and the number of possible solutions grows exponentially with the problem size.
An example is the Travelling Salesman Problem, although there are literally thousands of them. This category is a particularly interesting target from a commercial perspective because most real-life business problems are in it.
...
Quantum computers can be used to get approximate solutions to large NP-complete optimization problems much more quickly than the best known methods running on any supercomputer.
To win what, exactly--popularity? For free software advocates popularity is not a goal. Freedom is a goal, a goal that is not achieved by installing non-free software on one's computer.
I don't believe that Eric Raymond has never declared himself a partisan of "Free Software" so I don't know why you, the article submitter or the Slashdot editor are acting as if he did. Eric Raymond was one of several people who created an ALTERNATIVE movement to the Free Software Movement. The Open Source movement was specifically organized around the pragmatic principle, and this latest declaration is just one more pragmatic compromise he is willing to make.
I agree with him. I find ridiculous the idea that a person has a right to reprogram any program he's been given. Such a right is certainly not derivable from any major world religion, nor from any plausible natural law, nor from constitutional history, nor widely demanded by the populations of any particular country. I conclude, therefore, that it is a wish, not a right. Yes, I wish for the ability to reprogram all of my programs, as I wish for the ability to re-cut my movies, but I do not ask for the original takes of film.
Sadly, yes, doing something for it's own sake rather than for monetary gain is frowned apon
That is not correct. Look at the hoopla around both Gates and Buffett giving way their money. Look at the adoration of Mother Teresa. Look at the army of fans for Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.
and sometimes viewed with fear and confusion,
Sure: anything out of the ordinary will engender fear and confusion. There is a difference between suspecting that someone MAY NOT BE altrustic and "frowning upon" them for BEING altrusistic. The former is quite common. The latter is pretty rare. When is the last time you saw an editorial of the form: "Why the Salvation Army MUST BE STOPPED from giving away soup."
Dude: it is a minor mistake in a long article, with no relevance to the article's overall point. The author uses a correct analogy about "open" research. According to your OWN estimation, the article was worth reading except for this one sentence. Get a grip. You are in thrall to an ideology.
I'm all for capitalism and the idea of "prizes" to encourage research, but have we really become so jaded that it's a complete shock when someone does something worthwhile merely for its own sake?
It isn't a shock that he did it for its own sake at all. Look at the thousands of open source programmers. The shock is that he's been given a million dollars and seem uninterested. Linus Torvalds does Linux for its own sake but if someone gave him a million dollars, he'd take it. Even someone who is not materialistic might think: "hmmm. A million dollars might help many Russian orphans or deliver AIDS drugs to Africans or..." It is strange for a single person to be neither greedy, nor ambitious nor altruistic... merely obsessed.
Yes, that's strange. It's rare and therefore strange.
Did anyone claim it is a new problem? Of course it will be new to some people and old hat to others. As soon as I saw the title I knew what it woudl be about, but there are always new programmers coming through the system who don't know this stuff.
A vm that sees you load BluePillDetect.exe just goes in and twiddles a few bits here and there in the app
There exists an infinite number of bit patterns performing the task of BluePillDetect.exe. 99.99999% of them will be unrecognized by the malware. If the user can install one of them, or even type one in, then the malware is not "100% undetectable." So the claim has been debunked.
IBM definitely has the resources to create many of these software services themselves for alot less money. I think it's as much about buying these companies up before the competition can than getting the software.
Software is only one asset of a company like FileNet. How about: brand, customer loyalty, domain expertise, market share, talent. Even considering just the software: it isn't really helpful to pay a half a billion dollars to duplicate someone else's product if you will end up being two years behind the market.
Also: Excel is used as much for communication and data storage as it is for computation. It isn't as if an Excel spreadsheet is a stateless computer program. It's a container for data that can be easily transmitted and manipulated if necessary.
And finally I have tried to profile a Python app for memory usage, but gave up when I discovered that Python doesn't even try to be efficient with memory usage. No point trying to optimise the main app when the runtime makes memory inefficiency pervasive.
It isn't correct that Python does not attempt to be efficient with its memory usage. You mentioned before that you had heard of PyMalloc. What is PyMalloc for? "Pymalloc, a specialized object allocator written by Vladimir Marangozov, was a feature added to Python 2.1. Pymalloc is intended to be faster than the system malloc() and to have less memory overhead for allocation patterns typical of Python programs."
You also complained about a limitation of PyMalloc wherein it won't free memory from its working set on the basis that it will probably need it again later. This will no longer be true as of Python 2.5 which is currently in beta testing: http://evanjones.ca/python-memory-part3.html
Slashdot Mirror
but the assumption with books was that you were paying a good chunk toward the physical 'stuff' the book is made out of. With that cost gone, it would seem books should be dirt-cheap, but clearly they're not...
I never made that assumption for a second. Do you really think that a hardback novel costs something akin to $25 to make and distribute? If the costs were in the binding then they would bring out the hardback and paperback at the same time and let the customer choose. Instead they delay the paperback to push you towards the (relatively) overpriced hardback.
So where are the real costs? A book may take anywhere from a month to ten years to write. Ten years of a skilled labourer costs a million dollars. But more important, the occasional bestseller has to pay for all of the advances paid for unprofitable flops. In addition, there are substantial marketing costs to be heard above the noise.
Downloadability might actually cost the industry because people buy books to read "someday". But if every book is a download away, they won't buy speculatively anymore. They'll buy when they want to read. If my bookshelf is representative, that will represent a drop in sales for the publishers.
My opinion: programmers should learn one layer lower than whatever they program in day to day. (which is C for Ruby/Python/Java programmers) You need to know the layer below so you can decide when it is appropriate to dip down for more power or performance. Programmers should learn a few more layers below if and only if they are very interested in performance. But if you care a lot about performance, assembly is the wrong place to stop. You should really know some chip design to know about cache misses, predictive branching, cross-core locking etc.
Liberty includes the right to exclusively enjoy those things to which you have a proprietary interest (property right), by definition.
But who decides what things each of has an exclusive right to? The state defines property. The state defends property. The state oppresses me in my wish to enjoy the property that my neighbour claims is his. This is not in any sense an academic issue. I personally deny Paris Hilton has the right to inherit the results of the labour of the Hilton employees. But the state defends this "right" to the exclusion of the rest of us.
According to John Locke (who knew a bit about liberty):
My answer: the state (which Libertarians despise) invented the idea of landed property. I call that liberty.A socialist can easily argue that property is an oppression of every human's right to equal enjoyment of the earth.
All programmers should study assembler. With an understanding of what kind of action is going on behind the scenes, programming makes a lot more sense.
Perhaps they should also learn microcode because without that, you won't know what's going on behind the scenes in Assembler. And then to understand the microcode, maybe you need to understand electronics. And to understand the electronics, you should understand physics. So all programmers should understand Maxwell's equation lest they not know what's going on "behind the scenes."
Given the fact that Guile is more than just Scheme and that Scheme has very little traction as a scripting language, Guile is essentially "yet another scripting language" in competition with Python, Ruby and the rest. At one point there was a pipe dream that other languages would be compiled to Guile but that never materialized. In retrospect, Guile was a huge mistake for the FSF. Despite their long-term investment in Guile, Python is more popular for programming Gnome than Guile is. If the translation concept had worked then Guile might have been a reasonable project. But as your post demonstrates, since development actually began, Guile has essentially been just another Scheme implementation.
If you open the floodgates for the public, you'll just bring in an onslaught of stalkers (the newsfeed only makes things worse). There's already been quite the resentment for allowing high-schoolers to sign up for Facebook, what now for the common public?
I have no interest in or love for facebook. But I find it intensely irritating that people in this thread are not even reading nor responding to the Slashdot summary, much less the article:
In other words, there will be 500 independent facebooks on the same software platform. Not a single unified one with stalkers and students together.
However, once cannot expect to write something in IronPython and have it run in regular (CPython). Most of the other Python forks/implementations just tweak Python to make it faster or work better for certain things. So they still run your regular Python code.
According to Jim, the creator of IronPython: "To drive our Python compatibility, we run a large portion of the standard Python regression test suite in addition to a large custom test suite we added that runs IronPython and CPython side-by-side to test for identical behavior whenever possible. Despite all of this work, there will still be differences between IronPython 1.0 and CPython. The most obvious difference is that IronPython is missing a number of standard C-based extension modules so things like "import bsddb" will fail. We maintain a detailed list of differences between the two implementations and aim to reduce the size of this list in every release."
None of the implementations of Python run every C-based extension module that pure Python does. But IronPython is already more compatible with CPython than Jython is.
If you write some IronPython stuff with with .Net using WinForms, well you just killed one of the best features of Python, cross-platform execution.
Well, "duh." But who has a gun to your head telling you to do that? Just pick up a standard Python book at the library and code in standard Python. How would you even LEARN about WinForms without learning that it was a Microsoft .NET thing?
And your point? All of Microsoft's .Net platform is not part of an ECMA spec. In fact, the most important parts of it, the framework, are not an ECMA spec. So just because Mono and IronPython adhere to the ECMA CLR spec doesn't mean they will work. IronPython was paid for by MS so if MS has anything put in IronPython that is MS-Only, like Winforms, etc. then IronPython has basically become MS-Only.
Yes. That's why I explained to you that IronPython adheres to the ECMA spec. WinForms is not part of the ECMA spec, so IronPython does not depend upon it. IronPython can ACCESS WinForms, just as Unix Python can access Gnome GUI stuff and Mac Python can access Cocoa. But Iron Python does not depend upon Winforms.
I actually find the multi-language of of the CLR to be a negative. I work at a fortune 500 and most of us use C# and/or Java. There are a few groups of "programmers" that have always been VB-only/ASP-Only "programmers". ...
Surely this is a corporate policy problem and not a technology problem. There is no way to make a virtual machine that will only run one language. Even if you totally optimize it for a single language, someone can implement another language in that language. So you might as well make it work well for multiple languages.
I agree. I think Python is a good language and most importantly it is cross-platform. Why would someone want to kill Python by making it MS-Only?
How does adding a port of Python to .NET make Python "MS-Only." Development continues on at least three other Python impementations for different runtimes. It's like saying that the existence of Visual C++ makes C++ MS-Only. It increases, not decreases the scope of Python.
As far as getting this IronPython on Mono, I don't see it happening. I use Mono and it is pretty nice. Mono has .Net 1.1 complete and .Net 2.0 is pretty much there now too. I just don't see IronPython ever getting enough development behind it to get a port to Mono, especially with a "shared" source license.
Would you please stop talking out of your ass? IronPython does not need to be "ported" to Mono. Mono adheres to the ECMA CLR spec. IronPython adheres to the ECMA CLR spec. Any divergence is a bug. Most beta versions of IronPython do run on most beta versions of Mono and any incompatibility between the two in the final release versions will be considered a bug by one of the parties involved.
Furthermore, the IronPython license is very liberal. What aspect of it would prevent a port to Mono?
Look, the underlying issue happens to be this... if you are a minority voice in the community you will not be heard.
I'm curious what other collaborative exercises you have participated in where the voice of the minority is elevated above the voice of the majority. Does Brittanica seek out scientists who disagree with the mainstream theories (except for very specific articles on their alternative theories, which Wikipedia also supports)? Wikipedia gives you a chance to make your case. Would you know how to do that with Brittanica? Wikipedia is not perfect nor perfectable because humanity is not perfect nor perfectable. But it is nevertheless useful.
BTW, I'm surprised that you could not at least get the entry to support your position as a minority position. It is very typical in wikipedia to have paragraphs of the form: "Some believe that ...". This allows the minority position to be referenced without being endorsed by the majority. "While most Wiccans practice magic, a few do not, and do not identify as witches." That sentence discusses minority positions on a minority religion.
Usually such a compromise can be crafted unless the combatants have serious axes to grind.
I would prefer to scale web servers with processes rather than threads to minimize the chances of one thread corrupting the shared memory pool. How does OSX process creation compare to that of Linux and the BSDs?
Isn't it implicitly sexist to make such a big deal out of the first woman in space?
No. Women (especially Iranian women) have greater hurdles to their accomplishment. So the article highlights that she's done something unique by overcoming those extra hurdles. It is only sexist to highlight this if one presumes that these hurdles are innate and not imposed. Second, such a media event could encourage young girls to reject sterotypes and study science and business. This could help increase the pool of engineers and entrepreneurs. Third, because men tend to be dominant in society, one tends to assume things like that the funders of the X-Prize are likely to be all men. Correcting this misperception helps to dispell the underlying stereotypes. So I think it is good to publicize this aspect.
The write to "reprogram" anything you possess comes from the very core notion that you by default OWN what you posess and that there is no class of property that you cannot choose to own. Sure you can lease a car or a house but it is just as commonplace and easy to own both of those outright and be COMPLETELY FREE to do with them what you please.
I own my iPod, but Apple does not have a responsibility to provide me with the tools to disassemble it, change it and reassemble it. Apple does not have to give me a schematic or microcode.
I own my lawn mower, but it also does not come with tools that allow me to change it. If I can figure it out by reverse engineering then so be it. If not, I'm out of luck.
Even my house did not come with blueprints (despite the considerable amount I paid for it). If I wanted to figure out what was going on, I had to rip out the walls.
Reverse engineering is a freedom with a long history. By all means, defend it. But please do not confuse it with an invented right that requires the creator of a product not just to allow you to change it but to spend time and money helping you do so. That is not a freedom: it is a burden. It is undoubtedly a transfer of power from the creators of software to the consumers of it, but some of us believe that the market should decide the appropriate balance of power in these situations and not an invented right. This invented power can transfer power from small software companies to big businesses just as it does from big software companies to consumers.
If I want more power over restauranteurs, should I invent a right to get the recipe for all food I eat?
I read the article, but it didn't make it very clear - what will be the advantages of paid use of their quantum computer? Unless it's going to be faster than other supercomputers, I can't see the point. Is there some other advantage I'm not aware of?
Yes, of course the goal is to be substantially faster than other supercomputers: for certain classes of problems. These are outlined on the company's website ( http://www.dwavesys.com/optimization.php ) and ( http://www.dwavesys.com/quantumcomputing.php ). But if you want a "Neutral Point of View" , I'll quote wikipedia:
From D-Wave's website:
To win what, exactly--popularity? For free software advocates popularity is not a goal. Freedom is a goal, a goal that is not achieved by installing non-free software on one's computer.
I don't believe that Eric Raymond has never declared himself a partisan of "Free Software" so I don't know why you, the article submitter or the Slashdot editor are acting as if he did. Eric Raymond was one of several people who created an ALTERNATIVE movement to the Free Software Movement. The Open Source movement was specifically organized around the pragmatic principle, and this latest declaration is just one more pragmatic compromise he is willing to make.
I agree with him. I find ridiculous the idea that a person has a right to reprogram any program he's been given. Such a right is certainly not derivable from any major world religion, nor from any plausible natural law, nor from constitutional history, nor widely demanded by the populations of any particular country. I conclude, therefore, that it is a wish, not a right. Yes, I wish for the ability to reprogram all of my programs, as I wish for the ability to re-cut my movies, but I do not ask for the original takes of film.
Yes, I had forgotten about them. Luckily its been a while since I ran into one. ;)
Sadly, yes, doing something for it's own sake rather than for monetary gain is frowned apon
That is not correct. Look at the hoopla around both Gates and Buffett giving way their money. Look at the adoration of Mother Teresa. Look at the army of fans for Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.
and sometimes viewed with fear and confusion,
Sure: anything out of the ordinary will engender fear and confusion. There is a difference between suspecting that someone MAY NOT BE altrustic and "frowning upon" them for BEING altrusistic. The former is quite common. The latter is pretty rare. When is the last time you saw an editorial of the form: "Why the Salvation Army MUST BE STOPPED from giving away soup."
Wikipedia is not software. Mediawiki is software. But mediawiki is not particularly exciting software. Wikipedia is an exciting use of dull software.
Dude: it is a minor mistake in a long article, with no relevance to the article's overall point. The author uses a correct analogy about "open" research. According to your OWN estimation, the article was worth reading except for this one sentence. Get a grip. You are in thrall to an ideology.
I'm all for capitalism and the idea of "prizes" to encourage research, but have we really become so jaded that it's a complete shock when someone does something worthwhile merely for its own sake?
It isn't a shock that he did it for its own sake at all. Look at the thousands of open source programmers. The shock is that he's been given a million dollars and seem uninterested. Linus Torvalds does Linux for its own sake but if someone gave him a million dollars, he'd take it. Even someone who is not materialistic might think: "hmmm. A million dollars might help many Russian orphans or deliver AIDS drugs to Africans or ..." It is strange for a single person to be neither greedy, nor ambitious nor altruistic ... merely obsessed.
Yes, that's strange. It's rare and therefore strange.
Did anyone claim it is a new problem? Of course it will be new to some people and old hat to others. As soon as I saw the title I knew what it woudl be about, but there are always new programmers coming through the system who don't know this stuff.
A vm that sees you load BluePillDetect.exe just goes in and twiddles a few bits here and there in the app
There exists an infinite number of bit patterns performing the task of BluePillDetect.exe. 99.99999% of them will be unrecognized by the malware. If the user can install one of them, or even type one in, then the malware is not "100% undetectable." So the claim has been debunked.IBM definitely has the resources to create many of these software services themselves for alot less money. I think it's as much about buying these companies up before the competition can than getting the software.
Software is only one asset of a company like FileNet. How about: brand, customer loyalty, domain expertise, market share, talent. Even considering just the software: it isn't really helpful to pay a half a billion dollars to duplicate someone else's product if you will end up being two years behind the market.
Also: Excel is used as much for communication and data storage as it is for computation. It isn't as if an Excel spreadsheet is a stateless computer program. It's a container for data that can be easily transmitted and manipulated if necessary.
And finally I have tried to profile a Python app for memory usage, but gave up when I discovered that Python doesn't even try to be efficient with memory usage. No point trying to optimise the main app when the runtime makes memory inefficiency pervasive.
It isn't correct that Python does not attempt to be efficient with its memory usage. You mentioned before that you had heard of PyMalloc. What is PyMalloc for? "Pymalloc, a specialized object allocator written by Vladimir Marangozov, was a feature added to Python 2.1. Pymalloc is intended to be faster than the system malloc() and to have less memory overhead for allocation patterns typical of Python programs."
You also complained about a limitation of PyMalloc wherein it won't free memory from its working set on the basis that it will probably need it again later. This will no longer be true as of Python 2.5 which is currently in beta testing: http://evanjones.ca/python-memory-part3.html