Two is that people are stupid if they don't read those agreements.
Now that's something else. I wouldn't call myself stupid. I have actually read the Windows 98 EULA, but all the software that's downloaded and tried through the years' EULAs, I don't bother to read. I mean, how many people actually read EULAs?
If they don't, they are getting what's coming to them. Anytime someone enters a legal agreement it is their duty to make sure they know what their agreement actually is. Would you take a loan, buy insurance, rent an apartment or buy a book from Amazon without knowing the terms of the deal?
This is even worse, though, as it is about the volume licensing for companies. Sure, I can understand that someone buying a game for their kids don't bother with the EULA (consumers do have a layer of legal protection against onerous agreements), but this is about companies not even bothering to find out the terms of use for software that's expensive and critical for their operation. That is stupid.
First, the Gnome foundation has nothing to do with Mono.
Second, exactly how would open source people ignoring.net in any way help their cause, or hurt MS?
As you say yourself,.NET may be great technology. SHould we then succumb to the Not Invented Here syndrome and ignoring the technology just because of its origin?
Most people enthusiastic over Mono aren't even interested in compatibility issues with MS' implementation; they want to use it to develop Linux apps, not run MS stuff.
Of course the field is clear for people to design a competing standard that is better than.NET. I haven't seen any activity on that front, though.
Yes, people have tried to realize the benefits using the Java VM. It's a compelling thought; it's tried and true and it's already available for many platforms.
The problem with the Java VM is really that it's written to run Java, and Java only. All features and optimizations are geared towards this. For a few languages that turn out to have much the same features, it is doable, but for other languages it results in some incredibly ugly - and slow - hacks. CIL:s advantage is solely - but importantly - that it's designed to accomodate multiple languages (sort of the difference between a FORTH processor or signal processor and a general-purpose CPU).
That said, implementing a Java compiler for CIL is a good idea; you'd get even more places to run Java programs.
His mathematics is pretty bad. To get the security problems for Linux, he adds all security announcements from each of the major distributions - completely ignoring that most of those announcements are for the same bug. The Linux number is thus about a factor 4 too high.
Also, the Windows announcements are for the OS itself only, while the Linux announcements cover programs that do not count as OS stuff under Windows.
Even the idea of suspending normal work in order to fix problems in their products show that their work culture ignores correctness and security, and is very poor at addressing those issues. Doing a stunt like that just shows that they really do not take this seriously, and can't take it seriously with the development organisation they have.
A different organisation would just have allocated more resources (time, people, early design decisions) towards security than before, as part of the normal development cycle. that they have to do something like this implies they really don't care about these issues.
Neither GPL or copyleft are copyright free. Instead they leverage the power of copyright to function. If GPL were turned down in court, say, it would mean all GPL code reverts with full copyright to the original copyright owner. It would not mean the stuff would become free, quite the opposite. Their copyleft definition mirrors GPL very well, and 'copyfree' would have very wrong connotations.
You are actually choosing your subjects based on a future career? That's interesting.
In my view, few of us has any idea what we are going to be doing twenty years from now. We don't know which industries will be big, which will fail, or which all-new fields will be open by then. Especially at college age, you don't know what you will still like to do in ten or twenty years time (when you get upwards of forty, you start having a pretty good idea about it, though).
The way to choose your major is really to take two criteria into account: what subjects do you actually like; and what subjects will give you a broad enough foundation to be able to keep on choosing your path many years from now.
Majoring in something you really dislike just because there's plenty of jobs, because your family expects it, or because it carries with it an aura of status is a huge mistake. You might be doing that stuff for most of your life - do you really want to be unhappy with your job for most of your working career?Chances are you'll drop out - either at college or later - so you might as well choose something you actually like instead.
Getting a broad, foundational education is just as important. Sure, being a trained Cisco engineer pays a lot of money right now, but will it still do so in fifteen years? And what if you want to change to something else? The basic sciences are a good choice: physics, math, computer science, chemistry - they all tend to be useful almost no matter what you decide you want to do with your life later on.
Me, I waffled between Computer Science and Literature. I took CS and mathematics, and I haven't regretted it. Do I work as a programmer? No (though I might go back to that again in a year or two).
GCC is the only compiler you can count on being present on every Linux (or BSD) system. Thus most code released is going to continue being compilable by gcc, and it's going to remain the baseline for source distribution.
They planned to use the Linux version of Borland C++ Builder, which (as you can see on/. main page) has yet to materialize.
THere is hope that the toolset will run under Wine, though.
/Janne
Re:Different Net uses
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, I'm inclined to think places like Slashdot are a part of this problem as well. We're a fairly homogenous group of readers on this site, with a lot of shared interests and opinions. Although we come from most parts of the world, we're not much more different from one another than would be the people gathering in a LUG meeting or attending a hardware swapfest.
I wouldn't go so far as saying/. is insular, but the choice of topics and the language used on the site certainly does not welcome 'outsiders' to stay and become active. The same of course goes for many othe communities on the net (whether about computing, free software, right-wing or left-wing politics, religious matters and so on). A political site, for example, will tend to attract a like-minded crowd that will rapidly freeze out or otherwise ignore opposing viewpoints.
This is not strange, of course. We come to/. precisely because we want to read the news and opinions that catches our interests. But it does have the inevitable consequence that we will not be exposed to different points of view.
Another matter is of course, that on a site like this, you never get to know other people; it's little more socializing than following and contributing to the 'Letters' section in a daily paper. I've only seen truly social interactions on some less-popular chats or IRC channels, where the same bunch of people meet each other every day; or on some social mailinglists. They tend to suffer from the fact that many people know each other in person already, or are invited by someone already in that group. This does not promote diversity either to any appreciable degree.
Great - we can get spammed on GPS as well... Just imagine someone like a soda manufacturer buying a stretch of highway for a month, for example. If you use GPS navigation in your car, you'll get incessant harping about how thirsty you are, and how that particular brand of soda apparently makes your life better in one way or another.
That assumption (that most money goes into military spending) only holds true for the US, however. In most of the western Europe, far more funds go into civilian research than it does in the US. yes, there is a civilian dividend from military spending, but then, there is amilitary dividend from civilian spending as well...
It's interesting how some people immediately assume the big benefit for this technology is going to come from military use.
Likely, powered exoskeletons are rather going to be useful in civilian use first. Cargo handling, building, disposal, rescue, firefighting - all of those are going to benefit way more than military use, where a failure of the technology has far greater dangers than in civilian use - while the big cost savings are in civilian, rather than military applications. Just imagine that bear-proof suit that got an IG Nobel award a few years ago, but with active joints.
And don't forget that as soon as you have a real, workable exoskeleton, the step is fairly small to have two exoskeletons - One passive, worn by the operator; and one active, unmanned, working in a hazardous environment, connected together by radio.
As a side-note, the big problem (as stated by the article) is the lack of a good artificial muscle; this is a huge problem not only in this research, but in robotics research in general. No matter how good our control systems become, we just don't have a system that even approaches the energy/weight efficiency of the muscle. Until this problem gets some headway, we're never going to see those robots we all dream about.
I don't doubt you. But then, don't you run your stuff on UltraSparcs or something similar, rather than a desktop PC? If not, you should.
My point was that for desktop use, there simply isn't the same kind of incentive to upgrade as there was a few years ago. And if you need serious computing power, you're don't want to use a desktop in any case.
especailly geeks do not need the fastest system around. We do not necessarily need the latest games, we tend to use laTeX rather than Word, editor and compiler rather than an intgrated IDE and so on. I'm still doing half my work on a P133 HP Omnibook, just because it has the best laptop keyboard I've ever used...
I like really fast systems; I simulate brain areas for a living (or, well, for a PhD), and like lots of speed. The reality is, however, that even with an application like that, I spend a very small time actually running the simulator, and most of my time in an editor, writing code, writing papers, or writing grant proposals. This system, overall, would probably make me just as happy as a biggest-bang-of-all kind of product.
The only app I can think of that would require the best PC available (and that does not simply require the fastest system) is games. You want to run really serious simulations or hardware design apps? Well, get a big workstation or a PC cluster or something. You want to run smaller stuff? Run it on an ordinary PC, maybe get a cup of coffee while it churns - or get some text written while the simulator is working.
We're approaching the inflection point where it simply does not apply to get steadily faster, more potent computers. Last years machine - or that of three years ago - will do pretty much everything you throw at it. Not even MS has been able to increase system requirements at the same speed hardware has improved for the last couple of years.
Tell me, just for arguments' sake, exactly how you get OsX on to an x86 machine? Or are you suggesting we all ditch our current hardware and buy all new stuff?
Slashdot Mirror
And they claim doing sports is good for you...
/Janne
Congratulations!
/Janne
Two is that people are stupid if they don't read those agreements.
Now that's something else. I wouldn't call myself stupid. I have actually read the Windows 98 EULA, but all the software that's downloaded and tried through the years' EULAs, I don't bother to read. I mean, how many people actually read EULAs?
If they don't, they are getting what's coming to them. Anytime someone enters a legal agreement it is their duty to make sure they know what their agreement actually is. Would you take a loan, buy insurance, rent an apartment or buy a book from Amazon without knowing the terms of the deal?
This is even worse, though, as it is about the volume licensing for companies. Sure, I can understand that someone buying a game for their kids don't bother with the EULA (consumers do have a layer of legal protection against onerous agreements), but this is about companies not even bothering to find out the terms of use for software that's expensive and critical for their operation. That is stupid.
/Janne
First, the Gnome foundation has nothing to do with Mono.
.net in any way help their cause, or hurt MS?
.NET may be great technology. SHould we then succumb to the Not Invented Here syndrome and ignoring the technology just because of its origin?
.NET. I haven't seen any activity on that front, though.
Second, exactly how would open source people ignoring
As you say yourself,
Most people enthusiastic over Mono aren't even interested in compatibility issues with MS' implementation; they want to use it to develop Linux apps, not run MS stuff.
Of course the field is clear for people to design a competing standard that is better than
/Janne
Yes, people have tried to realize the benefits using the Java VM. It's a compelling thought; it's tried and true and it's already available for many platforms.
The problem with the Java VM is really that it's written to run Java, and Java only. All features and optimizations are geared towards this. For a few languages that turn out to have much the same features, it is doable, but for other languages it results in some incredibly ugly - and slow - hacks. CIL:s advantage is solely - but importantly - that it's designed to accomodate multiple languages (sort of the difference between a FORTH processor or signal processor and a general-purpose CPU).
That said, implementing a Java compiler for CIL is a good idea; you'd get even more places to run Java programs.
/Janne
His mathematics is pretty bad. To get the security problems for Linux, he adds all security announcements from each of the major distributions - completely ignoring that most of those announcements are for the same bug. The Linux number is thus about a factor 4 too high.
Also, the Windows announcements are for the OS itself only, while the Linux announcements cover programs that do not count as OS stuff under Windows.
Badly researched piece.
/Janne
There are paragraph breaks... If you pick up a book or a newspaper, you'll frequently see the same paragraph style. Nothing wrong with that.
/Janne
Even the idea of suspending normal work in order to fix problems in their products show that their work culture ignores correctness and security, and is very poor at addressing those issues. Doing a stunt like that just shows that they really do not take this seriously, and can't take it seriously with the development organisation they have.
A different organisation would just have allocated more resources (time, people, early design decisions) towards security than before, as part of the normal development cycle. that they have to do something like this implies they really don't care about these issues.
/Janne
Neither GPL or copyleft are copyright free. Instead they leverage the power of copyright to function. If GPL were turned down in court, say, it would mean all GPL code reverts with full copyright to the original copyright owner. It would not mean the stuff would become free, quite the opposite. Their copyleft definition mirrors GPL very well, and 'copyfree' would have very wrong connotations.
/Janne
What was our reaction to MS disabling access to the MSN sites? And this is different exactly how?
This is immature and childish. I hope he comes to his senses and refrains from this kind of petty vendettas.
/Janne
You are actually choosing your subjects based on a future career? That's interesting.
In my view, few of us has any idea what we are going to be doing twenty years from now. We don't know which industries will be big, which will fail, or which all-new fields will be open by then. Especially at college age, you don't know what you will still like to do in ten or twenty years time (when you get upwards of forty, you start having a pretty good idea about it, though).
The way to choose your major is really to take two criteria into account: what subjects do you actually like; and what subjects will give you a broad enough foundation to be able to keep on choosing your path many years from now.
Majoring in something you really dislike just because there's plenty of jobs, because your family expects it, or because it carries with it an aura of status is a huge mistake. You might be doing that stuff for most of your life - do you really want to be unhappy with your job for most of your working career?Chances are you'll drop out - either at college or later - so you might as well choose something you actually like instead.
Getting a broad, foundational education is just as important. Sure, being a trained Cisco engineer pays a lot of money right now, but will it still do so in fifteen years? And what if you want to change to something else? The basic sciences are a good choice: physics, math, computer science, chemistry - they all tend to be useful almost no matter what you decide you want to do with your life later on.
Me, I waffled between Computer Science and Literature. I took CS and mathematics, and I haven't regretted it. Do I work as a programmer? No (though I might go back to that again in a year or two).
/Janne
GCC is the only compiler you can count on being present on every Linux (or BSD) system. Thus most code released is going to continue being compilable by gcc, and it's going to remain the baseline for source distribution.
/Janne
They planned to use the Linux version of Borland C++ Builder, which (as you can see on /. main page) has yet to materialize.
THere is hope that the toolset will run under Wine, though.
/Janne
Actually, I'm inclined to think places like Slashdot are a part of this problem as well. We're a fairly homogenous group of readers on this site, with a lot of shared interests and opinions. Although we come from most parts of the world, we're not much more different from one another than would be the people gathering in a LUG meeting or attending a hardware swapfest.
/. is insular, but the choice of topics and the language used on the site certainly does not welcome 'outsiders' to stay and become active. The same of course goes for many othe communities on the net (whether about computing, free software, right-wing or left-wing politics, religious matters and so on). A political site, for example, will tend to attract a like-minded crowd that will rapidly freeze out or otherwise ignore opposing viewpoints.
/. precisely because we want to read the news and opinions that catches our interests. But it does have the inevitable consequence that we will not be exposed to different points of view.
I wouldn't go so far as saying
This is not strange, of course. We come to
Another matter is of course, that on a site like this, you never get to know other people; it's little more socializing than following and contributing to the 'Letters' section in a daily paper. I've only seen truly social interactions on some less-popular chats or IRC channels, where the same bunch of people meet each other every day; or on some social mailinglists. They tend to suffer from the fact that many people know each other in person already, or are invited by someone already in that group. This does not promote diversity either to any appreciable degree.
/Janne
Great - we can get spammed on GPS as well... Just imagine someone like a soda manufacturer buying a stretch of highway for a month, for example. If you use GPS navigation in your car, you'll get incessant harping about how thirsty you are, and how that particular brand of soda apparently makes your life better in one way or another.
/Janne
That assumption (that most money goes into military spending) only holds true for the US, however. In most of the western Europe, far more funds go into civilian research than it does in the US. yes, there is a civilian dividend from military spending, but then, there is amilitary dividend from civilian spending as well...
/janne
It's interesting how some people immediately assume the big benefit for this technology is going to come from military use.
Likely, powered exoskeletons are rather going to be useful in civilian use first. Cargo handling, building, disposal, rescue, firefighting - all of those are going to benefit way more than military use, where a failure of the technology has far greater dangers than in civilian use - while the big cost savings are in civilian, rather than military applications. Just imagine that bear-proof suit that got an IG Nobel award a few years ago, but with active joints.
And don't forget that as soon as you have a real, workable exoskeleton, the step is fairly small to have two exoskeletons - One passive, worn by the operator; and one active, unmanned, working in a hazardous environment, connected together by radio.
As a side-note, the big problem (as stated by the article) is the lack of a good artificial muscle; this is a huge problem not only in this research, but in robotics research in general. No matter how good our control systems become, we just don't have a system that even approaches the energy/weight efficiency of the muscle. Until this problem gets some headway, we're never going to see those robots we all dream about.
/Janne
The russians already have this: BBC. There have been other examples of exoskeleton-type things in the past as well.
/Janne
The experiment doesn't create black holes; it's just about detecting whether cosmic rays produce them naturally.
If they do, BTW, the holes are so small that they evaporate almost instantly.
/Janne
I don't doubt you. But then, don't you run your stuff on UltraSparcs or something similar, rather than a desktop PC? If not, you should.
My point was that for desktop use, there simply isn't the same kind of incentive to upgrade as there was a few years ago. And if you need serious computing power, you're don't want to use a desktop in any case.
/Janne
especailly geeks do not need the fastest system around. We do not necessarily need the latest games, we tend to use laTeX rather than Word, editor and compiler rather than an intgrated IDE and so on. I'm still doing half my work on a P133 HP Omnibook, just because it has the best laptop keyboard I've ever used...
/Janne
I like really fast systems; I simulate brain areas for a living (or, well, for a PhD), and like lots of speed. The reality is, however, that even with an application like that, I spend a very small time actually running the simulator, and most of my time in an editor, writing code, writing papers, or writing grant proposals. This system, overall, would probably make me just as happy as a biggest-bang-of-all kind of product.
The only app I can think of that would require the best PC available (and that does not simply require the fastest system) is games. You want to run really serious simulations or hardware design apps? Well, get a big workstation or a PC cluster or something. You want to run smaller stuff? Run it on an ordinary PC, maybe get a cup of coffee while it churns - or get some text written while the simulator is working.
We're approaching the inflection point where it simply does not apply to get steadily faster, more potent computers. Last years machine - or that of three years ago - will do pretty much everything you throw at it. Not even MS has been able to increase system requirements at the same speed hardware has improved for the last couple of years.
/Janne
Tell me, just for arguments' sake, exactly how you get OsX on to an x86 machine? Or are you suggesting we all ditch our current hardware and buy all new stuff?
/Janne
With HP discontinuing their calculator business, I just can't get excited about this. I want my RPN!!!
/Janne
Except that they get a bit of money for every blank tape or CD as compensation for us being able to do those same copies they now want to inhibit.
/Janne