Communism is a political theory that posits a series of inevitable revolutions of the working class, each time resulting in a fairer society until you finally get to a completely fair communist state.
So no, the final state is not a violent one.
But the path to that state is violent.
Communism is frequently confused with Stalinism which presents itself as being communism while really being a philosophy of violent revolt winding up with a form of totalitarian government that will claim to be communist...
Basically what I see is that the original patent holder is being given various time exemptions on the filing process, and also is given a response period, yada, yada, yada.
The only thing that lept out at me as relating to/. discussions was article 9(2) on page 29. I don't think that adding an extra step of somewhat indeterminate length before revoking silly patents is really a wise idea...sure the patent holder has to have a chance to defend themselves. But if it is a court, guess who has already just stated their case..?
Puh-leeze, a mechanical plague wipes out all people?
No, but here is a real danger.
To date upon many occasions technology has replaced people in some job. However the displaced people are more generally competent than machines, and so they wind up with new jobs doing other thing which it is easier to have a person do than machines. And with the switch we have increased productivity and been overall better off.
That changes if at some point for about $100,000 you can buy a general purpose machine that is about equal to a person. Assuming that the machine has a 5 year replacement period, that maching is equivalent to a $20,000/year person. And any job the person can try for, the same machine is available for. In that case why would anyone be willing to pay a person more than $20,000/year over the long haul? Particularly when several years later the machine costs only $10,000?
If nobody is willing to hire the average worker, and a "human business" is unable to economically compete with a "mechanical" one, what happens next?
History offers small comfort here. We do not currently have a shortage of production. Yet we still have people starving to death. A large-scale welfare state with the disenfranchised without visible means of attaining power is unstable. But without welfare the people in question won't get fed.
What then?
I dread the day that computers achive equivalent computational abilities to people. I have traded variations on the above argument for several years and nobody has yet found any convincing response.
One of the things that was a big headache for a lot of people going from 2.0 to 2.2 was firewalls.
Well one of the changes that people don't appear to be aware of was that it was completely rewritten again.
But relax, the new stuff was designed to be something to be easy to develop stuff on top of. So 2.4's firewall code will transparently work both like 2.2 and like 2.0 did, and there are hooks to do virtually anything you want.
But still if you want to find out what changed, wander on over to the Netfilter page.
ActiveState has been offering betas based on this software for nearly a month!
OK, OK, so they just released an earlier snapshot all packaged together. Same development series. And it was not a release candidate (meaning the developers were not prepared to call it a final release if nobody found any bugs).
Using 2 licenses is fine for a first edition, but the second edition should include corrections and additions submitted to the online documentation from third parties, that gets more complicated...
A publisher like O'Reilly produces technical manuals, under the license an author chooses. If a would-be author (who is about to do a lot of work) wants advice on licenses, O'Reilly is stuck between a rock and a hard place, they want to support open source, but they have to admit that the author will probably make more if it is not an open source license on the book. For some reason people like writing software but find documentation a chore.
However what seems to work very well is if O'Reilly can work with the author to produce both a book and connected documentation. An example is Programming Perl where the online documentation started life as the book rearranged (and without the bad jokes). If the online documentation is exactly the book, people act as if the book is a cheap rip-off. If there is a clear division, then they don't.
But if you do the above, the online documentation gets maintained and the dead tree version does not. At some point you need to re-synch. But what pair of licenses allows that?
Personally I think that it would be good to create some sort of arrangement where the exact text and arrangement of a document may or may not be free, but it and all its derivatives must allow the technical information in them to be free to use in any other document using either of the pair of licenses. IOW O'Reilly or anyone else can come out with clearly differentiated books, but the information contained in such has to be available as free documentation.
They cannot solve the halting problem because it is impossible!
But they make a decent attempt at figuring things out (even though doing it perfectly is impossible) and as a result can do quite a bit of optimization.
Likewise many more options can be graphically indicated than most people think. Ask an OS/2 fan some day about the Workplace Shell.
"It cannot be done" is too often an excuse for "Don't even try."
They are not equivalent.
One program cannot figure out what another one is doing. This is called the halting problem. However we have an entire class of program known as a compiler that typically attempts to do it anyways and figure out how to make the program faster. Sure, it cannot work in general, but it can work well enough to be very useful.
Similarly it is easy to say, "Oh, this is hard. If you cannot do X, Y, and Z then you shouldn't touch this." Sometimes that can even be true. (I don't want to trust any network whose security was set up by an automated program and then forgotten.) But in many cases it is quite possible to produce a good user interface that can do a lot more than one would expect. The value of this cannot be underestimated.
An interesting admission from a friend who is an old Unix hand (in fact he was a kernel hacker before the days of Linux). A couple of years ago he saw a demo of Photoshop in the store running on a Mac. He doesn't use Macs. But he likes photography, so he tried using the demo and found the program friendly and easy to use. Since he had a copy of Windows at home he bought a copy for Windows, took it home, and couldn't figure the darned thing out! Same program. Two operating systems. One has a good user interface, one a so-so one, and the difference showed.
Consider that story the next time you want to feel all superior about user interfaces.
Depending on how important performance is, you may want to just write it in a portable language, like Java, Perl, or Python. Possibly using C at some key places to speed things up...
Even if I think I can guess the address Google is going to list the real site first. After all I would not want to wind up somewhere like www.whitehouse.com by accident.
Of course that means that I have to trust Google...
Incidentally (slightly OT) speaking of people tracking what you are doing and all that, what is the scoop with @HOME's proxy servers? The only reason that I can see for them wanting you to use their proxy server is to track users. And boy do they go out of the way to force people to use their proxy server!
IIRC the scientists involved estimated about 1 person dead somewhere from fallout per launch. I call that unacceptable.
I note also that Freeman Dyson, one of the strongest supporters at the time of Orion, later admitted that he thinks that it was probably right to stop the project.
You try to lock someone into your product, and arrange that they cannot switch. It is when you have achieved lock-in that you can crank your profit margin.
Given the existence of subtle dependencies in software the achievement of lock-in has historically been surprisingly easy. The main problem is that after being burned so many times in one area customers are eager to run to anything resembling an open standard. The second problem is that given the reproducibility of software it is very easy for customers to not stick to the limits you want to enforce. Not surprisingly many of these limits have to do squeezing every penny, and more of them have to do with discouraging the existence of an open standard.
What UCITA is about is achieving through law more than can be achieved technologically. Of particular concern to the open source movement (which of course is an ultimate form of open standard) are the conditions meant to discourage open standards. For instance draconian prohibitions on reverse-engineering. Of particular concern to any CIO with a brain is...pretty much everything.:-(
They have names, addresses, etc. And when they get people to use their proxy server (like most people wind up doing since they keep on changing that setting) they also have a complete track of your web habits.
Care to take bets on whether they are selling this data?
In the links thread where people broke in, a "coward" broke in, got the specs, and noticed exactly why they want this rev hidden. It has nothing to do with the money that the USB folks just got, and everything to do with trying to do security the stupid way.
You probably are right about why they are hiding those specs. But why not use a publically available and tested encryption algorithm instead? I, at least, would feel a lot more comfortable with that...
Cheers, Ben
Books, catalogs, and *.coms
on
Middle Media
·
· Score: 2
There is an interesting theory I heard that went like this. Online business is a lot like the introduction of catalogs. Again you can run a business with a minimum of overhead, without stores everywhere, etc. But the most successful catalog businesses combine the two. People like to order from a catalog. But they also like to be able to see the real thing, and they want to return items to a real store. Whether it started as a retail business (Eaton's) or as a catalog business (Victoria's Secret) the most successful catalog retailers combine catalogs with traditional retail outlets.
I believe there is some reason to believe that the same thing is happening with online retailing. Barnes and Noble is more and more often beating Amazon. They are also beating Borders. Unless Amazon buys Borders, I think that we will eventually see Barnes and Noble dominate both the online and the retail markets - winning in each market because of the synergy with the other...
The kernel is supposed to have been in a feature freeze for a bit. But we have had devfs added, I have heard talk of adding cryptography, and lots of talk about a journalled filesystem. (ReiserFS and/or Ext3.)
Those are important features, but is there any danger that this feature freeze could be eroding?
There are many statements, here is one. "With better than even odds the lightbulb currently in your lightbulb socket will last longer than the lightbulb that you use after it."
It seems impossible, hence the name, "The Lightbulb Paradox".
The reason for it is a sampling bias. When you choose the lightbulb in a socket at a specific time, the odds of a given lightbulb being picked are proportional to how long it lasted.
In this case a random drink is more likely to be chosen by a heavy drinker than a random drinker.
Do they mean, "The average person who describes themselves as a Guinness drinker." Do they mean, "The average person who drinks Guinness at least X times a week." Do they mean, "The person who consumes an average Guinness." (Thanks to the lightbulb paradox, the last is likely the heaviest drinker.)
Then once we know what they mean by an "average Guinness drinker", what is their estimate of how much said drinker drinks? That is the important point. Are we estimating that people lose 10% of their Guinness to the beard? A tenth of a percent? What?
Without a concept of that someone like myself who likes Guinness (particularly in the form of a black-and-tan) but does not often consume it will have no idea how to judge how much I personally save in beer by shaving.
Slashdot Mirror
Communism is a political theory that posits a series of inevitable revolutions of the working class, each time resulting in a fairer society until you finally get to a completely fair communist state.
So no, the final state is not a violent one.
But the path to that state is violent.
Communism is frequently confused with Stalinism which presents itself as being communism while really being a philosophy of violent revolt winding up with a form of totalitarian government that will claim to be communist...
Regards,
Ben
Basically what I see is that the original patent holder is being given various time exemptions on the filing process, and also is given a response period, yada, yada, yada.
/. discussions was article 9(2) on page 29. I don't think that adding an extra step of somewhat indeterminate length before revoking silly patents is really a wise idea...sure the patent holder has to have a chance to defend themselves. But if it is a court, guess who has already just stated their case..?
The only thing that lept out at me as relating to
Cheers,
Ben
Puh-leeze, a mechanical plague wipes out all people?
No, but here is a real danger.
To date upon many occasions technology has replaced people in some job. However the displaced people are more generally competent than machines, and so they wind up with new jobs doing other thing which it is easier to have a person do than machines. And with the switch we have increased productivity and been overall better off.
That changes if at some point for about $100,000 you can buy a general purpose machine that is about equal to a person. Assuming that the machine has a 5 year replacement period, that maching is equivalent to a $20,000/year person. And any job the person can try for, the same machine is available for. In that case why would anyone be willing to pay a person more than $20,000/year over the long haul? Particularly when several years later the machine costs only $10,000?
If nobody is willing to hire the average worker, and a "human business" is unable to economically compete with a "mechanical" one, what happens next?
History offers small comfort here. We do not currently have a shortage of production. Yet we still have people starving to death. A large-scale welfare state with the disenfranchised without visible means of attaining power is unstable. But without welfare the people in question won't get fed.
What then?
I dread the day that computers achive equivalent computational abilities to people. I have traded variations on the above argument for several years and nobody has yet found any convincing response.
Regards,
Ben
One of the things that was a big headache for a lot of people going from 2.0 to 2.2 was firewalls.
Well one of the changes that people don't appear to be aware of was that it was completely rewritten again.
But relax, the new stuff was designed to be something to be easy to develop stuff on top of. So 2.4's firewall code will transparently work both like 2.2 and like 2.0 did, and there are hooks to do virtually anything you want.
But still if you want to find out what changed, wander on over to the Netfilter page.
Cheers,
Ben
I believe that if you fork() then exec() you will have problems.
Why?
Because to get around limitations of Windows the fork() is emulated within a multi-threaded program by a new thread...
Cheers,
Ben
Yes, it even supports goto().
I tried it, it worked, I shuddered...
Cheers,
Ben
You are wrong. :-)
Topaz is the C++ version. When that stabilizes it will be called Perl 6.0.
This is another in the 5.x series.
Cheers,
Ben
ActiveState has been offering betas based on this software for nearly a month!
:-)
OK, OK, so they just released an earlier snapshot all packaged together. Same development series. And it was not a release candidate (meaning the developers were not prepared to call it a final release if nobody found any bugs).
But still.
Cheers,
Ben
Using 2 licenses is fine for a first edition, but the second edition should include corrections and additions submitted to the online documentation from third parties, that gets more complicated...
Cheers,
Ben
Here is the problem.
A publisher like O'Reilly produces technical manuals, under the license an author chooses. If a would-be author (who is about to do a lot of work) wants advice on licenses, O'Reilly is stuck between a rock and a hard place, they want to support open source, but they have to admit that the author will probably make more if it is not an open source license on the book. For some reason people like writing software but find documentation a chore.
However what seems to work very well is if O'Reilly can work with the author to produce both a book and connected documentation. An example is Programming Perl where the online documentation started life as the book rearranged (and without the bad jokes). If the online documentation is exactly the book, people act as if the book is a cheap rip-off. If there is a clear division, then they don't.
But if you do the above, the online documentation gets maintained and the dead tree version does not. At some point you need to re-synch. But what pair of licenses allows that?
Personally I think that it would be good to create some sort of arrangement where the exact text and arrangement of a document may or may not be free, but it and all its derivatives must allow the technical information in them to be free to use in any other document using either of the pair of licenses. IOW O'Reilly or anyone else can come out with clearly differentiated books, but the information contained in such has to be available as free documentation.
But the devil is in the details...
Cheers,
Ben
They cannot solve the halting problem because it is impossible!
But they make a decent attempt at figuring things out (even though doing it perfectly is impossible) and as a result can do quite a bit of optimization.
Likewise many more options can be graphically indicated than most people think. Ask an OS/2 fan some day about the Workplace Shell.
Cheers,
Ben
"It cannot be done" is too often an excuse for "Don't even try."
They are not equivalent.
One program cannot figure out what another one is doing. This is called the halting problem. However we have an entire class of program known as a compiler that typically attempts to do it anyways and figure out how to make the program faster. Sure, it cannot work in general, but it can work well enough to be very useful.
Similarly it is easy to say, "Oh, this is hard. If you cannot do X, Y, and Z then you shouldn't touch this." Sometimes that can even be true. (I don't want to trust any network whose security was set up by an automated program and then forgotten.) But in many cases it is quite possible to produce a good user interface that can do a lot more than one would expect. The value of this cannot be underestimated.
An interesting admission from a friend who is an old Unix hand (in fact he was a kernel hacker before the days of Linux). A couple of years ago he saw a demo of Photoshop in the store running on a Mac. He doesn't use Macs. But he likes photography, so he tried using the demo and found the program friendly and easy to use. Since he had a copy of Windows at home he bought a copy for Windows, took it home, and couldn't figure the darned thing out! Same program. Two operating systems. One has a good user interface, one a so-so one, and the difference showed.
Consider that story the next time you want to feel all superior about user interfaces.
Cheers,
Ben
Depending on how important performance is, you may want to just write it in a portable language, like Java, Perl, or Python. Possibly using C at some key places to speed things up...
Cheers,
Ben
Even if I think I can guess the address Google is going to list the real site first. After all I would not want to wind up somewhere like www.whitehouse.com by accident.
Of course that means that I have to trust Google...
Incidentally (slightly OT) speaking of people tracking what you are doing and all that, what is the scoop with @HOME's proxy servers? The only reason that I can see for them wanting you to use their proxy server is to track users. And boy do they go out of the way to force people to use their proxy server!
Cheers,
Ben
Excuse me? Advocating Perl, the language this site is written in, does not count for a point?
Gee whiz, perhaps honestly answering questions like that is why I am an "Average Geek"...
Cheers,
Ben
IIRC the scientists involved estimated about 1 person dead somewhere from fallout per launch. I call that unacceptable.
I note also that Freeman Dyson, one of the strongest supporters at the time of Orion, later admitted that he thinks that it was probably right to stop the project.
Regards,
Ben
You try to lock someone into your product, and arrange that they cannot switch. It is when you have achieved lock-in that you can crank your profit margin.
:-(
Given the existence of subtle dependencies in software the achievement of lock-in has historically been surprisingly easy. The main problem is that after being burned so many times in one area customers are eager to run to anything resembling an open standard. The second problem is that given the reproducibility of software it is very easy for customers to not stick to the limits you want to enforce. Not surprisingly many of these limits have to do squeezing every penny, and more of them have to do with discouraging the existence of an open standard.
What UCITA is about is achieving through law more than can be achieved technologically. Of particular concern to the open source movement (which of course is an ultimate form of open standard) are the conditions meant to discourage open standards. For instance draconian prohibitions on reverse-engineering. Of particular concern to any CIO with a brain is...pretty much everything.
I wish the CIOs all of the best.
Ben
They have names, addresses, etc. And when they get people to use their proxy server (like most people wind up doing since they keep on changing that setting) they also have a complete track of your web habits.
Care to take bets on whether they are selling this data?
Cheers,
Ben "no proof but..." Tilly
In the links thread where people broke in, a "coward" broke in, got the specs, and noticed exactly why they want this rev hidden. It has nothing to do with the money that the USB folks just got, and everything to do with trying to do security the stupid way.
Cheers,
Ben
You probably are right about why they are hiding those specs. But why not use a publically available and tested encryption algorithm instead? I, at least, would feel a lot more comfortable with that...
Cheers,
Ben
There is an interesting theory I heard that went like this. Online business is a lot like the introduction of catalogs. Again you can run a business with a minimum of overhead, without stores everywhere, etc. But the most successful catalog businesses combine the two. People like to order from a catalog. But they also like to be able to see the real thing, and they want to return items to a real store. Whether it started as a retail business (Eaton's) or as a catalog business (Victoria's Secret) the most successful catalog retailers combine catalogs with traditional retail outlets.
I believe there is some reason to believe that the same thing is happening with online retailing. Barnes and Noble is more and more often beating Amazon. They are also beating Borders. Unless Amazon buys Borders, I think that we will eventually see Barnes and Noble dominate both the online and the retail markets - winning in each market because of the synergy with the other...
Cheers,
Ben
The kernel is supposed to have been in a feature freeze for a bit. But we have had devfs added, I have heard talk of adding cryptography, and lots of talk about a journalled filesystem. (ReiserFS and/or Ext3.)
Those are important features, but is there any danger that this feature freeze could be eroding?
Thanks,
Ben
There are many statements, here is one. "With better than even odds the lightbulb currently in your lightbulb socket will last longer than the lightbulb that you use after it."
It seems impossible, hence the name, "The Lightbulb Paradox".
The reason for it is a sampling bias. When you choose the lightbulb in a socket at a specific time, the odds of a given lightbulb being picked are proportional to how long it lasted.
In this case a random drink is more likely to be chosen by a heavy drinker than a random drinker.
Cheers,
Ben
So how does quantity consumed in the recent past correlate with proportion of guinness lost? :-)
Cheers,
Ben
The statistics offer little hint here.
Do they mean, "The average person who describes themselves as a Guinness drinker." Do they mean, "The average person who drinks Guinness at least X times a week." Do they mean, "The person who consumes an average Guinness." (Thanks to the lightbulb paradox, the last is likely the heaviest drinker.)
Then once we know what they mean by an "average Guinness drinker", what is their estimate of how much said drinker drinks? That is the important point. Are we estimating that people lose 10% of their Guinness to the beard? A tenth of a percent? What?
Without a concept of that someone like myself who likes Guinness (particularly in the form of a black-and-tan) but does not often consume it will have no idea how to judge how much I personally save in beer by shaving.
Cheers,
Ben