This article doesn't "thoroughly examine and refute" anything. It accuses Liebowitz and Margolis of claiming a number of things that it would have been contradictory, circular or unsupportable for them to claim through the wonderful device of saying "If you read the article carefully, you will find that it seems to claim more than it actually does claim,... , I will address its implications as if they were clearly stated claims", and goes on sto show these claims not to be supported, or to be circular.
You do however, have a point. The author's have an agenda and the information they present is designed to support that agenda. The publication in which the article appeared is the primary forum for "Chicago School" laissez faire economics, and they are trying to imply that network effects do not exist, or can be overcome by market mechanisms alone. They have a further agenda in doing that - their political sponsors want to support the case the government intervention in the economy (or more radical change away from a market economy) is unnecessary. This article supports that claim only by throwing mud at a classical example of network effects in the hope of casting doubt on the whole idea. It doesn't prove anything, but Chicago school economics rarely does.
The important point in the Liebowitz and Margolis paper is that there is little evidence for the idea that Dvorak's keyboard would have been a radically more sensible design to "lock in" that the QWERTY one. It is only marginally faster to train people in, and barely faster at all to use in experienced hands.
AMD is kind of strapped for cash. They've never been as successful as Intel, even when they were the official second source for Intel devices, so they've never had a cash cow to give them the kind of capital and access to engineering expertise Intel got from DRAM and then from the x86. Last year they haemoraged money trying to keep the price of the K6-3 down. Athlon might give them access to some cash, but I wouldn't count on it. This all means they can't swan off for a few years throwing money after some blue-sky project like and Alpha/x86 crossover, nor can they expect to get a whole new 64 bit instruction set adopted widely.
My guess would be that they'll either go for some kind of adaptive system like the one Transmeta seems to be working on, or they'll adopt the EPIC instructions that Merced will use. Alpha is something of an outside chance - they never really took off so there's a lack of software, and it doesn't have the inbuilt parallelism that the HP-Intel VLIW-only-not-called-that approach has.
Things like this make me think Noam Chomsky might be right. How does the following quoted texted fit with any definition of "liberal" or "conservative" that makes any kind of logical sense ?
3) liberals run around screaming "Look how awful nukes are!"
4) conservatives tilt their Laz-e-boys up a notch, puff on their pipes, and make devastating comments about "Luddites"
Noone would have needed it. The only downside to Solaris would have been its massive footprint (by 1992 standards), and that would have been fixed once someone saw the need.
To quote a famous American, that the crown in England is less tyrannical than that in Turkey is due to the constitution of her people, not that of her government. I think the value of written contitutions is overdone. Look at South America, then look at Britain, and tell me where you'd rather live.
Britain is a constitutional monarchy because in effect the monarch has no power to raise money without parliament, so in fact it is parliament that has the power. That goes back to James I (of England, VI of Scotland).
Having said that, I agree with you that the way Britain is run could use a little modernisation, and that writing down how its meant to work would be quite useful, and I'm right with you on the ECHR, except that reform of the Law Lords really needs to be tackled first.
Linuxconf is not very good. It also needs modifications (or maybe it has modules of some kind ?) for every new tool you want to add.
A suitably general DTD for application configuration would allow a single tool to read the config file for an app, generate the appropriate GUI, and let the user mess with the configuration.
Where's it say that ? It has a termination clause, but that doesn't say that Sun can terminate at any time, only if they consider the license to be broken.
Anyway, its a shrinkwrap license: unenforceable.
I haven't seen our source code license, but I'll believe you on that count.
No, they couldn't. Sun can stop licensing their version of the JDK is they wanted to, and stop licensing the trademark similarly.
That doesn't stop the existing binary licensees and even some source code licenses continuing to use their software. Similarly it does't stop anyone else supporting the language, or developing environments for it.
In other words, Java would be in the same situation as a every other language ever invented.
Re:Can "Free" or "Open Source" sofware be in Java
on
SGI Releases IDE
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· Score: 2
Oh great, so all that GNU software I used prior to 1990 didn't really exist. Some people have short memories.
It is improbable, yes, but the anthropic principle says that since we exist, everything that needed to happen to bring us into existence must have happened. Therefore it is not surpprising that life somehow appeared - if it hadn't we would not be here asking questions about it. It seems to me that you therefore can't doubt the correctness of theories about the origins of life on the grounds that they require staggeringly improbable events to have occured, unless you can extend the sample size beyond one planet.
I think French local trains run on the same guage as British ones. Its the high speed trains (TGVs vs InterCity) where there is a difference, because the French (and most Euroean countries) have separate high speed networks, whereas the British do not.
I just though the use of Talgo trains held an interesting moral...
Good programmers are a scarce resource, and good programmers who'll work for the love of it are even scarcer. I think some of the conservatism is due to a desire not to see people "waste" their talents on "doomed" projects, when they could be working on yours.
Not that I think Berlin is doomed. I think it has the potential to be very interesting.
Not only Russia I'm afraid. Britain has a different railway guage to France, which is different again to Spain (which uses several gauges internally). Italy uses several gauges again, though I think the trains that cross the border from France run on the French guage. Switzerland has its own gauge, but trains crossing the country run on a different one...
The problem is dealt with using "Talgo" trains that can swizzle their wheels around to change guages at the border (or by humping all the passengers out of the train). It can be lived with.
Lessons for mobile phones: They'll never manage to agree on a standard. People with continue with the existing trend of using multi-standard handsets. This won't upset anyone much except those who cross international borders a lot. Once the different regional standards are locked in, they are near-impossible to change.
The right has its fair share of annointed ones. So does the libertarian movement for that matter.
Laissze-faire applies to people because they are capable of making up there own minds. It does not apply to genes, trees, cows, or stones, because they are not.
All of these other things do a good job of arriving at stable configurations over very long periods of time. Thats no reason not to interfere with them if they happen to be inconvenient.
Hayek is one of the foremost thinkers in liberal and libertarian thought, especially in Economics, which was his own subject. "The Road to Serfdom" is usually taken to be his magnum opus, and might better be titled "Why Socialism Sucks".
Hayek is generally misunderstood both by the people who quote him and the people who revile him. He did support a limited amount of government intervention in the economy. He started out his political life as a member of the Fabian society, and was opposed to concentrations of power in general. His support for free markets was based on a belief that they are the best way of providing economic goods. Both his supporters and his opponents paint him as a some kind of wild eyed libertarian fanatic, which he wasn't.
Ok then assuming we evolved from something much simpler, why did evolution seem to have been contained in a straight line up untill bacteria.
I don't see evidence for any such thing. There are non-bacterial replicators still around. Had a cold recently ? Viruses seem to be doing just fine.
The dominance of bacterial and larger life forms is probably due to the much greater success of replicators that can control their chemical environment by surrounding themselves in cellular membranes. Once that happens, all the useful chemicals in the environment will soon be in some cell or another and non-bacterial life-forms will have to find a way to attack them - hence viruses etc.
On a meta-level note: are you seriously trying to challenge the theory of evolution with this example ? If so, you must be the world's first Slashdot reading creationist. You might like to note that this is in the "proof by personal incredulity" category of arguments, which goes "X is very remarkable, therefore god must have done it". You might like to read the talk.origins FAQ, and save us all a lot of time.
Its called Binary Coded Decimal or BCD. You use four bits to encode each decimal digit, not a byte - although people may do that too, but if you did that you could just use ASCII.
You can use ordinary binary arithemtic to do BCD arithmetic, but you have to add fudge factors to get it right.
Its used in accountancy applications because you know how many digits accuracy you have, and can use decimal rounding conventions etc. I think it probably matters legally.
The first versions of BASIC used BCD, since its less likely to produce 2 + 2 = 3.9999999 in the way certain BASICS that used floating point sometimes did.
This is good news. I always thought this one was likely to be a red herring. Does anyone think this bodes well for 1/1/00, or not ?
Does anyone know of any data on how the GPS rollover went ? It can't have been too bad, or I'd have heard, but I heard Tokyo had traffic problems due to failed recievers.
Does anyone know what the practicalities of implementing the kind of color matching schemes the latest versions of photoshop use (which are patented) outside of the US would be ? I guess it would make them colour-matching schemes for a start:-)
Seriously though, would it be possible to integrate such code into the main source tree of would it have to stay as a patch ?
Of course the actual alorithms are quite tough in themselves, but it seems the legal problem is bigger.
It would only be alarming if patches were being excluded on the grounds that they aren't film related. If that happened, and not solution could be found, someone would split the project. While projects have maintainers, and those people have influence, they have no real power over people who are determined to do something different. That is the whole idea.
Slashdot Mirror
This article doesn't "thoroughly examine and refute" anything. It accuses Liebowitz and Margolis of claiming a number of things that it would have been contradictory, circular or unsupportable for them to claim through the wonderful device of saying "If you read the article carefully, you will find that it seems to claim more than it actually does claim, ... , I will address its implications as if they were clearly stated claims", and goes on sto show these claims not to be supported, or to be circular.
You do however, have a point. The author's have an agenda and the information they present is designed to support that agenda. The publication in which the article appeared is the primary forum for "Chicago School" laissez faire economics, and they are trying to imply that network effects do not exist, or can be overcome by market mechanisms alone. They have a further agenda in doing that - their political sponsors want to support the case the government intervention in the economy (or more radical change away from a market economy) is unnecessary. This article supports that claim only by throwing mud at a classical example of network effects in the hope of casting doubt on the whole idea. It doesn't prove anything, but Chicago school economics rarely does.
The important point in the Liebowitz and Margolis paper is that there is little evidence for the idea that Dvorak's keyboard would have been a radically more sensible design to "lock in" that the QWERTY one. It is only marginally faster to train people in, and barely faster at all to use in experienced hands.
AMD is kind of strapped for cash. They've never been as successful as Intel, even when they were the official second source for Intel devices, so they've never had a cash cow to give them the kind of capital and access to engineering expertise Intel got from DRAM and then from the x86. Last year they haemoraged money trying to keep the price of the K6-3 down. Athlon might give them access to some cash, but I wouldn't count on it. This all means they can't swan off for a few years throwing money after some blue-sky project like and Alpha/x86 crossover, nor can they expect to get a whole new 64 bit instruction set adopted widely.
My guess would be that they'll either go for some kind of adaptive system like the one Transmeta seems to be working on, or they'll adopt the EPIC instructions that Merced will use. Alpha is something of an outside chance - they never really took off so there's a lack of software, and it doesn't have the inbuilt parallelism that the HP-Intel VLIW-only-not-called-that approach has.
3) liberals run around screaming "Look how awful nukes are!"
4) conservatives tilt their Laz-e-boys up a notch, puff on their pipes, and make devastating comments about "Luddites"
I know the answer to 2. Noone would have invented Linux if Solaris (x86) were free.
1 is not an interesting question. Obviously is can, because Solaris is (almost) free (beer) for most Linux users.
How exactly does being able to remember IP addresses make one clueful ?
Only free beer. You don't have the source, and you can't redistribute it.
... if solaris was free.
Noone would have needed it. The only downside to Solaris would have been its massive footprint (by 1992 standards), and that would have been fixed once someone saw the need.
To quote a famous American, that the crown in England is less tyrannical than that in Turkey is due to the constitution of her people, not that of her government. I think the value of written contitutions is overdone. Look at South America, then look at Britain, and tell me where you'd rather live.
Britain is a constitutional monarchy because in effect the monarch has no power to raise money without parliament, so in fact it is parliament that has the power. That goes back to James I (of England, VI of Scotland).
Having said that, I agree with you that the way Britain is run could use a little modernisation, and that writing down how its meant to work would be quite useful, and I'm right with you on the ECHR, except that reform of the Law Lords really needs to be tackled first.
Linuxconf is not very good. It also needs modifications (or maybe it has modules of some kind ?) for every new tool you want to add.
A suitably general DTD for application configuration would allow a single tool to read the config file for an app, generate the appropriate GUI, and let the user mess with the configuration.
Where's it say that ? It has a termination clause, but that doesn't say that Sun can terminate at any time, only if they consider the license to be broken.
Anyway, its a shrinkwrap license: unenforceable.
I haven't seen our source code license, but I'll believe you on that count.
No, they couldn't. Sun can stop licensing their version of the JDK is they wanted to, and stop licensing the trademark similarly.
That doesn't stop the existing binary licensees and even some source code licenses continuing to use their software. Similarly it does't stop anyone else supporting the language, or developing environments for it.
In other words, Java would be in the same situation as a every other language ever invented.
Oh great, so all that GNU software I used prior to 1990 didn't really exist. Some people have short memories.
It is improbable, yes, but the anthropic principle says that since we exist, everything that needed to happen to bring us into existence must have happened. Therefore it is not surpprising that life somehow appeared - if it hadn't we would not be here asking questions about it. It seems to me that you therefore can't doubt the correctness of theories about the origins of life on the grounds that they require staggeringly improbable events to have occured, unless you can extend the sample size beyond one planet.
I think French local trains run on the same guage as British ones. Its the high speed trains (TGVs vs InterCity) where there is a difference, because the French (and most Euroean countries) have separate high speed networks, whereas the British do not.
...
I just though the use of Talgo trains held an interesting moral
Good programmers are a scarce resource, and good programmers who'll work for the love of it are even scarcer. I think some of the conservatism is due to a desire not to see people "waste" their talents on "doomed" projects, when they could be working on yours.
Not that I think Berlin is doomed. I think it has the potential to be very interesting.
Not only Russia I'm afraid. Britain has a different railway guage to France, which is different again to Spain (which uses several gauges internally). Italy uses several gauges again, though I think the trains that cross the border from France run on the French guage. Switzerland has its own gauge, but trains crossing the country run on a different one ...
The problem is dealt with using "Talgo" trains that can swizzle their wheels around to change guages at the border (or by humping all the passengers out of the train). It can be lived with.
Lessons for mobile phones: They'll never manage to agree on a standard. People with continue with the existing trend of using multi-standard handsets. This won't upset anyone much except those who cross international borders a lot. Once the different regional standards are locked in, they are near-impossible to change.
IIRC all Tasmanian native mammals are marsupials. Some very wierd ones too.
While the original BSD was based on the AT&T sources, I believe the AT&T code was "cleaned" out when it was made un-free.
The free BSDs derrived from this "clean" source tree, so while the AT&T code may have had some impact on the structure and so on, it isn't there now.
The right has its fair share of annointed ones. So does the libertarian movement for that matter.
Laissze-faire applies to people because they are capable of making up there own minds. It does not apply to genes, trees, cows, or stones, because they are not.
All of these other things do a good job of arriving at stable configurations over very long periods of time. Thats no reason not to interfere with them if they happen to be inconvenient.
Hayek is one of the foremost thinkers in liberal and libertarian thought, especially in Economics, which was his own subject. "The Road to Serfdom" is usually taken to be his magnum opus, and might better be titled "Why Socialism Sucks".
Hayek is generally misunderstood both by the people who quote him and the people who revile him. He did support a limited amount of government intervention in the economy. He started out his political life as a member of the Fabian society, and was opposed to concentrations of power in general. His support for free markets was based on a belief that they are the best way of providing economic goods. Both his supporters and his opponents paint him as a some kind of wild eyed libertarian fanatic, which he wasn't.
Ok then assuming we evolved from something much simpler, why did evolution seem to have been contained in a straight line up untill bacteria.
I don't see evidence for any such thing. There are non-bacterial replicators still around. Had a cold recently ? Viruses seem to be doing just fine.
The dominance of bacterial and larger life forms is probably due to the much greater success of replicators that can control their chemical environment by surrounding themselves in cellular membranes. Once that happens, all the useful chemicals in the environment will soon be in some cell or another and non-bacterial life-forms will have to find a way to attack them - hence viruses etc.
On a meta-level note: are you seriously trying to challenge the theory of evolution with this example ? If so, you must be the world's first Slashdot reading creationist. You might like to note that this is in the "proof by personal incredulity" category of arguments, which goes "X is very remarkable, therefore god must have done it". You might like to read the talk.origins FAQ, and save us all a lot of time.
Its called Binary Coded Decimal or BCD. You use four bits to encode each decimal digit, not a byte - although people may do that too, but if you did that you could just use ASCII.
You can use ordinary binary arithemtic to do BCD arithmetic, but you have to add fudge factors to get it right.
Its used in accountancy applications because you know how many digits accuracy you have, and can use decimal rounding conventions etc. I think it probably matters legally.
The first versions of BASIC used BCD, since its less likely to produce 2 + 2 = 3.9999999 in the
way certain BASICS that used floating point sometimes did.
This is good news. I always thought this one was likely to be a red herring. Does anyone think this bodes well for 1/1/00, or not ?
Does anyone know of any data on how the GPS rollover went ? It can't have been too bad, or I'd have heard, but I heard Tokyo had traffic problems due to failed recievers.
Does anyone know what the practicalities of implementing the kind of color matching schemes the latest versions of photoshop use (which are patented) outside of the US would be ? I guess it would make them colour-matching schemes for a start :-)
Seriously though, would it be possible to integrate such code into the main source tree of would it have to stay as a patch ?
Of course the actual alorithms are quite tough in themselves, but it seems the legal problem is bigger.
It would only be alarming if patches were being excluded on the grounds that they aren't film related. If that happened, and not solution could be found, someone would split the project. While projects have maintainers, and those people have influence, they have no real power over people who are determined to do something different. That is the whole idea.