You remind me of my friend who kept saying "Social Insecurity" instead of Social Security. It was a valiant attempt to sound critical of a flawed behemoth which is a part of all our lives, but he just ended up sounding like an idiot.
The lesson: New words and phrases are best coined unintentionally.
Most mission critical systems have their clocks set to GMT with local zone information at a higher level of abstraction; my computer stores GMT in the bios and I use locales to represent time the way I want it to.
As a result I was looking for failures at 7PM on New Years Eve, well before the party;)
Normally I'd consider those "Yet Another.." posts trolls, but I think there is something to be said about this.
The source to Slash hasn't been released in quite a while; it seems slightly fishy that preaching the joys of Open Source gets Slashdot and Andover a lot of money, but the source isn't actually being released. Is this a strategic move for Andover?
If so, it's pretty stupid. Slashdot functionality has been emulated many times over. My personal favorite is SquishDot, a plug-in for Zope. I don't see any competitive advantage to not releasing the source. It's not like releasing the source is that much more work for Rob and crew; we know it's being worked on because of improvements in Slashdot itself...
A lot of people might respond "If you don't like it, leave. You get what you paid for." But this is a web site held by a publicly owned company; we get bombarded by the ads and click through on the banners and generally keep this site funded pretty well. You'd think that
1. in the face of consumer demand for the source (and yes, we are consumers whose click throughs fund slashdot and andover), and
2. in the face of the open source ideology that slashdot promulgates, and
3. in the face of the fact that there is no strategic advantage in delaying the release to Slash because there are so many workalikes
you'd think that Slash source code would be released.
That having been said, I don't particularly mind if the source isn't released because Rob et al are taking their sweet time due to programmer-endemic laziness (as opposed to andover policy and other conspiracy ideas ), but it would be nice to hear status reports on the matter at the very least (e.g., "01-03-2000: Did nothing."):-)
What I *am* saying is that the placental barrier can stop certain foreign agents from crossing the boundary from the embryo, to the mother.
That much I know for sure. The question to ask is, are the details (what agents, their combinations, molecular structure, ratios and amounts, etc.) species dependent?
If so (bloody likely), then it highlights the achievements of this science experiment..
Ligers and mules aside, this is a lot harder than it seems. The main problem isn't the actual fertilization, it's how the mother would deal with bearing a child of another species within itself. Presumably the (progesterone? I'm no biochemist) that the embryo secretes to inhibit reactions from the mother would be contained in proportion suited to a native species. It also might explain why crossbreeds are sterile. Once again, I am not a biochemist or geneticist, so I could be wrong.. However, I'd say that managing to pull this off was great, considering that our technology STILL isn't good enough to prevent organ rejections 100% of the time, I'm pretty sure cross-species gestation is probably an order of magnitude more touchy!
Good job to the doctors who pulled this off. Perhaps the technology that went into this can go into preventing organ rejections?
Or at the very least, that half-man half-lizard race of supermen I've been desigining in my basement will be ready to help me take over the world. Shit, was I thinking out loud again?
We do offer a link back. I dont think we are offering a 'competing' service because, as an arm of the I.T. division of a state-run university, I think we are by definition non-profit.
I can't speak in great detail or with absolute assurance about matters; I attend all the meetings but I'm really more of a server monkey/python programmer than I am a member of the web design or business/marketing teams. Still, I don't understand how you can make a service out of providing public domain information. I know Corbis does it, I know the Weather Channel seems to do it, but I don't understand the legal justification for it. How does providing a free service (the web page) for public domain information (the weather) allow them the right to own the weather (or so it seems)?
I am the sysadmin of a college online community (www.sin.wm.edu) and we've run into interesting issues. We are considering paying for a weather service to give us weather information every 10 odd minutes for us to parse and put into a web page.
This is because our old plan, that is parsing the Weather Channel home page's weather information for our region, has become legally suspect. At least our lawyers tell us so!
This is funny for two reasons:
1. It can't be legally suspect because of content. Please don't tell me the Weather Channel online has copyright to the weather. Weather is by definition public domain and I don't see any copyright infringement from using the information therein. Would you get in trouble for telling someone else what the weather is by word of mouth, without accrediting TWC? Weather is weather!
2. It can't be legally suspect because of implementation. We're not using the Weather Channel's implementation *at all*. Their layout is theirs, and we're just using the (aforementioned, public domain) content. They have an entirely different HTML structure, we actually parse out all the HTML and formatting and use the bare, public do main weather content.
So if it's not the content, and not the implementation, what is it? Why are our lawyers jumpy? It almost sounds as if the Weather Channel would get angry because we dared to rebroadcast the weather data they rebroadcasted from the National Weather Advisory (or whatever the organizational body's name is)... At least in the eyes of our paranoid lawyers. The Weather Channel hasn't bothered.
This leads to another issue. I promised you XML in the title and XML you wil get. XML's entire raison d'etre (reason for existence) is to make parsing of information easier. Yet, if we are to deal with a generation of confused copyright lawyers who aren't sure if parsing is legal or not, what's the point? XML makes content implementation-free, that is to say if I parse, TAG FOR TAG, the information off of the Weather Channel 2000's XML Weather Page, then my implementation and their implementation can be drastically different, but we could have the same DTD's and therefore the same content.
And the content is, unless you are seeing something I'm not, public domain. Please tell me weather is public domain. If it's otherwise, I'm going to kill myself now.:-)
Do DTD's count as content, or implementation, or is it an open standard that is to be used as all (read: "public domain") I'm not sure, but if more incidents occur such as ours, then we should look into:
1. Reconsidering XML 2. Reconsidering what constitutes public domain 3. Firing our lawyers and hiring a younger generation
That's my $0.02... I believe i have change coming.;)
Not ten minutes into the article's posting and I already see Stallman bashers calling the man crazy and/or outdated and/or stubborn for his Free Software crusade and actions.
Rather than rehash the old pro-Stallman arguments, which are basically naming his many accomplishments without justifying his beliefs, I'm going to pose his beliefs in the form of an ethical dilemma: Would you act differently than Stallman, given this dilemma?
Stallman acts on the belief that it is morally wrong to hold back information that was freely given to you. Namely, no idea is formed in a vacuum. Consciously, subconsciously, intentionally, unintentionally, the society around you bombards you with ideas to draw upon. Software engineers, for example, draw upon the ideas of friends, families, former educators, and in some cases mathematical concepts that have been in the idea pot since the Ancient Greeks.
It's patently (no pun intended) absurd to consider paying royalties to the Archimedes estate -- the idea just wouldn't hold water. (pun quite intended)
In other words, ideas aren't something which we have 100% control over. You can't will a good idea. Focus groups have proven this. You can will money and time into makeing a better environment for ideas to hit you, but the key here is that ideas come from the world around you.
If Microsoft were to acknowledge this, they would either have to pay The World a hefty royalty, or sue The World for patent infringement. And if we're all in jail, who will buy Microsoft products?
To all the Stallman bashers out there, consider this: do you consider your ideas to be truly, 100% yours? Every idea anyone has ever had has a basis either in another idea, or a social concept, or a form evident in nature. Now let's narrow the field down from the abstract of 'ideas' to 'software'. Most software performs a certain goal. The 'idea overlap' here is much greater in the world of software, because of common goals et al. It's not surprising that the originality of software comes not from the mind of the original but the sharing of information among many -- both because there are no truly original ideas and because the sharing is an extension of the above. That's why Open Source works. You hear something, you see something, and blend it in together with another random idea that hits you, and voila, instant 'idea'. Aren't you glad you don't have to pay royalties to everyone who helped you with the idea?
In economic terms, you can put it thusly: There is a scarcity of everything except desires. I guess you can consider an idea as a form of desire, namely a desire to make a thought tangible. That's great, thoughts are free and infinite, because ideas are born of ideas and interact with each other to make more ideas. Materials, however, are scarce. Here, then, is Stallman's consolation to the 'free idea' manifesto: ideas are free because they are infinite, and not sprung of one source; but implementations may be sold and owned by virtue of the fact that they are scarce.
In other words, you can't 'patent' selling CD's of Linux on it as original, because others do it or have the capability to do it. You can, however, charge money because not everyone can afford a CD press machine, or the time to burn all those CD's: that's scarcity in action.
But do the Stallman bashers feel ethically alright with charging money or defending ownership of something free and unlimited that comes not from one person, but from the interactions of an infinite number of outside and internal stimuli?
I'm rambling, so I better quit. Personally, I'm playing Devil's advocate; I feel you should be able to patent software *implementations* (i.e, actual binary form) because the TIME spent in R&D and the TIME spent coding is in itself scarce. But, the idea of software, i.e, specifications for software, or protocol types, or source, patenting compression algorithms etc, is free and the result of other ideas in an educational chain that spans the ages, and to sever the chain and claim it all came from your own mindspring is both hubris and ethically questionable.
Ironically enough, I just saw that movie last night. And the only thing that kept Sean Connery's character from getting away with it was the rather stupid belief that if he married, the girl would burn up..
/* It will swap like crazy if you assign the VM an amount equal to your physical memory.*/
I don't believe I've used the word 'duh' since the early 1980's.
I have a K6-2/400 with 256M RAM which makes it very comfortable to run Linux with 128M for host and VM with 128M. Performance ceases to be an issue above 192M RAM -- sometimes VMWare may *APPEAR* to be slower than it is because of screen refresh rates. If you run the VM in full screen mode you can get native speed on a machine with a decent amount of RAM.
I just dont get it. if they want state, why use a stateless protocol like http?
why not iiop (that is stateful, no?)? Why not a protocol like ftp or ssh (if you're a security nut) which is stateful?
Hack over hack over hack.. the statelessness of HTTP was a performance hack... the cookies are a statefulness hack... junkbuster is a stateless stateful statelessness hack...
I wouldn't say the WTO riots are in any way 'focused'. While there was a common cause of the protestors, I don't think it was to fight 'corporate greed', it was to promote 'labor greed' -- in other, more civil words, it's the age-old desire for labor to get a bigger piece of the pie than management gives them. Whether or not this is justified, I'll leave to personal opinion -- but this isn't a question of techno-idealism at all.
In fact, I'd probably say it's the precise opposite, and here's why.
At the center of the debates were three issues: The rights of (more highly skilled and paid) U.S. workers in the face of corporations increasingly moving abroad for labor; preserving the environment in the face of aforementined corporate practices; and occupational health and safety and child labor laws. There were many, many other issues, such as tariffs and the like -- but the protestors represented (at least according to the Washington Post) these three interests first and foremost.
Let's see why none of these are really 'techno-idealism.
First of all, the desire to move corporations back to domestic borders (from the perspective of the workers) is because we are highly educated and skilled relative to the other unskilled workers of the world. Our janitors have a better lifestyle than your janitors, and so on and so forth. In a [whips out microeconomics textbook] perfect market environment, the natural solution would be that the unskilled labor would move abroad, and the more highly paid workers, driven by their incentive to still make a livelihood, would become more highly skilled. The world is starving for computer jobs -- yet the protestors are not attempting to eschew their (for the most part; there are many exceptions) factory and service sector jobs in favor of retraining for the computer sector.
Whether they should or not is a matter of personal opinion; however a true 'techno-idealist' would be so enamoured by technology as a means and an end that they would not be in fear of being laid off in favor of a developing Global South nation.
Readjusting an entire economy to accomodate a technological paradigm shift isn't easy; a lot of people will be left jobless and bereft; but IMHO once the riots and pundits and yabbering of Katz passes in a few years we'll deal with it. "Luddites" anyone? I'd hardly call them Techno-Anarchists. Although I'm sure Jon Katz's ancestor, Horatio Alger Hiss Katz III wrote in The Daily Colostomy-Tribune, "These Followers Of Ludd, They Are Ye Technoe-Anarchistes, And Their Love of Geeke-Dom Is Fain Magickal." People want jobs and will use any means necessary. Using a web as a warfare platform is a use of technology, yes, but is a lot lighter use of technology than actually retraining for a computer sector career.
Techno-idealists also would not combat (again for the most part) environmental issues in the way the protestors did. If we are to take Jon Katz' definition that a Techno-Idealist is one enamored of political issues and technology to the same order of magnitude that Katz bandies about the words "Columbine" and "geek", then we would perhaps view the motivation of these aforementioned idealists to find a TECHNOLOGICAL solution to matters. Rather than start a riot, another ideological issues is the use of alternative, lesser-polluting fuels -- which are techologically feasible at this point in history but which the corporations don't view as cost-effective. So the (rather erroneous) view is promulgated that these technologies are "future technologies" when in fact I can have a fuel-cell today. A Techno-Idealist would use aforementioned Technology (Magickal or otherwise =) to promote public consciousness and outrage about the fact that we use the petrified remains of dinosaur shit to create smoky and oily futures for ourselves, when everyone should be using a hydrogen fuel-cell and making (gasp) water.
Burning, smashing and harassing people, web page defacement and the like do not promote public awareness of HOW we can fix the environment. At best these techno-anarchists have said "There's something wrong with the environment thanks to Joe Suit here."
That's great, but what do we do about it? I didn't hear about a Return To Pastoral Bliss summer camp. Where do I sign up?
In the end, if technology advances as it does, the only pollution will be heat pollution And that's mandated by Law. The Second Law, in fact. But to get this technology to move the way it does, we need public awareness. And the Techno-Boobs aren't doing that. In fact, simply blathering about how the WTO is satan(TM) is probably the least productive thing to do.
Finally, it can be said that the 'workers rights' view of the WTO, that the WTO promotes child labor and other such travesties, are not combatted in a 'techno-idealist' manner. Again, the key is awareness -- but the wonder of technology is that it allows people all over the world to be made aware. Making US citizens aware via protests and other 'web wars', legitimate or not, is good -- but the true potential of technology isn't being exploited. No one, to date, has used the wonders of technology to let the members of the exploited nations realize what a shitty time they're having. In other words, the protestors are preaching to a 'largely indifferent' choir. But techno-idealism would cause the workers of the country to realize how bad it is once they see images of American life, etc -- and they will not have any incentive to work.
Once they decide not to work until conditions are made better, arbitrage takes hold and the other nation's wages go up (because workers demand it), thus jobs move back to the US in some proportion until a new equilibrium is reached.
To date, no one has used technology to reach the afflicted workers. Companies are only there because wages are low, because workers there don't realize how bad it is and are willing to work there for that cheap.
To change policy best, change economics; to change economics, change incentives. This is advertising. This is canvassing. This is protesting done in a technological manner -- namely efficient and expedient without the middleman.
But of course, Katz must think that rioting and technology go hand in hand, after seeing the ape-show at Slashdot.
But what am I but a poor graduating college student with a background in computer science and public policy.
The main strength of Java is in servlet middleware, not little applets for cutesy "I Kiss You!!!!!!" home pages.
Servlets can keep state information better and more securely than cookies, and again it is on par with Python.
Good examples of Python and Java middleware: Zope (Python) and Enhydra (Java). The strength of the two is especially visible in the SQL database interface modules/servlets. I'm also partial to Zope's Squishdot:)
Please don't judge Java's performance on applets -- look at its usage in servlets for e-commerce websites, especially tying together frontends and backends . In such a situation the hits you'd get from being a byte-compiled language with blah-ish VM's and weird threading are compensated by server hardware, but you can move the applications from server to server as you upgrade hardware and have a consistent e-commerce site.
Elton Wells: Elton has left his position as Program Manager of Developer Tools at Microsoft to join LinSight. He brings years of Linux experience, and will be responsible for the development of LinSight
It's quite obvious that years of linux experience at microsoft means that they MUST BE STEALING GPL CODE AND USING IT! Panic...
I don't think this is loony at all. After reading the article (remember that? The chips and Dips crew did:). It is already a War Crime to impersonate a leader calling off the troops or falsifying information about treaties and ceasefires -- as the article hints, it violates perfidity -- why should an electronic version be any different?
There have ben no cases I know of of actors being arrested for war crimes by impersonating presidents, just as I predict there will be no cases of digital artists arrested for war crimes by morphing world leaders. It's not the technology, it's not even the application, it's the intent. I think you're playing with fire when you broadcast ANY image (technologically created or otherwise) of a world leader calling off troops during a time of war...
Thisis FUNNY. FUNNY. Not a "First Post" message. Or is someone parsing through these pages with a perl/python script and automoderating down posts with the word "First" in them.
Who's on First? "Offtopic" Third Base!
No... that doesn't work. Someone funnify this post.
almost EVERY company I've worked for uses greek/roman gods (and badly misspelt, as well.)
So when I got control of the DNS zone, my first sysadminial job was to give decent hostnames.
One IP block got characters from J.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and "Silmarillion."
The other got Sumerian/Babylonian gods. Nothing like logging into marduuk to feel better about yourself.
AS for my domain, I just make as many cheezy puns involving thw word 'breakdown' as i can (the server in my info is down btw)
chemical.breakdown.org nervous.breakdown.org mental.breakdown.org emotional.breakdown.org molecular.breakdown.org total.breakdown.org communications.breakdown.org (my *backup* mail server, isn't that witty!)
Basically, if I see another greek/Roman naming convention, I will have to slap people silly. There are hordes of fun pagan pantheons to use. Hell, they don't even need to be REAL! yog-sothoth.foo.com would be fun to admin.
I can picture an exasperated sysadmin. "Yog-sothoth is possessed, I swear." "What could possibly possess a machine named after a demon?" ( || "Something worse: NT.")
Maybe MS Should go into making hardware instead of software (I am a fan of their mice/keyboard), but something tells me MicroHard(R) probably won't go over well with the stockholders. On second thought, maybe it will... (that ain't stock they're holding!)
On a more serious note, I like the work that Microsoft research labs do. I saw an interesting article in a magazine a few months back, comparing Linus Torvalds and the GNOME team to Bill Gates and Microsoft Research labs (does anyone know the magazine or article, and if its available online?)
Microsoft Research to me is what PARC was in the 70's... they're heavily into UI research, namely natural-language UI research, because it's inevitable that voice controlled computers need to grasp natural languages. Personally, I'm a big fan of the consistency of Microsoft's UI's as compared to the forest of X toolkits (it doesn't compare to NeXTstep or MacOS or Be), personally they should drop the OS thing and go into UI and applications management (IMHO). Oh well, enough pipe dreaming.
Terrible CS department (The Econ department is fantastic, but then again I plan on becoming an economist:)
They teach you algorithms and concepts, that's true, but they dont teach you the fundamentals of anything practical. Case in point: they don't teach malloc(), realloc() or calloc() to the intro students! Rather than that, they jump through hoops to define classes and then use new() and delete() to "dynamically resize" arrays. Great theory, pathetic in practice.
OTOH, if you want something for PHBs, WM is the place to be.
Slashdot Mirror
You remind me of my friend who kept saying "Social Insecurity" instead of Social Security. It was a valiant attempt to sound critical of a flawed behemoth which is a part of all our lives, but he just ended up sounding like an idiot.
The lesson: New words and phrases are best coined unintentionally.
Most mission critical systems have their clocks set to GMT with local zone information at a higher level of abstraction; my computer stores GMT in the bios and I use locales to represent time the way I want it to.
;)
As a result I was looking for failures at 7PM on New Years Eve, well before the party
Normally I'd consider those "Yet Another.." posts trolls, but I think there is something to be said about this.
:-)
The source to Slash hasn't been released in quite a while; it seems slightly fishy that preaching the joys of Open Source gets Slashdot and Andover a lot of money, but the source isn't actually being released. Is this a strategic move for Andover?
If so, it's pretty stupid. Slashdot functionality has been emulated many times over. My personal favorite is SquishDot, a plug-in for Zope. I don't see any competitive advantage to not releasing the source. It's not like releasing the source is that much more work for Rob and crew; we know it's being worked on because of improvements in Slashdot itself...
A lot of people might respond "If you don't like it, leave. You get what you paid for." But this is a web site held by a publicly owned company; we get bombarded by the ads and click through on the banners and generally keep this site funded pretty well. You'd think that
1. in the face of consumer demand for the source (and yes, we are consumers whose click throughs fund slashdot and andover), and
2. in the face of the open source ideology that slashdot promulgates, and
3. in the face of the fact that there is no strategic advantage in delaying the release to Slash because there are so many workalikes
you'd think that Slash source code would be released.
That having been said, I don't particularly mind if the source isn't released because Rob et al are taking their sweet time due to programmer-endemic laziness (as opposed to andover policy and other conspiracy ideas ), but it would be nice to hear status reports on the matter at the very least (e.g., "01-03-2000: Did nothing.")
just an opinion..
What I *am* saying is that the placental barrier can stop certain foreign agents from crossing the boundary from the embryo, to the mother.
That much I know for sure. The question to ask is, are the details (what agents, their combinations, molecular structure, ratios and amounts, etc.) species dependent?
If so (bloody likely), then it highlights the achievements of this science experiment..
Ligers and mules aside, this is a lot harder than it seems. The main problem isn't the actual fertilization, it's how the mother would deal with bearing a child of another species within itself. Presumably the (progesterone? I'm no biochemist) that the embryo secretes to inhibit reactions from the mother would be contained in proportion suited to a native species. It also might explain why crossbreeds are sterile. Once again, I am not a biochemist or geneticist, so I could be wrong.. However, I'd say that managing to pull this off was great, considering that our technology STILL isn't good enough to prevent organ rejections 100% of the time, I'm pretty sure cross-species gestation is probably an order of magnitude more touchy!
Good job to the doctors who pulled this off. Perhaps the technology that went into this can go into preventing organ rejections?
Or at the very least, that half-man half-lizard race of supermen I've been desigining in my basement will be ready to help me take over the world. Shit, was I thinking out loud again?
We do offer a link back. I dont think we are offering a 'competing' service because, as an arm of the I.T. division of a state-run university, I think we are by definition non-profit.
I can't speak in great detail or with absolute assurance about matters; I attend all the meetings but I'm really more of a server monkey/python programmer than I am a member of the web design or business/marketing teams. Still, I don't understand how you can make a service out of providing public domain information. I know Corbis does it, I know the Weather Channel seems to do it, but I don't understand the legal justification for it. How does providing a free service (the web page) for public domain information (the weather) allow them the right to own the weather (or so it seems)?
I am the sysadmin of a college online community (www.sin.wm.edu) and we've run into interesting issues. We are considering paying for a weather service to give us weather information every 10 odd minutes for us to parse and put into a web page.
:-)
... I believe i have change coming. ;)
This is because our old plan, that is parsing the Weather Channel home page's weather information for our region, has become legally suspect. At least our lawyers tell us so!
This is funny for two reasons:
1. It can't be legally suspect because of content. Please don't tell me the Weather Channel online has copyright to the weather. Weather is by definition public domain and I don't see any copyright infringement from using the information therein. Would you get in trouble for telling someone else what the weather is by word of mouth, without accrediting TWC? Weather is weather!
2. It can't be legally suspect because of implementation. We're not using the Weather Channel's implementation *at all*. Their layout is theirs, and we're just using the (aforementioned, public domain) content. They have an entirely different HTML structure, we actually parse out all the HTML and formatting and use the bare, public do main weather content.
So if it's not the content, and not the implementation, what is it? Why are our lawyers jumpy? It almost sounds as if the Weather Channel would get angry because we dared to rebroadcast the weather data they rebroadcasted from the National Weather Advisory (or whatever the organizational body's name is)... At least in the eyes of our paranoid lawyers. The Weather Channel hasn't bothered.
This leads to another issue. I promised you XML in the title and XML you wil get. XML's entire raison d'etre (reason for existence) is to make parsing of information easier. Yet, if we are to deal with a generation of confused copyright lawyers who aren't sure if parsing is legal or not, what's the point? XML makes content implementation-free, that is to say if I parse, TAG FOR TAG, the information off of the Weather Channel 2000's XML Weather Page, then my implementation and their implementation can be drastically different, but we could have the same DTD's and therefore the same content.
And the content is, unless you are seeing something I'm not, public domain. Please tell me weather is public domain. If it's otherwise, I'm going to kill myself now.
Do DTD's count as content, or implementation, or is it an open standard that is to be used as all (read: "public domain") I'm not sure, but if more incidents occur such as ours, then we should look into:
1. Reconsidering XML
2. Reconsidering what constitutes public domain
3. Firing our lawyers and hiring a younger generation
That's my $0.02
I saw myself beginning to ramble. bear in mind i've gone a few days with little sleep and the finals beckon.
:)
:-) ...
perhaps here is a truncated 'point'
given the dilemma as to whether ideas in and of themselves should be free, can you blame richard stallman for being so pro-free-software?
uh, yeah, that's it
im going to sleep now
Not ten minutes into the article's posting and I already see Stallman bashers calling the man crazy and/or outdated and/or stubborn for his Free Software crusade and actions.
Rather than rehash the old pro-Stallman arguments, which are basically naming his many accomplishments without justifying his beliefs, I'm going to pose his beliefs in the form of an ethical dilemma: Would you act differently than Stallman, given this dilemma?
Stallman acts on the belief that it is morally wrong to hold back information that was freely given to you. Namely, no idea is formed in a vacuum. Consciously, subconsciously, intentionally, unintentionally, the society around you bombards you with ideas to draw upon. Software engineers, for example, draw upon the ideas of friends, families, former educators, and in some cases mathematical concepts that have been in the idea pot since the Ancient Greeks.
It's patently (no pun intended) absurd to consider paying royalties to the Archimedes estate -- the idea just wouldn't hold water. (pun quite intended)
In other words, ideas aren't something which we have 100% control over. You can't will a good idea. Focus groups have proven this. You can will money and time into makeing a better environment for ideas to hit you, but the key here is that ideas come from the world around you.
If Microsoft were to acknowledge this, they would either have to pay The World a hefty royalty, or sue The World for patent infringement. And if we're all in jail, who will buy Microsoft products?
To all the Stallman bashers out there, consider this: do you consider your ideas to be truly, 100% yours? Every idea anyone has ever had has a basis either in another idea, or a social concept, or a form evident in nature. Now let's narrow the field down from the abstract of 'ideas' to 'software'. Most software performs a certain goal. The 'idea overlap' here is much greater in the world of software, because of common goals et al. It's not surprising that the originality of software comes not from the mind of the original but the sharing of information among many -- both because there are no truly original ideas and because the sharing is an extension of the above. That's why Open Source works. You hear something, you see something, and blend it in together with another random idea that hits you, and voila, instant 'idea'. Aren't you glad you don't have to pay royalties to everyone who helped you with the idea?
In economic terms, you can put it thusly: There is a scarcity of everything except desires. I guess you can consider an idea as a form of desire, namely a desire to make a thought tangible. That's great, thoughts are free and infinite, because ideas are born of ideas and interact with each other to make more ideas. Materials, however, are scarce. Here, then, is Stallman's consolation to the 'free idea' manifesto: ideas are free because they are infinite, and not sprung of one source; but implementations may be sold and owned by virtue of the fact that they are scarce.
In other words, you can't 'patent' selling CD's of Linux on it as original, because others do it or have the capability to do it. You can, however, charge money because not everyone can afford a CD press machine, or the time to burn all those CD's: that's scarcity in action.
But do the Stallman bashers feel ethically alright with charging money or defending ownership of something free and unlimited that comes not from one person, but from the interactions of an infinite number of outside and internal stimuli?
I'm rambling, so I better quit. Personally, I'm playing Devil's advocate; I feel you should be able to patent software *implementations* (i.e, actual binary form) because the TIME spent in R&D and the TIME spent coding is in itself scarce. But, the idea of software, i.e, specifications for software, or protocol types, or source, patenting compression algorithms etc, is free and the result of other ideas in an educational chain that spans the ages, and to sever the chain and claim it all came from your own mindspring is both hubris and ethically questionable.
Ironically enough, I just saw that movie last night. And the only thing that kept Sean Connery's character from getting away with it was the rather stupid belief that if he married, the girl would burn up..
/* It will swap like crazy if you assign the VM an amount equal to your physical memory.*/
I don't believe I've used the word 'duh' since the early 1980's.
I have a K6-2/400 with 256M RAM which makes it very comfortable to run Linux with 128M for host and VM with 128M. Performance ceases to be an issue above 192M RAM -- sometimes VMWare may *APPEAR* to be slower than it is because of screen refresh rates. If you run the VM in full screen mode you can get native speed on a machine with a decent amount of RAM.
That's the point. Why are we using the web for commerce? It was never meant for state-dependent operations.
I just dont get it.
if they want state, why use a stateless protocol like http?
why not iiop (that is stateful, no?)?
Why not a protocol like ftp or ssh (if you're a security nut) which is stateful?
Hack over hack over hack.. the statelessness of HTTP was a performance hack... the cookies are a statefulness hack... junkbuster is a stateless stateful statelessness hack...
I wouldn't say the WTO riots are in any way 'focused'. While there was a common cause of the protestors, I don't think it was to fight 'corporate greed', it was to promote 'labor greed' -- in other, more civil words, it's the age-old desire for labor to get a bigger piece of the pie than management gives them. Whether or not this is justified, I'll leave to personal opinion -- but this isn't a question of techno-idealism at all.
In fact, I'd probably say it's the precise opposite, and here's why.
At the center of the debates were three issues: The rights of (more highly skilled and paid) U.S. workers in the face of corporations increasingly moving abroad for labor; preserving the environment in the face of aforementined corporate practices; and occupational health and safety and child labor laws. There were many, many other issues, such as tariffs and the like -- but the protestors represented (at least according to the Washington Post) these three interests first and foremost.
Let's see why none of these are really 'techno-idealism.
First of all, the desire to move corporations back to domestic borders (from the perspective of the workers) is because we are highly educated and skilled relative to the other unskilled workers of the world. Our janitors have a better lifestyle than your janitors, and so on and so forth. In a [whips out microeconomics textbook] perfect market environment, the natural solution would be that the unskilled labor would move abroad, and the more highly paid workers, driven by their incentive to still make a livelihood, would become more highly skilled. The world is starving for computer jobs -- yet the protestors are not attempting to eschew their (for the most part; there are many exceptions) factory and service sector jobs in favor of retraining for the computer sector.
Whether they should or not is a matter of personal opinion; however a true 'techno-idealist' would be so enamoured by technology as a means and an end that they would not be in fear of being laid off in favor of a developing Global South nation.
Readjusting an entire economy to accomodate a technological paradigm shift isn't easy; a lot of people will be left jobless and bereft; but IMHO once the riots and pundits and yabbering of Katz passes in a few years we'll deal with it. "Luddites" anyone? I'd hardly call them Techno-Anarchists. Although I'm sure Jon Katz's ancestor, Horatio Alger Hiss Katz III wrote in The Daily Colostomy-Tribune, "These Followers Of Ludd, They Are Ye Technoe-Anarchistes, And Their Love of Geeke-Dom Is Fain Magickal." People want jobs and will use any means necessary. Using a web as a warfare platform is a use of technology, yes, but is a lot lighter use of technology than actually retraining for a computer sector career.
Techno-idealists also would not combat (again for the most part) environmental issues in the way the protestors did. If we are to take Jon Katz' definition that a Techno-Idealist is one enamored of political issues and technology to the same order of magnitude that Katz bandies about the words "Columbine" and "geek", then we would perhaps view the motivation of these aforementioned idealists to find a TECHNOLOGICAL solution to matters. Rather than start a riot, another ideological issues is the use of alternative, lesser-polluting fuels -- which are techologically feasible at this point in history but which the corporations don't view as cost-effective. So the (rather erroneous) view is promulgated that these technologies are "future technologies" when in fact I can have a fuel-cell today. A Techno-Idealist would use aforementioned Technology (Magickal or otherwise =) to promote public consciousness and outrage about the fact that we use the petrified remains of dinosaur shit to create smoky and oily futures for ourselves, when everyone should be using a hydrogen fuel-cell and making (gasp) water.
Burning, smashing and harassing people, web page defacement and the like do not promote public awareness of HOW we can fix the environment. At best these techno-anarchists have said "There's something wrong with the environment thanks to Joe Suit here."
That's great, but what do we do about it? I didn't hear about a Return To Pastoral Bliss summer camp. Where do I sign up?
In the end, if technology advances as it does, the only pollution will be heat pollution And that's mandated by Law. The Second Law, in fact. But to get this technology to move the way it does, we need public awareness. And the Techno-Boobs aren't doing that. In fact, simply blathering about how the WTO is satan(TM) is probably the least productive thing to do.
Finally, it can be said that the 'workers rights' view of the WTO, that the WTO promotes child labor and other such travesties, are not combatted in a 'techno-idealist' manner. Again, the key is awareness -- but the wonder of technology is that it allows people all over the world to be made aware. Making US citizens aware via protests and other 'web wars', legitimate or not, is good -- but the true potential of technology isn't being exploited. No one, to date, has used the wonders of technology to let the members of the exploited nations realize what a shitty time they're having. In other words, the protestors are preaching to a 'largely indifferent' choir. But techno-idealism would cause the workers of the country to realize how bad it is once they see images of American life, etc -- and they will not have any incentive to work.
Once they decide not to work until conditions are made better, arbitrage takes hold and the other nation's wages go up (because workers demand it), thus jobs move back to the US in some proportion until a new equilibrium is reached.
To date, no one has used technology to reach the afflicted workers. Companies are only there because wages are low, because workers there don't realize how bad it is and are willing to work there for that cheap.
To change policy best, change economics; to change economics, change incentives. This is advertising. This is canvassing. This is protesting done in a technological manner -- namely efficient and expedient without the middleman.
But of course, Katz must think that rioting and technology go hand in hand, after seeing the ape-show at Slashdot.
But what am I but a poor graduating college student with a background in computer science and public policy.
The third area of protest is
Wow, KatzDot 2.0 does a good job of auto-generating message bodies as well!
The main strength of Java is in servlet middleware, not little applets for cutesy "I Kiss You!!!!!!" home pages.
:)
Servlets can keep state information better and more securely than cookies, and again it is on par with Python.
Good examples of Python and Java middleware: Zope (Python) and Enhydra (Java). The strength of the two is especially visible in the SQL database interface modules/servlets. I'm also partial to Zope's Squishdot
Please don't judge Java's performance on applets -- look at its usage in servlets for e-commerce websites, especially tying together frontends and backends . In such a situation the hits you'd get from being a byte-compiled language with blah-ish VM's and weird threading are compensated by server hardware, but you can move the applications from server to server as you upgrade hardware and have a consistent e-commerce site.
Elton Wells: Elton has left his position as Program Manager of Developer Tools at Microsoft to join LinSight. He brings years of Linux experience, and will be responsible for the development of LinSight
It's quite obvious that years of linux experience at microsoft means that they MUST BE STEALING GPL CODE AND USING IT! Panic...
smile, it's funny
I don't think this is loony at all. After reading the article (remember that? The chips and Dips crew did :). It is already a War Crime to impersonate a leader calling off the troops or falsifying information about treaties and ceasefires -- as the article hints, it violates perfidity -- why should an electronic version be any different?
There have ben no cases I know of of actors being arrested for war crimes by impersonating presidents, just as I predict there will be no cases of digital artists arrested for war crimes by morphing world leaders. It's not the technology, it's not even the application, it's the intent. I think you're playing with fire when you broadcast ANY image (technologically created or otherwise) of a world leader calling off troops during a time of war...
My point exactly.
Thisis FUNNY. FUNNY. Not a "First Post" message. Or is someone parsing through these pages with a perl/python script and automoderating down posts with the word "First" in them.
Who's on First?
"Offtopic"
Third Base!
No... that doesn't work. Someone funnify this post.
Someone likes lisp.
I know. I have an account on inferno remember? I used your zone files to learn BIND mack in the day. :)
almost EVERY company I've worked for uses greek/roman gods (and badly misspelt, as well.)
So when I got control of the DNS zone, my first sysadminial job was to give decent hostnames.
One IP block got characters from J.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and "Silmarillion."
The other got Sumerian/Babylonian gods. Nothing like logging into marduuk to feel better about yourself.
AS for my domain, I just make as many cheezy puns involving thw word 'breakdown' as i can (the server in my info is down btw)
chemical.breakdown.org
nervous.breakdown.org
mental.breakdown.org
emotional.breakdown.org
molecular.breakdown.org
total.breakdown.org
communications.breakdown.org (my *backup* mail server, isn't that witty!)
Basically, if I see another greek/Roman naming convention, I will have to slap people silly. There are hordes of fun pagan pantheons to use. Hell, they don't even need to be REAL! yog-sothoth.foo.com would be fun to admin.
I can picture an exasperated sysadmin. "Yog-sothoth is possessed, I swear." "What could possibly possess a machine named after a demon?" ( || "Something worse: NT.")
Maybe MS Should go into making hardware instead of software (I am a fan of their mice/keyboard), but something tells me MicroHard(R) probably won't go over well with the stockholders. On second thought, maybe it will... (that ain't stock they're holding!)
On a more serious note, I like the work that Microsoft research labs do. I saw an interesting article in a magazine a few months back, comparing Linus Torvalds and the GNOME team to Bill Gates and Microsoft Research labs (does anyone know the magazine or article, and if its available online?)
Microsoft Research to me is what PARC was in the 70's... they're heavily into UI research, namely natural-language UI research, because it's inevitable that voice controlled computers need to grasp natural languages. Personally, I'm a big fan of the consistency of Microsoft's UI's as compared to the forest of X toolkits (it doesn't compare to NeXTstep or MacOS or Be), personally they should drop the OS thing and go into UI and applications management (IMHO). Oh well, enough pipe dreaming.
I beg to differ.
:)
I go to William and Mary.
Terrible CS department (The Econ department is fantastic, but then again I plan on becoming an economist
They teach you algorithms and concepts, that's true, but they dont teach you the fundamentals of anything practical. Case in point: they don't teach malloc(), realloc() or calloc() to the intro students! Rather than that, they jump through hoops to define classes and then use new() and delete() to "dynamically resize" arrays. Great theory, pathetic in practice.
OTOH, if you want something for PHBs, WM is the place to be.
-- PHB in training.