This idea, and other similar simple-looking measures having to do with taxes and govt control, would only work if everyone could obtain complete and unbiased information about all options adapted to their case *and* everyone were behaving rationally *and* assumes that everyone lives in a interpersonal vacuum.
I agree that everyone should be allowed to take Achilles' choice (a short life but unending fame vs. a long but quiet life), but it isn't usually that simple.
There are idiots or ignorant people who take drugs without realising the consequences. They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit, they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot, they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends, etc. This is usually perceived as a problem by society. I'm not even getting into direct damage to others : would you like your father/your mum to turn to a life of drug and abandon you and your siblings while still at a young age ?
In other words antibiotics are not the only drugs with nasty side effects for other people than those who take it, and that is precisely the reason why they are regulated. I believe most people would not be able to cope with themselves in a society with very few laws (an anarchy), yet most people are under the delusion that they could.
If you have a workable solution to this, I'm sure many govt around the planet would like to hear it.
When Microsoft produced the first working version of NT, NT 3.1, which had a proper 32-bit kernel, it wasn't compatible with plain-Jane Win3.1, which was still DOS-based. Even less so if you chose to run it on PPC or Alpha, which you could. So yes, if you wanted to run it you had to toss away any and all DOS/Win3.1 applications. You had to buy the basics anew. NT3.1 had great reviews, but few bought it.
Later Microsoft produced NT3.5 and NT4.0 which proceeded to cut down on the number of supported platform. I'm pretty sure NT4.0SP6 was only released for x86 for instance, and they also added more hacks and backward compatibility layers.
My point was that Microsoft already has had a chance to produce an unencumbered O/S. They've actually done it, only to encumber it again shortly thereafter. My guess is that Microsoft could do it again, but that they would repeat their past behaviour, because it wouldn't sell.
Sorry I forgot the word "server". No one in their right mind would be running a server of any importance on a Pentium D, with its terrible implementation of x86_64. Recent benchmarks show that the best Pentium D runs slower than even single cores from either AMD or Intel.
For a reasonable server-class counter-offer to Opterons from Intel, we'll have to wait for Xeons based on core 2 duo, which are nowhere in sight AFAIK.
Sorry, MS already has had a shot at rewriting everything from scratch, and that was Windows NT. It was OK for a while as a server O/S, even supporting multiple platform, until MS in their wisdom decided to make it do too many things (like games), and now we have WinXP Home edition. I bet that if Microsoft were redoing yet another New NT, they would fall on their own sword the same way they already have.
That is, unless the culture at MS changes radically. The one that gives lip service to safety and security, privileges short term optimisation to maximise profit, etc.
3-4 months without rebooting, on your laptop ? That's pretty hard to do unless your laptop is constantly on AC power and never put into any of the sleep modes.
The point is that you can run a comfy linux environment on your CPU, which is useful for things like editors and compilers, while you are developing some L4-reliant RT software.
Linux runs like some kind of background task, and so won't disturb the RT tasks.
Are you sure you are not mistaking France with China ? I'll give you a couple hints. One is a democratic country and the other isn't. One has had people demonstrating in the street for just about any reason under the Sun, with the result that government policy on the issue generally changed, while the other had one demonstration in a big square that lasted for a month and ended in bloodshed.
Yet, interestingly, the US army is not doing all that well in Iraq right now despite all these weapons, systems and so on.
In Afghanistan they are doing even less well right now. Read the news, the Taliban are on the rise again despite all the daisy cutters.
In the event of a civil war on US soil, it is my belief that the US army would be doing extremely poorly. Sure they'll kill lots of militia in short order, but this will not help if the populace is motivated. Soon the conflict would escalate into suicide bombing, terror and guild inflicted onto regular soldiers. Right now in Iraq US soldiers can be repatriated to their family and rotated, but what if their own families and friends turned against them ? The army would simply mutiny and collapse, for they are not robots (and for that matter robots don't know how to fight).
What the US army can win easily is a conflict like 1991 Iraq, i.e. another organised army. What nobody knows how to fight against is a Vietnam-like conflict, i.e. a multi-faceted civilian enemy who will not fight by the rules. You can carpet-bomb and defoliate today even better than in the 60s, but that wouldn't help.
So you cannot outgun the US army today, but you can still win against it. At least the Iraqi insurgents seem to think so.
Are you a farmer ? Do you want to become a farmer ? My father was a farmer, now retired, and even though it's not bad living, it's very low pay, lots of dangerous, manual hard work, and dealing all the times with fellow farmers who are not always the most friendly people. I decided very early on, at the age of about 8 when I was first put to work at the family farm on Sundays and subsequently for about a month of every summer holidays of my entire childhood that I'd rather not be a farmer if I could do otherwise. I can't blame my parents, they had no choice.
Not to mention that living as a farmer these days in western countries means mostly depending on subsidies, which are not very popular, either with the other citizens of your own country because they have to pay for them, or those in third world countries because it forces them to undersell their own produces.
Not since iTunes 6.x, and it is no longer possible to purchase songs from the iTMS using earlier versions of the software. The software the old/. article talks about doesn't work anymore (that is, you can't download songs from the iTMS with it anymore).
Personally I think that your reply makes perfect sense, and I'll add that if the camera manufacturers were so sure of themselves they would not think there would be any point in producing RAW files out of their cameras (TIFF would be adequate).
On the contrary, new methods and algorithms to produce better output out of the Bayer-like mosaic of most sensors are published if not every week at least at each new major Image Processing conference. The whole point of RAW is to allow future such algorithms to be used on older images.
Actually it is possible that Microsoft is short of engineers at the moment, and its problems may not be solved by simply hiring more talent. Hiring competent people is a difficult and long process not immediately productive.
All the engineers working on IE7 are not working on other key aspects of Vista, so it is a question of priorities.
Intellectual property is *not* evil and wrong. On the contrary. The line in the EU constitution is not saying "IP shall be protected forever", you are the one in fear of this situation.
What is missing in you reply is the realisation that original ideas are in fact extremely scarce. How many original ideas have you had in your life? Myself, very very few, if any.
Patents and copyrights (trademark as well) intentions are to make sure the originators of original ideas are protected and rewarded. In a world with no IP protection of any kind, only rich companies will be allowed to thrive. In a world where anyone can easily obtained IP protection, one can truly live by our wits.
I've seen little startup come up with a bunch of what I thought were very original and worthy ideas get gutted by larger companies, simply because they couldn't protect them adequatly. As soon as one has shown something to be possible in theory, it is often the case that a large company has the resources to put this something in practice and make millions, whereas you, the originator of the idea, are left with nothing. At least with working patents, these companies would be forced to reward you.
Hello AC, please take the time to make an account so that you can see the replies.
Of course it wasn't a battle of the US companies trying to impose their thinking on Europeans, most large software-based companies in Europe were also in favour of US-style patents, but that doesn't make them right.
Yes the battle was hard, but the EU parliament voted 648 to 14 *AGAINST* software patents. This is not a close battle, this was like a complete hammering. The pro-patents lobby tried to get in via the side doors using all the dirty tricks in and out of the book, but that simply didn't work. If it had it would have meant absolute mayhem. Moreover, the "rapporteur" on the issue was that rare thing, a political first-class mind who really understood the issue and made life very hard for the lobbyists. Of course there were the thousands upon thousands of activists who tried to educate everybody about the issue. Eventually it worked.
If you have been involved in it, congratulations ! very well done work.
From the point of view of the lobbyists I'm sure they found the battle very hard as well. In fact I'm positive they completely panicked at some point, when the EU very very nearly passed a directive which would have made US-style software patents impossible in Europe, imposing patents on inventions "with software" but not "software-based". This would have been a terrible disaster for the lobbyists. They themselves very nearly lost on all front. That's why I don't think they'll try again shortly, for fear of losing all again.
I bought a S754 system almost 2y ago. You can still buy new processors for my very own mobo today, great ones too, in the form of the latest and greatest Turion processors. A year later I bought the almost exact same system for my parents.
Do you know any current mobo for which you think you'll be able to buy a compatible CPU in 2 year's time ?
Also it was incredibly cheap, the CPU works with passive solid-state cooling and is still running like a champ. It was thus because AMD was pushing 939 instead, but I couldn't see the benefits at the time, and still don't except perhaps for PCIe, which I have no use for right now. At any rate I couldn't have bought AMD + PCIe then, and 939 was much more expensive, it was really an easy decision.
I think you are deluding yourself if you think the US article has any teeth.
The EU paragraph doesn't say *how* the IP shall be protected, I'll grant you that, however the corresponding paragraph in the US constitution, while nicer on the outside, has been shown in effect to be just empty words.
Software patents in particular in the US have not been shown to foster progress, and copyrights on the other hand have infinite terms for all intents and purposes, so the ifs and buts serve strictly no purpose. If you start quaking in fear because some sentence leaves the door potentially open to some invented evil, soon your only option is to live in a cavern for fear of your own shadow.
Recall that the EU software patents are still illegal. The "offending" broad sentence in the EU constitution is not a blank check to suddenly making them legal and never would have been. The constitution should be a simple text defining broad principles. No one in their right mind would like IP rights not to be protected. The EU constitution says that they shall be, and leaves it to the democratically elected institutions to work out the details. Potentially these can change with time. In my opinion this is how it should be.
I'll remind you that last year these democratically elected EU institutions worked extremely well to defeat a remarkably well orchestrated attempt by lobby groups to impose US-style software patents in Europe. There were enough alert people to cry foul on all the dirty tricks and ATM the lobbyists are licking their wounds. They'll be back, but for the moment I'm not convinced they will necessarily win.
I'll take debate and a functioning democracy anytime over nicely worded sentences in arbitrary constitutions. Supposedly the old USSR constitution was a model of enlightened principles. Look how it turned out. It didn't prevent the gulag.
Actually both the Dutch and French oppositions to the EU proposed constitution were to my mind amazingly mature, reasoned, sensible and thus hard to refute. They predated any societal issues that France has been having recently, and they are not going away. Most established politicians had an incentive for the text to be accepted, and in both countries all the major parties, both ruling and in the opposition, were in favour of the constitution and campained for its adoption. Yet the text was soundly defeated.
The main point of contention was essentially that the EU regulations tend to be overly complex and byzantine. This is not what you want in a constitution, full stop.
Slashdot Mirror
This idea, and other similar simple-looking measures having to do with taxes and govt control, would only work if everyone could obtain complete and unbiased information about all options adapted to their case *and* everyone were behaving rationally *and* assumes that everyone lives in a interpersonal vacuum.
I agree that everyone should be allowed to take Achilles' choice (a short life but unending fame vs. a long but quiet life), but it isn't usually that simple.
There are idiots or ignorant people who take drugs without realising the consequences. They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit, they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot, they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends, etc. This is usually perceived as a problem by society. I'm not even getting into direct damage to others : would you like your father/your mum to turn to a life of drug and abandon you and your siblings while still at a young age ?
In other words antibiotics are not the only drugs with nasty side effects for other people than those who take it, and that is precisely the reason why they are regulated. I believe most people would not be able to cope with themselves in a society with very few laws (an anarchy), yet most people are under the delusion that they could.
If you have a workable solution to this, I'm sure many govt around the planet would like to hear it.
When Microsoft produced the first working version of NT, NT 3.1, which had a proper 32-bit kernel, it wasn't compatible with plain-Jane Win3.1, which was still DOS-based. Even less so if you chose to run it on PPC or Alpha, which you could. So yes, if you wanted to run it you had to toss away any and all DOS/Win3.1 applications. You had to buy the basics anew. NT3.1 had great reviews, but few bought it.
Later Microsoft produced NT3.5 and NT4.0 which proceeded to cut down on the number of supported platform. I'm pretty sure NT4.0SP6 was only released for x86 for instance, and they also added more hacks and backward compatibility layers.
My point was that Microsoft already has had a chance to produce an unencumbered O/S. They've actually done it, only to encumber it again shortly thereafter. My guess is that Microsoft could do it again, but that they would repeat their past behaviour, because it wouldn't sell.
Sorry I forgot the word "server". No one in their right mind would be running a server of any importance on a Pentium D, with its terrible implementation of x86_64. Recent benchmarks show that the best Pentium D runs slower than even single cores from either AMD or Intel.
For a reasonable server-class counter-offer to Opterons from Intel, we'll have to wait for Xeons based on core 2 duo, which are nowhere in sight AFAIK.
Sorry, MS already has had a shot at rewriting everything from scratch, and that was Windows NT. It was OK for a while as a server O/S, even supporting multiple platform, until MS in their wisdom decided to make it do too many things (like games), and now we have WinXP Home edition. I bet that if Microsoft were redoing yet another New NT, they would fall on their own sword the same way they already have.
That is, unless the culture at MS changes radically. The one that gives lip service to safety and security, privileges short term optimisation to maximise profit, etc.
They might, however they might worry because the only affordable systems that run Win64 use AMD cpu.
3-4 months without rebooting, on your laptop ? That's pretty hard to do unless your laptop is constantly on AC power and never put into any of the sleep modes.
One of them is straight engineering these days, the other is basic research.
Eventual progress and future economic value is highly dependent on today's basic research.
At first I didn't believe you but there is a link supporting your claim.
Harassment.
Well, the grandparent was talking about demonstrations repressed with tanks, which didn't exist in the 18th century, but never mind that.
In the US there was this little event called the Civil War if you want to talk about bloodshed.
The point is that you can run a comfy linux environment on your CPU, which is useful for things like editors and compilers, while you are developing some L4-reliant RT software.
Linux runs like some kind of background task, and so won't disturb the RT tasks.
Single CPU, yes, but the latest opteron 8xx series supports at least dual-core, 8-way SMP. Not quite the same thing.
What the Hell are you talking about ?
Are you sure you are not mistaking France with China ? I'll give you a couple hints. One is a democratic country and the other isn't. One has had people demonstrating in the street for just about any reason under the Sun, with the result that government policy on the issue generally changed, while the other had one demonstration in a big square that lasted for a month and ended in bloodshed.
Yet, interestingly, the US army is not doing all that well in Iraq right now despite all these weapons, systems and so on.
In Afghanistan they are doing even less well right now. Read the news, the Taliban are on the rise again despite all the daisy cutters.
In the event of a civil war on US soil, it is my belief that the US army would be doing extremely poorly. Sure they'll kill lots of militia in short order, but this will not help if the populace is motivated. Soon the conflict would escalate into suicide bombing, terror and guild inflicted onto regular soldiers. Right now in Iraq US soldiers can be repatriated to their family and rotated, but what if their own families and friends turned against them ? The army would simply mutiny and collapse, for they are not robots (and for that matter robots don't know how to fight).
What the US army can win easily is a conflict like 1991 Iraq, i.e. another organised army. What nobody knows how to fight against is a Vietnam-like conflict, i.e. a multi-faceted civilian enemy who will not fight by the rules. You can carpet-bomb and defoliate today even better than in the 60s, but that wouldn't help.
So you cannot outgun the US army today, but you can still win against it. At least the Iraqi insurgents seem to think so.
Perhaps you've heard of these guys.
Well, ask yourself !
Are you a farmer ? Do you want to become a farmer ? My father was a farmer, now retired, and even though it's not bad living, it's very low pay, lots of dangerous, manual hard work, and dealing all the times with fellow farmers who are not always the most friendly people. I decided very early on, at the age of about 8 when I was first put to work at the family farm on Sundays and subsequently for about a month of every summer holidays of my entire childhood that I'd rather not be a farmer if I could do otherwise. I can't blame my parents, they had no choice.
Not to mention that living as a farmer these days in western countries means mostly depending on subsidies, which are not very popular, either with the other citizens of your own country because they have to pay for them, or those in third world countries because it forces them to undersell their own produces.
Basically farming life sucks, sorry.
Not since iTunes 6.x, and it is no longer possible to purchase songs from the iTMS using earlier versions of the software. The software the old /. article talks about doesn't work anymore (that is, you can't download songs from the iTMS with it anymore).
See what DVD Jon says about the situation.
Linux also comes with bc, python, R, Octave, Scilab and of course emacs which are all mighty fine calculators, amongst other things.
Personally I think that your reply makes perfect sense, and I'll add that if the camera manufacturers were so sure of themselves they would not think there would be any point in producing RAW files out of their cameras (TIFF would be adequate).
On the contrary, new methods and algorithms to produce better output out of the Bayer-like mosaic of most sensors are published if not every week at least at each new major Image Processing conference. The whole point of RAW is to allow future such algorithms to be used on older images.
Actually it is possible that Microsoft is short of engineers at the moment, and its problems may not be solved by simply hiring more talent. Hiring competent people is a difficult and long process not immediately productive.
All the engineers working on IE7 are not working on other key aspects of Vista, so it is a question of priorities.
Intellectual property is *not* evil and wrong. On the contrary. The line in the EU constitution is not saying "IP shall be protected forever", you are the one in fear of this situation.
What is missing in you reply is the realisation that original ideas are in fact extremely scarce. How many original ideas have you had in your life? Myself, very very few, if any.
Patents and copyrights (trademark as well) intentions are to make sure the originators of original ideas are protected and rewarded. In a world with no IP protection of any kind, only rich companies will be allowed to thrive. In a world where anyone can easily obtained IP protection, one can truly live by our wits.
I've seen little startup come up with a bunch of what I thought were very original and worthy ideas get gutted by larger companies, simply because they couldn't protect them adequatly. As soon as one has shown something to be possible in theory, it is often the case that a large company has the resources to put this something in practice and make millions, whereas you, the originator of the idea, are left with nothing. At least with working patents, these companies would be forced to reward you.
Hello AC, please take the time to make an account so that you can see the replies.
Of course it wasn't a battle of the US companies trying to impose their thinking on Europeans, most large software-based companies in Europe were also in favour of US-style patents, but that doesn't make them right.
Yes the battle was hard, but the EU parliament voted 648 to 14 *AGAINST* software patents. This is not a close battle, this was like a complete hammering. The pro-patents lobby tried to get in via the side doors using all the dirty tricks in and out of the book, but that simply didn't work. If it had it would have meant absolute mayhem. Moreover, the "rapporteur" on the issue was that rare thing, a political first-class mind who really understood the issue and made life very hard for the lobbyists. Of course there were the thousands upon thousands of activists who tried to educate everybody about the issue. Eventually it worked.
If you have been involved in it, congratulations ! very well done work.
From the point of view of the lobbyists I'm sure they found the battle very hard as well. In fact I'm positive they completely panicked at some point, when the EU very very nearly passed a directive which would have made US-style software patents impossible in Europe, imposing patents on inventions "with software" but not "software-based". This would have been a terrible disaster for the lobbyists. They themselves very nearly lost on all front. That's why I don't think they'll try again shortly, for fear of losing all again.
Don't feel sorry for me, there is no point.
I bought a S754 system almost 2y ago. You can still buy new processors for my very own mobo today, great ones too, in the form of the latest and greatest Turion processors. A year later I bought the almost exact same system for my parents.
Do you know any current mobo for which you think you'll be able to buy a compatible CPU in 2 year's time ?
Also it was incredibly cheap, the CPU works with passive solid-state cooling and is still running like a champ. It was thus because AMD was pushing 939 instead, but I couldn't see the benefits at the time, and still don't except perhaps for PCIe, which I have no use for right now. At any rate I couldn't have bought AMD + PCIe then, and 939 was much more expensive, it was really an easy decision.
I think you are deluding yourself if you think the US article has any teeth.
The EU paragraph doesn't say *how* the IP shall be protected, I'll grant you that, however the corresponding paragraph in the US constitution, while nicer on the outside, has been shown in effect to be just empty words.
Software patents in particular in the US have not been shown to foster progress, and copyrights on the other hand have infinite terms for all intents and purposes, so the ifs and buts serve strictly no purpose. If you start quaking in fear because some sentence leaves the door potentially open to some invented evil, soon your only option is to live in a cavern for fear of your own shadow.
Recall that the EU software patents are still illegal. The "offending" broad sentence in the EU constitution is not a blank check to suddenly making them legal and never would have been. The constitution should be a simple text defining broad principles. No one in their right mind would like IP rights not to be protected. The EU constitution says that they shall be, and leaves it to the democratically elected institutions to work out the details. Potentially these can change with time. In my opinion this is how it should be.
I'll remind you that last year these democratically elected EU institutions worked extremely well to defeat a remarkably well orchestrated attempt by lobby groups to impose US-style software patents in Europe. There were enough alert people to cry foul on all the dirty tricks and ATM the lobbyists are licking their wounds. They'll be back, but for the moment I'm not convinced they will necessarily win.
I'll take debate and a functioning democracy anytime over nicely worded sentences in arbitrary constitutions. Supposedly the old USSR constitution was a model of enlightened principles. Look how it turned out. It didn't prevent the gulag.
Actually both the Dutch and French oppositions to the EU proposed constitution were to my mind amazingly mature, reasoned, sensible and thus hard to refute. They predated any societal issues that France has been having recently, and they are not going away. Most established politicians had an incentive for the text to be accepted, and in both countries all the major parties, both ruling and in the opposition, were in favour of the constitution and campained for its adoption. Yet the text was soundly defeated.
The main point of contention was essentially that the EU regulations tend to be overly complex and byzantine. This is not what you want in a constitution, full stop.