That is because Smalltalk doesn't have arithmetic expressions - it only has sending messages to objects:
2 + 3
is sending the message '+' to the object '2' with the argument '3'.
It does exactly the same thing in Python, C++, and C#, yet those languages have regular operator precedence. How you define operator precedence is unrelated to how arithmetic is implemented at the object level.
Smalltalk simply chose left-to-right operator precedence for consistency with its other message patterns; while consistency is a useful way of designing a language, sometimes consistency is the wrong principle to apply. In this case, it is, because it confuses the hell out of users of the language and leads to subtle errors.
Smalltalk could easily have defined "2 + 3 * 4" to mean "2 + ( 3 * 4 )". Or, it could simply have disallowed "2 + 3 * 4" altogether and required parentheses "(2 + 3) * 4" or "2 + (3 * 4)" in all cases involving arithmetic operators (we're only talking about "+", "-", "*", and "/"). Strict left-to-right evaluation was a bad idea and too error prone.
Language preference is a subjective thing. Nobody can prove that language X is objectively better than language Y. People think differently, their eyes work differently, etc. You cannot assume that what you like will gel with others also.
All you're saying is that different user communities and different application areas may demand different languages; that is true. The same is true for any other kinds of software.
But for each user community and each application area, there are good languages and bad languages, and their differences can be measured objectively. Furthermore, there are some things that are known to be bad across programming languages, and people tend to overestimate the difference that a user community makes.
So, no, you're wrong, language design is not just a question of personal taste. There are objective and important differences between programming languages.
In any case, if you were right, then we should definitely consign COBOL to the dustbin of history because, hey, if it doesn't make any difference at all and if it's all just a matter of taste, then companies would be better using the languages that everybody is using today.
Bjarne Stroustrup is the problem with programming. C++ is probably the worst widely-used language design the industry has ever seen. And what makes it particularly insidious is that it seems useful and powerful, that is, people get started with it, like the raw power and performance they get, and often never figure out the profound problems the language has.
So first you go on to call what I said "bullshit" and then you repeat it.
False. OpenDocument does NOT create lock-in, it alleviates (unintentional) lock-in that previously existed.
it's a simple fact that there are still problems with the format that urgently need to be addressed
You haven't given an example of a single problem with the format. All you keep pointing out is bugs in individual implementations. Yes, there are bugs. What the hell do you expect? The format just got approved recently.
Ignoring the problem isn't getting anyone one single step further.
People aren't "ignoring" the problem. The format has been defined now and open source office suites are implementing it and progressing fast. I'm sorry it's not fast enough for you, but there will always be whiners like you.
If we want OpenDocument to become the industry standard one day, these problems need to be pointed out and fixed NOW.
Well, they won't be because they can't be. Software development just takes a certain amount of time. Given how slow Microsoft and Apple are at updating their stuff, it seems to me open source is doing quite well in comparison, thank you very much.
The military is the used. The politicians point and off they go. They die on the politicians' say-so
The US has an all-volunteer force. If you sign up, you know that that's exactly what you're signing up for, and you approve, through your action, of the entire organization and its recent history and actions.
How happy would you be in that arrangement?
I'm not in that arrangement because I haven't signed up.
Wouldn't you want 300 billion dollars spent on ways for you to not die?
Objectively, no. The US military is used so widely because US troop losses are already miniscule compared to civilian casualties. So, if those $300bn actually result in lower losses to US troops, US politicians would probably engage in even more war, kill even more foreign civilians, and make us even less safe.
Would you be kind of pissed at people who persist in electing politicians who support 'staying the course' or better yet, politicians who support running away and leaving a perfectly innocent people at the mercy of those with even less moral fiber than an Abu Ghraib prison guard. Stop thinking about how much it is costing you and start thinking how about how much it is costing others.
I am, in fact, thinking about how much it is costing others; it's you who isn't thinking about "how much it is costing others".
First, you're incorrectly assuming that those $300bn are well spent on US military research. In fact, any gains in personal safety are likely small. The safer and more disconnected soldiers feel, the more likely you get abuses of power. Furthermore, the more asymmetric you make losses, the more likely enemies will engage in asymmetrical warfare: terrorism, suicide bombings, sabotage, etc. High tech warfare is a bad idea and it's expensive. And all of that isn't taking into account the already staggering losses to civilian populations caused by the US military.
Conversely, if we spent the same amount of money on development aid, scientific research, family planning, and other improvements to the world as a whole, we could reduce terrorism and spread democracy, and increase our safety. If politicians didn't have the notion that they can safely engage in warfare whenever and wherever they please, they'll wage less war.
OK, I'll bite. Since you're obviously an expert, please be so kind as to tell us exactly how big the US military should be to defend the US, deter would-be agressors, fulfill international treaty obligations, etc.
Probably roughly in line with the military expenditures of other Western nations, relative to their GDP and population (whichever is proportionally less).
I do agree with your comments about effective funding for research, but by calling the military a "gimmick" you're merely parading your ignorance of geopolitical reality. Do you honestly believe that the US doesn't need armed forces?
I was referring to scientific funding through the military as a "gimmick", not the military as a whole. The US should have a military that's in line with its population and GDP.
And geopolitical reality is that the current size and deployment of the US military has made the US less safe, not more safe. A smaller military would make us safer.
We have leaders who have put young people in harm's way to scratch an ideological itch. *cough* neocons *cough*
Yes, and if those leaders had a military like the Europeans or prosperous Asian nations, they wouldn't be able to scratch that itch. Neocons should put into practice what they preach: downsize government. And they should start with the biggest ticket item of them all: the military.
When war breaks out, blame the politicians, not the people who have to fight it.
The US military is a volunteer organization, and it has a track record going back two centuries, so everybody knows exactly what they are volunteering for when they are signing up.
If you sign up with that organization, you volunteer your body for use by those politicians, for whatever purpose they deem important. That's a moral choice every member of the US military is individually accountable for.
Yes, and I have nothing against manned space exploration per se. But now is not the time: we get far more bang for the buck from robotic exploration and satellites. Once we have figured out propulsion, power, etc. for robotic probes, then manned space exploration will be much easier and cheaper.
Designing a language that is simple to use and results in easy to read and easy-to-understand code is the right idea. For a first attempt, COBOL wasn't bad. But from a modern perspective, it has lots of problems. Also, COBOL (like Ada) incorrectly assumes that writing more text makes code clearer; it does not.
The best designed language overall is probably still Smalltalk: it's easy to read, easy to learn, and was designed from the ground up with the idea of being used in an interactive programming environment. It also strikes a better balance between verbosity and expressiveness. Just about the only thing that Smalltalk got wrong was to use strict left-to-right evaluation for arithmetic expressions; a better compromise might have been simply to require arithmetic expressions to be fully parenthesized.
The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.
You always can do with your ideas whatever you want: you can keep them in your head, you can publish them, you can tell your kids about them.
You want something completely different: you want the power of the state to create a market place for you where there ordinarily wouldn't be one. There is nothing "ethical" about that; it's an artificial construct and a compromise between the rights of the people (which copyright infringes on) and the desire to encourage creation of new, useful content.
The ironic thing about whiners like you is that if your rule were implemented, you wouldn't be able to create anything at all since inventors of basic ideas and creators of basic content are using license enforcement to restrict others from building new stuff. Expiration of copyright is fundamentally necessary for intellectual property to work--if stuff didn't fall into the public domain, others couldn't derive benefits from ideas that build on the old ideas.
Or, to put it bluntly: your ethics are screwed up, and so are your economics.
Just because the military and space exploration have traditionally funded research efforts that have "trickled down" doesn't mean that that's the best way of funding those efforts. What indirect funding through the military has accomplished in the past is to separate politicians from interfering directly research; that's been valuable, but it has also given us a bloated military and lots of wars, because that bloated military wants to do something.
In the end, the best way of funding medical research is by giving funding to medical research, and the best way of making advances in computers, semiconductors, material science, nutrition, etc. is to fund those areas. We just need to figure out how to make that work politically without wasting money on gimmicks like the military or manned space exploration.
ASCII doesn't work for figures, tables, most non-English languages, etc.
Multipart MIME encapsulating standard web formats (HTML, JPEG), however, does. It's a better for document interchange, because everybody understands it and because it runs on so many platforms, and may well represent the future.
But right now, people want MS Office-like formats, and OpenDocument is a better way of supporting them than MS Office XML.
Frankly, when I create a document in OpenOffice Writer and then open it in AbiWord or KWord, more often than not it looks quite different
And MS Office format would be better in this regard... how?
OpenDocument is, for practical purposes, less than a year old. It will take a while for office suites to catch up and fix bugs.
Furthermore, even when all the bugs are fixed, your documents will always look slightly different in different apps and different versions of apps. That's true even for Word documents in different versions of MS Word, or the same version of MS Word installed on different machines. Office formats are not designed for bit-identical rendering. You can avoid that by using logical markup and styles properly. Most "it looks different" bugs are due to user error.
Basically, [OpenDocument] still creates a form of lock-in, even if it's probably unintentional. I can't just switch away from OpenOffice, lest I want to have to fix the formatting on all my documents.
Bullshit. OpenDocument doesn't "create" the lock-in, it alleviates lock-in. what creates the lock-in is incompatibilities and bugs in how the various office suites implement it.
In addition, the primary point of open document formats is not to let large numbers of people switch suites (although that is very useful, too), it's to enable post-processing, indexing, and groupware built on top of the format. That, rather than FOSS competition, is also why MS has made their formats public.
"Cost" isn't TCO. The OLPC laptop costs $100, just like a MacBook costs $1100, and Ubuntu Linux costs $0.
TCO figures are hard to estimate and hard to compare. For OLPC in particular, it doesn't make sense to calculate training and maintenance costs the way you'd do for a corporate machine; in fact, arguably, training and maintenance costs for those machines are $0 because whatever people need will be provided by the community and volunteers.
Internet connectivity costs are $0 because Internet connectivity isn't needed and there is mesh networking.
But no matter how much Sun talks about it, they won't be the company delivering it and they won't get rich from it, given the products they actually ship.
Go take a look at it and judge for yourself. The open document formats are fairly reasonable XML-based structures (as "reasonable" as XML can ever be). MS Office XML abuses XML and is horrendously complex.
From a practical point of view, OpenDocument already works for interchanging between multiple open source apps.
In addition, Microsoft's file format is patented and Microsoft uses that patent to spread FUD. While the patent probably wouldn't stand, it's an additional reason not to use MS's office formats.
The supposed "bug" you point to is losing one of the files when copying two files distinguished only by case from a case sensitive file system to a non-case sensitive file system. Nautilus is a file manager for file systems with UNIX semantics, and those are case sensitive. That's not a bug.
In general, it simply has no way of knowing what the semantics of some mounted file system are going to be, so if you're using it to manipulate file systems with non-UNIX semantics, all bets are off. The same is true in reverse, for every other file system.
Of course, this is a common case, and Nautilus probably should recognize it and do something about it. But it's not a bug in Nautilus; at best, it's a missing feature.
Of course, the very same small number of ruthless and "smart" business and marketing people are the very same the regulate what is and is not produced.
Of course. And I'm not saying that working at a big company necessarily means that you're stupid, I'm saying that working at a big, successful company simply doesn't say anything about whether you're smart or good.
The problems with Microsoft's software developers and the quality of their work are specific to Microsoft: Microsoft has hired huge numbers of inexperienced college graduates over the years and trained them in-house. In addition, their development processes seem to be seriously flawed. But as long as people keep buying, Microsoft has no motivation fixing it and most of the people there don't even realize something's wrong.
You might say "people have been writing violent literature for a long time, so how can this be illegal". Well, what the guy is actually proposing is generalizing a law that applies to violent literature to gaming.
The irony is that the original law was probably a reaction to Germany's violent Nazi past. But the problem with the Nazis was not violence (everybody is capable of violence), it was totalitarianism, group think, and conformism. People seem to forget, but in their political campaigns, the Nazis became popular because they preached "family values", "clean living", and "Christian values", and they then proceeded to implement those by going after everybody who didn't conform: Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, anarchists, socialists, intellectuals, "decadent artists", etc.
In different words, laws like these and people like Beckstein are basically continuing a weakened form of Nazi ideology.
The article notes that Mr. Phipps' comments are somewhat surprising, given that the recent open-sourcing of Java went forward with GPLv2
First of all, GPLv3 isn't out yet, so Sun can't release under it. And it's understandable that many people are reluctant to release under "GPLv2 or later".
Furthermore, you can't judge licenses just by what they say, you have to judge them in context. Sun is not releasing Java under GPLv2; if they did, that would have been open-source hostile. What they did is announce that they will release Java under GPLv2 with linking exceptions on some parts; that's something very different. And even when GPLv3 comes out, specific open source projects may still benefit from GPLv2 because the terms of the license fit them better.
On the other hand, plenty of commercial companies are using the GPL as a nuisance license on their software, without actually running an open source project (many "dual-licensed" products fall into that category).
No matter what one may think of it as a story, a scifi with no aliens doesn't exactly strike me as the best choice for an MMORPG. And it's not like it's been a big success either.
(1) Yes, Mr. Tanenbaum, you have correctly mastered academic publishing: even the most inane ideas will get published if you just combine the right buzzwords (and this idea is inane indeed).
(2) No, Mr. Tanenbaum, the right way to deal with SQL injection bugs related to RFID problems is data validation and testing; interfering with RFID tags is neither effective nor necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only was the gameplay worse than Morrowind, I thought the graphics also hadn't improved much, given how long the company had been working on it.
That is because Smalltalk doesn't have arithmetic expressions - it only has sending messages to objects:
2 + 3
is sending the message '+' to the object '2' with the argument '3'.
It does exactly the same thing in Python, C++, and C#, yet those languages have regular operator precedence. How you define operator precedence is unrelated to how arithmetic is implemented at the object level.
Smalltalk simply chose left-to-right operator precedence for consistency with its other message patterns; while consistency is a useful way of designing a language, sometimes consistency is the wrong principle to apply. In this case, it is, because it confuses the hell out of users of the language and leads to subtle errors.
Smalltalk could easily have defined "2 + 3 * 4" to mean "2 + ( 3 * 4 )". Or, it could simply have disallowed "2 + 3 * 4" altogether and required parentheses "(2 + 3) * 4" or "2 + (3 * 4)" in all cases involving arithmetic operators (we're only talking about "+", "-", "*", and "/"). Strict left-to-right evaluation was a bad idea and too error prone.
Language preference is a subjective thing. Nobody can prove that language X is objectively better than language Y. People think differently, their eyes work differently, etc. You cannot assume that what you like will gel with others also.
All you're saying is that different user communities and different application areas may demand different languages; that is true. The same is true for any other kinds of software.
But for each user community and each application area, there are good languages and bad languages, and their differences can be measured objectively. Furthermore, there are some things that are known to be bad across programming languages, and people tend to overestimate the difference that a user community makes.
So, no, you're wrong, language design is not just a question of personal taste. There are objective and important differences between programming languages.
In any case, if you were right, then we should definitely consign COBOL to the dustbin of history because, hey, if it doesn't make any difference at all and if it's all just a matter of taste, then companies would be better using the languages that everybody is using today.
Bjarne Stroustrup is the problem with programming. C++ is probably the worst widely-used language design the industry has ever seen. And what makes it particularly insidious is that it seems useful and powerful, that is, people get started with it, like the raw power and performance they get, and often never figure out the profound problems the language has.
So first you go on to call what I said "bullshit" and then you repeat it.
False. OpenDocument does NOT create lock-in, it alleviates (unintentional) lock-in that previously existed.
it's a simple fact that there are still problems with the format that urgently need to be addressed
You haven't given an example of a single problem with the format. All you keep pointing out is bugs in individual implementations. Yes, there are bugs. What the hell do you expect? The format just got approved recently.
Ignoring the problem isn't getting anyone one single step further.
People aren't "ignoring" the problem. The format has been defined now and open source office suites are implementing it and progressing fast. I'm sorry it's not fast enough for you, but there will always be whiners like you.
If we want OpenDocument to become the industry standard one day, these problems need to be pointed out and fixed NOW.
Well, they won't be because they can't be. Software development just takes a certain amount of time. Given how slow Microsoft and Apple are at updating their stuff, it seems to me open source is doing quite well in comparison, thank you very much.
The military is the used. The politicians point and off they go. They die on the politicians' say-so
The US has an all-volunteer force. If you sign up, you know that that's exactly what you're signing up for, and you approve, through your action, of the entire organization and its recent history and actions.
How happy would you be in that arrangement?
I'm not in that arrangement because I haven't signed up.
Wouldn't you want 300 billion dollars spent on ways for you to not die?
Objectively, no. The US military is used so widely because US troop losses are already miniscule compared to civilian casualties. So, if those $300bn actually result in lower losses to US troops, US politicians would probably engage in even more war, kill even more foreign civilians, and make us even less safe.
Would you be kind of pissed at people who persist in electing politicians who support 'staying the course' or better yet, politicians who support running away and leaving a perfectly innocent people at the mercy of those with even less moral fiber than an Abu Ghraib prison guard. Stop thinking about how much it is costing you and start thinking how about how much it is costing others.
I am, in fact, thinking about how much it is costing others; it's you who isn't thinking about "how much it is costing others".
First, you're incorrectly assuming that those $300bn are well spent on US military research. In fact, any gains in personal safety are likely small. The safer and more disconnected soldiers feel, the more likely you get abuses of power. Furthermore, the more asymmetric you make losses, the more likely enemies will engage in asymmetrical warfare: terrorism, suicide bombings, sabotage, etc. High tech warfare is a bad idea and it's expensive. And all of that isn't taking into account the already staggering losses to civilian populations caused by the US military.
Conversely, if we spent the same amount of money on development aid, scientific research, family planning, and other improvements to the world as a whole, we could reduce terrorism and spread democracy, and increase our safety. If politicians didn't have the notion that they can safely engage in warfare whenever and wherever they please, they'll wage less war.
OK, I'll bite. Since you're obviously an expert, please be so kind as to tell us exactly how big the US military should be to defend the US, deter would-be agressors, fulfill international treaty obligations, etc.
Probably roughly in line with the military expenditures of other Western nations, relative to their GDP and population (whichever is proportionally less).
I do agree with your comments about effective funding for research, but by calling the military a "gimmick" you're merely parading your ignorance of geopolitical reality. Do you honestly believe that the US doesn't need armed forces?
I was referring to scientific funding through the military as a "gimmick", not the military as a whole. The US should have a military that's in line with its population and GDP.
And geopolitical reality is that the current size and deployment of the US military has made the US less safe, not more safe. A smaller military would make us safer.
We have leaders who have put young people in harm's way to scratch an ideological itch. *cough* neocons *cough*
Yes, and if those leaders had a military like the Europeans or prosperous Asian nations, they wouldn't be able to scratch that itch. Neocons should put into practice what they preach: downsize government. And they should start with the biggest ticket item of them all: the military.
When war breaks out, blame the politicians, not the people who have to fight it.
The US military is a volunteer organization, and it has a track record going back two centuries, so everybody knows exactly what they are volunteering for when they are signing up.
If you sign up with that organization, you volunteer your body for use by those politicians, for whatever purpose they deem important. That's a moral choice every member of the US military is individually accountable for.
Yes, and I have nothing against manned space exploration per se. But now is not the time: we get far more bang for the buck from robotic exploration and satellites. Once we have figured out propulsion, power, etc. for robotic probes, then manned space exploration will be much easier and cheaper.
Designing a language that is simple to use and results in easy to read and easy-to-understand code is the right idea. For a first attempt, COBOL wasn't bad. But from a modern perspective, it has lots of problems. Also, COBOL (like Ada) incorrectly assumes that writing more text makes code clearer; it does not.
The best designed language overall is probably still Smalltalk: it's easy to read, easy to learn, and was designed from the ground up with the idea of being used in an interactive programming environment. It also strikes a better balance between verbosity and expressiveness. Just about the only thing that Smalltalk got wrong was to use strict left-to-right evaluation for arithmetic expressions; a better compromise might have been simply to require arithmetic expressions to be fully parenthesized.
Black outfit, plastic helmet--looks like the soldier of the future is some kind of SciFi nerd.
The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.
You always can do with your ideas whatever you want: you can keep them in your head, you can publish them, you can tell your kids about them.
You want something completely different: you want the power of the state to create a market place for you where there ordinarily wouldn't be one. There is nothing "ethical" about that; it's an artificial construct and a compromise between the rights of the people (which copyright infringes on) and the desire to encourage creation of new, useful content.
The ironic thing about whiners like you is that if your rule were implemented, you wouldn't be able to create anything at all since inventors of basic ideas and creators of basic content are using license enforcement to restrict others from building new stuff. Expiration of copyright is fundamentally necessary for intellectual property to work--if stuff didn't fall into the public domain, others couldn't derive benefits from ideas that build on the old ideas.
Or, to put it bluntly: your ethics are screwed up, and so are your economics.
Just because the military and space exploration have traditionally funded research efforts that have "trickled down" doesn't mean that that's the best way of funding those efforts. What indirect funding through the military has accomplished in the past is to separate politicians from interfering directly research; that's been valuable, but it has also given us a bloated military and lots of wars, because that bloated military wants to do something.
In the end, the best way of funding medical research is by giving funding to medical research, and the best way of making advances in computers, semiconductors, material science, nutrition, etc. is to fund those areas. We just need to figure out how to make that work politically without wasting money on gimmicks like the military or manned space exploration.
That depends very much on the circumstances; in general, companies cannot simply say one thing and then write something else into the contract.
ASCII doesn't work for figures, tables, most non-English languages, etc.
Multipart MIME encapsulating standard web formats (HTML, JPEG), however, does. It's a better for document interchange, because everybody understands it and because it runs on so many platforms, and may well represent the future.
But right now, people want MS Office-like formats, and OpenDocument is a better way of supporting them than MS Office XML.
Frankly, when I create a document in OpenOffice Writer and then open it in AbiWord or KWord, more often than not it looks quite different
And MS Office format would be better in this regard... how?
OpenDocument is, for practical purposes, less than a year old. It will take a while for office suites to catch up and fix bugs.
Furthermore, even when all the bugs are fixed, your documents will always look slightly different in different apps and different versions of apps. That's true even for Word documents in different versions of MS Word, or the same version of MS Word installed on different machines. Office formats are not designed for bit-identical rendering. You can avoid that by using logical markup and styles properly. Most "it looks different" bugs are due to user error.
Basically, [OpenDocument] still creates a form of lock-in, even if it's probably unintentional. I can't just switch away from OpenOffice, lest I want to have to fix the formatting on all my documents.
Bullshit. OpenDocument doesn't "create" the lock-in, it alleviates lock-in. what creates the lock-in is incompatibilities and bugs in how the various office suites implement it.
In addition, the primary point of open document formats is not to let large numbers of people switch suites (although that is very useful, too), it's to enable post-processing, indexing, and groupware built on top of the format. That, rather than FOSS competition, is also why MS has made their formats public.
"Cost" isn't TCO. The OLPC laptop costs $100, just like a MacBook costs $1100, and Ubuntu Linux costs $0.
TCO figures are hard to estimate and hard to compare. For OLPC in particular, it doesn't make sense to calculate training and maintenance costs the way you'd do for a corporate machine; in fact, arguably, training and maintenance costs for those machines are $0 because whatever people need will be provided by the community and volunteers.
Internet connectivity costs are $0 because Internet connectivity isn't needed and there is mesh networking.
But no matter how much Sun talks about it, they won't be the company delivering it and they won't get rich from it, given the products they actually ship.
Go take a look at it and judge for yourself. The open document formats are fairly reasonable XML-based structures (as "reasonable" as XML can ever be). MS Office XML abuses XML and is horrendously complex.
From a practical point of view, OpenDocument already works for interchanging between multiple open source apps.
In addition, Microsoft's file format is patented and Microsoft uses that patent to spread FUD. While the patent probably wouldn't stand, it's an additional reason not to use MS's office formats.
The supposed "bug" you point to is losing one of the files when copying two files distinguished only by case from a case sensitive file system to a non-case sensitive file system. Nautilus is a file manager for file systems with UNIX semantics, and those are case sensitive. That's not a bug.
In general, it simply has no way of knowing what the semantics of some mounted file system are going to be, so if you're using it to manipulate file systems with non-UNIX semantics, all bets are off. The same is true in reverse, for every other file system.
Of course, this is a common case, and Nautilus probably should recognize it and do something about it. But it's not a bug in Nautilus; at best, it's a missing feature.
The innovation! What will MS think of next?<sarcasm>
Of course, the very same small number of ruthless and "smart" business and marketing people are the very same the regulate what is and is not produced.
Of course. And I'm not saying that working at a big company necessarily means that you're stupid, I'm saying that working at a big, successful company simply doesn't say anything about whether you're smart or good.
The problems with Microsoft's software developers and the quality of their work are specific to Microsoft: Microsoft has hired huge numbers of inexperienced college graduates over the years and trained them in-house. In addition, their development processes seem to be seriously flawed. But as long as people keep buying, Microsoft has no motivation fixing it and most of the people there don't even realize something's wrong.
You might say "people have been writing violent literature for a long time, so how can this be illegal". Well, what the guy is actually proposing is generalizing a law that applies to violent literature to gaming.
The irony is that the original law was probably a reaction to Germany's violent Nazi past. But the problem with the Nazis was not violence (everybody is capable of violence), it was totalitarianism, group think, and conformism. People seem to forget, but in their political campaigns, the Nazis became popular because they preached "family values", "clean living", and "Christian values", and they then proceeded to implement those by going after everybody who didn't conform: Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, anarchists, socialists, intellectuals, "decadent artists", etc.
In different words, laws like these and people like Beckstein are basically continuing a weakened form of Nazi ideology.
The article notes that Mr. Phipps' comments are somewhat surprising, given that the recent open-sourcing of Java went forward with GPLv2
First of all, GPLv3 isn't out yet, so Sun can't release under it. And it's understandable that many people are reluctant to release under "GPLv2 or later".
Furthermore, you can't judge licenses just by what they say, you have to judge them in context. Sun is not releasing Java under GPLv2; if they did, that would have been open-source hostile. What they did is announce that they will release Java under GPLv2 with linking exceptions on some parts; that's something very different. And even when GPLv3 comes out, specific open source projects may still benefit from GPLv2 because the terms of the license fit them better.
On the other hand, plenty of commercial companies are using the GPL as a nuisance license on their software, without actually running an open source project (many "dual-licensed" products fall into that category).
No matter what one may think of it as a story, a scifi with no aliens doesn't exactly strike me as the best choice for an MMORPG. And it's not like it's been a big success either.
(1) Yes, Mr. Tanenbaum, you have correctly mastered academic publishing: even the most inane ideas will get published if you just combine the right buzzwords (and this idea is inane indeed).
(2) No, Mr. Tanenbaum, the right way to deal with SQL injection bugs related to RFID problems is data validation and testing; interfering with RFID tags is neither effective nor necessary.