It will take somebody who's prepared to buy the rights for those technologies on behalf of the Linux community and then distribute them as a product.
Apple isn't selling the rights for those technologies to anybody. If anything, Linux actually has better third party support for iPod and relatd products than Windows at this point.
To get there, he says the Linux community will need to make "compromises." For starters: Linux believers will have to reach out beyond "self-absorbed" geeks who learn Klingon and attend science fiction conventions in their spare time.
All major Linux distributions permit, and even support, the use of proprietary drivers (e.g., for NVidia), proprietary CODECs (e.g., MPEG, RealNetworks), and proprietary programming platforms (e.g., Sun Java), under proprietary licenses. Vendors like RedHat and SuSE are even bundling for-pay applications with some of their distributions. And users are paying for those Linux distributions.
The fact that there aren't more proprietary codecs and drivers on Linux isn't the fault of "Linux believers". Linux believers are constantly "reaching out" to commercial companies, begging and pleading for drivers and applications to be ported to Linux, even closed source. I myself have been doing that for as long as Linux has been around. It's the lack of response from many vendors that has forced geeks to reverse engineer things and come up with their own solutions.
And it's the lack of response from commercial vendors, as well as their haphazard product lifecycles and support even on so-called "supported" platforms, that has caused people like me to increasingly prefer all-open-source solutions whenever we can get them. In the end, not having iPod support is less important than having to put up with yet another poorly supported driver or having to wait for months until a vendor gets around to updating a closed source library to work with the latest version of the OS.
In any case, if ESR's vision of the future is a sort of mix of commercial and open source software, with some commercial entity paying for licenses for proprietary functionality, that already exists: it's called an Apple Macintosh. And for what it is, it's not a bad compromise. But Linux users haven't moved en-masse to Macintosh because, to many people in the real world, iPod support is ultimately less important than reducing the various business risks associated with depending on vendors of proprietary software components.
my friend Rob Landley and I have done an analysis which we're going to publish very shortly suggesting that there is a critical window of vulnerability for changing the dominant operating system. And that is probably going to close in 2008.
I don't want to "change the dominant operating system", I want to see operating system dominance disappear completely. A world in which 90% of the machines run Linux is almost as bad as a world in which 90% of the machines run Windows or MacOS. The software industry should be built on a diversity of systems, unified through open standards, not a sequence of OS monocultures.
Anyway, we certainly would have evaluated them had John not withdrew the approval request. Approval was just not the best of all possible courses of action, which is why we asked him to withdraw.
As I see it...
If Microsoft's shared source license is OSI compliant, then OSI should make that determination publicly so that Microsoft's change in behavior is recognized and people can feel secure in using the software.
If Microsoft's shared source license is formally OSI compliant, but you don't think it is actually in the interest of open source developers, then you should change your compliance criteria.
And if Microsoft's shared source license is not OSI compliant, then people need to know urgently, because the code is out there and people may start using it.
If you think that Microsoft's license is legitimate but you don't approve it because you think it would look bad for OSI to approve a Microsoft license, then I think you really are biased.
I really just want to know: is Microsoft's shared source license compatible with open source principles? I hope OSI will answer that question and do so soon.
And why shouldn't they? Microsoft's behavior is a matter of public record, and there are numerous instances where strong condemnation of their corporate behavior is clearly justified.
What you wanted to happen was for OSI to, on its own, evaluate an MS license, reject it,
No, what I want to happen was for OSI to review it against their criteria and publish their conclusions, whatever they may be. I would welcome it if their license complied with OSI requirements because it would mean that there is more software that I can build on.
When the author of a license submits his license to be approved by a body such as OSI, the intent is to get that body to approve the license. Part of the process is that if the body rejects the license, the body informs the author of the reasons so that the author can, if he wishes, make adjustments to the license and resubmit it.
It is a very real possibility that Microsoft's various "shared source" initiatives contain traps and are a publicity stunt. In that case, they have no interest in having anybody review it or make changes to it, but users still need to know.
OTOH, Microsoft may simply have chosen not to submit the license to OSI because of PR considerations. In that case, failure by OSI to review the license would deprive many people of the use of their open source software unnecessarily.
If they had decided to evaluate an MS license without MS submitting it, and publicly rejected the license, then it would have been seen as no more than an anti-MS hit-job.
The purpose of evaluating a license is not, as you seem to think, some kind of PR stunt, it is to give people like me information about whether a particular license is safe to use or not.
That they didn't do that actually strengthens their credibility, not weaken it.
The basis for OSI is the open source community, and if OSI is seen to shy away from warning users about dangerous license terms in order to improve their relationships with companies like Microsoft, then OSI loses credibility with its community.
If OSI rejects the license based on a reasoned analysis, then that is not an indication of bias. If you interpret it as such, then the problem is with you, not OSI.
Except that, based on the Google results, they would probably still have concluded that the definition was not a problem; the geological term is mentioned, among plenty of other uses (ignoring hits on the actual decision to name these objects): some software, French and Spanish use of "pluton" for the planet, proposals to use that term, etc.
The term may be Geology 101, but it doesn't seem to come up that much. In any case, this kind of ambiguity just is not a problem in the sciences.
You're right, though, that it's embarrassing when a scientist uses MS Word spelling dictionary to pick names. Google is the right tool--it's an accepted and widely used tool by etymologists and linguists.
Manger's views are sure to cause a stir among a public which has long associated dolphins with intelligence, emotion and other human-like qualities.
Dolphins have emotions because they are mammals and because their brains have a certain structure, not because their brains are a minimum size.
Absolute brain size is largely determined by body size--more muscles means you need more brain mass.
Finally, except for a general trend, there is no conclusive data about a firm relationship between brain-to-body-mass ratio or neuron count to intelligence. The way to determine whether animals are intelligent is to observe and test their behavior.
Personally, I find it pretty smart that dolphins don't "jump out of their bowl to explore the environment"; for an aquatic animal of any kind, that seems like a survival trait to me...
The music industry is scared shitless of piracy. If people can get the music they've invested in without paying them a penny, then they're not going to make their money back.
Good. If the music industry stopped making music, people could start making real music again.
It's a matter of getting the right publicity. When you're trying to stop ordinary people from doing something that hurts you, and you've reached a point that you have no options left but to create penalties for doing it, the wrong publicity is the right publicity.
Until voters rebel and pull out the legal rug from under the RIAA.
Reconsider YOUR math. (It all depends on the sample size they used for the test.)
No, it depends on the frequency of terrorists in the population. That frequency is lower than the 50% figure you use. In fact, it's much lower than the 1% figure the GP used, making the fraction of wrongfully accused far, far worse.
Yes, IEEE floating point is a very well documented standard. Absolutely, it is a very well documented precise model for approximating numbers.
Floating point numbers are no more and no less "approximations" than integers or BCD numbers: for some operations and pairs of arguments, they give you exact results, for some, they give you rounded or truncated results, and for some, they give you overflow/underflow.
The rules are a bit more complicated for floating point numbers than for integers (e.g., for integers, only division truncates), but there is nothing intrinsically "approximate" about them. You can choose to view floating point numbers as approximations in your application but many people also use them for exact computations.
Vmware's main advantage is they provide the host OS for enterprise users without modifying the guest OS, which Xen requires the guest to be modified.
Yes, and the reason it does is because the old x86 had a few non-virtualizable instructions; an efficient workaround was a lot of effort, and Xen chose the simpler route of simply disallowing those instructions in the guest OS.
Kripkenstein mentions the dirty little secret that Intel doesnt tell you. Virtualization of the CPU is just that, CPU Virtualization, the memory management, peripherals, and IO hardware is still managed mostly by a host OS.
That's no secret at all. In fact, all the other necessary software already exists in open source form.
Part of the inheritance, of course. The fact that they guy was rude enough to die before they could get to him doesn't change that he did grave damage to the coffers of the RIAA. Well, at least that's likely their thinking.
Many people seem to think of floats as a kind of number that gives fuzzy results; that's b.s. Floating point numbers operate according to precise models. Those models may not fit your calcuations or needs, and one can argue that IEEE has standardized a Rube Goldberg-style floating point model, but none of that makes them inaccurate.
In particular, you can perform bit-accurate integer arithmetic with floating point numbers if you like.
That page ignores most of the important GUI history: Alto, Smalltalk, Lisa, Blit, W, X10, X11, OS2, Amiga, Atari, GEOS, Garnet, NeXT, to name just a few. It just reinforces the same old misconceptions about Apple, Microsoft, and UNIX. Stupid.
I have GREAT fears about people not leaning to clean up after themselves.
It's a fact that people don't clean up properly after themselves. Without garbage collection, when they don't, software crashes unpredictably. With garbage collection, at worst, it runs more slowly.
I spent a LONG time trying to explain to people that with 64k of memory, and NO garbage collection (yey "special" Java) you cannot just keep creating temporary objects at will and hoping mummy will clean up.
Well, and once people start programming embedded systems, that's a good point to spend a time to teach that. Teaching manual storage management earlier is premature. Furthermore, if your students had been properly trained in memory management using a garbage collector, they'd learn manual storage management quickly, since many of the techniques are the same.
(Incidentally, there is no reason why a 64k Java couldn't provide efficient garbage collection.)
How interest in news items evolves over time, how it depends on communication, links, and recommendations, has been the subject of research for decades. E-commerce sites use detailed models of this in order to determine when to remove items from the front page.
It is true that many people use exponential decay models, but that's not because they don't know any better, it's because exponential decay is computationally simple and works well enough. It's like using a linear approximation to a non-linear problem.
I think it's pretty telling that Barabási is publishing this in physics journals, not in statistics or web-related publications. This may be news to physicists, but it isn't news to anybody who actually works in the field and knows their stuff. The reviewers at Phys. rev. simply aren't qualified to determine whether this kind of work is novel and correct.
A simple example with hysteresis is the following. Imagine you place a metal ring on a flat table and inside that flat ring you put a small object (say, a flat pebble). When you drag the ring around and then move it back exactly to its original position, then the position of the small object inside the ring depends on the path along which you dragged the ring around, not just on the final position of the ring. Furthermore, the position of the object inside the ring may actually depend on the position of the ring some time earlier in its motion, without being dependent on the exact amount of time itself and without being dependent on the complete history of the ring either. Note that there is no time delay: when you stop moving the ring, everything just stays put. Also, there is no fatigue or degradation: you can move the ring as often as you like, and nothing really wears out.
Apple Computer has been so extremely picky with their own trademarks that judges should apply the same tight standards when the company is being sued by others.
The health care system CAN work in a free market economy. Unfortunately, the US does not have a free market economy. It is instead a managed market economy, that has a market system, but is encumbered by government intervention.
Yes, you're right, my bad: health care in an unregulated free market is just so much more efficient; after all, in those systems, the feudal lord only delivers health care to his vassals to the extent necessary to ensure their continued ability to work.
Certainly handing over the reins to a massive bureacracy is not it. Anyone who thinks so doesn't know the first thing about economics.
Quite right. That's why we need public health care because the private health care providers have overheads that are several times (!) as large for the same amount of patient care delivered as the public ones.
People writing vertical apps certainly do. And being one of the few devices running Linux in that form factor makes it quite attractive, in particular given the price.
We sort of had that develompent a century ago, until Congress stepped in. Our Congress is currently very corporatist, but the century is still young, and this sort of behavior has really pissed off the voters in the past, once they figured it out.
Actually, the thumb keyboard design on that device looks excellent: it's easy to learn for novices, familiar to texters, fits the device and the way it's held, and is probably quite efficient. If they didn't screw up on some detail, it should be at least as good as a chorded keyboard for most people, and it's going to be much better than pen input, on-screen tapping, or "drawer" style keyboards.
For engineers, treat it like a programming or design problem; they need to realize that, just like Java or C++ programs have a global structure, so do papers. Structure is not enough for great writing, but it's good enough to set them on the right path. If they think it's all inspiration and talent, they're never gonna make it.
Beyond that, they need lots of practice and feedback.
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It will take somebody who's prepared to buy the rights for those technologies on behalf of the Linux community and then distribute them as a product.
Apple isn't selling the rights for those technologies to anybody. If anything, Linux actually has better third party support for iPod and relatd products than Windows at this point.
To get there, he says the Linux community will need to make "compromises." For starters: Linux believers will have to reach out beyond "self-absorbed" geeks who learn Klingon and attend science fiction conventions in their spare time.
All major Linux distributions permit, and even support, the use of proprietary drivers (e.g., for NVidia), proprietary CODECs (e.g., MPEG, RealNetworks), and proprietary programming platforms (e.g., Sun Java), under proprietary licenses. Vendors like RedHat and SuSE are even bundling for-pay applications with some of their distributions. And users are paying for those Linux distributions.
The fact that there aren't more proprietary codecs and drivers on Linux isn't the fault of "Linux believers". Linux believers are constantly "reaching out" to commercial companies, begging and pleading for drivers and applications to be ported to Linux, even closed source. I myself have been doing that for as long as Linux has been around. It's the lack of response from many vendors that has forced geeks to reverse engineer things and come up with their own solutions.
And it's the lack of response from commercial vendors, as well as their haphazard product lifecycles and support even on so-called "supported" platforms, that has caused people like me to increasingly prefer all-open-source solutions whenever we can get them. In the end, not having iPod support is less important than having to put up with yet another poorly supported driver or having to wait for months until a vendor gets around to updating a closed source library to work with the latest version of the OS.
In any case, if ESR's vision of the future is a sort of mix of commercial and open source software, with some commercial entity paying for licenses for proprietary functionality, that already exists: it's called an Apple Macintosh. And for what it is, it's not a bad compromise. But Linux users haven't moved en-masse to Macintosh because, to many people in the real world, iPod support is ultimately less important than reducing the various business risks associated with depending on vendors of proprietary software components.
my friend Rob Landley and I have done an analysis which we're going to publish very shortly suggesting that there is a critical window of vulnerability for changing the dominant operating system. And that is probably going to close in 2008.
I don't want to "change the dominant operating system", I want to see operating system dominance disappear completely. A world in which 90% of the machines run Linux is almost as bad as a world in which 90% of the machines run Windows or MacOS. The software industry should be built on a diversity of systems, unified through open standards, not a sequence of OS monocultures.
Anyway, we certainly would have evaluated them had John not withdrew the approval request. Approval was just not the best of all possible courses of action, which is why we asked him to withdraw.
As I see it...
If Microsoft's shared source license is OSI compliant, then OSI should make that determination publicly so that Microsoft's change in behavior is recognized and people can feel secure in using the software.
If Microsoft's shared source license is formally OSI compliant, but you don't think it is actually in the interest of open source developers, then you should change your compliance criteria.
And if Microsoft's shared source license is not OSI compliant, then people need to know urgently, because the code is out there and people may start using it.
If you think that Microsoft's license is legitimate but you don't approve it because you think it would look bad for OSI to approve a Microsoft license, then I think you really are biased.
I really just want to know: is Microsoft's shared source license compatible with open source principles? I hope OSI will answer that question and do so soon.
OSI has featured anti-MS rhetoric on its site.
And why shouldn't they? Microsoft's behavior is a matter of public record, and there are numerous instances where strong condemnation of their corporate behavior is clearly justified.
What you wanted to happen was for OSI to, on its own, evaluate an MS license, reject it,
No, what I want to happen was for OSI to review it against their criteria and publish their conclusions, whatever they may be. I would welcome it if their license complied with OSI requirements because it would mean that there is more software that I can build on.
When the author of a license submits his license to be approved by a body such as OSI, the intent is to get that body to approve the license. Part of the process is that if the body rejects the license, the body informs the author of the reasons so that the author can, if he wishes, make adjustments to the license and resubmit it.
It is a very real possibility that Microsoft's various "shared source" initiatives contain traps and are a publicity stunt. In that case, they have no interest in having anybody review it or make changes to it, but users still need to know.
OTOH, Microsoft may simply have chosen not to submit the license to OSI because of PR considerations. In that case, failure by OSI to review the license would deprive many people of the use of their open source software unnecessarily.
If they had decided to evaluate an MS license without MS submitting it, and publicly rejected the license, then it would have been seen as no more than an anti-MS hit-job.
The purpose of evaluating a license is not, as you seem to think, some kind of PR stunt, it is to give people like me information about whether a particular license is safe to use or not.
That they didn't do that actually strengthens their credibility, not weaken it.
The basis for OSI is the open source community, and if OSI is seen to shy away from warning users about dangerous license terms in order to improve their relationships with companies like Microsoft, then OSI loses credibility with its community.
If OSI rejects the license based on a reasoned analysis, then that is not an indication of bias. If you interpret it as such, then the problem is with you, not OSI.
Except that, based on the Google results, they would probably still have concluded that the definition was not a problem; the geological term is mentioned, among plenty of other uses (ignoring hits on the actual decision to name these objects): some software, French and Spanish use of "pluton" for the planet, proposals to use that term, etc.
The term may be Geology 101, but it doesn't seem to come up that much. In any case, this kind of ambiguity just is not a problem in the sciences.
You're right, though, that it's embarrassing when a scientist uses MS Word spelling dictionary to pick names. Google is the right tool--it's an accepted and widely used tool by etymologists and linguists.
Manger's views are sure to cause a stir among a public which has long associated dolphins with intelligence, emotion and other human-like qualities.
Dolphins have emotions because they are mammals and because their brains have a certain structure, not because their brains are a minimum size.
Absolute brain size is largely determined by body size--more muscles means you need more brain mass.
Finally, except for a general trend, there is no conclusive data about a firm relationship between brain-to-body-mass ratio or neuron count to intelligence. The way to determine whether animals are intelligent is to observe and test their behavior.
Personally, I find it pretty smart that dolphins don't "jump out of their bowl to explore the environment"; for an aquatic animal of any kind, that seems like a survival trait to me...
The music industry is scared shitless of piracy. If people can get the music they've invested in without paying them a penny, then they're not going to make their money back.
Good. If the music industry stopped making music, people could start making real music again.
It's a matter of getting the right publicity. When you're trying to stop ordinary people from doing something that hurts you, and you've reached a point that you have no options left but to create penalties for doing it, the wrong publicity is the right publicity.
Until voters rebel and pull out the legal rug from under the RIAA.
Reconsider YOUR math. (It all depends on the sample size they used for the test.)
No, it depends on the frequency of terrorists in the population. That frequency is lower than the 50% figure you use. In fact, it's much lower than the 1% figure the GP used, making the fraction of wrongfully accused far, far worse.
Israeli airlines and airports have the reputation for being the safest in the world.
Yes, and they're also a huge pain to travel through.
Thanks, but no thanks. If the US and Europe end up becoming like Israel, the terrorists have won.
Yes, IEEE floating point is a very well documented standard. Absolutely, it is a very well documented precise model for approximating numbers.
Floating point numbers are no more and no less "approximations" than integers or BCD numbers: for some operations and pairs of arguments, they give you exact results, for some, they give you rounded or truncated results, and for some, they give you overflow/underflow.
The rules are a bit more complicated for floating point numbers than for integers (e.g., for integers, only division truncates), but there is nothing intrinsically "approximate" about them. You can choose to view floating point numbers as approximations in your application but many people also use them for exact computations.
Integers stored in floats are usually normalized, i.e. stored as a mantissa between 0 & 1, and exponent.
.11(2) * .1101(2) with a floating point unit, you get an exact result.
Indeed they are. What does that have to do with anything? When you compute
No you can't.
Yes, you can. Floating point numbers don't magically go fuzzy by themselves.
Yes, and the reason it does is because the old x86 had a few non-virtualizable instructions; an efficient workaround was a lot of effort, and Xen chose the simpler route of simply disallowing those instructions in the guest OS.
That's no secret at all. In fact, all the other necessary software already exists in open source form.
Part of the inheritance, of course. The fact that they guy was rude enough to die before they could get to him doesn't change that he did grave damage to the coffers of the RIAA. Well, at least that's likely their thinking.
Many people seem to think of floats as a kind of number that gives fuzzy results; that's b.s. Floating point numbers operate according to precise models. Those models may not fit your calcuations or needs, and one can argue that IEEE has standardized a Rube Goldberg-style floating point model, but none of that makes them inaccurate.
In particular, you can perform bit-accurate integer arithmetic with floating point numbers if you like.
That page ignores most of the important GUI history: Alto, Smalltalk, Lisa, Blit, W, X10, X11, OS2, Amiga, Atari, GEOS, Garnet, NeXT, to name just a few. It just reinforces the same old misconceptions about Apple, Microsoft, and UNIX. Stupid.
I have GREAT fears about people not leaning to clean up after themselves.
It's a fact that people don't clean up properly after themselves. Without garbage collection, when they don't, software crashes unpredictably. With garbage collection, at worst, it runs more slowly.
I spent a LONG time trying to explain to people that with 64k of memory, and NO garbage collection (yey "special" Java) you cannot just keep creating temporary objects at will and hoping mummy will clean up.
Well, and once people start programming embedded systems, that's a good point to spend a time to teach that. Teaching manual storage management earlier is premature. Furthermore, if your students had been properly trained in memory management using a garbage collector, they'd learn manual storage management quickly, since many of the techniques are the same.
(Incidentally, there is no reason why a 64k Java couldn't provide efficient garbage collection.)
How interest in news items evolves over time, how it depends on communication, links, and recommendations, has been the subject of research for decades. E-commerce sites use detailed models of this in order to determine when to remove items from the front page.
It is true that many people use exponential decay models, but that's not because they don't know any better, it's because exponential decay is computationally simple and works well enough. It's like using a linear approximation to a non-linear problem.
I think it's pretty telling that Barabási is publishing this in physics journals, not in statistics or web-related publications. This may be news to physicists, but it isn't news to anybody who actually works in the field and knows their stuff. The reviewers at Phys. rev. simply aren't qualified to determine whether this kind of work is novel and correct.
Well, no, not really.
A simple example with hysteresis is the following. Imagine you place a metal ring on a flat table and inside that flat ring you put a small object (say, a flat pebble). When you drag the ring around and then move it back exactly to its original position, then the position of the small object inside the ring depends on the path along which you dragged the ring around, not just on the final position of the ring. Furthermore, the position of the object inside the ring may actually depend on the position of the ring some time earlier in its motion, without being dependent on the exact amount of time itself and without being dependent on the complete history of the ring either. Note that there is no time delay: when you stop moving the ring, everything just stays put. Also, there is no fatigue or degradation: you can move the ring as often as you like, and nothing really wears out.
That's a fairly typical example of hysteresis.
Apple Computer has been so extremely picky with their own trademarks that judges should apply the same tight standards when the company is being sued by others.
You are referring, of course, to the upstairs torture chamber, right?
The health care system CAN work in a free market economy. Unfortunately, the US does not have a free market economy. It is instead a managed market economy, that has a market system, but is encumbered by government intervention.
Yes, you're right, my bad: health care in an unregulated free market is just so much more efficient; after all, in those systems, the feudal lord only delivers health care to his vassals to the extent necessary to ensure their continued ability to work.
Certainly handing over the reins to a massive bureacracy is not it. Anyone who thinks so doesn't know the first thing about economics.
Quite right. That's why we need public health care because the private health care providers have overheads that are several times (!) as large for the same amount of patient care delivered as the public ones.
The point is, you cannot throw money at this problem because it's not economic, it's cultural!
That may well be, but it sure as hell isn't going to get fixed by also messing up the school system further by privatizing it more.
Nobody gives a stuff what OS it runs.
People writing vertical apps certainly do. And being one of the few devices running Linux in that form factor makes it quite attractive, in particular given the price.
We sort of had that develompent a century ago, until Congress stepped in. Our Congress is currently very corporatist, but the century is still young, and this sort of behavior has really pissed off the voters in the past, once they figured it out.
Actually, the thumb keyboard design on that device looks excellent: it's easy to learn for novices, familiar to texters, fits the device and the way it's held, and is probably quite efficient. If they didn't screw up on some detail, it should be at least as good as a chorded keyboard for most people, and it's going to be much better than pen input, on-screen tapping, or "drawer" style keyboards.
For engineers, treat it like a programming or design problem; they need to realize that, just like Java or C++ programs have a global structure, so do papers. Structure is not enough for great writing, but it's good enough to set them on the right path. If they think it's all inspiration and talent, they're never gonna make it.
Beyond that, they need lots of practice and feedback.