While I have several books, I feel the same way. I'm highly suspicious when I walk into a developer's office and see the two dozen ".NET" books on the shelf, the spines giving all appearances of never being violated.
and then later:
Sidenote: Many Microsoft Press books come with a CD with an electronic copy of the book for searching and electronic access, as well as sample and promo material. Of course most developers wouldn't know this because they never actually cracked it open.
um...it's a crazy thought, but it is possible that often the books look rather unused (or, in your words look as if their spines have never been 'violated') because that alot of people are just reading the books on their PC using the included electronic copy?
From TFA: What follows are seven key principles we use to make knowledge workers most effective.
Seven,WTF? Is editing evil?
Um....no, if you count them, there's actually 10.
Hire by committee.
Cater to their every need.
Pack them in.
Make coordination easy.
Eat your own dog food.
Encourage creativity.
Strive to reach consensus.
Don't be evil.
Data drive decisions.
Communicate effectively.
However, I do like how the classic "Don't be evil" is listed near the bottom, and more standard, almost dilbert-ish, bullet points are listed above it (e.g.
"Encourage Creativity" & "Strive to reach consensus")
The big problem is that this changes the GPL into a EULA. Right now, the GPL doesn't attempt to restrict anything, it merely grants privileges that would not usually be in effect. That's why it's such a strong license.
Even under what might be in the proposed new license, your use of a licensed program is not restricted at all. Rather, you just might have a new obligation to distribute GPL'ed code that you use in a publicly exhibited application. If you don't want to distribute the code, then don't publicly exhibit stuff based on other people's GPL'ed works.
This is really not much different than the current stipulation that if you distribute the program you have to also distribute the code, especially since exhibition has been considered a form of distribution for years regarding other copywritten works (e.g. play, songs, etc.)
Over here, there's this weird, loud, high pitch sound that's always emanating from this one house.
The sound drives me nuts when ever I'm running/jogging through the area and pass by the place, and I've always wondered how people could actually live there with such a constant noise nuisance....I guess now I at least know it might be because the residents are too old to hear it.
No, actually, I really am talking about C vs. Java, or more specifically the compiler optimizations that are available in some other languages, e.g. Java, or Fortran (and thus implicitly assembler), that are not available in C.
Also, you said:
People have described C as something like an architecture-independant assembler. In other words, if you know the C, you can easily translate it into assembler.
While it may be the case that every C program can be trivial transformed into an equivalent piece of assembler code, the reverse is not always true. That is, not every chunk of optimized assembly code can be transformed into an equivalent chuck of C that, critically, when compiled will regenerate the original assembly code. Again, this is due to the fact that there are some optimizations that a C compiler can't safely make due to some of C's language features.
While I've heard that more than a few times, I can't help to think that it seems to contradict the following other meme:
Java programs run using a good JIT can actually be faster than C programs. This is because of two reasons: one, the JIT can use runtime information to know the best way to optimize certain segments of code; two, since Java don't have some language features such as pointers, it is possible to make optimizations that are not possible in C.
The first part about special insights obtained about the code during runtime can be argued against by claiming that a C/asm programmer with the help of a profiler could optimize his/her could based on how it's used at runtime. Of course, such profiler optimizations are by definition the ones that you don't get for free by using an optimizing compiler. Further, I would hazard a guess that since not all possible desirable optimizations are made by a optimization compiler and since assembler allows more control over what actually gets run on the processor, that then there exist optimizations that an asm programmer can make (or as you put it 'tricky assembly programming') that a C programmer won't be able to get even using an optimization compiler.
Moreover, for the second part of the Java JIT meme, the part regarding the difficulty/impossibility of some compiler optimizations of C programs due to language features such as pointers, further suggests that their exist certain machine/asm code level optimizations that are just not available to C. In fact, this argument has also been made by folks in the scientific computing arena when they claim that Fortran can be faster than C, all due to optimizations a Fortran compiler can safely make that a C compiler can not. Of course, any such optimization that can be made by a JIT/Fortran compiler is in principle available to an ASM programmer.
However, the real issue is how practical it is to program modern applications in assembly. Sure, it may be possible to squeeze 10/15% more out of the processor if significant portions of a given application were written in assembler. But, the amount of time required to initially develop the app would skyrocket. Squashing bugs during QA would probably be much more of a pain. And, long term maintenance of the code would be probably much more expensive, requiring many more man-hours of work to make small improvements.
This being one of the reasons why up and coming countries like Chine and India will probably surpass their western counterparts in both science and engineering.
and will find out that a worthless patent is about as useful as an EPA superfund site is a location for a strip mall.
Actually, in the silicon valley area, superfund sites and other toxic swaths of land are commonly used for strip malls as well as somewhat price housing.
In the first map, the red super fund site near Showers Dr is currently the site of the San Antonio Shopping center (a somewhat large strip map with WalMart, 3 grocery stores, Sears, Ross, Mervyn's, Ride Aide, and a number of small resteraunts).
In the second map, I think the plume overlaps with some moderately pricey housing.
It's not just Mountain View either (it just happens to be the case that I'm most familiar with that area). Much of silicon valley is dotted with these sites that have now been built over.
When she writes a non-fiction book she is typically asked to sign a contract that indemnifies the publisher against legal costs resulting from errors of fact in the book.
Authors are typically also asked to sign ownership of the copyright over the publisher. So, it sounds like said publishers now want ownership of the IP with someone else essentially signed up to take all the legal liability.
For that latter, they could technically just go to an insurance company for that kind of thing. Buy, why bother, when you can essentially get someone else (the author), the bear this burden for no additional cost.
I'm surprised the parent was modded +5 insightful, since I'm not sure the poster actually took the time to read the article. Anyhow...
Technically, the Bayh-Dole law that the article talks about doesn't really say too much about companies being able/unable to patent the results of research that's been privately funded.
Even prior to the law, if you want to spend your money on research, you of course had the rights to patent the results. However, Bayh-Dole made it so that your company could spend tax-payer(read 'our') money to do research and development and then still be assured of your company owning the resulting intellectual property. So, the whole thing really seems like a big corporate well fair racket, whereby companies have been essentially gifted valuable IP by the American tax-payers.
Maybe the NIH or NSF should start acting a little bit like a VC firm in these cases. That is, if companies and/or universities want to profit by patenting the results of publicly funded research, then maybe the funding federal agency should get a proportion of the proceeds. That money could then be funded into other new and interesting research projects.
Could this make it harder for smaller independent game developers to enter the market? For example, imagine the following scenario:
Your a small independent game
shop that decides to forego using a major publishing house to distribute
your titles, but rather decide to distribute/sell your video games from
your own website. In many ways this could be a smart move since it avoids
that whole you putting the majority of effort into making the video game
and somebody else pocketing almost all of the profits thing. In any case, after
setting up the website and posting a few games online, lets say that one
or more 15 year olds gets a hold of his/her parents credit card and buys a
couple of games the could be considered 'violent' under this law (e.g.
almost any FPS). The kids buy the game even though there is a clear warning
on the web site that it should not be purchases by anybody under 18, which of course is a pretty useless deterrent to a 15 year old. Then
later, lets say the kids parents find out and decide to go after your
company using this law.
Now, for a few sales that brought in $20 to $30, your company has to pay
out $5,000 $40,000?!? That's probably going to be a significant chunk of
the development budget for your next game. Heck, if you're a one man shop,
that might be all of your development budget.
So, it seems like this will pretty much force independent developers to
distribute with major publishing houses who can afford to shoulder the
liability. Or, even better for the publishing housing, shift that liability
over towards the brick and mortar shops that most people buy their video games at.
There seems to be alot of comments on how this is a bad move on the part of the Free Software Foundation.
However, it seems that this is just a way to update the GPL for the times and completely consistent with its original goals. That is, the GPL exists to ensure that people both have the freedom to extend and to share the software that they're using with others. Originally, copyrights and lack of distribution of the original source code were the means that commercial vendors would use to prevent such extension and sharing. Consequently, the GPL was written so that anyone given a copy of the code was also given the right to obtain the source as well as share the code/program with others.
Today, software patents figure much more prominently into the picture, and are being used in a way that undermines the sprite and goals of the GPL. For example, a company like IBM/Sun/Microsoft can release two versions of a product. One being a slightly crippled GPL'ed 'community edition' and the other being full featured non-GPL'ed edition. Now, without software patents, diligent programmers could extend the community edition so that it would have all the features of the commercial non-GPL'ed version. However, with a handful of software patents, the company in question could easily block such a move with the threat of legal retribution.
Additionally, software patents allow some companies (*cough* Google *cough*) to make extensive use of GPL software, and then proceed to make extensive use of the patent system and obtain/file-for patents that could in principle be used to block the development of some types of Free/GPL'ed software (e.g. in Google's case, think a GPL'ed enterprise search appliance, desktop search tool, or even just a plain old open source web search engine package).
So, the proposed ways in which the GPL might change just seem like reasonable efforts to protect from those who would use the patent system to undermine the original spirit while simultaneously gaining a competitive advantage by making us of GPL software.
So, this appears to be the school's way of backing down gracefully. That is, they get to drop the charges without having to admit that it was wrong to press the charges in the first place.
Overall, not a bad out come. But, it does leave it as an open question whether or not the school district will every try something like this again.
Sorry, the yahoo links I gave above are erroneous.
Here's the corrected version of the first one, "lawyer"
that results in 125,000,000 many estimated hits.
The second one,
"lawyer lawyer"
results in 124,000,000 many estimated hits.
This trend appears to continue, as seen in that repeating the "lawyer" keyword 10 times results in Google estimating that there are
389,000,000 hits in it's index.
On yahoo, this sort of thing doesn't seem to happen as much, but it still does happen. For example, searching for "laywer" returns 124,000,000 results,
and searching for "lawyer lawyer" or "lawyer lawyer" returns 125,000,000 results.
So, it probably doesn't really make seen to judge the relative size of either index based on the estimated number of hits for any given set of keywords in their index. Right now, Google's numbers look a little more suspect since they seem to variety so greatly just based on the repetition of a keyword. However, the stability of Yahoo's numbers don't necessarily mean that they're correct either.
What happened at your school seems like even bigger news that what's described in the article. It also seems to go against the quote from the Electronic Frontier Foundation guy in the article who said "As long as people have the choice (of printed books), it's not such a dangerous move".
Slashdot Mirror
from your post:
While I have several books, I feel the same way. I'm highly suspicious when I walk into a developer's office and see the two dozen ".NET" books on the shelf, the spines giving all appearances of never being violated.
and then later:
Sidenote: Many Microsoft Press books come with a CD with an electronic copy of the book for searching and electronic access, as well as sample and promo material. Of course most developers wouldn't know this because they never actually cracked it open.
um...it's a crazy thought, but it is possible that often the books look rather unused (or, in your words look as if their spines have never been 'violated') because that alot of people are just reading the books on their PC using the included electronic copy?
Seven,WTF? Is editing evil?
Um....no, if you count them, there's actually 10.
However, I do like how the classic "Don't be evil" is listed near the bottom, and more standard, almost dilbert-ish, bullet points are listed above it (e.g. "Encourage Creativity" & "Strive to reach consensus")
Taste of their own medicine? huh?
IIRC - unlike some other companies out there *cough* IBM *cough*, Microsoft isn't really a big software patent litigator.
The big problem is that this changes the GPL into a EULA. Right now, the GPL doesn't attempt to restrict anything, it merely grants privileges that would not usually be in effect. That's why it's such a strong license.
Even under what might be in the proposed new license, your use of a licensed program is not restricted at all. Rather, you just might have a new obligation to distribute GPL'ed code that you use in a publicly exhibited application. If you don't want to distribute the code, then don't publicly exhibit stuff based on other people's GPL'ed works.
This is really not much different than the current stipulation that if you distribute the program you have to also distribute the code, especially since exhibition has been considered a form of distribution for years regarding other copywritten works (e.g. play, songs, etc.)
This sounds more like direct completion to craigslist rather than Google base.
But, I guess doing the whole clash of the titans thing, e.g. Microsoft vs. Google, does make the story sound a bit more sexy...
Over here, there's this weird, loud, high pitch sound that's always emanating from this one house.
The sound drives me nuts when ever I'm running/jogging through the area and pass by the place, and I've always wondered how people could actually live there with such a constant noise nuisance....I guess now I at least know it might be because the residents are too old to hear it.
Also, you said: People have described C as something like an architecture-independant assembler. In other words, if you know the C, you can easily translate it into assembler.
While it may be the case that every C program can be trivial transformed into an equivalent piece of assembler code, the reverse is not always true. That is, not every chunk of optimized assembly code can be transformed into an equivalent chuck of C that, critically, when compiled will regenerate the original assembly code. Again, this is due to the fact that there are some optimizations that a C compiler can't safely make due to some of C's language features.
The first part about special insights obtained about the code during runtime can be argued against by claiming that a C/asm programmer with the help of a profiler could optimize his/her could based on how it's used at runtime. Of course, such profiler optimizations are by definition the ones that you don't get for free by using an optimizing compiler. Further, I would hazard a guess that since not all possible desirable optimizations are made by a optimization compiler and since assembler allows more control over what actually gets run on the processor, that then there exist optimizations that an asm programmer can make (or as you put it 'tricky assembly programming') that a C programmer won't be able to get even using an optimization compiler.
Moreover, for the second part of the Java JIT meme, the part regarding the difficulty/impossibility of some compiler optimizations of C programs due to language features such as pointers, further suggests that their exist certain machine/asm code level optimizations that are just not available to C. In fact, this argument has also been made by folks in the scientific computing arena when they claim that Fortran can be faster than C, all due to optimizations a Fortran compiler can safely make that a C compiler can not. Of course, any such optimization that can be made by a JIT/Fortran compiler is in principle available to an ASM programmer.
However, the real issue is how practical it is to program modern applications in assembly. Sure, it may be possible to squeeze 10/15% more out of the processor if significant portions of a given application were written in assembler. But, the amount of time required to initially develop the app would skyrocket. Squashing bugs during QA would probably be much more of a pain. And, long term maintenance of the code would be probably much more expensive, requiring many more man-hours of work to make small improvements.
This being one of the reasons why up and coming countries like Chine and India will probably surpass their western counterparts in both science and engineering.
It may not be what china is doing now, but didn't the people's republic of china at one time have policies encouraging population growth?
Actually, in the silicon valley area, superfund sites and other toxic swaths of land are commonly used for strip malls as well as somewhat price housing.
In the first map, the red super fund site near Showers Dr is currently the site of the San Antonio Shopping center (a somewhat large strip map with WalMart, 3 grocery stores, Sears, Ross, Mervyn's, Ride Aide, and a number of small resteraunts).
In the second map, I think the plume overlaps with some moderately pricey housing.
It's not just Mountain View either (it just happens to be the case that I'm most familiar with that area). Much of silicon valley is dotted with these sites that have now been built over.
When she writes a non-fiction book she is typically asked to sign a contract that indemnifies the publisher against legal costs resulting from errors of fact in the book.
Authors are typically also asked to sign ownership of the copyright over the publisher. So, it sounds like said publishers now want ownership of the IP with someone else essentially signed up to take all the legal liability.
For that latter, they could technically just go to an insurance company for that kind of thing. Buy, why bother, when you can essentially get someone else (the author), the bear this burden for no additional cost.
I'm surprised the parent was modded +5 insightful, since I'm not sure the poster actually took the time to read the article. Anyhow...
Technically, the Bayh-Dole law that the article talks about doesn't really say too much about companies being able/unable to patent the results of research that's been privately funded.
Even prior to the law, if you want to spend your money on research, you of course had the rights to patent the results. However, Bayh-Dole made it so that your company could spend tax-payer(read 'our') money to do research and development and then still be assured of your company owning the resulting intellectual property. So, the whole thing really seems like a big corporate well fair racket, whereby companies have been essentially gifted valuable IP by the American tax-payers.
Maybe the NIH or NSF should start acting a little bit like a VC firm in these cases. That is, if companies and/or universities want to profit by patenting the results of publicly funded research, then maybe the funding federal agency should get a proportion of the proceeds. That money could then be funded into other new and interesting research projects.
Yeah, everybody knows that Google (and maybe IBM) is the only company with any real clue and that stands a chance against Microsoft...
Interestingly enough, the guy who used to run Novell now heads up Google.
Could this make it harder for smaller independent game developers to enter the market? For example, imagine the following scenario:
Your a small independent game shop that decides to forego using a major publishing house to distribute your titles, but rather decide to distribute/sell your video games from your own website. In many ways this could be a smart move since it avoids that whole you putting the majority of effort into making the video game and somebody else pocketing almost all of the profits thing. In any case, after setting up the website and posting a few games online, lets say that one or more 15 year olds gets a hold of his/her parents credit card and buys a couple of games the could be considered 'violent' under this law (e.g. almost any FPS). The kids buy the game even though there is a clear warning on the web site that it should not be purchases by anybody under 18, which of course is a pretty useless deterrent to a 15 year old. Then later, lets say the kids parents find out and decide to go after your company using this law.
Now, for a few sales that brought in $20 to $30, your company has to pay out $5,000 $40,000?!? That's probably going to be a significant chunk of the development budget for your next game. Heck, if you're a one man shop, that might be all of your development budget.
So, it seems like this will pretty much force independent developers to distribute with major publishing houses who can afford to shoulder the liability. Or, even better for the publishing housing, shift that liability over towards the brick and mortar shops that most people buy their video games at.
Typically.....the 'trailer park mamma' with 12 kids will probably have kids that reproduce early and often themselves.
Thus, we can sort of conclude what strategy will probably win in the end.
Any clue on why this might be a good strategic move for Intel?
I mean, it seems a bit random in that it's miles away from their 'core competencies' in chip design/manufacturing.
There seems to be alot of comments on how this is a bad move on the part of the Free Software Foundation.
However, it seems that this is just a way to update the GPL for the times and completely consistent with its original goals. That is, the GPL exists to ensure that people both have the freedom to extend and to share the software that they're using with others. Originally, copyrights and lack of distribution of the original source code were the means that commercial vendors would use to prevent such extension and sharing. Consequently, the GPL was written so that anyone given a copy of the code was also given the right to obtain the source as well as share the code/program with others.
Today, software patents figure much more prominently into the picture, and are being used in a way that undermines the sprite and goals of the GPL. For example, a company like IBM/Sun/Microsoft can release two versions of a product. One being a slightly crippled GPL'ed 'community edition' and the other being full featured non-GPL'ed edition. Now, without software patents, diligent programmers could extend the community edition so that it would have all the features of the commercial non-GPL'ed version. However, with a handful of software patents, the company in question could easily block such a move with the threat of legal retribution.
Additionally, software patents allow some companies (*cough* Google *cough*) to make extensive use of GPL software, and then proceed to make extensive use of the patent system and obtain/file-for patents that could in principle be used to block the development of some types of Free/GPL'ed software (e.g. in Google's case, think a GPL'ed enterprise search appliance, desktop search tool, or even just a plain old open source web search engine package).
So, the proposed ways in which the GPL might change just seem like reasonable efforts to protect from those who would use the patent system to undermine the original spirit while simultaneously gaining a competitive advantage by making us of GPL software.
Only with a 2.6% stake??
I don't know, was yahoo hedging their bets with the 5% stake they had in google?
In english no...
But to someone who speaks Mandarin, it might roll a little more naturally off the tongue
So, this appears to be the school's way of backing down gracefully. That is, they get to drop the charges without having to admit that it was wrong to press the charges in the first place.
Overall, not a bad out come. But, it does leave it as an open question whether or not the school district will every try something like this again.
Sorry, the yahoo links I gave above are erroneous.
Here's the corrected version of the first one, "lawyer" that results in 125,000,000 many estimated hits. The second one, "lawyer lawyer" results in 124,000,000 many estimated hits.
-
lawyer - results 29,300,000
-
lawyer lawyer - results 29,300,000
-
lawyer lawyer lawyer - results 62,000,000
-
lawyer lawyer lawyer lawyer - results 78,600,000
This trend appears to continue, as seen in that repeating the "lawyer" keyword 10 times results in Google estimating that there are 389,000,000 hits in it's index.On yahoo, this sort of thing doesn't seem to happen as much, but it still does happen. For example, searching for "laywer" returns 124,000,000 results, and searching for "lawyer lawyer" or "lawyer lawyer" returns 125,000,000 results.
So, it probably doesn't really make seen to judge the relative size of either index based on the estimated number of hits for any given set of keywords in their index. Right now, Google's numbers look a little more suspect since they seem to variety so greatly just based on the repetition of a keyword. However, the stability of Yahoo's numbers don't necessarily mean that they're correct either.
I don't know if anybody has said it before but with all that it's empowered various companies to do the DMCA is clearly the:
worst...technology-law...ever....
Out of interest, what university did you attend?
What happened at your school seems like even bigger news that what's described in the article. It also seems to go against the quote from the Electronic Frontier Foundation guy in the article who said "As long as people have the choice (of printed books), it's not such a dangerous move".