The first page of the article is quite coherent. Then he pulls out a few random good things from the proprietary world and then makes a completely unrelated conclusion.
Secondly his examples of the proprietary world aren't very proprietary. The iPhone (which I think is a gimmick, but that is besides the point) is based on BSD. Google is an open-source poster child. Google would not have been possible without the radical commodisation made possible by Linux-Apache-MySQL.
When all your arguments are based on arbitrary arguments, you can easily switch them around:
"There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases."
Can become:
"There is only one Linux kernel, but there are hundreds of proprietary embedded systems". "There is only one WWW, but there are hundreds of failed proprietary network protocols."
I think we probably do agree. Taking capitalism for granted is what allows a neo-nobility to control us. I agree with your point entirely.
As an example, it is conceivable that the citizens of the US could have put the RIAA out of business a long time ago. But people still insist on giving them money (for the mediocre crap they produce, no less), which the RIAA then uses to continue to tightening the noose around copyright law and fair use.
I think the RIAA is a bit like AIDS. If you have never heard of AIDS, then you are exposed to it by default. However, when you know that AIDS exist, if you have unprotected sex then you are consciously choosing to expose yourself to the risk of it, well at least you have the choice.
If you have never heard of the RIAA then you are part of the system, however as soon as you know how the system works then every time you buy music, you are actually consciously choosing to expose yourself to the RIAA or not.
So the RIAA have a problem, when everyone knows they exist then they are finished. Bands and labels will leave the RIAA if it costs them sales. And the RIAA only makes sense if it controls the vast majority of artists.
"Sounds like communism except the entities being equalized are companies instead of people. I don't see a real way anyone could equalize access to property, capital or labour."
Well everything can sound like everything thing else if you abstract out far enough, but having laws to enforce the free market does not make one a communist.
If you sell computers, and your operating system supplier charges you $100 per box, but charges a similar company $50 a box, then they are colluding against you.
Likewise in England, there is a certain supermarket that just ignores the planning laws and then lobbies/threatens local councils after it has illegally built the buildings for respective permission. That company has unfair access to land.
Ah, but in the world wars, the bill was footed by the taxpayers. Only the influx from government money was able to push forward the necessary research under these conditions.
I think it is important to separate the supply side from the demand side. Ditching all the patents and agreements and so on was a supply-side change. The government needing lots of planes for the war is on the demand side.
So yes the money is part of it, but I think the longer lasting effect was on liberating the supply, it did need the war to really start plane production, but when the wars finished, they carried on building the planes and the commercial air industry was born.
Far more people are employed by the airlines, airports and so on, than the plane manufacturers; then you have to mention all the jobs created through international trade that results from the ability to jump on a plane in London and arrive in wherever-the-hell you want.
So the net-benefit to society in having a thriving airline industry, is far more than the net-loss faced by the people who owned the invalidated patents to the airline technology. While airplanes only got more advanced, not less advanced.
This external net-benefit also, I would argue, now applies to computing technology. The potential net benefits of computing technology to wider society and the wider economy, out weigh any loss faced by certain technology companies if we liberate the supply.
If you change the rules to treat all products as commodities, then only commodities will get built.
Is that true? Airplanes are a lot more advanced now than before the second world war, so the situation is a lot more complicated than the "patents-foster-innovation" doctrine would suggest.
If you abandon patents, companies will try to protect their knowledge keeping more trade secrets.
I don't think that is necessarily true for a lot of modern technology, it hasn't been true for a long time. How many computer technologies can you replicate from the patents? Patents are increasingly obfuscated legal boilderplate that do not really help you in engineering. Even if they could, by the time the patent expires the knowledge you gain is obsolete anyhow.
Microsoft has many many patents, but the patents did not help Samba replicate CIFS and so on. Samba had to go to the EU to force Microsoft to produce protocol documentation.
So patents don't help when they are secrets. However, for many computer technologies, there are no secrets. When you have the thing you know how it works.
research and advanced development will simply stall, because there would be no way to extract a decent return on investment from such activities
That is the rhetoric, but again on a practical level, that is not really how R&D works in the 2007 technology industries. In countries or industries where there are no patents, people still innovate.
One of the key aspects of freedom of speech is the freedom to shut the fuck up and not tell you what I don't want to.
Well in America you have the right to remain silent. In Britain you don't:
You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.
Microsoft did not have the right to keep it's networking protocols secret.
Note how already today the companies that are the real innovators are often not the ones who are commercially most successful and leading their market.
I agree 100%. However, I would say that in some high-technology area, patents and so on are not really helping but making things worse.
The problem in technology is that you hundreds of ideas to make a high-tech product, and so large companies like Microsoft or IBM cross-licence, canceling each other's patents out. So they can replicate all they want. Microsoft or IBM have huge piles of patent lawyers, so every that moves is pat
And when it comes to economics, I'm willing to bet most voters believe things that are the absolute opposite of what experts believe. I think many of the barriers we have in our markets are there exactly because voters want them to be.
I agree. But what are these symptoms of? They are symptoms of people believing what the advertising, the lobbyists, and the spin-doctors want them to believe. Yes the majority of people are programmable by the elite.
If power is unequally distributed, then the minority can make the majority believe that honey is manure and manure is honey. People can be made to believe what is best for others and worse for them, is what is right and best.
However, this programming does require a lot of control. It also requires the majority to not understand about how the control works. One of my favourite parts of the film Gandhi is the following:
Brigadier: You don't think we're just going to walk out of India! Gandhi: Yes. In the end, you will walk out. Because 100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians, if those Indians refuse to cooperate.
> Isn't the point of a free market that they are free to do anything they want?
No it is not. Being free does not mean you can remove the freedoms of others. Having free speech does not mean you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theatre if there is no fire. Freedom of speech also requires some enforcement to keep it free, speech is not free if you get sacked or killed for speaking,
So what do we mean by 'free'? Well markets are free when the prices, quantity and quality (i.e. features) of products are determined by customer demand alone. This means that anyone must be able to set up and compete in the market, without barriers to entry or unequal access to suppliers, property, capital or labour.
If one company can coerce competitors, suppliers or consumers then it is not a free market. Therefore some anti-trust regulation is required to keep markets free. Also government purchasing needs to reflect competition. So for example, if the government buys only Microsoft software then that creates a network effect leading to a non-free market.
Markets start free, they just become non-free through layers of government intervention and large firms colluding. Certain agricultural products are more or less free markets, as well as light bulbs, screws, etc.
The resistances in the system are not physical properties of nature but man made structures. The problems are never that the speed of light is too slow or gravity is too strong. The problem is that those who think they are against government intervention, often are the first to argue for patents, trademarks, trade barriers, special protections, and so on.
Free markets are the optimal solution for the majority of the population, both as consumers and employees. Cartels only benefit the minority.
If governments became truly accountable to voters, such that the voters could clearly get actual representatives, rather than a choice of two identical people who will ignore the voters for the next four-five years, then I don't see why the interference cannot be removed in most industries if the will was there.
I think the problem is not too much capitalism, it is too little. Adam Smith's free markets have been replaced by an international neo-conservative monarchy and nobility.
Among certain industries, free markets have been replaced by cartels. These cartels then send out waves of lobbyists and campaign contributions to get governments to further weight the system against the consumer.
If you look at how the airplane developed, the market was hampered by cartels, patents and so on. However, in the two world wars, the war effort was considered more important than entrenched interests within the early aviation industry. All these cartels and patents were swept aside in favour of truly free markers, and they could finally build decent planes, and build them in quantity.
Society is slowly but surely going to realise that computers are more important for the development of the economy and society as a whole than for the narrow interests of the technology industry, and then radically free markets will be introduced once again.
Look at the Microsoft vs EU decision and the OLPC project, both of these in their different ways are interesting early signs.
We might get getting a dead-cat bounce, but it has become so cheap that even a relatively small trade can affect the value. The volume moving through is pretty high, if the volume stays high for several days then there will be the naked shorts.
As I post this, SCOXQ.PK is selling for 10 cents per share
Yeah it is literally going down before our eyes as the computer programs of institutional investors automatically ditch the non-listed shares. I wonder if there are a load of Linux fans who shorted this thing at $15 and made thousands? (I wish I had!)
I reckon there are quite a lot of naked shorts out there that now have to now unravel so the price might bob up and down for a few days, but I am not sure that pink sheets can go on the Threshold Security List? Anyone know that?
Yeah but did you see all the unpaid bills at restaurants, entertainment companies and such like. The employees seemed to have a hell of a time on the way down. Ran the company into the ground yes, but it seems Darl can throw a pretty good party...
And monopoly doesn't mean what you think it does. It literally means exclusive control of a market. I know it's cool to be revisionist and claim it means something else, but look it up.
My first degree was in Economics and I have a big pile of dusty textbooks, I don't need to look it up, but you do - in a real publication. Or look at any government's competition authority, you will see the normal threshold is 25% for them to pay an interest. It is not revisionist, it is the classical definition.
The definition of a monopoly is not having 100% of the market. It is having enough (e.g. 25%) to distort the market and unfairly control your supplies or customers, e.g. to make prices rather than to take them, to dictate your own proprietary standards rather than open standards and so on.
Interesting in the PDF, the first shows Google differently than Yahoo. Google is put together as if it is some outrageous monopoly, but yahoo is put at both ends.
I think Tkinter still has a lot of advantages at this point over GTK. It has plenty of life left in it. At least until someone writes an equally high-level Python interface to a different graphical toolkit and gets it into the standard library.
If you have a Python application and want to throw a quick GUI onto it, Tkinter is a lot easier. It is also very easy to deploy since it is in the Python standard library. You can write a custom app on your Linux workstation and then the next day put it on a customer's Windows desktop.
Relative to most Python libraries, PyGTK is rather low level, the Python bindings to TK are a lot more Pythonic. For 80% of people, TK is far more useful for adding a quick and dirty GUI onto an application.
Even for someone such as me who uses GNOME-based systems and couldn't care less about how ugly it looks on Windows, GTK is far more powerful and better looking than Tkinter, yes. However, you can't just dip in with Python knowledge and get going, you have to learn rather a lot of low level details about how GTK works. You are far more programming to an implementation rather than to an interface.
So another approach is the WX toolkit. However, I have been looking at a library called Kiwi ( http://www.async.com.br/projects/kiwi/ ) which attempts to provide a more abstracted Python interface to PyGTK. It is still in some ways lower level than Tkinter though.
So I don't see Python changing its default graphical toolkit from TK anytime soon.
P.S. Slashdot does not allow TK >= GTK as the title, perhaps they should re-write the site in Python?
IANAL, and I have no idea what the domain rules are with.com, what arbitration and so on you have to jump through first, but if it gets to court then it will help to go get a trademark, even if your business looks even close to real then it will look better than a farmed domain.
Media codecs in small devices often use hardware acceleration to save on power, and the chip Nokia put in it does not support that. However, comment 48 on that bug hits it on the head really.
Also, I think Nokia still haven't got the plot entirely if the argument against ogg is because Nokia's policy is to always use MPEG. Perhaps "the customer is always right" does not translate to Finnish very well.
Ok after looking at the website, it is probably both. He can't really speak English and he is a nut. However, Nokia is a really big company with lots of divisions, so I would not take it too too seriously
Slashdot Mirror
Some guy, who has written a few academic papers but has produced what exactly?, thinks that Stallman and Torvalds' world famous software is boring.
That is like me (skinny web developer) saying that I think Tiger Woods is a boring golfer or David Beckham should be more creative on the pitch.
Where is this creative output from computer science that is better? Writing a paper is useful but it is not engineering. Where is the code?
Exactly.
The first page of the article is quite coherent. Then he pulls out a few random good things from the proprietary world and then makes a completely unrelated conclusion.
Secondly his examples of the proprietary world aren't very proprietary. The iPhone (which I think is a gimmick, but that is besides the point) is based on BSD. Google is an open-source poster child. Google would not have been possible without the radical commodisation made possible by Linux-Apache-MySQL.
When all your arguments are based on arbitrary arguments, you can easily switch them around:
"There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases."
Can become:
"There is only one Linux kernel, but there are hundreds of proprietary embedded systems".
"There is only one WWW, but there are hundreds of failed proprietary network protocols."
I'm not sure I agree.
I think we probably do agree. Taking capitalism for granted is what allows a neo-nobility to control us. I agree with your point entirely.
As an example, it is conceivable that the citizens of the US could have put the RIAA out of business a long time ago. But people still insist on giving them money (for the mediocre crap they produce, no less), which the RIAA then uses to continue to tightening the noose around copyright law and fair use.
I think the RIAA is a bit like AIDS. If you have never heard of AIDS, then you are exposed to it by default. However, when you know that AIDS exist, if you have unprotected sex then you are consciously choosing to expose yourself to the risk of it, well at least you have the choice.
If you have never heard of the RIAA then you are part of the system, however as soon as you know how the system works then every time you buy music, you are actually consciously choosing to expose yourself to the RIAA or not.
So the RIAA have a problem, when everyone knows they exist then they are finished. Bands and labels will leave the RIAA if it costs them sales. And the RIAA only makes sense if it controls the vast majority of artists.
"Sounds like communism except the entities being equalized are companies instead of people. I don't see a real way anyone could equalize access to property, capital or labour."
Well everything can sound like everything thing else if you abstract out far enough, but having laws to enforce the free market does not make one a communist.
If you sell computers, and your operating system supplier charges you $100 per box, but charges a similar company $50 a box, then they are colluding against you.
Likewise in England, there is a certain supermarket that just ignores the planning laws and then lobbies/threatens local councils after it has illegally built the buildings for respective permission. That company has unfair access to land.
> It is a bare necessity for raising investment capital.
Again, that is just a symptom of the current system. Which can only measure innovation by counting patents.
Ah, but in the world wars, the bill was footed by the taxpayers. Only the influx from government money was able to push forward the necessary research under these conditions.
I think it is important to separate the supply side from the demand side. Ditching all the patents and agreements and so on was a supply-side change. The government needing lots of planes for the war is on the demand side.
So yes the money is part of it, but I think the longer lasting effect was on liberating the supply, it did need the war to really start plane production, but when the wars finished, they carried on building the planes and the commercial air industry was born.
Far more people are employed by the airlines, airports and so on, than the plane manufacturers; then you have to mention all the jobs created through international trade that results from the ability to jump on a plane in London and arrive in wherever-the-hell you want.
So the net-benefit to society in having a thriving airline industry, is far more than the net-loss faced by the people who owned the invalidated patents to the airline technology. While airplanes only got more advanced, not less advanced.
This external net-benefit also, I would argue, now applies to computing technology. The potential net benefits of computing technology to wider society and the wider economy, out weigh any loss faced by certain technology companies if we liberate the supply.
If you change the rules to treat all products as commodities, then only commodities will get built.
Is that true? Airplanes are a lot more advanced now than before the second world war, so the situation is a lot more complicated than the "patents-foster-innovation" doctrine would suggest.
If you abandon patents, companies will try to protect their knowledge keeping more trade secrets.
I don't think that is necessarily true for a lot of modern technology, it hasn't been true for a long time. How many computer technologies can you replicate from the patents? Patents are increasingly obfuscated legal boilderplate that do not really help you in engineering. Even if they could, by the time the patent expires the knowledge you gain is obsolete anyhow.
Microsoft has many many patents, but the patents did not help Samba replicate CIFS and so on. Samba had to go to the EU to force Microsoft to produce protocol documentation.
So patents don't help when they are secrets. However, for many computer technologies, there are no secrets. When you have the thing you know how it works.
research and advanced development will simply stall, because there would be no way to extract a decent return on investment from such activities
That is the rhetoric, but again on a practical level, that is not really how R&D works in the 2007 technology industries. In countries or industries where there are no patents, people still innovate.
One of the key aspects of freedom of speech is the freedom to shut the fuck up and not tell you what I don't want to.
Well in America you have the right to remain silent. In Britain you don't:
You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.
Microsoft did not have the right to keep it's networking protocols secret.
Note how already today the companies that are the real innovators are often not the ones who are commercially most successful and leading their market.
I agree 100%. However, I would say that in some high-technology area, patents and so on are not really helping but making things worse.
The problem in technology is that you hundreds of ideas to make a high-tech product, and so large companies like Microsoft or IBM cross-licence, canceling each other's patents out. So they can replicate all they want. Microsoft or IBM have huge piles of patent lawyers, so every that moves is pat
And when it comes to economics, I'm willing to bet most voters believe things that are the absolute opposite of what experts believe. I think many of the barriers we have in our markets are there exactly because voters want them to be.
I agree. But what are these symptoms of? They are symptoms of people believing what the advertising, the lobbyists, and the spin-doctors want them to believe. Yes the majority of people are programmable by the elite.
If power is unequally distributed, then the minority can make the majority believe that honey is manure and manure is honey. People can be made to believe what is best for others and worse for them, is what is right and best.
However, this programming does require a lot of control. It also requires the majority to not understand about how the control works. One of my favourite parts of the film Gandhi is the following:
Brigadier: You don't think we're just going to walk out of India!
Gandhi: Yes. In the end, you will walk out. Because 100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians, if those Indians refuse to cooperate.
> Isn't the point of a free market that they are free to do anything they want?
No it is not. Being free does not mean you can remove the freedoms of others. Having free speech does not mean you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theatre if there is no fire. Freedom of speech also requires some enforcement to keep it free, speech is not free if you get sacked or killed for speaking,
So what do we mean by 'free'? Well markets are free when the prices, quantity and quality (i.e. features) of products are determined by customer demand alone. This means that anyone must be able to set up and compete in the market, without barriers to entry or unequal access to suppliers, property, capital or labour.
If one company can coerce competitors, suppliers or consumers then it is not a free market. Therefore some anti-trust regulation is required to keep markets free. Also government purchasing needs to reflect competition. So for example, if the government buys only Microsoft software then that creates a network effect leading to a non-free market.
Markets start free, they just become non-free through layers of government intervention and large firms colluding. Certain agricultural products are more or less free markets, as well as light bulbs, screws, etc.
The resistances in the system are not physical properties of nature but man made structures. The problems are never that the speed of light is too slow or gravity is too strong. The problem is that those who think they are against government intervention, often are the first to argue for patents, trademarks, trade barriers, special protections, and so on.
Free markets are the optimal solution for the majority of the population, both as consumers and employees. Cartels only benefit the minority.
If governments became truly accountable to voters, such that the voters could clearly get actual representatives, rather than a choice of two identical people who will ignore the voters for the next four-five years, then I don't see why the interference cannot be removed in most industries if the will was there.
BTW, the last post is a reply to the post above it, I have no idea how it relates to graphics cards.
I think the problem is not too much capitalism, it is too little. Adam Smith's free markets have been replaced by an international neo-conservative monarchy and nobility.
Among certain industries, free markets have been replaced by cartels. These cartels then send out waves of lobbyists and campaign contributions to get governments to further weight the system against the consumer.
If you look at how the airplane developed, the market was hampered by cartels, patents and so on. However, in the two world wars, the war effort was considered more important than entrenched interests within the early aviation industry. All these cartels and patents were swept aside in favour of truly free markers, and they could finally build decent planes, and build them in quantity.
Society is slowly but surely going to realise that computers are more important for the development of the economy and society as a whole than for the narrow interests of the technology industry, and then radically free markets will be introduced once again.
Look at the Microsoft vs EU decision and the OLPC project, both of these in their different ways are interesting early signs.
We might get getting a dead-cat bounce, but it has become so cheap that even a relatively small trade can affect the value. The volume moving through is pretty high, if the volume stays high for several days then there will be the naked shorts.
As I post this, SCOXQ.PK is selling for 10 cents per share
Yeah it is literally going down before our eyes as the computer programs of institutional investors automatically ditch the non-listed shares. I wonder if there are a load of Linux fans who shorted this thing at $15 and made thousands? (I wish I had!)
I reckon there are quite a lot of naked shorts out there that now have to now unravel so the price might bob up and down for a few days, but I am not sure that pink sheets can go on the Threshold Security List? Anyone know that?
Yeah but did you see all the unpaid bills at restaurants, entertainment companies and such like. The employees seemed to have a hell of a time on the way down. Ran the company into the ground yes, but it seems Darl can throw a pretty good party...
And monopoly doesn't mean what you think it does. It literally means exclusive control of a market. I know it's cool to be revisionist and claim it means something else, but look it up.
My first degree was in Economics and I have a big pile of dusty textbooks, I don't need to look it up, but you do - in a real publication. Or look at any government's competition authority, you will see the normal threshold is 25% for them to pay an interest. It is not revisionist, it is the classical definition.
The definition of a monopoly is not having 100% of the market. It is having enough (e.g. 25%) to distort the market and unfairly control your supplies or customers, e.g. to make prices rather than to take them, to dictate your own proprietary standards rather than open standards and so on.
We'll they do seem to be wearing a girdle.
Interesting in the PDF, the first shows Google differently than Yahoo. Google is put together as if it is some outrageous monopoly, but yahoo is put at both ends.
Yes, okay Plain Text formatting.
Are you talking about this bug 1851526?
I think Tkinter still has a lot of advantages at this point over GTK. It has plenty of life left in it. At least until someone writes an equally high-level Python interface to a different graphical toolkit and gets it into the standard library.
If you have a Python application and want to throw a quick GUI onto it, Tkinter is a lot easier. It is also very easy to deploy since it is in the Python standard library. You can write a custom app on your Linux workstation and then the next day put it on a customer's Windows desktop.
Relative to most Python libraries, PyGTK is rather low level, the Python bindings to TK are a lot more Pythonic. For 80% of people, TK is far more useful for adding a quick and dirty GUI onto an application.
Even for someone such as me who uses GNOME-based systems and couldn't care less about how ugly it looks on Windows, GTK is far more powerful and better looking than Tkinter, yes. However, you can't just dip in with Python knowledge and get going, you have to learn rather a lot of low level details about how GTK works. You are far more programming to an implementation rather than to an interface.
So another approach is the WX toolkit. However, I have been looking at a library called Kiwi (
http://www.async.com.br/projects/kiwi/ ) which attempts to provide a more abstracted Python interface to PyGTK. It is still in some ways lower level than Tkinter though.
So I don't see Python changing its default graphical toolkit from TK anytime soon.
P.S. Slashdot does not allow TK >= GTK as the title, perhaps they should re-write the site in Python?
IANAL, and I have no idea what the domain rules are with .com, what arbitration and so on you have to jump through first, but if it gets to court then it will help to go get a trademark, even if your business looks even close to real then it will look better than a farmed domain.
Good point, well made.
Media codecs in small devices often use hardware acceleration to save on power, and the chip Nokia put in it does not support that. However, comment 48 on that bug hits it on the head really.
Also, I think Nokia still haven't got the plot entirely if the argument against ogg is because Nokia's policy is to always use MPEG. Perhaps "the customer is always right" does not translate to Finnish very well.
Ok after looking at the website, it is probably both. He can't really speak English and he is a nut. However, Nokia is a really big company with lots of divisions, so I would not take it too too seriously