If nothing else, make it so you can register all current TLDs at once, easily, at a discounted rate.
That was what led to the *current* problem.
There *was* no problem when.org,.com, etc were being correctly used. Verisign and a group of similar assholes figured out that it was profitable to provide a "click here to rent all other available domains with the same name in a different TLD button", even though doing so directly encouraged people to violate the DNS scheme.
Of the new TLDs, the only two that I've seen in significant actual use are.info and.name. Both of those suffer from severe problems..name (obviously) has name collisions. There are many people who might want want bobsmith.name, and there is not a great way to resolve this..info might be useful, except for the fact that they are aimed at people who want to find information about a particular thing -- and Google and similar systems are almost always a better solution to "finding information about a particular thing". Future systems may improve on Google, but I don't think that they will get worse.
DNS has two useful attributes. First, reputation. I trust that Bank of America will not let someone *else* control bankofamerica.com with a similar-looking site for very long (though there's always *some* similar-looking domain, so this is of limited use -- but since certificates for SSL are granted these companies based on domain name, it's all I really have to go on, unless I actually read certificate info for every site I go to). Adding more TLDs does not make this more useful -- it just means that some people can maybe slip into bankofamerica.biz. Second, memorability. Let's say that you *double* the number of TLDs out there. That's a lot. You've just added a single bit of information to a domain name. That's a tiny fraction of a single additional letter. Thus, more TLDs doesn't help memorability much.
Now, the registrars have absolutely zero incentive to return things to sanity. They'd *love* to see people buying every entry out there. If they could sell the foobar TLD, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Why not? It's free money for them.
I'd love to be able to type in google and have it actaully go to google instead of automatically go to the first google search result for "google". Confusing example, of course, but I think you should be able to get the general idea.
Why? Google does a good job of this -- and as a matter of fact, it *does* give you Google.com.
It's not as if you need to use Google to do this -- any other system that allows similar searching would work as well, but Firefox uses Google because it's currently the best available system.
Innovative work expressed in software (a virtual machine) should have the same protection as any innovative work expressed in mechanical form (a physical machine). It is the non-obvious innovative work part that the patent office seems to not understand when it comes to software as well as they do when it comes to physical machines.
Not necessarily. The costs are different.
Patents are designed to deal with the realities of physical goods.
It is expensive to produce many plows. It takes a while to produce a factory to make plows. Plows, like most physical products, are pretty simple. So, basically, if I decide that I want to make a better plow in a world without patents, the existing dominant plow manufacturer can easily grab my idea (it's easy to reverse-engineer) and start competing with me long before I've ramped up my production. Also, it takes a lot of capital to compete with them -- someone has to be willing to throw money into establishing a factory. There are only a few improvements that can be easily made to a plow.
This is *not* the case with software production. The lifetime of a copy of software is usually only a few years. Even long-lived software packages, which may survive for twenty or more years, are seriously evolving over that time. Their success does not depend on a single idea, but on continued development. The complexity of software is very high, and thus almost everything can be seen as "patentable" -- software developers are must *constantly* come up with new ideas in the course of writing software.
In software, the person who comes up with an idea can probably write a prototype himself, and it's not unreasonable for many ideas for him to even produce a final product. The cost of distribution is extremely low -- there are plenty of one-man software outfits. This means that you need only sell the package for a short period of time to recoup your R&D investment. Furthermore, the time to reverse-engineer software is lengthy. With a plow, it may take no more than a ten-second glance to see how a new mechanism works. With software, it may take a long time of digging through diassembly to figure out the details of how, say, the Quake IV graphics engine works. Thus, the need to create an artificial monopoly doesn't necessarily exist -- in software, the problem that patents solve is at least partially already solved.
In addition, the very low cost of software distribution enables the concept of free product. Someone can create something without direct monentary compensation. This product will meet the needs of many people -- yet they do not require money to do this. This concept cannot exist in the world of plows, because distribution of plows, the per-unit cost of making each new plow, is significant. A good deal of excellent software was created by open-source volunteers. Patents, which a structure that embraces the established organizations that can supply money to lawyers to file applications and lawsuits, hurt open source a great deal -- far more than they affect closed source.
I'm not trying to make a positive argument that there is no need for software patents here -- I'm just saying that I can easily see how someone could make such an argument. I also don't think that the assumption that patents are equally needed in software is valid.
Finally, it is *really* hard to review patents well. Currently, there is *significant* benefit to making a patent obscure and hard-to-understand. Short of drastic changes, like passing something allowing the USPTO to throw out patents because they are "unclear", there is no incentive for filers to make life reasonable for patent examiners.
Some of the most new and innovative ideas I've seen in software (for example, in the peer-to-peer world) exist without any kind of patent encouragement whatsoever. Software patents would only harm development in this area.
Finally, I just really haven't seen any convincing examples where I feel that patents were really necessa
They're never going to be anything other than activists.
Eliminating software patents -- okay, they might get some votes there, from at least a limited set of people.
Copyright strength reduction *might* get some people onboard, though I've found that outside the software world, people tend to not understand the negative implications of copyright that lasts over a century. I had real problems convincing someone that if they create a character in a book or something, they should not have a lifetime exclusive monopoly over content containing that character.
Copyright elimination is not going to pass. Unless they have a serious competing plan for funding content creation, they are not going to get enough mainstream people onboard. It would cause a massive amount of business disruption.
It *does* show that there is a sizeable group of people that is pissed off at at least some of the issues, though. I've seen a number of legislators pushing back against the RIAA (mostly after the press ran a couple national stories about that nine-year-old girl being sued for tens of thousands of dollars, though, so I'm not sure how much of this is just due to short-term emotion).
will hold up legally, and how much of it is just hot air and rants?
I'm not really thrilled with this part:
Regardless of any other provision of this license, no permission is given to distribute covered works that illegally invade users' privacy, nor for modes of distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of the legal rights granted by this License.
I don't like spyware, but I think that the GPL is a really, really bad place to try to "fix" spyware. And illegally under what laws? Can I now not distribute my software in Podunk, North Dakota because it's illegal, under Podunk city law, to do Tivo-style recommendations based on phone-home viewing data? It seems like it's pretty broad, and doesn't seem within the scope of promoting Free Software.
I wouldn't really like to see restrictions on spammers using GPL software either -- not because I like spammers much, but because I don't think that the GPL should be saddled with anything non-crucial.
One question for OSS projects currently using GPL, will be, should they relicense?
And if so, how will people know?
Freshmeat and RPMs and so forth only contain the text "GPL", not "GPLv2" or "GPLv3". Or, in the case of Linux, "GPLv2 only". (Actually, I lied -- apparently the Fedora RPMs have "GPLv2" for Linux, which is outright wrong -- GPLv2 is different from "GPLv2 only".)
There are probably in the tens of thousands of projects out there under the GPL. Their maintainers all have to consider the rammifications of the licence and figure out whether to move or not (and if they don't, have to avoid merging code from any projects that *have* relicensed). That's not a small amount of work -- it's an awful lot of time of that limited volunteer time being eaten up. And it's more not-fun-legal-crap that people have to deal with instead of making-cool-stuff.
I hope that the changes in the GPLv3 are *really* worthwhile, because the FSF is imposing a severe cost on the open source world by releasing a modification.
I really wish that software development courses (and CS courses, because to be honest, more people with a CS major wind up developing software than writing papers) included a legal component. One course should be enough to at least cover the crucial basics.
I know some of you new Eclipse/Visual Studio DOT NET guys love 30000 character lines, and don't get me started on perl, but for the projects I work on having long lines is a drawback.
I wish that programming languages didn't allow freedom to place whitespace (as C, perl, and so forth do). Python is partway there.
The reason why is the same reason that HTML (at least as originally envisioned) was set up to dissociate the storage format from the display formatting. I can stick newlines wherever I want when writing HTML, but it will be displayed however the user wants. If he wants emphasized text to appear in orange, or be set off by *stars*, or to appear in an italic face, he can do so. Dissociating the storage and viewing format provides this benefit.
The problem is that people take advantage of the flexibility of the storage format of programming languages like C to insert display formatting -- a few spaces here and there to line things up -- and there is no clean way to separate the storage format and the display format. A better approach would be to have a fixed storage format (preventing display formatting from being encoded with the file). Each user could make the file display however they want while working with it, and their additions would be free of any of their own display preferences.
With the existing schemes, you can always make a file display however you want -- ram it through GNU indent -- but after you save the file, you've lost the original embedded display formatting information.
If all files used single spaces as separators between all tokens or something along those lines, then an editor could display the file however it wanted.
Of course, it would make editing the language with a regular text editor less good, which is probably why this hasn't really caught on (I think that languages that aren't easily editable in standard text editors are slowly approaching -- I listened to a lecture on aspect-oriented programming, and I think that the largest drawback is that working with the thing in a standard text editor kind of sucks).
The fact that a bunch of sickos use this technology to be perverted does not mean that the rest of us should not use it.
And here is the problem.
There is one major reason for anonymity. It prevents the tyranny of the majority.
Without anonymity, it is possible for existing memes to suppress other memes before they have time to grow. The argument for anonymity is that these ideas may be worthwhile, but can be killed before having a chance to spread.
The cost to you, of course, is that even those memes that you carry that are *overwhelmingly* dominant in the general population cannot be outright suppressed by that general population. The typical American probably carries memes that oppose Nazi beliefs, oppose challenges to Christian values, oppose polygamy, and oppose pedophilia. All of those ideas, however, can grow in an anonymous environment, as long as they are convincing enough. Anonymity allows each person to make their own decisions about what memes they want to buy into, without society being able to simply suppress ideas.
Anonymity sounds good, but you have to consider that for this to necessarily be good, each person has to be rational and informed, which isn't the case -- the question is whether or not people approximate that closely enough.
There is one other problem it brings in. Government mostly exists to solve public good problems -- things like laws preventing people from littering. There are a number of public good problems associated with published information, such as how to fund the creation of that information. We currently have a concept of "intellectual property", where knowledge distribution is restricted, and knowledge creation gets funded by people who must pay for a copy of that knowledge. This is certainly not the only approach to solving the problem, but it has more-or-less worked for a number of decades. An anonymous environment allows redistribution of information, and puts a large hole in the concept of intellectual property.
If you want to have a practical arguments for widespread anonymity, you need to also answer some questions about how knowledge creation is going to be funded, and whether you are comfortable living without the suppression of challenges to mainstream memes. These are not unanswerable questions -- you can centrally fund the creation of knowledge, you can fund it with tips, you can fund it with grants. You can choose to simply accept never being able to completely quash ideas that you find distasteful. Anonymity has both helpful and harmful sides, and the two are inextricably linked.
Slashdot could simply disallow not-logged-in access from troublesome IPs. Still kind of a PITA for someone (since they have to log in each time if they've turned their machine into a Tor node), but it allows anonymous browsing.
Of course, it could be that those ad banners track your browsing and that advertisers would be less interested in just getting anonymous requests.
Dell's aim is to have the best supply chain and produce computers cheaper than anyone else, this means they don't really do any innovation its more of a Wallmart sort of play.
Keep in mind how Apple makes money. Apple is making money through a set of ad campaigns that have given their products a popular image, so they can currently demand high profit margins on their iPods. Apple's strength is in marketing -- they have Jobs running around in a black turtleneck, sell shiny products, and basically sell a self-image of creativity to consumers.
That's not likely to last forever. All it takes is one good competing ad campaign, and they've lost that. Also, iPods are consumer electronics devices. When one wears out, there's a clean "breaking point" where there's no cost to the customer is switching to a competing brand with more space for the cost. Apple's personal computer market is a lot more stable -- people put a lot of time into learning how to use their computers, they own hardware and software for their computers, and there's a lot of incentive to get a new Mac. That isn't the case for iPods -- I mean, Apple can make a lot of money on 'em in the short term, but they can also dry up quickly.
Finally, the iPods, even aside from the image issue, are luxury items. When people's budget is short, luxury items are the first thing to dry up.
Dell, on the other hand, is quite stable. I think that your Wal-Mart analogy is quite apt. Wal-Mart would be incredibly difficult for someone to unseat -- they sell to the value market, and they keep their costs low, and they've built up a great deal of infrastructure that someone else would have to beat. Dell is in a similar position. It's *hard* to provide competing products at a lower price point than Dell. Dell is providing a meat-and-potatoes service. Everyone needs PCs. If you need three PCs for new employees, you need three PCs for new employees, no ifs, ands, or buts. Dell doesn't sell the highest-end products out there, or even things that are all that exciting, but they do sell tools that inexpensively get the job done. Dell's been doing the "sell on value" thing for many, many years, and they're pretty good at it.
Now, that doesn't mean that Apple is going to flop, but it means that their revenues rely on a much riskier and more volatile source than Dell's do.
It is a system that assumes that less braking ability is okay, provided you are still able to steer.
I suspect that you are wrong, at least if you are just comparing ABS to locking your brakes.
Locking your brakes is not the fastest way to stop.
When you are skidding, the force stopping you is kinetic friction. When you are not skidding, the force stopping you is static friction. Static friction is greater than kinetic friction. ABS tries to skid minimally, keeping the majority of the braking force relying on static friction. This yields shorter stopping distances.
In theory, you can probably beat ABS, because ABS doesn't do a *perfect* job of maximizing static friction without entering kinetic friction. But it probably does a pretty fair job of it, so I wouldn't be betting on the guy without ABS.
ABS is less about stopping and more about being able to steer while under braking.
Mmm...you could tune ABS to do that, yes.
And I don't know what car manufacturers have it tuned to (whether it holds off the brakes enough to allow turning).
However, it is quite true that an ABS system can reduce braking distance. Static friction between two objects is greater than kinetic friction. ABS tries to keep you relying on static friction, which provides you with greater braking force.
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
They aren't doing this.
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange; or,
They don't seem to be doing this.
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer
to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is
allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you
received the program in object code or executable form with such
an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
They aren't noncommercial. Thus, they're violating the GPL.
Still, I often wonder why these cameras don't include a non-RAW lossless format like LZW-compressed TIFF as an intermediate option (my first digital camera, a 1.3 MP Olympus point and shoot, could take TIFF).
That I can answer. You need a larger RAM buffer to dump the image into as you send it to flash memory, as well as higher speed flash.
What happens when you take a bunch of average drivers, put them in a car with no high-tech systems like anti-lock brakes and traction control, and ask them to drive on a safety test track? 360-degree spins [CC], of course. And not only do today's drivers need ABS and traction control to keep their cars under control, it also turns out most drivers can't even name the high tech safety systems that are continually saving their butts.
In other news, a typical teenager can neither properly operate nor name the components in a horse and buggy.
It's a waste of time to train humans to manually perform tasks like complicated braking. The fact that screwing it up risks an (expensive) human life makes this even worse. Elimination of useless work is the main goal engineers have. I don't see this as a loss.
When I was a 2nd year student we weren't this sort of stuff, makes me wish I went to Stanford.
You really don't need to go to some high-ranked CS university to do cool projects. I hear a lot of people on Slashdot griping about how they couldn't go to MIT/CMU/Stanford/CalTech/whatever. Okay, maybe you get some good lectures and have some bright people handy to work with, but that's really a drop in the bucket compared to what you choose to do yourself. If you read about the things you're interested in, work on some projects, you *will* know far more than the people that went to Ivy League U and didn't do anything themselves -- just went to class and read enough content to get their grades. You have powerful, inexpensive computers easily available. You have free high-quality development software (if you don't have Valgrind and gcc on your computer, you're really missing out). You have an Internet's worth of excellentresourcesavailable, along with research papers on every neat thing you can think of free for the downloading. You don't need a professor or a boss to say "okay, write me a Foobar" to write a Foobar -- as a matter of fact, if you're writing a Foobar for yourself, it's probably going to be a better Foobar than if you're writing it because someone else is making you do so. Same goes for reading an algorithms book or a research paper.
Plus, if you don't want to tackle a whole game, choose something that you *do* like doing -- AI, graphics, sound engine, networking -- and pick a random existing open-source project and put your ideas into it. Then you have a nice end result that you can show off to people ("That game you're playing? Yeah, I'm one of the authors"), you have encouragement to keep going (because it isn't just a lone you -- you get feedback when you do something cool), and if you want a good practical excuse, you have a resume item that shows that not only do you have the ability to work with people to produce neat things -- but you've done so simply because you like making neat things. Also, it's *fun* to add a new feature to a game and then play using said feature with the rest of the dev team.
Remember that Woz never got his college degree (well, until a few years ago, when he decided to go back and get it). He built cool things because he liked making cool things, not because someone in a suit told him to make something cool. The same's true of an awful lot of techie folks out there -- school is a convenient tool, but it's much less important than going out and actively learning about things, and the fact that your uni has "State" in its name doesn't have a heck of a lot to do with what you learn. Sure, your professor will assign a bunch of books to read, but you can write that final paper without learning all that much, and certainly with big gaps in what you know. On the other hand, you can read all you want about just about anything I can think of on that Internet-connected computer in front of you.
Universities enforce a lower bound on your knowledge at graduation. They have nothing to do with setting a ceiling.
I'd say i'm fairly unimpressed by the lack of improvement of the games over the years. 2002 was a leap in the quality of games over previous years and the subsequent years have just been disappointing.
The reason *commercial* games have developed more sophisticated graphics engines isn't, I'd say, necessarily because of more powerful hardware or even new techniques being developed. Some of it is that budgets are larger. More budget == more man-hours to add features and effects.
I suspect that the largest factor in the quality of the graphics in these classes is not how powerful the computers or graphics cards are, but in how much time the students were able/willing to devote to the projects.
Incidently, one thing I decided from poking around with OGL is that one of the most annoying things about graphics programming is that you have a lot of invisible state sitting around on the 3d card that you can't inspect. ("Why is my screen *black* all of a sudden?") Maybe a debug OGL library that allows one to inspect what's going on or look for common errors would be helpful -- I'm not sure quite what a good fix would be.
I really enjoyed that class, Prof. Kuffner. Thanks.
Incidently, the wrapup for that class the year I took it was a blast. Basically, one demoed one's project in front of the class at the end. I still remember that one particularly presentation-savvy group, after demoing their game themselves, asked everyone in the room (which was a computer lab) to start up a binary that they'd precompiled and put on AFS in a public directory and started a deathmatch with all the audience at once. Very nifty.
Also, in the industry, you likely don't get the pleasure of being able to make Linux your target platform (if you want -- there were people that targetted other platforms as well).
No, we have a much simpler algorithm here, which has been going on for at least hundreds of years (Mark Twain apparently got suckered on multiple occasions).
1) Spew vaguely-sciency sounding claims. 2) Take in money from uninformed investors "whose money is needed to develop the process further". 3) Profit!
South Korea and Japan are also probably the most wealthy.
I think that a lot of copyright infringement derives more from the fact that the incentive to pirate something is an awful lot higher if the item costs, in terms of your buying power, two or three or four times as much.
Slashdot Mirror
If nothing else, make it so you can register all current TLDs at once, easily, at a discounted rate.
.org, .com, etc were being correctly used. Verisign and a group of similar assholes figured out that it was profitable to provide a "click here to rent all other available domains with the same name in a different TLD button", even though doing so directly encouraged people to violate the DNS scheme.
.info and .name. Both of those suffer from severe problems. .name (obviously) has name collisions. There are many people who might want want bobsmith.name, and there is not a great way to resolve this. .info might be useful, except for the fact that they are aimed at people who want to find information about a particular thing -- and Google and similar systems are almost always a better solution to "finding information about a particular thing". Future systems may improve on Google, but I don't think that they will get worse.
That was what led to the *current* problem.
There *was* no problem when
Of the new TLDs, the only two that I've seen in significant actual use are
DNS has two useful attributes. First, reputation. I trust that Bank of America will not let someone *else* control bankofamerica.com with a similar-looking site for very long (though there's always *some* similar-looking domain, so this is of limited use -- but since certificates for SSL are granted these companies based on domain name, it's all I really have to go on, unless I actually read certificate info for every site I go to). Adding more TLDs does not make this more useful -- it just means that some people can maybe slip into bankofamerica.biz. Second, memorability. Let's say that you *double* the number of TLDs out there. That's a lot. You've just added a single bit of information to a domain name. That's a tiny fraction of a single additional letter. Thus, more TLDs doesn't help memorability much.
Now, the registrars have absolutely zero incentive to return things to sanity. They'd *love* to see people buying every entry out there. If they could sell the foobar TLD, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Why not? It's free money for them.
I'd love to be able to type in google and have it actaully go to google instead of automatically go to the first google search result for "google". Confusing example, of course, but I think you should be able to get the general idea.
Why? Google does a good job of this -- and as a matter of fact, it *does* give you Google.com.
It's not as if you need to use Google to do this -- any other system that allows similar searching would work as well, but Firefox uses Google because it's currently the best available system.
Innovative work expressed in software (a virtual machine) should have the same protection as any innovative work expressed in mechanical form (a physical machine). It is the non-obvious innovative work part that the patent office seems to not understand when it comes to software as well as they do when it comes to physical machines.
Not necessarily. The costs are different.
Patents are designed to deal with the realities of physical goods.
It is expensive to produce many plows. It takes a while to produce a factory to make plows. Plows, like most physical products, are pretty simple. So, basically, if I decide that I want to make a better plow in a world without patents, the existing dominant plow manufacturer can easily grab my idea (it's easy to reverse-engineer) and start competing with me long before I've ramped up my production. Also, it takes a lot of capital to compete with them -- someone has to be willing to throw money into establishing a factory. There are only a few improvements that can be easily made to a plow.
This is *not* the case with software production. The lifetime of a copy of software is usually only a few years. Even long-lived software packages, which may survive for twenty or more years, are seriously evolving over that time. Their success does not depend on a single idea, but on continued development. The complexity of software is very high, and thus almost everything can be seen as "patentable" -- software developers are must *constantly* come up with new ideas in the course of writing software.
In software, the person who comes up with an idea can probably write a prototype himself, and it's not unreasonable for many ideas for him to even produce a final product. The cost of distribution is extremely low -- there are plenty of one-man software outfits. This means that you need only sell the package for a short period of time to recoup your R&D investment. Furthermore, the time to reverse-engineer software is lengthy. With a plow, it may take no more than a ten-second glance to see how a new mechanism works. With software, it may take a long time of digging through diassembly to figure out the details of how, say, the Quake IV graphics engine works. Thus, the need to create an artificial monopoly doesn't necessarily exist -- in software, the problem that patents solve is at least partially already solved.
In addition, the very low cost of software distribution enables the concept of free product. Someone can create something without direct monentary compensation. This product will meet the needs of many people -- yet they do not require money to do this. This concept cannot exist in the world of plows, because distribution of plows, the per-unit cost of making each new plow, is significant. A good deal of excellent software was created by open-source volunteers. Patents, which a structure that embraces the established organizations that can supply money to lawyers to file applications and lawsuits, hurt open source a great deal -- far more than they affect closed source.
I'm not trying to make a positive argument that there is no need for software patents here -- I'm just saying that I can easily see how someone could make such an argument. I also don't think that the assumption that patents are equally needed in software is valid.
Finally, it is *really* hard to review patents well. Currently, there is *significant* benefit to making a patent obscure and hard-to-understand. Short of drastic changes, like passing something allowing the USPTO to throw out patents because they are "unclear", there is no incentive for filers to make life reasonable for patent examiners.
Some of the most new and innovative ideas I've seen in software (for example, in the peer-to-peer world) exist without any kind of patent encouragement whatsoever. Software patents would only harm development in this area.
Finally, I just really haven't seen any convincing examples where I feel that patents were really necessa
They're never going to be anything other than activists.
Eliminating software patents -- okay, they might get some votes there, from at least a limited set of people.
Copyright strength reduction *might* get some people onboard, though I've found that outside the software world, people tend to not understand the negative implications of copyright that lasts over a century. I had real problems convincing someone that if they create a character in a book or something, they should not have a lifetime exclusive monopoly over content containing that character.
Copyright elimination is not going to pass. Unless they have a serious competing plan for funding content creation, they are not going to get enough mainstream people onboard. It would cause a massive amount of business disruption.
It *does* show that there is a sizeable group of people that is pissed off at at least some of the issues, though. I've seen a number of legislators pushing back against the RIAA (mostly after the press ran a couple national stories about that nine-year-old girl being sued for tens of thousands of dollars, though, so I'm not sure how much of this is just due to short-term emotion).
will hold up legally, and how much of it is just hot air and rants?
I'm not really thrilled with this part:
Regardless of any
other provision of this license, no permission is given to distribute
covered works that illegally invade users' privacy, nor for modes of
distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of
the legal rights granted by this License.
I don't like spyware, but I think that the GPL is a really, really bad place to try to "fix" spyware. And illegally under what laws? Can I now not distribute my software in Podunk, North Dakota because it's illegal, under Podunk city law, to do Tivo-style recommendations based on phone-home viewing data? It seems like it's pretty broad, and doesn't seem within the scope of promoting Free Software.
I wouldn't really like to see restrictions on spammers using GPL software either -- not because I like spammers much, but because I don't think that the GPL should be saddled with anything non-crucial.
One question for OSS projects currently using GPL, will be, should they relicense?
And if so, how will people know?
Freshmeat and RPMs and so forth only contain the text "GPL", not "GPLv2" or "GPLv3". Or, in the case of Linux, "GPLv2 only". (Actually, I lied -- apparently the Fedora RPMs have "GPLv2" for Linux, which is outright wrong -- GPLv2 is different from "GPLv2 only".)
There are probably in the tens of thousands of projects out there under the GPL. Their maintainers all have to consider the rammifications of the licence and figure out whether to move or not (and if they don't, have to avoid merging code from any projects that *have* relicensed). That's not a small amount of work -- it's an awful lot of time of that limited volunteer time being eaten up. And it's more not-fun-legal-crap that people have to deal with instead of making-cool-stuff.
I hope that the changes in the GPLv3 are *really* worthwhile, because the FSF is imposing a severe cost on the open source world by releasing a modification.
I really wish that software development courses (and CS courses, because to be honest, more people with a CS major wind up developing software than writing papers) included a legal component. One course should be enough to at least cover the crucial basics.
I know some of you new Eclipse/Visual Studio DOT NET guys love 30000
character lines, and don't get me started on perl, but for the projects
I work on having long lines is a drawback.
I wish that programming languages didn't allow freedom to place whitespace (as C, perl, and so forth do). Python is partway there.
The reason why is the same reason that HTML (at least as originally envisioned) was set up to dissociate the storage format from the display formatting. I can stick newlines wherever I want when writing HTML, but it will be displayed however the user wants. If he wants emphasized text to appear in orange, or be set off by *stars*, or to appear in an italic face, he can do so. Dissociating the storage and viewing format provides this benefit.
The problem is that people take advantage of the flexibility of the storage format of programming languages like C to insert display formatting -- a few spaces here and there to line things up -- and there is no clean way to separate the storage format and the display format. A better approach would be to have a fixed storage format (preventing display formatting from being encoded with the file). Each user could make the file display however they want while working with it, and their additions would be free of any of their own display preferences.
With the existing schemes, you can always make a file display however you want -- ram it through GNU indent -- but after you save the file, you've lost the original embedded display formatting information.
If all files used single spaces as separators between all tokens or something along those lines, then an editor could display the file however it wanted.
Of course, it would make editing the language with a regular text editor less good, which is probably why this hasn't really caught on (I think that languages that aren't easily editable in standard text editors are slowly approaching -- I listened to a lecture on aspect-oriented programming, and I think that the largest drawback is that working with the thing in a standard text editor kind of sucks).
Someone owns that copyright, and you can get it from them.
But I agree -- Linux is likely to remain GPLv2 for the foreseeable future.
The fact that a bunch of sickos use this technology to be perverted does not mean that the rest of us should not use it.
And here is the problem.
There is one major reason for anonymity. It prevents the tyranny of the majority.
Without anonymity, it is possible for existing memes to suppress other memes before they have time to grow. The argument for anonymity is that these ideas may be worthwhile, but can be killed before having a chance to spread.
The cost to you, of course, is that even those memes that you carry that are *overwhelmingly* dominant in the general population cannot be outright suppressed by that general population. The typical American probably carries memes that oppose Nazi beliefs, oppose challenges to Christian values, oppose polygamy, and oppose pedophilia. All of those ideas, however, can grow in an anonymous environment, as long as they are convincing enough. Anonymity allows each person to make their own decisions about what memes they want to buy into, without society being able to simply suppress ideas.
Anonymity sounds good, but you have to consider that for this to necessarily be good, each person has to be rational and informed, which isn't the case -- the question is whether or not people approximate that closely enough.
There is one other problem it brings in. Government mostly exists to solve public good problems -- things like laws preventing people from littering. There are a number of public good problems associated with published information, such as how to fund the creation of that information. We currently have a concept of "intellectual property", where knowledge distribution is restricted, and knowledge creation gets funded by people who must pay for a copy of that knowledge. This is certainly not the only approach to solving the problem, but it has more-or-less worked for a number of decades. An anonymous environment allows redistribution of information, and puts a large hole in the concept of intellectual property.
If you want to have a practical arguments for widespread anonymity, you need to also answer some questions about how knowledge creation is going to be funded, and whether you are comfortable living without the suppression of challenges to mainstream memes. These are not unanswerable questions -- you can centrally fund the creation of knowledge, you can fund it with tips, you can fund it with grants. You can choose to simply accept never being able to completely quash ideas that you find distasteful. Anonymity has both helpful and harmful sides, and the two are inextricably linked.
Good point.
Slashdot could simply disallow not-logged-in access from troublesome IPs. Still kind of a PITA for someone (since they have to log in each time if they've turned their machine into a Tor node), but it allows anonymous browsing.
Of course, it could be that those ad banners track your browsing and that advertisers would be less interested in just getting anonymous requests.
Dell's aim is to have the best supply chain and produce computers cheaper than anyone else, this means they don't really do any innovation its more of a Wallmart sort of play.
Keep in mind how Apple makes money. Apple is making money through a set of ad campaigns that have given their products a popular image, so they can currently demand high profit margins on their iPods. Apple's strength is in marketing -- they have Jobs running around in a black turtleneck, sell shiny products, and basically sell a self-image of creativity to consumers.
That's not likely to last forever. All it takes is one good competing ad campaign, and they've lost that. Also, iPods are consumer electronics devices. When one wears out, there's a clean "breaking point" where there's no cost to the customer is switching to a competing brand with more space for the cost. Apple's personal computer market is a lot more stable -- people put a lot of time into learning how to use their computers, they own hardware and software for their computers, and there's a lot of incentive to get a new Mac. That isn't the case for iPods -- I mean, Apple can make a lot of money on 'em in the short term, but they can also dry up quickly.
Finally, the iPods, even aside from the image issue, are luxury items. When people's budget is short, luxury items are the first thing to dry up.
Dell, on the other hand, is quite stable. I think that your Wal-Mart analogy is quite apt. Wal-Mart would be incredibly difficult for someone to unseat -- they sell to the value market, and they keep their costs low, and they've built up a great deal of infrastructure that someone else would have to beat. Dell is in a similar position. It's *hard* to provide competing products at a lower price point than Dell. Dell is providing a meat-and-potatoes service. Everyone needs PCs. If you need three PCs for new employees, you need three PCs for new employees, no ifs, ands, or buts. Dell doesn't sell the highest-end products out there, or even things that are all that exciting, but they do sell tools that inexpensively get the job done. Dell's been doing the "sell on value" thing for many, many years, and they're pretty good at it.
Now, that doesn't mean that Apple is going to flop, but it means that their revenues rely on a much riskier and more volatile source than Dell's do.
Yes, the infamous "video game researcher" is back at it again.
It is a system that assumes that less braking ability is okay, provided you are still able to steer.
I suspect that you are wrong, at least if you are just comparing ABS to locking your brakes.
Locking your brakes is not the fastest way to stop.
When you are skidding, the force stopping you is kinetic friction. When you are not skidding, the force stopping you is static friction. Static friction is greater than kinetic friction. ABS tries to skid minimally, keeping the majority of the braking force relying on static friction. This yields shorter stopping distances.
In theory, you can probably beat ABS, because ABS doesn't do a *perfect* job of maximizing static friction without entering kinetic friction. But it probably does a pretty fair job of it, so I wouldn't be betting on the guy without ABS.
ABS is less about stopping and more about being able to steer while under braking.
Mmm...you could tune ABS to do that, yes.
And I don't know what car manufacturers have it tuned to (whether it holds off the brakes enough to allow turning).
However, it is quite true that an ABS system can reduce braking distance. Static friction between two objects is greater than kinetic friction. ABS tries to keep you relying on static friction, which provides you with greater braking force.
Dunno about now, but parts of Wyoming used to have a 45mph nighttime limit on 2-lane roads, thanks to all the deer competing for pavement space.
I wonder if wolves or seatbelts would save more lives...
No, they still violate the GPL:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
They aren't doing this.
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange; or,
They don't seem to be doing this.
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer
to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is
allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you
received the program in object code or executable form with such
an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
They aren't noncommercial. Thus, they're violating the GPL.
Still, I often wonder why these cameras don't include a non-RAW lossless format like LZW-compressed TIFF as an intermediate option (my first digital camera, a 1.3 MP Olympus point and shoot, could take TIFF).
That I can answer. You need a larger RAM buffer to dump the image into as you send it to flash memory, as well as higher speed flash.
What happens when you take a bunch of average drivers, put them in a car with no high-tech systems like anti-lock brakes and traction control, and ask them to drive on a safety test track? 360-degree spins [CC], of course. And not only do today's drivers need ABS and traction control to keep their cars under control, it also turns out most drivers can't even name the high tech safety systems that are continually saving their butts.
In other news, a typical teenager can neither properly operate nor name the components in a horse and buggy.
It's a waste of time to train humans to manually perform tasks like complicated braking. The fact that screwing it up risks an (expensive) human life makes this even worse. Elimination of useless work is the main goal engineers have. I don't see this as a loss.
Film STILL offers better resolution, although this won't last for long. I believe its close to 22 megapixels, although this is not for sure.
Digital doesn't have grain, but my inexpensive consumer camera JPEG compresses everything. Do pro cameras force lossy compression as well?
When I was a 2nd year student we weren't this sort of stuff, makes me wish I went to Stanford.
You really don't need to go to some high-ranked CS university to do cool projects. I hear a lot of people on Slashdot griping about how they couldn't go to MIT/CMU/Stanford/CalTech/whatever. Okay, maybe you get some good lectures and have some bright people handy to work with, but that's really a drop in the bucket compared to what you choose to do yourself. If you read about the things you're interested in, work on some projects, you *will* know far more than the people that went to Ivy League U and didn't do anything themselves -- just went to class and read enough content to get their grades. You have powerful, inexpensive computers easily available. You have free high-quality development software (if you don't have Valgrind and gcc on your computer, you're really missing out). You have an Internet's worth of excellent resources available, along with research papers on every neat thing you can think of free for the downloading. You don't need a professor or a boss to say "okay, write me a Foobar" to write a Foobar -- as a matter of fact, if you're writing a Foobar for yourself, it's probably going to be a better Foobar than if you're writing it because someone else is making you do so. Same goes for reading an algorithms book or a research paper.
Plus, if you don't want to tackle a whole game, choose something that you *do* like doing -- AI, graphics, sound engine, networking -- and pick a random existing open-source project and put your ideas into it. Then you have a nice end result that you can show off to people ("That game you're playing? Yeah, I'm one of the authors"), you have encouragement to keep going (because it isn't just a lone you -- you get feedback when you do something cool), and if you want a good practical excuse, you have a resume item that shows that not only do you have the ability to work with people to produce neat things -- but you've done so simply because you like making neat things. Also, it's *fun* to add a new feature to a game and then play using said feature with the rest of the dev team.
Remember that Woz never got his college degree (well, until a few years ago, when he decided to go back and get it). He built cool things because he liked making cool things, not because someone in a suit told him to make something cool. The same's true of an awful lot of techie folks out there -- school is a convenient tool, but it's much less important than going out and actively learning about things, and the fact that your uni has "State" in its name doesn't have a heck of a lot to do with what you learn. Sure, your professor will assign a bunch of books to read, but you can write that final paper without learning all that much, and certainly with big gaps in what you know. On the other hand, you can read all you want about just about anything I can think of on that Internet-connected computer in front of you.
Universities enforce a lower bound on your knowledge at graduation. They have nothing to do with setting a ceiling.
Stupid Coral cache submission.
Why can't people install this GreaseMonkey script and stop worrying about whether or not someone posted a Coral Cache link?
I'd say i'm fairly unimpressed by the lack of improvement of the games over the years. 2002 was a leap in the quality of games over previous years and the subsequent years have just been disappointing.
The reason *commercial* games have developed more sophisticated graphics engines isn't, I'd say, necessarily because of more powerful hardware or even new techniques being developed. Some of it is that budgets are larger. More budget == more man-hours to add features and effects.
I suspect that the largest factor in the quality of the graphics in these classes is not how powerful the computers or graphics cards are, but in how much time the students were able/willing to devote to the projects.
Incidently, one thing I decided from poking around with OGL is that one of the most annoying things about graphics programming is that you have a lot of invisible state sitting around on the 3d card that you can't inspect. ("Why is my screen *black* all of a sudden?") Maybe a debug OGL library that allows one to inspect what's going on or look for common errors would be helpful -- I'm not sure quite what a good fix would be.
I really enjoyed that class, Prof. Kuffner. Thanks.
Incidently, the wrapup for that class the year I took it was a blast. Basically, one demoed one's project in front of the class at the end. I still remember that one particularly presentation-savvy group, after demoing their game themselves, asked everyone in the room (which was a computer lab) to start up a binary that they'd precompiled and put on AFS in a public directory and started a deathmatch with all the audience at once. Very nifty.
Also, in the industry, you likely don't get the pleasure of being able to make Linux your target platform (if you want -- there were people that targetted other platforms as well).
No, we have a much simpler algorithm here, which has been going on for at least hundreds of years (Mark Twain apparently got suckered on multiple occasions).
1) Spew vaguely-sciency sounding claims.
2) Take in money from uninformed investors "whose money is needed to develop the process further".
3) Profit!
South Korea and Japan are also probably the most wealthy.
I think that a lot of copyright infringement derives more from the fact that the incentive to pirate something is an awful lot higher if the item costs, in terms of your buying power, two or three or four times as much.