IMHO, I think that the worst trend that has been hitting the PC gaming industry in recent years is a near-total lack of serious innovation and originality. The kinds of trends described in the article are nothing compared to this. Compared to the 1980's and early 1990's, the games of today seem to me anyway, comparatively lackluster and boring. Every major gaming company seems to be suffering from a me-too syndrome that causes the market to flood with dozens of similar games on the coattails of the last major innovation (which comes more and more seldom thanks to this phenomenon). We have hundreds of first-person shooter games and their close variants, more and more games in a genre that was saturated long ago. Real-time strategy games seem to suffer from the same problem. IMHO, the worst thing that ever happened to the gaming industry in recent years was the 3D card, which has seen more than its share of abuse at the hands of the major game companies. They seem to think that making a game 3D with impressive graphics is enough to make up for all of its shortcomings; in fact it's usually more true that abuse of the 3D engine can very quickly become a game's biggest shortcoming. Good graphics does not make up for an RPG's lack of plot and coherent storyline (cough...Ultima IX...cough), nor is it even required for many genre of games (cough...Warcraft III...cough).
DRM-ish measures in games and the other inconveniences mentioned are relatively minor compared to the mess that is a mediocre or unoriginal game.
This article is a better, more insightful read into what's wrong with the gaming industry today.
Consistency, accountability, and responsibility is something that you hardly get assured of with proprietary software. On the other hand I would argue that you actually have a better chance of getting these three values with Open Source and Free software.
Let's take consistency first (yes, there is no letter 'a' in that word). What kind of assurance do you have that your proprietary software will remain consistent with your needs? All you can do is take the developer's word for it, and trust that they won't force you into upgrades that contain features you don't want or don't need, and make the software less suited for you. Not a particularly strong assurance to me, and one that I see Microsoft along with many other proprietary software vendors routinely violate. For Free/Open Source Software on the other hand, you have the source code, and the right to change it, and you have a better chance of achieving consistency with your needs by either making the changes yourself or paying someone to make them for you.
How about accountability and responsibility? Let's see... Some proprietary software vendors (e.g. Microsoft) have EULAs that totally shirk this, and actually disclaim all accountability and responsibility for their software. Strike one. Other vendors may give this to you only at great price, because their privileged access to the source gives them a de facto monopoly in this. Strike two. Even if the vendor does give you the level of accountability and responsibility you require, what assurance do you have that they will continue to provide this for as long as you need it? The vendor could go bankrupt. They could get acquired by someone that has no interest in supporting their products. They could just simply and unilaterally decide that it's no longer worth it for them to go on supporting the software you're using. You've basically tied the accountability and responsibility for your software to the fortunes and whims of its vendor. If they decide to screw you, all you can do is bend over. If they eventually get screwed themselves, then so are you. Strike three. Open Source / Free software suffers from none of these problems. Nobody has a monopoly on supporting OSS/FS, and you have a much better chance of getting the level of accountability and responsibility that you need by taking your choice of support from many possible sources. If all else fails, the fact that you have the source and the freedom to modify it for your own needs gives you the ability to provide that support yourself should it come to that.
It's at least free as in beer, but is it free as in speech? That's what I'd like to know, and is the most important question from my point of view. Is it GPL, BSD/X-Windows, or public domain? Or could it even be proprietary but gratis? I can't tell from looking the pages from the SkyOS website I was able to see at before it got totally slashdotted just like the TechIMO website.
If it's closed source and proprietary, then forget it. Such a system is of no real use.
What to do? I confess I don't know. It'd be nice for Linux/FOSS to maybe have an associated legal entity tasked with promoting Linux/FOSS in the market and protecting Linux/FOSS in the law. Ideally, a not-for profit organization. (A honest to goodness charity would be better, at least your legal defense contributions would be a tax deduction...)
I think we all know of a couple of organizations that when put together sorta fit your description: first the Free Software Foundation. Eben Moglen in fact has been enforcing the GPL quietly for quite some time. As for promoting Linux/FOSS in the market, that's done by another organization, the the Open Source Initiative. The only problem is that the philosophical differences between the two camps make it difficult for them to collaborate at the level you hope they could... Yes, they can collaborate on writing software, but promoting FOSS in the market and defending it from messes like SCO requires that they find a philosophical middle ground of some kind.:(
The OSI is a non-profit corporation, while the FSF is actually an honest to goodness charity. Both of them, if they could work together at a deeper philosophical level, could be just the type of organization you describe.
No, production costs aren't getting so low as software. Perhaps if you could have a chip foundry on your desk to make an integrated circuit by writing the VHDL code, and if it was as easy to fabricate a printed circuit board as it is to write a subroutine, then maybe. However, today it still costs well over a billion dollars to open up a chip fabrication plant, and billions more to operate it till it turns up a profit. It costs a significant amount of time and effort to make and fabricate a printed circuit board, and a lot of specialized expensive equipment to make one that uses surface mount devices and other modern components. By contrast, the only equipment you need to develop software is your computer.
I live in the Third World, and what I can say is that the use of proprietary software IS a form of oppression indeed. For the first time in human history the advance of technology has practically removed all barriers to accessing useful information, but corporations like Microsoft are using the same technology to erect artificial barriers in the name of their profits. They would condemn whole nations and peoples into ignorance and backwardness because these nations and peoples cannot afford to get around their exclusionary measures. As FSF General Counsel Eben Moglen said: "If you could feed everyone on earth at the cost of baking one loaf and pressing a button, what would be the moral case for charging more for bread than some people could afford to pay?" (original article Freeing The Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture).
Free Software is not just a "method of software methodology", though open source is, and that I believe is the pons asinorum that most people here on Slashdot cannot seem to get past whenever there's an article about Stallman or the GNU Project. The kinds of arguments I see here whenever such an article comes up always seem to misunderstand the difference in philosophy between the two movements. On the other hand, Free Software believes that the right to share and change software are inalienable rights that no one should be allowed to take away. The fact that it also turns out to be a good methodology for software development is a side issue for people like RMS. The moral courage of a man like RMS to stand up for these principles indeed can be compared to the moral courage that eliminated slavery. Indeed, it is but a different sort of slavery that RMS is standing up against, and yes, there is a war being fought for it right now, and we all are at its forefront. One of the major battles is SCO v. IBM...
RMS is an idealist, and a highly dedicated one at that, one who has actually dedicated his entire life to this cause. The fact that he has always been so unflinching in his dedication to these ideals has in fact been a good thing, even now. Had we someone more willing to compromise at the forefront then perhaps the Free Software movement as we know it today would never exist. Our precious Linux kernel would never have become the phenomenon it is today without the ideals Stallman has dedicated his life to defending. I find it hard to see that he's doing the entire community of Free Software developers a disservice even now, as his unwillingness to compromise on the core issue of Software Freedom has kept those who might intentionally or unintentionally compromise the movement out of existence in check.
"Proper procedures laid out hundreds of years ago by the French revolutionaries"? What the hell are you talking about??
I suppose you think that IBM, SGI, HP, and these other major corporations that have embraced the growth of the GNU/Linux operating system are not a part of "corporate America"?
By definition, yes. The string "1" must be random by this definition, for instance, as no TM program to output the single character "1" can exist that uses zero characters in its UTM description.
One definition of randomness, and one that seems quite reasonable is that a string is "random" if it cannot be compressed to smaller than it is, i.e. listing its characters itself is the most compact possible description. Formally, a string is random if there exists no algorithm generating the string whose description on some universal Turing machine is smaller than the string itself (this is the definition used in the field of Kolmogorov complexity). A string of a billion digits making up Pi, for example, is not random by this definition, as one can easily write a short program, whose length would certainly be less than one billion characters, whose output is the digits of Pi. Think of it this way: the most general form of pattern matching device that we know of is a Turing machine, and if the best device you can construct to match that pattern is as complex or more complex than the pattern itself, then well, you have total randomness. Unfortunately, rigorously proving that a particular string is random by this very strong definition is extremely difficult, as you run into undecidability everywhere you turn.
This is the sort of stuff that real theoretical computer science is made of. For a very good overview of the theory of Kolmogorov Complexity and algorithmic information theory, Gregory Chaitin's home page is a good starting point
To go back to the Voynich manuscript, if there is some sort of regularity that can be discerned from it, then perhaps a context-free or context-sensitive (or something in between) language may be found to characterize it. Once you have such a syntactic characterization, perhaps it might be possible to divine the semantics from context. The shape of the grammar that results may well prove whether the Manuscript is in fact a real language, a fabrication, an elaborate cipher, or just total gibberish.
The reason why the BIOS has remained essentially unchanged for so long is so that PC's could run what was at the time a significant quantity of legacy software. With some minor adjustments it is still possible to run programs from the most ancient ancient eras of PC history on the modern hardware, but this is IMHO better accomplished by use of a program like vmware or bochs. Today's PC's have hundreds or even up to tens of thousands of times the processing power of hardware from that era, and they can most certainly emulate through virtualization almost every piece of esoteric hardware from those bygone eras while hardly breaking out a sweat.
Besides, most of the really important legacy software from the era of perhaps up to a decade ago or so has long since been superseded and is no longer supported by anyone, and if anything is still useful from that time I would say it's classic DOS games, which again would be much better run with a virtualization system. You don't get the adverse effects of playing an arcade game with no frame limiter on too fast hardware.:)
The original PC BIOS has incredibly remained basically unchanged since the days of the IBM PC, more than twenty years ago. We have all that legacy stuff in our PC's firmware that harks back to the days of MS-DOS and its limitations are being stretched to the breaking point by hacks and kluges (e.g. the disk size limits imposed by the real-mode BIOS calls). It would be nice to see it all go away for good.
On the other hand, it's Microsoft and Intel working together on this. This could very well be the next step towards the groundwork for Palladium, and more ugly DRM embedded into the lowest levels of PC hardware, that may well prevent anyone from running any operating system on commodity PC hardware besides that of Microsoft, among other baneful things. I'm not willing to bet that this new specification doesn't lay this type of groundwork in any way.
The only problem with just in time compilation is that it takes up a LOT of memory. Granted, memory is getting cheaper and cheaper these days, but instruction cache memory is not. Today's cache-sensitive architectures will probably operate at suboptimal rates with a JIT that's generating code on one hand and executing the generated code on the other. That would eventually result in thrashing no matter how big your cache happens to be, and cache misses tend to be expensive in the grand scheme of things if they happen often enough.
In fact, some people have argued (e.g. an article in the August 1992 edition of DDJ, "Personal Supercomputing", by Ian Hirschsohn) that modern RISC architectures shouldn't be fed raw machine code directly at all. Actually a RISC is nothing but a CISC processor minus the microcode; instead it can be "microprogrammed" by placing instructions that live on its i-cache. Paradoxically, interpreted languages might actually be faster than compiled languages on such an architecture! A proper memory-transfer based intermediate language interpreted by a small, hand-optimized interpreter that makes maximal use of the microprocessor's bus bandwidth and is small enough to more or less fit inside the i-cache may well blow any straight or JIT-compiled language out of the water performance-wise on the applications that really matter.
The Java Virtual Machine doesn't fit this description, not by a long shot. Its stack based architecture makes it not terribly efficient in its use of CPU bus bandwidth, and its sheer size alone says that it wasn't designed with platform efficiency in mind. Same thing goes for the.NET CLR, it would seem. This is however the system that was used on the CDC 6600, which was one of Seymour Cray's seminal supercomputer designs (back when his company was known as Control Data Corporation), so perhaps they'll use some of these same ideas.
If I recall correctly, the "silence is golden" maxim in Unix programming arose as an artifact of Unix's origins. When Dennis Ritchie and the rest of the historic team at Bell Labs began work on the earliest editions of Unix and C, they were operating on teletype terminals that ran at 110 baud (kinda humbling in this day and age, ain't it?). 110 baud translates to roughly 13 characters per second, so a program that was too chatty wasted precious bandwidth. If they had something like the cp(1) command operating the way the MS-DOS COPY command did, displaying messages like "14 file(s) copied.", which is 20 characters (plus the newline), it would take about a couple of seconds to display, while displaying nothing would be 20 times faster. It had nothing to do with making programs work better with each other and everything to do with conserving bandwidth. This is also the reason why ed(1) and vi(1) have such eccentric design, preserving a resource that was scarce in the day they were made.
That might be true, but I don't see how they can legally do it. The GPL will allow the creation of such proprietary drivers, as from the point of view of a microkernel OS drivers are for all intents and purposes no different from any other application running on the system. As such, they merely USE the kernel, and are not creating a derived work from it, as might be argued is the case with Linux binary modules. If they came up with GPLv3 that provided a legal leg for this, they would at the same time hurt the cause of Free Software by forcing all applications running on the Hurd to be GPL. Richard Stallman is actually a pragmatist who is not above making compromises that benefit the cause of Free Software, contrary to the impression he seems to have for most people on/., and I seriously doubt that he would do something so patently foolish.
Why the hell this post was modded +5 Interesting is beyond me, as it simply goes on slinging more FUD and further misconceptions.
The language is, in many places, ambigouous and misleading. The concept of a derived work is not explicitly defined, nor has specific attention been paid to dynamic versus static linking.
A derived work is a specific term used in the Copyright Act, and it has a very clear definition there, and has a very clear meaning based upon decades of case law. Dynamic vs. static linking is clearly delienated in the LGPL, not the GPL, which explicitly states that linking *of any kind*, static or dynamic, constitutes the creation of a derived work. The Lesser GPL relaxes this saying that dynamic linking is considered a use of the library under the license, and not the creation of a derived work.
No definitive interpretation by a court has been made. This article is completely the interpretation of a single individual and its relevancy to a definitive interpretation within a courtroom setting is dubious at best. There exists Linus's interpretation of this matter, which would preclude the possibility of binary only kernel drivers, but shouldn't this carry over to any code which utilizes system calls in Linux?
Why should it? Any code that utilizes system calls in Linux is by definition merely USING the kernel, not creating a derived work, and even absent the clarification statement Linus Torvalds put just before the GPL in the COPYING file in all Linux distributions this should be obvious to anyone who knows how an operating system is used by programs running under it, and this issue will definitely come up if there were a court case involving this (and there probably never will be one, unless some bizzare legal strategy by SCO decides to use it).
Do you really think that Oracle's lawyers didn't take this into consideration before they decided to port Oracle to Linux? The fact that we have a lot of significant proprietary software running under Linux written by large corporations with well-funded legal teams should be sufficient to fully dispel this misconception in the mind of a layperson.
Kernel modules, on the other hand, are a completely different animal, and for the most part modules actually do incorporate large portions of real kernel code and are linked into a GPLed kernel, thus making them a derived work. While it is not in violation of any license to actually make and possibly even distribute such kernel modules, it may be a GPL violation to distribute a whole binary kernel that uses these modules.
Wouldn't such code be considered a derived work and be forced to be distributed under the terms of the GPL? Consequently, it doesn't seem possible for glibc to legally be LGPL, as it utilizes the Linux system call table and is consequently a derived work of the GPL'd Linux kernel. This opens up a whole nasty can of worms...
The system call table is mere information, and information cannot be copyrighted.
The GPL has many bizarre concessions and terms, such as requiring those who distribute GPL software to distribute it by mail at anyone's request, charging only the cost of media.
Where in the GPL does it state that you are required to do this? I don't see it anywhere. Perhaps you didn't bother to read this particular section as carefully as you should have:
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,
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 sour
Ironically, the GNU/HURD may well be more friendly to proprietary software and drivers than Linux ever will be! Being a microkernel OS, drivers would have a far cleaner separation from the GPLed HURD kernel than the current loadable module system in Linux does. Though I wouldn't bet on it, we may actually get a stable, usable Hurd kernel before Linux fixes the binary modules issue that was the topic of a recent story. At least the Hurd team IS moving towards making a stable release, but it does not seem to be a high priority at the moment in Linux dev to make even something like the Windows DDK for kernel modules.
Man, this is absolutely incredible. There was a theatrical release for both movies (which both TOTALLY ROCK!... I can only hope that Miramax & Co. don't butcher them!) here in my country a long time ago! Hero was released here late last year, and Shaolin Soccer not long after if I recall correctly. Now, Shaolin Soccer, and maybe even Hero, have actually even been popping up on the Chinese cable channels (with English subtitles, thank goodness) occasionally. Does a whole lot of good for them to be closing the barn door after the horse has already run around more than half the world for about a year ongoing, don't ya think?
Actually, Chomsky (or one of his contemporaries anyhow) discovered early on that almost no natural language can be represented solely by regular languages, or even context-free languages. Chomsky initially even tried to use unrestricted/semi-Thue grammars to represent natural languages, but realized just as quickly that this HUGE class of languages is much, much too big (in fact, it's actually Turing complete, and only useful to those doing research in the theory of computation, not the theory behind human language). That left the context-sensitive languages in the original Chomsky hierarchy, but even those languages were found to be much too general, and the most general simulators for linear bounded automata needed to process CSL's apparently requires exponential time to operate. Current research in computational linguistics these days seems to concentrate on classes of languages between CFL's and CSL's, formal languages which are "mildly" context sensitive to characterize human languages. One example is the tree-adjunct grammars (which also incidentally have been found to characterize RNA secondary structures very well, and are of great use in bioinformatics). There are a few other models out there which I researched while making a writeup on the Chomsky hierarchy for E2, but unfortunately E2 is still down...:(
Apparently computational linguistics is taking the same course that most other fields in artificial intelligence have taken lately. One camp takes the formal symbol manipulation approach (the original Chomsky theory and its descendants), and the other camp includes more recent approaches based on neural nets, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, and so forth, which are more grounded in biology rather than abstract mathematics. Sorta like the traditional SMPA robotics vs. Dr. Brooks' behavioral robotics.
True, but who's to say that SCO isn't using this incident ITSELF as a FUD tactic? Do we have their upstream Internet provider coming forward and testifying that there really was a DoS? McBride could have just as easily said to Stowell: "I think our servers need another fake DoS just to make them open source people look bad. Let's unplug our systems from the Internet a moment then you send out a press release stating that once again those commie open source bastards have again DDoSed our site so they're nothing but a bunch of terrorists and criminals."
Frankly, anyone who's been following the story even casually would probably take any press release from SCO with a grain of salt. They've been talking with brain disconnected for so long that if this was in another industry they would be laughed and ridiculed and never taken seriously by anyone. Frankly, they sound like some of those kooks in my country who go forward with a deed they say has been signed by our nation's former colonial rulers giving them rights to all the land in the whole country! SCO's audacity frankly puts even those lunatics to shame.
Sounds like the questions people put to Bruce Schneier after he made a serious and informed statement that enforcing copyrights by means of technology was absolutely impossible:
"Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. `How will authors and artists get paid for their work?' they ask me. Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: `How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?' I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either."
Otherwise, you'll get sued by Microsoft for copyright infringement. I doubt we'll ever legally see it work on Knoppix or similar distros for that reason. How would you be able to get a copy of ntfs.sys from within, say, a loaded and running Knoppix without first mounting the NTFS partition in the first place? Well, probably the in-kernel read-only driver could get ntfs.sys from some other NTFS partition, copy that file into a ramdisk, then remount using ntfs.sys. Still sounds like a monstrously klugy solution, and one that will make life difficult for the users of a CD distribution like Knoppix.
It's not like ntfs.sys is readily distributable free of charge like the Win32 codec DLL's are, right? Or is it?
The best solution would really to get write support on NTFS working. That would get rid of this kluge to avoid copyright infringement.
Apparently, Diebold's ATM machines aren't worth squat either. Some of them actually got hit by the Nachi worm. So there you folks in the United States are, forced to entrust your votes and your money to a company that doesn't seem to know the first thing about security, and has made its partisan bias clearly known.:(
Oh my. Why the hell should we trust a group whose servers can't even withstand a slashdotting? I think the fact that they can't even set up a web server that can take a few hundred thousand hits in a few hours pushes their credibility a little further down the scale way below Netcraft.
What they really should be doing is coupling ion engines to nuclear reactors. Then you'd have a power plant capable of producing a large quantity of energy for a long time, and keep going for many, many years.
I remember reading somewhere that nuclear-powered ships could keep going and going for 20+ years or more. The only reason why such nuclear aircraft carriers eventually must return to port is other supplies like food and water for the crew, not fuel. Same thing goes for ballistic missile submarines, which can stay submerged for years on end, using the power from the nuclear reactor to produce drinkable water and breathable air for the crew. A typical deterrence patrol for an Ohio class SSBN only lasts for two months only because that's probably how long a crew can stay cooped up in a very small space without going crazy.:)
Only thing is there are all these groups that seem to be afraid to put anything nuclear in space for some reason. If anyone's still really serious about doing manned space exploration, we'll have to do this eventually, I think. Solar just won't be able to produce the kind of power required to provide extended life support and reasonably fast travel at the same time. It's no good to be cooped up in a space capsule for eight months to get to Mars, and back again... These ion engines could probably produce a lot more thrust with the kind of juice a nuclear reactor onboard could put out, possibly even enough to accelerate the ions to relativistic velocities, and then we could have some real serious speed, to make interstellar travel, at least by machines, a realistic possibility.
As for radiation shielding, that's something you'll have to deal with anyway, nuclear reactor or not. Even a small coronal mass ejection could produce far, far more radiation than the power plant would.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, I think that the worst trend that has been hitting the PC gaming industry in recent years is a near-total lack of serious innovation and originality. The kinds of trends described in the article are nothing compared to this. Compared to the 1980's and early 1990's, the games of today seem to me anyway, comparatively lackluster and boring. Every major gaming company seems to be suffering from a me-too syndrome that causes the market to flood with dozens of similar games on the coattails of the last major innovation (which comes more and more seldom thanks to this phenomenon). We have hundreds of first-person shooter games and their close variants, more and more games in a genre that was saturated long ago. Real-time strategy games seem to suffer from the same problem. IMHO, the worst thing that ever happened to the gaming industry in recent years was the 3D card, which has seen more than its share of abuse at the hands of the major game companies. They seem to think that making a game 3D with impressive graphics is enough to make up for all of its shortcomings; in fact it's usually more true that abuse of the 3D engine can very quickly become a game's biggest shortcoming. Good graphics does not make up for an RPG's lack of plot and coherent storyline (cough...Ultima IX...cough), nor is it even required for many genre of games (cough...Warcraft III...cough).
DRM-ish measures in games and the other inconveniences mentioned are relatively minor compared to the mess that is a mediocre or unoriginal game.
This article is a better, more insightful read into what's wrong with the gaming industry today.
Consistency, accountability, and responsibility is something that you hardly get assured of with proprietary software. On the other hand I would argue that you actually have a better chance of getting these three values with Open Source and Free software.
Let's take consistency first (yes, there is no letter 'a' in that word). What kind of assurance do you have that your proprietary software will remain consistent with your needs? All you can do is take the developer's word for it, and trust that they won't force you into upgrades that contain features you don't want or don't need, and make the software less suited for you. Not a particularly strong assurance to me, and one that I see Microsoft along with many other proprietary software vendors routinely violate. For Free/Open Source Software on the other hand, you have the source code, and the right to change it, and you have a better chance of achieving consistency with your needs by either making the changes yourself or paying someone to make them for you.
How about accountability and responsibility? Let's see... Some proprietary software vendors (e.g. Microsoft) have EULAs that totally shirk this, and actually disclaim all accountability and responsibility for their software. Strike one. Other vendors may give this to you only at great price, because their privileged access to the source gives them a de facto monopoly in this. Strike two. Even if the vendor does give you the level of accountability and responsibility you require, what assurance do you have that they will continue to provide this for as long as you need it? The vendor could go bankrupt. They could get acquired by someone that has no interest in supporting their products. They could just simply and unilaterally decide that it's no longer worth it for them to go on supporting the software you're using. You've basically tied the accountability and responsibility for your software to the fortunes and whims of its vendor. If they decide to screw you, all you can do is bend over. If they eventually get screwed themselves, then so are you. Strike three. Open Source / Free software suffers from none of these problems. Nobody has a monopoly on supporting OSS/FS, and you have a much better chance of getting the level of accountability and responsibility that you need by taking your choice of support from many possible sources. If all else fails, the fact that you have the source and the freedom to modify it for your own needs gives you the ability to provide that support yourself should it come to that.
It's at least free as in beer, but is it free as in speech? That's what I'd like to know, and is the most important question from my point of view. Is it GPL, BSD/X-Windows, or public domain? Or could it even be proprietary but gratis? I can't tell from looking the pages from the SkyOS website I was able to see at before it got totally slashdotted just like the TechIMO website.
If it's closed source and proprietary, then forget it. Such a system is of no real use.
I think we all know of a couple of organizations that when put together sorta fit your description: first the Free Software Foundation. Eben Moglen in fact has been enforcing the GPL quietly for quite some time. As for promoting Linux/FOSS in the market, that's done by another organization, the the Open Source Initiative. The only problem is that the philosophical differences between the two camps make it difficult for them to collaborate at the level you hope they could... Yes, they can collaborate on writing software, but promoting FOSS in the market and defending it from messes like SCO requires that they find a philosophical middle ground of some kind. :(
The OSI is a non-profit corporation, while the FSF is actually an honest to goodness charity. Both of them, if they could work together at a deeper philosophical level, could be just the type of organization you describe.
No, production costs aren't getting so low as software. Perhaps if you could have a chip foundry on your desk to make an integrated circuit by writing the VHDL code, and if it was as easy to fabricate a printed circuit board as it is to write a subroutine, then maybe. However, today it still costs well over a billion dollars to open up a chip fabrication plant, and billions more to operate it till it turns up a profit. It costs a significant amount of time and effort to make and fabricate a printed circuit board, and a lot of specialized expensive equipment to make one that uses surface mount devices and other modern components. By contrast, the only equipment you need to develop software is your computer.
I live in the Third World, and what I can say is that the use of proprietary software IS a form of oppression indeed. For the first time in human history the advance of technology has practically removed all barriers to accessing useful information, but corporations like Microsoft are using the same technology to erect artificial barriers in the name of their profits. They would condemn whole nations and peoples into ignorance and backwardness because these nations and peoples cannot afford to get around their exclusionary measures. As FSF General Counsel Eben Moglen said: "If you could feed everyone on earth at the cost of baking one loaf and pressing a button, what would be the moral case for charging more for bread than some people could afford to pay?" (original article Freeing The Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture).
Free Software is not just a "method of software methodology", though open source is, and that I believe is the pons asinorum that most people here on Slashdot cannot seem to get past whenever there's an article about Stallman or the GNU Project. The kinds of arguments I see here whenever such an article comes up always seem to misunderstand the difference in philosophy between the two movements. On the other hand, Free Software believes that the right to share and change software are inalienable rights that no one should be allowed to take away. The fact that it also turns out to be a good methodology for software development is a side issue for people like RMS. The moral courage of a man like RMS to stand up for these principles indeed can be compared to the moral courage that eliminated slavery. Indeed, it is but a different sort of slavery that RMS is standing up against, and yes, there is a war being fought for it right now, and we all are at its forefront. One of the major battles is SCO v. IBM...
RMS is an idealist, and a highly dedicated one at that, one who has actually dedicated his entire life to this cause. The fact that he has always been so unflinching in his dedication to these ideals has in fact been a good thing, even now. Had we someone more willing to compromise at the forefront then perhaps the Free Software movement as we know it today would never exist. Our precious Linux kernel would never have become the phenomenon it is today without the ideals Stallman has dedicated his life to defending. I find it hard to see that he's doing the entire community of Free Software developers a disservice even now, as his unwillingness to compromise on the core issue of Software Freedom has kept those who might intentionally or unintentionally compromise the movement out of existence in check.
"Proper procedures laid out hundreds of years ago by the French revolutionaries"? What the hell are you talking about??
I suppose you think that IBM, SGI, HP, and these other major corporations that have embraced the growth of the GNU/Linux operating system are not a part of "corporate America"?
By definition, yes. The string "1" must be random by this definition, for instance, as no TM program to output the single character "1" can exist that uses zero characters in its UTM description.
"Random" in the algorithmic information theoretic sense is not equivalent to "meaningless".
One definition of randomness, and one that seems quite reasonable is that a string is "random" if it cannot be compressed to smaller than it is, i.e. listing its characters itself is the most compact possible description. Formally, a string is random if there exists no algorithm generating the string whose description on some universal Turing machine is smaller than the string itself (this is the definition used in the field of Kolmogorov complexity). A string of a billion digits making up Pi, for example, is not random by this definition, as one can easily write a short program, whose length would certainly be less than one billion characters, whose output is the digits of Pi. Think of it this way: the most general form of pattern matching device that we know of is a Turing machine, and if the best device you can construct to match that pattern is as complex or more complex than the pattern itself, then well, you have total randomness. Unfortunately, rigorously proving that a particular string is random by this very strong definition is extremely difficult, as you run into undecidability everywhere you turn.
This is the sort of stuff that real theoretical computer science is made of. For a very good overview of the theory of Kolmogorov Complexity and algorithmic information theory, Gregory Chaitin's home page is a good starting point
To go back to the Voynich manuscript, if there is some sort of regularity that can be discerned from it, then perhaps a context-free or context-sensitive (or something in between) language may be found to characterize it. Once you have such a syntactic characterization, perhaps it might be possible to divine the semantics from context. The shape of the grammar that results may well prove whether the Manuscript is in fact a real language, a fabrication, an elaborate cipher, or just total gibberish.
The reason why the BIOS has remained essentially unchanged for so long is so that PC's could run what was at the time a significant quantity of legacy software. With some minor adjustments it is still possible to run programs from the most ancient ancient eras of PC history on the modern hardware, but this is IMHO better accomplished by use of a program like vmware or bochs. Today's PC's have hundreds or even up to tens of thousands of times the processing power of hardware from that era, and they can most certainly emulate through virtualization almost every piece of esoteric hardware from those bygone eras while hardly breaking out a sweat.
Besides, most of the really important legacy software from the era of perhaps up to a decade ago or so has long since been superseded and is no longer supported by anyone, and if anything is still useful from that time I would say it's classic DOS games, which again would be much better run with a virtualization system. You don't get the adverse effects of playing an arcade game with no frame limiter on too fast hardware. :)
The original PC BIOS has incredibly remained basically unchanged since the days of the IBM PC, more than twenty years ago. We have all that legacy stuff in our PC's firmware that harks back to the days of MS-DOS and its limitations are being stretched to the breaking point by hacks and kluges (e.g. the disk size limits imposed by the real-mode BIOS calls). It would be nice to see it all go away for good.
On the other hand, it's Microsoft and Intel working together on this. This could very well be the next step towards the groundwork for Palladium, and more ugly DRM embedded into the lowest levels of PC hardware, that may well prevent anyone from running any operating system on commodity PC hardware besides that of Microsoft, among other baneful things. I'm not willing to bet that this new specification doesn't lay this type of groundwork in any way.
The only problem with just in time compilation is that it takes up a LOT of memory. Granted, memory is getting cheaper and cheaper these days, but instruction cache memory is not. Today's cache-sensitive architectures will probably operate at suboptimal rates with a JIT that's generating code on one hand and executing the generated code on the other. That would eventually result in thrashing no matter how big your cache happens to be, and cache misses tend to be expensive in the grand scheme of things if they happen often enough.
In fact, some people have argued (e.g. an article in the August 1992 edition of DDJ, "Personal Supercomputing", by Ian Hirschsohn) that modern RISC architectures shouldn't be fed raw machine code directly at all. Actually a RISC is nothing but a CISC processor minus the microcode; instead it can be "microprogrammed" by placing instructions that live on its i-cache. Paradoxically, interpreted languages might actually be faster than compiled languages on such an architecture! A proper memory-transfer based intermediate language interpreted by a small, hand-optimized interpreter that makes maximal use of the microprocessor's bus bandwidth and is small enough to more or less fit inside the i-cache may well blow any straight or JIT-compiled language out of the water performance-wise on the applications that really matter.
The Java Virtual Machine doesn't fit this description, not by a long shot. Its stack based architecture makes it not terribly efficient in its use of CPU bus bandwidth, and its sheer size alone says that it wasn't designed with platform efficiency in mind. Same thing goes for the .NET CLR, it would seem. This is however the system that was used on the CDC 6600, which was one of Seymour Cray's seminal supercomputer designs (back when his company was known as Control Data Corporation), so perhaps they'll use some of these same ideas.
If I recall correctly, the "silence is golden" maxim in Unix programming arose as an artifact of Unix's origins. When Dennis Ritchie and the rest of the historic team at Bell Labs began work on the earliest editions of Unix and C, they were operating on teletype terminals that ran at 110 baud (kinda humbling in this day and age, ain't it?). 110 baud translates to roughly 13 characters per second, so a program that was too chatty wasted precious bandwidth. If they had something like the cp(1) command operating the way the MS-DOS COPY command did, displaying messages like "14 file(s) copied.", which is 20 characters (plus the newline), it would take about a couple of seconds to display, while displaying nothing would be 20 times faster. It had nothing to do with making programs work better with each other and everything to do with conserving bandwidth. This is also the reason why ed(1) and vi(1) have such eccentric design, preserving a resource that was scarce in the day they were made.
That might be true, but I don't see how they can legally do it. The GPL will allow the creation of such proprietary drivers, as from the point of view of a microkernel OS drivers are for all intents and purposes no different from any other application running on the system. As such, they merely USE the kernel, and are not creating a derived work from it, as might be argued is the case with Linux binary modules. If they came up with GPLv3 that provided a legal leg for this, they would at the same time hurt the cause of Free Software by forcing all applications running on the Hurd to be GPL. Richard Stallman is actually a pragmatist who is not above making compromises that benefit the cause of Free Software, contrary to the impression he seems to have for most people on /., and I seriously doubt that he would do something so patently foolish.
Why the hell this post was modded +5 Interesting is beyond me, as it simply goes on slinging more FUD and further misconceptions.
The language is, in many places, ambigouous and misleading. The concept of a derived work is not explicitly defined, nor has specific attention been paid to dynamic versus static linking.
A derived work is a specific term used in the Copyright Act, and it has a very clear definition there, and has a very clear meaning based upon decades of case law. Dynamic vs. static linking is clearly delienated in the LGPL, not the GPL, which explicitly states that linking *of any kind*, static or dynamic, constitutes the creation of a derived work. The Lesser GPL relaxes this saying that dynamic linking is considered a use of the library under the license, and not the creation of a derived work.
Why should it? Any code that utilizes system calls in Linux is by definition merely USING the kernel, not creating a derived work, and even absent the clarification statement Linus Torvalds put just before the GPL in the COPYING file in all Linux distributions this should be obvious to anyone who knows how an operating system is used by programs running under it, and this issue will definitely come up if there were a court case involving this (and there probably never will be one, unless some bizzare legal strategy by SCO decides to use it).
Do you really think that Oracle's lawyers didn't take this into consideration before they decided to port Oracle to Linux? The fact that we have a lot of significant proprietary software running under Linux written by large corporations with well-funded legal teams should be sufficient to fully dispel this misconception in the mind of a layperson.
Kernel modules, on the other hand, are a completely different animal, and for the most part modules actually do incorporate large portions of real kernel code and are linked into a GPLed kernel, thus making them a derived work. While it is not in violation of any license to actually make and possibly even distribute such kernel modules, it may be a GPL violation to distribute a whole binary kernel that uses these modules.
Wouldn't such code be considered a derived work and be forced to be distributed under the terms of the GPL? Consequently, it doesn't seem possible for glibc to legally be LGPL, as it utilizes the Linux system call table and is consequently a derived work of the GPL'd Linux kernel. This opens up a whole nasty can of worms...
The system call table is mere information, and information cannot be copyrighted.
The GPL has many bizarre concessions and terms, such as requiring those who distribute GPL software to distribute it by mail at anyone's request, charging only the cost of media.
Where in the GPL does it state that you are required to do this? I don't see it anywhere. Perhaps you didn't bother to read this particular section as carefully as you should have:
Ironically, the GNU/HURD may well be more friendly to proprietary software and drivers than Linux ever will be! Being a microkernel OS, drivers would have a far cleaner separation from the GPLed HURD kernel than the current loadable module system in Linux does. Though I wouldn't bet on it, we may actually get a stable, usable Hurd kernel before Linux fixes the binary modules issue that was the topic of a recent story. At least the Hurd team IS moving towards making a stable release, but it does not seem to be a high priority at the moment in Linux dev to make even something like the Windows DDK for kernel modules.
Man, this is absolutely incredible. There was a theatrical release for both movies (which both TOTALLY ROCK!... I can only hope that Miramax & Co. don't butcher them!) here in my country a long time ago! Hero was released here late last year, and Shaolin Soccer not long after if I recall correctly. Now, Shaolin Soccer, and maybe even Hero, have actually even been popping up on the Chinese cable channels (with English subtitles, thank goodness) occasionally. Does a whole lot of good for them to be closing the barn door after the horse has already run around more than half the world for about a year ongoing, don't ya think?
Actually, Chomsky (or one of his contemporaries anyhow) discovered early on that almost no natural language can be represented solely by regular languages, or even context-free languages. Chomsky initially even tried to use unrestricted/semi-Thue grammars to represent natural languages, but realized just as quickly that this HUGE class of languages is much, much too big (in fact, it's actually Turing complete, and only useful to those doing research in the theory of computation, not the theory behind human language). That left the context-sensitive languages in the original Chomsky hierarchy, but even those languages were found to be much too general, and the most general simulators for linear bounded automata needed to process CSL's apparently requires exponential time to operate. Current research in computational linguistics these days seems to concentrate on classes of languages between CFL's and CSL's, formal languages which are "mildly" context sensitive to characterize human languages. One example is the tree-adjunct grammars (which also incidentally have been found to characterize RNA secondary structures very well, and are of great use in bioinformatics). There are a few other models out there which I researched while making a writeup on the Chomsky hierarchy for E2, but unfortunately E2 is still down... :(
Apparently computational linguistics is taking the same course that most other fields in artificial intelligence have taken lately. One camp takes the formal symbol manipulation approach (the original Chomsky theory and its descendants), and the other camp includes more recent approaches based on neural nets, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, and so forth, which are more grounded in biology rather than abstract mathematics. Sorta like the traditional SMPA robotics vs. Dr. Brooks' behavioral robotics.
True, but who's to say that SCO isn't using this incident ITSELF as a FUD tactic? Do we have their upstream Internet provider coming forward and testifying that there really was a DoS? McBride could have just as easily said to Stowell: "I think our servers need another fake DoS just to make them open source people look bad. Let's unplug our systems from the Internet a moment then you send out a press release stating that once again those commie open source bastards have again DDoSed our site so they're nothing but a bunch of terrorists and criminals."
Frankly, anyone who's been following the story even casually would probably take any press release from SCO with a grain of salt. They've been talking with brain disconnected for so long that if this was in another industry they would be laughed and ridiculed and never taken seriously by anyone. Frankly, they sound like some of those kooks in my country who go forward with a deed they say has been signed by our nation's former colonial rulers giving them rights to all the land in the whole country! SCO's audacity frankly puts even those lunatics to shame.
Sounds like the questions people put to Bruce Schneier after he made a serious and informed statement that enforcing copyrights by means of technology was absolutely impossible:
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0108.html#7
"Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. `How will authors and artists get paid for their work?' they ask me. Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: `How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?' I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either."
Otherwise, you'll get sued by Microsoft for copyright infringement. I doubt we'll ever legally see it work on Knoppix or similar distros for that reason. How would you be able to get a copy of ntfs.sys from within, say, a loaded and running Knoppix without first mounting the NTFS partition in the first place? Well, probably the in-kernel read-only driver could get ntfs.sys from some other NTFS partition, copy that file into a ramdisk, then remount using ntfs.sys. Still sounds like a monstrously klugy solution, and one that will make life difficult for the users of a CD distribution like Knoppix.
It's not like ntfs.sys is readily distributable free of charge like the Win32 codec DLL's are, right? Or is it?
The best solution would really to get write support on NTFS working. That would get rid of this kluge to avoid copyright infringement.
Apparently, Diebold's ATM machines aren't worth squat either. Some of them actually got hit by the Nachi worm. So there you folks in the United States are, forced to entrust your votes and your money to a company that doesn't seem to know the first thing about security, and has made its partisan bias clearly known. :(
Oh my. Why the hell should we trust a group whose servers can't even withstand a slashdotting? I think the fact that they can't even set up a web server that can take a few hundred thousand hits in a few hours pushes their credibility a little further down the scale way below Netcraft.
What they really should be doing is coupling ion engines to nuclear reactors. Then you'd have a power plant capable of producing a large quantity of energy for a long time, and keep going for many, many years.
I remember reading somewhere that nuclear-powered ships could keep going and going for 20+ years or more. The only reason why such nuclear aircraft carriers eventually must return to port is other supplies like food and water for the crew, not fuel. Same thing goes for ballistic missile submarines, which can stay submerged for years on end, using the power from the nuclear reactor to produce drinkable water and breathable air for the crew. A typical deterrence patrol for an Ohio class SSBN only lasts for two months only because that's probably how long a crew can stay cooped up in a very small space without going crazy. :)
Only thing is there are all these groups that seem to be afraid to put anything nuclear in space for some reason. If anyone's still really serious about doing manned space exploration, we'll have to do this eventually, I think. Solar just won't be able to produce the kind of power required to provide extended life support and reasonably fast travel at the same time. It's no good to be cooped up in a space capsule for eight months to get to Mars, and back again... These ion engines could probably produce a lot more thrust with the kind of juice a nuclear reactor onboard could put out, possibly even enough to accelerate the ions to relativistic velocities, and then we could have some real serious speed, to make interstellar travel, at least by machines, a realistic possibility.
As for radiation shielding, that's something you'll have to deal with anyway, nuclear reactor or not. Even a small coronal mass ejection could produce far, far more radiation than the power plant would.