There are several things that even a non-programmer can benefit from having the sort of freedom to share and change source code. The most obvious advantage being they can always get someone who does know how to program to do custom modifications to free software as need be. These non-programmers can also more easily communicate with the users than any proprietary software developers can. It's an indirect benefit, but a valuable one nonetheless. And it ties in with the freedoms of speech, and other civil rights as well. We see in the flap with the DMCA and the UCITA how copyright laws as applied to digital information violate these rights. In contrast, the freedom in free software serves to uphold those rights as well.
These new "free beer" software packages we find are probably not a good thing. This is because these "free" programs fill a need, and the average joe user who isn't one of RMS's zealots and has at most a vague idea of the distinctions between software that is just free of cost and software that grants him freedom won't really care. And since these packages tend to be more complete than the embryonic Free Software packages that exist, they gain market share, at the expense of software that is Free (speech). Thus the motivation for developing the Free Software versions is decreased, because someone has already filled that need. And the decreased user base for the Free Software variants means development will tend to slow down. And these free (beer) packages, even if Happy Hour never ends (which is extremely unlikely), suffer from all the drawbacks all proprietary software does, and then some. Apart from the fact that you again have secret file formats and the danger of lock-in, as someone has already mentioned, since you aren't paying for it you can't possibly expect any kind of warranty. At least if you payed mucho dinero for a copy of M$ Office, you could at least have the (albeit remote) possibility of getting some useful tech support off M$'s support numbers. Free beer packages probably will not provide any kind of support at all. And there's obviously no possibility of your getting into the guts of the code to fix the problem yourself because it's closed source. The average joe user is at this point only concerned with getting results, and freedom is only an incidental thing for them as of now. These closed-source, free (beer), proprietary packages are a stumbling block in their path because it tends to make them value their freedom less. The average joe user needs to learn to value the freedom granted by true Free Software, and these "free" programs are making that process harder.
It was only a few years ago that people started using unleaded gasoline in my country. No wonder my poor countrymen elected such a buffoon to the presidency of the Philippines. Add brain drain to the mix and to call us Filipinos stupid will begin to become an insult to stupid people. Vicious cycle is right, and we people of the Third World are in deepest.
Well, I might begin to sound like one of RMS's zealots at this point...Although I feel that this is a good thing, they miss the whole point of what free software is about: the precise weakness of 'open source' as a term. Free software is about freedom, not about price. The real reason why free software is stable, low on resources, and so well-supported is because of this freedom. And we shouldn't forget this.
Are these going to go away? If my understanding is correct, biotech patents come very close to patents on software (wetware actually), and worse yet, they amount to patents on `secrets of nature' which should never have patents even by the insane US patent system. If the HGP info is made public then do all of these have to go away? Otherwise, making it public would be a useless gesture.
Just $1,500,000? What the heck are they going to do with such a princely sum? I don't think that this is serious. If ever there is a major technical breakthrough in the field of quantum computing, none of us who are reading slashdot will ever hear about it. The NSA will have that information locked up tighter than the H-Bomb was ever classified. I smell a US Government PR job buried in all this. Ever see Chain Reaction? If ever a major breakthrough that allows the construction of a machine with a nontrivial number of qubits does occur in the near future, the US gov't will quickly take steps to put it under wraps. They'll probably exploit it, too, without letting anyone know about it. When they feel that "the world is ready," that's when they'll start feeding it to some company that has, for some reason, earned government favor. Which may be a long time in coming. I remember Colossus was so deeply classified until relatively recently, after three generations of computers had come and gone! Unless, of course, a practical quantum encryption scheme is developed first and becomes widely adopted, which seems a more likely scenario (encryption is easier and simpler than computation).
What you're referring to is Jack St. Clair Kilby's patent on the integrated circuit. It didn't kill the nascent computer industry then, because nobody but the big companies capable of paying royalties for it were capable of duplicating the IC manufacturing process (BTW, The Japs tried to get around this patent but lost after 30 years, so they'll have to keep paying royalties until 2004 [I think], long after the patent has expired in the rest of the world!). For a quantum computer the process will probably be even more difficult, and enormous quantities of capital would be required, so patent royalties would be a drop in the bucket as far as investment would be concerned, and wouldn't stop the industry from progressing. Patents are not all bad. The whole point of patents is to keep trade secrets from vanishing. Would you rather have the inventor getting rich over his invention or lose the secret forever because his/her company made a bad investment and had to fold? In the case of physical hardware, like the designs for a quantum computer, they would do immeasurably more good than bad. It's just that people have found a loophole in the process and found ways of patenting things for which the patent process should not be applicable, like algorithms.
A quantum computer would compile a kernel at most equally fast, and most probably far slower, than a normal, classical machine. It's only when you've got good stuff, i.e. quantum algorithms available for a particular task are they going to burn rubber and leave your classical machine out in the dust. Granted, someone may find a quantum algorithm for parsing and event state machine processing (there's an unordered quantum search that goes O(sqrt(N)) by L. Grover), but 'less we have that, no dough. Quantum computers are strange artifacts, to say the least, and require a completely different programming paradigm.
Hasn't the US Government's NSA been doing the same thing for years? Just not without official sanction. And I think you guys ought to edit the story a bit so that it reads *cracking*, not *hacking* lest the Hacker Anti-Defamation League start raising hell over it. And this from a site by hackers and for hackers!
If a quantum computer capable of handling a significant number of qubits practically is invented by a US (or by extension, anyone in G7) scientist, it is quite doubtful that we will ever hear about it at all. The NSA and other US Government intelligence agencies will either kill the inventor or recruit him (under threat of death) and classify the technology a million times higher than the hydrogen bomb or Stealth. And yes, it IS possible for a quantum computer to trouble non-factoring-based encryption schemes. There is Grover's algorithm, which is capable of unordered searches in O(sqrt(N)), which has proved useful in improved heuristics for the solution of NP-complete problems. It can't completely ward off NP-completeness, but it is enough to raise the infeasibility threshold somewhat. DES will definitely fall apart as the ~1e16 possible keys goes down to as little as a hundred million operations with Grover's algorithm. And who knows; someone may actually find a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for the satisfiability problem... --
Gee, is the world coming to an end or what? First we got those Lunar and Solar Eclipses two weeks apart last July-August, then the Turkish earthquake, and then another quake in Taiwan, and then another in Southern California (Richter 7.0 but luckily for those people who live there it didn't do much damage). Well, I have the sinking feeling that the next quake is going to hit my sorry country (just south of Taiwan!). The last was nine years ago. It's the millenium; who knows what may happen next? --
It's a classic example of the embrace and extend tactic Microsoft just loves to use. I suppose this is what "de-commoditizing protocols and services" in Halloween I means. They take a simple standard like HTML and try to add their own incompatible extensions to it, using their OS monopoly as leverage so the rest of the world has to bend over. They tried to do this to Java and now they're trying to do it to HTML. Gates really is brilliant, thinking up these new ways to screw the rest of the computing world over for a quick buck. And to hell with innovation and progress. --
IIRC, this guy was called Bob Lazar, and he claims that if used in a certain way Element 115 produces strong gravity waves that are the basis for the UFO propulsion systems. A gravitational warp drive. Of course, without a quantum theory of gravity there's no way to prove or disprove his statements. Unless Lazar is telling the truth, we have never even observed gravitational waves directly! But if Lazar isn't full of it, it hints of something deeply fundamental, like a complex interaction between all four forces that drive the universe. It will be an interesting story, but why do I get the feeling that we won't be around to see it...? --
Well, I recently got a Toshiba Libretto, and after struggling for about a week to get Linux installed on it I suppose that little IR port there at the back will never see any use. I was thinking about using it to send programs to one of the mobile robots we're developing at our lab, but alas... Looks like we're stuck to implementing a complete RF transciever or incompatible IR port from scratch. Getting workable IrDA hardware from a specific manufacturer is so difficult, with fickle computer parts importers and in a state-funded university in the third world to boot.
What do these tight-fisted hardware manufacturers gain anyway from concealing their drivers? Don't they get enough money from hardware sales? Licensing these closed drivers to third parties doesn't account for one hundredth of one percent of their income I guess. Are they afraid that the competition will be able to reverse-engineer them from knowledge of the interface? Granted, knowledge of the interface makes this slightly easier, but a really determined reverse engineer will be able to get them anyway, reverse engineers being what they are. Cracking the interface is only a small part of reverse engineering a system. It's like the argument against hiding cryptographic algorithms: it makes life difficult for people who'd like to use their hardware legitimately, but ultimately doesn't stop those who would abuse their hardware for malicious purposes. --
It will be a long and hard battle before open source ever gains the level of acceptance that traditional closed source systems do, especially among the senior IT managers who make the decisions that lead to adoption of open source systems. Open source is supported in the corporate world primarily by the technical people (such as those who read/.) who know and understand why open source is such a Good Thing, but do not have the authority to get their organizations to adopt it. It's precisely this situation that prompted Linus to say: "But not many people want to come out of the closet to officially say they are using Linux...I know that Linux is used in places like Boeing, but I can't point people to a Web page that says so." And senior management is notoriously difficult to convince, especially for such a revolutionary concept as open source, and being blinded by M$'s vast marketing war machine to boot.
Another, and potentially more serious, problem is the dearth of applications that matter to most companies. Most open source development efforts are useless from the point of view of many businesses. I know for a fact that lots of corporations spend millions of dollars for Microsoft Office licenses, while using only Word to write memos and Excel to balance books. There is no real open source equivalent (yet) for either of these applications, which works compatibly with their closed-source equivalents (to get them to switch while keeping their old documents). Correct me if I'm wrong. You also won't be able to find an accounting or inventory tracking system in the open source world, which are very important to most companies. And while the last two are relatively trivial compared to such massive efforts as the Linux kernel and the GIMP, they are also unglamorous projects from the hacker point of view. Unglamorous but vitally necessary. This mindset has got to change if open source is to be taken seriously in the corporate world. The other difficulty with these applications in particular is that they require knowledge which is typically out of the domain of the regular open source hacker, who typically has training in electrical engineering or computer science, not business administration, accounting, or management (a hacker with an MBA... now that's something I've never heard of before!). And professionals of those types are always in it for the money.
(this has got to be the longest post I've made on Slashdot. Maybe I should write a paper that fleshes out these details...) --
It's pretty slow, at only 130 million mph. That's only a small fraction of the speed of light! It will take approximately 21 years to reach even Alpha Centauri! And never mind more distant star systems... Think of it, someone who was born when the ship leaves Earth will be a grown person by the time the ship gets to Alpha Centauri. (Actually, time dilation means that a 20-year mission appears to be only 19.6 years from the POV of someone aboard the ship; they've lost a whole 138 days traveling at that speed...). It would really be practical only for manned interplanetary travel, because a journey to Pluto would only be about two days at such a high speed. I'm gonna go out on a limb for a moment... Now unless the US Government has found a warp drive in the alien spacecraft they are said to have recovered, our chances of interstellar travel are real slim. Some guy who claims to have been in the Groom Lake ("Area 51") base's inner sanctum says that there was some kind of graviton generating device which was the basis for the alien propulsion systems. That allowed them to get to distant places while hardly moving at all... On a skeptical note, actually proving that such a thing is even possible will probably require a quantum theory of gravity, which is something we probably won't have for a long time (good luck, Professor Hawking!). --
This is a really bad thing methinks. Since my country is part of APEC, that means that these stupid decisions will probably apply to us too. And then we'll have all of the terrible scenarios that the League for Programming Freedom has on their website. Fact is, the power to make laws over the things we care about is in the hands of people who know absolutely nothing about what they're doing, and have no idea of the real consequences of their decisions. "The breaking apart is fundamentally the schizoid and schismatic mental fugue of lawyer-politicians attempting to administrate a worldwide technology whose mechanisms they lack the education to comprehend and whose gestalttrend (sic) they frustrate by breaking apart into obsolete Renaissance nation-states." -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Eye in the Pyramid --
Slashdot Mirror
There are several things that even a non-programmer can benefit from having the sort of freedom to share and change source code. The most obvious advantage being they can always get someone who does know how to program to do custom modifications to free software as need be. These non-programmers can also more easily communicate with the users than any proprietary software developers can. It's an indirect benefit, but a valuable one nonetheless. And it ties in with the freedoms of speech, and other civil rights as well. We see in the flap with the DMCA and the UCITA how copyright laws as applied to digital information violate these rights. In contrast, the freedom in free software serves to uphold those rights as well.
These new "free beer" software packages we find are probably not a good thing. This is because these "free" programs fill a need, and the average joe user who isn't one of RMS's zealots and has at most a vague idea of the distinctions between software that is just free of cost and software that grants him freedom won't really care. And since these packages tend to be more complete than the embryonic Free Software packages that exist, they gain market share, at the expense of software that is Free (speech). Thus the motivation for developing the Free Software versions is decreased, because someone has already filled that need. And the decreased user base for the Free Software variants means development will tend to slow down. And these free (beer) packages, even if Happy Hour never ends (which is extremely unlikely), suffer from all the drawbacks all proprietary software does, and then some. Apart from the fact that you again have secret file formats and the danger of lock-in, as someone has already mentioned, since you aren't paying for it you can't possibly expect any kind of warranty. At least if you payed mucho dinero for a copy of M$ Office, you could at least have the (albeit remote) possibility of getting some useful tech support off M$'s support numbers. Free beer packages probably will not provide any kind of support at all. And there's obviously no possibility of your getting into the guts of the code to fix the problem yourself because it's closed source. The average joe user is at this point only concerned with getting results, and freedom is only an incidental thing for them as of now. These closed-source, free (beer), proprietary packages are a stumbling block in their path because it tends to make them value their freedom less. The average joe user needs to learn to value the freedom granted by true Free Software, and these "free" programs are making that process harder.
It was only a few years ago that people started using unleaded gasoline in my country. No wonder my poor countrymen elected such a buffoon to the presidency of the Philippines. Add brain drain to the mix and to call us Filipinos stupid will begin to become an insult to stupid people. Vicious cycle is right, and we people of the Third World are in deepest.
Well, I might begin to sound like one of RMS's zealots at this point...Although I feel that this is a good thing, they miss the whole point of what free software is about: the precise weakness of 'open source' as a term. Free software is about freedom, not about price. The real reason why free software is stable, low on resources, and so well-supported is because of this freedom. And we shouldn't forget this.
Are these going to go away? If my understanding is correct, biotech patents come very close to patents on software (wetware actually), and worse yet, they amount to patents on `secrets of nature' which should never have patents even by the insane US patent system. If the HGP info is made public then do all of these have to go away? Otherwise, making it public would be a useless gesture.
Just $1,500,000? What the heck are they going to do with such a princely sum? I don't think that this is serious. If ever there is a major technical breakthrough in the field of quantum computing, none of us who are reading slashdot will ever hear about it. The NSA will have that information locked up tighter than the H-Bomb was ever classified. I smell a US Government PR job buried in all this. Ever see Chain Reaction? If ever a major breakthrough that allows the construction of a machine with a nontrivial number of qubits does occur in the near future, the US gov't will quickly take steps to put it under wraps. They'll probably exploit it, too, without letting anyone know about it. When they feel that "the world is ready," that's when they'll start feeding it to some company that has, for some reason, earned government favor. Which may be a long time in coming. I remember Colossus was so deeply classified until relatively recently, after three generations of computers had come and gone! Unless, of course, a practical quantum encryption scheme is developed first and becomes widely adopted, which seems a more likely scenario (encryption is easier and simpler than computation).
What you're referring to is Jack St. Clair Kilby's patent on the integrated circuit. It didn't kill the nascent computer industry then, because nobody but the big companies capable of paying royalties for it were capable of duplicating the IC manufacturing process (BTW, The Japs tried to get around this patent but lost after 30 years, so they'll have to keep paying royalties until 2004 [I think], long after the patent has expired in the rest of the world!). For a quantum computer the process will probably be even more difficult, and enormous quantities of capital would be required, so patent royalties would be a drop in the bucket as far as investment would be concerned, and wouldn't stop the industry from progressing. Patents are not all bad. The whole point of patents is to keep trade secrets from vanishing. Would you rather have the inventor getting rich over his invention or lose the secret forever because his/her company made a bad investment and had to fold? In the case of physical hardware, like the designs for a quantum computer, they would do immeasurably more good than bad. It's just that people have found a loophole in the process and found ways of patenting things for which the patent process should not be applicable, like algorithms.
A quantum computer would compile a kernel at most equally fast, and most probably far slower, than a normal, classical machine. It's only when you've got good stuff, i.e. quantum algorithms available for a particular task are they going to burn rubber and leave your classical machine out in the dust. Granted, someone may find a quantum algorithm for parsing and event state machine processing (there's an unordered quantum search that goes O(sqrt(N)) by L. Grover), but 'less we have that, no dough. Quantum computers are strange artifacts, to say the least, and require a completely different programming paradigm.
Hasn't the US Government's NSA been doing the same thing for years? Just not without official sanction. And I think you guys ought to edit the story a bit so that it reads *cracking*, not *hacking* lest the Hacker Anti-Defamation League start raising hell over it. And this from a site by hackers and for hackers!
If a quantum computer capable of handling a significant number of qubits practically is invented by a US (or by extension, anyone in G7) scientist, it is quite doubtful that we will ever hear about it at all. The NSA and other US Government intelligence agencies will either kill the inventor or recruit him (under threat of death) and classify the technology a million times higher than the hydrogen bomb or Stealth. And yes, it IS possible for a quantum computer to trouble non-factoring-based encryption schemes. There is Grover's algorithm, which is capable of unordered searches in O(sqrt(N)), which has proved useful in improved heuristics for the solution of NP-complete problems. It can't completely ward off NP-completeness, but it is enough to raise the infeasibility threshold somewhat. DES will definitely fall apart as the ~1e16 possible keys goes down to as little as a hundred million operations with Grover's algorithm. And who knows; someone may actually find a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for the satisfiability problem...
--
Gee, is the world coming to an end or what? First we got those Lunar and Solar Eclipses two weeks apart last July-August, then the Turkish earthquake, and then another quake in Taiwan, and then another in Southern California (Richter 7.0 but luckily for those people who live there it didn't do much damage). Well, I have the sinking feeling that the next quake is going to hit my sorry country (just south of Taiwan!). The last was nine years ago. It's the millenium; who knows what may happen next?
--
It's a classic example of the embrace and extend tactic Microsoft just loves to use. I suppose this is what "de-commoditizing protocols and services" in Halloween I means. They take a simple standard like HTML and try to add their own incompatible extensions to it, using their OS monopoly as leverage so the rest of the world has to bend over. They tried to do this to Java and now they're trying to do it to HTML. Gates really is brilliant, thinking up these new ways to screw the rest of the computing world over for a quick buck. And to hell with innovation and progress.
--
IIRC, this guy was called Bob Lazar, and he claims that if used in a certain way Element 115 produces strong gravity waves that are the basis for the UFO propulsion systems. A gravitational warp drive. Of course, without a quantum theory of gravity there's no way to prove or disprove his statements. Unless Lazar is telling the truth, we have never even observed gravitational waves directly! But if Lazar isn't full of it, it hints of something deeply fundamental, like a complex interaction between all four forces that drive the universe. It will be an interesting story, but why do I get the feeling that we won't be around to see it...?
--
Well, I recently got a Toshiba Libretto, and after struggling for about a week to get Linux installed on it I suppose that little IR port there at the back will never see any use. I was thinking about using it to send programs to one of the mobile robots we're developing at our lab, but alas... Looks like we're stuck to implementing a complete RF transciever or incompatible IR port from scratch. Getting workable IrDA hardware from a specific manufacturer is so difficult, with fickle computer parts importers and in a state-funded university in the third world to boot.
What do these tight-fisted hardware manufacturers gain anyway from concealing their drivers? Don't they get enough money from hardware sales? Licensing these closed drivers to third parties doesn't account for one hundredth of one percent of their income I guess. Are they afraid that the competition will be able to reverse-engineer them from knowledge of the interface? Granted, knowledge of the interface makes this slightly easier, but a really determined reverse engineer will be able to get them anyway, reverse engineers being what they are. Cracking the interface is only a small part of reverse engineering a system. It's like the argument against hiding cryptographic algorithms: it makes life difficult for people who'd like to use their hardware legitimately, but ultimately doesn't stop those who would abuse their hardware for malicious purposes.
--
It will be a long and hard battle before open source ever gains the level of acceptance that traditional closed source systems do, especially among the senior IT managers who make the decisions that lead to adoption of open source systems. Open source is supported in the corporate world primarily by the technical people (such as those who read /.) who know and understand why open source is such a Good Thing, but do not have the authority to get their organizations to adopt it. It's precisely this situation that prompted Linus to say: "But not many people want to come out of the closet to officially say they are using Linux...I know that Linux is used in places like Boeing, but I can't point people to a Web page that says so." And senior management is notoriously difficult to convince, especially for such a revolutionary concept as open source, and being blinded by M$'s vast marketing war machine to boot.
Another, and potentially more serious, problem is the dearth of applications that matter to most companies. Most open source development efforts are useless from the point of view of many businesses. I know for a fact that lots of corporations spend millions of dollars for Microsoft Office licenses, while using only Word to write memos and Excel to balance books. There is no real open source equivalent (yet) for either of these applications, which works compatibly with their closed-source equivalents (to get them to switch while keeping their old documents). Correct me if I'm wrong. You also won't be able to find an accounting or inventory tracking system in the open source world, which are very important to most companies. And while the last two are relatively trivial compared to such massive efforts as the Linux kernel and the GIMP, they are also unglamorous projects from the hacker point of view. Unglamorous but vitally necessary. This mindset has got to change if open source is to be taken seriously in the corporate world. The other difficulty with these applications in particular is that they require knowledge which is typically out of the domain of the regular open source hacker, who typically has training in electrical engineering or computer science, not business administration, accounting, or management (a hacker with an MBA... now that's something I've never heard of before!). And professionals of those types are always in it for the money.
(this has got to be the longest post I've made on Slashdot. Maybe I should write a paper that fleshes out these details...)
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It's pretty slow, at only 130 million mph. That's only a small fraction of the speed of light! It will take approximately 21 years to reach even Alpha Centauri! And never mind more distant star systems... Think of it, someone who was born when the ship leaves Earth will be a grown person by the time the ship gets to Alpha Centauri. (Actually, time dilation means that a 20-year mission appears to be only 19.6 years from the POV of someone aboard the ship; they've lost a whole 138 days traveling at that speed...). It would really be practical only for manned interplanetary travel, because a journey to Pluto would only be about two days at such a high speed. I'm gonna go out on a limb for a moment... Now unless the US Government has found a warp drive in the alien spacecraft they are said to have recovered, our chances of interstellar travel are real slim. Some guy who claims to have been in the Groom Lake ("Area 51") base's inner sanctum says that there was some kind of graviton generating device which was the basis for the alien propulsion systems. That allowed them to get to distant places while hardly moving at all... On a skeptical note, actually proving that such a thing is even possible will probably require a quantum theory of gravity, which is something we probably won't have for a long time (good luck, Professor Hawking!).
--
This is a really bad thing methinks. Since my country is part of APEC, that means that these stupid decisions will probably apply to us too. And then we'll have all of the terrible scenarios that the League for Programming Freedom has on their website. Fact is, the power to make laws over the things we care about is in the hands of people who know absolutely nothing about what they're doing, and have no idea of the real consequences of their decisions. "The breaking apart is fundamentally the schizoid and schismatic mental fugue of lawyer-politicians attempting to administrate a worldwide technology whose mechanisms they lack the education to comprehend and whose gestalttrend (sic) they frustrate by breaking apart into obsolete Renaissance nation-states." -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Eye in the Pyramid
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