Tony Parisi doesn't seem to get it--the best way to kill off X3D from getting mindshare was to make it an ISO standard, because almost all ISO standards cannot be freely shared in electronic form and the process takes too long to revise deficiencies. What is really pathetic is with all of his experience Parisi still wasn't able to see that the best way to spread a software technology and overthrow the existing order is to make the standard as freely accessible as RFCs or W3C standards.
For software ISO standards only "work" with already existing market leaders. And even market leaders can be eventually dragged down by the restrictions of being an ISO standard, such as the deficiencies of C++ leading to the creation of Java and C#. Making a software technology such as X3D an ISO standard before it had any market share was simply madness, and Parisi should have known better.
The media portrayed Gerald Ford as clumsy even though he had been an excellent athlete in college. There were comedy skits such as I believe on Saturday Night Live making fun of Ford's tripping while exiting an airplane. I recall browsing a book on left-handedness a few years ago--it might have been Stanley Cohen's "The Left-Hander Syndrome"--that claimed that Ford's problems were due to staff that was untrained for handling the protocols for a left-hander.
What confuses me is reading the replies at Groklaw. According to Loren Heal in the message posted at Groklaw , under the user information and time "Authored by: RealProgrammer on Monday, December 15 2003 @ 11:47 AM EST," "But if you use the Linux source code, even by including the Linux kernel header files, you may only publish your program under the GPL." Loren claims to have reached this conclusion after reading comments by Linux Torvalds. I only saw one reply that might or might not have been a correction to this statement.
I'm assuming to use Linux specific system calls one has to include the header files.
After reading various articles from Linus Torvalds and from people posting on Groklaw, I still have no idea if a program that uses the Linux kernel headers is required to be GPLed. If this is true, what system calls are permitted to be used without having to GPL one's program--only ones already specified in standards such as for Unix?
From what I have read, Oracle's founders had the best solution to the problem of customers holding off buying until version 2.0: "This first Oracle was named version 2 rather than version 1 because the fledgling company thought potential customers were more likely to purchase a second version rather than an initial release."
The old Battlestar Galactica suffered in comparison to Star Wars because the television series could give no hope that the heroes would win. The heroes were therefore losers. On the other hand the constraints of network television story telling demanded that the enemy Cylons, at least the normal soldiers, be portrayed as being ridiculously inept and incompetent, to be swept away like flies in single combat when the heroes used their innate ability. Both sides were portrayed as losers.
Decades have passed and United States audiences willing to watch science fiction have been exposed to anti-heroes in the mass media, from the movies to TV shows such as the Sopranos to WWE pro wrestling. The anti-hero is almost a norm, and it is expected for the weak to be continuously humiliated.
Now is the right time to re-image the Galactica story. Instead of network television having to cater to mass tastes, the Sci Fi Channel can concentrate on a smaller niche, a niche that is quite comfortable with WWE or reality show entertainment.
When I read purported leaks of the Galactica storyline by Ron Moore, I saw that Moore had solved all of the problems posed by the constraints on the original series. What Moore has done is to understand that while the supposed heroes are required to fill up time on the screen, the real stars of the series are the Cylons. Victims in modern television are no more to be pitied than the people trampled in a Japanese monster movie. The story of Galactica has never been about the humans, it should have been, and Moore has remade it to be, about the rise and victory of the new dominant species, the new top predator.
Many will criticize the ridiculous and humiliating portrayal of humans in the new Galactica series. What they fail to see is that we should watch the story as if it were told from the Cylons' perspective. The new series will examine why humans are inferior and why Cylons are obligated to wage total war to eliminate human evil.
Root for the true good guys of Galatica--the Cylons.
Actually, the Japanese had similar oxygen destroying technology since 1954, unfortunately, the discoverer Dr. Serizawa chose to commit suicide rather than risk having the technology made into a weapon. The technology was rediscovered in the 1990s, unfortunately, the manner in which it was re-revealed to the world led to unfavorable publicity. Only now has the furor died down enough for oxygen destroying technology to finally realize its potential.
IANAL, but it seems fortunate to me that the Glade developers inserted into the FAQ included with the source distribution an explicit waiver of rights over generated C code. Glade, which is GPLed, appears to insert into generated projects at least one file support.c which is not meant to be edited and which may be required for the project to function. Without the waiver, I wonder if a Glade produced project could be considered a derived work.
For the sake of clarity, I suggest that if someone decides to GPL a tool which which inserts an equivalent of a template into the output, he or she needs to explicitly state in the license file whether generated output is considered a derived work and therefore subject to the GPL. Years ago the FSF was forced to explicitly state that output from GNU Bison was not bound by the GPL. In the case of Bison, a large portion of Bison's yyparse function was being inserted into the output. Whether or not output the size of support.c or other code inserted from Glade would meet a similar standard is I suspect unknown.
After all, they've shown Braveheart.:-) I'm just wondering what excuse they'll use to do what everyone else is doing when they someday feature The Godfather or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Or I suppose I can look forward to the inevitable James Bond marathon week...
I have little sympathy for fans of cancelled TV shows. The typical response I hear from Farscape fans is to say that everyone else's show is "written to the 13 year old level". Ironically the writer of that remark illustrates his comment by attacking of all shows CSI as "95% star-trek style technobabble around a loose and predicable crime scene". Maybe if fans would show a little more respect for the tastes of others I would have more sympathy. But to be honest, if their attitude is that everyone else is inferior for not watching their show, then I am happy that their show is cancelled.
Why can't Farscape or other SF fans find a way to praise their own show without questioning the intelligence of fans of other shows?
I don't know why people have to feel that the only way to advocate their tastes is to tear down the choices of others. Do these people go around saying that everyone else's cuisine sucks because they really like one of their own particular dishes? Maybe the shows would have more fans if their advocates weren't always acting like a bunch of juveniles.
Ironically just recently there had been much rejoicing over the headline, now prominently featured on Trolltech's website: "IBM Pervasive Chooses Trolltech's Qt/Embedded and Qtopia for its New Embedded Linux Reference Platform".
A century ago Europe dominated the world not just in the sciences and engineering, but in art, literature, theater, and music. Today the European continent lies in cultural ruins, a modern day Roman empire helpless against successive waves of outside invasion.
I think it will become evident that video games are part of the art of this age. In that context it is baffling that Europe has little influence in the current artistic project. Europe speaks better English and has longer historical ties to the United States, yet has eschewed participating in an industry whose size now is greater than that of the movie industry. Japanese, not European artists, are in their games and anime successfully fusing both Western and Eastern culture into the new world youth culture.
Fines for unfair trade practices do nothing to address the real problem, which is that Europe is not producing for itself its own fresh supply of culture. How is this possible given Europe's history, tradition, and diversity?
There is imbalance here which is not good for humanity. Social welfare systems cannot be the ultimate goal, statis cannot be the objective. The argument must be that in comfort creativity and discovery are enhanced. We must find a way to escape the paradox that Orson Welles stated when he said, "In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
Napster missed its chance to truly revolutionize the music industry. Had Napster simply chosen opt-in instead of opt-out, the standard that is proposed for every other Internet issue, Napster could have repeated the success of pop music on the radio.
From what I've read radio faced a similar problem of music licensing, only at that time the issue was the licensing of copyrighted classic music recordings. The solution was to open a new genre of music, pop music.
However, this would have required Napster's founders to have actually done some work that they probably didn't want to do, such as interacting with social classes of people who were ignored by the mainstream. But that's just not what people who want to only have clean hands programming want to do. Too bad, Napster blew the biggest opportunity in this generation to dominate a new medium.
Why can't they donate free labor to ...
on
Get Your Moto On
·
· Score: 1
Predictably after an article is posted about a piece of free software dozens of whiners will complain "Why couldn't this person have contributed free labor to my own pet project." We still have people complaining everytime an article is posted about Gnome even though the project has been successful for years. These whiners never seem to get the point that people have pride in ownership of their own project. If people were to stop developing their own projects, most likely they would simply contribute far less to free software considering the incredible timesink.
I have no idea what you people are complaining about with this new programming language. It's fucking GPLed you hypocritical ingrates. What more do you want? If you think the code has worthwhile ideas, knock yourself out improving other GPL software.
There was only one mathematician, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss. He seemed to live a fairly successful long life including having several children and making a fortune.
Reuse an idea that everyone in the target audience has seen, something shown on US national TV. Have a spunky child play a major role (Sixth Sense). Show young scientists/inventors who are struggling to convince the establishment of their worth. Have some sort of environmental angle where irresponsible use of nuclear weapons causes a threat to the world, and throw in a friendly AI/robot.
From the Danish perspective I would think whether or not wind power's merits will cause an energy revolution are irrelevant. The important thing is that the Danes aren't just using wind power, they are manufacturing the turbines and selling the technology abroad. This brings in cold cash and gives the country a niche in the global economy. That is the point.
By having a focus, Danish industry can seek to acquire the IP such as patents to build up a top industry. As in other industries the idea is to go so far down the learning curve that it becomes more economical for other countries to buy the technology from you rather than develop it themselves.
That is why conservatives who bash alternative energy are stupid. Any reading of US history shows massive government involvement to nurture any industry whether through protective tariffs, cash for infrastructure, land grants, whatever. To make money you have to spend money. A so-called conservative who espouses capitalism should understand that.
Yet another GPL/GNU advocate steals credit from The Apache Software Foundation while claiming that Apache's success supports the GPL. Ironic how the same movement that is trying to advocate the name GNU Linux is shamelessly citing Apache's success as its own. Of course the Apache Software License is incompatible with the GPL so that code from the Apache and GNU projects cannot be mixed whatsoever, but that doesn't stop the GNU advocates from citing Apache as support for the GPL.
How many more of these articles are we going to see that make bizarre claims like Apache is GPL software? (Note the passage containing "today thousands of GNU GPL software packages are already available including operating systems (like the famous Linux OS), office packages, Internet servers (like Apache running on 30% of Internet Servers".
I don't understand the comments that the GPL is impairing MySQL. Considering MySQL's popularity, that does not appear to be the case.
I would suggest the reason is that for consultants who are recommending a custom solution the terms of the GPL are not onerous. The GPL unlike other licenses does NOT require one to give source changes back to the original developer. You just have to give the source code including your source changes to the customer licensed under the GPL.
In theory the customer can then take your changes and distribute them for free under the GPL. But why would the customer do this if your solution is giving the customer a competitive advantage?
I would conjecture that databases are an almost ideal situation for the GPL to not affect consultants. The customer will not be worried because in all likelihood they aren't going to be distributing the customized database outside the company, so they don't have to reveal the code you gave to them under the GPL. You don't have to be worried because even though you licensed your code under the GPL, the customer has no incentive to publicize it.
Schneier's new approach according to the article is to rely on "intelligent, trained" and "well paid" people instead of blind trust in technology. Throughout the article Schneier repeatedly attempts to cut through official explanations to reveal their foolishness by examining root causes. Yet in the end Schneier can say nothing about the causes of the real root problem, at least in the US--almost no one is willing to pay for these people nor give them the freedom to do their jobs in the best way they can see. Unless security is handled by well paid people from top to bottom there will be no real security.
Bad technology that takes away human initiative is used in the US because the good people are too expensive and the cheap people are not reliable. Besides there is a perpetual labor surplus especially of the people who will work for cheap due to basically unrestricted immigration. And since so many of the immigrants come from non-Western European countries there will never be mass public support for paying them higher wages. Those are the facts that limit the effectiveness of security in the US, or the effectiveness of many other things.
There is an incredible article in this month's The Weekly Standard Patio Man and the Sprawl People. David Brooks' insight into the American psyche is that the American approach to problems is to move away, especially to move away from people who are different, to move to a community of similar people. Where people stay rooted such as the South there is open conflict. Where people move to new communities such as the suburbs there can be a facade of acceptance--until too many of the different people start to move in.
In recent years I have noticed an increasing chorus in the media extolling the virtues of Europe, its peacefulness, its openness. I feel a small nagging doubt similar to when I heard praise for Japan's system in the early 80s. In the case of Japan the Sony headed by Akira Morita is not the Sony of today, and in the case of Europe, it does not seem to be headed in the direction of the one long-lasting democracy on that continent--Switzerland. The vaunted EU hardly submits every question of importance such as the Euro to referendum, unlike Switzerland. And even more worrisome, the direction of Europe the past century has been continuous fissioning of countries, instead of Switzerland's keeping itself together despite populations native speaking at least four different languages. Europe essentially murdered or expelled much of its Jewish population, it has not solved the Roma problem, and now Europe is struggling with Muslim immigration.
Even when European countries stay intact all is not well. Is not Italy's problem between north and south the same as the United States'?
Almost all conflict in the past couple of centuries can be summarized as the painful transition from agricultural serfdom to industrial society. A successful modern nation needs to actually pull off two incredible reformations, while most can't manage one. First agricultural serfdom has to be reformed so that small farmers own their land. Switzerland accomplished land reform in the 1800s, Japan had land reform imposed on it by General Douglas MacArthur during the Occupation because it was the only way to prevent a Communist insurrection. Once the land is put in the hands of a land-owning small farmer class there will be no danger of revolution. Sadly nations such as Russia have not accomplished just this one step over the past two centuries. Second, and perhaps paradoxically, the populace must in large part move to the cities and the power of the rural areas over the government must be diminished, for the rural areas tend to be more conservative and less willing to support reform.
Needless to say the vast majority of the nations on this planet have not successfully reformed themselves, twice. Thus there is an endless supply of refugees and endless labor surplus. Security remains far off and elusive.
I do not understand the problem with funding the projects on Tom Lord's web site if the projects have the value claimed for them. The projects appear to be licensed under the GPL. There are GPLed libraries such as hackerlab and there are GPLed programs such as arch. Supposedly arch is being used by several commercial projects. The copyright is held I would guess by one person, Tom Lord, so he would be free to dual-license it for commercial use.
Perhaps the problem is the overinsistence on advertising the products as free software as opposed to advertising them as useful products that can be licensed, for a price, at whatever terms the buyer wishes. The problem appears similar to that solved by Sleepycat.
The claims of hackerlab and arch are that they are technically superior solutions to important subareas of computer science. This is precisely what Sleepycat claims for Berkeley DB. As a GPLed library, hackerlab already qualifies as a product that cannot be used commercially unless the distributor wishes to distribute the source code for the application under the GPL. If hackerlab really has value, that ought to be enough to pry some money to continue its support. Similar considerations should apply to arch if it was designed properly.
I really don't know why in this case the market isn't a perfect judge of the true value of this project.
The IT earthquake of the 1990s was not Linux, it was Sun's smashing the industry equilibrium with Java. With Java, Sun hoped to annihilate its competitors, both Unix and Microsoft, by providing a common platform for software that it alone controlled. The PC would vanish to be replaced by a dumb terminal, the network computer. These network computers would of course have to be connected to servers. And even though competitors could license Java, for a price (especially J2EE), there was always the subcontext of why would a customer choose servers other than from Java's parent Sun, or maybe IBM.
A graphic illustration of the hopelessness of a Unix hardware vendor other than IBM trying to sell middleware for Java can be seen in the collapse of HP's NetAction Software Suite. There is simply no place for HP at the Java table.
But as IBM long ago realized it would be wise to give Sun something to worry about. The remnants of the former Oppose Sun Forever coalition have re-formed, this time with Linux as their project to humble Sun.
I'm a little worried about history repeating itself. Once again an industry consortium is banding together without a good sense of how to improve computing for everyone. Before Oppose Sun Forever the Unix companies employed researchers whose interests ranged over all of computing and who contributed to the community through papers, code, informal cooperation. There has been a tremendous narrowing of focus in favor of corporate IT computing. But IT spending is not exactly increasing, nor will it increase while the telecom industry is so deeply in debt.
While Oppose Sun Forever and Sun were fighting the last time, computing for non-business users was ceded to Microsoft. X was a monstrous bureacratic compromise, and there was no equivalent of X for audio or video.
What indication is there that these clowns aren't just going to create another version of the Open Group while standards go uncreated for natural language processing and artificial intelligence, once again ceding the field to what Microsoft does at Microsoft's pace?
HP's problems began well before Carly Fiorina. The critical decision was made by 1993 when HP decided that it could not afford to manufacture the next generation of processors, choosing instead to partner with Intel to develop the Itanium processor. What HP refused to admit a decade ago was that in effect it was surrendering the high-end Unix business.
By telling the world that PA-RISC was going to be phased out, HP killed any chance of growth in the high-end business. No customer with any sense would believe that a transition from PA-RISC to Itanium would not be a monumental upheaval. And if a painful transition was a certainty, why not bite the bullet and go with either Sun or IBM? The decision could not have come at a worse time with the last boom for a while in business computing just about to start.
With growth flat in what should have been a boom time, HP desperately entered the lower margin consumer PC business in order to generate more cash flow, any kind of cash flow. Unfortunately HP entered the business just as it was about to crash in turn. What was supposed to at least generate some revenue now has the prospect of unending losses.
Anyone can see that the sensible approach for HP would be to save the last of the company's crown jewels, the printer business, by simply exiting the consumer and small business PC markets, both HP and Compaq brands. This would have eliminated competing head-to-head with Dell and probably avoided provoking Dell into trying to offer Dell's own brand of printers. The only problem would have been figuring out what was left for the company to do in the computing industry. Where can HP generate profit if on the high-end the product line is dependent on the Itanium processor, especially if Intel is now selling to anyone not just the processor but also the guts of entire systems? What exactly does HP own that is unique in the computing industry? Where's the beef?
Perhaps the decline was inevitable once HP ceased to be a company of engineers who got things done. The company had reached the limits of organization. To have preserved the "HP Way" the company by the 1980s would have had to have morphed into a high-tech holding company whose "business" would have been using connections to Stanford and Berkeley to finance upstarts such as Steven Wozniak.
Reading the Register's article I came across the bizarre phrase "GNU Perl toolkit". I have never heard of this toolkit. A google search of the exact phrase "GNU Perl toolkit" returns nothing. The FSF's page on Perl has nothing mentioning any sort of toolkit, whereas their page on Java has many projects listed.
A search of google did reveal however that there is a shocking number of companies who seem to believe that there is something called "GNU Perl" including apparently IBM. I'm not holding my breath for RMS to spend any of his time correcting this widespread inaccurate credit of Perl to the GNU project.
That Net-Nexus Seoul article explicitly mentioned cultural differences between the US and Korea. To recast the analysis in a different light, the quest in the US for the past few decades has been for individual space. This is reflected in the American obsession for the automobile and the suburbs. The United States has basically spread out development to sustain the "American dream" of home ownership. In Korea on the other hand the article points out that many people are crowded into small apartments without room to entertain friends. As the Koreans wish to be social they will gladly go out to be with others, and for younger people, they will flock to the equivalent of Internet cafes.
From the American perspective it does not take an evil conspiracy to explain why providers would prefer the Internet to be used to deliver content not interactivity. If there is a market it is likely considering the American culture that this is the best way to make money by satisfying consumer demand. Americans with money will have relatively big houses and the willingness to spend thousands of dollars on home entertainment systems. In the past decade American consumers have shown they are willing to purchase billions in content in the form of DVDs. In the US at least it is not considered shameful to spend whatever free hours one has on self-emersed isolated personal entertainment, and there is a strong psychological demand for such entertainment.
The fly in the ointment is simply the classic analysis by Tanenbaum that one should not underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon transporting tapes down the highway. That is, if one can ignore latency of 12 hours, there is no bandwith advantage to the Internet when it comes to delivering content. In the US at least it is very easy for the lone commuter in an automobile to stop by the store on the way home to pick up a DVD. Unless the Federal Government were to launch a program on the scale of the building of the Interstate highway system to close the last mile gap with fiber, something that will not happen, the average US consumer will suffer less latency from just dropping by the local store versus waiting for content to be downloaded. The current cable/DSL piddly bandwidth relative to what DVD quality content demands simply can't cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
Tony Parisi doesn't seem to get it--the best way to kill off X3D from getting mindshare was to make it an ISO standard, because almost all ISO standards cannot be freely shared in electronic form and the process takes too long to revise deficiencies. What is really pathetic is with all of his experience Parisi still wasn't able to see that the best way to spread a software technology and overthrow the existing order is to make the standard as freely accessible as RFCs or W3C standards.
For software ISO standards only "work" with already existing market leaders. And even market leaders can be eventually dragged down by the restrictions of being an ISO standard, such as the deficiencies of C++ leading to the creation of Java and C#. Making a software technology such as X3D an ISO standard before it had any market share was simply madness, and Parisi should have known better.
The media portrayed Gerald Ford as clumsy even though he had been an excellent athlete in college. There were comedy skits such as I believe on Saturday Night Live making fun of Ford's tripping while exiting an airplane. I recall browsing a book on left-handedness a few years ago--it might have been Stanley Cohen's "The Left-Hander Syndrome"--that claimed that Ford's problems were due to staff that was untrained for handling the protocols for a left-hander.
What confuses me is reading the replies at Groklaw. According to Loren Heal in the message posted at Groklaw , under the user information and time "Authored by: RealProgrammer on Monday, December 15 2003 @ 11:47 AM EST," "But if you use the Linux source code, even by including the Linux
kernel header files, you may only publish your program under the GPL." Loren claims to have reached this conclusion after reading comments by Linux Torvalds. I only saw one reply that might or might not have been a correction to this statement.
I'm assuming to use Linux specific system calls one has to include the header files.
After reading various articles from Linus Torvalds and from people posting on Groklaw, I still have no idea if a program that uses the Linux kernel headers is required to be GPLed. If this is true, what system calls are permitted to be used without having to GPL one's program--only ones already specified in standards such as for Unix?
From what I have read, Oracle's founders had the best solution to the problem of customers holding off buying until version 2.0: "This first Oracle was named version 2 rather than version 1 because the fledgling company thought potential customers were more likely to purchase a second version rather than an initial release."
The old Battlestar Galactica suffered in comparison to Star Wars because the television series could give no hope that the heroes would win. The heroes were therefore losers. On the other hand the constraints of network television story telling demanded that the enemy Cylons, at least the normal soldiers, be portrayed as being ridiculously inept and incompetent, to be swept away like flies in single combat when the heroes used their innate ability. Both sides were portrayed as losers.
Decades have passed and United States audiences willing to watch science fiction have been exposed to anti-heroes in the mass media, from the movies to TV shows such as the Sopranos to WWE pro wrestling. The anti-hero is almost a norm, and it is expected for the weak to be continuously humiliated.
Now is the right time to re-image the Galactica story. Instead of network television having to cater to mass tastes, the Sci Fi Channel can concentrate on a smaller niche, a niche that is quite comfortable with WWE or reality show entertainment.
When I read purported leaks of the Galactica storyline by Ron Moore, I saw that Moore had solved all of the problems posed by the constraints on the original series. What Moore has done is to understand that while the supposed heroes are required to fill up time on the screen, the real stars of the series are the Cylons. Victims in modern television are no more to be pitied than the people trampled in a Japanese monster movie. The story of Galactica has never been about the humans, it should have been, and Moore has remade it to be, about the rise and victory of the new dominant species, the new top predator.
Many will criticize the ridiculous and humiliating portrayal of humans in the new Galactica series. What they fail to see is that we should watch the story as if it were told from the Cylons' perspective. The new series will examine why humans are inferior and why Cylons are obligated to wage total war to eliminate human evil.
Root for the true good guys of Galatica--the Cylons.
Actually, the Japanese had similar oxygen destroying technology since 1954, unfortunately, the discoverer Dr. Serizawa chose to commit suicide rather than risk having the technology made into a weapon. The technology was rediscovered in the 1990s, unfortunately, the manner in which it was re-revealed to the world led to unfavorable publicity. Only now has the furor died down enough for oxygen destroying technology to finally realize its potential.
IANAL, but it seems fortunate to me that the Glade developers inserted into the FAQ included with the source distribution an explicit waiver of rights over generated C code. Glade, which is GPLed, appears to insert into generated projects at least one file support.c which is not meant to be edited and which may be required for the project to function. Without the waiver, I wonder if a Glade produced project could be considered a derived work.
For the sake of clarity, I suggest that if someone decides to GPL a tool which which inserts an equivalent of a template into the output, he or she needs to explicitly state in the license file whether generated output is considered a derived work and therefore subject to the GPL. Years ago the FSF was forced to explicitly state that output from GNU Bison was not bound by the GPL. In the case of Bison, a large portion of Bison's yyparse function was being inserted into the output. Whether or not output the size of support.c or other code inserted from Glade would meet a similar standard is I suspect unknown.
After all, they've shown Braveheart. :-) I'm just wondering what excuse they'll use to do what everyone else is doing when they someday feature The Godfather or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Or I suppose I can look forward to the inevitable James Bond marathon week...
I have little sympathy for fans of cancelled TV shows. The typical response I hear from Farscape fans is to say that everyone else's show is "written to the 13 year old level". Ironically the writer of that remark illustrates his comment by attacking of all shows CSI as "95% star-trek style technobabble around a loose and predicable crime scene". Maybe if fans would show a little more respect for the tastes of others I would have more sympathy. But to be honest, if their attitude is that everyone else is inferior for not watching their show, then I am happy that their show is cancelled.
Why can't Farscape or other SF fans find a way to praise their own show without questioning the intelligence of fans of other shows?
I don't know why people have to feel that the only way to advocate their tastes is to tear down the choices of others. Do these people go around saying that everyone else's cuisine sucks because they really like one of their own particular dishes? Maybe the shows would have more fans if their advocates weren't always acting like a bunch of juveniles.
Ironically just recently there had been much rejoicing over the headline, now prominently featured on Trolltech's website: "IBM Pervasive Chooses Trolltech's Qt/Embedded and Qtopia for its New Embedded Linux Reference Platform".
I think it will become evident that video games are part of the art of this age. In that context it is baffling that Europe has little influence in the current artistic project. Europe speaks better English and has longer historical ties to the United States, yet has eschewed participating in an industry whose size now is greater than that of the movie industry. Japanese, not European artists, are in their games and anime successfully fusing both Western and Eastern culture into the new world youth culture.
Fines for unfair trade practices do nothing to address the real problem, which is that Europe is not producing for itself its own fresh supply of culture. How is this possible given Europe's history, tradition, and diversity?
There is imbalance here which is not good for humanity. Social welfare systems cannot be the ultimate goal, statis cannot be the objective. The argument must be that in comfort creativity and discovery are enhanced. We must find a way to escape the paradox that Orson Welles stated when he said, "In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
From what I've read radio faced a similar problem of music licensing, only at that time the issue was the licensing of copyrighted classic music recordings. The solution was to open a new genre of music, pop music.
However, this would have required Napster's founders to have actually done some work that they probably didn't want to do, such as interacting with social classes of people who were ignored by the mainstream. But that's just not what people who want to only have clean hands programming want to do. Too bad, Napster blew the biggest opportunity in this generation to dominate a new medium.
I have no idea what you people are complaining about with this new programming language. It's fucking GPLed you hypocritical ingrates. What more do you want? If you think the code has worthwhile ideas, knock yourself out improving other GPL software.
There was only one mathematician, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss. He seemed to live a fairly successful long life including having several children and making a fortune.
De Niro needs to remake Godzilla vs. Megalon.
By having a focus, Danish industry can seek to acquire the IP such as patents to build up a top industry. As in other industries the idea is to go so far down the learning curve that it becomes more economical for other countries to buy the technology from you rather than develop it themselves.
That is why conservatives who bash alternative energy are stupid. Any reading of US history shows massive government involvement to nurture any industry whether through protective tariffs, cash for infrastructure, land grants, whatever. To make money you have to spend money. A so-called conservative who espouses capitalism should understand that.
How many more of these articles are we going to see that make bizarre claims like Apache is GPL software? (Note the passage containing "today thousands of GNU GPL software packages are already available including operating systems (like the famous Linux OS), office packages, Internet servers (like Apache running on 30% of Internet Servers".
I would suggest the reason is that for consultants who are recommending a custom solution the terms of the GPL are not onerous. The GPL unlike other licenses does NOT require one to give source changes back to the original developer. You just have to give the source code including your source changes to the customer licensed under the GPL.
In theory the customer can then take your changes and distribute them for free under the GPL. But why would the customer do this if your solution is giving the customer a competitive advantage?
I would conjecture that databases are an almost ideal situation for the GPL to not affect consultants. The customer will not be worried because in all likelihood they aren't going to be distributing the customized database outside the company, so they don't have to reveal the code you gave to them under the GPL. You don't have to be worried because even though you licensed your code under the GPL, the customer has no incentive to publicize it.
Bad technology that takes away human initiative is used in the US because the good people are too expensive and the cheap people are not reliable. Besides there is a perpetual labor surplus especially of the people who will work for cheap due to basically unrestricted immigration. And since so many of the immigrants come from non-Western European countries there will never be mass public support for paying them higher wages. Those are the facts that limit the effectiveness of security in the US, or the effectiveness of many other things.
There is an incredible article in this month's The Weekly Standard Patio Man and the Sprawl People. David Brooks' insight into the American psyche is that the American approach to problems is to move away, especially to move away from people who are different, to move to a community of similar people. Where people stay rooted such as the South there is open conflict. Where people move to new communities such as the suburbs there can be a facade of acceptance--until too many of the different people start to move in.
In recent years I have noticed an increasing chorus in the media extolling the virtues of Europe, its peacefulness, its openness. I feel a small nagging doubt similar to when I heard praise for Japan's system in the early 80s. In the case of Japan the Sony headed by Akira Morita is not the Sony of today, and in the case of Europe, it does not seem to be headed in the direction of the one long-lasting democracy on that continent--Switzerland. The vaunted EU hardly submits every question of importance such as the Euro to referendum, unlike Switzerland. And even more worrisome, the direction of Europe the past century has been continuous fissioning of countries, instead of Switzerland's keeping itself together despite populations native speaking at least four different languages. Europe essentially murdered or expelled much of its Jewish population, it has not solved the Roma problem, and now Europe is struggling with Muslim immigration.
Even when European countries stay intact all is not well. Is not Italy's problem between north and south the same as the United States'?
Almost all conflict in the past couple of centuries can be summarized as the painful transition from agricultural serfdom to industrial society. A successful modern nation needs to actually pull off two incredible reformations, while most can't manage one. First agricultural serfdom has to be reformed so that small farmers own their land. Switzerland accomplished land reform in the 1800s, Japan had land reform imposed on it by General Douglas MacArthur during the Occupation because it was the only way to prevent a Communist insurrection. Once the land is put in the hands of a land-owning small farmer class there will be no danger of revolution. Sadly nations such as Russia have not accomplished just this one step over the past two centuries. Second, and perhaps paradoxically, the populace must in large part move to the cities and the power of the rural areas over the government must be diminished, for the rural areas tend to be more conservative and less willing to support reform.
Needless to say the vast majority of the nations on this planet have not successfully reformed themselves, twice. Thus there is an endless supply of refugees and endless labor surplus. Security remains far off and elusive.
Perhaps the problem is the overinsistence on advertising the products as free software as opposed to advertising them as useful products that can be licensed, for a price, at whatever terms the buyer wishes. The problem appears similar to that solved by Sleepycat.
The claims of hackerlab and arch are that they are technically superior solutions to important subareas of computer science. This is precisely what Sleepycat claims for Berkeley DB. As a GPLed library, hackerlab already qualifies as a product that cannot be used commercially unless the distributor wishes to distribute the source code for the application under the GPL. If hackerlab really has value, that ought to be enough to pry some money to continue its support. Similar considerations should apply to arch if it was designed properly.
I really don't know why in this case the market isn't a perfect judge of the true value of this project.
A graphic illustration of the hopelessness of a Unix hardware vendor other than IBM trying to sell middleware for Java can be seen in the collapse of HP's NetAction Software Suite. There is simply no place for HP at the Java table.
But as IBM long ago realized it would be wise to give Sun something to worry about. The remnants of the former Oppose Sun Forever coalition have re-formed, this time with Linux as their project to humble Sun.
I'm a little worried about history repeating itself. Once again an industry consortium is banding together without a good sense of how to improve computing for everyone. Before Oppose Sun Forever the Unix companies employed researchers whose interests ranged over all of computing and who contributed to the community through papers, code, informal cooperation. There has been a tremendous narrowing of focus in favor of corporate IT computing. But IT spending is not exactly increasing, nor will it increase while the telecom industry is so deeply in debt.
While Oppose Sun Forever and Sun were fighting the last time, computing for non-business users was ceded to Microsoft. X was a monstrous bureacratic compromise, and there was no equivalent of X for audio or video.
What indication is there that these clowns aren't just going to create another version of the Open Group while standards go uncreated for natural language processing and artificial intelligence, once again ceding the field to what Microsoft does at Microsoft's pace?
By telling the world that PA-RISC was going to be phased out, HP killed any chance of growth in the high-end business. No customer with any sense would believe that a transition from PA-RISC to Itanium would not be a monumental upheaval. And if a painful transition was a certainty, why not bite the bullet and go with either Sun or IBM? The decision could not have come at a worse time with the last boom for a while in business computing just about to start.
With growth flat in what should have been a boom time, HP desperately entered the lower margin consumer PC business in order to generate more cash flow, any kind of cash flow. Unfortunately HP entered the business just as it was about to crash in turn. What was supposed to at least generate some revenue now has the prospect of unending losses.
Anyone can see that the sensible approach for HP would be to save the last of the company's crown jewels, the printer business, by simply exiting the consumer and small business PC markets, both HP and Compaq brands. This would have eliminated competing head-to-head with Dell and probably avoided provoking Dell into trying to offer Dell's own brand of printers. The only problem would have been figuring out what was left for the company to do in the computing industry. Where can HP generate profit if on the high-end the product line is dependent on the Itanium processor, especially if Intel is now selling to anyone not just the processor but also the guts of entire systems? What exactly does HP own that is unique in the computing industry? Where's the beef?
Perhaps the decline was inevitable once HP ceased to be a company of engineers who got things done. The company had reached the limits of organization. To have preserved the "HP Way" the company by the 1980s would have had to have morphed into a high-tech holding company whose "business" would have been using connections to Stanford and Berkeley to finance upstarts such as Steven Wozniak.
A search of google did reveal however that there is a shocking number of companies who seem to believe that there is something called "GNU Perl" including apparently IBM. I'm not holding my breath for RMS to spend any of his time correcting this widespread inaccurate credit of Perl to the GNU project.
From the American perspective it does not take an evil conspiracy to explain why providers would prefer the Internet to be used to deliver content not interactivity. If there is a market it is likely considering the American culture that this is the best way to make money by satisfying consumer demand. Americans with money will have relatively big houses and the willingness to spend thousands of dollars on home entertainment systems. In the past decade American consumers have shown they are willing to purchase billions in content in the form of DVDs. In the US at least it is not considered shameful to spend whatever free hours one has on self-emersed isolated personal entertainment, and there is a strong psychological demand for such entertainment.
The fly in the ointment is simply the classic analysis by Tanenbaum that one should not underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon transporting tapes down the highway. That is, if one can ignore latency of 12 hours, there is no bandwith advantage to the Internet when it comes to delivering content. In the US at least it is very easy for the lone commuter in an automobile to stop by the store on the way home to pick up a DVD. Unless the Federal Government were to launch a program on the scale of the building of the Interstate highway system to close the last mile gap with fiber, something that will not happen, the average US consumer will suffer less latency from just dropping by the local store versus waiting for content to be downloaded. The current cable/DSL piddly bandwidth relative to what DVD quality content demands simply can't cut it.