If restrictions on speech are unconstitutional to the point that anyone with enough money can drown out opposing viewpoints in an election, how the hell do they justify allowing a district in central Florida to censor the internet?
It is very likely that corporate advertising that lies and tries to scare people into voting a certain way offends the standards of more than a few communities- say, Berkeley, for one. Under this precedent, Berkeley should start suing the folks who air those highly offensive anti-healthcare reform ads. I guarantee you that they'll have a sympathetic jury if all it takes is a local community standard.
I'm hearing a lot about this story from the perspective of Imus being singled out for saying "nappy headed ho", whereas others (insert random Hip Hop artist here) are not "fired" for saying similar things. This meme appears to be diverting much attention and energy from the both the actual cause of the outrage, and, conveniently for those politicians concerned, from an steaming pile of accumulating scandals in the US executive branch.
IMHO, the actual cause of the outrage is that Imus made an unprovoked derogatory slur on national media against a -specific- group of women, simply because they were female and black. This was basically a public sucker punch against an innocent group of actual, real life young women with parents, relatives and friends.
Can anyone here reasonably say that if a popular, well known personality, on national TV and radio, called your wife or daughter or good friend a (insert race specific stereotype) (insert culture specific derogatory slang for whore), you wouldn't want to defend them at least by complaining to their employer? What if this crap was directed against your team, business, or place of worship?
Somehow this is getting played into making folks look like they're supporting censorship, and it appears to be some sort of insidious dividing tactic that splits folks into the false dichotomy of "if you don't support commercialized hate speech, you support big brother censorship". Man, we are so getting played here.
As a contract custom software developer, I've been dealt with this issue repeatedly over the past 10 years.
The first time it came up, I was employed as an accounting systems developer for a medium sized electronics manufacturer. I was also having some success doing contract work on the side building unrelated software for a couple of small businesses. The work conditions at the employer became unsustainable for me. To make a long story short, the company was run by a dysfunctional extended family which expressed their issues through the inter-departmental processes that I had the task of automating.
At a point, I resigned and incorporated myself as a custom software development company. I knew they depended on me, and I offered them support and continued development as long as they would appoint someone as a single point of contact so that I didn't have to play family counselor to get people to agree on business process. One important function of my new company was to develop a codebase that had general use in the type of work I was doing (relational database front ends) to add significant value to my services by increasing the reliability and decreasing the cost of the custom product I provided. Needless to say, this involved retaining ownership to the code I wrote.
The next thing that happened was that their in-house councel asked me to sign a contract (their "standard" boilerplate) to the effect that everything I created or had an idea about creating during the time I was providing services to them would belong to them, and that I would grant them power of attorney to make sure that I complied. I didn't need to take that to a lawyer to tell me it was 'onerous' (Merriam-Webster: "having legal obligations that outweigh the advantages")- but I took it to a lawyer anyway.
I gained three important things from my work with my lawyer. Firstly, I gained an good understanding of the motivations and implications behind the 'onerous' contract, why things were phrased the way they were, and what was ommitted. Secondly, we worked out a standard agreement for my company, which focused on clarifying the obligations of both parties with respect to the process of allocating resources, delivering custom software, receiving payment, providing a limited warrantee, etc. Thirdly, I gained an understanding of the importance of each clause in my own boilerplate, the reason it was included, and the drawbacks of removing or modifying it.
All in all, the point was to enable me to have a standard agreement which IMHO offered a fair value to both parties with regards to services and IP transfer of non-generic work, and dealt clearly and specifically with the kinds of eventualities that occur in the practice of custom software development. After all, this was -my- business, and it was my responsibility to define the value proposition and negotiate from that perspective.
Well, I responded to my previous employer with my own terms, but they insisted that I agree to their terms. The CEO, with whom I had a positive working relationship, seemed to be caught in the middle. He made a concerted emotional appeal to the effect of "what will happen to the company if you leave? You can't leave us like this, you need to agree to these terms", but ultimately, they didn't go for my agreement, and they refused to tell me why. Ultimately, I refused to agree to their terms. We were both very disappointed and negatively financially impacted.
The second time this happened, I was working for a small startup which was purchased by a huge public corporation. I had designed a product for the small startup, and was providing dedicated support to an initial customer. The huge corporation shut us down after the purchase, but, as I had expressed an interest in pursuing unrelated plans after the acquisition, and the product that I had designed was on the "kill due to redundancy" list, the CEO/purchaser put me in the "terminate" group as opposed to the "assimilate" group. I sign a no-compete in return for an option
Please mod up the parent post. There is a lot of misinformation floating around that Microsoft only -extended- Java. The fact that the core issue here is their deliberate -exclusion- of standard functionality (JNI/RMI) has gotten very little play in this discussion.
Your statements are incorrect. If your standard Java code included standard JNI or standard RMI, your code would not work with Microsoft's JVM. It seems obvious that this was done to prevent people from using JNI to achieve portability in the Java->Native interface, and to prevent people from using RMI for IPC as opposed to Microsoft's IPC flavor of the year.
If Microsoft had included those standard features of Java, there would not be so many complaints about their extensions. IMHO, the whole extension issue is a red herring. The real issue is the standard functionality that Microsoft -excluded- to kneecap otherwise portable Java code.
The only somewhat legit issue regarding MS extensions is the fact that they didn't make developers aware that generated code from their IDE used their Windows specific extensions and thus was not portable.
There seems to be an obvious point of hypocrisy in the position that copyright violation is the equivalent of theft.
The major labels, which are publicly traded corporations, endorse the position of the RIAA that copyright violation, or 'piracy' is the equivalent of theft, and that the industry is sustaining major losses as a result.
If someone robbed their warehouse or 'stole their car', these corporations would be required to charge these losses against stated earnings as an expense on their income statement.
The fact that they do not write off piracy as a loss is indicative that they do -not- consider piracy to be theft when it comes right down to it.
To what extent are these these public traded corporations making false and/or misleading public statements about the degree of 'theft' affecting their financial health? Are they not violating some sort of SEC rules when they mislead investors into thinking that their financial statements somehow account for this 'theft'- implying that their earnings would be much higher if this 'theft' did not take place? Doesn't this artificially inflate the value of their stock by implying that their efforts to stop 'piracy' will have some sort of proportionally positive effect on their earnings?
Perhaps an appropriate response to statements from the RIAA equating copyright violation with theft is to ask them "Where on your members' income statements do they account for this theft?". A very simple question, but the answer is either "ok, copyright violations are not really theft, they are just potentially lost sales", or "we are commiting fraud by not accounting for the theft thus artificially inflating our earnings"
IMHO, finding pre-built functionality out there that does what I want, the way I want it, with an appropriate license and tolerable side effects that does not require me to make me own code dependent on the third party implementation is very difficult. I don't think the state of the art of component abstraction methodologies (class libraries, VMs, languages) are mature, complete and interoperable enough at the present time to reduce the amount of integration effort required for third party code to the point where using many components from different vendors in a single system is cost effective.
While functionality that you build can be an asset if you can effectively package it for re-use, integration code that you write to work third party components into your own application can become a liability, as it absorbs maintenance effort as the third party libraries evolve.
Third party code that has well defined interfaces, and would be very hard to implement yourself tends to be better suited for integration as the cost of integration over time needs to be less than the cost of building it yourself.
In my experience, it is easy to underestimate the amount of integration effort required for third party code due to vendors' incentive to promote their products. Some commercial vendors get you way past the point of no return before you find the 'issues'. Once you pass the event horizon, you may be doomed to have your time and money sucked into the black hole of repeated workaround and upgrade.
Open source is better that way- at least you can -see- what you are getting into before you decide to commit the integration time.
It is very hard to predict how much it will really cost to integrate with something you don't fully understand. If you do fully understand it, it may be less expensive to build it yourself.
So at some point SCO realized that their 'stolen' IP was in the Linux kernel. SCO was distributing said Linux kernel at the time under the GPL and chose to continue distributing it under the GPL for some time after learning about the situation.
Regardless of IBM's culpability in stealing SCO's code (that is, if IBM is in fact guilty), there are two obvious licensing implications for the rest of the Linux community of SCO's continued distribution of the kernel under the GPL.
If SCO knowingly included their own IP in Linux kernel distributions, releasing the whole package under the GPL they:
1. Chose to release their own IP under the GPL and have thus spared the rest of the community from having to address the issue.
or
2. Have violated the terms of the GPL themselves by intentionally distributing GPLed code with their own proprietary code embedded in it. As such, they had no license to distribute the Linux kernel and may be guilty of copyright infringement against everyone who holds a copyright on code in the Linux kernel. They may also be responsible for any damage they may have caused to those receiving the distribution which was misrepresented as being GPL licensed, since at some point in time they had enough information to know that their distribution was infringing, yet they continued to distribute it.
I'm not a lawyer, but maybe a lawsuit to make SCO clarify their licensing position regarding code they have chosen to ship with the Linux kernel (once they had full knowledge it was their IP) would be in order.
Re:Stop the anti-MS BS all the damned time
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 1
Ever heard of AccessibleObject, JVMPI or Custom ClassLoaders? There, you have at least 3 ways to access private fields in Java besides your 'only way'.
Untrusted, sandboxed code in Java is not permitted to use these features.
The point here is to secure a user's own trusted hardware and software (including the VM) from some developer's untrusted code. Access modifiers are an important part of the 'sandbox via encapsulation' model which is fundamental to Java security. The Java sandbox will not allow untrusted code to access private members of trusted code, or to do anything to circumvent such a restriction, such as change the access modifier through reflection.
If an untrusted developer can tunnel out of the sandbox in.NET by bypassing lax enforcement of access modifiers, that would be a serious security hole.
For some reason people here seem to be making the misinterpretation that the point is to secure some developer's compiled code and runtime context from another user's or developer's hardware and software, which is patently ridiculous. You can't secure something from the mechanism responsible for enforcing security. If you are going to let your code run on someone elses machine/VM in the first place, you are going to have to tolerate it when that machine/VM decides to not follow your instructions.
Basically, whoever owns the machine (physical, OS, or VM) gets to provide the security, normally by relying on software mechanisms like sandboxing external code. This issue is about trusting the these mechanisms to keep your machine secure, NOT about keeping your code secure from untrusted machines. THAT can only be done by keeping your code off of those machines entirely.
I guess that explains the difference in attitudes to borderline copyright infringement- if it takes you 8 months and most of your sanity to get it right, you will care an awful lot more to extract every last buck out of it than if you knocked it out in 3 days and could do it again next week.
This leads to the pathological situation that a 'turd' (as the expression goes) painstakingly polished for 8 months may come with its own secret service, while an inspired performance captured and delivered in 3 days may come with a license to share.
I'm not saying that this is the normal case, but when you are forced under contract to produce music, 95% of the total product of 8 months in the studio probably never makes it out. This is probably a huge cost factor for major label music- they spend it to write in the studio because they can.
This sounds a bit like the dot com startup thing where a company flush with VC hires 30 coders to start coding while they are still trying to figure out what their business plan is.
geekee writes "But unknown artists will give their left arm for a recording contract that is a supposed rip-off. Why? Because it isn't a rip-off. Unknown artists want someone to take a risk on them."
Lots of people also give their 'right arm', so to speak, and their paycheck to casinos and other such types of gambling. IMHO, it it probably easier to win a slot machine jackpot than it is to 'make it' in the music business in the way that many starry eyed wannabes think is coming to them when they 'get signed' by a major label.
Many aspiring artists and songwriters fail to understand that -you- are employing the -label- when you sign a contract. They wouldn't be so enthusiastic about 'getting signed' by the door-to-door insurance salesman or Anderson Consulting, for that matter. They think that 'getting signed' == being propelled to stardom on a magic carpet, but in reality, it is more like hiring a major consulting company to help you reach Fortune 500 status but instead going bankrupt paying their fee while they have you running around doing all the legwork. To extend the analogy, once you are bankrupt, they buy you for a 'song' and -then- cash out, leaving you wondering what happened.
This illusion is propogated by the media concentration and marketing influence of the major labels. The same influence which creates manufactured one-hit-wonders with billions in revenues yet elusive profits seems to make people think they can be the next pop star if they are just 'found' by the right sugar daddy.
This stuff is becoming more and more like an infomercial every day- "Johnny signed the contract, and now he's down at the beach partying with the babes. You too can be the next Britney Spears- if you're hot and you can dance, we'll let you sign the contract too, and then you can be on stage selling product for us, erm.. performing your art as well. In only 20 years, you too might be rich and famous. (fine print...compensation not guaranteed...substantial penalty for early withdrawal...artist is responsible for all expenses incurred on their behalf...company held harmless if artist fails perform as instructed)". You get the idea.
Business like these will gladly take a sucker for all they are worth. These people are not out to help your career, they are out to extract maximum value from your intellectual property and your good looks while you 'till the soil', so to speak. This is why most business-savvy artists don't sign major deals unless they have a lot of leverage (like a huge existing fan base) to negotiate equitable agreements.
BTW, in order to justify getting the lion's share of the profit, less than ethical businesses tend to grossly inflate the perceived monetary risk they are taking. As we've all seen, especially lately, corporate conglomerates have many unseen pockets to help them define 'risk' and 'profit' in a way that best suits their own interests.
This issue is -the- pathological case of debates about language. IMHO, this is more about language than religion.
One of the aspects of this case that makes it remarkable is that it is brought by an individual who is described as an 'atheist'.
* According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 'atheist' means: Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a god.
* Thus the definition of 'atheist' is dependent on the definition of the word 'god'.
* The definition of the word 'god' and its cross language equivalents is arguably the most contentious and divisive issues of human history. Attempts to subject others to a particular definition of this concept are responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of millions and tyranny over billions.
* The act by groups of people of defining the word 'god' and the subsequent implications for human motivation and behavior is at the core of what we define as 'religion'.
* The U.S. constitution's freedom of religion tenents are designed to ensure that the government does not make laws or take actions that favor one religion over another- in this context, the constitution prevents the government from passing laws or taking actions which favor one individual's definition of the word 'god' over another's.
* One appropriate secular, unbiased interpretation of the word 'god' (IMHO) would be 'your most all encompassing concept, in light of your own personal world view'. Surely that one is hard to logically refute without negating all existence.
* In light of the above secular version of the word 'god', the word 'atheist' would be an oxymoron, which would mean that this definition of the word 'god', if made by the court to validate the inclusion of 'under god' in the pledge, would violate the constitution because it would be biased against atheists, if atheism is to be considered a valid beleif system.
* If the courts decide that the word 'god' applies to a specific set of monotheistic religions, the court has effectively issued a religious doctrine favoring a particular religion, a decision which violates the constitution.
* The 9th circuit court, in writing its decision, equated 'god' to 'jesus' and 'vishnu'- in effect, it issued a religious doctrine defining the word 'god' as referring to the highest concept of a specific set of monotheistic religions, just as those other words apply to higher concepts of various other religions. As such, it seems that the court had no jurisdiction to make such a decision because it is biased towards a specific religion.
* The conclusion that can be derived from all these arguments is that the word 'god' is in effect a divisive razor, which causes a bias in all those who seek to incorporate it into language, by virtue of the fact that the word means something unique to every individual, and that self described atheists are defining their own belief system in terms of that which they don't beleive in- any definition at all of the word 'god'.
It seems that due to the inherent contradictions, divisiveness, and confusion that occurs when trying to apply logic and reason to the word 'god', that the use of this word should be excluded in language that seeks to achieve clarity , inclusion and fairness, which is the goal of our constitution and framework of laws.
Rather that trying to define the word 'god' as the property of any individual religion, the court should probably, IMHO, just roll back the act of congress which introduced the word in the first place, with the reasoning that it is impossible to incorporate the word 'god' into any official language without creating the perception of religious bias and de-facto endorsement of a particular religion- even if the word were defined to have a specific secular meaning.
Those who would argue that the word 'god' should be incorporated into official language should take a moment to define what they mean by 'god', and achieve some consensus about that definition. If that is considered to be an impossible task, and they find that the word is not really definable to any reasonably detailed consensus, what business does the word have in the language of our legal system and our government?
Personally, I have my own definition of a highest, unifying concept, that which no name can do justice. This is because names define and separate- what would be the point of a unifying concept if it could be defined from other concepts? It wouldn't be unifying any more. This is why the word 'god' should be left out of official public discourse and kept in the context of one's personal religion and spirituality. If people want to think of being 'under god' in the 'one nation' part of the pledge of allegience, they are welcome to invoke their own concept of such.
We are a custom software development shop using our own framework as a basis for delivering custom applications to customers.
We have an arrangement with our customers which works out very well for both of us. Once you factor in the incentives of both parties, this arrangement naturally leads to a happy situation for both parties.
We come into the relationship with a substantial framework, which we license to the customer under the GPL. As the relationship progresses, we build many components. Some of these components are specific to the customer's business process, and some are more generic. We retain all IP rights to the generic components, which we integrate into the framework and license back to the customer under the GPL. The customer retains all IP rights to code that is specific to their business process.
We maintain a code repository for each customer which contains their business specific code. These are typically workflow definitions, business specific data models, entry screens and reports, etc.
We also maintain a common repository for the framework, which contains all the reusable code (whatever we define to be reusable). We usually have a few projects going on at the same time, and this repository receives contributions from all of them.
The benefits of this arrangement for the customer are:
* Customer owns specific business process logic, UI elements, data models for their business, which means that they control their trade secrets and we can't go to their competitors and sell them the system they payed to custom build. In return, customer is solely responsible for paying someone (usually us) for maintaining and enhancing these components as their business changes.
* Customer does not have to pay to build a major system from scratch. They get a tested and tuned framework for free upon entering the contract, and only pay for customization, which is a process we excel at. In this fashion, we can deliver a return quickly and with minimal expenditure, since we don't have to build much infrastructure.
* Customer gains the benefit of framework enhancements for other customers. Over time, as contributions are made to the core framework, more and more reusable functionality is available to incorporate into our custom solutions. This has the effect of bringing sophisticated functionality into the customer's price range. In effect, all our customers indirectly share the cost of maintenance, tuning, and additional generic functionality.
* If we go out of business for some reason, the customers have all the source code they need to achieve continuity.
The benefits of this arrangement for us are:
* We gain a powerful framework that is tested and tuned across multiple production deployments.
* We can out-bid competitors who need to build things from scratch, who base their work on proprietary software which they cannot enhance or control, or who must recoup massive amounts of R&D , marketing expense, and capital risk.
* We spend our time solving unique business and technical problems, as opposed to re-coding functionality for multiple customers simply because we don't own IP.
* We spend very little time on maintenance because most of the difficult code is maintained in one place- application specific code is mostly declarative.
* We do not have to pressure customers to buy upgrades. We keep customers current as part of the development process.
We have been modestly successful using this model, and people who work with us, both developers and customers, are happy and getting good value.
Once caviat- our customers tend to be in a line of business other that software development, thus they care less about owning software IP than than do about streamlining their business processes.
I run a small custom software development company. We develop web applications tailored for our clients' businesses. Our clients tend to be small businesses who make a fair margin providing products and/or services to their customers. Their primary motivation for hiring us to develop web applications is to achieve some ROI by cutting costs associated with business processes by automating them. This allows them to scale their offerings better. These business processes range from internal data entry and reporting systems to high volume public web sites.
In our scenario, there are a number of reasons why using and developing free software makes sense:
1. Predictability: Free software is much more transparent and malleable than software that cannot be modified by the purchaser. This permits a software engineering organization to understand and mold the 'building materials' to fit the software development process. By understanding and being able to tune the composition and behavior of software components, one can develop reliable metrics for cost and time prediction.
Because our customers are usually not flush with cash, budget and timing can make or break a project. Our ability to meet our estimates is one of our key competetive aspects. The achilles heel of non-free software is the 'suprise factor', or the point in the project where you run across an bug or an invalid assumption. Lack of malleability causes you to have to build a 'workaround', which may have a ripple effect on the rest of the architecture, and may blow your budget as a result.
In summary, free software is much more predictable than non-free software due to its transparency and malleability, and thus is a preferred choice when faced with tight budgets and schedules.
2. Price: Not having to pay license fees as business expands and usage increases is a clear bonus here. Not having to manage license fees is a considerable factor, due to the potentially massive cost and legal implications of non-compliance.
In some cases, prices for well known commercially distributed application servers are higher that what we charge to build an entire application, and in our experience don't meet our requirements regarding performance, reliability and development tool support that we need for our projects.
3. Ease of distribution: We install our GPL framework and custom applications built on top of it to customers by checking it a single set of files from a CVS (revision control system) account onto each piece of hardware they need it on. Separately installing and managing dozens of proprietary components on each target machine in order to deploy an application would present a point of cost, complexity and potential for human error, yet this is usually a required step when using non-free software due to licenses which restrict copying.
4. Vendor goals misaligned: The business model of proprietary software comes with an incentive to seek the largest possible target market for products. Vendors do not build products for the handful of experts in a given area, they build them for the masses of novices and average users because they are easier to satify and represent a larger market segment.
In addition many commercial product vendors polish the upper, visible layers of their products and ensure that 'common' use patterns work well. This means that these products will serve the average user, but any underlying architectural deficiencies won't be uncovered until the point they become a problem, usually in the latter phases of a project, which is the -worst- time to discover a problem.
As an expert in my field, I ultimately demand a high level of quality in my tools, even if I have to improve them myself to get them to the level of quality I require. If use a tool from a non-free software vendor and it doesn't meet my standards of quality, I have no option but to toss it out and start over with a different tool. Coupled with the fact that I cannot inspect the architecture of the tool before I commit to using it, my logical conclusion is that most commercial software represents an uncontrollable project risk. Some people can live with that, if they have a lot of cash to burn, but my customers won't fund that kind of risk.
Often, people make the mistake of associating well marketed brand names and high product cost with a reduced level of project risk. I have not found any justification for such a correlation. The source of the risk is ultimately a lack of visibility with regards to product architecture, a lack of understanding of the vendors primary target market (usually due to vendors not wanting to exclude -anyone- as a potential customer), and a lack of ability to fix bugs promptly.
5. Selective use of others work: With free software, one can gain the benefits of using existing code at a granular level. With non-free software, this choice is not so granular- you end up having to use much more of a third party product than you may need or want to simply because the product can not be de-integrated by the purchaser.
In summary, using free software is critical for my business developing custom solutions for customers. I get paid in proportion to my costs developing these solutions, and make a fair profit. My business is sustainable and relatively predictable due to the level of control I have over my toolbase and development process. This level of control necessitates the use of free software, but free software alone is not sufficent- I have put a tremendous amount of work into my own GPL'd tools and into the integration with third party GPL tools, as well as commercial products where they can be tolerated.
I would love to know how many people vote multiple times by sending an absentee ballot to their summer homes. I would hope that there would be some national cross checking going on, because this could have a significant effect in a place like Florida.
Mike
A pocket-watch form factor would be great
on
Watch Camera
·
· Score: 1
I've always thought that a pocket-watch form factor with a sturdy metal case on a belt chain would be a much more attractive option.
The round case would help it work with clothing better as the corners would not protrude or get caught, and round things tend to be a bit more stylish.
The unit could then have more room for functionality (in both halves of the shell) without it being too clunky to wear, while it would still maintain its wearability aspect, unlike palm PDAs which, IMHO, cross the threshold of being truly 'wearable'.
I can imagine a brushed chrome or matte black shell about 2.5 inches to 3 inches in diameter and about.5 inches to.75 inches thick, with a tasteful multi-colored LED on the outside, a color, touch screen lcd display on the top and a touch-tablet interface on the bottom.
The combination of the all the cool I/O functions (PIM, audio/video I/O, gps, IR, bluetooth, serial) would at least be more feasible in this larger form factor. Perhaps these functions can all use a peripheral bus where the option hardware would be packaged in pie-slice shaped modules- 8 slots per unit and a module can use an integral number of slots.
I would definitely buy something like this, as long as the OS was open enough to support a community of developers.
What is terrific about this research is not simply that it can recognize a word independently of the speaker, rate of utterance, and noise characteristics. The 'design patterns' used in this system can provide a building block for systems which recognize patterns in many different areas.
Generalizing a system like this from recognizing one word to recognizing many seems to be simply a matter of determining which 'word-neuron' is the most excited. Recognizing phrases may be accomplished by using a sequence of 'word-neuron' firings as input and determining which 'phrase-neuron' is the most excited.
Presumably, the system works by using some sort of time-delay neuron chain which ensures that all the monosyllables of the word 'one', when spoken in the correct sequence, generate signals which arrive at the 'aggregator' neuron at the same time, thus pushing it over the threshold. (I won't attempt to try to figure out how the -learning- system works right now, which is the really deep part of this:).
I would really like to know which principles of neuron activity play a factor in building such a system- there is a relatively fixed physical model which is simulated in a piece of software; as well as the the interconnection patterns which realize the learning and pattern recognition model. This knowlege could form a great foundation for a general purpose piece of software that could be applied to many areas of pattern analysis.
Mike
Have you ever made a copy, or received a copy of a tape or album from a friend, which introduced you to a band who later became a major influence and indirectly influenced your later success?
Tell us how you were first introduced to -your- musical influences, specifically where you first heard your favorite bands, and what specific media (tape, album, copy of friend's tape, radio, bootleg, etc) were involved.
If you would have been prosecuted immediately for receiving unauthorized copies of other's music by the bands involved, how may have this affected your perception of these bands?
To make the question simpler, how would you feel about the Misfits they had you arrested for receiving a unauthorized copy of one of their albums?
I have been wondering for a while just how censored the movies I rent at the video store are. I've seen a couple of director's cuts of movies, and have then looked at the released version and found that much was lacking.
From many of the comments I have read, I now understand that Region Coding is an attempt by the movie industry to balance the need to sell movies and the need to maintain political capital in the U.S. specifically. That is, explicit content in movies released in the U.S. would rally the puritan special interest groups and their congressional representatives against the movie industry. I suppose that there is some incentive to tailor content to foreign countries as well, in order that the distribution channels maintain political capital in their respective regions. I suppose that this is an issue with movie studios in other countries as well, but the U.S. certainly has political issues regarding sex and nudity.
I would certainly love to see an uncensored version of Eyes Wide Shut. I'm disappointed that in a country like the U.S. that was built on freedom of speech, I cannot obtain uncensored versions of popular movies at my local video store. Perhaps I was naive, but now I'm truly disgusted. I feel like I'm getting ripped off- like I only got a 'lite' version of something, or a half-cup of coffee, or watered down liquor.
Perhaps it is not the threat of unauthorized duplication, or even of there being alternatives to licensed players, but the threat of political confrontation which drives the movie industry to pursue DeCSS, since the open source nature of the product would allow region codes to be easily defeatable without threat of license revocation. God forbid some conservative senator's kid runs Linux and plays an uncensored version of some movie his foreign exchange student brought over from Japan. Unfortunately for the movie industry, 'Region Code Bypassing' doesn't carry the same emotional and PR weight as 'Piracy'.
Perhaps the true purpose of the DMCA and its access control provisions is to introduce a firmer basis for controlling access to pornography and other 'undesirable' content, by giving the content production industry a legal tool that gives them no excuse NOT to control access, and then holding them accountable if they don't control access effectively enough.
This may be a stretch, but since Congress doesn't have a friend in the Executive branch of government for their censorship agenda, they are using a cash rich music and movie industry as a surrogate Executive branch in order to establish a judical bulwark of precedents for their legislation.
I just don't buy the argument that Region Coding is just to prevent people from seeing stuff before it comes out locally. Censorship concerns are the real issue, and the only entity who wants to pursue censorship and has influence is Congress.
The question is, can and would Congress legislate against the movie industry if the movie industry stopped wholeheartedly 'enforcing' censorship through region coding and other means?
I'm not a theologian or a physicist, nor a practicing member of a religion, but I have thought long and hard about this word 'God' we have.
The short of it, is that 'God' is a word for 'everything', or 'the whole of existence', or just plain 'all'.
Any attempt to define 'God' as anything other is illogical, since the act of defining what something -is- also defines what it is -not-. Definitions differentiate something from its context. But if there is God and something else that is not God, then there is something greater than God in the combination, which misses the point- God is a word for everything.
Trying to associate words like 'created' and 'causes', etc with God is missing the point as well. Time is part of God, just another aspect of existence. If you are at the level of thinking about everything, there is no was, there is no will-be, there just IS. All of time exists, every 'frame' of it in a time-space.
The many words for God in different religions speak about aspects of existence as it relates to us. The Judge, the Merciful, Our Lord, Protector, etc. These aspects have personified the word and have tended to distract people from the true meaning (a unifying and empowering principle) and into deity worship, and from there, into the control of religions 'authorities' who may have a divisive purpose.
Remarkably, the word 'Elohim', a word for God in Hebrew, is -plural-, a possible indication that someone was trying to convey a single word for the multitude that composes 'everything'.
The laws of God are the laws of existence (physics, psychology, chemistry, interpersonal relationships, etc), the ones we know and the ones we haven't learned about yet. The laws of God cannot be broken, only our assumptions about them can be (Newtonian->Quantum paradigm shifts).
Imagine trying to explain the concept of 'everything' to people, especially those without a philosophically and historically rich language, in order to get people to think bigger picture than their day-to-day existence. Eventually, the word you use for that 'everything' gets deified. People that haven't caught on to the concept start worshiping the word, much like their other gods. Picture the dialog:
Random person: 'You mean 'everything' is more powerful than Ra, the sun god?'
Philosopher: 'No, 'everything' is bigger than Ra, bigger than all the gods put together'
Random person: 'Oh, ok, long live 'everything', our greatest lord'.
Sometimes I think the commandment (of the 10 commandments of popular knowledge) 'Thall shall not worship the graven image', means 'Don't worship the tablets this is written on' and 'Don't worship the word God' as much as it means not to worship statues.
One of the most important prayers of Judaism contains the phrase 'The lord is one and his name one'. This sounds like an attempt to drive home the point that the God means the 'all'. (Even the word 'Universe' is overloaded these days). Language is somewhat incapable of doing the opposite of defining and dividing.
So in my humble philosophy, the Supreme Being is everthing; us, time, evolution, science, love, war, disease, the cycle of big-bang and big-bust, etc. There is no such thing as God vs. science, because they are one and the same. Everything can be ascribed to God, without putting an end to the scientific investigation of 'how'.
Saying that God created everything is like saying that the Earth starts at the North Pole. It's just not linear, even if it looks that way from our point of view. Time is part of 'everything' just like space.
Overall, thinking about God as a word for everything is faultlessly logical, is compatable with interpretations of ancient religious texts and can well be a source of great spiritual inspiration (God spoke to Einstein, or rather, Einstein, through dedicated thought and observation, came to a profound conclusion about the nature of Everything---- what's the difference here? None, as far as I can see). This also leaves NO room for disagreement about 'the nature of God' , but rather puts the realm of disagreement into constructive academic research on the nature of the universe and life.
I apologize if I have offended anyone, but I would like to hear what others think about this approach.
1. Customers who need software post requirements to a web application.
2. Developers submit a proposal with features and milestones and a bid, potentially leveraging the fact that multiple customers have similar requirements. The bid is to a pool, not an individual customer. Customers save money dividing the cost equally. The proposal does not have to meet all the requirements- as long as the proposal is accepted by the pool of customers.
3. During the project, some respected third party reviewer elected by the pool and approved by the developer is responsible for ensuring that the developer has lived up to the milestones they have stated in the proposal.
4. After the pooled work is done, customers can re-pool to complete additional requirements not met by the original proposal.
If 50 customers wanted a GUI admin interface for Apache, $500.00 apiece results in $25,000.00 pooled to develop the code.
I find the reverse auction approach to be too top-down to attract good developers into this model. Top-down work is easy to come by at high rates for good developers- why should the subject themselves to this model.
Letting developers propose the scope of the project they are willing to work on puts the developer in the driver's seat, which is a more coveted position, and is more likely to be preferred by developers to top-down contractor work, which is one of the primary ways that open source developers make a living.
It seems that Bill Joy does not understand the fundamental enabling principles of the GPL, and their truly democratic nature.
1. Modifications to another's work are judged by the community and ONLY the community, with no barrier to redistribution. In a worst-case scenario, if Linus doesn't like someone's mod to the kernel, but 50% of the rest of the community does, this 50% of the community does not have to wait for Linus or anybody else to approve anything in order to use the modification. It would sure be nice to fix some long standing Java bugs and OPTIMIZE some of the existing implementations without having to go through Sun or write my own versions of their implementations.
"Torvalds is a philosopher-king, let's say. Do you prefer that to a democracy?". Bah!
Imagine if we had to go through a single entity who controlled who got to run for President of the U.S. on the basis of the 'compatability of their philosophy' with the ideals of the controlling entity. That certainly is not a democracy to me. To call the SCSL democratic is playing fast and loose with the word. The GPL is WAY more a democracy, because there is no GATEWAY ENTITY.
2. If the fork illustrated by #1 does happen, the GPL ensures that a third party can come along and find a way to make the two forked code bases distributable as a unit, with perhaps a compiler switch or a 'compile-time' module or patch. If this work passed community scrutiny, it will be accepted by a large majority. This is only possible because they have access to the source code of both distributions, and they can get it out to people to look at DURING AND AFTER the development process with NO SINGLE GATEWAY ENTITY.
The problem with the SCSL is that SUN is the gateway entity. You can't distribute your mods or get help with development or testing without going through SUN to pass their compatability tests. So everyone involved in the development process must bind themselves to the SCSL, and you can't even solicit community review before the code is 'finished'. In essence, you have to use the JCK and pay SUN to do your QA for you if you can't afford to pay people to enter into the SCSL agreement, which most open source developers do not want to do.
Granted, the Blackdown Java-Linux port is quite stable in it's pre-release form. If the SCSL weren't in the way, I for one would contribute a significant amount of effort to making that port successful, since I use Java almost exclusively in my software development services business. I would put particular effort into optimizing the Java APIs, which would result in faster Java everywhere, benefitting Sun.
But Sun obviously isn't ready to take the step of making the free software community their development PARTNER. With the SCSL, they have come as close as possible without actually giving up anything. They just have to realize that if they don't give something up, nobody else will either.
What disturbs me is that Sun tries to portray the SCSL as fair to the those on the other side of the agreement, and better that the GPL for the community. At most, it is a legal vehicle for releasing source code to paying licensees. At worst, it ensnares unknowing developers into not being able to work on clean-room implementations by exposing them to Sun's intellectual property on unfair terms. They are in deep public denial if they are trying to say that the SCSL is their answer to the GPL or any open source development process.
I have found that for user-centric projects, such as web sites or business process automation systems a use-case based approach to requirements works well to establish an agreement between the producer and the consumer of the system as to precisely what situations need to be handled by the system.
Basically, you script out how a user interacts with the system and try to cover all standard and anomalous cases.
If the system is large, it is usually productive to phase the project in terms of iterations, as opposed to doing -all- the design up front a-la the waterfall model. This is because a tremendous amount of discovery happens during the implementation process, no matter how thorough you might have thought you were in the design process. Both the customer and the implementer will end up discovering new and changed requirements.
By doing a top-to-bottom iteration- a reusable prototype so to speak, you and the customer can get a better sense of what you will encounter during the rest of the project. You will also have a preliminary unit effort measurement with which you can guage the rest of the project by.
I recommend putting the use cases in a database that preserves revisions, and composing the design docs on the fly. This is because you will want to view them from multiple points of view, such the users point of view, a workflow point of view, or a system component point of view. Databases are much more amenable to this than documents are.
On the other side of the coin are infrastructure type projects where the users are higher level components. The primary design doc for this kind of project is an API spec. With languages like Java or C++, you can deliver this in code, that both the users and implementers can compile against. You can write stubs and drivers that permit both the implementer and the user to work independently. Code is the language of choice for 'design docs' targeted at technical people. If you cannot express a design clearly in a layer of code, the language and API set your are basing your project on may be either at too high or too low a level for what you are trying to do.
IMHO, a chunk of infrastructure is best designed by a single good architect and reviewed by peers. This ensures some degree of consistency in the outcome. If an infrastructure project is over-divided among several architects, the 'whole' may end up being a suboptimal compromise.
I have personally experienced such a situation. Because many designers wanted to have a say in the project, there was a lot of political horse trading over who would implement what capability in their part of the system. The end result was an execution path that had way too many interface layers and representation conversions to be efficient. There were good arguments for each individual design, but since there was never 'proof' of the superiority of any the approaches, management forced a compromise rather than a choice.
I think that a group needs to elect a leader for a project and then submit themselves to the choices that this leader makes. The leader should not compromise architecture in order to appease different opinions in the group.
Perhaps the solution to these problems is along the lines of the existing 'zero tolerance' policy many schools have taken towards weapons possession.
The 'zero tolerance' policy should be extended to include mandatory suspension/expulsion for instances of physical assault, harrassment and restraint after a 'trial' establishing the guilt of the perpetrator.
For instance, when some jerk intentionally trips you, pushes you into a locker, knocks your books out of your hands, defaces your property, or beats you up, they should be treated in the same fashion as one who has brought a weapon into school. In many cases, there is a 'weapon'; the superior strength of the attacker, who would have never dared to assault you if your strength was on parity. Even worse than possessing a weapon, these people have demonstrated that violence is an acceptable everyday tool.
Athletes especially should be punished for using the tools of their trade, their muscles, to agressively and violently assert their position in the social hierarchy.
In normal society, these individuals would be prosecuted under criminal law. In school, like in prison, this pre-civilized behavior is permitted due to a lack of a 'higher court' to complain to.
Perhaps a web site should be created that is dedicated to providing an outlet for people who are assaulted and harrassed in school. This perhaps could correlate stories of incidents and expose schools/individuals with serious and widespread aggression problems. (Without violating individual's right to privacy, of course)
In reality, school kids -do- belong to the society at large, and most of them are part of the internet society. Perhaps the internet society can play a role in making sure that the societies within schools are visible and answerable to the general public.
I don't see how an advocacy group such as this could possibly be negative. How can you possibly complain about a non-profit group that wishes to advance the cause of free software.
When a multinational corporation sues you for violating some obscure, nonsensical patent in the free software you've created and you can't afford to legal fees to research the case, you'll be quite happy to have a group like this around to provide research and perhaps pro-bono assistance.
This group seems to have the same ulterior motives as those that write free software- to help to create a fair and free society. Although there are quite a lot of greedy, immoral lawyers out there, there are many who take up the legal profession in order to effect positive change in society. These advocates of freedom have been and will always be the front line of defense against big-business influenced legislation and litigation that restricts the freedom of individuals to share knowledge and do business amongst themselves. We would be an oligarchy if it weren't for these people.
As far as their claim to offer leadership, this is quite welcome. Leadership is not synonymous with dictatorship. A society can have many leaders. Leaders take an active role to clarify and promote viewpoints. Like free software, the best aspects of those viewpoints will be combined to result in a stronger, clearer message. We should welcome new leaders, as opposed to being xenophobic and spreading suspicion that they are 'out to get us'.
Slashdot Mirror
If restrictions on speech are unconstitutional to the point that anyone with enough money can drown out opposing viewpoints in an election, how the hell do they justify allowing a district in central Florida to censor the internet?
It is very likely that corporate advertising that lies and tries to scare people into voting a certain way offends the standards of more than a few communities- say, Berkeley, for one. Under this precedent, Berkeley should start suing the folks who air those highly offensive anti-healthcare reform ads. I guarantee you that they'll have a sympathetic jury if all it takes is a local community standard.
I'm hearing a lot about this story from the perspective of Imus being singled out for saying "nappy headed ho", whereas others (insert random Hip Hop artist here) are not "fired" for saying similar things. This meme appears to be diverting much attention and energy from the both the actual cause of the outrage, and, conveniently for those politicians concerned, from an steaming pile of accumulating scandals in the US executive branch.
IMHO, the actual cause of the outrage is that Imus made an unprovoked derogatory slur on national media against a -specific- group of women, simply because they were female and black. This was basically a public sucker punch against an innocent group of actual, real life young women with parents, relatives and friends.
Can anyone here reasonably say that if a popular, well known personality, on national TV and radio, called your wife or daughter or good friend a (insert race specific stereotype) (insert culture specific derogatory slang for whore), you wouldn't want to defend them at least by complaining to their employer? What if this crap was directed against your team, business, or place of worship?
Somehow this is getting played into making folks look like they're supporting censorship, and it appears to be some sort of insidious dividing tactic that splits folks into the false dichotomy of "if you don't support commercialized hate speech, you support big brother censorship". Man, we are so getting played here.
As a contract custom software developer, I've been dealt with this issue repeatedly over the past 10 years.
The first time it came up, I was employed as an accounting systems developer for a medium sized electronics manufacturer. I was also having some success doing contract work on the side building unrelated software for a couple of small businesses. The work conditions at the employer became unsustainable for me. To make a long story short, the company was run by a dysfunctional extended family which expressed their issues through the inter-departmental processes that I had the task of automating.
At a point, I resigned and incorporated myself as a custom software development company. I knew they depended on me, and I offered them support and continued development as long as they would appoint someone as a single point of contact so that I didn't have to play family counselor to get people to agree on business process. One important function of my new company was to develop a codebase that had general use in the type of work I was doing (relational database front ends) to add significant value to my services by increasing the reliability and decreasing the cost of the custom product I provided. Needless to say, this involved retaining ownership to the code I wrote.
The next thing that happened was that their in-house councel asked me to sign a contract (their "standard" boilerplate) to the effect that everything I created or had an idea about creating during the time I was providing services to them would belong to them, and that I would grant them power of attorney to make sure that I complied. I didn't need to take that to a lawyer to tell me it was 'onerous' (Merriam-Webster: "having legal obligations that outweigh the advantages")- but I took it to a lawyer anyway.
I gained three important things from my work with my lawyer. Firstly, I gained an good understanding of the motivations and implications behind the 'onerous' contract, why things were phrased the way they were, and what was ommitted. Secondly, we worked out a standard agreement for my company, which focused on clarifying the obligations of both parties with respect to the process of allocating resources, delivering custom software, receiving payment, providing a limited warrantee, etc. Thirdly, I gained an understanding of the importance of each clause in my own boilerplate, the reason it was included, and the drawbacks of removing or modifying it.
All in all, the point was to enable me to have a standard agreement which IMHO offered a fair value
to both parties with regards to services and IP transfer of non-generic work, and dealt clearly and specifically with the kinds of eventualities that occur in the practice of custom software development. After all, this was -my- business, and it was my responsibility to define the value proposition and negotiate from that perspective.
Well, I responded to my previous employer with my own terms, but they insisted that I agree to their terms. The CEO, with whom I had a positive working relationship, seemed to be caught in the middle. He made a concerted emotional appeal to the effect of "what will happen to the company if you leave? You can't leave us like this, you need to agree to these terms", but ultimately, they didn't go for my agreement, and they refused to tell me why. Ultimately, I refused to agree to their terms. We were both very disappointed and negatively financially impacted.
The second time this happened, I was working for a small startup which was purchased by a huge public corporation. I had designed a product for the small startup, and was providing dedicated support to an initial customer. The huge corporation shut us down after the purchase, but, as I had expressed an interest in pursuing unrelated plans after the acquisition, and the product that I had designed was on the "kill due to redundancy" list, the CEO/purchaser put me in the "terminate" group as opposed to the "assimilate" group. I sign a no-compete in return for an option
Please mod up the parent post. There is a lot of misinformation floating around that Microsoft only -extended- Java. The fact that the core issue here is their deliberate -exclusion- of standard functionality (JNI/RMI) has gotten very little play in this discussion.
Your statements are incorrect. If your standard Java code included standard JNI or standard RMI, your code would not work with Microsoft's JVM. It seems obvious that this was done to prevent people from using JNI to achieve portability in the Java->Native interface, and to prevent people from using RMI for IPC as opposed to Microsoft's IPC flavor of the year.
If Microsoft had included those standard features of Java, there would not be so many complaints about their extensions. IMHO, the whole extension issue is a red herring. The real issue is the standard functionality that Microsoft -excluded- to kneecap otherwise portable Java code.
The only somewhat legit issue regarding MS extensions is the fact that they didn't make developers aware that generated code from their IDE used their Windows specific extensions and thus was not portable.
There seems to be an obvious point of hypocrisy in the position that copyright violation is the equivalent of theft.
The major labels, which are publicly traded corporations, endorse the position of the RIAA that copyright violation, or 'piracy' is the equivalent of theft, and that the industry is sustaining major losses as a result.
If someone robbed their warehouse or 'stole their car', these corporations would be required to charge these losses against stated earnings as an expense on their income statement.
The fact that they do not write off piracy as a loss is indicative that they do -not- consider piracy to be theft when it comes right down to it.
To what extent are these these public traded corporations making false and/or misleading public statements about the degree of 'theft' affecting their financial health? Are they not violating some sort of SEC rules when they mislead investors into thinking that their financial statements somehow account for this 'theft'- implying that their earnings would be much higher if this 'theft' did not take place? Doesn't this artificially inflate the value of their stock by implying that their efforts to stop 'piracy' will have some sort of proportionally positive effect on their earnings?
Perhaps an appropriate response to statements from the RIAA equating copyright violation with theft is to ask them "Where on your members' income statements do they account for this theft?". A very simple question, but the answer is either "ok, copyright violations are not really theft, they are just potentially lost sales", or "we are commiting fraud by not accounting for the theft thus artificially inflating our earnings"
IMHO, finding pre-built functionality out there that does what I want, the way I want it, with an appropriate license and tolerable side effects that does not require me to make me own code dependent on the third party implementation is very difficult. I don't think the state of the art of component abstraction methodologies (class libraries, VMs, languages) are mature, complete and interoperable enough at the present time to reduce the amount of integration effort required for third party code to the point where using many components from different vendors in a single system is cost effective.
While functionality that you build can be an asset if you can effectively package it for re-use, integration code that you write to work third party components into your own application can become a liability, as it absorbs maintenance effort as the third party libraries evolve.
Third party code that has well defined interfaces, and would be very hard to implement yourself tends to be better suited for integration as the cost of integration over time needs to be less than the cost of building it yourself.
In my experience, it is easy to underestimate the amount of integration effort required for third party code due to vendors' incentive to promote their products. Some commercial vendors get you way past the point of no return before you find the 'issues'. Once you pass the event horizon, you may be doomed to have your time and money sucked into the black hole of repeated workaround and upgrade.
Open source is better that way- at least you can -see- what you are getting into before you decide to commit the integration time.
It is very hard to predict how much it will really cost to integrate with something you don't fully understand. If you do fully understand it, it may be less expensive to build it yourself.
So at some point SCO realized that their 'stolen' IP was in the Linux kernel. SCO was distributing said Linux kernel at the time under the GPL and chose to continue distributing it under the GPL for some time after learning about the situation.
Regardless of IBM's culpability in stealing SCO's code (that is, if IBM is in fact guilty), there are two obvious licensing implications for the rest of the Linux community of SCO's continued distribution of the kernel under the GPL.
If SCO knowingly included their own IP in Linux kernel distributions, releasing the whole package under the GPL they:
1. Chose to release their own IP under the GPL and have thus spared the rest of the community from having to address the issue.
or
2. Have violated the terms of the GPL themselves by intentionally distributing GPLed code with their own proprietary code embedded in it. As such, they had no license to distribute the Linux kernel and may be guilty of copyright infringement against everyone who holds a copyright on code in the Linux kernel. They may also be responsible for any damage they may have caused to those receiving the distribution which was misrepresented as being GPL licensed, since at some point in time they had enough information to know that their distribution was infringing, yet they continued to distribute it.
I'm not a lawyer, but maybe a lawsuit to make SCO clarify their licensing position regarding code they have chosen to ship with the Linux kernel (once they had full knowledge it was their IP) would be in order.
Ever heard of AccessibleObject, JVMPI or Custom ClassLoaders? There, you have at least 3 ways to access private fields in Java besides your 'only way'.
.NET by bypassing lax enforcement of access modifiers, that would be a serious security hole.
Untrusted, sandboxed code in Java is not permitted to use these features.
The point here is to secure a user's own trusted hardware and software (including the VM) from some developer's untrusted code. Access modifiers are an important part of the 'sandbox via encapsulation' model which is fundamental to Java security. The Java sandbox will not allow untrusted code to access private members of trusted code, or to do anything to circumvent such a restriction, such as change the access modifier through reflection.
If an untrusted developer can tunnel out of the sandbox in
For some reason people here seem to be making the misinterpretation that the point is to secure some developer's compiled code and runtime context from another user's or developer's hardware and software, which is patently ridiculous. You can't secure something from the mechanism responsible for enforcing security. If you are going to let your code run on someone elses machine/VM in the first place, you are going to have to tolerate it when that machine/VM decides to not follow your instructions.
Basically, whoever owns the machine (physical, OS, or VM) gets to provide the security, normally by relying on software mechanisms like sandboxing external code. This issue is about trusting the these mechanisms to keep your machine secure, NOT about keeping your code secure from untrusted machines. THAT can only be done by keeping your code off of those machines entirely.
I guess that explains the difference in attitudes to borderline copyright infringement- if it takes you 8 months and most of your sanity to get it right, you will care an awful lot more to extract every last buck out of it than if you knocked it out in 3 days and could do it again next week.
This leads to the pathological situation that a 'turd' (as the expression goes) painstakingly polished for 8 months may come with its own secret service, while an inspired performance captured and delivered in 3 days may come with a license to share.
I'm not saying that this is the normal case, but when you are forced under contract to produce music, 95% of the total product of 8 months in the studio probably never makes it out. This is probably a huge cost factor for major label music- they spend it to write in the studio because they can.
This sounds a bit like the dot com startup thing where a company flush with VC hires 30 coders to start coding while they are still trying to figure out what their business plan is.
geekee writes "But unknown artists will give their left arm for a recording contract that is a supposed rip-off. Why? Because it isn't a rip-off. Unknown artists want someone to take a risk on them."
Lots of people also give their 'right arm', so to speak, and their paycheck to casinos and other such types of gambling. IMHO, it it probably easier to win a slot machine jackpot than it is to 'make it' in the music business in the way that many starry eyed wannabes think is coming to them when they 'get signed' by a major label.
Many aspiring artists and songwriters fail to understand that -you- are employing the -label- when you sign a contract. They wouldn't be so enthusiastic about 'getting signed' by the door-to-door insurance salesman or Anderson Consulting, for that matter. They think that 'getting signed' == being propelled to stardom on a magic carpet, but in reality, it is more like hiring a major consulting company to help you reach Fortune 500 status but instead going bankrupt paying their fee while they have you running around doing all the legwork. To extend the analogy, once you are bankrupt, they buy you for a 'song' and -then- cash out, leaving you wondering what happened.
This illusion is propogated by the media concentration and marketing influence of the major labels. The same influence which creates manufactured one-hit-wonders with billions in revenues yet elusive profits seems to make people think they can be the next pop star if they are just 'found' by the right sugar daddy.
This stuff is becoming more and more like an infomercial every day- "Johnny signed the contract, and now he's down at the beach partying with the babes. You too can be the next Britney Spears- if you're hot and you can dance, we'll let you sign the contract too, and then you can be on stage selling product for us, erm.. performing your art as well. In only 20 years, you too might be rich and famous. (fine print...compensation not guaranteed...substantial penalty for early withdrawal...artist is responsible for all expenses incurred on their behalf...company held harmless if artist fails perform as instructed)". You get the idea.
Business like these will gladly take a sucker for all they are worth. These people are not out to help your career, they are out to extract maximum value from your intellectual property and your good looks while you 'till the soil', so to speak. This is why most business-savvy artists don't sign major deals unless they have a lot of leverage (like a huge existing fan base) to negotiate equitable agreements.
BTW, in order to justify getting the lion's share of the profit, less than ethical businesses tend to grossly inflate the perceived monetary risk they are taking. As we've all seen, especially lately, corporate conglomerates have many unseen pockets to help them define 'risk' and 'profit' in a way that best suits their own interests.
This issue is -the- pathological case of debates about language. IMHO, this is more about language than religion.
One of the aspects of this case that makes it remarkable is that it is brought by an individual who is described as an 'atheist'.
* According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 'atheist' means: Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a god.
* Thus the definition of 'atheist' is dependent on the definition of the word 'god'.
* The definition of the word 'god' and its cross language equivalents is arguably the most contentious and divisive issues of human history. Attempts to subject others to a particular definition of this concept are responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of millions and tyranny over billions.
* The act by groups of people of defining the word 'god' and the subsequent implications for human motivation and behavior is at the core of what we define as 'religion'.
* The U.S. constitution's freedom of religion tenents are designed to ensure that the government does not make laws or take actions that favor one religion over another- in this context, the constitution prevents the government from passing laws or taking actions which favor one individual's definition of the word 'god' over another's.
* One appropriate secular, unbiased interpretation of the word 'god' (IMHO) would be 'your most all encompassing concept, in light of your own personal world view'. Surely that one is hard to logically refute without negating all existence.
* In light of the above secular version of the word 'god', the word 'atheist' would be an oxymoron, which would mean that this definition of the word 'god', if made by the court to validate the inclusion of 'under god' in the pledge, would violate the constitution because it would be biased against atheists, if atheism is to be considered a valid beleif system.
* If the courts decide that the word 'god' applies to a specific set of monotheistic religions, the court has effectively issued a religious doctrine favoring a particular religion, a decision which violates the constitution.
* The 9th circuit court, in writing its decision, equated 'god' to 'jesus' and 'vishnu'- in effect, it issued a religious doctrine defining the word 'god' as referring to the highest concept of a specific set of monotheistic religions, just as those other words apply to higher concepts of various other religions. As such, it seems that the court had no jurisdiction to make such a decision because it is biased towards a specific religion.
* The conclusion that can be derived from all these arguments is that the word 'god' is in effect a divisive razor, which causes a bias in all those who seek to incorporate it into language, by virtue of the fact that the word means something unique to every individual, and that self described atheists are defining their own belief system in terms of that which they don't beleive in- any definition at all of the word 'god'.
It seems that due to the inherent contradictions, divisiveness, and confusion that occurs when trying to apply logic and reason to the word 'god', that the use of this word should be excluded in language that seeks to achieve clarity , inclusion and fairness, which is the goal of our constitution and framework of laws.
Rather that trying to define the word 'god' as the property of any individual religion, the court should probably, IMHO, just roll back the act of congress which introduced the word in the first place, with the reasoning that it is impossible to incorporate the word 'god' into any official language without creating the perception of religious bias and de-facto endorsement of a particular religion- even if the word were defined to have a specific secular meaning.
Those who would argue that the word 'god' should be incorporated into official language should take a moment to define what they mean by 'god', and achieve some consensus about that definition. If that is considered to be an impossible task, and they find that the word is not really definable to any reasonably detailed consensus, what business does the word have in the language of our legal system and our government?
Personally, I have my own definition of a highest, unifying concept, that which no name can do justice. This is because names define and separate- what would be the point of a unifying concept if it could be defined from other concepts? It wouldn't be unifying any more. This is why the word 'god' should be left out of official public discourse and kept in the context of one's personal religion and spirituality. If people want to think of being 'under god' in the 'one nation' part of the pledge of allegience, they are welcome to invoke their own concept of such.
We are a custom software development shop using our own framework as a basis for delivering custom applications to customers.
We have an arrangement with our customers which works out very well for both of us. Once you factor in the incentives of both parties, this arrangement naturally leads to a happy situation for both parties.
We come into the relationship with a substantial framework, which we license to the customer under the GPL. As the relationship progresses, we build many components. Some of these components are specific to the customer's business process, and some are more generic. We retain all IP rights to the generic components, which we integrate into the framework and license back to the customer under the GPL. The customer retains all IP rights to code that is specific to their business process.
We maintain a code repository for each customer which contains their business specific code. These are typically workflow definitions, business specific data models, entry screens and reports, etc.
We also maintain a common repository for the framework, which contains all the reusable code (whatever we define to be reusable). We usually have a few projects going on at the same time, and this repository receives contributions from all of them.
The benefits of this arrangement for the customer are:
* Customer owns specific business process logic, UI elements, data models for their business, which means that they control their trade secrets and we can't go to their competitors and sell them the system they payed to custom build. In return, customer is solely responsible for paying someone (usually us) for maintaining and enhancing these components as their business changes.
* Customer does not have to pay to build a major system from scratch. They get a tested and tuned framework for free upon entering the contract, and only pay for customization, which is a process we excel at. In this fashion, we can deliver a return quickly and with minimal expenditure, since we don't have to build much infrastructure.
* Customer gains the benefit of framework enhancements for other customers. Over time, as contributions are made to the core framework, more and more reusable functionality is available to incorporate into our custom solutions. This has the effect of bringing sophisticated functionality into the customer's price range. In effect, all our customers indirectly share the cost of maintenance, tuning, and additional generic functionality.
* If we go out of business for some reason, the customers have all the source code they need to achieve continuity.
The benefits of this arrangement for us are:
* We gain a powerful framework that is tested and tuned across multiple production deployments.
* We can out-bid competitors who need to build things from scratch, who base their work on proprietary software which they cannot enhance or control, or who must recoup massive amounts of R&D , marketing expense, and capital risk.
* We spend our time solving unique business and technical problems, as opposed to re-coding functionality for multiple customers simply because we don't own IP.
* We spend very little time on maintenance because most of the difficult code is maintained in one place- application specific code is mostly declarative.
* We do not have to pressure customers to buy upgrades. We keep customers current as part of the development process.
We have been modestly successful using this model, and people who work with us, both developers and customers, are happy and getting good value.
Once caviat- our customers tend to be in a line of business other that software development, thus they care less about owning software IP than than do about streamlining their business processes.
Hopefully this will inspire some ideas.
Mike
I run a small custom software development company. We develop web applications tailored for our clients' businesses. Our clients tend to be small businesses who make a fair margin providing products and/or services to their customers. Their primary motivation for hiring us to develop web applications is to achieve some ROI by cutting costs associated with business processes by automating them. This allows them to scale their offerings better. These business processes range from internal data entry and reporting systems to high volume public web sites.
In our scenario, there are a number of reasons why using and developing free software makes sense:
1. Predictability: Free software is much more transparent and malleable than software that cannot be modified by the purchaser. This permits a software engineering organization to understand and mold the 'building materials' to fit the software development process. By understanding and being able to tune the composition and behavior of software components, one can develop reliable metrics for cost and time prediction.
Because our customers are usually not flush with cash, budget and timing can make or break a project. Our ability to meet our estimates is one of our key competetive aspects. The achilles heel of non-free software is the 'suprise factor', or the point in the project where you run across an bug or an invalid assumption. Lack of malleability causes you to have to build a 'workaround', which may have a ripple effect on the rest of the architecture, and may blow your budget as a result.
In summary, free software is much more predictable than non-free software due to its transparency and malleability, and thus is a preferred choice when faced with tight budgets and schedules.
2. Price: Not having to pay license fees as business expands and usage increases is a clear bonus here. Not having to manage license fees is a considerable factor, due to the potentially massive cost and legal implications of non-compliance.
In some cases, prices for well known commercially distributed application servers are higher that what we charge to build an entire application, and in our experience don't meet our requirements regarding performance, reliability and development tool support that we need for our projects.
3. Ease of distribution: We install our GPL framework and custom applications built on top of it to customers by checking it a single set of files from a CVS (revision control system) account onto each piece of hardware they need it on. Separately installing and managing dozens of proprietary components on each target machine in order to deploy an application would present a point of cost, complexity and potential for human error, yet this is usually a required step when using non-free software due to licenses which restrict copying.
4. Vendor goals misaligned: The business model of proprietary software comes with an incentive to seek the largest possible target market for products. Vendors do not build products for the handful of experts in a given area, they build them for the masses of novices and average users because they are easier to satify and represent a larger market segment.
In addition many commercial product vendors polish the upper, visible layers of their products and ensure that 'common' use patterns work well. This means that these products will serve the average user, but any underlying architectural deficiencies won't be uncovered until the point they become a problem, usually in the latter phases of a project, which is the -worst- time to discover a problem.
As an expert in my field, I ultimately demand a high level of quality in my tools, even if I have to improve them myself to get them to the level of quality I require. If use a tool from a non-free software vendor and it doesn't meet my standards of quality, I have no option but to toss it out and start over with a different tool. Coupled with the fact that I cannot inspect the architecture of the tool before I commit to using it, my logical conclusion is that most commercial software represents an uncontrollable project risk. Some people can live with that, if they have a lot of cash to burn, but my customers won't fund that kind of risk.
Often, people make the mistake of associating well marketed brand names and high product cost with a reduced level of project risk. I have not found any justification for such a correlation. The source of the risk is ultimately a lack of visibility with regards to product architecture, a lack of understanding of the vendors primary target market (usually due to vendors not wanting to exclude -anyone- as a potential customer), and a lack of ability to fix bugs promptly.
5. Selective use of others work: With free software, one can gain the benefits of using existing code at a granular level. With non-free software, this choice is not so granular- you end up having to use much more of a third party product than you may need or want to simply because the product can not be de-integrated by the purchaser.
In summary, using free software is critical for my business developing custom solutions for customers. I get paid in proportion to my costs developing these solutions, and make a fair profit. My business is sustainable and relatively predictable due to the level of control I have over my toolbase and development process. This level of control necessitates the use of free software, but free software alone is not sufficent- I have put a tremendous amount of work into my own GPL'd tools and into the integration with third party GPL tools, as well as commercial products where they can be tolerated.
I would love to know how many people vote multiple times by sending an absentee ballot to their summer homes. I would hope that there would be some national cross checking going on, because this could have a significant effect in a place like Florida.
Mike
I've always thought that a pocket-watch form factor with a sturdy metal case on a belt chain would be a much more attractive option.
.5 inches to .75 inches thick, with a tasteful multi-colored LED on the outside, a color, touch screen lcd display on the top and a touch-tablet interface on the bottom.
The round case would help it work with clothing better as the corners would not protrude or get caught, and round things tend to be a bit more stylish.
The unit could then have more room for functionality (in both halves of the shell) without it being too clunky to wear, while it would still maintain its wearability aspect, unlike palm PDAs which, IMHO, cross the threshold of being truly 'wearable'.
I can imagine a brushed chrome or matte black shell about 2.5 inches to 3 inches in diameter and about
The combination of the all the cool I/O functions (PIM, audio/video I/O, gps, IR, bluetooth, serial) would at least be more feasible in this larger form factor. Perhaps these functions can all use a peripheral bus where the option hardware would be packaged in pie-slice shaped modules- 8 slots per unit and a module can use an integral number of slots.
I would definitely buy something like this, as long as the OS was open enough to support a community of developers.
Mike
What is terrific about this research is not simply that it can recognize a word independently of the speaker, rate of utterance, and noise characteristics. The 'design patterns' used in this system can provide a building block for systems which recognize patterns in many different areas. Generalizing a system like this from recognizing one word to recognizing many seems to be simply a matter of determining which 'word-neuron' is the most excited. Recognizing phrases may be accomplished by using a sequence of 'word-neuron' firings as input and determining which 'phrase-neuron' is the most excited. Presumably, the system works by using some sort of time-delay neuron chain which ensures that all the monosyllables of the word 'one', when spoken in the correct sequence, generate signals which arrive at the 'aggregator' neuron at the same time, thus pushing it over the threshold. (I won't attempt to try to figure out how the -learning- system works right now, which is the really deep part of this :).
I would really like to know which principles of neuron activity play a factor in building such a system- there is a relatively fixed physical model which is simulated in a piece of software; as well as the the interconnection patterns which realize the learning and pattern recognition model. This knowlege could form a great foundation for a general purpose piece of software that could be applied to many areas of pattern analysis.
Mike
Have you ever made a copy, or received a copy of a tape or album from a friend, which introduced you to a band who later became a major influence and indirectly influenced your later success?
Tell us how you were first introduced to -your- musical influences, specifically where you first heard your favorite bands, and what specific media (tape, album, copy of friend's tape, radio, bootleg, etc) were involved.
If you would have been prosecuted immediately for receiving unauthorized copies of other's music by the bands involved, how may have this affected your perception of these bands?
To make the question simpler, how would you feel about the Misfits they had you arrested for receiving a unauthorized copy of one of their albums?
Mike
I have been wondering for a while just how censored the movies I rent at the video store are.
I've seen a couple of director's cuts of movies, and have then looked at the released version and found that much was lacking.
From many of the comments I have read, I now understand that Region Coding is an attempt by the movie industry to balance the need to sell movies and the need to maintain political capital in the U.S. specifically. That is, explicit content in movies released in the U.S. would rally the puritan special interest groups and their congressional representatives against the movie industry. I suppose that there is some incentive to tailor content to foreign countries as well, in order that the distribution channels maintain political capital in their respective regions. I suppose that this is an issue with movie studios in other countries as well, but the U.S. certainly has political issues regarding sex and nudity.
I would certainly love to see an uncensored version of Eyes Wide Shut. I'm disappointed that in a country like the U.S. that was built on freedom of speech, I cannot obtain uncensored versions of popular movies at my local video store. Perhaps I was naive, but now I'm truly disgusted. I feel like I'm getting ripped off- like I only got a 'lite' version of something, or a half-cup of coffee, or watered down liquor.
Perhaps it is not the threat of unauthorized duplication, or even of there being alternatives to licensed players, but the threat of political confrontation which drives the movie industry to pursue DeCSS, since the open source nature of the product would allow region codes to be easily defeatable without threat of license revocation. God forbid some conservative senator's kid runs Linux and plays an uncensored version of some movie his foreign exchange student brought over from Japan. Unfortunately for the movie industry, 'Region Code Bypassing' doesn't carry the same emotional and PR weight as 'Piracy'.
Perhaps the true purpose of the DMCA and its access control provisions is to introduce a firmer basis for controlling access to pornography and other 'undesirable' content, by giving the content production industry a legal tool that gives them no excuse NOT to control access, and then holding them accountable if they don't control access effectively enough.
This may be a stretch, but since Congress doesn't have a friend in the Executive branch of government for their censorship agenda, they are using a cash rich music and movie industry as a surrogate Executive branch in order to establish a judical bulwark of precedents for their legislation.
I just don't buy the argument that Region Coding is just to prevent people from seeing stuff before it comes out locally. Censorship concerns are the real issue, and the only entity who wants to pursue censorship and has influence is Congress.
The question is, can and would Congress legislate against the movie industry if the movie industry stopped wholeheartedly 'enforcing' censorship through region coding and other means?
Mike
I'm not a theologian or a physicist, nor a practicing member of a religion, but I have thought long and hard about this word 'God' we have.
The short of it, is that 'God' is a word for 'everything', or 'the whole of existence', or just plain 'all'.
Any attempt to define 'God' as anything other is illogical, since the act of defining what something -is- also defines what it is -not-. Definitions differentiate something from its context. But if there is God and something else that is not God, then there is something greater than God in the combination, which misses the point- God is a word for everything.
Trying to associate words like 'created' and 'causes', etc with God is missing the point as well. Time is part of God, just another aspect of existence. If you are at the level of thinking about everything, there is no was, there is no will-be, there just IS. All of time exists, every 'frame' of it in a time-space.
The many words for God in different religions speak about aspects of existence as it relates to us. The Judge, the Merciful, Our Lord, Protector, etc. These aspects have personified the word and have tended to distract people from the true meaning (a unifying and empowering principle) and into deity worship, and from there, into the control of religions 'authorities' who may have a divisive purpose.
Remarkably, the word 'Elohim', a word for God in Hebrew, is -plural-, a possible indication that someone was trying to convey a single word for the multitude that composes 'everything'.
The laws of God are the laws of existence (physics, psychology, chemistry, interpersonal relationships, etc), the ones we know and the ones we haven't learned about yet. The laws of God cannot be broken, only our assumptions about them can be (Newtonian->Quantum paradigm shifts).
Imagine trying to explain the concept of 'everything' to people, especially those without a philosophically and historically rich language, in order to get people to think bigger picture than their day-to-day existence. Eventually, the word you use for that 'everything' gets deified. People that haven't caught on to the concept start worshiping the word, much like their other gods. Picture the dialog:
Random person: 'You mean 'everything' is more powerful than Ra, the sun god?'
Philosopher: 'No, 'everything' is bigger than Ra, bigger than all the gods put together'
Random person: 'Oh, ok, long live 'everything', our greatest lord'.
Sometimes I think the commandment (of the 10 commandments of popular knowledge) 'Thall shall not worship the graven image', means 'Don't worship the tablets this is written on' and 'Don't worship the word God' as much as it means not to worship statues.
One of the most important prayers of Judaism contains the phrase 'The lord is one and his name one'. This sounds like an attempt to drive home the point that the God means the 'all'. (Even the word 'Universe' is overloaded these days). Language is somewhat incapable of doing the opposite of defining and dividing.
So in my humble philosophy, the Supreme Being is everthing; us, time, evolution, science, love, war, disease, the cycle of big-bang and big-bust, etc. There is no such thing as God vs. science, because they are one and the same. Everything can be ascribed to God, without putting an end to the scientific investigation of 'how'.
Saying that God created everything is like saying that the Earth starts at the North Pole. It's just not linear, even if it looks that way from our point of view. Time is part of 'everything' just like space.
Overall, thinking about God as a word for everything is faultlessly logical, is compatable with interpretations of ancient religious texts and can well be a source of great spiritual inspiration (God spoke to Einstein, or rather, Einstein, through dedicated thought and observation, came to a profound conclusion about the nature of Everything---- what's the difference here? None, as far as I can see). This also leaves NO room for disagreement about 'the nature of God' , but rather puts the realm of disagreement into constructive academic research on the nature of the universe and life.
I apologize if I have offended anyone, but I would like to hear what others think about this approach.
Mike
A better system than CodeSource (IMHO):
1. Customers who need software post requirements to a web application.
2. Developers submit a proposal with features and milestones and a bid, potentially leveraging the fact that multiple customers have similar requirements. The bid is to a pool, not an individual customer. Customers save money dividing the cost equally. The proposal does not have to meet all the requirements- as long as the proposal is accepted by the pool of customers.
3. During the project, some respected third party reviewer elected by the pool and approved by the developer is responsible for ensuring that the developer has lived up to the milestones they have stated in the proposal.
4. After the pooled work is done, customers can re-pool to complete additional requirements not met by the original proposal.
If 50 customers wanted a GUI admin interface for Apache, $500.00 apiece results in $25,000.00 pooled to develop the code.
I find the reverse auction approach to be too top-down to attract good developers into this model. Top-down work is easy to come by at high rates for good developers- why should the subject themselves to this model.
Letting developers propose the scope of the project they are willing to work on puts the developer in the driver's seat, which is a more coveted position, and is more likely to be preferred by developers to top-down contractor work, which is one of the primary ways that open source developers make a living.
Mike
It seems that Bill Joy does not understand the fundamental enabling principles of the GPL, and their truly democratic nature.
1. Modifications to another's work are judged by the community and ONLY the community, with no barrier to redistribution. In a worst-case scenario, if Linus doesn't like someone's mod to the kernel, but 50% of the rest of the community does, this 50% of the community does not have to wait for Linus or anybody else to approve anything in order to use the modification. It would sure be nice to fix some long standing Java bugs and OPTIMIZE some of the existing implementations without having to go through Sun or write my own versions of their implementations.
"Torvalds is a philosopher-king, let's say. Do you prefer that to a democracy?". Bah!
Imagine if we had to go through a single entity who controlled who got to run for President of the U.S. on the basis of the 'compatability of their philosophy' with the ideals of the controlling entity. That certainly is not a democracy to me. To call the SCSL democratic is playing fast and loose with the word. The GPL is WAY more a democracy, because there is no GATEWAY ENTITY.
2. If the fork illustrated by #1 does happen, the GPL ensures that a third party can come along and find a way to make the two forked code bases distributable as a unit, with perhaps a compiler switch or a 'compile-time' module or patch. If this work passed community scrutiny, it will be accepted by a large majority. This is only possible because they have access to the source code of both distributions, and they can get it out to people to look at DURING AND AFTER the development process with NO SINGLE GATEWAY ENTITY.
The problem with the SCSL is that SUN is the gateway entity. You can't distribute your mods or get help with development or testing without going through SUN to pass their compatability tests. So everyone involved in the development process must bind themselves to the SCSL, and you can't even solicit community review before the code is 'finished'. In essence, you have to use the JCK and pay SUN to do your QA for you if you can't afford to pay people to enter into the SCSL agreement, which most open source developers do not want to do.
Granted, the Blackdown Java-Linux port is quite stable in it's pre-release form. If the SCSL weren't in the way, I for one would contribute a significant amount of effort to making that port successful, since I use Java almost exclusively in my software development services business. I would put particular effort into optimizing the Java APIs, which would result in faster Java everywhere, benefitting Sun.
But Sun obviously isn't ready to take the step of making the free software community their development PARTNER. With the SCSL, they have come as close as possible without actually giving up anything. They just have to realize that if they don't give something up, nobody else will either.
What disturbs me is that Sun tries to portray the SCSL as fair to the those on the other side of the agreement, and better that the GPL for the community. At most, it is a legal vehicle for releasing source code to paying licensees. At worst, it ensnares unknowing developers into not being able to work on clean-room implementations by exposing them to Sun's intellectual property on unfair terms. They are in deep public denial if they are trying to say that the SCSL is their answer to the GPL or any open source development process.
Mike
Basically, you script out how a user interacts with the system and try to cover all standard and anomalous cases.
If the system is large, it is usually productive to phase the project in terms of iterations, as opposed to doing -all- the design up front a-la the waterfall model. This is because a tremendous amount of discovery happens during the implementation process, no matter how thorough you might have thought you were in the design process. Both the customer and the implementer will end up discovering new and changed requirements.
By doing a top-to-bottom iteration- a reusable prototype so to speak, you and the customer can get a better sense of what you will encounter during the rest of the project. You will also have a preliminary unit effort measurement with which you can guage the rest of the project by.
I recommend putting the use cases in a database that preserves revisions, and composing the design docs on the fly. This is because you will want to view them from multiple points of view, such the users point of view, a workflow point of view, or a system component point of view. Databases are much more amenable to this than documents are.
On the other side of the coin are infrastructure type projects where the users are higher level components. The primary design doc for this kind of project is an API spec. With languages like Java or C++, you can deliver this in code, that both the users and implementers can compile against. You can write stubs and drivers that permit both the implementer and the user to work independently. Code is the language of choice for 'design docs' targeted at technical people. If you cannot express a design clearly in a layer of code, the language and API set your are basing your project on may be either at too high or too low a level for what you are trying to do.
IMHO, a chunk of infrastructure is best designed by a single good architect and reviewed by peers. This ensures some degree of consistency in the outcome. If an infrastructure project is over-divided among several architects, the 'whole' may end up being a suboptimal compromise.
I have personally experienced such a situation. Because many designers wanted to have a say in the project, there was a lot of political horse trading over who would implement what capability in their part of the system. The end result was an execution path that had way too many interface layers and representation conversions to be efficient. There were good arguments for each individual design, but since there was never 'proof' of the superiority of any the approaches, management forced a compromise rather than a choice.
I think that a group needs to elect a leader for a project and then submit themselves to the choices that this leader makes. The leader should not compromise architecture in order to appease different opinions in the group.
Well, that's my 2 cents. I hope it helps.
Mike
Perhaps the solution to these problems is along the lines of the existing 'zero tolerance' policy many schools have taken towards weapons possession.
The 'zero tolerance' policy should be extended to include mandatory suspension/expulsion for instances of physical assault, harrassment and restraint after a 'trial' establishing the guilt of the perpetrator.
For instance, when some jerk intentionally trips you, pushes you into a locker, knocks your books out of your hands, defaces your property, or beats you up, they should be treated in the same fashion as one who has brought a weapon into school. In many cases, there is a 'weapon'; the superior strength of the attacker, who would have never dared to assault you if your strength was on parity. Even worse than possessing a weapon, these people have demonstrated that violence is an acceptable everyday tool.
Athletes especially should be punished for using the tools of their trade, their muscles, to agressively and violently assert their position in the social hierarchy.
In normal society, these individuals would be prosecuted under criminal law. In school, like in prison, this pre-civilized behavior is permitted due to a lack of a 'higher court' to complain to.
Perhaps a web site should be created that is dedicated to providing an outlet for people who are assaulted and harrassed in school. This perhaps could correlate stories of incidents and expose schools/individuals with serious and widespread aggression problems. (Without violating individual's right to privacy, of course)
In reality, school kids -do- belong to the society at large, and most of them are part of the internet society. Perhaps the internet society can play a role in making sure that the societies within schools are visible and answerable to the general public.
Mike
I don't see how an advocacy group such as this could possibly be negative. How can you possibly complain about a non-profit group that wishes to advance the cause of free software.
When a multinational corporation sues you for violating some obscure, nonsensical patent in the free software you've created and you can't afford to legal fees to research the case, you'll be quite happy to have a group like this around to provide research and perhaps pro-bono assistance.
This group seems to have the same ulterior motives as those that write free software- to help to create a fair and free society. Although there are quite a lot of greedy, immoral lawyers out there, there are many who take up the legal profession in order to effect positive change in society. These advocates of freedom have been and will always be the front line of defense against big-business influenced legislation and litigation that restricts the freedom of individuals to share knowledge and do business amongst themselves. We would be an oligarchy if it weren't for these people.
As far as their claim to offer leadership, this is quite welcome. Leadership is not synonymous with dictatorship. A society can have many leaders. Leaders take an active role to clarify and promote viewpoints. Like free software, the best aspects of those viewpoints will be combined to result in a stronger, clearer message. We should welcome new leaders, as opposed to being xenophobic and spreading suspicion that they are 'out to get us'.
Mike