The sad alternative to a strong community
on
Freedom or Power?
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· Score: 1
Without this right one does not have a strong community and does not promote civil involvement.
Ganz genau: without access to the source code, the best you can hope for is a free
forall-- really nothing to write home about.
[BTW, mckelveyf, I am not trivializing your point with this pun. The serious take on it is seriously meant, too. But it's 4AM, I've been doing battle with GDB for many hours now, and it's getting hard for me to keep a straight face while reading all the dogma (elsewhere) in this discussion.]
Why don't we just amend the US Constitution...
on
Freedom or Power?
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· Score: 1
...so as to guarantee that libiberty and justice for all I heard so much about in my high school Government class? It didn't make much sense to me then, but this latest essay by Stallman sure makes it sound like a great idea.
let's fix the org before fixing the lang
on
C with Safety - Cyclone
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· Score: 2, Insightful
``The underlying problem here has never been with C, it's been with using C for the wrong jobs. [...] The biggest problem at the moment is that none of these "safer" languages has yet developed the same raw expressive power of C++.''
You seem to have assumed, for the purpose of the above exposition, that implementation languages are chosen by well-informed people, and substantially on the basis of technical merit. That's not always the case. Well, outside your shop in any case.;-)
In my opinion, acceptably safe languages that are quite expressive do already exist. I do not believe that the alleged deficiencies of safe languages explains the continued use of "unsafe" languages in domains for which the latter are not a good fit; I believe that, on the average, ill-conceived implementation strategies are more likely at fault. How many projects struggle with inadequate languages as a result of misinformed (or even uninformed) managers' inconsiderate (and uncontestable) decrees? Too many.:-(
I am happy to learn that smart people are busy inventing the next great programming language, but I think that, collectively, we need to spend less time improving our tools and more time addressing the organizational deficiencies that result in our having to use the wrong tools when we know better.
One Captain Marchessi was interviewed live over the telephone on Spain's national television, TVE. He said (and I am paraphrasing here) that Airbus planes are designed to survive the loss of an engine, and that pilots are trained for precisely such an eventuality; therefore, he believes, it is unlikely that the loss of thrust alone would have caused the plane to crash. (To his credit, he declined to speculate further despite pressure from the reporter.)
Now, can somebody tell me whether the phrase "the loss of an engine" in this context could mean the physical loss of the engine? Or is it just an idiom meaning "the loss of an engine's thrust"? I mean -- are these planes really designed to account for the possible dettachment of an engine?
You make a very good point: the case of an ethnic group "inheriting" some of the mythology of the people already living in the lands to which they migrate is indeed well known.
I want to thank you again for a very interesting link, and I encourage you to post while logged in so that we can pay special attention to other such posts from you in the future. I think that's the idea behind Slashdot Karma, which is finally just a formalism that automates this primitive evaluative efficiency enhancement technique (which is to say that Slashdot Karma institutionalizes a sort of justifiable prejudice on a per-individual basis).
In any case, thanks for joining the discussion, AC.
Wow. I did not think IBM management could be that, um, confused; thanks for setting me straight.
Some brief remarks that I would have sent you privately if I had known how:
I am relieved to learn that at least some people in big iron shops are clued in.;-)
I beg your pardon for my misunderstanding of your words and your position.
I thank you for acknowledging my point and for the conciliatory tone of your message.
I commend you for your efforts on behalf of open development and I hope you don't get hurt professionally over it; we need to have more clueful people in places like IBM.
I am not aware of Celtic tribes who feared that the sky might fall on their heads living in or near Estonia at the prehistoric times suggested by the article, but I will tell you what I know that might be relevant to your question in case you are interested:
According to historians, the shores of the North sea and especially Jutland were once the home of the Cymvri or Cymry, who later migrated to Llydaw in north Britain and later -- circa 500AD -- proceeded southward to conquer Goidelic and Brythonnic Celts in present-day Wales. Interestingly, some believe that the Cymry had previously settled lands in or near Thracia and the Bosphorus, where other Celtic tribes also lived. Apparently, the Celtic populations in the Low Danube were, demographically speaking, very successful.
The Kentaurs, who some say are the same as the Kantauri, and the Bebryces, who some say are the same as the Beribraces, also settled lands around the Black Sea, especially in Thracia, and yet later vanished from those lands, with some migrating toward the northwest of the Iberian peninsula (the Romans' Gallaecia) and present-day Brittany (the Romans' Armorica) -- leaving as early as 1400BC and arriving no later than around 700BC. Of these, the Bebryces at least were to be counted amongst the Celtic tribes to which the Romans referred, collectively, as the Gauls -- those primitive folk who feared that the sky might fall on their heads.
Thank you for the link, by the way. I wish you had posted while logged in. In any case, let me know what else you find.
I agree with your claim that open development can lead to higher total product costs than closed development; however, low development cost was never the right reason for doing open development in the first place. One good reason for choosing the open source approach is the desire to respect the users' freedom, as well as the developers'. Another good reason for developing software openly is that truly open development can lead to much higher quality products:
the product is more likely to comply with the users' actual requirements because the users can become invoved in product development; and
the product is less vulnerable to necktie damage (which can manifest itself in various and most insidious ways) because the managers' work is subject to as much scrutiny as the developers' work.
I think that some of the things you mention to in your caveat regarding open development are actually Good Things; the difficulties to which you allude may have less to do with the well-documented "features" of open source and more to do with the abilities of the managers charged with addressing them. Let me annotate part of your post in order to clarify that statement.
[My apologies to Dennis Leary, etc.]
"When you open it, suddenly, you lose control."
... unless you are a good manager who understands that it is the manager's responsibility to ensure that the goals of the project are achieved and who is therefore willing to play the tyrant with dramatic flair when it becomes necessary. Two words: Richard fskcing Stallman.
"You can't just make decisions anymore; you need to work with your contributor base, which is a much slower process than managerial decree."
... unless you are a good manager who understands that delegation is inevitable for large-scale system building and who knows how to identify, motivate, assist, and trust talented contributors. Two words: Linus fscking Torvalds.
"And you need to deal with the fact that people will be changing things all over the place, and be capable of integrating those changes into your own ongoing work."
... which is not a problem (it may even be a Good Thing) if you are a good manager who understands that the shape of things must change to suit the needs of the people who use them, and who consequently designs the infrastructure of both the software system and the user/developer community in such a way as to make such a distributed effort possible and rewarding. Two words: Larry fscking Wall.
I have long suspected that one reason (of many) why project managers in traditional shops fear open source development is that the model puts a lot of responsibility on them and requires that they perform their function well. In fact, it may well be that a poorly managed open source project is less likely to survive infancy than a poorly managed closed source project -- and it may well be that some managers know they aren't up to the challenge.
Re:Small? F***ing huge more like...
on
Tiny Apps
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· Score: 1
Well, what you are describing would be a device not unlike that of Huffman coding, don't you think? As in "shorter sequences for common characters, longer sequences for rarer characters", no? Your approach gives you some of the benefits of Huffman coding without the complex routine or the somewhat expensive lookup. So, you see, you guys really were at least as heroic as I suspected.;-) Thank you for replying, BTW.
Wouldn't somebody have survived (maybe somebody who was traveling at the time) and passed the story of this down through history?
I think I have a candidate for you to consider. The so-called pre-Roman Celts of what is now France and northwestern Spain feared that the sky might fall on their heads. Although the so-called Celtic (as opposed to Basque) ethnic groups in present-day France and the mountains in the north of Spain (Liguri, Asturi, Kantauri, Gallici) most probably came from other mountain homelands in Europe, like (in the case of the probably Celtic Liguri) the Alps, poet and historian Robert Graves has pointed to similarities between Celtic myths of the western Celts (Spanish, Irish, Welsh, and Brittonic) and myths which were "displaced" in early recorded history (euphemism for ethnically cleansed) in lands that were later to become Greece and Persia. Now, it seems reasonable to object that people that far west could not have seen this event, but it is known that Celts, who preferred to live in easily -defended high grounds, periodically migrated in large groups; Julius Caesar reported that, during his "last" campaign against the Gauls, thousands of Celts passed near his encampment, apparently on their way to the Iberian peninsula. What I am trying to say is that the Celts may well have lived that far east a long time ago; indeed, not so long ago, the Isauri [sp?] were a well-documented (and almost certainly Celtic) pain in the ass in the middle east -- during early recorded history, IIRC. Or maybe there were many meteor impacts, some of which remain to be discovered near the traditional Celtic homelands. In any case, I don't know whether the collective Celtic memory of the sky "falling" is linked to the cataclysm alluded to in the article, but it's an interesting conjecture -- one that I make on no authority (I am not a historian) strictly for the sake of discussion.
Re:Small? F***ing huge more like...
on
Tiny Apps
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· Score: 1
A set of between 17 and 32 elements, such as your 31 character set, requires 5 bits per entity to encode; therefore, in the absence of something like Huffman coding, you could fit a maximum of 51 characters in those 32 bytes, and not 64. Now, here's my question: did you really stick Huffman coding routines in those minuscule 8 kilobyte executables? 'Cause I didn't think that had been common practice; I mean, even today, something like the colorForth source editor is a bit of a novelty. Maybe the *old* oldtimers were in fact more heroic than I had imagined. Please, don't mistake my reverence for mockery: the first computer I actually owned, circa 1986, was an Amstrad CPC6128 with 128 *kilobytes* of RAM, so your mindset is hard for me to intuit.
If you know a program that has one, let me know. And I'll tell you why it doesn't cut it.
OK, you're on: try the Amaya (it's open source, IIRC) and then come back to this forum to tell me why its Structure View facility "doesn't cut it".
Now, I do not use this program to create my documents, but I often use it to understand how a document is laid out, especially when it contains funky SVG and MathML, or just really perverse HTML; I find that its document structure view facility is great, albeit not the most comfortable for the mouse-disinclined, like me.
By the way, Amaya supports collaborative annotation, external to the document being annotated, courtesy of the Annotea Project. You're welcome to comment on this facility, too; let us know how it measures up to Word's offering.
By the way, did I mention that Amaya aims to be, and largely is, strictly standards compliant? That it is available as a Windows port, too? In binary form? With an installer? Yes? Well, what are you waiting for, st. augustine?:-) Seriously, though, tell us how it went when you're done, if you would. Thanks in advance.
Why the FUD? Companies already choosing GPL!
on
Mundie Responds
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· Score: 1
Microsoft realizes that
most corporations for whom
intellectual property is the most important asset are
not software publishers. That means
that, for a lot of organizations, using and releasing
software under the GPL makes a lot of sense. I want to use today's Dreamworks animation studio story as an example
of how contributing to the development of software licensed
under the GPL can be in the interest of a corporation wishing
to protect its intellectual property.
The Dreamworks animation studio did not choose to use Linux
because of imaginary benefits or because of philosophical bias;
they most certainly were not jumping on a bandwagon. I want to
state, for the record, that when Lans Carstensen (the network
admin guy at Dreamworks and a friend of mine) started deploying
Linux, he talked about specific, present business needs
addressed by the deployment. Amongst them, the story of the
network filesystem issue is especially interesting because it
shows how the decision to deploy Linux stems directly from the
need to protect intellectual property related corporate assets.
The workstations at the Dreamworks animation studio have two or
three network cards in them, one of which is a Gigabit Ethernet
adapter. Network usage is high enough to warrant this sort of
configuration because, amongst other things, the animators' work
(which consists of mind-numbingly large graphics files) is stored
on the network filesystem. This situation is, to say the least,
unusual. In fact, the needs of the Dreamworks animation studio
are so special that, at one point, they were even considering
developing their own network filesystem! This seems crazy --
until you learn that the Dreamworks animation studio rightly
considers its computer files to be a primary business asset;
in the case of animation frames, computer files are the direct
precursor of their final product! With that in mind, try to put
yourself in their shoes: if you had to develop your
own alternative implementation of important network services,
what target platform would you choose? The developers at the
Dreamworks animation studio chose an open source, free software
product (Linux) as the starting point for their efforts.
[If you did not arrive at a similar solution, please read the
rest of the article and then try again.:)] Now,
the story of Linux deployment at the Dreamworks animation
studio was not one of unmitigated success, as many bugs were
discovered that had to be overcome, but this just underscores
why a group of talented IT professionals would choose an open
source product over a closed source product, whether "shared" or not: the latter would leave them at the mercy of the vendor,
whereas the former allows them to help themselves.
Let me summarize. The decision to deploy Linux at the Dreamworks
animation studio was not made on the basis of the product's
technical merit alone. Responsible IT professionals
choose Linux because, beyond providing a solid foundation on
which to build a custom solution, it empowers its users and
developers in ways that closed source and so-called shared source
products never could. The Dreamworks
animation studio staff can better protect the company's
intellectual assets (which are created in the form of animation frames)
by using, modifying, and sharing GPL'd software. Interestingly, the GPL, by virtue of its perpetuity, further protects their assets by guaranteeing that the software they helped create will remain available to them.
Let me now spew some tenets of pop-psychology empowerment theory
with which even Microsoft's PR flunkies could not disagree:
Every user's needs are unique in some respect.
A user is empowered when he has the ability to customize
the product to meet his unique needs fully.
A user is only truly empowered when he cannot be denied
continued use of the customizations he requires.
I propose for your consideration, that the Dreamworks animation
studio story is, undeniably, one of empowerment. Moreover, I
propose for your consideration that, if you believe that the
above tenets are true, then you should find that Craig Mundie's
statements of the past few days are an egregious example of FUD.
I realize that I may be preaching to the choir by posting this
here, but it is my hope that the above will give somebody powerful
arguments for the next water cooler debate.:)
Re:article won't persuade most potential users
on
Linux and Shrek
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· Score: 1
Agreed.
The Dreamworks animation studio did not choose to use Linux
because of imaginary benefits or because of philosophical bias;
they most certainly were not jumping on a bandwagon. I want to
state, for the record, that when Lans Carstensen (network
admin guy at Dreamworks and a friend of mine) started deploying Linux at the Dreamworks animation studio last year (which I mentioned here), he talked about specific, present business needs
addressed by the deployment. Amongst them, the story of the
network filesystem issue is especially interesting because it
shows how the decision to deploy Linux stems directly from the
need to protect intellectual property related corporate assets.
The workstations at the Dreamworks animation studio have two or
three network cards in them, one of which is a Gigabit Ethernet
adapter. Network usage is high enough to warrant this sort of
configuration because, amongst other things, the animators' work
(which consists of mind-numbingly large graphics files) is stored
on the network filesystem. This situation is, to say the least,
unusual. In fact, the needs of the Dreamworks animation studio
are so special that, at one point, they were even considering
developing their own network filesystem! This seems crazy --
until you learn that the Dreamworks animation studio (rightly)
considers its computer files to be a primary business asset;
in the case of animation frames, computer files are the direct
precursor of their final product! With that in mind, try to put
yourself in their shoes: if you had to develop your
own alternative implementation of important network services,
what target platform would you choose? The developers at the
Dreamworks animation studio chose an open source, free software
product (Linux) as the starting point for their efforts.
[If you did not arrive at a similar solution, please read the
rest of the article and then try again.:)] Now,
the story of Linux deployment at the Dreamworks animation
studio was not a fairy tale, as many bugs were
discovered that had to be overcome, but this just underscores
why a group of talented IT professionals would choose an open
source product over a closed source product, whether "shared" or not: the latter would leave them at the mercy of the vendor,
whereas the former allows them to help themselves.
Let me summarize. The decision to deploy Linux at the Dreamworks
animation studio was not made on the basis of the product's
technical merit alone. Responsible IT professionals
choose Linux because, beyond providing a solid foundation on
which to build a custom solution, it empowers its users and
developers in ways that closed source and so-called shared source
products never could. The Dreamworks
animation studio staff can better protect the company's
intellectual assets (which are created in the form of animation frames)
by using, modifying, and sharing GPL'd software. Interestingly, the GPL, by virtue of its perpetuity, further protects their assets by guaranteeing that any software they help create will remain available to them.
Let me try to address a question from the article post in my own convoluted way. When people go to the store to buy a new computer, they look at the software and the peripherals available for it before making a decision. Right now, Joe Q. Average, retail shopper, will find plenty of digital cameras and scanners and printers and software with the Windows logo or the MacOS logo on the package, and he will assume that he must own a computer with Windows or MacOS in order to use them. Yep, Joe Q. Average will only consider buying a computer with pre-installed Linux if all those goodies I just mentioned feature a big fat Tux logo alongside the Windows disintegrating flag and the MacOS happy face. Computer manufacturers know this, and they will therefore refrain from putting a machine running Linux on a retail outlet's shelves until the situation is corrected. Now that Linux 2.4 is available, Linux International and friends should first try to persuade all of those cheap USB peripheral manufacturers to donate Linux drivers (or at least release hardware specs, which in time become drivers) for their products and then (and this is very important) persuade their marketing departments to advertise Linux 2.4 compatibility on their retail packaging. Of course, this would be a lot more meaningful if there were a suitable LSB specification that guaranteed the availability of corresponding userland facilities that may be needed to facilitate the use of the peripheral (like ALSA and SANE and Ghostscript and whatever) but that's a whole 'nother story. Of course, all of the above depends on the premise that Linux really is suitable for mass consumption; given that we would not want to fall flat on our faces, it is extremely important that case studies should tell us in what domains and to what extent Linux is ready for use by Joe Q. Average, computer user, before a potentially premature branding effort gets started. For some things, late is better than wrong.
The GPL establishes a new legal entity (the software) and defines
its rights; that is, it describes what licensees
may and may not do to the software, and further describes the obligations
that they incur as a result of doing certain things to the software.
Now, the GNU GPL does not curtail the rights of the copyright holder
(which include freedom) and in fact relies on the enforceability of
said licensor rights; however, the GNU GPL does curtail the rights of
users and developers of the software who do not hold a copyright on the
entire work.
It has also been said that one's freedom ends where another's begins;
according to that perspective, which is widely held even by those
who object to the GNU GPL, curtailing of the freedom of developers is
perfectly legitimate in the context of the GPL's goals, which include
protecting the rights of software. However, while limiting freedom
to guarantee freedom is probably a defensible proposition, the above
argument in defense of the GPL is only tenable if one assumes that
software can have unassailable rights. I propose that things do not
have rights -- people have rights.
If you believe in the primacy of people's rights, it is perfectly
legitimate to object to the GNU GPL; in fact, some radical libertarians
believe that the very notion of copyright (and, by extension, copyleft)
is flawed. In any case, this Slashdot discussion is motivated by the
fact that there are talented programmers who choose to release their
software under licenses that limit the freedom of people in various
unpleasant ways.
When source code is released under a suitably permissive license or
into the public domain, developers are free to recombine it at will,
which is a Good Thing. Of course, some people choose to withhold
their (modified) source code, but we should respect their right to do
that because they, and not the programs, are free -- and
that is a good thing.
[I would have moderated Blade's
post as(+3, Flamebait Deluxe). It is
irresistible!]
The Linux model is not a good vehicle for big business because the
usenet model of support only works for a couple of dozen computers. We shall
never see nationwide installations of Linux in the 10k + range until there
is a very large Linux company.
The problem is not the model of support, as you allege, but the priorities
of management. You may be correct in suggesting that more companies would
consider deploying Linux if there were a dominant distribution with "stifling
power", but this just means that IT managers are concerned about the wrong
things. IT departments ought ideally to exist for the purpose of creating and
maintaining their organization's IT infrastructure (regardless of whether
these arise from vendor ineptitude or unorthodox requirements in the
organization) -- and not for the purpose of coordinating foreign
intervention (i.e., yelling at vendors and hiring consultants) when
problems arise.
A small development team can still hope to craft a custom GNU/Linux system
with long-term value that addresses the organization's needs
precisely because GNU/Linux development is fragmented (which means
that sources remain accessible in every respect) and because there is not a
dominant player (which means that the evolution of the system is still
reasonably transparent). Consider, for example, the Linux deployment by Lans
Carstensen's team at the Dreamworks animation studio.
Now, the only way we are going to get such a large Linux company that
the corps feel they can trust to fix their problems is if Red Hat, SuSE,
Caldera, Corel etc become one. Divided, they are small and weak. Together
they are strong.
If a company with expansive resources such as you seem to advocate should
emerge, it could (according to Eric Raymond's analysis)
assert effective ownership of parts of GNU/Linux simply becoming the
maintainer or primary developer of those parts. Consider, for example, the
case of Red Hat, who keep various Linux, GCC, and GNOME developers on payroll.
If such a company then chose to release new versions of free software only in
conjunction with a new distribution (thus diminishing availability,
accessibility) and without coordinating its efforts with other developers
(thus diminishing transparency of the evolution of the software), the
aforementioned virtues of GNU/Linux would be in doubt (regardless of whether
the company did this maliciously) and many would find good reason to choose a
different platform.
I expect that in ten years, after a struggle between these companies
involving bankruptcies, mergers and hostile takeovers there shall emerge one
true Linux company, if you like a MS of the Linux world, without quite the
same stifling power.
Gosh, I hope you are wrong about there being only one "Linux company" but I
know you are wrong to claim that such a company would be less
stifling. And, now, repeat after me: diversity, distributedness, and
transparency are good.:) A single, almighty "Linux company" is not
likely to give you any of those things.
Only then will corps be able to make large scale deployments of Linux
with the proper assurance and support.
The fact that some people think that Linux is a poor choice because it is
fragmented is a good indication of just how perverse the mainstream IT
perspective is. I hope I live to see the day in which avoiding responsibility
gives way to meeting requirements as the modus operandi of technology
managers in every company.
I know it is lame to reply to one's post, but I thought I should disambiguate one of the sentences. It should have been as follows:
Consider the case of Latin, a well-known dead language: we do not say "it is dead because it has not changed" -- rather, we say "it has not changed because it is dead." In other words, languages change if they survive, not the other way around.
With all due respect, sir, I find your
arguments above to be caca-doodee-poopoo.:) Seriously, though, your
position is, in my not-so-humble opinion, untenable.
Mantle:I
don't think it's a big deal using english words in normal foreign language
speech.
It may not be a big deal to you and it may not be a big deal for a lot of
immigrants, but it is a very big deal for a lot of people
around the world.
Mantle:I
am a Cantonese speaker and this type of thing has been happening for years,
even before the web explosion of the 90s. We call it "Chinglish". It's not a
big deal.
If Chinese immigrants wish to dilute their cultural heritage, I say "let
them" because it would be a choice that is consistent with their decision to
emigrate; however, if Chinese immigrants were to demand that Americans start
using Chinese words for the sake of convenience or ease of assimilation, I
would have to denounce their intellectual laxitude and their cultural bigotry.
Similarly, it is sad but admissible that Iberoamerican immigrants choose to
pollute their native language with English words, but it would be inadmissible
that they should demand that US citizens use Spanish words when speaking
English.
Are we in agreement so far? I hope so.
Now, you should be able to see how, according to the above perspective, it
is equally undesirable that English words should creep into other languages
merely because English is the lingua franca of commerce today; it is
well to learn the ways of the empire, but one should not forsake one's
cultural identity in the process. As Asterix, William Wallace, and José Bové
have proved, resistance is not futile. (Yes, Asterix and William
Wallace are the stuff of comic books and legends, but those are good indices
of popular opinion, too, and popular opinion clearly says that one's cultural
identity is worth fighting for.)
What is at stake is not the legacy cultural assets of immigrants, most of
whom probably chose to leave their country, but the integrity of an
important cultural asset of billions of people - be they Chinese, Indian,
Mexican, or Basque - who wish to spend their lives in their native cultural
medium and who value their cultural heritage.
Mantle:Languages change and evolve. Lots of words in english come from other
cultures and languages. What's wrong with english words being used in other
languages?
What is wrong is that, often, other languages do already have
equivalent words; furthermore, when the language does not have a word for a
genuinely new thing, new words can be constructed in such a way that they are
euphonious in the target language and suggestive of their meaning to a native
speaker of that language. (As a native Spaniard, I can tell you that, for most
of my fellow Spanish citizens, English words are neither euphonious nor
suggestive of their meaning.) I would also like to point out that most of the
words associated with modern computing as experienced by plain folk predate
the advent of computers, so it seems reasonable to expect that equivalent
terms exist in most languages. Let me take advantage of this opportunity to
bring to your attention some of the jargon mentioned in the
article we are discussing:
"With the arrival of the Internet and e-mail," he wrote, "(U.S.
Spanish speakers) have begun... to adopt Spanish-ized terms for technical
computer jargon: aplodear for 'upload,' chatear for 'chat,' printear for
'print,' and many others."
All of these words have perfectly usable Spanish counterparts:
email: correo electrónico (not email
or even emilio:)
to upload: cargar (not
aploadear)
to download: descargar (not
daunloadear)
to chat: charlar (not chatear)
to print: imprimir (not
printear)
Here are some more Spanish words:
file: archivo
file management: gestión de archivos
directory: directorio
folder: carpeta
hard drive: disco duro
floppy drive: disco flexible
keyboard: teclado
mouse: ratón
screen: pantalla
to browse: hojear (yes, that should really
have that "h":)
to search: buscar
to find: encontrar
to store: almacenar
Well, I think that's enough to prove my point.
Mantle:No
language can survive if it doesn't change.
You are confused. Before I explain why, let me define the terms living
language and dead language as language that people speak
routinely and language that people do not speak routinely,
respectively. Statements like "No living language is invulnerable to change"
or perhaps "A dead language does not change" would have been accurate.
Your statement is wrong not because it is a vague truism but because
it is symptomatic of a broken understanding of the nature and the role of
language. A language that does not change cannot "survive" because it is, by
definition, not "alive" in the first place. Consider the case of Latin, a
well-known dead language: it is not dead because it has not changed -- it has
not changed because it is dead. In other words, languages change if they
survive, not the other way around.
Of course, if the people who speak the language do not survive, the
language will not survive either. Consider a case in which an entire nation
is annihilated, as when the Spanish "accidentally repopulated" the Canary
Islands. Horror stories aside, a living language survives along with the
people who speak it and evolves to suit their needs. In living languages,
grammar is continuously revised by the people to become more
expressive and words are invented by the people to describe new
things. Consider, for example, the case of the Castilian word for privacy
(privacidad): it was added to the language in the last decade because
people wished to refer to that particular notion using a noun rather than the
corresponding adjective (privado), which did already exist. Nobody
decreed what the new word should be, but a new word was nevertheless tacitly
agreed upon without recourse to the English language. This anecdote
exemplifies an approach to the evolution of language that is sound in every
way: it augments the lexicon with words that are euphonious and meaningful for
native speakers, and it helps stem the incessant waves of corporate
colonization that slowly erode the cultural identity of every nation that
trades with the United States. And Spain is not the only country where people
value their cultural identity and resent the use of random foreign words;
surely, even you can supply substantiating evidence for this claim.
Cultural identity, of which language is an important part, may not be a big
deal to you or to me -- but, for most people, it is a big deal.
Chris Hind is right: if you did not "experience" the sixties and the seventies, Heinlein's work can be hard to stomach. I also agree that other authors of that time are simply better writers than Heinlein. Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep deals with the issue of religion allegorically (Mercer, empathy boxes, etc.) and manages to convey a well-formed view of the role of religion in our lives without needing to formulate an alternative for illustrative purposes. PKD's perspective is almost the opposite of Heinlein's: DADoES does insinuate that organized religion may be a fraud (the "God is dead and an actor plays his part" line -- literally) but it also argues credibly in favor of the value of mythology and shared experience.
The expropriation of Rambus's patents is a perfectly viable option. Just as individuals had to give up their junk at a fair price during World War II so that war production could proceed, and just as farmers must often part with land today so that public works may proceed (dams, roads, whatever), Rambus could be forcibly divested of its patents so that the evolution of computer hardware can proceed with proper regard to technical merit, which is ultimately in everybody's interest. The only legitimate obstacle I foresee is that the relevant people in the US government lack the cojones to do it; they would have to move resolutely and unapologetically, but they will not. (Before dismissing that last statement, you should take a moment to read the Wired story on the Microsoft antitrust trial.)
I agree: Florida should scrap these results. Even if we ignore Jeb and voter fraud and ballot layout for a moment, it seems reasonable to demand that the people of Florida vote again because the integrity of the counts from the ballot boxes that were (briefly) missing yesterday cannot be guaranteed. At the very least, there should be a well-run federal investigation of the whole affair.
[The following is a revision of a letter I have been distributing via email. I ought to have posted this earlier, but I lacked the courage. You can find the original on my website.]
Dear US Citizen,
I am writing to remind you to vote conscientiously tomorrow. I will also
indulge in a little political activism by introducing some issues (watered
stock, free trade, and others) for your consideration. As you read this
message, keep in mind that I am not recommending that you vote for this or
that candidate, but only that you think about what is at stake, make a choice,
and vote.
I wish to bring to your attention a pattern of behavior by national
governments that suggests that, in the world-wide political arena, the
interests of citizens rank far below those of large corporations, and that the
latter seek actively to diminish the influence of citizens on their
governments' legislative activity. In some countries, citizens are even
compelled by law to foot the bill for this nonsense.;) It is worth noting
that the worst consequences of this are not in the future: most US citizens
feel so disenfranchised today that they either don't vote or vote for
the lesser evil, and US taxpayers (citizens or not) bear the burden of
unprecedented personal and national debt. If you don't vote, you will be
capitulating, and the future of US politics will be that much closer to a
foregone conclusion. As a citizen of the European Union and a resident of
Switzerland, a very small sovereign state, I have learned that the rest of the
world cannot afford apathy or carelessness on the part of registered voters in
the US. You can think of this message as a plea for help.
[As you read this, please excuse the careless use of "Americans" where "US
citizens" would have been correct.]
The first issue I want to discuss is the connection between corporations
and public money. You may or may not be aware of the emergence of watered stock and pooling as a
powerful weapons in the corporations' arsenal; for example, Microsoft and
Cisco have managed to attain tax-free status by writing off stock options (and
then earning some of that back when new stock is issued for the purpose of
redeeming those options) and Citigroup recapitalizes and decapitalizes itself
arbitrarily to achieve spectacular mergers (thus posing a great risk to the
banking sector) -- right under the nose of the SEC. In a perfect world, this
sort of abuse would have been reigned in already but, in our world, the
possibility of relief seems remote. Let me make this plain: the watered stock
write-off scheme amounts to a theft of public money and pooling needlessly
endangers the stability of the economy. At the very least, insofar as stock
represents a redeemable claim against a company's assets, it is a perversion
of the modern economic perspective in which the stock market is allegedly as
adequate a store of value as gold ever was.
Actually, said modern economic perspective was already quite perverse (in
ways too numerous to mention) long before watered stock was even imagined.
Such perversity is a natural consequence of the absence of an adequate
standard of value, which was in turn an intended consequence of changes in
policy that took place earlier in the century. Long ago, Alan Greenspan
explained that the institution he heads today is a powerful instrument with
which the government can confiscate part of the value of your money and, not
incidentally, engage in deficit spending regularly. You might argue that
calculated inflation is a small price to pay for being able to float a chronic
debt and sustain a deficit as needed. You might argue that your national debt
is presently unassailable because American households, which on average have a
negative savings rate and face unabatable credit card debt, are financially
overcommitted as it is. You might be wrong. Habitual deficit spending and
the resulting chronic national indebtedness, along with the corporate welfare
mechanisms that aggravate them, are to blame for your misery: the federal
government uses inflation and national debt to mortgage your personal assets
and your public resources, respectively, as effortlessly as a corporation uses
watered stock to dilute the value of your share holdings. Think what you will
of Greenspan's former support of the gold standard, but you have to admit that
he was correct in predicting the practical consequences of failing to provide
an adequate store of value, and in identifying the welfare state as the
primary beneficiary:
Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more
than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the
productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare
schemes.
What he may not have realized then is that corporate welfare is
just as likely a welfare scheme as any other.
It now behooves us to ask not only how this wave of abuse can be stemmed,
but also how this sort of situation can arise even under the watchful eye of
our elected officials. The answer is that, in the US, the Executive and the
Agencies operate with considerable autonomy; many important decisions are
often made away from public scrutiny, largely or altogether, and there is a
vested interest on the part of large corporations to increase the autonomy, if
not the stature, of these public servants. Consider the case of MAI, the Multilateral
agreement on investment -- a
charter of rights and freedoms for corporations. Those of you who have
not heard of it should at least know that it was the culmination of attempts
to transfer some important powers from the popularly elected legislative
bodies to the executive officials of sovereign states and to give corporations
the legal standing of sovereign states. Let me take a moment to explore the
brilliance of these tactics.
When decision making forums are sheltered from public scrutiny,
executive officials can serve corporate interests with impunity.
When corporations have the same legal standing as sovereign states,
large multinational corporations have power over small sovereign states -- perhaps even those in which the company is incorporated.
Surely, you can give examples of an administration negotiating treaties
that would be difficult to accept for a majority of citizens and impossible to
ratify for most congresses; now, try to imagine a future in which the
legislature is powerless to stop unfavorable or undesirable consequences of
free trade arrangements that it did not have the opportunity to approve or
reject. Surely, you can name instances of a corporation getting away with
practices that a majority of citizens would condemn but which the courts are
powerless to stop in the absence of adequate legislation or jurisdiction; now,
try to imagine a future in which a corporation undertakes legal action against
sovereign states for refusing to let it set up shop, or even for having laws
and regulations that hinder it, such as strict environmental standards.
Now, the two leading candidates, Al Gore and George Bush, look at the issue
very differently, saying that free trade creates jobs, without mentioning what
kind and where. Actually, Bush has even said
that it is the duty of the administration to "sell" free trade (on WTO's
terms, of course) to US citizens! Ralph Nader, on the other hand, has
said that he wants the US to withdraw from the WTO and that we should
re-examine the premise of so-called "free trade" agreements. I was going to
give you a reference to Nader's website with that last statement, as WTO/NAFTA was one of
the three key issues on his home page until just a few days ago, but now it is
not even in the issue summaries. What could this mean? I think it means
that he has pushed one of his favorite issues into the background because he
needs enough votes to get federal funding for his next campaign. And this, in
turn, suggests that American politicians think that the US electorate is
politically comatose. You can help prove them wrong: a strong showing by
Americans on election day would tell US politicians and corporations
and the world that Americans are still in control of their political
system. It would be a great sequel to the Battle of Seattle, with
a lot less violence and just as much press coverage. Realistically, you
probably cannot afford to act as resolutely as José Bové, but you can
vote.
When I think about US politics, I think of the fable in which a master
presents some options to his student, threatening to beat him with a cane if
he chooses poorly; the essence of the problem is that the student cannot
choose any of the options presented to him without risking bodily harm. (You
should now take a moment to discover how the student can avoid the beating and
what the moral of the story is.) You can and should vote for the presidential
candidate who will most closely represent your interests, as you have more
valid options than the mainstream media seem to suggest: you can vote for George W. Bush; you can vote for Al Gore; you can vote for Ralph Nader; you can vote for Harry Browne; and you can vote for some
other candidate (yes, there are more) though his name may not appear on your
ballot. If you cast a so-called "useful" vote, you are supporting a system in
which you have a lot less influence than you otherwise might, and you
might get beat with a cane. Of course, if you don't vote, you have
no voice, nor will you ever, and when you and I finally get beat with a very
stiff cane, no one will hear us scream. Please, vote.
Here is some additional information: lately, most graduate students of physics in the US are not WASPs -- many aren't even US citizens! Chad is the only white US citizen in our Applied Optics grad program (hi, Chad). So, I have shown that I propel in an environment that is at least as diverse as your own (assuming Chinese and Indian count as "colored":-) and at least as technology- driven as your own (though we are not engineers in the strict sense of the word). 'That good enough?
Clarification: "His" in the second sentence is "Jon's" -- sorry for the ambiguity. Observation: Look at my name. Anecdote: A fellow by the name of Henry (hi, Henry:-) works for an American (US) chemical company in Switzerlad. He is Swiss -- he is black. He was invited to sit on a "diversity awareness" committee in the company. He told them they were full of shit. He was relieved of his responsibility on the committee -- QED. About me: I have a B.S. in optical physics and I am working on my M.S. in optical engineering. Scientists and engineers have no time for issues of race -- there are too many gadgets waiting to be made!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Ganz genau: without access to the source code, the best you can hope for is a free forall -- really nothing to write home about.
[BTW, mckelveyf, I am not trivializing your point with this pun. The serious take on it is seriously meant, too. But it's 4AM, I've been doing battle with GDB for many hours now, and it's getting hard for me to keep a straight face while reading all the dogma (elsewhere) in this discussion.]
...so as to guarantee that libiberty and justice for all I heard so much about in my high school Government class? It didn't make much sense to me then, but this latest essay by Stallman sure makes it sound like a great idea.
You seem to have assumed, for the purpose of the above exposition, that implementation languages are chosen by well-informed people, and substantially on the basis of technical merit. That's not always the case. Well, outside your shop in any case. ;-)
In my opinion, acceptably safe languages that are quite expressive do already exist. I do not believe that the alleged deficiencies of safe languages explains the continued use of "unsafe" languages in domains for which the latter are not a good fit; I believe that, on the average, ill-conceived implementation strategies are more likely at fault. How many projects struggle with inadequate languages as a result of misinformed (or even uninformed) managers' inconsiderate (and uncontestable) decrees? Too many. :-(
I am happy to learn that smart people are busy inventing the next great programming language, but I think that, collectively, we need to spend less time improving our tools and more time addressing the organizational deficiencies that result in our having to use the wrong tools when we know better.
One Captain Marchessi was interviewed live over the telephone on Spain's national television, TVE. He said (and I am paraphrasing here) that Airbus planes are designed to survive the loss of an engine, and that pilots are trained for precisely such an eventuality; therefore, he believes, it is unlikely that the loss of thrust alone would have caused the plane to crash. (To his credit, he declined to speculate further despite pressure from the reporter.)
Now, can somebody tell me whether the phrase "the loss of an engine" in this context could mean the physical loss of the engine? Or is it just an idiom meaning "the loss of an engine's thrust"? I mean -- are these planes really designed to account for the possible dettachment of an engine?
You make a very good point: the case of an ethnic group "inheriting" some of the mythology of the people already living in the lands to which they migrate is indeed well known.
I want to thank you again for a very interesting link, and I encourage you to post while logged in so that we can pay special attention to other such posts from you in the future. I think that's the idea behind Slashdot Karma, which is finally just a formalism that automates this primitive evaluative efficiency enhancement technique (which is to say that Slashdot Karma institutionalizes a sort of justifiable prejudice on a per-individual basis).
In any case, thanks for joining the discussion, AC.
Wow. I did not think IBM management could be that, um, confused; thanks for setting me straight.
Some brief remarks that I would have sent you privately if I had known how:
Best of luck with your project!
Wow, Mr. AC, that is an informative and very on-topic link! Maybe there is hope for Shalshdot after all. ;-)
I am not aware of Celtic tribes who feared that the sky might fall on their heads living in or near Estonia at the prehistoric times suggested by the article, but I will tell you what I know that might be relevant to your question in case you are interested:
Thank you for the link, by the way. I wish you had posted while logged in. In any case, let me know what else you find.
I agree with your claim that open development can lead to higher total product costs than closed development; however, low development cost was never the right reason for doing open development in the first place. One good reason for choosing the open source approach is the desire to respect the users' freedom, as well as the developers'. Another good reason for developing software openly is that truly open development can lead to much higher quality products:
I think that some of the things you mention to in your caveat regarding open development are actually Good Things; the difficulties to which you allude may have less to do with the well-documented "features" of open source and more to do with the abilities of the managers charged with addressing them. Let me annotate part of your post in order to clarify that statement.
[My apologies to Dennis Leary, etc.]
... unless you are a good manager who understands that it is the manager's responsibility to ensure that the goals of the project are achieved and who is therefore willing to play the tyrant with dramatic flair when it becomes necessary. Two words: Richard fskcing Stallman.
... unless you are a good manager who understands that delegation is inevitable for large-scale system building and who knows how to identify, motivate, assist, and trust talented contributors. Two words: Linus fscking Torvalds.
... which is not a problem (it may even be a Good Thing) if you are a good manager who understands that the shape of things must change to suit the needs of the people who use them, and who consequently designs the infrastructure of both the software system and the user/developer community in such a way as to make such a distributed effort possible and rewarding. Two words: Larry fscking Wall.
I have long suspected that one reason (of many) why project managers in traditional shops fear open source development is that the model puts a lot of responsibility on them and requires that they perform their function well. In fact, it may well be that a poorly managed open source project is less likely to survive infancy than a poorly managed closed source project -- and it may well be that some managers know they aren't up to the challenge.
Well, what you are describing would be a device not unlike that of Huffman coding, don't you think? As in "shorter sequences for common characters, longer sequences for rarer characters", no? Your approach gives you some of the benefits of Huffman coding without the complex routine or the somewhat expensive lookup. So, you see, you guys really were at least as heroic as I suspected. ;-) Thank you for replying, BTW.
I think I have a candidate for you to consider. The so-called pre-Roman Celts of what is now France and northwestern Spain feared that the sky might fall on their heads. Although the so-called Celtic (as opposed to Basque) ethnic groups in present-day France and the mountains in the north of Spain (Liguri, Asturi, Kantauri, Gallici) most probably came from other mountain homelands in Europe, like (in the case of the probably Celtic Liguri) the Alps, poet and historian Robert Graves has pointed to similarities between Celtic myths of the western Celts (Spanish, Irish, Welsh, and Brittonic) and myths which were "displaced" in early recorded history (euphemism for ethnically cleansed) in lands that were later to become Greece and Persia. Now, it seems reasonable to object that people that far west could not have seen this event, but it is known that Celts, who preferred to live in easily -defended high grounds, periodically migrated in large groups; Julius Caesar reported that, during his "last" campaign against the Gauls, thousands of Celts passed near his encampment, apparently on their way to the Iberian peninsula. What I am trying to say is that the Celts may well have lived that far east a long time ago; indeed, not so long ago, the Isauri [sp?] were a well-documented (and almost certainly Celtic) pain in the ass in the middle east -- during early recorded history, IIRC. Or maybe there were many meteor impacts, some of which remain to be discovered near the traditional Celtic homelands. In any case, I don't know whether the collective Celtic memory of the sky "falling" is linked to the cataclysm alluded to in the article, but it's an interesting conjecture -- one that I make on no authority (I am not a historian) strictly for the sake of discussion.
A set of between 17 and 32 elements, such as your 31 character set, requires 5 bits per entity to encode; therefore, in the absence of something like Huffman coding, you could fit a maximum of 51 characters in those 32 bytes, and not 64. Now, here's my question: did you really stick Huffman coding routines in those minuscule 8 kilobyte executables? 'Cause I didn't think that had been common practice; I mean, even today, something like the colorForth source editor is a bit of a novelty. Maybe the *old* oldtimers were in fact more heroic than I had imagined. Please, don't mistake my reverence for mockery: the first computer I actually owned, circa 1986, was an Amstrad CPC6128 with 128 *kilobytes* of RAM, so your mindset is hard for me to intuit.
OK, you're on: try the Amaya (it's open source, IIRC) and then come back to this forum to tell me why its Structure View facility "doesn't cut it".
Now, I do not use this program to create my documents, but I often use it to understand how a document is laid out, especially when it contains funky SVG and MathML, or just really perverse HTML; I find that its document structure view facility is great, albeit not the most comfortable for the mouse-disinclined, like me.
By the way, Amaya supports collaborative annotation, external to the document being annotated, courtesy of the Annotea Project. You're welcome to comment on this facility, too; let us know how it measures up to Word's offering.
By the way, did I mention that Amaya aims to be, and largely is, strictly standards compliant? That it is available as a Windows port, too? In binary form? With an installer? Yes? Well, what are you waiting for, st. augustine? :-) Seriously, though, tell us how it went when you're done, if you would. Thanks in advance.
Microsoft realizes that most corporations for whom intellectual property is the most important asset are not software publishers. That means that, for a lot of organizations, using and releasing software under the GPL makes a lot of sense. I want to use today's Dreamworks animation studio story as an example of how contributing to the development of software licensed under the GPL can be in the interest of a corporation wishing to protect its intellectual property.
The Dreamworks animation studio did not choose to use Linux because of imaginary benefits or because of philosophical bias; they most certainly were not jumping on a bandwagon. I want to state, for the record, that when Lans Carstensen (the network admin guy at Dreamworks and a friend of mine) started deploying Linux, he talked about specific, present business needs addressed by the deployment. Amongst them, the story of the network filesystem issue is especially interesting because it shows how the decision to deploy Linux stems directly from the need to protect intellectual property related corporate assets.
The workstations at the Dreamworks animation studio have two or three network cards in them, one of which is a Gigabit Ethernet adapter. Network usage is high enough to warrant this sort of configuration because, amongst other things, the animators' work (which consists of mind-numbingly large graphics files) is stored on the network filesystem. This situation is, to say the least, unusual. In fact, the needs of the Dreamworks animation studio are so special that, at one point, they were even considering developing their own network filesystem! This seems crazy -- until you learn that the Dreamworks animation studio rightly considers its computer files to be a primary business asset; in the case of animation frames, computer files are the direct precursor of their final product! With that in mind, try to put yourself in their shoes: if you had to develop your own alternative implementation of important network services, what target platform would you choose? The developers at the Dreamworks animation studio chose an open source, free software product (Linux) as the starting point for their efforts. [If you did not arrive at a similar solution, please read the rest of the article and then try again. :)] Now,
the story of Linux deployment at the Dreamworks animation
studio was not one of unmitigated success, as many bugs were
discovered that had to be overcome, but this just underscores
why a group of talented IT professionals would choose an open
source product over a closed source product, whether "shared" or not: the latter would leave them at the mercy of the vendor,
whereas the former allows them to help themselves.
Let me summarize. The decision to deploy Linux at the Dreamworks animation studio was not made on the basis of the product's technical merit alone. Responsible IT professionals choose Linux because, beyond providing a solid foundation on which to build a custom solution, it empowers its users and developers in ways that closed source and so-called shared source products never could. The Dreamworks animation studio staff can better protect the company's intellectual assets (which are created in the form of animation frames) by using, modifying, and sharing GPL'd software. Interestingly, the GPL, by virtue of its perpetuity, further protects their assets by guaranteeing that the software they helped create will remain available to them.
Let me now spew some tenets of pop-psychology empowerment theory with which even Microsoft's PR flunkies could not disagree:
I propose for your consideration, that the Dreamworks animation studio story is, undeniably, one of empowerment. Moreover, I propose for your consideration that, if you believe that the above tenets are true, then you should find that Craig Mundie's statements of the past few days are an egregious example of FUD.
I realize that I may be preaching to the choir by posting this here, but it is my hope that the above will give somebody powerful arguments for the next water cooler debate. :)
Agreed.
The Dreamworks animation studio did not choose to use Linux because of imaginary benefits or because of philosophical bias; they most certainly were not jumping on a bandwagon. I want to state, for the record, that when Lans Carstensen (network admin guy at Dreamworks and a friend of mine) started deploying Linux at the Dreamworks animation studio last year (which I mentioned here), he talked about specific, present business needs addressed by the deployment. Amongst them, the story of the network filesystem issue is especially interesting because it shows how the decision to deploy Linux stems directly from the need to protect intellectual property related corporate assets.
The workstations at the Dreamworks animation studio have two or three network cards in them, one of which is a Gigabit Ethernet adapter. Network usage is high enough to warrant this sort of configuration because, amongst other things, the animators' work (which consists of mind-numbingly large graphics files) is stored on the network filesystem. This situation is, to say the least, unusual. In fact, the needs of the Dreamworks animation studio are so special that, at one point, they were even considering developing their own network filesystem! This seems crazy -- until you learn that the Dreamworks animation studio (rightly) considers its computer files to be a primary business asset; in the case of animation frames, computer files are the direct precursor of their final product! With that in mind, try to put yourself in their shoes: if you had to develop your own alternative implementation of important network services, what target platform would you choose? The developers at the Dreamworks animation studio chose an open source, free software product (Linux) as the starting point for their efforts. [If you did not arrive at a similar solution, please read the rest of the article and then try again. :)] Now,
the story of Linux deployment at the Dreamworks animation
studio was not a fairy tale, as many bugs were
discovered that had to be overcome, but this just underscores
why a group of talented IT professionals would choose an open
source product over a closed source product, whether "shared" or not: the latter would leave them at the mercy of the vendor,
whereas the former allows them to help themselves.
Let me summarize. The decision to deploy Linux at the Dreamworks animation studio was not made on the basis of the product's technical merit alone. Responsible IT professionals choose Linux because, beyond providing a solid foundation on which to build a custom solution, it empowers its users and developers in ways that closed source and so-called shared source products never could. The Dreamworks animation studio staff can better protect the company's intellectual assets (which are created in the form of animation frames) by using, modifying, and sharing GPL'd software. Interestingly, the GPL, by virtue of its perpetuity, further protects their assets by guaranteeing that any software they help create will remain available to them.
Let me try to address a question from the article post in my own convoluted way. When people go to the store to buy a new computer, they look at the software and the peripherals available for it before making a decision. Right now, Joe Q. Average, retail shopper, will find plenty of digital cameras and scanners and printers and software with the Windows logo or the MacOS logo on the package, and he will assume that he must own a computer with Windows or MacOS in order to use them. Yep, Joe Q. Average will only consider buying a computer with pre-installed Linux if all those goodies I just mentioned feature a big fat Tux logo alongside the Windows disintegrating flag and the MacOS happy face. Computer manufacturers know this, and they will therefore refrain from putting a machine running Linux on a retail outlet's shelves until the situation is corrected. Now that Linux 2.4 is available, Linux International and friends should first try to persuade all of those cheap USB peripheral manufacturers to donate Linux drivers (or at least release hardware specs, which in time become drivers) for their products and then (and this is very important) persuade their marketing departments to advertise Linux 2.4 compatibility on their retail packaging. Of course, this would be a lot more meaningful if there were a suitable LSB specification that guaranteed the availability of corresponding userland facilities that may be needed to facilitate the use of the peripheral (like ALSA and SANE and Ghostscript and whatever) but that's a whole 'nother story. Of course, all of the above depends on the premise that Linux really is suitable for mass consumption; given that we would not want to fall flat on our faces, it is extremely important that case studies should tell us in what domains and to what extent Linux is ready for use by Joe Q. Average, computer user, before a potentially premature branding effort gets started. For some things, late is better than wrong.
It has been said that software released under the GNU GPL is not in fact free-as-in-speech because the GPL curtails the freedom of programmers. This perspective is confused: the GNU GPL does indeed liberate the software precisely because it restricts the freedom of its developers.
The GPL establishes a new legal entity (the software) and defines its rights; that is, it describes what licensees may and may not do to the software, and further describes the obligations that they incur as a result of doing certain things to the software.
Now, the GNU GPL does not curtail the rights of the copyright holder (which include freedom) and in fact relies on the enforceability of said licensor rights; however, the GNU GPL does curtail the rights of users and developers of the software who do not hold a copyright on the entire work.
It has also been said that one's freedom ends where another's begins; according to that perspective, which is widely held even by those who object to the GNU GPL, curtailing of the freedom of developers is perfectly legitimate in the context of the GPL's goals, which include protecting the rights of software. However, while limiting freedom to guarantee freedom is probably a defensible proposition, the above argument in defense of the GPL is only tenable if one assumes that software can have unassailable rights. I propose that things do not have rights -- people have rights.
If you believe in the primacy of people's rights, it is perfectly legitimate to object to the GNU GPL; in fact, some radical libertarians believe that the very notion of copyright (and, by extension, copyleft) is flawed. In any case, this Slashdot discussion is motivated by the fact that there are talented programmers who choose to release their software under licenses that limit the freedom of people in various unpleasant ways.
When source code is released under a suitably permissive license or into the public domain, developers are free to recombine it at will, which is a Good Thing. Of course, some people choose to withhold their (modified) source code, but we should respect their right to do that because they, and not the programs, are free -- and that is a good thing.
[I would have moderated Blade's post as(+3, Flamebait Deluxe). It is irresistible!]
The problem is not the model of support, as you allege, but the priorities of management. You may be correct in suggesting that more companies would consider deploying Linux if there were a dominant distribution with "stifling power", but this just means that IT managers are concerned about the wrong things. IT departments ought ideally to exist for the purpose of creating and maintaining their organization's IT infrastructure (regardless of whether these arise from vendor ineptitude or unorthodox requirements in the organization) -- and not for the purpose of coordinating foreign intervention (i.e., yelling at vendors and hiring consultants) when problems arise.
A small development team can still hope to craft a custom GNU/Linux system with long-term value that addresses the organization's needs precisely because GNU/Linux development is fragmented (which means that sources remain accessible in every respect) and because there is not a dominant player (which means that the evolution of the system is still reasonably transparent). Consider, for example, the Linux deployment by Lans Carstensen's team at the Dreamworks animation studio.
If a company with expansive resources such as you seem to advocate should emerge, it could (according to Eric Raymond's analysis) assert effective ownership of parts of GNU/Linux simply becoming the maintainer or primary developer of those parts. Consider, for example, the case of Red Hat, who keep various Linux, GCC, and GNOME developers on payroll. If such a company then chose to release new versions of free software only in conjunction with a new distribution (thus diminishing availability, accessibility) and without coordinating its efforts with other developers (thus diminishing transparency of the evolution of the software), the aforementioned virtues of GNU/Linux would be in doubt (regardless of whether the company did this maliciously) and many would find good reason to choose a different platform.
Gosh, I hope you are wrong about there being only one "Linux company" but I know you are wrong to claim that such a company would be less stifling. And, now, repeat after me: diversity, distributedness, and transparency are good. :) A single, almighty "Linux company" is not
likely to give you any of those things.
The fact that some people think that Linux is a poor choice because it is fragmented is a good indication of just how perverse the mainstream IT perspective is. I hope I live to see the day in which avoiding responsibility gives way to meeting requirements as the modus operandi of technology managers in every company.
I know it is lame to reply to one's post, but I thought I should disambiguate one of the sentences. It should have been as follows:
Sorry about that. :)
With all due respect, sir, I find your arguments above to be caca-doodee-poopoo. :) Seriously, though, your
position is, in my not-so-humble opinion, untenable.
It may not be a big deal to you and it may not be a big deal for a lot of immigrants, but it is a very big deal for a lot of people around the world.
What about the recent squabble between the Chinese government and the domain registrars? Not a big deal, huh?
If Chinese immigrants wish to dilute their cultural heritage, I say "let them" because it would be a choice that is consistent with their decision to emigrate; however, if Chinese immigrants were to demand that Americans start using Chinese words for the sake of convenience or ease of assimilation, I would have to denounce their intellectual laxitude and their cultural bigotry. Similarly, it is sad but admissible that Iberoamerican immigrants choose to pollute their native language with English words, but it would be inadmissible that they should demand that US citizens use Spanish words when speaking English.
Are we in agreement so far? I hope so.
Now, you should be able to see how, according to the above perspective, it is equally undesirable that English words should creep into other languages merely because English is the lingua franca of commerce today; it is well to learn the ways of the empire, but one should not forsake one's cultural identity in the process. As Asterix, William Wallace, and José Bové have proved, resistance is not futile. (Yes, Asterix and William Wallace are the stuff of comic books and legends, but those are good indices of popular opinion, too, and popular opinion clearly says that one's cultural identity is worth fighting for.)
What is at stake is not the legacy cultural assets of immigrants, most of whom probably chose to leave their country, but the integrity of an important cultural asset of billions of people - be they Chinese, Indian, Mexican, or Basque - who wish to spend their lives in their native cultural medium and who value their cultural heritage.
What is wrong is that, often, other languages do already have equivalent words; furthermore, when the language does not have a word for a genuinely new thing, new words can be constructed in such a way that they are euphonious in the target language and suggestive of their meaning to a native speaker of that language. (As a native Spaniard, I can tell you that, for most of my fellow Spanish citizens, English words are neither euphonious nor suggestive of their meaning.) I would also like to point out that most of the words associated with modern computing as experienced by plain folk predate the advent of computers, so it seems reasonable to expect that equivalent terms exist in most languages. Let me take advantage of this opportunity to bring to your attention some of the jargon mentioned in the article we are discussing:
All of these words have perfectly usable Spanish counterparts:
Here are some more Spanish words:
Well, I think that's enough to prove my point.
You are confused. Before I explain why, let me define the terms living language and dead language as language that people speak routinely and language that people do not speak routinely, respectively. Statements like "No living language is invulnerable to change" or perhaps "A dead language does not change" would have been accurate. Your statement is wrong not because it is a vague truism but because it is symptomatic of a broken understanding of the nature and the role of language. A language that does not change cannot "survive" because it is, by definition, not "alive" in the first place. Consider the case of Latin, a well-known dead language: it is not dead because it has not changed -- it has not changed because it is dead. In other words, languages change if they survive, not the other way around.
Of course, if the people who speak the language do not survive, the language will not survive either. Consider a case in which an entire nation is annihilated, as when the Spanish "accidentally repopulated" the Canary Islands. Horror stories aside, a living language survives along with the people who speak it and evolves to suit their needs. In living languages, grammar is continuously revised by the people to become more expressive and words are invented by the people to describe new things. Consider, for example, the case of the Castilian word for privacy (privacidad): it was added to the language in the last decade because people wished to refer to that particular notion using a noun rather than the corresponding adjective (privado), which did already exist. Nobody decreed what the new word should be, but a new word was nevertheless tacitly agreed upon without recourse to the English language. This anecdote exemplifies an approach to the evolution of language that is sound in every way: it augments the lexicon with words that are euphonious and meaningful for native speakers, and it helps stem the incessant waves of corporate colonization that slowly erode the cultural identity of every nation that trades with the United States. And Spain is not the only country where people value their cultural identity and resent the use of random foreign words; surely, even you can supply substantiating evidence for this claim. Cultural identity, of which language is an important part, may not be a big deal to you or to me -- but, for most people, it is a big deal.
Chris Hind is right: if you did not "experience" the sixties and the seventies, Heinlein's work can be hard to stomach. I also agree that other authors of that time are simply better writers than Heinlein. Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep deals with the issue of religion allegorically (Mercer, empathy boxes, etc.) and manages to convey a well-formed view of the role of religion in our lives without needing to formulate an alternative for illustrative purposes. PKD's perspective is almost the opposite of Heinlein's: DADoES does insinuate that organized religion may be a fraud (the "God is dead and an actor plays his part" line -- literally) but it also argues credibly in favor of the value of mythology and shared experience.
The expropriation of Rambus's patents is a perfectly viable option. Just as individuals had to give up their junk at a fair price during World War II so that war production could proceed, and just as farmers must often part with land today so that public works may proceed (dams, roads, whatever), Rambus could be forcibly divested of its patents so that the evolution of computer hardware can proceed with proper regard to technical merit, which is ultimately in everybody's interest. The only legitimate obstacle I foresee is that the relevant people in the US government lack the cojones to do it; they would have to move resolutely and unapologetically, but they will not. (Before dismissing that last statement, you should take a moment to read the Wired story on the Microsoft antitrust trial.)
I agree: Florida should scrap these results. Even if we ignore Jeb and voter fraud and ballot layout for a moment, it seems reasonable to demand that the people of Florida vote again because the integrity of the counts from the ballot boxes that were (briefly) missing yesterday cannot be guaranteed. At the very least, there should be a well-run federal investigation of the whole affair.
[The following is a revision of a letter I have been distributing via email. I ought to have posted this earlier, but I lacked the courage. You can find the original on my website.]
Dear US Citizen,
I am writing to remind you to vote conscientiously tomorrow. I will also indulge in a little political activism by introducing some issues (watered stock, free trade, and others) for your consideration. As you read this message, keep in mind that I am not recommending that you vote for this or that candidate, but only that you think about what is at stake, make a choice, and vote.
I wish to bring to your attention a pattern of behavior by national governments that suggests that, in the world-wide political arena, the interests of citizens rank far below those of large corporations, and that the latter seek actively to diminish the influence of citizens on their governments' legislative activity. In some countries, citizens are even compelled by law to foot the bill for this nonsense. ;) It is worth noting
that the worst consequences of this are not in the future: most US citizens
feel so disenfranchised today that they either don't vote or vote for
the lesser evil, and US taxpayers (citizens or not) bear the burden of
unprecedented personal and national debt. If you don't vote, you will be
capitulating, and the future of US politics will be that much closer to a
foregone conclusion. As a citizen of the European Union and a resident of
Switzerland, a very small sovereign state, I have learned that the rest of the
world cannot afford apathy or carelessness on the part of registered voters in
the US. You can think of this message as a plea for help.
[As you read this, please excuse the careless use of "Americans" where "US citizens" would have been correct.]
The first issue I want to discuss is the connection between corporations and public money. You may or may not be aware of the emergence of watered stock and pooling as a powerful weapons in the corporations' arsenal; for example, Microsoft and Cisco have managed to attain tax-free status by writing off stock options (and then earning some of that back when new stock is issued for the purpose of redeeming those options) and Citigroup recapitalizes and decapitalizes itself arbitrarily to achieve spectacular mergers (thus posing a great risk to the banking sector) -- right under the nose of the SEC. In a perfect world, this sort of abuse would have been reigned in already but, in our world, the possibility of relief seems remote. Let me make this plain: the watered stock write-off scheme amounts to a theft of public money and pooling needlessly endangers the stability of the economy. At the very least, insofar as stock represents a redeemable claim against a company's assets, it is a perversion of the modern economic perspective in which the stock market is allegedly as adequate a store of value as gold ever was.
Actually, said modern economic perspective was already quite perverse (in ways too numerous to mention) long before watered stock was even imagined. Such perversity is a natural consequence of the absence of an adequate standard of value, which was in turn an intended consequence of changes in policy that took place earlier in the century. Long ago, Alan Greenspan explained that the institution he heads today is a powerful instrument with which the government can confiscate part of the value of your money and, not incidentally, engage in deficit spending regularly. You might argue that calculated inflation is a small price to pay for being able to float a chronic debt and sustain a deficit as needed. You might argue that your national debt is presently unassailable because American households, which on average have a negative savings rate and face unabatable credit card debt, are financially overcommitted as it is. You might be wrong. Habitual deficit spending and the resulting chronic national indebtedness, along with the corporate welfare mechanisms that aggravate them, are to blame for your misery: the federal government uses inflation and national debt to mortgage your personal assets and your public resources, respectively, as effortlessly as a corporation uses watered stock to dilute the value of your share holdings. Think what you will of Greenspan's former support of the gold standard, but you have to admit that he was correct in predicting the practical consequences of failing to provide an adequate store of value, and in identifying the welfare state as the primary beneficiary:
What he may not have realized then is that corporate welfare is just as likely a welfare scheme as any other.
It now behooves us to ask not only how this wave of abuse can be stemmed, but also how this sort of situation can arise even under the watchful eye of our elected officials. The answer is that, in the US, the Executive and the Agencies operate with considerable autonomy; many important decisions are often made away from public scrutiny, largely or altogether, and there is a vested interest on the part of large corporations to increase the autonomy, if not the stature, of these public servants. Consider the case of MAI, the Multilateral agreement on investment -- a charter of rights and freedoms for corporations. Those of you who have not heard of it should at least know that it was the culmination of attempts to transfer some important powers from the popularly elected legislative bodies to the executive officials of sovereign states and to give corporations the legal standing of sovereign states. Let me take a moment to explore the brilliance of these tactics.
Surely, you can give examples of an administration negotiating treaties that would be difficult to accept for a majority of citizens and impossible to ratify for most congresses; now, try to imagine a future in which the legislature is powerless to stop unfavorable or undesirable consequences of free trade arrangements that it did not have the opportunity to approve or reject. Surely, you can name instances of a corporation getting away with practices that a majority of citizens would condemn but which the courts are powerless to stop in the absence of adequate legislation or jurisdiction; now, try to imagine a future in which a corporation undertakes legal action against sovereign states for refusing to let it set up shop, or even for having laws and regulations that hinder it, such as strict environmental standards.
"That's not a problem," you say, "because Public Citizen told us about MAI in the nick of time." That's not the point; the point is that MAI is evidence of an alarming, long-standing pattern of behavior: as Noam Chomsky has said, our governments really are, and have been for a long time, trying to undermine democracy. Consider, as further evidence, the case of Australia's MIGA, an agency that predates MAI and obviates the "need" for it.
Now, the two leading candidates, Al Gore and George Bush, look at the issue very differently, saying that free trade creates jobs, without mentioning what kind and where. Actually, Bush has even said that it is the duty of the administration to "sell" free trade (on WTO's terms, of course) to US citizens! Ralph Nader, on the other hand, has said that he wants the US to withdraw from the WTO and that we should re-examine the premise of so-called "free trade" agreements. I was going to give you a reference to Nader's website with that last statement, as WTO/NAFTA was one of the three key issues on his home page until just a few days ago, but now it is not even in the issue summaries. What could this mean? I think it means that he has pushed one of his favorite issues into the background because he needs enough votes to get federal funding for his next campaign. And this, in turn, suggests that American politicians think that the US electorate is politically comatose. You can help prove them wrong: a strong showing by Americans on election day would tell US politicians and corporations and the world that Americans are still in control of their political system. It would be a great sequel to the Battle of Seattle, with a lot less violence and just as much press coverage. Realistically, you probably cannot afford to act as resolutely as José Bové, but you can vote.
When I think about US politics, I think of the fable in which a master presents some options to his student, threatening to beat him with a cane if he chooses poorly; the essence of the problem is that the student cannot choose any of the options presented to him without risking bodily harm. (You should now take a moment to discover how the student can avoid the beating and what the moral of the story is.) You can and should vote for the presidential candidate who will most closely represent your interests, as you have more valid options than the mainstream media seem to suggest: you can vote for George W. Bush; you can vote for Al Gore; you can vote for Ralph Nader; you can vote for Harry Browne; and you can vote for some other candidate (yes, there are more) though his name may not appear on your ballot. If you cast a so-called "useful" vote, you are supporting a system in which you have a lot less influence than you otherwise might, and you might get beat with a cane. Of course, if you don't vote, you have no voice, nor will you ever, and when you and I finally get beat with a very stiff cane, no one will hear us scream. Please, vote.
Yours,
Alejandro Gómez de Argüello
Here is some additional information: lately, most graduate students of physics in the US are not WASPs -- many aren't even US citizens! Chad is the only white US citizen in our Applied Optics grad program (hi, Chad). So, I have shown that I propel in an environment that is at least as diverse as your own (assuming Chinese and Indian count as "colored" :-) and at least as technology- driven as your own (though we are not engineers in the strict sense of the word). 'That good enough?
Clarification: "His" in the second sentence is "Jon's" -- sorry for the ambiguity. Observation: Look at my name. Anecdote: A fellow by the name of Henry (hi, Henry :-) works for an American (US) chemical company in Switzerlad. He is Swiss -- he is black. He was invited to sit on a "diversity awareness" committee in the company. He told them they were full of shit. He was relieved of his responsibility on the committee -- QED. About me: I have a B.S. in optical physics and I am working on my M.S. in optical engineering. Scientists and engineers have no time for issues of race -- there are too many gadgets waiting to be made! :-)