What's interesting here is that many EULA's impose a great many ridiculous restrictions on how some uses the software. And, of course, the special "use" of redistribution copies of the software is rather restricted; they usually spell out quite carefully when a user should not even make a copy, even if the user is not redistributing the work.
The GPL imposes no restrictions on use (you can back it up, use it on as many machines, give CD's to friends, etc.).
It would seem very reasonable for the GPL to place conditions on redistribution of modified work, inasmuch as it places no restrictions on redistribution of unmodified work.
The requirement that source accompany modified distributions of GPL'd work seems quite consistent with the overall objectives of copyright, which was to grant a temporary monopoly to further the greater interest of getting the "IP" into the public domain where it can be freely used.
There's little problem with government being a user of free and open source software, no more than an individual or a company. But, like the individual or company, the government will have to weigh the value of support, costs of lock-in, etc.
Most governments have little problem with the GPL requirement that
if they modify the software AND
if they distribute modified software
that they must distribute the modified source.
The "share and share alike" part of the GPL integrates well with government modifications, IMHO. Even when government generated software finds its way out into the commercial arena, there are usually safeguards along the lines of "the U.S. Government retains a non-exclusive license to use". They like to get back and leverage the advantages of software in which they had a hand in contributing.
The government has funded public works projects (roads, etc) in physical space for some time. What's not as widely known is how much government has supported public works projects in the form of FOSS.
Plusses for the government to use FOSS include not just limited to a reduced acquisition cost or reduced lock-in costs down the line.
A lot of government business is tied up in document formats and databases that cannot be accessed indefinitely. Vendors upgrade their products and cease support for old versions. With the source code available for their business functions, government is much better able to protect its information investment in the long term. Should the time come for data conversion, they'll be in a much better position.
Finally, in terms of interacting with the public, government can adhere to zero-cost public standards, not necessarily by requiring the government use FOSS, but by requiring that all interfaces between software use completely specified, free (speech and beer), formats and protocols (you known, Latin alphabet, ASCII encoding, English language, etc.). A government that doesn't interact with the public unless it coughs up money (to buy some piece of software) can hardly be said to operating in the public's interest.
No one can afford to invest the kind of money in new projects at the same level as MS. If they have Chinese translators working the MSN search engine building on multimillion dollar project, it's not like Google is going to suddenly decide to ante up the same kind of money to meet that potential challenge. No other company can sit at the same poker table with MS; the stakes get too high for them.
That kind of paranoia was more suited to the company culture 20 years ago than it is today.
Nevertheless, I'm encouraged that they actually buy G5 machines and work on new ideas. I hate to see that kind of money and talent devoted solely to business objectives that don't do as much for the IT community as they do for MSFT shareholders.
governmental organisations...interact with so many people.
It's very good.
If a government agency sends out paperwork to vendors in a.doc file, they're implicitly requiring the vendor to pay for MS Word to decrypt it.
Governments shouldn't be needlessly forcing people to make such an expenditure.
With OpenOffice documents, the public at large is able to read documents without any hidden charges. Later, they may find that OOo provides acceptable performance for the price compared with MS Office and use it for purposes besides interacting with their government.
From what I've seen, poor people eat a diet that is largely devoid of nutrition.
Draw a walking distance radius around most poor neighborhoods. You'll find loads of convenience stores selling food products rich in refined sugar, refined starch and saturated fat. Not to mention the fast food outlets. [Then there's the alcohol, tobacco, lottery outlets...]
Convenience, cost, shelf-life and the natural tendency of the human animal to crave high-calorie foods tend to drive poor people's decisions to a greater degree than wealthier people.
I make more money than average and know what kind of food is good for me and still it's enough of a struggle to take the time and energy to drive 15 miles to where I can find fresh fruits and vegetables (frequently, because of the low shelf life) that then requires a fair amount of preparation time (washing, cooking, chopping, cleanup, etc.) We're all faced with the same problem of eating good food; I'm just saying that it requires increasing effort to make the proper choices as your income level decreases. You may know a diet rich is fresh fish is good for you, but you're not going to be buying it.
As far as exercise is concerned, there's no comparison.
Manual labor is hard work, but it's a lot more likely to give you a bad back, sore feet and repetitive motion injuries than what you do in a health club.
And again, being a desk jockey, I have the energy to go to a health club, but have done enough hard labor to understand where going to the gym after a hard day's work is more difficult. (Nevertheless, I do know some construction workers that put in a few hours at the health club before work. More power to them.)
Scrubbing floors on your hands and knees or digging ditches will burn calories, but won't give the same benefits as a planned exercise program.
SCO's millions can certainly pay for some competent counsel
SCO's case is so weak that counsel competency will be measured by how lengthy the proceedings can be made and if/how much they can get IBM to settle the case for.
I'm sure there's a discount price for settlement that IBM's already refused.
A metric might be the ratio of SCO's market capitalization to the size of their lawsuit. If it's less than 1.00, then it says something about the public's confidence in the merit of their case.
Still, I have to wonder what the terms of payment are for SCO's legal team: 100% cash, or some combination involving shares of SCO?
Flashy buzz and things that look nice are generally irrelevant to the OS. I know that lists of OS improvement features aren't flashy to consumers, but developers shouldn't be getting sold on eye candy.
My complaint was the so much of the Longhorn rollout was devoted to flashy things that have no real business in the OS.
WinFS is a worthwhile step forward; the other stuff is just so much marketing hype, needlessly tying higher level interfaces down into the OS.
Apple does a fine job of integrating their overall system, but I don't confuse Cocoa with Mac OS X anymore than I confuse Win2K with.NET or Linux 2.4 with KDE.
Just like TV, where channels start creating obnoxious dynamic logos on top of your favorite programs, as if the time breaks that include self advertisements aren't enough.
If by "your e-mail" you mean "e-mail that you recieve at work", then, yes, MS enables your employer to decide what can and can't be done with it.
I receive email at work now using a non-MS client. Works great and never hiccoughs through the worms that cause a furor for my win32 brethren.
This IRM that inserts an extra step of corresponding with an authenticating Win2003 server "enables":
MS to sell licenses for such servers to MyCorp
MyCorp to eliminate the possibility of using any MUA other than Outlook and increasing our dependence on a single vendor for our MUAs
Yes, this will be sold as an "enabling" technology in the glossy ads: businesses focus on their core competencies while MS "takes care" of all of your IT solutions, keeping email private, etc.
Other definitions of "enabler" would be more pertinent, but help is available.
Having read about Gates' describing Longhorn and then reading the OSDL announcement of Linux-2.6.0-test9 ready for big tests, I couldn't help noticing some differences in style.
Longhorn addresses some OS issues, but other parts of the press release talk about issues that would seem to me to belong at a higher level in the application area.
fundamentals like security and scalability,
new presentation technology that includes a rebuilding of Windows' graphics system,
a new file storage system called WinFS that makes heavy use of XML, extensible markup language data, and
new Web services and communications technology.
The first objective is great, the second and third are tolerable, and the last one makes little sense for an operating system. It's like an excuse to define a new technology because you own an old one.
"Agenda-Setting and Innovation are owned by us."
and
"This is what you're going to get (we'll tell you later how much you're going to pay.)"
The OSDL release announcement has much more of ringing tone of desperation:
"We need you testers. Our OS will be buggy without you."
Xouvert is a development branch of the Xfree86 source tree. It's purpose is to provide wide testing and integration for third party patches, and to test and stabilize innovative new ideas for submission to the main Xfree86 branch.
It's an interesting phenomenon associated with free software: enough talented developers get the perception that the current people in control are being unreasonable about release schedules, overall direction, features, bugs, indenting styles, etc. and fork their own branch.
A closely-related parallel here is how the egcs folks wanted greater ability to change the gcc codebase than the gcc developers wanted to do.
Then, the egcs branch took off so famously that later it essentially became the gcc development branch.
That excludes people who prefer to browse using text, which is what that image recognition filter effectively does. Blind people, low bandwidth folks are automatically eliminated from the community.
Requiring a periodic human response at the other end of a live email address, after a time interval, helps some. It's still possible for spammers to cultivate a temporary reputation of responsibility and spam a site as their last post, but requiring them to periodically exert effort to prove they're authentically human helps to make spamming hard work.
It wouldn't hurt for sites to start keeping a growing list of bad urls and poisoned posters. A spider that visits url's, maybe one or two deep after the posted URL (phenomena of delayed appearance of herbal viagara behind URLs that are opaque looking), checks for spam links, and assigns big negative karma would help some, especially if it runs before the posting appears on the blog.
Re:Does adding every ingredient make it better?
on
C# 2.0 Spec Released
·
· Score: 1
Amen. I agree: the right tool for the job.
The best service that a good CS education could provide is a programmer that has been thrown into several different programming languages and environments. Where learning a language is an incidental journey on the way to solving a problem. I remember courses where I was expected to pick up all kinds of ancillary knowledge so that I could create a Turing machine in Pascal. (Such as learning Pascal, for example.)
The strengths and weaknesses of languages become much more apparent after you've been experiencing more than one of them.
The best of the Olympic programmers view the world from high, where they can see beyond the walls of what many take for granted as the comfortable walls of the maze they live in.
We need more such programmers to help drive the industry in directions that make sense for programmers.
Business programming, for the sake of cost, often simply drives along popular routes that were yesterday's frontiers. And certainly the businesses hiring CS grads will want people capable for running along those paths proficiently. But it would be a disservice to students if they were only given as much as what businesses want Right Now from programmers.
If programmers only get trained for todays technology, they'll do great for some years, but will have a harder time adapting to the environment a couple of decades in the future which will look radically different (ask anyone that's been here in 1982).
My advice to CS students:
Look for fewer capital letters in course titles and lots of different capital letters in programming assignments.
On the other hand, if I have a lit candle, and someone else lights another candle from it, that does not make my room any darker, yet we both have lit candles: the light is not diminished by the act of sharing.
You betry your lack of experience and credentials in IT.
Anyone that's really been exposed to decision-making processes in corporate IT knows that we live in a restricted oxygen environment where 2 candles will simply kill us off twice as fast as one candle.
People coming out of meetings, blue-faced and open-mouthed gasping...
Good principles and we should strive to meet them.
Be warned, though, that your life will still not be stress-free utopian bliss.
There are inherent conflicts between 1 and 2.
Boss: "What's your opinion of Joe Weasel in Marketing?" You: (after you attend yet another Joe Weasel presentation where he inflates himself and deftly scrapes the gum off the bottom of his shoe onto a defenseless adversary) "He certainly gives flashy presentations!" (thinking...if you can't say anything good about a person then don't say anything...)
One of the main things about the average surfer, I find, is that (s)he simply doesn't know about it.
How true it is.
Most people take whatever is dished out to them that "came with My PC".
It takes an extra-ordinary effort for them to get and install software. Either
They have to really want something (like WinAmp or something);
it has to be available in a shrink-wrapped box.
It has to be so easy to install that not installing it takes a greater effort (witness the success of IE).
Since AOL gave up fighting the browser war, after being paid $750 million, the potential avenue of distributing 50 million free CD's with Mozilla is not going to happen.
Deliberately downloading software isn't what 90% of PC users do.
The only hope is for clandestine download, perhaps using an IE security hole, in innocuous pieces that don't compromise BW, via an adware/spyware/virus mechanism (something like Gator, but not so obnoxious).
Then, once people get used to this "virus version of IE", they might start telling their friends how good it is.
I've had it since 1984, and it's still going strong.
Mine doesn't work anymore.
I miss it, but get by with my wife's HP-12C.
Some years ago, HP distributed xhpcalc, an X windows clients that provided a good facsimile of their programmer/scientific/financial calculator lines with nice buttons, RPN, LCD looking display, etc. [I wish I had a screen dump of it so you could see what it looked like.] This was on HP-UX for PA-RISC machines, like the 700 series. Looks as if it got phased out in favor of dtcalc (which I haven't used).
Unfortunately, it seems to have disappeared and I've yet to see anything on freshmeat comparable to xhpcalc.
economic premises and principles which are, fundamentally, arbitrary.
True economic principles are actually quite sterile and free of value-judgements, just as science is.
Science, like economics, can be applied ruthlessly to any problem without regard for fundamental values that people like to hold.
Take taxation policy, for example.
Science and economics can help you evaluate the effects of different policies.
But in real life, people place different value on different propositions. These propositions can be argued forever without resolution because of differing underlying value judgements that people have, Eg.,
"Taxing rich people is unfair to people who deserve wealth."
"Having hungry children raised by incompetent parents is bad and society has a right to fix it."
You will get all kinds of opinions about how what value society should place overall on how happy or unhappy some people will be in certain situations and quantifying things. Once quantified, science and economics can take things from there.
It's clear that people are unhappy when their money is taken away from them and are happy when money is given to them. But saying that one person's happiness outweighs another person's unhappiness is a pure value judgement.
Sound principles of economics and science can be overlaid upon any value system you like: libertarian, socialistic, totalitarian, democracy, nihilism, theocracy.
Slashdot Mirror
restrictions on the use
What's interesting here is that many EULA's impose a great many ridiculous restrictions on how some uses the software. And, of course, the special "use" of redistribution copies of the software is rather restricted; they usually spell out quite carefully when a user should not even make a copy, even if the user is not redistributing the work.
The GPL imposes no restrictions on use (you can back it up, use it on as many machines, give CD's to friends, etc.).
It would seem very reasonable for the GPL to place conditions on redistribution of modified work, inasmuch as it places no restrictions on redistribution of unmodified work.
The requirement that source accompany modified distributions of GPL'd work seems quite consistent with the overall objectives of copyright, which was to grant a temporary monopoly to further the greater interest of getting the "IP" into the public domain where it can be freely used.
There's little problem with government being a user of free and open source software, no more than an individual or a company. But, like the individual or company, the government will have to weigh the value of support, costs of lock-in, etc.
Most governments have little problem with the GPL requirement that
- if they modify the software AND
- if they distribute modified software
that they must distribute the modified source.The "share and share alike" part of the GPL integrates well with government modifications, IMHO. Even when government generated software finds its way out into the commercial arena, there are usually safeguards along the lines of "the U.S. Government retains a non-exclusive license to use". They like to get back and leverage the advantages of software in which they had a hand in contributing.
The government has funded public works projects (roads, etc) in physical space for some time. What's not as widely known is how much government has supported public works projects in the form of FOSS.
Plusses for the government to use FOSS include not just limited to a reduced acquisition cost or reduced lock-in costs down the line.
A lot of government business is tied up in document formats and databases that cannot be accessed indefinitely. Vendors upgrade their products and cease support for old versions. With the source code available for their business functions, government is much better able to protect its information investment in the long term. Should the time come for data conversion, they'll be in a much better position.
Finally, in terms of interacting with the public, government can adhere to zero-cost public standards, not necessarily by requiring the government use FOSS, but by requiring that all interfaces between software use completely specified, free (speech and beer), formats and protocols (you known, Latin alphabet, ASCII encoding, English language, etc.). A government that doesn't interact with the public unless it coughs up money (to buy some piece of software) can hardly be said to operating in the public's interest.
historians and archaeologists are ever going to be able to dig
A. They'll use machines to do the heavy digging.
B. Or, the historians and archaelogists will be machines.
A big problem will be that those 5 EB of data describing 5 years near Y2K will be dissolved in a much larger ocean of data by that time.
The real test of 2.6.0 will be seeing if fantastic Andrew Morton can field the breadth and depth of kernel issues as well as the amazing Alan Cox.
Exactly what operations were performed?
The "vector matrix" multiply is attractive to a lot of people.
But I doubt this includes fetching data, storing results in memory. And the operations might be more like one-bit XOR's than general Level 3 BLAS.
Need more information...
No one can afford to invest the kind of money in new projects at the same level as MS. If they have Chinese translators working the MSN search engine building on multimillion dollar project, it's not like Google is going to suddenly decide to ante up the same kind of money to meet that potential challenge. No other company can sit at the same poker table with MS; the stakes get too high for them.
That kind of paranoia was more suited to the company culture 20 years ago than it is today.
Nevertheless, I'm encouraged that they actually buy G5 machines and work on new ideas. I hate to see that kind of money and talent devoted solely to business objectives that don't do as much for the IT community as they do for MSFT shareholders.
governmental organisations...interact with so many people.
It's very good.
If a government agency sends out paperwork to vendors in a .doc file, they're implicitly requiring the vendor to pay for MS Word to decrypt it.
Governments shouldn't be needlessly forcing people to make such an expenditure.
With OpenOffice documents, the public at large is able to read documents without any hidden charges. Later, they may find that OOo provides acceptable performance for the price compared with MS Office and use it for purposes besides interacting with their government.
OK, I'll admit not being on the apache mailing list.
But I'm thinking of installing Apache (and gentoo ) on an unused Athlon box.
Is there any reason not to install the latest Apache 2.0 instead of the 1.3 series?
[I ask because, IIRC, early releases of 2.0 didn't support the latest PHP.]
From what I've seen, poor people eat a diet that is largely devoid of nutrition.
Draw a walking distance radius around most poor neighborhoods. You'll find loads of convenience stores selling food products rich in refined sugar, refined starch and saturated fat. Not to mention the fast food outlets. [Then there's the alcohol, tobacco, lottery outlets...]
Convenience, cost, shelf-life and the natural tendency of the human animal to crave high-calorie foods tend to drive poor people's decisions to a greater degree than wealthier people.
I make more money than average and know what kind of food is good for me and still it's enough of a struggle to take the time and energy to drive 15 miles to where I can find fresh fruits and vegetables (frequently, because of the low shelf life) that then requires a fair amount of preparation time (washing, cooking, chopping, cleanup, etc.) We're all faced with the same problem of eating good food; I'm just saying that it requires increasing effort to make the proper choices as your income level decreases. You may know a diet rich is fresh fish is good for you, but you're not going to be buying it.
As far as exercise is concerned, there's no comparison.
Manual labor is hard work, but it's a lot more likely to give you a bad back, sore feet and repetitive motion injuries than what you do in a health club.
And again, being a desk jockey, I have the energy to go to a health club, but have done enough hard labor to understand where going to the gym after a hard day's work is more difficult. (Nevertheless, I do know some construction workers that put in a few hours at the health club before work. More power to them.)
Scrubbing floors on your hands and knees or digging ditches will burn calories, but won't give the same benefits as a planned exercise program.
SCO's millions can certainly pay for some competent counsel
SCO's case is so weak that counsel competency will be measured by how lengthy the proceedings can be made and if/how much they can get IBM to settle the case for.
I'm sure there's a discount price for settlement that IBM's already refused.
A metric might be the ratio of SCO's market capitalization to the size of their lawsuit. If it's less than 1.00, then it says something about the public's confidence in the merit of their case.
Still, I have to wonder what the terms of payment are for SCO's legal team: 100% cash, or some combination involving shares of SCO?
I disagree.
Flashy buzz and things that look nice are generally irrelevant to the OS. I know that lists of OS improvement features aren't flashy to consumers, but developers shouldn't be getting sold on eye candy.
My complaint was the so much of the Longhorn rollout was devoted to flashy things that have no real business in the OS.
WinFS is a worthwhile step forward; the other stuff is just so much marketing hype, needlessly tying higher level interfaces down into the OS.
Apple does a fine job of integrating their overall system, but I don't confuse Cocoa with Mac OS X anymore than I confuse Win2K with .NET or Linux 2.4 with KDE.
robots out of infinite loops
Yeah, I've gotten the definite feeling that "America in Iraq" is an infinite loop, too.:)
Just like TV, where channels start creating obnoxious dynamic logos on top of your favorite programs, as if the time breaks that include self advertisements aren't enough.
If by "your e-mail" you mean "e-mail that you recieve at work", then, yes, MS enables your employer to decide what can and can't be done with it.
I receive email at work now using a non-MS client. Works great and never hiccoughs through the worms that cause a furor for my win32 brethren.
This IRM that inserts an extra step of corresponding with an authenticating Win2003 server "enables":
Yes, this will be sold as an "enabling" technology in the glossy ads: businesses focus on their core competencies while MS "takes care" of all of your IT solutions, keeping email private, etc.
Other definitions of "enabler" would be more pertinent, but help is available.
Having read about Gates' describing Longhorn and then reading the OSDL announcement of Linux-2.6.0-test9 ready for big tests, I couldn't help noticing some differences in style.
Longhorn addresses some OS issues, but other parts of the press release talk about issues that would seem to me to belong at a higher level in the application area.
The first objective is great, the second and third are tolerable, and the last one makes little sense for an operating system. It's like an excuse to define a new technology because you own an old one.
andThe OSDL release announcement has much more of ringing tone of desperation:
Xouvert is a development branch of the Xfree86 source tree. It's purpose is to provide wide testing and integration for third party patches, and to test and stabilize innovative new ideas for submission to the main Xfree86 branch.
It's an interesting phenomenon associated with free software: enough talented developers get the perception that the current people in control are being unreasonable about release schedules, overall direction, features, bugs, indenting styles, etc. and fork their own branch.
A closely-related parallel here is how the egcs folks wanted greater ability to change the gcc codebase than the gcc developers wanted to do.
Then, the egcs branch took off so famously that later it essentially became the gcc development branch.
May the best X branch become the tree trunk.
That excludes people who prefer to browse using text, which is what that image recognition filter effectively does. Blind people, low bandwidth folks are automatically eliminated from the community.
Requiring a periodic human response at the other end of a live email address, after a time interval, helps some. It's still possible for spammers to cultivate a temporary reputation of responsibility and spam a site as their last post, but requiring them to periodically exert effort to prove they're authentically human helps to make spamming hard work.
It wouldn't hurt for sites to start keeping a growing list of bad urls and poisoned posters. A spider that visits url's, maybe one or two deep after the posted URL (phenomena of delayed appearance of herbal viagara behind URLs that are opaque looking), checks for spam links, and assigns big negative karma would help some, especially if it runs before the posting appears on the blog.
Amen. I agree: the right tool for the job.
The best service that a good CS education could provide is a programmer that has been thrown into several different programming languages and environments. Where learning a language is an incidental journey on the way to solving a problem. I remember courses where I was expected to pick up all kinds of ancillary knowledge so that I could create a Turing machine in Pascal. (Such as learning Pascal, for example.)
The strengths and weaknesses of languages become much more apparent after you've been experiencing more than one of them.
The best of the Olympic programmers view the world from high, where they can see beyond the walls of what many take for granted as the comfortable walls of the maze they live in.
We need more such programmers to help drive the industry in directions that make sense for programmers.
Business programming, for the sake of cost, often simply drives along popular routes that were yesterday's frontiers. And certainly the businesses hiring CS grads will want people capable for running along those paths proficiently. But it would be a disservice to students if they were only given as much as what businesses want Right Now from programmers.
If programmers only get trained for todays technology, they'll do great for some years, but will have a harder time adapting to the environment a couple of decades in the future which will look radically different (ask anyone that's been here in 1982).
My advice to CS students:
On the other hand, if I have a lit candle, and someone else lights another candle from it, that does not make my room any darker, yet we both have lit candles: the light is not diminished by the act of sharing.
You betry your lack of experience and credentials in IT.
Anyone that's really been exposed to decision-making processes in corporate IT knows that we live in a restricted oxygen environment where 2 candles will simply kill us off twice as fast as one candle.
People coming out of meetings, blue-faced and open-mouthed gasping...
Some organizations (like say SCO) might not want to release their code to an outside party.
I, too, will admit to being embarrassed about some old code I've written.
should be very, very illegal for normal people to have these devices
No, no, no.
We've been through this same argument before regarding other technologies, such as DeCSS.
It should not be illegal for people to have these devices.
It should be illegal for people to use them irresponsibly: i.e, to hurt other people.
Good principles and we should strive to meet them.
Be warned, though, that your life will still not be stress-free utopian bliss.
There are inherent conflicts between 1 and 2.
Boss: "What's your opinion of Joe Weasel in Marketing?"You: (after you attend yet another Joe Weasel presentation where he inflates himself and deftly scrapes the gum off the bottom of his shoe onto a defenseless adversary) "He certainly gives flashy presentations!" (thinking...if you can't say anything good about a person then don't say anything...)
One of the main things about the average surfer, I find, is that (s)he simply doesn't know about it.
How true it is.
Most people take whatever is dished out to them that "came with My PC".
It takes an extra-ordinary effort for them to get and install software. Either
Since AOL gave up fighting the browser war, after being paid $750 million, the potential avenue of distributing 50 million free CD's with Mozilla is not going to happen.
Deliberately downloading software isn't what 90% of PC users do.
The only hope is for clandestine download, perhaps using an IE security hole, in innocuous pieces that don't compromise BW, via an adware/spyware/virus mechanism (something like Gator, but not so obnoxious).
Then, once people get used to this "virus version of IE", they might start telling their friends how good it is.
I've had it since 1984, and it's still going strong.
Mine doesn't work anymore.
I miss it, but get by with my wife's HP-12C.
Some years ago, HP distributed xhpcalc, an X windows clients that provided a good facsimile of their programmer/scientific/financial calculator lines with nice buttons, RPN, LCD looking display, etc. [I wish I had a screen dump of it so you could see what it looked like.] This was on HP-UX for PA-RISC machines, like the 700 series. Looks as if it got phased out in favor of dtcalc (which I haven't used).
Unfortunately, it seems to have disappeared and I've yet to see anything on freshmeat comparable to xhpcalc.
economic premises and principles which are, fundamentally, arbitrary.
True economic principles are actually quite sterile and free of value-judgements, just as science is.
Science, like economics, can be applied ruthlessly to any problem without regard for fundamental values that people like to hold.
Take taxation policy, for example.
Science and economics can help you evaluate the effects of different policies.
But in real life, people place different value on different propositions. These propositions can be argued forever without resolution because of differing underlying value judgements that people have, Eg.,
You will get all kinds of opinions about how what value society should place overall on how happy or unhappy some people will be in certain situations and quantifying things. Once quantified, science and economics can take things from there.It's clear that people are unhappy when their money is taken away from them and are happy when money is given to them. But saying that one person's happiness outweighs another person's unhappiness is a pure value judgement.
Sound principles of economics and science can be overlaid upon any value system you like: libertarian, socialistic, totalitarian, democracy, nihilism, theocracy.