It's bizarre and sad that first Turing and von Neumann invented programmed machines, then the Unix folks invited everyone to write good things that other people could use, and now, the fact that someone owns software means that if you want to write a program and give it away, you have to prove that no-one owns it.
It's not that code wants to be free. A lot of it doesn't. But why should the code that does want to be free have to go to court first?
Thucydides' History of the Pelopponesian War (411BCE?) makes clear that the Athenians insisted that other governments should be more like their own and encouraged that with a very large military. He seems to have thought that they did so in order to increase their own wealth and power and to enhance their security.
Hey, cwcowell: I got my PhD in philosophy from Berkeley also, worked with Davidson and Vermazen and Searle and Dreyfus. Now I'm a professor of philosophy. But writing code got me through my PhD. I tell my undergraduates that the reason I was a successful programmer (I did free-lance programming on the Pick system, mostly mail-order systems) is that I asked "why" and "why should I believe that" much more than the folks around me. I also understood language and languages better than some (once a project leader suggested that we should design a programming language which wouldn't let you write bad code). So the practice of philosophy is good for the practice of computer science. Anything that helps you think structurally and abstractly has to be good for CS.
It's certainly true that most philosophy isn't directly relevant to CS in any forms. But some philosophy is directly relevant to some kinds of CS. If you are interested in cognition and AI and cognitive science, then you have to know some philosophy. If you are interested in how to think about objects and relations, then you should think about what the philosophers say -- see http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/ It's certainly true, as cwcowell says, that when philosophy gets things clear enough, they stop being philosophy (my favorite example of this is Cantor on the infinite); but there are plenty of things that aren't that clear yet.
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It's bizarre and sad that first Turing and von Neumann invented programmed machines, then the Unix folks invited everyone to write good things that other people could use, and now, the fact that someone owns software means that if you want to write a program and give it away, you have to prove that no-one owns it. It's not that code wants to be free. A lot of it doesn't. But why should the code that does want to be free have to go to court first?
Oberon is the grandchild of Pascal and way cooler. It's seriously a bondage&discipline language: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/
I've noticed that a lot of cars have the same functionality, API, etc. Does MS hold a patent on the look-and-feel of cars?
that's right -- my university switched to using the gmail system for the students, and the addresses all stayed the same.
We could call it "multi tasking" or a "multi user system" or "the concurrent interweb" or something! One computer doing two things at once!!!
"bad dog, no biscuit" is a Gary Larson cartoon
like your sig
This year I bought a dozen CD's at Xmas, the same last year. Because I heard things on pandora.com and last.com. Before that, I bought nothing.
I for one think that $4000 for innovation like this is a small price to pay.
Have a look at Jonathan Cohen's webpage for a philosopher using Red Hat/Fedora. Ubuntu is fine too.
You'll never see Dick Cheney's house.
Thucydides' History of the Pelopponesian War (411BCE?) makes clear that the Athenians insisted that other governments should be more like their own and encouraged that with a very large military. He seems to have thought that they did so in order to increase their own wealth and power and to enhance their security.
Hey, cwcowell: I got my PhD in philosophy from Berkeley also, worked with Davidson and Vermazen and Searle and Dreyfus. Now I'm a professor of philosophy. But writing code got me through my PhD. I tell my undergraduates that the reason I was a successful programmer (I did free-lance programming on the Pick system, mostly mail-order systems) is that I asked "why" and "why should I believe that" much more than the folks around me. I also understood language and languages better than some (once a project leader suggested that we should design a programming language which wouldn't let you write bad code). So the practice of philosophy is good for the practice of computer science. Anything that helps you think structurally and abstractly has to be good for CS.
It's certainly true that most philosophy isn't directly relevant to CS in any forms. But some philosophy is directly relevant to some kinds of CS. If you are interested in cognition and AI and cognitive science, then you have to know some philosophy. If you are interested in how to think about objects and relations, then you should think about what the philosophers say -- see http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/ It's certainly true, as cwcowell says, that when philosophy gets things clear enough, they stop being philosophy (my favorite example of this is Cantor on the infinite); but there are plenty of things that aren't that clear yet.