OK I really don't like this. If they patent the genes to some plant, and demand that
anyone else researching its DNA pay them some kind
of license fee, that's bad enough - especially if it's a staple crop.
But human DNA? Some of those patented sequences could be mine! And IMO, if I wanted to and had a few million to spend on a lab, I should be able to do any R&D on my own DNA without permission from ANYONE.
Suppose you or someone else discovers that one of your genes conveys a specific advantage. Does the patent holder then have a case to stop you selling or donating an egg or a semen sample because it infringes on their IP?
Property rights (intellectual or otherwise) are not a moral absolute. Beware those who think they can own a part of what makes you human - drop your guard and they'll have the rest, you better believe it. --
I couldn't agree more. The company is going to make working past 6pm at the office more attractive to me than going home to my two beautiful children, cooking stir-fry and playing Vandalhearts 2 on the playstation?
I don't fuckin' think so!
I don't work for a software house, but a whisky
company. Overtime is optional, holidays are good,
pay is OK (I don't care that much), and if I can get my work done as well as reading/. and working on my Sourceforge projects then my boss is not going to give me a hard time.
Hey, I am at least a "good" programmer, but
that's not all I am, and I happen to like a little
balance in my life.
P.S. the word "wankerous" is open-source and may be freely used and distributed (except in the US, perhaps:-)
--
That is new, very interesting and possibly useful for a tiny number of applications, but it's an anti-cross-platform feature, and a potential maintenance nightmare.
For some reason, the idea of great steaming lumps of opaque legacy VB entangled into the inheritance tree of my Python application doesn't appeal to me.:-)
Hmm, no. "Capitalism" is the correct term, since what we are talking about is the abuse of the concept of "ownership" as a means for acquiring wealth and power.
You may be an American, and so have lots of negative associations with the word "socialism", but it's mostly to do with focusing on getting social justice. Inevitably when you do that some bloated billionaire mourns the loss of his freedom to run sweatshops and dump toxic waste in the rivers.
Also, wake up! The free market is what made the MPAA. The fact that they are now big enough to get some legislative influence and
restrict the freedoms of others should be no shock
to you. That's capitalism.
Great, I think you should get Debian/Linux
running on as many things as possible, practical or not.
It's a good sturdy distribution, obviously well-designed for porting to other platforms, and it is easy to cut it back to the barest essentials because of its philosopy of lots of little packages rather than a few big ones.
Then when you have Debian/Linux, one day you can
move to Debian/HURD which should have a smaller
and more modular kernel perhaps better suited to 'small' hardware.
But even if neither is actually very useful,
without some Free software presence in a given
market sector, there is little or nothing to stop
software becoming ever more closed and expensive.
Of course what I really want is Debian/Plan9 - but in the meantime Debian/Linux is
as I say, a good place to start.
--
...so does that mean a plug-in or something for the.NET VM would interpret Python bytecode into.NET bytecode and then do a JIT compile on that?Sounds clunky to me.
Or would a.NET version of Python compile straight to.NET bytecode? But why bother when "normal" Python is already multi-platform?
For that matter, if your favourite minority language for any particular kind of task has been ported to all the OS/hardware combinations you use, what does.NET give you?
There's maybe a danger of significant development effort on your favourite esoteric language being diverted to making it run on.NET, that should be spent on improving the language itself.
Yup, If I had any moderator points I would have used one here. Failing that, I feel I have to comment.
Yes, BASIC is and always has been a dreadful language. It lacks beauty, it lacks elegance. That's not to say KBasic won't be fun to play with, and good luck to the guys who want to play at developing it, but Yeeurgh! No way am I going to develop in it!
Python has elegance, and beauty, and doesn't force you to turn your head inside-out like scheme does. I know some people love the spawn of
LISP, and it has elegance for sure, but I think you have to really get off on all those nested parentheses to enjoy coding in it. (It's some kind of perversion (if you ask me). (You didn't, I know))
Anyway, BASIC was always the result of an intellectual mistake - that a simplistic set of constructs would somehow make programming simpler for beginners. It doesn't - it just restricts the language to beginners.
My personal list of cool stuff a language has to have includes: inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, dictionaries, lists, functions as first-class objects, and clear consistent syntax. BASIC is not even close. If KBasic gets even half as close as Python then good, but still, why bother? --
I thought patents had to be for non-obvious implementations of ideas?
The whole idea of X is that you can have a graphical interface on machine A, with the program itself running on (presumably faster) machine B.
It is therefore OBVIOUS that the program could be accessing a database on machine C.
Also, if you want to find multi-tier database applications with an X or other graphical front end, seek out Progress Software Corporation. They have been doing client/server RDB stuff for a LONG time.
I'm sure they'd be happy to help block a patent like the one described, which would utterly fuck them. (Unless it's them trying to get the patent, but I doubt it - IMHO they're not big enough to withstand comfortably the hostility such a move would earn them.)
I was there too, (not wearing a suit), but I never met any famous gurus, mostly because I wouldn't know them by sight. I'm glad to hear there were a few.
I have to agree about the Alphas - that Mandelbrot demo was almost hypnotic. I mean, we've all done a Mandelbrot program in C or BASIC or whatever, and know how long it can take to generate. (My fastest so far was a few seconds on the company's HP9000, in C). Maybe the Alpha has a "complex multiply" instruction? If you saw a scruffy guy standing there with his jaw dropping too, that was me.
More impressive in a way was the Debian stand. They had Debian/Linux running on an old Sparcstation, 2 different Toshiba laptops, a Toshiba libretto palmtop and an Acorn RiscPC. I liked the latter 'cause I'm an old ARM fan from way back. I thought, Hey, is there anything you can't run Linux on?
I bought the "Potato" CD set, of course. Unfortunately I f*d up the install a bit and haven't got X working again yet, but I was greatly impressed with the level of control Debian gives you (exemplified by the way it let me f* it up I suppose).
I did make it to the Great Linux Debate, but I have to say you didn't miss much. There was little or no useful debate, partly because the panel weren't disagreeing, but also because some of the questions from the audience were disappointingly petty or ill-informed.
There were a few stands touting web-enabled database solutions (my employer's main interest in the Expo), so I was disappointed there wasn't a Zope stand. IMO that would have blown the others away, and I couldn't honestly recommend any of the offerings I saw. If we want to actually pay for a database, we'll stick with Progress:-)
Anyway, a good day out and well worth getting up at 5:30am.
--- By the way, I work for a subsidiary of Jim Beam. Our bit makes proper Whisky, though. The company itself has no opinions I am aware of.
All the good questions have been asked e.g. about movies, technology, Shaper/Mechanist stories etc.
Schismatrix was superb, rich with ideas.I doubt if many directors would be able to make a good movie out of it, but Heavy Weather would be great as a film, IMO.
Any opinions about graphic novels, or plans to put any of your stories in that form?
Slashdot Mirror
Corel commercial, Debian non-profit.
Corel a company, Debian a distributed effort.
Corel Linux irrelevant suckage, Debian GNU/Linux just superb.
Not labouring the point too much I hope?
--
But human DNA? Some of those patented sequences could be mine! And IMO, if I wanted to and had a few million to spend on a lab, I should be able to do any R&D on my own DNA without permission from ANYONE.
Suppose you or someone else discovers that one of your genes conveys a specific advantage. Does the patent holder then have a case to stop you selling or donating an egg or a semen sample because it infringes on their IP?
Property rights (intellectual or otherwise) are not a moral absolute. Beware those who think they can own a part of what makes you human - drop your guard and they'll have the rest, you better believe it.
--
No wait, I know - variable names.
--
I don't fuckin' think so!
I don't work for a software house, but a whisky company. Overtime is optional, holidays are good, pay is OK (I don't care that much), and if I can get my work done as well as reading /. and working on my Sourceforge projects then my boss is not going to give me a hard time.
Hey, I am at least a "good" programmer, but that's not all I am, and I happen to like a little balance in my life.
P.S. the word "wankerous" is open-source and may be freely used and distributed (except in the US, perhaps :-)
--
Do anybody unto others like that that that you would do them unto you have.
--
For some reason, the idea of great steaming lumps of opaque legacy VB entangled into the inheritance tree of my Python application doesn't appeal to me. :-)
--
You may be an American, and so have lots of negative associations with the word "socialism", but it's mostly to do with focusing on getting social justice. Inevitably when you do that some bloated billionaire mourns the loss of his freedom to run sweatshops and dump toxic waste in the rivers.
Also, wake up! The free market is what made the MPAA. The fact that they are now big enough to get some legislative influence and restrict the freedoms of others should be no shock to you. That's capitalism.
--
It's a good sturdy distribution, obviously well-designed for porting to other platforms, and it is easy to cut it back to the barest essentials because of its philosopy of lots of little packages rather than a few big ones.
Then when you have Debian/Linux, one day you can move to Debian/HURD which should have a smaller and more modular kernel perhaps better suited to 'small' hardware.
But even if neither is actually very useful, without some Free software presence in a given market sector, there is little or nothing to stop software becoming ever more closed and expensive.
Of course what I really want is Debian/Plan9 - but in the meantime Debian/Linux is as I say, a good place to start.
--
Or would a .NET version of Python compile straight to .NET bytecode? But why bother when "normal" Python is already multi-platform?
For that matter, if your favourite minority language for any particular kind of task has been ported to all the OS/hardware combinations you use, what does .NET give you?
There's maybe a danger of significant development effort on your favourite esoteric language being diverted to making it run on .NET, that should be spent on improving the language itself.
--
--
Yes, BASIC is and always has been a dreadful language. It lacks beauty, it lacks elegance. That's not to say KBasic won't be fun to play with, and good luck to the guys who want to play at developing it, but Yeeurgh! No way am I going to develop in it!
Python has elegance, and beauty, and doesn't force you to turn your head inside-out like scheme does. I know some people love the spawn of LISP, and it has elegance for sure, but I think you have to really get off on all those nested parentheses to enjoy coding in it. (It's some kind of perversion (if you ask me). (You didn't, I know))
Anyway, BASIC was always the result of an intellectual mistake - that a simplistic set of constructs would somehow make programming simpler for beginners. It doesn't - it just restricts the language to beginners.
My personal list of cool stuff a language has to have includes: inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, dictionaries, lists, functions as first-class objects, and clear consistent syntax. BASIC is not even close. If KBasic gets even half as close as Python then good, but still, why bother?
--
The whole idea of X is that you can have a graphical interface on machine A, with the program itself running on (presumably faster) machine B.
It is therefore OBVIOUS that the program could be accessing a database on machine C.
Also, if you want to find multi-tier database applications with an X or other graphical front end, seek out Progress Software Corporation. They have been doing client/server RDB stuff for a LONG time.
I'm sure they'd be happy to help block a patent like the one described, which would utterly fuck them. (Unless it's them trying to get the patent, but I doubt it - IMHO they're not big enough to withstand comfortably the hostility such a move would earn them.)
Good Luck
I have to agree about the Alphas - that Mandelbrot demo was almost hypnotic. I mean, we've all done a Mandelbrot program in C or BASIC or whatever, and know how long it can take to generate. (My fastest so far was a few seconds on the company's HP9000, in C). Maybe the Alpha has a "complex multiply" instruction? If you saw a scruffy guy standing there with his jaw dropping too, that was me.
More impressive in a way was the Debian stand. They had Debian/Linux running on an old Sparcstation, 2 different Toshiba laptops, a Toshiba libretto palmtop and an Acorn RiscPC. I liked the latter 'cause I'm an old ARM fan from way back. I thought, Hey, is there anything you can't run Linux on?
I bought the "Potato" CD set, of course. Unfortunately I f*d up the install a bit and haven't got X working again yet, but I was greatly impressed with the level of control Debian gives you (exemplified by the way it let me f* it up I suppose).
I did make it to the Great Linux Debate, but I have to say you didn't miss much. There was little or no useful debate, partly because the panel weren't disagreeing, but also because some of the questions from the audience were disappointingly petty or ill-informed.
There were a few stands touting web-enabled database solutions (my employer's main interest in the Expo), so I was disappointed there wasn't a Zope stand. IMO that would have blown the others away, and I couldn't honestly recommend any of the offerings I saw. If we want to actually pay for a database, we'll stick with Progress :-)
Anyway, a good day out and well worth getting up at 5:30am.
--- By the way, I work for a subsidiary of Jim Beam. Our bit makes proper Whisky, though. The company itself has no opinions I am aware of.
All the good questions have been asked e.g. about movies, technology, Shaper/Mechanist stories etc.
Schismatrix was superb, rich with ideas.I doubt if many directors would be able to make a good movie out of it, but Heavy Weather would be great as a film, IMO.
Any opinions about graphic novels, or plans to put any of your stories in that form?