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Comment Krugman's 24/7 lecture at the Ig Nobels (Score 1) 123

I thought that was very good. From his blog

24:

Given decentralized constrained optimization by maximizing agents with well-defined convex objective functions and/or convex production functions, engaging in exchange and production with free disposal, leads, in the absence of externalities, market power, and other distortions, there exists an equilibrium characterized by Pareto optimality.

7:

Greedy people, competing, make the world go round.

Comment Re:RMS was right, but got one detail wrong. (Score 1) 263

Maybe you remember Cygnus and other numerous commercial contributors who have contributed significantly to GCC. They would have done that work if GCC was viral. And you know RMS views on Cygnus.

I still have a lot of respect for RMS ideals, his movement has spread an awareness and a framework in which you can discuss freedom of software. But I see the bad side too, and the worst of that is seen in the GPL3 debate and the Lignux debate.

Comment Re:RMS was right, but got one detail wrong. (Score 1) 263

I assume that by "commercial guys" you mean developers of proprietary applications rather than Red Hat and Canonical. If GlibC were GPL, one could still use other implementations such as uclibc and dietlibc. If RMS had really wanted to make it hard to release proprietary software that could run on GNU, he would have made GCC viral. Instead it has a specific exception that makes it acceptable to use for software of any license. Though GlibC is very important to GNU/Linux, GCC is absolutely essential as there's no complete alternative. GCC is essential to not all GNU/Linux systems but to most Free Software operating systems, including the FLOSS BSDs.

I don't think RMS have GCC non-viral because of this reason. IMO, if he makes GCC more restrictive, he will lose his control because it will surely get replaced. And don't think this cannot happen, the other efforts in C compilers does not get any traction because GCC is good enough and it had a license you can live with.

You can see from the SSH and PF situation what people can do if pushed too hard.

Comment Re:RMS was right, but got one detail wrong. (Score 1) 263

I don't think you got this right, PyQt is already available GPL licensed, and that is not acceptable for Nokia, so they moved to LGPL.

The important thing here is that, if a company wants to promote any infrastructure component, GPL is a horrible license to do that. If you release a library of even a device driver as GPL, you are imposing a very strict condition on your customers, that they have to be GPL too.

This is no way acceptable for most people, and that is why LGPL or BSD licensing is attractive in this situation.

RMS has got it wrong, actuall if RMS had got his way, GLIBC would be GPL and most of the commerical guys would have to get out of developing on Linux.

Comment Re:Some Perspective (Score 1) 812

Almost every kid is expected to be an engineer and most of these engineers hardly even know what the hell they are talking about. As Feynman would say their knowledge is fragile.

Our educational system itself is a joke. Trust me on this.

I think you are being unnecessarily cynical here about India. The problem would be the the very good engineers go to higher studies in US and end up setting there. Look at the top tech companies in US and there is no difference between the level of Indian and other engineers. So we lose the best and brightest to US, because US culturally is very immigrant friendly.

Of course there are a some good engineers and very many engineers of lesser capability left here, but due to the magic of offshoring they can live very well at 1/5th the salary of a US engineer.

At the same time entrepeneurs are discouraged and looked down upon. They are sorta treated with ice, as everyone wants a *son* in an MNC with a prestigous MBA.

Okay, a MNC job was the middle class dream (once a government job was the middle class dream). Middle class in India are very insecure and they push their children into schools and then to engineering colleges and medical colleges because of this.

But things are changing, as the first generation who were in the internet boom are now growing older and richer. And that has definitely brought about change in attitude and entrepreneurship.

Comment Re:Krugman called FOR the bubble (Score 5, Informative) 127

To be fair you have to add Krugman's response to this accusation:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/and-i-was-on-the-grassy-knoll-too/

Guys, read it again. It wasn't a piece of policy advocacy, it was just economic analysis. What I said was that the only way the Fed could get traction would be if it could inflate a housing bubble. And that's just what happened.

Comment Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command: (Score 1) 254

Bah. Your command would fail. You need to escape the splat just like the semicolon:

find my_lawn -name kids\* -exec rm -f {} \;

However -exec is slow. Try:

find my_lawn -name kids\* | xargs rm -rvf

Verbose for your kid-removing satisfaction.

Oh, and happy birthday, UNIX! Without you my career would have undoubtedly been less interesting.

find my_lawn -name kids\* -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rvf

You will thank me one day when some kid creates a file named "\n/\n"

Comment Re:I had this great idea for green power... (Score 1) 388

OP AC here... Thanks for the explanation.

But the original point remains...

With SF Bay or any other bay, the problem remain that you kill sea port, and screw up the environment with pollution or changing eco-system.

With the two oceans, there is no concern like this and the volume of water is unlimited, so you can practically generate as much power as you want...

Announcements

Submission + - Parrot VM 0.4.10 Released

Will Coleda writes: "Parrot 0.4.10 released: http://www.parrotcode.org/news/2007/Parrot-0.4.10. html Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages. Parrot currently hosts a variety of language implementations in various stages of completion, including Tcl, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, PHP, Python, Perl 6, APL, and a .NET bytecode translator."

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