Well, what you say might all be fine and dandy, but at the heart of this issue there is no binary "yes-no" dichotomy.
Meaning that it is perfectly possible for Mr. Cremo to be a nutjob, *and* for a not-so-small percentage of established science being junk.
Being a professional scientist myself, I can unfortunately testify to the latter being far more probable than most people outside academia would hope.
An uncomfortably large number of "researchers" and "professors" in academia are basically subpar scientists, without much of a vision where the field they are allegedly proficient in is heading.
For people like that, one easy way to deflect questions about their own performance is to hamper the work of others. This is not made any better by the prevalent systems of academic self-assessment, which penalise anyone who openly admits that he or she was wrong, and that it is someone else's idea which is, in fact, brilliant.
Interestingly, this is even true for the engineering sciences where I happen to work - although the ratio of meaningful scientific output vs. effort invested is even lower in many other areas (such as the social sciences), which have less recourse to objective analysis of the results which are generated.
Chip Morningstar once wrote a brilliant essay about the mechanisms behind the decay of literary criticism as a science - read that for some really nice observations on the inner workings of academia in general.
That having been said, the theories of Mr. Cremo still do not sound particularly credible, even if one takes this "inherent bias against anything new" within academia into account. And this has nothing to do with him being a follower of a non-Western, non-standard religion.
Logic and common sense (as well as the requirement to base any conclusions on independently verifiable facts) should also apply to someone follwing ancient Vedic teachings, one would hope...
Even though I basically agree with you, in that any argument that might lead to dehumanisation is a dangerous path to be treading on, the parent post unfortunately does have a point of sorts.
I mean, the level of daily carnage occurring in Iraq can only be described as mind-blowing these days.
And I do not even mean the violence directed towards American troops - the motivation behind these actions is comprehensible, at least to some degree. Laying an ambush, and firing an RPG at the convoy of what some Iraqis perceive to be an occupying army is an action that will in all probability result in death or injury for a large number of persons - but at least this is done for a reason that can be understood.
To me, the truly worrying aspect of the whole thing is the almost daily, pretty much arbitrary slaughtering of Iraqi civilians by other Iraqis the parent post is referring to.
The whole situation almost looks like Ruanda in 1994, just with even fewer discernible motives, and less overall organisation on the part of the perpetrators.
Any attempt at rationalising the actions of someone who blows up a truck full of explosives in a crowded market is hard work. That is to say, it can be pretty hard to come to any other conclusion, than that the people who do such things are complete psychopaths - criminally insane, if you will.
Such actions are deemed utterly reprehensible in practically all value systems, and in particular the moral framework postulated by all branches of Islam - there simply is no justification for doing something like that, which will stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.
Modern society goes to great lengths to avoid obvious dehumanisation of all those who fall into the category of "deranged criminal", but at the end of the day there is usually no other option, than to lock up the most severely disturbed individuals for the remainder of their lives.
In polite society no-one would use the kind of language the parent post was using when referring to such people, but the actions of society towards them (i.e. usually indefinite detention in a mental hospital) is still much the same, as if they really were not entirely human.
So: just because the Nazis had some very bizarre ideas about who was a valuable human (and who was not) one cannot argue that *all* categorisations of persons are automatically wrong.
If someone is - after an objective examination - found to be too dangerously defective to be at large, they can and should be removed from circulation.
Of course, liberally applying such harsh judgements to large, only somewhat accurately specified groups of people (i.e. "the terrorists") without investigating every single one of them (like the parent poster did) - well, this is where the fun usually starts... then it really is only a few steps until - for instance - all guys with long beards get rounded up, because they are, well, you know, extremists?
they could rule that any violence shown on TV must be absolutely realistic.
Not the idiotic "bang, you're dead" type "violence" that you see all day long in gangster films and the like.
No, they would have to show the real thing - where someone who is shot takes quite a long time to die, and does so under very disconcerting circumstances.
My guess is that people would turn off their TV sets rather than watch something like that. And they would complain on their own accord - "think of the children!", but this time it would be a grassroots thing, rather than something which is being mandated from the top.
And to boot, having seen such scenes would probably make children a lot more squeamish about playing with toy guns and "shooting" people as well...
Or perhaps I'm still too optimistic about people in general - perhaps doing something like that would not achieve anything, except turning the nation's children into hardened psychopaths much faster than they are now...:-)
was (and is), that few people realised how great the original NeXTStep environment - which GNUStep attempts to clone - was.
I was already around as a CS major at the time NeXTStep basically failed in the marketplace due to a) asinine marketing/pricing on the part of NeXT Inc. and b) the fact that everytime we showed the NeXTStep environment to fellow CS students and CS faculty, you would mostly get blank stares, and a few polite remarks. But no more.
Few "got it" how easy this was to use - concepts like the seperation of the user interface specification from the core logic of a program simply did not register with people weaned on TurboVision ("one line per code for each UI element"), and Apple has (probably rightfully so) more or less given up on educating people on how great the current successor to NeXTStep (Cocoa) is.
Nowadays, people code for OS X because OS X is seen as a hip system with a small but viable installed base, and the fact that the dev tools are extremely nice is just an added bonus.
So if GNUStep is just an Open Source version of something that is obsolete, why care at all?
Well, because the likes of KDE could have had it so much easier if they had used something like GNUStep (the structure of which is pretty revolutionary), instead of toolkits like QT, which were developed to be just a "better Win32" API.
Make no mistake, QT/KDE et al. turned out to *be* a better Win32/Foundation class environment, but I guess that most folks who were ever proficient in developing for the NeXT environment will agree, that a widely used and enhanced GNUStep would have been even more productive than that.
And still could be someday - after all, Linux desktops are such a melting pot of different toolkits and environments, that perhaps some "killer GNUStep apps" (graphics apps, like an Illustrator clone would be a good start) could get people to notice GNUStep again.
Ah, but spoofing conferences works for "hard science" too. See the VIDEA story as one nice example; they submitted totally bogus abstracts to a conference about computer graphics and got them all accepted as well.
Mind you, that VIDEA conference was apparently not all that good (to put it mildly), but it can even happen at the best venues: Paul Heckbert once had a paper about "Ray Tracing Jell-O Brand Gelatin" at SIGGRAPH 87...
(to be fair, they knew it was bogus, and published because it sounded cool - but still, a SIGGRAPH paper is a SIGGRAPH paper...);-)
his book ("The Fractal Geometry of Nature") contains at least one oversight that is really staggering, and throws a bizarre light on his abilities beyond pure math (and other posters here have speculated at length about the originality of his mathematical work as well).
In that book is a high-res picture of one of the fractal landscapes he did (one of the high-gloss images in the center), and the caption reads something like "this image does not look particularly realistic, since real valleys have much smoother floors than the ridges around them - and I have no idea why". Either he was joking, or the whole concept of erosion (and common sense along with that) had completely passed him by.
I first read that book when I was about 15, and this has bothered me ever since then - how come that such an icon can make such stupid mistakes?
Apart from that I found the whole book to be remarkably long on convoluted talk at the time, and remarkably short on actual insight. But who are we to question an icon of modern math...;-)
KDE was started to create a destkop, not an API. The API was merely a pleasant side effect.
Given that my original claim was that the basic structure of KDE is not nearly as well thought out as it should be I can only say - "and your point is?"
With a well thought out comprehensive application development toolkit like OS on the one side, and something which started out as one of these retarded "X desktop projects" ("one more kewl way of drawing Xterms" - granted, it's evolved beyond recognition into something genuinely useable now, but still >;-) and added most of the useful stuff as an afterthought, where do you think my sympathies lie?
I am actually amazed how much the KDE team has achieved, given that the entire software structure is suboptimal compared to e.g. (but probably not only) OpenStep.
The galling thought which the parent poster wanted to bring across was that if all that precious effort put into KDE had been invested into something with a more solid foundation - like for instance OpenStep - we could be much, much further on now than we currently are. People would in all probability be flocking to Linux due to its RAD prototyping capabilites, like they did with NeXTStep - and as a consequence there would not be such a lack of sophisticated GUI applications for the platform.
The apathy towards OpenStep stems from two facts. First, until recently there was no Free OpenStep desktop.
Yes, I agree, that was the thing which broke the back of any widespread OStep adoption. You could download an - arguably buggy and unfinished, but basically USEABLE - version of KDE when the GNUStep guys were still tinkering with the nth unuseable prerelease of their perfect uberdesktop. They did their work well (in the sense of being thorough), and the last sentence was not meant to deride them and their effort. Given the complexity of the project they have fared very well, but they are a bit late to the party now...
Qt/KDE is not "crippleware". That's below-the-belt FUD that cheapens your whole argument.
You are right - that was a rather over-the-top comment; apologies to the KDEers out there.
And I have to add that even if one were in a mood to flame KDE the nomenclature I used would not be entirely correct anyway; KDE is certainly not crippleware as such (this would imply broken functionality, which is generally not the case nowadays), but rather something I would call "conceptual crippleware" - a fundamentally limited design which is being meticulously implemented by a very dedicated team... >;-)
I agree with you that nowadays the available alternatives - e.g. Java/Eclipse or Python/Gtk+ - make ObjC/Cocoa a contender on a much more level field than e.g. 10 years ago, and that it is in effect relegated to a niche today due to the various issues which surround it (obscure language, free implementation was and is late and incomplete etc.).
However, the period roughly 10 years ago was the time the original poster was talking about - no real competition for OpenStep existed, and still the majority of open source hackers preferred to develop free implementations of arguably inferior concepts at the time.
Given the obsession with superiority of concept which was so prevalent in early open source movement this remains a slightly strange omission; the whole thread is about historical issues, and not what we should use nowadays...
The main trouble - then and now - is that the majority of folks simply "don't get it" why OpenStep is superior to crippleware APIs like Qt/KDE.
KDE is "trying to do an improved Windows on Linux" (and taking a lot of its bad design choices with them in the process), while OpenStep is something entirely different. And for an average, M$-infected programmer using something like that would require some re-thinking of some of one's own assumptions how apps should be coded, so most simply don't bother. Sheep, that's what I call them...;-)
I guess the apathy towards OpenStep also stems from the fact that most people have never seen NeXTStep development in action - it left most witnesses drooling for more - and/or because they're too conventionally-minded to try anything outside their mainstream C++/Java box. To paraphrase a famous quote, "nobody was ever fired for choosing C++", right? And who's ever heard of Objective C - apart from geeks, that is?.
If you're particularly uncharitable you could argue that the selection process which gave us Linux itself followed a similar pattern. There were technologically more advanced and initially cleaner OS projects out there at the time, but somehow the crowd choose a less-than-cutting-edge project they could at least *understand*.
I used NeXTStep for years, and I'm still doing my software development in ObjC - luckily I work in a niche where this is possible. If all others want to make their life difficult - well, that's their choice...;-)
I'm one of the comparatively few people here to have extensively used NeXTStep (the direct precursor of OS X - the core OS technology is still the same) on Intel hardware, back in the day when Linux was a freaky pile of small-rodent crud, Macs were "Win3.11 with an attitude" abominations and no other alternative to the evil empire existed.
A lot of postings here have tried to make points like "Steven Jobs hates untidy hardware" or "they couldn't make it work as neatly on x86 machines as they do on PPC rigs they build themselves", or even "they can't make it work on x86".
The first is perhaps be true (good for him if it is), the second might just be the case (but I seriously doubt this), and the third is certainly absolute rubbbish.
Granted, a lot of time has passed since then, and OS X is certainly more than NeXTStep 5 (as some diehards like to call it). But the nasty fact remains that the technological foundation of NeXTStep/OS X is enormously more stable, robust and inherently cross-platform than that of Windows in all its assorted versions of degeneracy. The Intel port of NeXTStep was perfectly useable and delivered all the comfort and useability to this new platform (and two more, actually - Sparc and HP builds also existed). You could not use arbitrary hardware (only that which had NeXTStep drivers), but that hardware was rock-solid, and given the availabilty of the excellent DriverKit the only reason other stuff wasn't supported was the lack of device information from the vendors (which is more readily available nowadays, partly due to Linux).
In short: if Apple wanted to pull this off (BIG if), the technological underpinnings would be there, and if it worked half was well as NeXTStep (which is pretty likely) technological issues would be the least of it. It's just not very likely from a marketing perspective, that's all (a shame, really, but what can one do...).
This is a "me,too!" post just in case someone from IBM is listening...
In my spare time, I'm the admin of a small office network (~10 PCs when fully deployed) which uses SuSE as desktop OS after endless troubles with an aging NT4 installation. The users mostly love it, and generally find it to be easier to use than NT (which is not surprising since it does not constantly act up like NT did). Staroffice turns out to be a suboptimal but acceptable replacement for MS Office, and the only thing we have to run in Wine is Notes R5.
Since we need the advanced facilities of the client (i.e. not just mail) we need the genuine article, and not e.g. a third party mailer or a web interface.
Even though Wine is a terrific application, there are always some problems with complex apps like Notes, especially for advanced features like database views. Also, the users find the idea of one program basically being a Windows app in a KDE world pretty confusing (KDE itself is fine for them), and configuration of this setup is troublesome. A native Notes client with KDE integration would be extremely nice to have - come on, IBM, you can't tell me you haven't been working on this anyway!
I can only assume Alan's objection is that it was yet another really neat thing developed (or sponsored) by rival Linux company SuSE (like reiserfs, which he also objected to)
I personally would rather believe that Alan Cox is a very capable engineer who saw that ReiserFS could have sucked marbles through bent straws, no matter where it came from.
That crud just made it into the kernel because Mr. Reiser kept pestering everyone, and finally succeeded with SuSE, who should have known better than to promote an immature filesystem which was still prone to data corruption when they first touted it as an alternative to ext2.
Hey, don't go and bash diesel Rabbits! I drive one of those, and it is a _very_ nice car! 13 years old, 70hp, and uses between 5 to 6 litres per 100km - and that with quite decent acceleration!;-)
On the other hand, yes, NTSC could suck glass eyes through micropores as a TV and colour standard, so I agree with you that these guys aren't setting their sights very high there...
The property of light you exploit when making of a hologram is called coherency, not polarization. That's why lasers are necessary, since polarized light could be also be generated with a bulb and a filter.
But it probably doesn't matter that much really, since the rest of your explanation also sounds a bit weird to me. I'm not an expert on holography, but AFAIK the trick is to capture not only the light intensity (as a photograph would) but also the phase information of the light (perhaps this is where you got that notion of polarization being necessary from). This is typically done by splitting a laser beam, and recording the interference patterns between the ray that hits the object and its undisturbed counterpart (something like that is only going to work with coherent light). On this interference pattern - which is captured on a special kind of film - a coherent lightsource can be used to reconstruct the entire phase information upon projection, which explains why a laser is also necessary to illuminate classical holograms.
This might not be a 100% correct description of the process, but it is probably more on the mark than your explanation. Then again, it might be not. Go dig up a physics book and check!:-)
I'm not sure whether all aspects of NeXT were destroyed by Java - after all, Java sucks glass eyes through micropores as a language and w/r to performance even nowadays; it's just that with 1GHz machines being a commodity fewer and fewer mainstream users notice.
If you're into high-performance computing in complex problem domains Objective-C still has some standing, as the ability to "do ANSI C" in performance critical components of a well-structured OO framework can be worth quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments towards the IT industry - without ultimately unsuccessful birds of paradise like NeXT, who at least demonstrated that elegant engineering is possible in this industry, things would be in an even worse shape that they are nowadays (with crud like Win32 and Java ruling the roost).
Does the US insist on using machines for this purpose in the first place? It just adds one more thing that can go wrong to the process, and hand-counted ballots are much more reliable and equally fast, if the set-up is done right. Quite a number of European countries (for example Austria, the place where I live) are testimony to the fact that hand-counting is a perfectly adequate way of going about counting a ballot in a modern democracy. And yes, although Austria has only 8 million inhabitants the highly parallel local method would even scale to something the size of the US.
But no, computers are sooo much more flashy than doing it by hand. Especially if you let *those* losers do the system. Yay!
A part of the population that quite a few posters (and the author of the article) seem to ignore are those who simply don't want a closed-source OS on their desktop any more.
Those who have this attitude because we've been there. For example, people like me. I used NeXTStep (the precursor to OS X) for several years before switching to Linux/KDE. KDE 2.0 is still not comparable to what NeXT 3.1 was like in terms of UI consistency, useability, stability and so on (although it's come a long way), and the abomination I used at first when I switched (KDE 1.1?) was even much, much worse.
But I still gladly traded the polished UI and seamless application integration for never again having to write postings about missing features to mainlinglists that NeXT employees might read. Never again having to speculate about when support for something useful might be implemented, and whether doing so would be politically viable for the provider of your OS.
The fact that if I really, really needed something in my OS I could get the CVS sources and fix it seems like the only way to exist - I don't want to be totally dependent on some corporation w/r to what my computer behaves like.
Besides, OS X is NeXTStep dumbed-down to the need of the average person who buys his machine at the supermarket and does AOL pr0n with it. Linux is for people who know what they're doing. The two groups don't oerlap to such a great degree.
I don't know about the U.S., but here in Europe Russian technolgy has a reputation for being extremely simple and robust. During the assembly phase of the ISS one of the more persistent rumors about the reason for the delays was that the U.S. components were sub-par, made by the lowest bidder and had to be improved before being useable.
IMHO the best anecdote about the different attitudes towards space technology in the U.S. and Russia is the bit about the writing utensils: when early astronauts/kosmonauts found out that ballpoint pens fail in microgravity, the U.S. spent a comparatively large amount of time and money to devise a pen that would actually work in an oribiting spacecraft (the famous "space pen"). The Russians thought about the matter for a moment and decided to use pencils instead.
What struck me as being the most obvious oddity about BeOS 5 is the disparity between a very nice underlying operating system and API system, and a comparatively childish, clunky user interface. To me, it looks and behaves like something that is trying to be a better Windows 3.1, i.e. Something That Ought Not To Happen (tm).
I'm not saying that Linux is all that better w/r to UIs, but KDE is at least improving over time, where BeOS is more or less locked down on its present look and feel.
Well, the original post is a troll, but somehow worth repsonding to anyway...
As a longtime NeXT user who has also been using the various alphas and betas of OS X over the past two years, I tend to respectfully disagree with you. My current desktop system is KDE 2 in (as of today) its latest-but-one incarnation, and in terms of useability for my particular line of work (computer graphics R & D), it is better suited than the current OS X beta.
Why? As other posters have mentioned before, OS X has a certain "macified kludge" feeling about it that was totally absent from NeXTStep. It is a serious compromise, away from a power user desktop like NeXT towards an OS that everyone and his inbred dog can use. And, contrary to the more open and multi-use philosophy behind e.g. KDE or GNOME, OS X is pretty static insofar as it enforces pretty similar handling habits on everyone who uses it through comparatively rather sparse UI config options. Which in turn means that power users will find it somewhat lacking to their taste in one or the other way.
Several UI aspects of the OS X interface (such as the giant photorealistic icons and the current version of the dock) have yet to be proven as effective improvements over previous standards, and the Aqua interface certainly will be refined for quite some time yet (which makes it a bit premature to speak of a new standard).
After all, OS X introduces very few new UI ideas, but rather presents old ones in an arguably unprecedented style and beauty. But just having the coolest 2D rendering engine out there (which, apart from a bastardised UNIX filesystem, is the only huge innovation in OS X) does not automagically make it a winning proposition by itself.
As for X windows, well, everyone knows that it could suck planet sized marbles through bent straws. But at least it works, and it is free. Having something like the Quartz rendering engine on Linux instead of X would certainly be an improvement, but don't count on anyone writing one soon.
I got 7.0 within 2 days of the release here in Austria (end of August), and installed it on my desktop SMP machine as my workplace OS, and have been using it almost daily since. As potential stumbling blocks for Linux my box has got a new Geforce 2 (purchased at the time of the 7.0 install - before it was SuSE 6.3 and a MGA Millenium), and a USB CompactFlash reader. To be adventurous, I also opted to use the KDE 2 beta as my main and only desktop - the new KMail being the most compelling reason to leave KDE 1 behind.
And everything went just fine and continues to work "right out of the box" (of course only after the compulsory day or wrestling with it until everything is right; but that is apparently common to all new distros and releases anyway).
The Geforce 2 performs quite well; the only problems there are with the beta binary-only NVidia driver, which guns the machine down about once per week (but that's what one has ReiserFS for anyway, right? Besides, this is hardly the fault of SuSE).
The only problem with the CompactFlash was that - out of habit - I tried to build my own kernel with appropriate USB support before it dawned on me that the stock 7.0 kernel already had all the support I needed compiled in (2 hours down the drain).
KDE 2 is, well, beta, but that again is hardly the fault of SuSE, who explicitly tell you that it's not quite there yet. I'd only wish that they'd post updated RPMs for new betas on their website from time to time (with the same disclaimer).
These are my personal experiences - maybe I was just lucky, but IMO 7.0 is quite a nice distro and worth the upgrade from previous SuSE offerings. But of course YMMV.
I consider myself something of an expert user, I live in Austria and I use SuSE 7.0 without having had a single real problem so far - I guess I must have missed something. I use 7.0 on a permanently networked SMP box with a Geforce 2, and apart from the occasional lockup due to the beta NVidia GLX driver (~ once per week - long live ReiserFS!) which can't be held against SuSE anyway, the machine is rock stable and does exactly what I want. And - thanks to YaST - does so with pretty minimal config effort on my part.
Perhaps you could share some of your "disturbing experiences" (or what exactly consitutes a "mess" in your opinion) with the audience here - I for one would be curious. Perhaps I've just learned to avoid certain neuralgic spots and there are some problems out there that I don't even see anymore, or that I take for granted and ignore because they've been there for so long (I've used SuSE since 6.0).
I don't know about your computer, but the main source of the annoying high-pitched noise from my desktop box are the high RPM harddisks, not the fans. And low-RPM harddisks are not entirely quiet either, so my guess is that the cubes, cool as they may be, are *not* totally quiet.
But I'll of course concede that any moving part less in a machine situated within earshot helps.
Yes, true, and this also shows what good benchmarks can be if you try to apply them to different application areas. The stuff Carmack does is real-time embellished polygon spitting on cutting edge 3D hardware, which is dependant on quite a number of other factors besides CPU speed, and where specifically the interaction of the CPU with the rest of the system matters quite a bit (gross oversimplification in semi-techspeak, please no flames). We more or less only do number crunching, which is pretty processor-centric, so a good chip can show off more of it's potential in our case. Not the same thing altogether.
There _are_ people who benefit quite a lot from the current "mine is longer" processor speed wars, such as computer graphics users. For the rendering of photorealistic images with one of the more sophisticated image synthesis methods, such as raytracing and/or radiosity, CPU horsepower is essential. Without this (mostly inane) speed race on the desktop, graphics researchers like ourselves would still be paying SGI et al. $BIGNUM for halfway decent CPUs. But, as anyone with an ounce of sense knows anyway, MHz means not as much as it sounds.
Example: at our institute, we are in the process of writing a more modern GPL'ed cross-platform replacement for POVray, mainly as a rendering research tool, but it's also intended to be useable by enthusiasts. This rendering system (which btw is mostly done and will be released soon) gives us a nice opportunity to compare the performance of processors with a complex, floating-point savvy real-world benchmark, with the different levels of compiler optimization in EGCS being the only real distortion across platforms.
Not suprisingly, Intel processors could suck planet-sized marbles through bent straws in this contest. My blue-white 400MHz Apple G3 is up to 30% faster than a PIII 450, both running Linux (and floating point stuff is supposedly the weak point of the G3). Depressingly, rendering on a single Athlon 550 is for certain scenes almost as fast as on a dual PIII 450 running on both processors (the raytracer is threaded and has almost no parallelization overhead, so this is actually a fair comparison).
So, personally speaking, a flaky 1.5GHz PIII demo does little to get me excited. (fantasize-mode on) What I'd much more like to hear about would be something like third-party G4 SMP boards (ATX format) that one could install Linux on (drool... time to take my medication again).
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Well, what you say might all be fine and dandy, but at the heart of this issue there is no binary "yes-no" dichotomy.
Meaning that it is perfectly possible for Mr. Cremo to be a nutjob, *and* for a not-so-small percentage of established science being junk.
Being a professional scientist myself, I can unfortunately testify to the latter being far more probable than most people outside academia would hope.
An uncomfortably large number of "researchers" and "professors" in academia are basically subpar scientists, without much of a vision where the field they are allegedly proficient in is heading.
For people like that, one easy way to deflect questions about their own performance is to hamper the work of others. This is not made any better by the prevalent systems of academic self-assessment, which penalise anyone who openly admits that he or she was wrong, and that it is someone else's idea which is, in fact, brilliant.
Interestingly, this is even true for the engineering sciences where I happen to work - although the ratio of meaningful scientific output vs. effort invested is even lower in many other areas (such as the social sciences), which have less recourse to objective analysis of the results which are generated.
Chip Morningstar once wrote a brilliant essay about the mechanisms behind the decay of literary criticism as a science - read that for some really nice observations on the inner workings of academia in general.
That having been said, the theories of Mr. Cremo still do not sound particularly credible, even if one takes this "inherent bias against anything new" within academia into account. And this has nothing to do with him being a follower of a non-Western, non-standard religion.
Logic and common sense (as well as the requirement to base any conclusions on independently verifiable facts) should also apply to someone follwing ancient Vedic teachings, one would hope...
A.
Even though I basically agree with you, in that any argument that might lead to dehumanisation is a dangerous path to be treading on, the parent post unfortunately does have a point of sorts.
I mean, the level of daily carnage occurring in Iraq can only be described as mind-blowing these days.
And I do not even mean the violence directed towards American troops - the motivation behind these actions is comprehensible, at least to some degree. Laying an ambush, and firing an RPG at the convoy of what some Iraqis perceive to be an occupying army is an action that will in all probability result in death or injury for a large number of persons - but at least this is done for a reason that can be understood.
To me, the truly worrying aspect of the whole thing is the almost daily, pretty much arbitrary slaughtering of Iraqi civilians by other Iraqis the parent post is referring to.
The whole situation almost looks like Ruanda in 1994, just with even fewer discernible motives, and less overall organisation on the part of the perpetrators.
Any attempt at rationalising the actions of someone who blows up a truck full of explosives in a crowded market is hard work. That is to say, it can be pretty hard to come to any other conclusion, than that the people who do such things are complete psychopaths - criminally insane, if you will.
Such actions are deemed utterly reprehensible in practically all value systems, and in particular the moral framework postulated by all branches of Islam - there simply is no justification for doing something like that, which will stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.
Modern society goes to great lengths to avoid obvious dehumanisation of all those who fall into the category of "deranged criminal", but at the end of the day there is usually no other option, than to lock up the most severely disturbed individuals for the remainder of their lives.
In polite society no-one would use the kind of language the parent post was using when referring to such people, but the actions of society towards them (i.e. usually indefinite detention in a mental hospital) is still much the same, as if they really were not entirely human.
So: just because the Nazis had some very bizarre ideas about who was a valuable human (and who was not) one cannot argue that *all* categorisations of persons are automatically wrong.
If someone is - after an objective examination - found to be too dangerously defective to be at large, they can and should be removed from circulation.
Of course, liberally applying such harsh judgements to large, only somewhat accurately specified groups of people (i.e. "the terrorists") without investigating every single one of them (like the parent poster did) - well, this is where the fun usually starts... then it really is only a few steps until - for instance - all guys with long beards get rounded up, because they are, well, you know, extremists?
A.
they could rule that any violence shown on TV must be absolutely realistic.
:-)
Not the idiotic "bang, you're dead" type "violence" that you see all day long in gangster films and the like.
No, they would have to show the real thing - where someone who is shot takes quite a long time to die, and does so under very disconcerting circumstances.
My guess is that people would turn off their TV sets rather than watch something like that. And they would complain on their own accord - "think of the children!", but this time it would be a grassroots thing, rather than something which is being mandated from the top.
And to boot, having seen such scenes would probably make children a lot more squeamish about playing with toy guns and "shooting" people as well...
Or perhaps I'm still too optimistic about people in general - perhaps doing something like that would not achieve anything, except turning the nation's children into hardened psychopaths much faster than they are now...
A.
was (and is), that few people realised how great the original NeXTStep environment - which GNUStep attempts to clone - was.
:-)
I was already around as a CS major at the time NeXTStep basically failed in the marketplace due to a) asinine marketing/pricing on the part of NeXT Inc. and b) the fact that everytime we showed the NeXTStep environment to fellow CS students and CS faculty, you would mostly get blank stares, and a few polite remarks. But no more.
Few "got it" how easy this was to use - concepts like the seperation of the user interface specification from the core logic of a program simply did not register with people weaned on TurboVision ("one line per code for each UI element"), and Apple has (probably rightfully so) more or less given up on educating people on how great the current successor to NeXTStep (Cocoa) is.
Nowadays, people code for OS X because OS X is seen as a hip system with a small but viable installed base, and the fact that the dev tools are extremely nice is just an added bonus.
So if GNUStep is just an Open Source version of something that is obsolete, why care at all?
Well, because the likes of KDE could have had it so much easier if they had used something like GNUStep (the structure of which is pretty revolutionary), instead of toolkits like QT, which were developed to be just a "better Win32" API.
Make no mistake, QT/KDE et al. turned out to *be* a better Win32/Foundation class environment, but I guess that most folks who were ever proficient in developing for the NeXT environment will agree, that a widely used and enhanced GNUStep would have been even more productive than that.
And still could be someday - after all, Linux desktops are such a melting pot of different toolkits and environments, that perhaps some "killer GNUStep apps" (graphics apps, like an Illustrator clone would be a good start) could get people to notice GNUStep again.
One can always dream...
Just my $0.2E-32
A.
Ah, but spoofing conferences works for "hard science" too. See the VIDEA story as one nice example; they submitted totally bogus abstracts to a conference about computer graphics and got them all accepted as well.
;-)
Mind you, that VIDEA conference was apparently not all that good (to put it mildly), but it can even happen at the best venues: Paul Heckbert once had a paper about "Ray Tracing Jell-O Brand Gelatin" at SIGGRAPH 87...
(to be fair, they knew it was bogus, and published because it sounded cool - but still, a SIGGRAPH paper is a SIGGRAPH paper...)
Just my 0.2E-32 EUR
A.W.
his book ("The Fractal Geometry of Nature") contains at least one oversight that is really staggering, and throws a bizarre light on his abilities beyond pure math (and other posters here have speculated at length about the originality of his mathematical work as well).
;-)
In that book is a high-res picture of one of the fractal landscapes he did (one of the high-gloss images in the center), and the caption reads something like "this image does not look particularly realistic, since real valleys have much smoother floors than the ridges around them - and I have no idea why". Either he was joking, or the whole concept of erosion (and common sense along with that) had completely passed him by.
I first read that book when I was about 15, and this has bothered me ever since then - how come that such an icon can make such stupid mistakes?
Apart from that I found the whole book to be remarkably long on convoluted talk at the time, and remarkably short on actual insight. But who are we to question an icon of modern math...
Just my 0.2EUR
A.W.
KDE was started to create a destkop, not an API. The API was merely a pleasant side effect.
Given that my original claim was that the basic structure of KDE is not nearly as well thought out as it should be I can only say - "and your point is?"
With a well thought out comprehensive application development toolkit like OS on the one side, and something which started out as one of these retarded "X desktop projects" ("one more kewl way of drawing Xterms" - granted, it's evolved beyond recognition into something genuinely useable now, but still >;-) and added most of the useful stuff as an afterthought, where do you think my sympathies lie?
I am actually amazed how much the KDE team has achieved, given that the entire software structure is suboptimal compared to e.g. (but probably not only) OpenStep.
The galling thought which the parent poster wanted to bring across was that if all that precious effort put into KDE had been invested into something with a more solid foundation - like for instance OpenStep - we could be much, much further on now than we currently are. People would in all probability be flocking to Linux due to its RAD prototyping capabilites, like they did with NeXTStep - and as a consequence there would not be such a lack of sophisticated GUI applications for the platform.
The apathy towards OpenStep stems from two facts. First, until recently there was no Free OpenStep desktop.
Yes, I agree, that was the thing which broke the back of any widespread OStep adoption. You could download an - arguably buggy and unfinished, but basically USEABLE - version of KDE when the GNUStep guys were still tinkering with the nth unuseable prerelease of their perfect uberdesktop. They did their work well (in the sense of being thorough), and the last sentence was not meant to deride them and their effort. Given the complexity of the project they have fared very well, but they are a bit late to the party now...
Qt/KDE is not "crippleware". That's below-the-belt FUD that cheapens your whole argument.
You are right - that was a rather over-the-top comment; apologies to the KDEers out there.
And I have to add that even if one were in a mood to flame KDE the nomenclature I used would not be entirely correct anyway; KDE is certainly not crippleware as such (this would imply broken functionality, which is generally not the case nowadays), but rather something I would call "conceptual crippleware" - a fundamentally limited design which is being meticulously implemented by a very dedicated team... >;-)
0.2E-32 EUR
A.W.
I agree with you that nowadays the available alternatives - e.g. Java/Eclipse or Python/Gtk+ - make ObjC/Cocoa a contender on a much more level field than e.g. 10 years ago, and that it is in effect relegated to a niche today due to the various issues which surround it (obscure language, free implementation was and is late and incomplete etc.).
However, the period roughly 10 years ago was the time the original poster was talking about - no real competition for OpenStep existed, and still the majority of open source hackers preferred to develop free implementations of arguably inferior concepts at the time.
Given the obsession with superiority of concept which was so prevalent in early open source movement this remains a slightly strange omission; the whole thread is about historical issues, and not what we should use nowadays...
0.2E-32 EUR
A.W.
The main trouble - then and now - is that the majority of folks simply "don't get it" why OpenStep is superior to crippleware APIs like Qt/KDE.
;-)
;-)
KDE is "trying to do an improved Windows on Linux" (and taking a lot of its bad design choices with them in the process), while OpenStep is something entirely different. And for an average, M$-infected programmer using something like that would require some re-thinking of some of one's own assumptions how apps should be coded, so most simply don't bother. Sheep, that's what I call them...
I guess the apathy towards OpenStep also stems from the fact that most people have never seen NeXTStep development in action - it left most witnesses drooling for more - and/or because they're too conventionally-minded to try anything outside their mainstream C++/Java box. To paraphrase a famous quote, "nobody was ever fired for choosing C++", right? And who's ever heard of Objective C - apart from geeks, that is?.
If you're particularly uncharitable you could argue that the selection process which gave us Linux itself followed a similar pattern. There were technologically more advanced and initially cleaner OS projects out there at the time, but somehow the crowd choose a less-than-cutting-edge project they could at least *understand*.
I used NeXTStep for years, and I'm still doing my software development in ObjC - luckily I work in a niche where this is possible. If all others want to make their life difficult - well, that's their choice...
Just my two euro cents
A.W.
I'm one of the comparatively few people here to have extensively used NeXTStep (the direct precursor of OS X - the core OS technology is still the same) on Intel hardware, back in the day when Linux was a freaky pile of small-rodent crud, Macs were "Win3.11 with an attitude" abominations and no other alternative to the evil empire existed.
A lot of postings here have tried to make points like "Steven Jobs hates untidy hardware" or "they couldn't make it work as neatly on x86 machines as they do on PPC rigs they build themselves", or even "they can't make it work on x86".
The first is perhaps be true (good for him if it is), the second might just be the case (but I seriously doubt this), and the third is certainly absolute rubbbish.
Granted, a lot of time has passed since then, and OS X is certainly more than NeXTStep 5 (as some diehards like to call it). But the nasty fact remains that the technological foundation of NeXTStep/OS X is enormously more stable, robust and inherently cross-platform than that of Windows in all its assorted versions of degeneracy. The Intel port of NeXTStep was perfectly useable and delivered all the comfort and useability to this new platform (and two more, actually - Sparc and HP builds also existed). You could not use arbitrary hardware (only that which had NeXTStep drivers), but that hardware was rock-solid, and given the availabilty of the excellent DriverKit the only reason other stuff wasn't supported was the lack of device information from the vendors (which is more readily available nowadays, partly due to Linux).
In short: if Apple wanted to pull this off (BIG if), the technological underpinnings would be there, and if it worked half was well as NeXTStep (which is pretty likely) technological issues would be the least of it. It's just not very likely from a marketing perspective, that's all (a shame, really, but what can one do...).
Just my two euro cents
A. W.
This is a "me,too!" post just in case someone from IBM is listening...
In my spare time, I'm the admin of a small office network (~10 PCs when fully deployed) which uses SuSE as desktop OS after endless troubles with an aging NT4 installation. The users mostly love it, and generally find it to be easier to use than NT (which is not surprising since it does not constantly act up like NT did). Staroffice turns out to be a suboptimal but acceptable replacement for MS Office, and the only thing we have to run in Wine is Notes R5.
Since we need the advanced facilities of the client (i.e. not just mail) we need the genuine article, and not e.g. a third party mailer or a web interface.
Even though Wine is a terrific application, there are always some problems with complex apps like Notes, especially for advanced features like database views. Also, the users find the idea of one program basically being a Windows app in a KDE world pretty confusing (KDE itself is fine for them), and configuration of this setup is troublesome. A native Notes client with KDE integration would be extremely nice to have - come on, IBM, you can't tell me you haven't been working on this anyway!
A.W.
I can only assume Alan's objection is that it was yet another really neat thing developed (or sponsored) by rival Linux company SuSE (like reiserfs, which he also objected to)
I personally would rather believe that Alan Cox is a very capable engineer who saw that ReiserFS could have sucked marbles through bent straws, no matter where it came from.
That crud just made it into the kernel because Mr. Reiser kept pestering everyone, and finally succeeded with SuSE, who should have known better than to promote an immature filesystem which was still prone to data corruption when they first touted it as an alternative to ext2.
Just my $0.2E-32
Alexander Wilkie
Hey, don't go and bash diesel Rabbits! I drive one of those, and it is a _very_ nice car! 13 years old, 70hp, and uses between 5 to 6 litres per 100km - and that with quite decent acceleration! ;-)
On the other hand, yes, NTSC could suck glass eyes through micropores as a TV and colour standard, so I agree with you that these guys aren't setting their sights very high there...
just my $0.2E-32
Alexander
The property of light you exploit when making of a hologram is called coherency, not polarization. That's why lasers are necessary, since polarized light could be also be generated with a bulb and a filter.
But it probably doesn't matter that much really, since the rest of your explanation also sounds a bit weird to me. I'm not an expert on holography, but AFAIK the trick is to capture not only the light intensity (as a photograph would) but also the phase information of the light (perhaps this is where you got that notion of polarization being necessary from). This is typically done by splitting a laser beam, and recording the interference patterns between the ray that hits the object and its undisturbed counterpart (something like that is only going to work with coherent light). On this interference pattern - which is captured on a special kind of film - a coherent lightsource can be used to reconstruct the entire phase information upon projection, which explains why a laser is also necessary to illuminate classical holograms.
This might not be a 100% correct description of the process, but it is probably more on the mark than your explanation. Then again, it might be not. Go dig up a physics book and check! :-)
Just my $0.2E-32
A.W.
I'm not sure whether all aspects of NeXT were destroyed by Java - after all, Java sucks glass eyes through micropores as a language and w/r to performance even nowadays; it's just that with 1GHz machines being a commodity fewer and fewer mainstream users notice.
If you're into high-performance computing in complex problem domains Objective-C still has some standing, as the ability to "do ANSI C" in performance critical components of a well-structured OO framework can be worth quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments towards the IT industry - without ultimately unsuccessful birds of paradise like NeXT, who at least demonstrated that elegant engineering is possible in this industry, things would be in an even worse shape that they are nowadays (with crud like Win32 and Java ruling the roost).
$0.2E-32
Alexander Wilkie
Does the US insist on using machines for this purpose in the first place? It just adds one more thing that can go wrong to the process, and hand-counted ballots are much more reliable and equally fast, if the set-up is done right. Quite a number of European countries (for example Austria, the place where I live) are testimony to the fact that hand-counting is a perfectly adequate way of going about counting a ballot in a modern democracy. And yes, although Austria has only 8 million inhabitants the highly parallel local method would even scale to something the size of the US.
But no, computers are sooo much more flashy than doing it by hand. Especially if you let *those* losers do the system. Yay!
$0.2E-32
Alexander Wilkie
A part of the population that quite a few posters (and the author of the article) seem to ignore are those who simply don't want a closed-source OS on their desktop any more.
Those who have this attitude because we've been there. For example, people like me. I used NeXTStep (the precursor to OS X) for several years before switching to Linux/KDE. KDE 2.0 is still not comparable to what NeXT 3.1 was like in terms of UI consistency, useability, stability and so on (although it's come a long way), and the abomination I used at first when I switched (KDE 1.1?) was even much, much worse.
But I still gladly traded the polished UI and seamless application integration for never again having to write postings about missing features to mainlinglists that NeXT employees might read. Never again having to speculate about when support for something useful might be implemented, and whether doing so would be politically viable for the provider of your OS.
The fact that if I really, really needed something in my OS I could get the CVS sources and fix it seems like the only way to exist - I don't want to be totally dependent on some corporation w/r to what my computer behaves like.
Besides, OS X is NeXTStep dumbed-down to the need of the average person who buys his machine at the supermarket and does AOL pr0n with it. Linux is for people who know what they're doing. The two groups don't oerlap to such a great degree.
$0.2E-32
Alexander
I don't know about the U.S., but here in Europe Russian technolgy has a reputation for being extremely simple and robust. During the assembly phase of the ISS one of the more persistent rumors about the reason for the delays was that the U.S. components were sub-par, made by the lowest bidder and had to be improved before being useable.
IMHO the best anecdote about the different attitudes towards space technology in the U.S. and Russia is the bit about the writing utensils: when early astronauts/kosmonauts found out that ballpoint pens fail in microgravity, the U.S. spent a comparatively large amount of time and money to devise a pen that would actually work in an oribiting spacecraft (the famous "space pen"). The Russians thought about the matter for a moment and decided to use pencils instead.
$0.2E-32
Alexander
What struck me as being the most obvious oddity about BeOS 5 is the disparity between a very nice underlying operating system and API system, and a comparatively childish, clunky user interface. To me, it looks and behaves like something that is trying to be a better Windows 3.1, i.e. Something That Ought Not To Happen (tm).
I'm not saying that Linux is all that better w/r to UIs, but KDE is at least improving over time, where BeOS is more or less locked down on its present look and feel.
$0.2E-32
AlexanderWell, the original post is a troll, but somehow worth repsonding to anyway...
As a longtime NeXT user who has also been using the various alphas and betas of OS X over the past two years, I tend to respectfully disagree with you. My current desktop system is KDE 2 in (as of today) its latest-but-one incarnation, and in terms of useability for my particular line of work (computer graphics R & D), it is better suited than the current OS X beta.
Why? As other posters have mentioned before, OS X has a certain "macified kludge" feeling about it that was totally absent from NeXTStep. It is a serious compromise, away from a power user desktop like NeXT towards an OS that everyone and his inbred dog can use. And, contrary to the more open and multi-use philosophy behind e.g. KDE or GNOME, OS X is pretty static insofar as it enforces pretty similar handling habits on everyone who uses it through comparatively rather sparse UI config options. Which in turn means that power users will find it somewhat lacking to their taste in one or the other way.
Several UI aspects of the OS X interface (such as the giant photorealistic icons and the current version of the dock) have yet to be proven as effective improvements over previous standards, and the Aqua interface certainly will be refined for quite some time yet (which makes it a bit premature to speak of a new standard).
After all, OS X introduces very few new UI ideas, but rather presents old ones in an arguably unprecedented style and beauty. But just having the coolest 2D rendering engine out there (which, apart from a bastardised UNIX filesystem, is the only huge innovation in OS X) does not automagically make it a winning proposition by itself.
As for X windows, well, everyone knows that it could suck planet sized marbles through bent straws. But at least it works, and it is free. Having something like the Quartz rendering engine on Linux instead of X would certainly be an improvement, but don't count on anyone writing one soon.
Just my two cents... (and kudos to the KDE team!)
Alexander Wilkie
I got 7.0 within 2 days of the release here in Austria (end of August), and installed it on my desktop SMP machine as my workplace OS, and have been using it almost daily since. As potential stumbling blocks for Linux my box has got a new Geforce 2 (purchased at the time of the 7.0 install - before it was SuSE 6.3 and a MGA Millenium), and a USB CompactFlash reader. To be adventurous, I also opted to use the KDE 2 beta as my main and only desktop - the new KMail being the most compelling reason to leave KDE 1 behind.
And everything went just fine and continues to work "right out of the box" (of course only after the compulsory day or wrestling with it until everything is right; but that is apparently common to all new distros and releases anyway).
The Geforce 2 performs quite well; the only problems there are with the beta binary-only NVidia driver, which guns the machine down about once per week (but that's what one has ReiserFS for anyway, right? Besides, this is hardly the fault of SuSE).
The only problem with the CompactFlash was that - out of habit - I tried to build my own kernel with appropriate USB support before it dawned on me that the stock 7.0 kernel already had all the support I needed compiled in (2 hours down the drain).
KDE 2 is, well, beta, but that again is hardly the fault of SuSE, who explicitly tell you that it's not quite there yet. I'd only wish that they'd post updated RPMs for new betas on their website from time to time (with the same disclaimer).
These are my personal experiences - maybe I was just lucky, but IMO 7.0 is quite a nice distro and worth the upgrade from previous SuSE offerings. But of course YMMV.
I consider myself something of an expert user, I live in Austria and I use SuSE 7.0 without having had a single real problem so far - I guess I must have missed something. I use 7.0 on a permanently networked SMP box with a Geforce 2, and apart from the occasional lockup due to the beta NVidia GLX driver (~ once per week - long live ReiserFS!) which can't be held against SuSE anyway, the machine is rock stable and does exactly what I want. And - thanks to YaST - does so with pretty minimal config effort on my part.
Perhaps you could share some of your "disturbing experiences" (or what exactly consitutes a "mess" in your opinion) with the audience here - I for one would be curious. Perhaps I've just learned to avoid certain neuralgic spots and there are some problems out there that I don't even see anymore, or that I take for granted and ignore because they've been there for so long (I've used SuSE since 6.0).
I don't know about your computer, but the main source of the annoying high-pitched noise from my desktop box are the high RPM harddisks, not the fans. And low-RPM harddisks are not entirely quiet either, so my guess is that the cubes, cool as they may be, are *not* totally quiet.
But I'll of course concede that any moving part less in a machine situated within earshot helps.
Just my 0.2E-32
Alexander Wilkie
Yes, true, and this also shows what good benchmarks can be if you try to apply them to different application areas. The stuff Carmack does is real-time embellished polygon spitting on cutting edge 3D hardware, which is dependant on quite a number of other factors besides CPU speed, and where specifically the interaction of the CPU with the rest of the system matters quite a bit (gross oversimplification in semi-techspeak, please no flames). We more or less only do number crunching, which is pretty processor-centric, so a good chip can show off more of it's potential in our case. Not the same thing altogether.
AlexanderThere _are_ people who benefit quite a lot from the current "mine is longer" processor speed wars, such as computer graphics users. For the rendering of photorealistic images with one of the more sophisticated image synthesis methods, such as raytracing and/or radiosity, CPU horsepower is essential. Without this (mostly inane) speed race on the desktop, graphics researchers like ourselves would still be paying SGI et al. $BIGNUM for halfway decent CPUs. But, as anyone with an ounce of sense knows anyway, MHz means not as much as it sounds.
Example: at our institute, we are in the process of writing a more modern GPL'ed cross-platform replacement for POVray, mainly as a rendering research tool, but it's also intended to be useable by enthusiasts. This rendering system (which btw is mostly done and will be released soon) gives us a nice opportunity to compare the performance of processors with a complex, floating-point savvy real-world benchmark, with the different levels of compiler optimization in EGCS being the only real distortion across platforms.
Not suprisingly, Intel processors could suck planet-sized marbles through bent straws in this contest. My blue-white 400MHz Apple G3 is up to 30% faster than a PIII 450, both running Linux (and floating point stuff is supposedly the weak point of the G3). Depressingly, rendering on a single Athlon 550 is for certain scenes almost as fast as on a dual PIII 450 running on both processors (the raytracer is threaded and has almost no parallelization overhead, so this is actually a fair comparison).
So, personally speaking, a flaky 1.5GHz PIII demo does little to get me excited. (fantasize-mode on) What I'd much more like to hear about would be something like third-party G4 SMP boards (ATX format) that one could install Linux on (drool... time to take my medication again).
just my usual 0.2E-32Alexander Wilkie