And to think that I gave up the opportunity to spend a year in Antarctica as a research assistant in my youth... Don't mind "normal" cold, but that was a bit more than I was willing to submit to. In any case, these people are to be admired for their persistence in following their dream.
I agree with you in that Apple makes highly polished and easy to use software that appeals to many, many people. In fact, as an IT consultant and software engineer I often recommend Apple computers to my clients and my wife is a hard-core Apple user and particle physicist. So yes, both can exist, but people need to know both the benefits and the drawbacks of each approach to computing. In any case, I believe that Stallman was trying to make the point that the success of Apple's approach is a temptation for others to constrict user options in much the same way, and that is inherently dangerous in general.
FWIW, all of my systems run some variety of Linux (my phone is a Nexus One, my development workstation runs Scientific Linux, and my laptop runs Ubuntu). I develop embedded systems using Linux and QNX, and my wife works with Linux extensively in her job at a major physics research laboratory. To both of us, open source is critical in our lives and careers; however, for her personal systems, Apple is top dog, including her phone.
Stallman was just voicing his long and honestly held beliefs that a free and open software environment is a major benefit to society, and that closed systems such as promulgated by Jobs is not in people's best interests, but is only in the best interest of those who own the system - Jobs/Apple in this case. Yes, Jobs was a brilliant visionary and executor of his vision, but that vision was to limit people's choices to those he approved of. If our government were to do that (oops, they must have read his book) we would be up in arms...
You'd think that a tor-like vpn service would be smart enough to not enable logging, except for errors that they may need to fix, and then not log IP addresses in any case. Then, they can hand over the logs, knowing that no, or little, information will be available.
I found a copy of Feynman's book (including a CD audio copy) "6 Not So Easy Pieces" on quantum mechanics and related topics, the companion to "6 Easy Pieces" on general physics, about 10 years ago. It is remarkably easy for someone with basic college math and science to understand - once you whack your head against the wall a few times!:-) Anyway, here is a link to the Amazon page for the book: http://www.amazon.com/Six-Not-So-Easy-Pieces-Relativity-Space-Time/dp/0465025269/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314560980&sr=1-17
Well, the latest kernel for RHEL and SL 6 is 2.6.32-131.2.1, so I would expect CentOS 6 to be using that as well. You can go to their mirrors and check. Since they took so long to release 6, I switched to SL 6 last December.
Actually, that was Tom Lehrer's "That Was The Year That Was" album! A favorite of mine since it came out in 1965. I think some of the other topical songs included the classics "So Long Mom (I'm Off to Drop the Bomb)", "Pollution", and "The Vatican Rag".
Bob will be missed. I have been reading his postings on EDN for many, many years (probably about 25 years now) and always found them interesting, informational, and often quite funny. The Silicon Valley and the industry has lost a real gentleman and guiding light.
Googling on the terms "nebraska nuclear power plant" returns a number of results that both support and contradict my assertions. The fact is that there was an hours-long failure of getting cooling water to overloaded spent fuel ponds, amongst other problems. Some of the pictures are not encouraging, and the Missouri is still rising.
Apparently the no-fly zone was extended because of the leaks. I saw an nice picture of the plant yesterday with Missouri flood waters up to their armpits. Anyway, the info I saw was from the IAEA or similar international nuclear regulatory body.
"And all of them could escalate dangers in the event of an accident."
You mean, like the one going on in Nebraska 20 miles from Omaha on the Missouri River, that the Obama administration has placed under a total news blackout? That has been placed in a no-fly zone because of the radiation leaks?
Oops sorry. You haven't heard about it, because of the news blackout...
New? Not likely. We were doing this with QNX as far back as the 1980's. We used to say that it was the supercomputer that you built one host at a time.
A lot of web sites that have tuned their main (and other) pages over time to be usable and accessible, often seem to think that a major change is "improvement". Sometimes it is, but often it isn't simply because they don't spend enough energy on validating functionality and usability with their users. Having a "try new interface" or "use old interface" options would help so that people can try out the new look, yet go back to the old one if the new interface doesn't work for them. Then, requesting active feedback from users will help them to make sure that all is working as they wish before deprecating the old interfaces. Like customers, the users are always right. New eye candy may not be what you need to be successful.
"... faking counterfeit data..." Duh? Doesn't that mean the same as "... creating real data..."? Oh well, just a matter of semantics, and computers are still pretty piss poor with that.
Most billboards offend me and cause me undue emotional distress. Ditto religious displays, pictures of cops beating people, and politicians giving speeches. The first time I saw Ronald Reagan on TV as the replacement announcer for Death Valley Days after the old ranger quit/died, I got nauseated, and blurted out (I was 5 or 6 at the time) "I don't trust that guy!", and never watched the show again. So, according to Tennessee law, pictures of Ronald Reagan should be banned...
Generally, I am against software patents, however I do believe that there are some software innovations that should be patentable. My feeling is that they should be held to much higher standards of innovation, non-obviousness, and utility than current software patents are. I say this as the holder of a software patent related to adaptive systems that allows compiled applications to alter the structure and behavior of application classes at run time without writing code or recompiling the application source code. I honestly believe that the innovations I invented (and are in use by most semiconductor and similar high-tech manufacturing enterprises to enable them to tailor off-the-shelf manufacturing software to their particular enterprise without writing and integrating new code) meet the same standards required of physical devices and such.
That said, most of the software patents I have read about, or studied in detail, are totally bogus and should have been laughed out of the Patent and Trademark Office.
Period of time for software patents? 10 years max in my opinion. 20 years is absurd. As stated elsewhere in these comments, software innovations occur too rapidly to lock up some concept for that much time.
I'm a cheapskate. For $39, I'll go for the 3 year warranty, and keep the thing for 5. The reasons I usually purchase higher capability models is my work (professional software engineer) and that they are still reasonable after 4+ years. My 3 year old Dell D630 is still as capable as most new systems - 2.5GHz dual core 64-bit processor w/ 4GB RAM, 250GB disc, extended run battery (9 cell), bluetooth, high-res (1400x1050) display, nVidia graphics. In 2 years, I'll be ready to trade up. Right now, a comparable system is going to cost me an arm and a leg. Do I want the costly warranty extension? Yes. Am I going to buy it? Don't know. I have to decide by Wednesday...
Something I have said since I sold PC's in the 80's - if you can buy it, it is already obsolete... Get a system with a good warranty. My Dell D630, and my D600 laptop before that, both came with a 3 year warranty. Most laptops come with a 1 year warranty unless you pay extra. Dell charges $39 for their Latitude systems to extend that to 3 years - well worth the price. In any case, consider 3 years a minimum life time, and 5 years max. By then she will probably be ready to trade. Mine is just 3 years old now. It is still sound and has enough power, video, memory, and disc to last a few more I think. Dell is trying to get me to reup the warrany, but I'm not sure it is worth it. At this point I think it's about an extra $150 per year.
Shows how one can make mis-assumptions when not all of the data is available...:-) That helps (using ML for functional programming), but I still think that OO analysis and design are proper subjects for early CS program courses. JMHO...
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And to think that I gave up the opportunity to spend a year in Antarctica as a research assistant in my youth... Don't mind "normal" cold, but that was a bit more than I was willing to submit to. In any case, these people are to be admired for their persistence in following their dream.
So, if I commit a crime, can I have my clone do my time?
I agree with you in that Apple makes highly polished and easy to use software that appeals to many, many people. In fact, as an IT consultant and software engineer I often recommend Apple computers to my clients and my wife is a hard-core Apple user and particle physicist. So yes, both can exist, but people need to know both the benefits and the drawbacks of each approach to computing. In any case, I believe that Stallman was trying to make the point that the success of Apple's approach is a temptation for others to constrict user options in much the same way, and that is inherently dangerous in general. FWIW, all of my systems run some variety of Linux (my phone is a Nexus One, my development workstation runs Scientific Linux, and my laptop runs Ubuntu). I develop embedded systems using Linux and QNX, and my wife works with Linux extensively in her job at a major physics research laboratory. To both of us, open source is critical in our lives and careers; however, for her personal systems, Apple is top dog, including her phone.
Stallman was just voicing his long and honestly held beliefs that a free and open software environment is a major benefit to society, and that closed systems such as promulgated by Jobs is not in people's best interests, but is only in the best interest of those who own the system - Jobs/Apple in this case. Yes, Jobs was a brilliant visionary and executor of his vision, but that vision was to limit people's choices to those he approved of. If our government were to do that (oops, they must have read his book) we would be up in arms...
Actually, this should read "A neutrino staggers out of a bar. The barkeep says 'We don't serve faster-than-light particles in here'.
You'd think that a tor-like vpn service would be smart enough to not enable logging, except for errors that they may need to fix, and then not log IP addresses in any case. Then, they can hand over the logs, knowing that no, or little, information will be available.
For any Windows system, the time to usable is (IMO) just about infinite...
As one wag said, "The nice thing about standards, is that there are so many." and "The nice thing about standards, is that everyone has one."...
I found a copy of Feynman's book (including a CD audio copy) "6 Not So Easy Pieces" on quantum mechanics and related topics, the companion to "6 Easy Pieces" on general physics, about 10 years ago. It is remarkably easy for someone with basic college math and science to understand - once you whack your head against the wall a few times! :-) Anyway, here is a link to the Amazon page for the book: http://www.amazon.com/Six-Not-So-Easy-Pieces-Relativity-Space-Time/dp/0465025269/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314560980&sr=1-17
Well, the latest kernel for RHEL and SL 6 is 2.6.32-131.2.1, so I would expect CentOS 6 to be using that as well. You can go to their mirrors and check. Since they took so long to release 6, I switched to SL 6 last December.
Sort of. But it was a very popular (for Lehrer) album. Here is the Wikipedia article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Was_the_Year_That_Was
Actually, that was Tom Lehrer's "That Was The Year That Was" album! A favorite of mine since it came out in 1965. I think some of the other topical songs included the classics "So Long Mom (I'm Off to Drop the Bomb)", "Pollution", and "The Vatican Rag".
Bob will be missed. I have been reading his postings on EDN for many, many years (probably about 25 years now) and always found them interesting, informational, and often quite funny. The Silicon Valley and the industry has lost a real gentleman and guiding light.
Googling on the terms "nebraska nuclear power plant" returns a number of results that both support and contradict my assertions. The fact is that there was an hours-long failure of getting cooling water to overloaded spent fuel ponds, amongst other problems. Some of the pictures are not encouraging, and the Missouri is still rising.
Apparently the no-fly zone was extended because of the leaks. I saw an nice picture of the plant yesterday with Missouri flood waters up to their armpits. Anyway, the info I saw was from the IAEA or similar international nuclear regulatory body.
"And all of them could escalate dangers in the event of an accident." You mean, like the one going on in Nebraska 20 miles from Omaha on the Missouri River, that the Obama administration has placed under a total news blackout? That has been placed in a no-fly zone because of the radiation leaks? Oops sorry. You haven't heard about it, because of the news blackout...
New? Not likely. We were doing this with QNX as far back as the 1980's. We used to say that it was the supercomputer that you built one host at a time.
Yeah. Right. And I wear a fez... Actually, I wear a cowboy hat when I play bluegrass.
A lot of web sites that have tuned their main (and other) pages over time to be usable and accessible, often seem to think that a major change is "improvement". Sometimes it is, but often it isn't simply because they don't spend enough energy on validating functionality and usability with their users. Having a "try new interface" or "use old interface" options would help so that people can try out the new look, yet go back to the old one if the new interface doesn't work for them. Then, requesting active feedback from users will help them to make sure that all is working as they wish before deprecating the old interfaces. Like customers, the users are always right. New eye candy may not be what you need to be successful.
"... faking counterfeit data ..." Duh? Doesn't that mean the same as "... creating real data ..."? Oh well, just a matter of semantics, and computers are still pretty piss poor with that.
"If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out"...
Most billboards offend me and cause me undue emotional distress. Ditto religious displays, pictures of cops beating people, and politicians giving speeches. The first time I saw Ronald Reagan on TV as the replacement announcer for Death Valley Days after the old ranger quit/died, I got nauseated, and blurted out (I was 5 or 6 at the time) "I don't trust that guy!", and never watched the show again. So, according to Tennessee law, pictures of Ronald Reagan should be banned...
Generally, I am against software patents, however I do believe that there are some software innovations that should be patentable. My feeling is that they should be held to much higher standards of innovation, non-obviousness, and utility than current software patents are. I say this as the holder of a software patent related to adaptive systems that allows compiled applications to alter the structure and behavior of application classes at run time without writing code or recompiling the application source code. I honestly believe that the innovations I invented (and are in use by most semiconductor and similar high-tech manufacturing enterprises to enable them to tailor off-the-shelf manufacturing software to their particular enterprise without writing and integrating new code) meet the same standards required of physical devices and such. That said, most of the software patents I have read about, or studied in detail, are totally bogus and should have been laughed out of the Patent and Trademark Office. Period of time for software patents? 10 years max in my opinion. 20 years is absurd. As stated elsewhere in these comments, software innovations occur too rapidly to lock up some concept for that much time.
I'm a cheapskate. For $39, I'll go for the 3 year warranty, and keep the thing for 5. The reasons I usually purchase higher capability models is my work (professional software engineer) and that they are still reasonable after 4+ years. My 3 year old Dell D630 is still as capable as most new systems - 2.5GHz dual core 64-bit processor w/ 4GB RAM, 250GB disc, extended run battery (9 cell), bluetooth, high-res (1400x1050) display, nVidia graphics. In 2 years, I'll be ready to trade up. Right now, a comparable system is going to cost me an arm and a leg. Do I want the costly warranty extension? Yes. Am I going to buy it? Don't know. I have to decide by Wednesday...
Something I have said since I sold PC's in the 80's - if you can buy it, it is already obsolete... Get a system with a good warranty. My Dell D630, and my D600 laptop before that, both came with a 3 year warranty. Most laptops come with a 1 year warranty unless you pay extra. Dell charges $39 for their Latitude systems to extend that to 3 years - well worth the price. In any case, consider 3 years a minimum life time, and 5 years max. By then she will probably be ready to trade. Mine is just 3 years old now. It is still sound and has enough power, video, memory, and disc to last a few more I think. Dell is trying to get me to reup the warrany, but I'm not sure it is worth it. At this point I think it's about an extra $150 per year.
Shows how one can make mis-assumptions when not all of the data is available... :-) That helps (using ML for functional programming), but I still think that OO analysis and design are proper subjects for early CS program courses. JMHO...