And it's obvious that some people just can't take a joke these days. Have a Laugh, it's funny and get over your arrogant self.
Do you not understand that a joke that is funny once, or ten times, or even a hundred times, eventually stops being funny? I have lost count of the number of times I've seen this "joke" repeated. (The fact that it relies on an offensive stereotype doesn't help, of course; the only reason it was funny at all, ever, is because the stereotype does have a grain of truth to it.) I don't think I'm being arrogant when I say that it just isn't funny any more, and IMO has become another Soviet Russia / Natalie Portman / *BSD is dying.
Solution # 3.5: stop making this stupid "joke," which as far as I'm concerned is a troll. Obviously there are plenty of/.ers who do have relationships, and for those of us over the age of thirteen or so the balance between the geek and non-geek portions of our life is a serious concern. I'm really sick of the way nobody can say anything on/. about relationships without having this troll pop up.
It's not "part of" Andromeda; it's a satellite galaxy, like the Magellanic Clouds are to the Milky Way. It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to talk about a dim galaxy that's part of a regular galaxy, anyway...
The opposite, I suspect: Brown's implication is that his "report" is "samizdat" aimed at the oppressive power of"communist" Linux. (Remember that the original samizdat was underground anti-Communist writing in the USSR.) This is a favorite tactic of extremists, particularly those on the right wing: painting themselves as heroic rebels speaking the truth to power, even when in fact (as is clearly the case in M/i/c/r/o/s/o/f/t/ AdTI vs. Linux) they hold most of the cards. Cf. Christian fundamendalists in the US, who love acting like a persecuted minority in a country that's 85% Christian...
I think we may be using the word "chasing" in a slightly different way. I do indeed want to see developers coming up with new word processors. I don't want to see MS Word clones, which seems to be about all we've got right now. (Note that MS Word was noticeably different from WordPerfect from day one.) Your last paragraph pretty much illustrates what I was trying to say.
Well, yeah, and I want a better word processor and a better Web browser and a better OS and...
The problem is that I just can't see how anyone will ever produce a better ___ by slavishly imitating Microsoft's ___. Developers who do so, IMO, are boxing themselves in.
It's going to take more than customer demand. Can you imagine the reaction of Adobe if a customer, or even a bunch of customers, demanded that they prove the latest version of Photoshop contains no GIMP code? They'd laugh themselves sick.
Companies submit to financial audits, by and large, because the law requires them to do so. Honestly, the only way I ever see software auditing becoming a standard practice is if there a few big lawsuits where, say, the FSF can prove that Microsoft has infringed on the GPL. And while I'd love to see that happen, I don't expect it any time soon.
Please, to all non-MS developers out there: stop chasing Microsoft!
I understand the motivation behind designing office suites to look like Office clones, window managers to look like Windows clones, etc.: the idea is that people switching from MS products will find it easier to get used to the new software if it looks like what they're used to. But I really think this is a fundamentally flawed line of reasoning, for two reasons.
1. No one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. You may expend endless blood, toil, tears, and sweat trying to clone $MS_PRODUCT down to the last widget, but you'll never get it exactly right. And if you try to lull users into feeling like they're using $MS_PRODUCT... well, the instant something doesn't work, or just doesn't work exactly the way they're expecting, they'll dismiss your product as a cheap knockoff.
2. Microsoft interfaces may be the "standard," but they're not the best. In almost every market niche I can think of, there's some product that's faster, more powerful, and/or easier to use than whatever Microsoft is pushing. If you're going to copy something, copy something better than Windows, Office, IE, ad nauseam -- or better yet, start with the best as a baseline and innovate from there.
Guy I know once talked about looking at an old Sears & Roebuck catalog from, I think, just before WW1. In it there was a section for early power tools. They sold power saws, screwdrivers, etc. just like they do now. The difference was, though, to use any of these tools, you had to buy a separate motor. This was a bulky thing that you set on your workbench next to your project. It came with a variety of adapters which you could use via a chain drive or something along those lines to power your saw, screwdriver, etc.
The analogy here is pretty plain, I think. I'm not sure that the idea of "the computer" as a separate machine will ever entirely go away, but certainly the computing power in everyday appliances (TV's, radios, hell, even toasters and refrigerators) is growing all the time. The standalone computer may eventually go the way of the standalone power tool motor.
Whether you like their work or not, all of the individuals listed have had enormous influence on the field. The museum should include people important in the history of SF, whatever their roles, just as, e.g., history museums should include exhibits on people who did both Really Good and Really Bad things.
BTW, Charles Brown is the editor of Locus, one of the most influential magazines in the SF field. He's not famous, but he's got a lot of pull.
The way I read the article, he's saying that massive code theft is rare and next to impossible for open source developers, because the nature of OSS makes it very hard to conceal such theft; but that closed source developers (i.e., proprietary software companies) can and do steal code frequently, because it's so hard to prove they did it.
The Beatles and Led Zeppelin were among the very best musicians of their day, which is why we remember them. There was also a hell of a lot of disposable crap on the radio at the time that we rarely hear now because, well, it was crap. Time tends to reward the artists whose work has lasting value. I don't know who the modern equivalents are -- I may never have heard of them, since I don't want to wade through all the pedophile pop (Britney et al) and other Top 40 crap in the record store* any more to find the good stuff -- but I'm sure they're out there.
And in another couple of decades, today's teenagers will be grumbling about how lousy music is these days, and how much better ____ and ____ were back in the day. I still listen to the music I loved in high school, and it makes me happy. Mostly I listen to the same few bands over and over, because that's the good stuff, the stuff that's held up over the years. Today's kids will no doubt do the same.
The Sony device will be quite good, and will compare favorably to the iPod. The Microsoft device will be a POS, but will sell like hotcakes despite that, and in a few years we'll have fanboys and pundits gushing about how Bill Gates "innovated" the personal MP3 player.
Nope, the fact that you fall if you jump off a skyscraper is that fact that you fall if you jump off a skyscraper. Gravity is the theory that says you fall because the Earth, being rather large, exerts a powerful attractive force on your soon-to-be corpse. You could just as easily explain the falling by using the Aristotelian (IIRC) "things fall because it is their nature to fall" -- but that theory proved to be incompatible with the evidence, and thus was discarded; modern gravitational theory is the best we've got, so far.
Funny, no. But sometimes that kind of dramatic analogy is necessary to get the point across to people who don't understand what the word "theory" means in a scientific context.
I tend to personalize it a bit: "If you believe that ___* is 'just a theory,' be aware that gravity is 'just a theory' as well. I invite you to try jumping off a skyscraper because, surely, nothing that is 'just a theory' can hurt you."
*___ is almost always evolution, of course, though sometimes it's relativity.
Apparently I wasn't clear enough. My point was that ISP's that downgrade packets from outside sources are engaging in the same kind of bullshit behavior as the online services used to; and that such behavior was then, still is, and always will be destructive to the "inter-ness" of the internet as a whole.
I don't see how bacteria could survive and grow on energy from radiolysis while their own cytoplasm is being damaged by that same radiolysis.
It is far easier to believe that the bacteria are consuming the organic materials in the radioactive sludge.
Well, yeah, that's what I was getting at -- I wasn't suggesting that they were using the radioactivity directly, but rather, that the high levels of radioactivity might contribute to the formation of some unusual high-energy organics, of which the bacteria could then make use.
Think back to the Neolithic -- say, 1991 or so -- when most people who were online used one of the big online services (which at that time were, in descending order of size, IIRC, Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, GEnie, and Delphi. I could be off here; it's been a while.) You could sometimes, by jumping through all sorts of arcane hoops, exchange e-mails between the services. There was no reason for it to be this hard, of course -- they all had TCP/IP communications going, and could quite easily have used POP and SMTP for their e-mail -- but for obvious reasons, each service wanted to keep their users penned in, and make it as difficult as possible for them to access the outside world.
And of course here there's a great energy source: the radioactive sludge the bacteria are living in. I'm not suggesting that they actually use the radioactivity directly (I don't think we've ever found a critter that can do that) but there must be lots of interesting chemistry going on in those tanks, creating all kinds of high-energy compunds the bacteria can digest.
Unless Vonage pays fees to the network provider, there is no reason the operator should not make the service a lower priority on the network.
Oh yeah, no reason at all -- except that if they do that, it's not the internet any more. And if they call themselves "internet providers," they're lying.
Throughout history, science is never done by consensus. Someone comes along with an idea, the bulk of the scientific community laughs in derision, 50 years later all those tenured professors are forgotten and that lone voice is elevated to the status of Einstein.
God, I hate this myth, especially the "laughs in derision" part. Einstein's work was immediately recognized by "all those tenured professors" as having immense value, being a unified explanation of some serious problems with classical physics that had been bothering physicists since the mid-19th c.; there may have been those who disagreed with some aspects of his work (as, indeed, they were right to do; note that we still haven't unified relativity with quantum theory) but controversy is not the same as derision. Einstein's major papers were published in respected, established journals managed by those old fuddy-duddy academics you decry.
Newton, Darwin, Watson and Crick -- pretty much all of them worked their way through the scientific establishments of their day. Every once in a great while a major breakthrough is greeted with open derision (e.g., Mendeleev's periodic table) but the vast majority of those dismissed as crackpots are, in fact, crackpots; and the vast majority of scientific advances come from scientists working within the established system.
Nothing is wrong with CORBA, other than that it's clunky as hell. And nothing is wrong with SOAP, other than that it discarded the "Simple" that is supposed to be the first letter of its name long ago, and is now turning into CORBA. I would love to see a true, universal, easy to program remote object model, but my experiences trying to use the current implementations have convinced me that we have a long way to go.
No, I don't claim to know what a better way is, only that neither CORBA nor SOAP is it.
Replying to my own comment... You might have missed this part in the last paragraph:
That brings the overall energy balance down to 1.38:1, roughly three times better than the 0.36:1 of the hydrogen fuel cell car. This figure means that for each unit of energy that goes into growing the crops and producing the biodiesel, 1.38 units of energy are available to be used for moving the vehicle, a net gain of 38%, compared to a net loss of 64% for hydrogen.
So they are in fact using the same assumptions for overall efficiency calculations for biodiesel and hydrogen.
And, as another poster pointed out, you still haven't explained why you think this is thermodynamically impossible.
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And it's obvious that some people just can't take a joke these days. Have a Laugh, it's funny and get over your arrogant self.
Do you not understand that a joke that is funny once, or ten times, or even a hundred times, eventually stops being funny? I have lost count of the number of times I've seen this "joke" repeated. (The fact that it relies on an offensive stereotype doesn't help, of course; the only reason it was funny at all, ever, is because the stereotype does have a grain of truth to it.) I don't think I'm being arrogant when I say that it just isn't funny any more, and IMO has become another Soviet Russia / Natalie Portman / *BSD is dying.
Solution # 3.5: stop making this stupid "joke," which as far as I'm concerned is a troll. Obviously there are plenty of /.ers who do have relationships, and for those of us over the age of thirteen or so the balance between the geek and non-geek portions of our life is a serious concern. I'm really sick of the way nobody can say anything on /. about relationships without having this troll pop up.
It's not "part of" Andromeda; it's a satellite galaxy, like the Magellanic Clouds are to the Milky Way. It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to talk about a dim galaxy that's part of a regular galaxy, anyway ...
The opposite, I suspect: Brown's implication is that his "report" is "samizdat" aimed at the oppressive power of"communist" Linux. (Remember that the original samizdat was underground anti-Communist writing in the USSR.) This is a favorite tactic of extremists, particularly those on the right wing: painting themselves as heroic rebels speaking the truth to power, even when in fact (as is clearly the case in M/i/c/r/o/s/o/f/t/ AdTI vs. Linux) they hold most of the cards. Cf. Christian fundamendalists in the US, who love acting like a persecuted minority in a country that's 85% Christian ...
I think we may be using the word "chasing" in a slightly different way. I do indeed want to see developers coming up with new word processors. I don't want to see MS Word clones, which seems to be about all we've got right now. (Note that MS Word was noticeably different from WordPerfect from day one.) Your last paragraph pretty much illustrates what I was trying to say.
Well, yeah, and I want a better word processor and a better Web browser and a better OS and ...
The problem is that I just can't see how anyone will ever produce a better ___ by slavishly imitating Microsoft's ___. Developers who do so, IMO, are boxing themselves in.
It's going to take more than customer demand. Can you imagine the reaction of Adobe if a customer, or even a bunch of customers, demanded that they prove the latest version of Photoshop contains no GIMP code? They'd laugh themselves sick.
Companies submit to financial audits, by and large, because the law requires them to do so. Honestly, the only way I ever see software auditing becoming a standard practice is if there a few big lawsuits where, say, the FSF can prove that Microsoft has infringed on the GPL. And while I'd love to see that happen, I don't expect it any time soon.
Please, to all non-MS developers out there: stop chasing Microsoft!
... well, the instant something doesn't work, or just doesn't work exactly the way they're expecting, they'll dismiss your product as a cheap knockoff.
I understand the motivation behind designing office suites to look like Office clones, window managers to look like Windows clones, etc.: the idea is that people switching from MS products will find it easier to get used to the new software if it looks like what they're used to. But I really think this is a fundamentally flawed line of reasoning, for two reasons.
1. No one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. You may expend endless blood, toil, tears, and sweat trying to clone $MS_PRODUCT down to the last widget, but you'll never get it exactly right. And if you try to lull users into feeling like they're using $MS_PRODUCT
2. Microsoft interfaces may be the "standard," but they're not the best. In almost every market niche I can think of, there's some product that's faster, more powerful, and/or easier to use than whatever Microsoft is pushing. If you're going to copy something, copy something better than Windows, Office, IE, ad nauseam -- or better yet, start with the best as a baseline and innovate from there.
Guy I know once talked about looking at an old Sears & Roebuck catalog from, I think, just before WW1. In it there was a section for early power tools. They sold power saws, screwdrivers, etc. just like they do now. The difference was, though, to use any of these tools, you had to buy a separate motor. This was a bulky thing that you set on your workbench next to your project. It came with a variety of adapters which you could use via a chain drive or something along those lines to power your saw, screwdriver, etc.
The analogy here is pretty plain, I think. I'm not sure that the idea of "the computer" as a separate machine will ever entirely go away, but certainly the computing power in everyday appliances (TV's, radios, hell, even toasters and refrigerators) is growing all the time. The standalone computer may eventually go the way of the standalone power tool motor.
Whether you like their work or not, all of the individuals listed have had enormous influence on the field. The museum should include people important in the history of SF, whatever their roles, just as, e.g., history museums should include exhibits on people who did both Really Good and Really Bad things.
BTW, Charles Brown is the editor of Locus, one of the most influential magazines in the SF field. He's not famous, but he's got a lot of pull.
Yes.
The way I read the article, he's saying that massive code theft is rare and next to impossible for open source developers, because the nature of OSS makes it very hard to conceal such theft; but that closed source developers (i.e., proprietary software companies) can and do steal code frequently, because it's so hard to prove they did it.
The Beatles and Led Zeppelin were among the very best musicians of their day, which is why we remember them. There was also a hell of a lot of disposable crap on the radio at the time that we rarely hear now because, well, it was crap. Time tends to reward the artists whose work has lasting value. I don't know who the modern equivalents are -- I may never have heard of them, since I don't want to wade through all the pedophile pop (Britney et al) and other Top 40 crap in the record store* any more to find the good stuff -- but I'm sure they're out there.
...
And in another couple of decades, today's teenagers will be grumbling about how lousy music is these days, and how much better ____ and ____ were back in the day. I still listen to the music I loved in high school, and it makes me happy. Mostly I listen to the same few bands over and over, because that's the good stuff, the stuff that's held up over the years. Today's kids will no doubt do the same.
*Heh, showing my age
The Sony device will be quite good, and will compare favorably to the iPod. The Microsoft device will be a POS, but will sell like hotcakes despite that, and in a few years we'll have fanboys and pundits gushing about how Bill Gates "innovated" the personal MP3 player.
Nope, the fact that you fall if you jump off a skyscraper is that fact that you fall if you jump off a skyscraper. Gravity is the theory that says you fall because the Earth, being rather large, exerts a powerful attractive force on your soon-to-be corpse. You could just as easily explain the falling by using the Aristotelian (IIRC) "things fall because it is their nature to fall" -- but that theory proved to be incompatible with the evidence, and thus was discarded; modern gravitational theory is the best we've got, so far.
Well, Fred and Barney were about the size of small rats at the time ...
Funny, no. But sometimes that kind of dramatic analogy is necessary to get the point across to people who don't understand what the word "theory" means in a scientific context.
I tend to personalize it a bit: "If you believe that ___* is 'just a theory,' be aware that gravity is 'just a theory' as well. I invite you to try jumping off a skyscraper because, surely, nothing that is 'just a theory' can hurt you."
*___ is almost always evolution, of course, though sometimes it's relativity.
Apparently I wasn't clear enough. My point was that ISP's that downgrade packets from outside sources are engaging in the same kind of bullshit behavior as the online services used to; and that such behavior was then, still is, and always will be destructive to the "inter-ness" of the internet as a whole.
I don't see how bacteria could survive and grow on energy from radiolysis while their own cytoplasm is being damaged by that same radiolysis.
It is far easier to believe that the bacteria are consuming the organic materials in the radioactive sludge.
Well, yeah, that's what I was getting at -- I wasn't suggesting that they were using the radioactivity directly, but rather, that the high levels of radioactivity might contribute to the formation of some unusual high-energy organics, of which the bacteria could then make use.
Um. Good point.
..."
Okay, "any radioactivity that isn't electromagnetic radiation in a fairly narrow spectrum
Think back to the Neolithic -- say, 1991 or so -- when most people who were online used one of the big online services (which at that time were, in descending order of size, IIRC, Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, GEnie, and Delphi. I could be off here; it's been a while.) You could sometimes, by jumping through all sorts of arcane hoops, exchange e-mails between the services. There was no reason for it to be this hard, of course -- they all had TCP/IP communications going, and could quite easily have used POP and SMTP for their e-mail -- but for obvious reasons, each service wanted to keep their users penned in, and make it as difficult as possible for them to access the outside world.
Do you consider that "the internet?" I don't.
And of course here there's a great energy source: the radioactive sludge the bacteria are living in. I'm not suggesting that they actually use the radioactivity directly (I don't think we've ever found a critter that can do that) but there must be lots of interesting chemistry going on in those tanks, creating all kinds of high-energy compunds the bacteria can digest.
Unless Vonage pays fees to the network provider, there is no reason the operator should not make the service a lower priority on the network.
Oh yeah, no reason at all -- except that if they do that, it's not the internet any more. And if they call themselves "internet providers," they're lying.
Throughout history, science is never done by consensus. Someone comes along with an idea, the bulk of the scientific community laughs in derision, 50 years later all those tenured professors are forgotten and that lone voice is elevated to the status of Einstein.
God, I hate this myth, especially the "laughs in derision" part. Einstein's work was immediately recognized by "all those tenured professors" as having immense value, being a unified explanation of some serious problems with classical physics that had been bothering physicists since the mid-19th c.; there may have been those who disagreed with some aspects of his work (as, indeed, they were right to do; note that we still haven't unified relativity with quantum theory) but controversy is not the same as derision. Einstein's major papers were published in respected, established journals managed by those old fuddy-duddy academics you decry.
Newton, Darwin, Watson and Crick -- pretty much all of them worked their way through the scientific establishments of their day. Every once in a great while a major breakthrough is greeted with open derision (e.g., Mendeleev's periodic table) but the vast majority of those dismissed as crackpots are, in fact, crackpots; and the vast majority of scientific advances come from scientists working within the established system.
Nothing is wrong with CORBA, other than that it's clunky as hell. And nothing is wrong with SOAP, other than that it discarded the "Simple" that is supposed to be the first letter of its name long ago, and is now turning into CORBA. I would love to see a true, universal, easy to program remote object model, but my experiences trying to use the current implementations have convinced me that we have a long way to go.
No, I don't claim to know what a better way is, only that neither CORBA nor SOAP is it.
Replying to my own comment ... You might have missed this part in the last paragraph:
That brings the overall energy balance down to 1.38:1, roughly three times better than the 0.36:1 of the hydrogen fuel cell car. This figure means that for each unit of energy that goes into growing the crops and producing the biodiesel, 1.38 units of energy are available to be used for moving the vehicle, a net gain of 38%, compared to a net loss of 64% for hydrogen.
So they are in fact using the same assumptions for overall efficiency calculations for biodiesel and hydrogen.
And, as another poster pointed out, you still haven't explained why you think this is thermodynamically impossible.