I find one issue that people rarely bring up when discussing Ms vs. Open Source OS's is that if the tables turned, people would shit on Nix's as openly and wantonly as MS products.
"Rarely"? Are you kidding? We hear that all the time. And it's just as untrue when you say it as when the other 9,999,999 people say it.
Microsoft simply does a worse job with security than its competitors. The security records of those non-MS products which have higher market share than the MS versions, whether open source or proprietary (e.g., Apache in Web servers, Oracle in databases) overwhelmingly bear this out.
As a resident of a firearm-happy country (the US) I think you're mixing OS politics with other types of politics a little too much. If a piece of software works well, I really don't care about the authors' views on guns, abortion, tax policy, medical care, national security, or any other issue except, well, how much (if anything) to charge me for using their software.
Yeah, ESR may be a bit of a nut on the gun issue. So what? When writing about open-source, he comes across as eminently sane and reasonable -- which is exactly the kind of spokesman the OSS movement needs. To be fair, I think we also need RMS and his ilk; fanatics get people moving -- but after the movement has started, they need to tone things down a bit, and unfortunately, they usually can't make themselves do that.
Yep. Grandparent is a troll, but his question is common enough that it's worth answering.
Genetic engineering is hard work. Just as mechanical engineers build prototypes to test their ideas before going into full-scale production, so do genetic engineers (and, actually, every other type of engineer I can think of.) As I mentioned in another post, we breed glowing mice at my work; it took about five years of basic research and another three years of trial and error to get a strain of true-breeding* GFP** mice.
Are these mice useful for anything in themselves? Well, actually, they are; it turns out the GFP gene is a useful marker for other genes that don't express quite so dramatically. But that really wasn't the point. The point was to learn how to implant certain genes -- say, genes that are a risk factor for certain kinds of cancer, or genes for resistance to AIDS, or genes to produce useful drugs -- in a true-breeding strain of mice. Now that technology is understood, and it can usefully be applied to all the examples I gave and many more.
No one gets upset when Ford builds a concept car, for God's sake.
--- * True-breeding means that the children of parents with these characteristics will reliably have the characteristics themselves.
** Green Fluorescent Protein. IIRC, originally found in jellyfish.
We breed fluorescent mice at my work. Cute little critters, have no idea that they glow. But they probably do wonder why people are always picking them up and sticking them under funny-colored lights and making "ooh, aah" noises.;)
Show me a private school that has a legal obligation to educate for free every child who comes to their door and does a better job than public schools with less money, please.
Well, in the extreme case, if you kill someone who presents an immediate threat to your life or limb, or that of your family, it's self-defense, which is a legitimate defense in most states. Granted, the spammers didn't present any such threat to this guy -- but then, he didn't actually physically attack anyone, either. I would say that just as deadly force is a reasonable response to deadly force, violent threats are a reasonable response to unrelenting harassment.
Maybe the best legal solution, instead of anti-spam bills that are doomed to failure anyway (opt-out lists? Oh please) would be to grant immunity for electronic acts committed against spammers which would otherwise be crimes -- e-mail threats, DDoS attacks, worms, etc. Right now, spammers have the exact same rights under laws like the DMCA as everyone else. Take that protection away, and there will be a lot fewer spammers very quickly.
Seppuku is honorable suicide. The rituals are different for men and women. Men commit seppuku by hara-kiri ("belly cutting") with a wakizashi. Women commit seppuku by cutting their throats with a kozuka. (I don't know if there's a separate term for this act.) Hara-kiri is a fairly crude term, kind of like "kicking the bucket" in English, so if you want to be respectful to a man who's killing himself, you talk about him committing seppuku rather than hara-kiri.
Re:I don't know about you guys
on
Snail Mail Tech
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I heard an interview a while back -- wish I could remember more of the details -- with the guy who runs the international mail coordination office. It's a small group of people, 30 or so, in Switzerland (of course) who deal with postal departments all over the world to negotiate stamp exchange rates (so your local post office can tell you how much it costs to send a letter from New York to Taipei) and international routes. Apparently they've been doing this for a looong time; they're part of the UN now, IIRC, but they've been operating since the 19th c. One detail that stuck with me was the guy saying that during WW2, you could send a letter from London through Berlin to Moscow, and it would actually get there...
I hope you're right. The problem is that when things get screwed up at the state level, the only recourse is to turn to the federal government -- and who runs the federal government right now? That's right...
Well, okay, there is another recourse -- "1776 is the cure for 1984" and all that. But I really don't expect to see that happen, no matter how egregious the vote fraud gets.
To elaborate: in the US and in many other countries, republicanism is the mechanism of democracy. We are both (in theory) a republic and a democracy -- a republican democracy, or a democratic republic (that latter term, unfortunately, having been recently hijacked by some very undemocratic republics.) Anyone who says "the US is a republic, not a democracy" and thinks it proves something is an idiot.
Examples of undemocratic republics: USSR, China, Cuba, Iraq (yes, still), Iran, North Korea, etc. The list of unrepublican democracies is shorter, but includes countries such as the UK, Japan, and Sweden. If the grandparent poster and those like him had to give up one -- republicanism or democracy -- I wonder which he would choose?
... is this book any more useful as a textbook for businesses than rah-rah stuff like In Search of Excellence? In other words, is it useful either to pick out really smart things companies have done, or really dumb things companies have done, and say "Do this, and you'll succeed; do that, and you'll fail"?
I'm not sure it is. Certainly the lessons of history are just as important in business as in any other field of endeavor. But a listing of successes and failures -- both, inevitably, filtered through the authors' biases -- does not constitute useful history in itself.
No, he's telling him about how after he's been on the Moon for a while, a little-known side effect of low-g is that it will DRAMATICALLY INCREASE HIS PENIS SIZE!!!
The truth is that both ideas are ultimately feeding on the free market as the source of their power. Dammit, I want to live in a world with out these friggin' overlords and uber men around every corner. A free market with small companies still looks like the best of all worlds to me.
Yes, I think that is the best of all possible worlds -- but the current rules of traditional capitalism, with every bit of IP that might possibly being useful to anyone locked away behind patents and copyrights and NDA's and the DMCA and what have you, have proven spectacularly unsuccessful in making that happen. It's too early to tell if open source will do better, but the early signs are good.
I make my living by developing with open source software for a small business that sells proprietary software. Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe -- but considering that the main OSS I use in my job comprises PHP, MySQL, and Red Hat Linux, I don't think so. I'm making a living, and so are the people who develop these products.
The various models of software development -- proprietary, academic, OSS, Free -- can peacefully coexist, and people can make a good living thereby. Any one of them has the potential to become a destructive force to software development, and to the tech economy in general, if it predominates. But right now the balance is still tilted so far in favor of proprietary software to the exclusion of the others that any gain by the others is unreservedly a Good Thing.
Yep. More to the point, the simulations we already have are a hell of a lot better than human intuition when it comes to predicting side effects. (Or primary effects, for that matter.) Drug discovery has undergone a quiet revolution in the last decade or so: it's largely switched over from the old "shotgun" approach -- "here's an interesting chemical from this fungus/herb/frog, let's see what it does inside a rat with cancer" -- to a tailored approach in which new drugs are built up molecule by molecule, sometimes atom by atom, to target a specific biological mechanism. We're not quite there yet, and there are probably lots of interesting pharmaceuticals left to find in the natural world, but the fact is that soon "drug discovery" itself will be an obsolete term.
All that being said, it will be a long time, if ever, before we get past the requirement for animal followed by human trials. Any simulation, no matter how good, can miss something. Trying the drug out on real live critters remains the gold standard. However, as the simulations improve, so will the quality of the drugs developed, and the trials stage will hopefully become dramatically cheaper and faster. Right now, the majority of candidate drugs never make it to market, and those that do take years. Changing that will be a major benefit.
Because the boilerplate agreements that employees sign these days almost always have something in them to that effect. It's evil; it's also, in most cases, a condition of getting (or keeping) a job, and with the tech economy the way it is, most programmers will sign away the rights to their firstborn if it means getting paid enough.
I have to worry about this kind of thing all the time. I work in biotech, and am a grad student in comp. bio.; although the applications I develop for school are in a somewhat different field than those I develop for work, it's conceivable that my employer could lay claim to some of my academic work -- and, of course, that my school could lay claim to just about anything I do. By and large, I trust both my boss and my professors, but... Does it suck? Hell yeah. Is there anything I can do about it? Not if I want a job and a degree.
Yep. But it doesn't have anything to do with killing little brown people, so it's off the list. Perhaps we should tell Bush that we need to keep Hubble going so we can spot alien terrorists...
So, you're saying that if AutoCAD became OSS, it would immediately and magically drop back to 1985 levels of functionality?
Of course you're not. You're saying that right now there is no OSS CAD software that compares to the good high-end closed-source stuff. Well, if there's one immutable law of economics, it's this: where there is a demand, there will be a supply. If the need arises for good OSS CAD software, rest assured, it will exist. Assuming that the current state of the art represents The Way Things Are Forever And Always Amen is really incredibly dumb.
I'm assuming you're joking, but here's a serious answer: for a supercomputer, scientific calculations are real world stuff. A significant chunk of the processing power in the world goes to things that the average desktop user will never see directly. I like a fast framerate on Quake or a fast Photoshop filter as much as anyone, but as a comp. bio. grad student, I also really appreciate a system that can run my bioinformatics apps in a reasonable time.
The difference is that Compaq's marketing of the Alpha was nonexistent. (And even DEC didn't market it nearly as much, or as well, as they should have.) Apple, OTOH, will market the hell out of this achievement.
Having worked with a wide variety of USAF systems, and a somewhat smaller variety of Navy systems, I'm not sure that there's any reason to believe one service has a wider variety of systems than another. (Disclaimer: I wasn't a techie at the time, I was a medic, so I wasn't paying any more than an interested layman's attention to the details.) I'm also not at all sure that either looks better on a resume than the other -- both the AF and the Navy have pretty high-tech reputations. (Army and Marines might be harder to convince people, which really isn't fair, but...) In any case, yes, the service -- any branch -- will give you all kinds of travel opportunities, some you've never even had nightmares about. Trust me on this.
An interesting kind of step in the opposite direction, especially if you've got a bit of a talent for fundraising, is geekcorps. Actually, in some ways, it's probably pretty similar to being in the service: in a matter of a day or so, you could find yourself whisked away from 21st c. America to someplace just out of the stone age, and you've got to deal with it. But the mission's rather different.
Unfortunately, both stereotypes are to a large degree true. Finding politicians of either major party who are willing to champion science for its own sake and the long-term benefits isn't easy. Right-wingers do object to science that treads on their ideology (which, given the pervasiveness of both right-wing ideology and modern science, is a hell of a lot of it) and left-wingers do object to spending money on blue-sky research vs. short-term giveaways. And anti-intellectualism is always a good selling point in anyone's campaign.
Actually, isn't the internet bigger than just Earth these days? Coulda sworn there was a story a while back about a couple of space probes using TCP/IP...
Fair enough. Last I heard, there was still some controversy over whether or not a ramscoop could be efficient at high enough velocity; I admit that I haven't particularly kept up on the idea.
And yes, of course there's no way to travel at xc, where x > 0.001 or so, between the Earth and the Moon and have either of them as a reasonable destination. (Unless you have accelerations that would turn the occupants of the ship into jelly.) What I was thinking was, to make the original poster's idea feasible, you'd have to go waaay out there -- like, a few light-weeks out -- and travel around scooping up hydrogen, then come back and dump it on the Moon. And I rather suspect that by the time we have that kind of technology, if we ever do, we will have licked the problems of Lunar habitation anyway.
It may, at some point, be meaningful to talk about sucking up large amounts of hydrogen and other useful gases from the gas giants and taking them to places where they're needed elsewhere in the Solar System; but again, that implies that space travel is developed to the point that a trip to the moon is about as routine as a short-hop commuter flight is today.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft simply does a worse job with security than its competitors. The security records of those non-MS products which have higher market share than the MS versions, whether open source or proprietary (e.g., Apache in Web servers, Oracle in databases) overwhelmingly bear this out.
As a resident of a firearm-happy country (the US) I think you're mixing OS politics with other types of politics a little too much. If a piece of software works well, I really don't care about the authors' views on guns, abortion, tax policy, medical care, national security, or any other issue except, well, how much (if anything) to charge me for using their software.
Yeah, ESR may be a bit of a nut on the gun issue. So what? When writing about open-source, he comes across as eminently sane and reasonable -- which is exactly the kind of spokesman the OSS movement needs. To be fair, I think we also need RMS and his ilk; fanatics get people moving -- but after the movement has started, they need to tone things down a bit, and unfortunately, they usually can't make themselves do that.
Yep. Grandparent is a troll, but his question is common enough that it's worth answering.
Genetic engineering is hard work. Just as mechanical engineers build prototypes to test their ideas before going into full-scale production, so do genetic engineers (and, actually, every other type of engineer I can think of.) As I mentioned in another post, we breed glowing mice at my work; it took about five years of basic research and another three years of trial and error to get a strain of true-breeding* GFP** mice.
Are these mice useful for anything in themselves? Well, actually, they are; it turns out the GFP gene is a useful marker for other genes that don't express quite so dramatically. But that really wasn't the point. The point was to learn how to implant certain genes -- say, genes that are a risk factor for certain kinds of cancer, or genes for resistance to AIDS, or genes to produce useful drugs -- in a true-breeding strain of mice. Now that technology is understood, and it can usefully be applied to all the examples I gave and many more.
No one gets upset when Ford builds a concept car, for God's sake.
---
* True-breeding means that the children of parents with these characteristics will reliably have the characteristics themselves.
** Green Fluorescent Protein. IIRC, originally found in jellyfish.
We breed fluorescent mice at my work. Cute little critters, have no idea that they glow. But they probably do wonder why people are always picking them up and sticking them under funny-colored lights and making "ooh, aah" noises. ;)
Show me a private school that has a legal obligation to educate for free every child who comes to their door and does a better job than public schools with less money, please.
Well, in the extreme case, if you kill someone who presents an immediate threat to your life or limb, or that of your family, it's self-defense, which is a legitimate defense in most states. Granted, the spammers didn't present any such threat to this guy -- but then, he didn't actually physically attack anyone, either. I would say that just as deadly force is a reasonable response to deadly force, violent threats are a reasonable response to unrelenting harassment.
Maybe the best legal solution, instead of anti-spam bills that are doomed to failure anyway (opt-out lists? Oh please) would be to grant immunity for electronic acts committed against spammers which would otherwise be crimes -- e-mail threats, DDoS attacks, worms, etc. Right now, spammers have the exact same rights under laws like the DMCA as everyone else. Take that protection away, and there will be a lot fewer spammers very quickly.
It gets more complicated than that.
Seppuku is honorable suicide. The rituals are different for men and women. Men commit seppuku by hara-kiri ("belly cutting") with a wakizashi. Women commit seppuku by cutting their throats with a kozuka. (I don't know if there's a separate term for this act.) Hara-kiri is a fairly crude term, kind of like "kicking the bucket" in English, so if you want to be respectful to a man who's killing himself, you talk about him committing seppuku rather than hara-kiri.
I heard an interview a while back -- wish I could remember more of the details -- with the guy who runs the international mail coordination office. It's a small group of people, 30 or so, in Switzerland (of course) who deal with postal departments all over the world to negotiate stamp exchange rates (so your local post office can tell you how much it costs to send a letter from New York to Taipei) and international routes. Apparently they've been doing this for a looong time; they're part of the UN now, IIRC, but they've been operating since the 19th c. One detail that stuck with me was the guy saying that during WW2, you could send a letter from London through Berlin to Moscow, and it would actually get there ...
I hope you're right. The problem is that when things get screwed up at the state level, the only recourse is to turn to the federal government -- and who runs the federal government right now? That's right ...
Well, okay, there is another recourse -- "1776 is the cure for 1984" and all that. But I really don't expect to see that happen, no matter how egregious the vote fraud gets.
Yes, exactly.
To elaborate: in the US and in many other countries, republicanism is the mechanism of democracy. We are both (in theory) a republic and a democracy -- a republican democracy, or a democratic republic (that latter term, unfortunately, having been recently hijacked by some very undemocratic republics.) Anyone who says "the US is a republic, not a democracy" and thinks it proves something is an idiot.
Examples of undemocratic republics: USSR, China, Cuba, Iraq (yes, still), Iran, North Korea, etc. The list of unrepublican democracies is shorter, but includes countries such as the UK, Japan, and Sweden. If the grandparent poster and those like him had to give up one -- republicanism or democracy -- I wonder which he would choose?
... is this book any more useful as a textbook for businesses than rah-rah stuff like In Search of Excellence? In other words, is it useful either to pick out really smart things companies have done, or really dumb things companies have done, and say "Do this, and you'll succeed; do that, and you'll fail"?
I'm not sure it is. Certainly the lessons of history are just as important in business as in any other field of endeavor. But a listing of successes and failures -- both, inevitably, filtered through the authors' biases -- does not constitute useful history in itself.
No, he's telling him about how after he's been on the Moon for a while, a little-known side effect of low-g is that it will DRAMATICALLY INCREASE HIS PENIS SIZE!!!
... in ... spaaaace!
Spam
I make my living by developing with open source software for a small business that sells proprietary software. Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe -- but considering that the main OSS I use in my job comprises PHP, MySQL, and Red Hat Linux, I don't think so. I'm making a living, and so are the people who develop these products.
The various models of software development -- proprietary, academic, OSS, Free -- can peacefully coexist, and people can make a good living thereby. Any one of them has the potential to become a destructive force to software development, and to the tech economy in general, if it predominates. But right now the balance is still tilted so far in favor of proprietary software to the exclusion of the others that any gain by the others is unreservedly a Good Thing.
Yep. More to the point, the simulations we already have are a hell of a lot better than human intuition when it comes to predicting side effects. (Or primary effects, for that matter.) Drug discovery has undergone a quiet revolution in the last decade or so: it's largely switched over from the old "shotgun" approach -- "here's an interesting chemical from this fungus/herb/frog, let's see what it does inside a rat with cancer" -- to a tailored approach in which new drugs are built up molecule by molecule, sometimes atom by atom, to target a specific biological mechanism. We're not quite there yet, and there are probably lots of interesting pharmaceuticals left to find in the natural world, but the fact is that soon "drug discovery" itself will be an obsolete term.
All that being said, it will be a long time, if ever, before we get past the requirement for animal followed by human trials. Any simulation, no matter how good, can miss something. Trying the drug out on real live critters remains the gold standard. However, as the simulations improve, so will the quality of the drugs developed, and the trials stage will hopefully become dramatically cheaper and faster. Right now, the majority of candidate drugs never make it to market, and those that do take years. Changing that will be a major benefit.
Because the boilerplate agreements that employees sign these days almost always have something in them to that effect. It's evil; it's also, in most cases, a condition of getting (or keeping) a job, and with the tech economy the way it is, most programmers will sign away the rights to their firstborn if it means getting paid enough.
... Does it suck? Hell yeah. Is there anything I can do about it? Not if I want a job and a degree.
I have to worry about this kind of thing all the time. I work in biotech, and am a grad student in comp. bio.; although the applications I develop for school are in a somewhat different field than those I develop for work, it's conceivable that my employer could lay claim to some of my academic work -- and, of course, that my school could lay claim to just about anything I do. By and large, I trust both my boss and my professors, but
Yep. But it doesn't have anything to do with killing little brown people, so it's off the list. Perhaps we should tell Bush that we need to keep Hubble going so we can spot alien terrorists ...
So, you're saying that if AutoCAD became OSS, it would immediately and magically drop back to 1985 levels of functionality?
Of course you're not. You're saying that right now there is no OSS CAD software that compares to the good high-end closed-source stuff. Well, if there's one immutable law of economics, it's this: where there is a demand, there will be a supply. If the need arises for good OSS CAD software, rest assured, it will exist. Assuming that the current state of the art represents The Way Things Are Forever And Always Amen is really incredibly dumb.
I'm assuming you're joking, but here's a serious answer: for a supercomputer, scientific calculations are real world stuff. A significant chunk of the processing power in the world goes to things that the average desktop user will never see directly. I like a fast framerate on Quake or a fast Photoshop filter as much as anyone, but as a comp. bio. grad student, I also really appreciate a system that can run my bioinformatics apps in a reasonable time.
The difference is that Compaq's marketing of the Alpha was nonexistent. (And even DEC didn't market it nearly as much, or as well, as they should have.) Apple, OTOH, will market the hell out of this achievement.
I can't help but be amused that the UN Web site, or at least that portion of it, runs on ASP.
Having worked with a wide variety of USAF systems, and a somewhat smaller variety of Navy systems, I'm not sure that there's any reason to believe one service has a wider variety of systems than another. (Disclaimer: I wasn't a techie at the time, I was a medic, so I wasn't paying any more than an interested layman's attention to the details.) I'm also not at all sure that either looks better on a resume than the other -- both the AF and the Navy have pretty high-tech reputations. (Army and Marines might be harder to convince people, which really isn't fair, but ...) In any case, yes, the service -- any branch -- will give you all kinds of travel opportunities, some you've never even had nightmares about. Trust me on this.
An interesting kind of step in the opposite direction, especially if you've got a bit of a talent for fundraising, is geekcorps. Actually, in some ways, it's probably pretty similar to being in the service: in a matter of a day or so, you could find yourself whisked away from 21st c. America to someplace just out of the stone age, and you've got to deal with it. But the mission's rather different.
Unfortunately, both stereotypes are to a large degree true. Finding politicians of either major party who are willing to champion science for its own sake and the long-term benefits isn't easy. Right-wingers do object to science that treads on their ideology (which, given the pervasiveness of both right-wing ideology and modern science, is a hell of a lot of it) and left-wingers do object to spending money on blue-sky research vs. short-term giveaways. And anti-intellectualism is always a good selling point in anyone's campaign.
I think 1 televion ~= 0.0012 VW Beetle.
Actually, isn't the internet bigger than just Earth these days? Coulda sworn there was a story a while back about a couple of space probes using TCP/IP ...
Fair enough. Last I heard, there was still some controversy over whether or not a ramscoop could be efficient at high enough velocity; I admit that I haven't particularly kept up on the idea.
And yes, of course there's no way to travel at xc, where x > 0.001 or so, between the Earth and the Moon and have either of them as a reasonable destination. (Unless you have accelerations that would turn the occupants of the ship into jelly.) What I was thinking was, to make the original poster's idea feasible, you'd have to go waaay out there -- like, a few light-weeks out -- and travel around scooping up hydrogen, then come back and dump it on the Moon. And I rather suspect that by the time we have that kind of technology, if we ever do, we will have licked the problems of Lunar habitation anyway.
It may, at some point, be meaningful to talk about sucking up large amounts of hydrogen and other useful gases from the gas giants and taking them to places where they're needed elsewhere in the Solar System; but again, that implies that space travel is developed to the point that a trip to the moon is about as routine as a short-hop commuter flight is today.