Time for hte Open Source folks to innovate or get out of the way
The "open source folks" have excellent and innovative streaming media technologies. The problem is that they don't have the marketing muscle or the desktop monopoly to foist them on consumers.
I HATE when I see this crap where MS is supposed to wipe the penguin's ass.
MS is simply supposed to stop leveraging its monopoly. And pushing out Silverlight through their desktop and server distribution channels is leveraging their monopoly.
You may notice that the open source community doesn't have a big problem with Flash anymore, in particular since Adobe has documented most of it fairly well and there are starting to be open source implementations of it now.
To paraphrase you: it is Microsoft that should innovate or get out of the way. Unfortunately, as long as they can make heaps of money shipping bad, outdated technologies, why should they bother?
asked if Docs and Spreadsheets will compete with MS Office, and he said, "We don't think so. It doesn't have all the functionality, nor is it intended to have the functionality of products like Microsoft Office."
That's a nice way of saying "oh, no, we wouldn't want it to be that bloated and complicated":-)
'But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) [...] This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video."
I'm glad to see Adobe is doing their part to try to help Microsoft's new Silverlight succeed.
unlike generics in C#, maintaining backwards (and forwards) compatibility with existing Java code
As a consequence of Java's attempts to maintain backwards compatibility, Java generics are nearly useless. They fail to make your code statically type-safe, and they fail to make it run faster. Yet, despite failing to achieve the two primary purposes that generics have, they still make the language considerably more complex. In contrast, using generics in C# does give you extra type safety and extra performance compared to casting.
If you obtained foo.c under the GPL, then the terms of the GPL apply to you: that is the "contract" between you and the author. Those terms can be modified only if all parties to the contract agree. It doesn't matter what terms the owner of foo.c distributes the file under to other people, either at the same time or at a later time.
Even if the owner of foo.c wanted to change the terms of your license retroactively, he couldn't; any such attempt wouldn't be "fraud", it would be futile. The only way this would ever amount to fraud is if the owner of foo.c tried to alter documentation and made false statements in a court of law for the purpose of creating the impression that he never distributed foo.c under the GPL at all.
But none of that seems to have happened when it comes to SQL-Ledger. The guy who owned SQL-Ledger has simply chosen to make new releases of the software under a different license and stop releasing under the old one. People do that all the time for all sorts of reasons. It's perfectly legitimate. It violates neither legal nor ethical rules.
If there are no third party contributions to the software, then the author can change the license in whatever way he wants to (of course, not retroactively--old GPL'ed copies remain GPL).
If there are third party contributions, it depends on whether the contributors assigned the copyright to him. If they did not, he can't change the license. If they did, it depends on what the copyright assignment forms imposed on him.
In many cases, I wouldn't consider a GPL->proprietary license change a big deal for a package like this; basically, it means that the maintainer cannot, or doesn't want to, maintain the software under the GPL anymore. Whether he just stops it altogether or tries to make a go at it commercially doesn't make such a big difference to people interested in open source.
GPL->proprietary changes (or similar license shenanigans) are a big problem for infrastructure products (libraries, virtual machines, compilers), because they have a lot of downstream dependencies, and they pose the conundrum whether one should stay with "the standard" or with the open source version.
sure it is. You're thinking of the biosphere, which is the Earth we actually care about.
You're apparently having trouble with some of the different meanings of "planet".
Looking for a "magic bullet" solution sparked the industrial revolution, bub.
The 19th and early 20th century was the time of hucksters and snake oil salesmen, people selling products responsible for a lot of death and suffering. These days, our drugs are carefully screened and tested.
And just like we have learned a lot about how to introduce new medicines, we have learned a lot about how to introduce new technologies.
The industrial revolution has caused one of the greatest mass-extinctions in earth's history (if not the greatest one); we cannot afford to repeat this. We must use what we have learned and tread far more carefully this time around.
The big difference on wind is that, even if we somehow sucked out so much power from the atmosphere that the wind vanished, we could simply turn he things off and, a few storms later, the winds would return.
In theory, we could also simply stop pumping oil out of the ground and stop burning it, but in practice we can't.
Strangely the most confidential documents such as analysis, internal white papers, usecase for next product... even rarely travel outside.
Don't kid yourself: it's on dozens of laptops and is being read on virus-infected home computers. Where it's being hosted is the least of your worries.
However company don't like their trade secret being hosted by their competitor.
Very few companies are Google's competitors. Those that are can find other hosting options. Hosting your own mail servers makes very little sense at this point.
These devices don't remove wind energy uniformly across the whole globe, they remove one very specific kind of wind energy at a narrow range of altitudes over a specific range of terrains. Dismissing concerns, as the authors do, by saying that it is "not expect to have adverse environmental consequences" is hardly sufficient.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't explore these options, but with future energy options, we should study the environmental impact a lot more carefully ahead of time than we did for coal, oil, or nuclear.
I was merely putting out numbers and putting them in perspective.
Well, and what perspective would that be?
I did not mean to imply anything.
Sure you did.
It might interest you to know, though, that the 70TW is supposed to be available for windpower at 80m, not total wind energy at that level. So for total windpower, the number is much too small;
Those numbers are just as irrelevant as your previous numbers. These devices don't randomly capture wind energy out of the total wind energy, they capture one specific kind of wind energy. Let's say they capture strong updrafts at a particular altitude over flat land. Now, what total amount of windpower is there contained in strong updrafts at that altitude over flat land?
We should explore these kinds of technologies, but (1) there is a high probability that they aren't practical, and (2) if they are practical, there is a good chance that they will turn out to be quite harmful.
To be cautious about exploring new sources of energy because of unknown environmental impact seems overly superstitious to me.
I'm not "cautious about exploring" them, I'm simply pointing out that there is a good chance that they will have a harmful impact on the environment.
We know that coal-fired plants have a large negetive impact on the environment so trying new forms of energy is the only sensible way forward.
Actually, the sensible way forward is to greatly reduce our energy usage. We could easily reduce energy usage to a small fraction of what we're using today while improving our standard of living.
I find GTDmail (www.gtdmail.com) a far more interesting mash-up, giving me functionality that I currently can't easily get in Thunderbird.
Maybe TB 2.0 will have sufficient tagging capabilities, but what TB really needs is far easier user-scripting and a built-in script editor. You know, like Greasemonkey only better and specifically for Thunderbird.
I am not going to put my companies email on a Google server across the Internet.
Why not? Your company's email already travels openly and usually unencrypted across the Internet, ready for dozens of hosts to capture and analyze. Furthermore, data retention and auditing guidelines mean that your corporate email has to be archived and accessible to authorities anyway.
I can see choosing not to use Google (or Yahoo or Hotmail) for personal or private E-mail, but for hosted corporate E-mail, I see little reason not to.
Of course, most people tend to think of it the other way around, but I think they're getting it backwards.
Do we want our online office and email to become dependant on yet another single vendor?
The problem with Microsoft has not been that they have been a single monopolistic vendor, the problem has been that once you are on Microsoft platforms, the cost of switching away is very high. A secondary problem has been that many people simply don't like the way Microsoft's products work.
So far, Google has been very open: you can import and export your mail fully, and if you register a domain through some registrar, you can easily switch E-mail providers. As soon as Google becomes monopolistic, there will be howls of protest and you will know about it and have enough time to pick a different company.
Of course, there is some risk that Google becomes so predominant that there will simply be no alternatives to switch to, but I don't see that happening. That has never even happened with Microsoft; there have always been alternatives, it's simply been too costly to switch.
So, my policy is to use Google for the time being, but watch them closely and leave if either something better comes along, or if it ever looks like they are going to make it hard to leave.
That's fine... if ISPs are held financially responsible for the losses they cause when they disconnect someone groundlessly. Losses includes lost productivity, time spent on trying to get the service reconnected, lost business, distress, etc.
You're implicitly assuming that 1% or 0.1% or whatever is a "small number", but there is no way of predicting that. Furthermore, you're calculating the percetage based on total wind energy, but these devices can extract energy only from a particular kind of flow, hence the percentage of energy removed from those kinds of flows will be much larger.
Nobody can predict what the effect of a widespread deployment of such devices would be, and we need to be quite careful not to rush into another "quick fix" solution.
That's because Apple actually has a need to do this: Apple has managed to create a mystique surrounding their product releases. Microsoft revealing a new product is about as exciting as the supreme court justices taking off their robes.
I'll repost the rebuttal: the energy removed from the slipstream is estimated at 1/10th of 1 percent if the entire planet were to be powered by these devices.
First, how do you know whether 0.1% is significant or insignificant? This isn't your kitchen fan, this is a planetary wide wind system.
Second, if these devices actually yield cheap abundant energy, that percentage won't stay at 0.1%, it will increase.
The energy removed from the atmosphere when the planet's coal plants were disabled might far overshadow the energy harnessed and reused...
The planet isn't some big lump of rock; it matters where you take out the energy. Disabling all coal power plants has a completely different effect from taking an equivalent amount of energy out of a high altitude wind system. Furthermore, we know the effects of disabling coal power plants pretty well, since that's the world we were living in until recently.
Wind energy is prevelant, replenished by the sun, and available around the globe. If we can use even a small portion of the wind's energy I'm all for it.
I'm not. I think the solution to our energy problems is to reduce energy usage, not to keep looking for that magic bullet solution of abundant, free energy.
Just consider it a small cooling effect to offset the warming effect generated by Cow methane.
Trouble is that cow methane is causing problems at ground level; taking energy out of the atmosphere at high levels could easily make global warming worse.
You can't conclude from a press release what the real reason for the delay is. Leopard may be delayed because of the iPhone, or it may be delayed because it's still buggy, or maybe Apple is still trying to file some last minute patents, or maybe it's something completely different.
He should have been fired long ago. If the Internet can be used to hold people accountable for the kinds of filth they are spewing in the media, that's great. Ex-Senator Allen also had to learn that there are certain attitudes and behaviors you just can't get away with anymore.
And make no mistake about it: the outrage over Imus and Allen didn't arise because they were politically incorrect once or made a mistake, the outrage reflects that people are fed up with what they perceive to be a fundamental part of those people's character.
Taking out 40MW of wind energy per wind farm from high altitude winds may not be such a good idea; that energy is doing something right now: mixing the atmosphere, generating heat, etc., and chances are that whatever it is doing is probably important for keeping the atmosphere the way we know and like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Time for hte Open Source folks to innovate or get out of the way
The "open source folks" have excellent and innovative streaming media technologies. The problem is that they don't have the marketing muscle or the desktop monopoly to foist them on consumers.
I HATE when I see this crap where MS is supposed to wipe the penguin's ass.
MS is simply supposed to stop leveraging its monopoly. And pushing out Silverlight through their desktop and server distribution channels is leveraging their monopoly.
You may notice that the open source community doesn't have a big problem with Flash anymore, in particular since Adobe has documented most of it fairly well and there are starting to be open source implementations of it now.
To paraphrase you: it is Microsoft that should innovate or get out of the way. Unfortunately, as long as they can make heaps of money shipping bad, outdated technologies, why should they bother?
That's a nice way of saying "oh, no, we wouldn't want it to be that bloated and complicated"
'But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) [...] This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video."
I'm glad to see Adobe is doing their part to try to help Microsoft's new Silverlight succeed.
unlike generics in C#, maintaining backwards (and forwards) compatibility with existing Java code
As a consequence of Java's attempts to maintain backwards compatibility, Java generics are nearly useless. They fail to make your code statically type-safe, and they fail to make it run faster. Yet, despite failing to achieve the two primary purposes that generics have, they still make the language considerably more complex. In contrast, using generics in C# does give you extra type safety and extra performance compared to casting.
If you obtained foo.c under the GPL, then the terms of the GPL apply to you: that is the "contract" between you and the author. Those terms can be modified only if all parties to the contract agree. It doesn't matter what terms the owner of foo.c distributes the file under to other people, either at the same time or at a later time.
Even if the owner of foo.c wanted to change the terms of your license retroactively, he couldn't; any such attempt wouldn't be "fraud", it would be futile. The only way this would ever amount to fraud is if the owner of foo.c tried to alter documentation and made false statements in a court of law for the purpose of creating the impression that he never distributed foo.c under the GPL at all.
But none of that seems to have happened when it comes to SQL-Ledger. The guy who owned SQL-Ledger has simply chosen to make new releases of the software under a different license and stop releasing under the old one. People do that all the time for all sorts of reasons. It's perfectly legitimate. It violates neither legal nor ethical rules.
infrared light is non-ionizing, so it's absolutely no dangerous to use that kind of instrument continuously on a person
A kitchen broiler is also non-ionizing radiation, but I suspect using it "continuously" on someone's brain is not such a good idea.
If there are no third party contributions to the software, then the author can change the license in whatever way he wants to (of course, not retroactively--old GPL'ed copies remain GPL).
If there are third party contributions, it depends on whether the contributors assigned the copyright to him. If they did not, he can't change the license. If they did, it depends on what the copyright assignment forms imposed on him.
In many cases, I wouldn't consider a GPL->proprietary license change a big deal for a package like this; basically, it means that the maintainer cannot, or doesn't want to, maintain the software under the GPL anymore. Whether he just stops it altogether or tries to make a go at it commercially doesn't make such a big difference to people interested in open source.
GPL->proprietary changes (or similar license shenanigans) are a big problem for infrastructure products (libraries, virtual machines, compilers), because they have a lot of downstream dependencies, and they pose the conundrum whether one should stay with "the standard" or with the open source version.
sure it is. You're thinking of the biosphere, which is the Earth we actually care about.
You're apparently having trouble with some of the different meanings of "planet".
Looking for a "magic bullet" solution sparked the industrial revolution, bub.
The 19th and early 20th century was the time of hucksters and snake oil salesmen, people selling products responsible for a lot of death and suffering. These days, our drugs are carefully screened and tested.
And just like we have learned a lot about how to introduce new medicines, we have learned a lot about how to introduce new technologies.
The industrial revolution has caused one of the greatest mass-extinctions in earth's history (if not the greatest one); we cannot afford to repeat this. We must use what we have learned and tread far more carefully this time around.
The big difference on wind is that, even if we somehow sucked out so much power from the atmosphere that the wind vanished, we could simply turn he things off and, a few storms later, the winds would return.
In theory, we could also simply stop pumping oil out of the ground and stop burning it, but in practice we can't.
Strangely the most confidential documents such as analysis, internal white papers, usecase for next product ... even rarely travel outside.
Don't kid yourself: it's on dozens of laptops and is being read on virus-infected home computers. Where it's being hosted is the least of your worries.
However company don't like their trade secret being hosted by their competitor.
Very few companies are Google's competitors. Those that are can find other hosting options. Hosting your own mail servers makes very little sense at this point.
Who are the consumer-level users who want virtualization going to be?
A large number of Mac users.
These devices don't remove wind energy uniformly across the whole globe, they remove one very specific kind of wind energy at a narrow range of altitudes over a specific range of terrains. Dismissing concerns, as the authors do, by saying that it is "not expect to have adverse environmental consequences" is hardly sufficient.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't explore these options, but with future energy options, we should study the environmental impact a lot more carefully ahead of time than we did for coal, oil, or nuclear.
I was merely putting out numbers and putting them in perspective.
Well, and what perspective would that be?
I did not mean to imply anything.
Sure you did.
It might interest you to know, though, that the 70TW is supposed to be available for windpower at 80m, not total wind energy at that level. So for total windpower, the number is much too small;
Those numbers are just as irrelevant as your previous numbers. These devices don't randomly capture wind energy out of the total wind energy, they capture one specific kind of wind energy. Let's say they capture strong updrafts at a particular altitude over flat land. Now, what total amount of windpower is there contained in strong updrafts at that altitude over flat land?
We should explore these kinds of technologies, but (1) there is a high probability that they aren't practical, and (2) if they are practical, there is a good chance that they will turn out to be quite harmful.
To be cautious about exploring new sources of energy because of unknown environmental impact seems overly superstitious to me.
I'm not "cautious about exploring" them, I'm simply pointing out that there is a good chance that they will have a harmful impact on the environment.
We know that coal-fired plants have a large negetive impact on the environment so trying new forms of energy is the only sensible way forward.
Actually, the sensible way forward is to greatly reduce our energy usage. We could easily reduce energy usage to a small fraction of what we're using today while improving our standard of living.
I find GTDmail (www.gtdmail.com) a far more interesting mash-up, giving me functionality that I currently can't easily get in Thunderbird.
Maybe TB 2.0 will have sufficient tagging capabilities, but what TB really needs is far easier user-scripting and a built-in script editor. You know, like Greasemonkey only better and specifically for Thunderbird.
I am not going to put my companies email on a Google server across the Internet.
Why not? Your company's email already travels openly and usually unencrypted across the Internet, ready for dozens of hosts to capture and analyze. Furthermore, data retention and auditing guidelines mean that your corporate email has to be archived and accessible to authorities anyway.
I can see choosing not to use Google (or Yahoo or Hotmail) for personal or private E-mail, but for hosted corporate E-mail, I see little reason not to.
Of course, most people tend to think of it the other way around, but I think they're getting it backwards.
Are we so sure that Google will always be nice?
No, but we don't have to.
Do we want our online office and email to become dependant on yet another single vendor?
The problem with Microsoft has not been that they have been a single monopolistic vendor, the problem has been that once you are on Microsoft platforms, the cost of switching away is very high. A secondary problem has been that many people simply don't like the way Microsoft's products work.
So far, Google has been very open: you can import and export your mail fully, and if you register a domain through some registrar, you can easily switch E-mail providers. As soon as Google becomes monopolistic, there will be howls of protest and you will know about it and have enough time to pick a different company.
Of course, there is some risk that Google becomes so predominant that there will simply be no alternatives to switch to, but I don't see that happening. That has never even happened with Microsoft; there have always been alternatives, it's simply been too costly to switch.
So, my policy is to use Google for the time being, but watch them closely and leave if either something better comes along, or if it ever looks like they are going to make it hard to leave.
That's fine... if ISPs are held financially responsible for the losses they cause when they disconnect someone groundlessly. Losses includes lost productivity, time spent on trying to get the service reconnected, lost business, distress, etc.
You're implicitly assuming that 1% or 0.1% or whatever is a "small number", but there is no way of predicting that. Furthermore, you're calculating the percetage based on total wind energy, but these devices can extract energy only from a particular kind of flow, hence the percentage of energy removed from those kinds of flows will be much larger.
Nobody can predict what the effect of a widespread deployment of such devices would be, and we need to be quite careful not to rush into another "quick fix" solution.
Which do you think has a greater impact on atmospheric conditions?
I have no idea. In fact nobody does. And that's my point.
That's because Apple actually has a need to do this: Apple has managed to create a mystique surrounding their product releases. Microsoft revealing a new product is about as exciting as the supreme court justices taking off their robes.
I'll repost the rebuttal: the energy removed from the slipstream is estimated at 1/10th of 1 percent if the entire planet were to be powered by these devices.
First, how do you know whether 0.1% is significant or insignificant? This isn't your kitchen fan, this is a planetary wide wind system.
Second, if these devices actually yield cheap abundant energy, that percentage won't stay at 0.1%, it will increase.
The energy removed from the atmosphere when the planet's coal plants were disabled might far overshadow the energy harnessed and reused...
The planet isn't some big lump of rock; it matters where you take out the energy. Disabling all coal power plants has a completely different effect from taking an equivalent amount of energy out of a high altitude wind system. Furthermore, we know the effects of disabling coal power plants pretty well, since that's the world we were living in until recently.
Wind energy is prevelant, replenished by the sun, and available around the globe. If we can use even a small portion of the wind's energy I'm all for it.
I'm not. I think the solution to our energy problems is to reduce energy usage, not to keep looking for that magic bullet solution of abundant, free energy.
Just consider it a small cooling effect to offset the warming effect generated by Cow methane.
Trouble is that cow methane is causing problems at ground level; taking energy out of the atmosphere at high levels could easily make global warming worse.
You can't conclude from a press release what the real reason for the delay is. Leopard may be delayed because of the iPhone, or it may be delayed because it's still buggy, or maybe Apple is still trying to file some last minute patents, or maybe it's something completely different.
He should have been fired long ago. If the Internet can be used to hold people accountable for the kinds of filth they are spewing in the media, that's great. Ex-Senator Allen also had to learn that there are certain attitudes and behaviors you just can't get away with anymore.
And make no mistake about it: the outrage over Imus and Allen didn't arise because they were politically incorrect once or made a mistake, the outrage reflects that people are fed up with what they perceive to be a fundamental part of those people's character.
Taking out 40MW of wind energy per wind farm from high altitude winds may not be such a good idea; that energy is doing something right now: mixing the atmosphere, generating heat, etc., and chances are that whatever it is doing is probably important for keeping the atmosphere the way we know and like it.