And additionally, that part of the spectrum (formerly used for TV channels) definately fell under the category of commerce, what with all the ads and everything.
The difference with Vista is that the KDE team really has some major interesting new technologies now, though most of them are rather invisible from the common user's perspective.
That's not a difference between KDE and Vista. Actually, KDE and Vista are very much the same in this regard, and the main point of Vista is a slew of new changes under the hood that aren't immediately visible to end users. In fact, that's the main reason users are griping; they don't see too much difference between XP and Vista except for some eye candy. However, anyone who actually develops programs for Vista is not complaining about it or jumping on the anti-Microsoft bandwagon that seems to be so crowded right now. WPF, WCF, DirectX 10, and WF are all very useful for developers, and the programs we can write using them will be very cool, and will ultimately impress end users. But it will be a while before some of these new features in Vista are fully exploited, and until then, the common user gripes. Don't mistake their griping for knowledgeable critiquing though; most are clueless, and what you just said about KDE applies equally well to Vista.
Science at it's very purest form, simply going and observing something nobody has actually seen before.
I agree that this is a very pure and useful form of science. However, what I don't understand is why we don't do this more often. Why haven't we been sending out a probe every year, or at least every five years, upgraded with the best propulsion systems and scientific instruments we can put on it? These two probes were launched 30 years ago, and while they still work, technology improved a lot over the decades. If it takes 30 years to get to the termination shock, it seems like they took an awfully big risk sending just two probes and then sitting tight. If something went wrong or failed, you have just one probe left, or maybe none if it was an issue common to the two of them. And then you have to wait 30 years to get back to where you were. In addition, science usually likes many repeated observations of phenomena more than just a few, and repeatedly launching probes in different directions would have helped establish even more reliablity for all data returned.
I just don't understand why we don't do this more often. I would have to think we could build a better, sturdier probe with a faster propulsion system, longer lasting power sources and far more powerful scientific devices. Unless perhaps we have launched another probe that will eventually have this mission (but maybe is doing something else on the way for now), I just don't understand why we don't do this again.
The speed of sound in the interstellar medium is much higher than it is on earth. In case you didn't know, space is not empty. Vacuum is, but space isn't.
That's garbage. Space is not a total vacuum, it's true. However, the density of particles of matter in space is, for the most part, so low that space can be treated as a vacuum. It's like rounding 0.1xE-25 to just 0.
And as for the whole thing about sound travelling faster in space, you just made that up. Light (and other electromagnetic phenomena) do travel faster in a vacuum like space (perhaps you've confused the two). Sound, however, is caused waves of physical compression. In other words, one particle bumps into the next, which bumps into the next, and so on. Sound travels faster and farther through more solid materials. It has a certain speed and a certain distance it will travel in air, a faster speed and greater distance in water, and an even faster speed and greater distance through concrete. It has no speed or distance at all in space, because what little matter there is isn't close enough to touch the next peice of matter, and you can't set up the compression wave.
This just tells us once again that our wonderful editors on/. don't even try to understand what's behind an article, but they just find some sensationalistic title (the more AntiMS, the better) and done.
I suspect it is the fault of slashdot user base as much as the editors. I bet a lot of users were in the firehose, saw the sensationalist title, etc, and rated it highly. The editor comes in, sees it has a sensationalist title and is now colored read, meaning users really think it is great, and posts it. So yes, the editor may not have read the article, but I'm sure the user base didn't either, at least not until after it got posted.
True for graphics... but I think Nintendo has just jumpstarted the next trend, which focuses on trying to actually get inside your games. The wiimote is just the first iteration of what will probably become fully immersive virtual reality. Consoles like the 360 and PS3 are very close graphics wise to photo-realism, but as soon as they get there gamers are going to want to be actually holding the tank controls themselves. Holodecks, here we come!
There would be nothing stopping Google from putting up a better Microsoft Office.
That makes no sense. There are five things stopping Google from just throwing out a better Office.
The amount of sheer work involved. Microsoft Office has been developing for well over a decade now, and even just cloning it would take a huge amount of labor and financial investment. And then making it actually better than Microsoft takes even more time, planning, strategizing, and investment. Google is big, but they have bought so many companies and have so many projects going I question whether they would have the manpower for such an investment.
Infrastructure is stopping Google. Animations, eye candy, processing power... all of those are subpar when you are talking about the Internet. Yes, you have flash which looks good, but the downloading of the swf files embeded in the pages can be quite slow, and it would get even slower if lots of people started using it (unless Google made some more monstrous server farms, and that would be another huge economic investment). Some things are simply resource intensive enough that they are just better done on the desktop. (And yes, wordprocessing seems simple, but when you start packing in lots and lots of features, animations, etc, you generate a large memory and resource footprint)
Security is stopping Google. Corporations are not going to start editing their sensative files over the Internet. They aren't going to transmit that data all over the web, and they aren't going to store it on Google's servers. They just won't, regardless of whether encryption is used. It will be viewed as too big a risk.
Entrenchment is stopping Google. Microsoft Office is entrenched. I'm not just talking about users being comfortable and used to it (and therefore not wanting to change), I'm talking about being entrenched corporately. Most corporations have built innumerable applications that integrate and work with office, and you can't just rip out one suite and replace it with another without causing the majority of enterprise processes and applications to break. Very few corporations are going to be willing to switch unless Google somehow comes up with some undeniable, overwhelming reason that they must use the Google product. And I can't think of any scenario that would fit that bill (this very issue, btw, is why Open Office is not, and probably never will be, adopted at the corporate level).
Lack of financial gain is therefore stopping Google. Unless Google can think of ways to overcome all of these issues, they are not going to recoup their investment (and make no mistake, developing an Internet Office application that is better than MS Office is an incredibly large investment). There are many other areas less dominated by competitors where the pickings are easier and the return on investment is higher. They may make simple spreadsheet apps that may drive a few private users to their site (and generate some advertising dollars from the extra traffic), but trying to truly trying to take dominance from Microsoft in the Office arena simply isn't going to be in their gameplan. It just isn't worth it.
Or countless other innovative companies from killing the Windows platform.
This is even less likely to be true than what you said about Google and Office. How is having access to an open version of Flash going to kill the Windows platform? Because you are talking about Flash, that implies that you are talking about web development. The Windows Platform is an operating system. Therefore you are attempting to make the claim that open Flash will allow a third party company (which, by the way, will almost certainly have less manpower and money than Microsoft) to develop some sort of web OS that will render a mature, entrenched desktop OS like Windows obsolete. Actually, lets leave out the mature and entrenched parts of the argument for a moment (although they alone are enough to kil
I'd join this class action. I'm a Comcast customer and I can't stand the way they try to restrict Internet activity when they often claim service is "unlimited".
There actually are some pretty good reasons to put ads in games. In fact, having ads in games (to a point) can be a win/win for both the software company, which gets more money, and the user, who gets more realism. For instance, if you play a game in a city setting, one would expect realistic ads on billboards, bulletin boards, walls, etc (as opposed to crappy old games where you would race cars through a city, for instance, and every billboard would say "Midway!", which got old really quick). And speaking of racing games, what kind of a NASCAR game would you have if there weren't ads plastered all over the cars? I think having ads in a game is great for realism and cost defrayment (maybe you don't need as many people to buy a game for developers to be willing to make it, since they will also get ad money). As long as they put the ads in context within the game, this is a great thing.
Now, I should say I haven't seen this beta so I don't know if they are crossing the line and putting ads out of context. If every third person in a crowd is wearing an NVIDIA shirt, that is out of context and pretty ridiculous. Also, if performance suffers from downloading new ads for the game or something, that is bad too. But if performance doesn't suffer, downloading new ads could be good. After all, billboards, walls, etc change their ads in real life, so why shouldn't a game? That ads realism and variety to the landscape.
I keep seeing people in this debate arguing that this is a chance for churches to be "relevant". In fact, that seems to be the entire argument for those who say that Halo 3 should be in churches. They argue that it is needed to be "relevant".
Really, though, doesn't following this course of action make churches irrelevant? It seems to me that it does. I mean, what exactly are they providing here? Kids aren't showing up for the sermons, they are showing up for Halo 3 and the entertainment. Halo 3 parties, entertainment, and socializing are something you can get just about anywhere else. You can easilly find halo tournaments, free pizza, etc in a college dorm, for example. This raises the question: if you can get this sort of entertainment with or without the church, then why is the church needed? What is it bringing to the table? Since we can get the entertainment and social time with or without the church, then having the church is irrelevant . It's existence no longer matters, because things will stay the same with or without it.
Now don't misunderstand me, I'm not trying to make the claim that all churches are irrelevant. If a church can make the case to a person that they are a sinner, and that the Jesus that they serve can forgive sins, then they have become relevant to that person's life. Once a person believes they are a sinner, finding forgiveness of sins will be very relevant to them. The church can then bring things to the table that you can't find anywhere else. That makes the church relevant , because without them things will be different.
And this is why I find the argument that churches "need" to bring Halo in to stay "relevant" ridiculous. If your main focus is trying to provide entertainment and a social club just to lure more people in and boost attendance (and that is what many churches these days are about and how they measure success), you will become unecessary, irrelevant, and discarded. Those teens you can lure to a Halo tournament will come today, but just as soon as they can graduate, get jobs and buy their own big screen TV they will be gone. You won't ever make yourself relevant by providing Halo. Only churches that focus on their core message rather than socializing are going to be able to bring something to the table that no one else can. Only that will make them relevant to people. I'm not saying a church can't have social groups or even play video games. Those things can be great. But giving up some of the core beliefs, such as the belief that taking pleasure in violence is bad, is not going to make a church more relevent. It will in fact do the opposite, and make that church disposable.
It seems to me that these statements by Ballmer are a clear Lanham Act violation under Section 43(a)(1)(B) which can be used when false or misleading statements are alleged to have hurt a business.
They aren't a violation if he isn't saying Microsoft is going to go after them for IP issues. I know he's said Microsoft will go after them for patent infringement in the past, but it looks like this time he is saying that they had better watch out or Eolas will get them, just like Eolas already got Microsoft for 521 million.
Linux will always be a niche player on the desktop. OSS wont have an opportunity to be huge until there is a truly monumental shift in the way we use personal computers.
And when/if the big shift happens, there is no reason to believe that FOSS will gain any more market share. This is because the big shift will be caused by Microsoft (doing something such as Surface) or Apple or some other proprietary software company, as usual. And FOSS will simply do a copy of it, probably a year late, as usual. Nothing the FOSS community ever does is innovative enough to be considered a new way of computing. Look at the two primary desktop manager programs on Linux: KDE and GNOME. KDE is a copy/lookalike of Microsoft's interface, and GNOME was a copy of the old Mac interface. Very little new has been done.
I do have to give FOSS a little bit of credit for UI's like enlightenment and fluxbox, which are different than what Mac and Windows use. However, Linux desktop use is so small, and knowledge of/experimentation with alternative UI's is so much smaller still (because they don't ship with most distros), that even if something different is done, no one hears about it. Linux use is too small to change the way users do their computing; only a highly visible company like Apple or Microsoft is going to get the press and spotlight long enough to really change how people work with their machines.
Actually, I am. Microsoft developers aren't out there bashing each other. I don't know why you guys aren't seeing my distinction. There are always people who bash any product. Even though slashdot mostly is a pro-Linux crowd, people bash Linux too. But I don't know of any other product development group that degenerates into infighting over every little development issue that comes along.
And to counteract the objection that these are seperate projects, you don't hear Microsoft's XBox 360 project team bashing the Office team, do you? And the comparisons are comparable, because the FOSS community is in essence the overall organization, despite having different product groups and subhierarchies. Technically everyone is still claiming allegience to FOSS.
Just because some kid has an ipod and a cellphone doesn't mean they're a genius when it comes to technology. An ipod is easy enough for an idiot to use, it's not a badge of honor to be able to use one.
I wholeheartedly agree. This group might be the most lazy, or might have access to gadgets with more processing power than any prior generation, or might have access to the most disposable income, but calling them the most technically savvy is ridiculous. I was born in 1983, and I would say that people my age can make a much better case for being the most technologically savvy generation than the current crop of teenagers can, for the following reason:
When I was young, much of the new computer powered technology coming out was quite new. As a consequence, much of it didn't work. For instance, just about every time I tried to install a new DOS game on my computer, something didn't work the way the directions said it would. I had to learn quite a few DOS commands and quite a lot about the system just trying to get my games to install when I was 8. When the list of commands that the instructions listed for installation didn't work, I had to figure out why. Maybe a directory assumed to exist didn't. Maybe something got copied to the wrong spot. Maybe a path setting was wrong. Maybe a device the game needed was detected or configured right. Maybe my CD-ROM had a different letter name than D: (assumed by directions).
Some of those issues sound ridiculously simple now, but keep in mind, for an 8 year old with no training on the computer whatsoever, it was pretty good that I could, just from reading game instruction books, start spotting similarites between them and learning DOS just from seeing the different commands. I cut my teeth on computers just trying to get programs to run in those early days, and ended up gaining an interest in them that never left (I'm now have degrees in computer science and computer engineering and work as a developer).
So here's the point I'm getting at. I, and the many others like me who grew up in the 80's, had to demonstrate far more technical savvy getting flaky products to work than any of today's teenagers are demonstrating. Today all it usually takes to install a computer game is clicking the next button, but most kids today don't even do that much. They all have consoles and just pop CDs into those instead. Any fool can put a CD in a slot; that doesn't make you technically savvy. Being able to use an iPod scroll wheel to select songs and then pressing a play button doesn't make you technically savvy. My wife works with mentally retarded women who require constant supervision all day long, and even THEY know how to put a DVD in a DVD player and press the play button. Calling kids today technically savvy is bull. They now how to push on switches on the expensive toys they are constantly buying. Whoop-de-doo. See how many companies want to hire you for possessing that "technical savviness."
Note: This wasn't a sour grapes post, I have nothing against people who have cool gadgets and toys like iPods, iPhones, or Wiis. I have some of those myself. But it isn't that today's kids are more savvy because they can operate them; on the contrary, their adoption has a lot more to do with the fact that our engineering and usability design has gotten so good that anyone, including toddlers and mentally handicapped people, can use them.
Bigger movements sometimes gain too much momentum, interest groups sometimes get too emotional, fanboys tend to yell a lot.
Granted, all that is true. However, the difference I see is that FOSS is supposed to be striving for a higher calling. People like Richard Stallman pretty much elevate it to a religious/moral level. This isn't just some XBox fanboy telling a Nintendo fanboy how much better his console is than the Wii. Supposedly, FOSS is bigger/higher than those sorts of things. Yet we see these arguments over even the slightest issues.
Issue number 2 is that FOSS is supposed to be more of a scientific/engineering/technological group as well. I understand 14 year old gamer fanboys getting up in arms about things, but these participants are supposed to be scientists critically and logically examining issues. Instead, their debates usually turn into shouting matches with lots of red herrings and poisoning the well type attacks (such as the security professionals "wanging opinions" remark), and often aren't inherently logical debates at all. Maybe I shouldn't expect anything of them, but I really would expect a group that markets itself the way FOSS does to be above a lot of the pettiness I see day to day from the leaders.
What ordinarily might have been an issue barely worth noticing became a loud, public dispute in Linux and BSD circles.
Seriously, is there anything that doesn't turn into a large, public dispute when the open source community (and their overly large egos) are involved? Whether its constant squabling over scheduler FUD, Linus Torvalds saying that security professional are just running around "wanging opinions", people freaking out about GPLv2 vs GPLv3 vs BSD, or this latest issue, it seems like we have several large, ridiculous disputes a day. Why can't people in the FOSS movement just get along? They like to bash Microsoft and talk about how it is attacking other developers/companies/3rd party groups, but FOSS can't even get along within its own movement. At least Microsoft doesn't attack itself.
Unless he meant overall Internet traffic, overall Internet content, overall complexity and quality of web sites/applications, overall number/complexity of cyber attacks, etc.
In many ways the Internet has increased by many orders of magnitude. The IP protocol itself may not have massively changed, but size, scope, data, throughput... pretty much everything about the network itself has increased by an order of magnitude.
Hell, MS Office alone take 256M just to load Word (I KID...) But seriously, modern apps are huge.
Lol... you joke about Office, but what about Emacs? It's a text editor with a 141 MB footprint (I don't kid). Modern apps may be huge, but I guess emacs proves that old, cluttered apps are the hugest.
You can get random credit card numbers just by using a basic random number generator as well. All you need to do is generate a 16 digit number to fool 99.9% of the public. I know there are rules governing valid and nonvalid credit card numbers, but how many people really know those? Just seeing a number that looked like a credit card number is good enough.
Yes, we did see that article, but the prototype could barely produce enough thrust to push a peice of paper, if that, and to power a spacecraft to mars in a week it was going to have to be scaled up to a point that some think is impractical. This design has a much greater chance of being usable and production ready in the near future.
Will, know-how, AND hardware and hardware skills to pull the signal in and analyze it. This new system, however, requires significantly less effort, because the conversation is already being routed through the hardware of your phone, automatically. Now you probably just need to download a small peice of software to listen in. In essence, the vast majority of the hard work is done for you.
I know people will say, "Well, we'll encrypt the message", but when my phone is a man in the middle, good luck transfering the key without me finding a way to get it. This isn't just a wiretap (or as the parent said, listening in on the air) or some sort of passive observation. As part of the mesh, these packets are actually being routed to me, and I am supposed to send them on. Random numbering of TCP packets when initiating the connection won't help you when I flat out get the packets addressed to me.
Reading the article, it doesn't exactly sound like anyone is truly building life from scratch. Building life from scratch would be assembling from base elements the building blocks of the cell, assmbling from base elements the walls and structure of the cell, putting it all together, and then starting up all the "machinery" and watching the cell come to life. As far as I know, no one has been able to do that, and it doesn't look like these teams are doing that either.
The top down team clearly isn't close to doing things this way, because they are taking already living cells of a simple organism that is already alive and tweaking the DNA, trying to find the minimum set of genes necessary for function.
In contrast, the bottom up team takes enzymes from already alive sells, puts them into a stripped down fatty bag cell and watches them synthesize proteins. That's hardly creating life from scratch. That's taking bits and peices from things already alive and trying to create a new organism out of them. While this technique may indeed succeed in creating a new, minimal organism, there is a large difference between taking nothing but inert, base elements from the periodic table and creating something alive and simply taking peices from other lifeforms (by definition already alive) and assembling a different organism. And there is also a large difference between having enzymes make proteins in a test tube (something that has been done before) and creating something that is alive.
We've never seen anyone truly create life from scratch, and I don't think we are particularly close to that, if it would ever even happen. I think most of this "I've created new life in a test tube!" stuff is propoganda from scientists to gain more funding. Saying "I've created life in a test tube!" tends to sound better and garner more funds than saying "I've tweaked existing life in a test tube!", which is what has actually occurred here.
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And additionally, that part of the spectrum (formerly used for TV channels) definately fell under the category of commerce, what with all the ads and everything.
That's not a difference between KDE and Vista. Actually, KDE and Vista are very much the same in this regard, and the main point of Vista is a slew of new changes under the hood that aren't immediately visible to end users. In fact, that's the main reason users are griping; they don't see too much difference between XP and Vista except for some eye candy. However, anyone who actually develops programs for Vista is not complaining about it or jumping on the anti-Microsoft bandwagon that seems to be so crowded right now. WPF, WCF, DirectX 10, and WF are all very useful for developers, and the programs we can write using them will be very cool, and will ultimately impress end users. But it will be a while before some of these new features in Vista are fully exploited, and until then, the common user gripes. Don't mistake their griping for knowledgeable critiquing though; most are clueless, and what you just said about KDE applies equally well to Vista.
I agree that this is a very pure and useful form of science. However, what I don't understand is why we don't do this more often. Why haven't we been sending out a probe every year, or at least every five years, upgraded with the best propulsion systems and scientific instruments we can put on it? These two probes were launched 30 years ago, and while they still work, technology improved a lot over the decades. If it takes 30 years to get to the termination shock, it seems like they took an awfully big risk sending just two probes and then sitting tight. If something went wrong or failed, you have just one probe left, or maybe none if it was an issue common to the two of them. And then you have to wait 30 years to get back to where you were. In addition, science usually likes many repeated observations of phenomena more than just a few, and repeatedly launching probes in different directions would have helped establish even more reliablity for all data returned.
I just don't understand why we don't do this more often. I would have to think we could build a better, sturdier probe with a faster propulsion system, longer lasting power sources and far more powerful scientific devices. Unless perhaps we have launched another probe that will eventually have this mission (but maybe is doing something else on the way for now), I just don't understand why we don't do this again.
That's garbage. Space is not a total vacuum, it's true. However, the density of particles of matter in space is, for the most part, so low that space can be treated as a vacuum. It's like rounding 0.1xE-25 to just 0.
And as for the whole thing about sound travelling faster in space, you just made that up. Light (and other electromagnetic phenomena) do travel faster in a vacuum like space (perhaps you've confused the two). Sound, however, is caused waves of physical compression. In other words, one particle bumps into the next, which bumps into the next, and so on. Sound travels faster and farther through more solid materials. It has a certain speed and a certain distance it will travel in air, a faster speed and greater distance in water, and an even faster speed and greater distance through concrete. It has no speed or distance at all in space, because what little matter there is isn't close enough to touch the next peice of matter, and you can't set up the compression wave.
I suspect it is the fault of slashdot user base as much as the editors. I bet a lot of users were in the firehose, saw the sensationalist title, etc, and rated it highly. The editor comes in, sees it has a sensationalist title and is now colored read, meaning users really think it is great, and posts it. So yes, the editor may not have read the article, but I'm sure the user base didn't either, at least not until after it got posted.
True for graphics... but I think Nintendo has just jumpstarted the next trend, which focuses on trying to actually get inside your games. The wiimote is just the first iteration of what will probably become fully immersive virtual reality. Consoles like the 360 and PS3 are very close graphics wise to photo-realism, but as soon as they get there gamers are going to want to be actually holding the tank controls themselves. Holodecks, here we come!
I for one wait with Clay Shirkey to welcome our "devestatingly intelligent" machine searching overlords!
That makes no sense. There are five things stopping Google from just throwing out a better Office.
This is even less likely to be true than what you said about Google and Office. How is having access to an open version of Flash going to kill the Windows platform? Because you are talking about Flash, that implies that you are talking about web development. The Windows Platform is an operating system. Therefore you are attempting to make the claim that open Flash will allow a third party company (which, by the way, will almost certainly have less manpower and money than Microsoft) to develop some sort of web OS that will render a mature, entrenched desktop OS like Windows obsolete. Actually, lets leave out the mature and entrenched parts of the argument for a moment (although they alone are enough to kil
I'd join this class action. I'm a Comcast customer and I can't stand the way they try to restrict Internet activity when they often claim service is "unlimited".
There actually are some pretty good reasons to put ads in games. In fact, having ads in games (to a point) can be a win/win for both the software company, which gets more money, and the user, who gets more realism. For instance, if you play a game in a city setting, one would expect realistic ads on billboards, bulletin boards, walls, etc (as opposed to crappy old games where you would race cars through a city, for instance, and every billboard would say "Midway!", which got old really quick). And speaking of racing games, what kind of a NASCAR game would you have if there weren't ads plastered all over the cars? I think having ads in a game is great for realism and cost defrayment (maybe you don't need as many people to buy a game for developers to be willing to make it, since they will also get ad money). As long as they put the ads in context within the game, this is a great thing.
Now, I should say I haven't seen this beta so I don't know if they are crossing the line and putting ads out of context. If every third person in a crowd is wearing an NVIDIA shirt, that is out of context and pretty ridiculous. Also, if performance suffers from downloading new ads for the game or something, that is bad too. But if performance doesn't suffer, downloading new ads could be good. After all, billboards, walls, etc change their ads in real life, so why shouldn't a game? That ads realism and variety to the landscape.
I keep seeing people in this debate arguing that this is a chance for churches to be "relevant". In fact, that seems to be the entire argument for those who say that Halo 3 should be in churches. They argue that it is needed to be "relevant".
Really, though, doesn't following this course of action make churches irrelevant? It seems to me that it does. I mean, what exactly are they providing here? Kids aren't showing up for the sermons, they are showing up for Halo 3 and the entertainment. Halo 3 parties, entertainment, and socializing are something you can get just about anywhere else. You can easilly find halo tournaments, free pizza, etc in a college dorm, for example. This raises the question: if you can get this sort of entertainment with or without the church, then why is the church needed? What is it bringing to the table? Since we can get the entertainment and social time with or without the church, then having the church is irrelevant . It's existence no longer matters, because things will stay the same with or without it.
Now don't misunderstand me, I'm not trying to make the claim that all churches are irrelevant. If a church can make the case to a person that they are a sinner, and that the Jesus that they serve can forgive sins, then they have become relevant to that person's life. Once a person believes they are a sinner, finding forgiveness of sins will be very relevant to them. The church can then bring things to the table that you can't find anywhere else. That makes the church relevant , because without them things will be different.
And this is why I find the argument that churches "need" to bring Halo in to stay "relevant" ridiculous. If your main focus is trying to provide entertainment and a social club just to lure more people in and boost attendance (and that is what many churches these days are about and how they measure success), you will become unecessary, irrelevant, and discarded. Those teens you can lure to a Halo tournament will come today, but just as soon as they can graduate, get jobs and buy their own big screen TV they will be gone. You won't ever make yourself relevant by providing Halo. Only churches that focus on their core message rather than socializing are going to be able to bring something to the table that no one else can. Only that will make them relevant to people. I'm not saying a church can't have social groups or even play video games. Those things can be great. But giving up some of the core beliefs, such as the belief that taking pleasure in violence is bad, is not going to make a church more relevent. It will in fact do the opposite, and make that church disposable.
And when/if the big shift happens, there is no reason to believe that FOSS will gain any more market share. This is because the big shift will be caused by Microsoft (doing something such as Surface) or Apple or some other proprietary software company, as usual. And FOSS will simply do a copy of it, probably a year late, as usual. Nothing the FOSS community ever does is innovative enough to be considered a new way of computing. Look at the two primary desktop manager programs on Linux: KDE and GNOME. KDE is a copy/lookalike of Microsoft's interface, and GNOME was a copy of the old Mac interface. Very little new has been done.
I do have to give FOSS a little bit of credit for UI's like enlightenment and fluxbox, which are different than what Mac and Windows use. However, Linux desktop use is so small, and knowledge of/experimentation with alternative UI's is so much smaller still (because they don't ship with most distros), that even if something different is done, no one hears about it. Linux use is too small to change the way users do their computing; only a highly visible company like Apple or Microsoft is going to get the press and spotlight long enough to really change how people work with their machines.
Actually, I am. Microsoft developers aren't out there bashing each other. I don't know why you guys aren't seeing my distinction. There are always people who bash any product. Even though slashdot mostly is a pro-Linux crowd, people bash Linux too. But I don't know of any other product development group that degenerates into infighting over every little development issue that comes along.
And to counteract the objection that these are seperate projects, you don't hear Microsoft's XBox 360 project team bashing the Office team, do you? And the comparisons are comparable, because the FOSS community is in essence the overall organization, despite having different product groups and subhierarchies. Technically everyone is still claiming allegience to FOSS.
Nope, you overestimated. And I'm not sure what all the hooplah is about. Usage may have doubled, but doubling zero is still zero :D.
In tomorrow's news flash: Linux usage on the desktop has tripled! Penguins everywhere rejoice!
I wholeheartedly agree. This group might be the most lazy, or might have access to gadgets with more processing power than any prior generation, or might have access to the most disposable income, but calling them the most technically savvy is ridiculous. I was born in 1983, and I would say that people my age can make a much better case for being the most technologically savvy generation than the current crop of teenagers can, for the following reason:
When I was young, much of the new computer powered technology coming out was quite new. As a consequence, much of it didn't work. For instance, just about every time I tried to install a new DOS game on my computer, something didn't work the way the directions said it would. I had to learn quite a few DOS commands and quite a lot about the system just trying to get my games to install when I was 8. When the list of commands that the instructions listed for installation didn't work, I had to figure out why. Maybe a directory assumed to exist didn't. Maybe something got copied to the wrong spot. Maybe a path setting was wrong. Maybe a device the game needed was detected or configured right. Maybe my CD-ROM had a different letter name than D: (assumed by directions).
Some of those issues sound ridiculously simple now, but keep in mind, for an 8 year old with no training on the computer whatsoever, it was pretty good that I could, just from reading game instruction books, start spotting similarites between them and learning DOS just from seeing the different commands. I cut my teeth on computers just trying to get programs to run in those early days, and ended up gaining an interest in them that never left (I'm now have degrees in computer science and computer engineering and work as a developer).
So here's the point I'm getting at. I, and the many others like me who grew up in the 80's, had to demonstrate far more technical savvy getting flaky products to work than any of today's teenagers are demonstrating. Today all it usually takes to install a computer game is clicking the next button, but most kids today don't even do that much. They all have consoles and just pop CDs into those instead. Any fool can put a CD in a slot; that doesn't make you technically savvy. Being able to use an iPod scroll wheel to select songs and then pressing a play button doesn't make you technically savvy. My wife works with mentally retarded women who require constant supervision all day long, and even THEY know how to put a DVD in a DVD player and press the play button. Calling kids today technically savvy is bull. They now how to push on switches on the expensive toys they are constantly buying. Whoop-de-doo. See how many companies want to hire you for possessing that "technical savviness."
Note: This wasn't a sour grapes post, I have nothing against people who have cool gadgets and toys like iPods, iPhones, or Wiis. I have some of those myself. But it isn't that today's kids are more savvy because they can operate them; on the contrary, their adoption has a lot more to do with the fact that our engineering and usability design has gotten so good that anyone, including toddlers and mentally handicapped people, can use them.
Granted, all that is true. However, the difference I see is that FOSS is supposed to be striving for a higher calling. People like Richard Stallman pretty much elevate it to a religious/moral level. This isn't just some XBox fanboy telling a Nintendo fanboy how much better his console is than the Wii. Supposedly, FOSS is bigger/higher than those sorts of things. Yet we see these arguments over even the slightest issues.
Issue number 2 is that FOSS is supposed to be more of a scientific/engineering/technological group as well. I understand 14 year old gamer fanboys getting up in arms about things, but these participants are supposed to be scientists critically and logically examining issues. Instead, their debates usually turn into shouting matches with lots of red herrings and poisoning the well type attacks (such as the security professionals "wanging opinions" remark), and often aren't inherently logical debates at all. Maybe I shouldn't expect anything of them, but I really would expect a group that markets itself the way FOSS does to be above a lot of the pettiness I see day to day from the leaders.
Seriously, is there anything that doesn't turn into a large, public dispute when the open source community (and their overly large egos) are involved? Whether its constant squabling over scheduler FUD, Linus Torvalds saying that security professional are just running around "wanging opinions", people freaking out about GPLv2 vs GPLv3 vs BSD, or this latest issue, it seems like we have several large, ridiculous disputes a day. Why can't people in the FOSS movement just get along? They like to bash Microsoft and talk about how it is attacking other developers/companies/3rd party groups, but FOSS can't even get along within its own movement. At least Microsoft doesn't attack itself.
Unless he meant overall Internet traffic, overall Internet content, overall complexity and quality of web sites/applications, overall number/complexity of cyber attacks, etc.
In many ways the Internet has increased by many orders of magnitude. The IP protocol itself may not have massively changed, but size, scope, data, throughput... pretty much everything about the network itself has increased by an order of magnitude.
Hell, MS Office alone take 256M just to load Word (I KID...) But seriously, modern apps are huge. Lol... you joke about Office, but what about Emacs? It's a text editor with a 141 MB footprint (I don't kid). Modern apps may be huge, but I guess emacs proves that old, cluttered apps are the hugest.
You can get random credit card numbers just by using a basic random number generator as well. All you need to do is generate a 16 digit number to fool 99.9% of the public. I know there are rules governing valid and nonvalid credit card numbers, but how many people really know those? Just seeing a number that looked like a credit card number is good enough.
Yes, we did see that article, but the prototype could barely produce enough thrust to push a peice of paper, if that, and to power a spacecraft to mars in a week it was going to have to be scaled up to a point that some think is impractical. This design has a much greater chance of being usable and production ready in the near future.
Will, know-how, AND hardware and hardware skills to pull the signal in and analyze it. This new system, however, requires significantly less effort, because the conversation is already being routed through the hardware of your phone, automatically. Now you probably just need to download a small peice of software to listen in. In essence, the vast majority of the hard work is done for you.
I know people will say, "Well, we'll encrypt the message", but when my phone is a man in the middle, good luck transfering the key without me finding a way to get it. This isn't just a wiretap (or as the parent said, listening in on the air) or some sort of passive observation. As part of the mesh, these packets are actually being routed to me, and I am supposed to send them on. Random numbering of TCP packets when initiating the connection won't help you when I flat out get the packets addressed to me.
This brings to mind some major privacy concerns too. Who besides me doesn't want my conversation getting routed through someone else's phone?
Reading the article, it doesn't exactly sound like anyone is truly building life from scratch. Building life from scratch would be assembling from base elements the building blocks of the cell, assmbling from base elements the walls and structure of the cell, putting it all together, and then starting up all the "machinery" and watching the cell come to life. As far as I know, no one has been able to do that, and it doesn't look like these teams are doing that either.
The top down team clearly isn't close to doing things this way, because they are taking already living cells of a simple organism that is already alive and tweaking the DNA, trying to find the minimum set of genes necessary for function.
In contrast, the bottom up team takes enzymes from already alive sells, puts them into a stripped down fatty bag cell and watches them synthesize proteins. That's hardly creating life from scratch. That's taking bits and peices from things already alive and trying to create a new organism out of them. While this technique may indeed succeed in creating a new, minimal organism, there is a large difference between taking nothing but inert, base elements from the periodic table and creating something alive and simply taking peices from other lifeforms (by definition already alive) and assembling a different organism. And there is also a large difference between having enzymes make proteins in a test tube (something that has been done before) and creating something that is alive.
We've never seen anyone truly create life from scratch, and I don't think we are particularly close to that, if it would ever even happen. I think most of this "I've created new life in a test tube!" stuff is propoganda from scientists to gain more funding. Saying "I've created life in a test tube!" tends to sound better and garner more funds than saying "I've tweaked existing life in a test tube!", which is what has actually occurred here.