Ok, what do I know about cooling, right? For ages, Intel processors have had a facility to protect against overheating should the CPU fan fall off or whatever. When the temperature gets too high, the CPU is made to sleep for periods of time necessary to keep it cool enough. The key point is that the system keeps running, just more slowly. Now, why can't data centers emply something like that? Servers that sleep to keep cool and then just ventilation systems that circulate air with the outside. Server response is slower, but nothing goes down.
It seems to me that it's common knowledge that Comcast are bastards. I pity anyone who is unfortunate enough to live in a place where they have to get their internet service from Comcast.
If Apple had just sold unlocked phones, there MIGHT have done just fine. But I think this deal with AT&T dramatically improved their chances. A lot of the process of rolling out a new product is publicity, and making this deal with AT&T gave them an immediate advertizing channel. Plus, Apple is very careful about this "experience" thing, where they control the environment so as to minimize problems. MacOS is awesome for the novice, but to make it usable for an expert does require a fair amount of tweaking with some add-on programs and such. The thing is, if Apple were to ship with these things, they'd be increasing their chances of problems. If you install a third-party app, and the system does something funny, then it's your fault or the fault of the app developer. But Apple does not by any means PRECLUDE these add-ons when you know what you're doing.
This goes along with the current lack of dev kit or the iPhone. The launch MUST go smoothly, with minimal problems. Delaying the introduction of a dev kit gives Apple the opportunity to demonstrate how a virgin iPhone works. If a dev kit had been released with the phone, the market would have been flooded with 3rd part apps that would muddy the waters--people won't necessarily be able to distinguish whether a major problem was the fault of Apple or the 3rd party. People are most likely to blame Apple. Once we're used to virgin iPhones, then when 3rd party apps break things, Apple benefits because we automatically blame the app developer instead.
So, back to the locking issue, supporting a single carrier is FAR easier than supporting everyone. For one thing, AT&T were actually willing to work with Apple in order to support interesting features like the visual voice mail. That is, certain features exist ONLY because of the relationship. If Apple had tried to work with every carrier, then some carriers would not provide services that are an integral part of the iPhone experience that is making everyone drool over it. Add to that the complications of activating a phone. With one carrier, it's trivial. With every carrier, just associating the phone with the network requires technical knowledge that many people don't have. Even if the problems were relatively slight, they would have MASSIVE impact on adoption.
So, I maintain that stricking a deal with a carrier (any carrier, but a specific one) was CRITICAL to the market penetration of the iPhone. This gives Apple the control they need over the network. The contract with AT&T goes both ways. If you can't use your unlocked iPhone with T-Mobile's feature X, you're screwed. If you can't get it to work with AT&T, you call customer service, and they fix it for you. Indeed, you're not going to want to have an iPhone with a carrier that Apple doesn't have a contract with. You WILL run into some technical problem along the way, and you're going to want to have a supported device on a supported carrier. The only difference is that all the carriers use the same phone and would let you migrate between them. (Or they better, else Apple will be doing something stupid or inexplicably failing in the market.)
BTW, those who already own iPhones probably hope that, once the AT&T contract is over, Apple will provide a way to unlock your phone. This might or might not happen. Apple's far better than other PC makers about supporting older hardware, but they also engage in tactical obsolescence. A first-gen iPod will work fine with the latest iTunes, but there are no firmware updates for it, so you don't get, for instance, memory as to where you left off when you were last listening to an audiobook or podcast. Every time you patch a device's firmware, you take a risk of breaking it, so there are not just profit but also engineering reasons to not provide an "it ain't broke" update like that, even if the newer iPhones are unlocked.
That's MARKET penetration, for the dirty-minded of you out there.
Listen, I'm not going to buy an iPhone any time soon. I'm a grad student and just can't afford it. In fact, by the time I can afford one, every other cell phone manufacturer will have something that copies all its features, although Apple will also keep up and have some better phones, etc. But I think Apple is doing absolutely the right thing with the iPhone, and as annoying as some of their actions have been, they're ultimately going to our benefit as well as theirs. This isn't altruism. They want profit. It's just that they know about user demand, but they presently have their hands tied.
Here's something you need to realize: Apple doesn't like this lockin any more than you do. Oh, sure, they like the kickbacks, no doubt. But the lockin has caused them untold grief from both technical and PR angles. And the KNEW this even before setting out.
So why put us through all this bullshit? Because before there was an iPhone, there was no specific demand for it. As an idea, there was GENERAL demand, but there wasn't a phone from Apple already that you could play with to tell that you really want a phone from Apple. If Apple were to start out with an unlocked phone, they would shoot themselves in the foot--no carrier would pick up their phone, because there wouldn't be enough guaranteed profit in it. As it is, Apple and AT&T have going basically the only way to go about it and not have the iPhone be a total waste of time that tanked before it started. The key factors here are (1) to get users familiar with it and addicted do it, and (2) make significant profit. The only way to do these things is to sell them by the millions. The only way to sell by the millions AN UNPROVEN PRODUCT is to make a deal with a major carrier who will see enough profit in it to help push it on buyers.
In short, what Apple did was SMART. Oh, it wasn't NICE. But it was SMART, because frankly, it's the only way to meet these basic business requirements.
I guarantee you that before iPhone+AT&T, T-Mobile was only passingly interested in it, considering it to be a very risky thing to take on. NOW, they're shitting themselves and are about ready to beg Apple to sell to them. Apple knows this. This is why Apple did what they did. They had to prove themselves, and now everyone wants them. One way to prove yourself is to sell the product successfully. The best way for them to sell the iPhone successfully THE FIRST TIME was to take another route.
Apple is smart and is going to take advantage of their popularity. Once AT&T becomes dependent on the iPhone because they see it as highly profitable, they'll agree to terms more favorable to Apple, which is that Apple will sell to other carriers, and the phones they sell will be unlocked! Apple is not only aware of what the users want; they've ancipated what the users want and are preparing to give us those features. They just can't yet. Apple is fighting tooth and nail with the unlockers, not because they give a shit about unlocking. They WANT unlocking. In fact, they're probably elated that users are able to use the phones on other networks. But they have to put on a good show for AT&T! They have a contract with AT&T that requires them to maintain the lockin. And they MUST maintain that lockin, because they have not YET achieved that critical mass of adoption.
Oh, BTW, if Apple doesn't do as I predict, users will become jaded and lose interest in the iPhone as the competition catches up and DOES provide what people want. I don't think Apple is that blind or stupid. Otherwise, they wouldn't get half their Mac sales from people who've never before owned a Mac.
This wouldn't be the first time someone who ostensibly was out to "do the right thing" resorted to blatantly unethical tactics. The fact is that most people can't understand the difference between some learned set of rules they call "morality" from the more general concept of right and wrong called "ethics." This is why fundies have no problems killing abortion doctors or terrorists killing thousands of innocents. Their moral high-ground is the only definition of right and wrong to them, and that gives them license to do anything the hell they want in the name of their morality. It's been this way throughout all of human history, and it's unlikely to change. People get it in their minds that anything counter to what they believe is evil and should be eradicated.
Now and then, I get an unsolicited email from someone, usually a job recruiter, in Word format. Sometimes it's an attachment, and sometimes, it's the whole damn email. I sometimes tell them that it's rude to send emails in a format that is not an open standard, especially if I'm totally interested in what they have to say. This one time, some recruiter women kept sending me short emails in Word format, where the whole email was in Word format. I asked her not to do that, but she kept doing it. I think she must had Word tied to Outlook with the wrong box checked, and she didn't know enough to fix the problem. It was incredibly frustrating for me, because I was using a Linux box, and I had to exlicitly download and load each email into OOo just to read it.
I've sometimes wondered... why don't drive manufactures make drives that have more than one read/write head arm? Random access times would be dramatically improved, no?
Cost? Reliability? With what they're spending to add flash, they could afford the cost of another head. Of course, it also occurs to me that if you want multiple heads, you can go for some kind of RAID configuration.
As far as I understand both the dairy allergy in the other patient I mentioned and the soy allergy that I have are things that run in the family. My mother has a mild soy allergy, and the other patient's mother and grandmother have problems with dairy. I would agree with you that, often, some other thing can be the cause of the sensitivity, but in these two cases, they seem to be more examples of "genetic defects."
I'd say that, far more than people realize, health problems can be nailed down to nutritional issues. I don't mean "too much fat" or that sort of thing. People suffer weird symptoms from specific vitamin deficiencies and the like.
For instance, I know one person who suffered from "hypothyroidism" for a long time and had to take T4 supplements. It turned out that her real problem was an iodine deficiency, that itself was likely caused by being on the birth control pill. Taking high doses of an iodine supplement cleared up the problem very quickly, and her thyroid began functioning properly again.
I know another patient who was inexplicably ill for many years. After an IgG panel blood test, it was determined that she had a food alergy to casein, the principal protein in milk and other dairy derivatives. This isn't the sort of IgE alergy that causes itching or anaphalaxis, but the IgG kind that takes days to set in, and the symptoms are less severe and can be flu-like. Part of the reason she never considered cutting out dairy was that she is not, in fact, lactose intolerant, so lactase ensyme didn't help. Eliminating dairy entirely solved her problem.
Just like the preceding case, I have an IgG reaction to soy protein. Imagine trying to avoid soy in the U.S. Soybean oil is the default "vegetable oil," soya lecithin is used as an emusifier in lots of foods, and soy protein isolate (not considered to be a food by the FDA) is added to lots of things that want to report having high protein content. Oh, and don't forget the estrogen analogues found in soy. Anyhow, challenging as it was, eliminating soy products resulted in a huge improvement to my energy level. (I suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, and my nutritionist believes that it was caused by the soy alergy compromising my immune system.)
I know lots of people who have suffered from prolonged illness that was completely blown off by MDs that was then remedied very quickly by a nutritionist. And it frustrates me to no end how ignorant MDs are about nutritional effects and that they never refer people to nutritionists!
Ok, so what's my point? That in a lot of cases, I would not be surprised of there was some kind of food that people are sensitive to or which is eaten to excess that has compromised part of their metabolism. Taking insulin shots was a bandaid for diabetics. Taking something to inhibit PKCepsilon production is a BETTER bandaid, but it's still a bandaid. Someone's got to figure out the root cause.
Oh, did you know that a significant number of autism cases, when caught early enough, show remarkable improvement when wheat and dairy are removed from their diets? Many neurologists will tell you otherwise, but that's because they just don't study nutrition in school. The nutritionists know otherwise.
Oh, and BTW, I'm not against MDs. I just know their limitations. Got a broken bone, lyme disease, or a structural organ failure? Better go to an MD. But many of the little things that affect people's health are not in the "take this pill" or "let me operate" categories but rather in the "don't eat this" and "eat this instead" categories. The effect of environment and intake has a HUGE impact on the human body!
I wonder if eventually the speed and latency of USB will reach a point where SATA, for instance, becomes unnecessary. Or how about ethernet? We'll always need REALLY fast links like PCIe or dedicated ones like DVI. But when it comes to busses, perhaps it would be good to settle on one standard. I'm envisioning something along the lines of 100 gigabit ethernet, except all computers would have a whole bunch of dedicated ports, rather than just one network.
I'm going to give you an "If I were them, I would have...", but in this case, it's not hollow. I've actually done this before, to positive effect. If you're going to use someone else's code under terms slightly different from what they clearly intended, I see an obvious course of action: ASK PERMISSION.
They say that it's often easier to get forgiveness than permission. This is absolutely not the case in the FOSS community. Yes, Theo is a hot-head, and he's clearly over-reacting. But at the same time, some Linux contributor didn't think very hard about the wishes of the original author of the code they borrowed. They just took it. In the FOSS community, we're not about copyright. We're about ethical sharing of ideas and the rights of both software developers and software users.
How long could it have taken to ask? "May I use your code?" "May I alter the license on your code?" "If not, is there some compromise we can reach?"
I think Free Software is important, I share a lot of Stallman's ideals, and I use terms like "Free Software" and "GNU/Linux". I think it's important to have ethical ideals and stick to them.
What I don't like is all of this useless bickering. I'm not particularly religious, but I like inter-faith organizations, because they try to look past their differences a work together for common good. I think RMS, ESR, and LBT should stop bitching at each other and start cooperating.
Because it seems like a total waste and a potential point of failure to have a package manager when a better system design would eliminate the need for it entirely. Seems straight forward to me. It's always a win if you can make a system simpler, more reliable, and more intuitive all in one fell swoop.
You should consider studying a bit of cognitive engineering.
For practical reasons, people often find they have to use Windows. There are a lot of practical people out there, trying to actually GET STUFF DONE, so they make choices based on need.
In a similar vein, it is frustration with the out-dated UNIX system of spreading bits of applications around inconsistent places in/bin,/usr,/etc,/usr/local and who knows where else that has pushed me away from most Linux distros towards using BogoLinux, PC-BSD, and MacOS X.
Ok, well, I've been using NetBeans on a Mac, and it looks really nice. You say it looks good on Windows. So it sounds like they need to really seriously work on the Linux version.
Why do we see do may articles that mention Eclipse as though it's the default IDE for Java development and whatnot, when so many of the professional programmers I know say they prefer NetBeans because it's a more intuitive, less busy interface?
You seem to forget that they ALREADY have this tool. It runs when you install the OS! It's very smart and figures out exactly what card you have and everything!
The problems occur when you do something as simple as move the graphics card to a different slot after installation. X is not smart enough to figure out that it just needs to substitute a different PCI bus ID.
Ok, I'm sure others have too, but I filed a bug report on this problem a LOOOONG time ago. It's taken them quite a long time to get around to fixing this, a rather significant usability problem.
Plenty disagree, but just as many agree. The UNIX file system organization that splits a single app across multiple different places (/bin,/usr,/etc) is unintuitive and needs to go away. Moreover, how each app is organized is not necessary the same as every other. Plenty of people learn how things are organized, but having to memorize these arbitrary things increases the cognitive load for experts and makes it harder to learn for novices. Just starting by putting each app in its own self-contained directory under/Programs or/Applications like GoboLinux or MacOS would be a good start in cleaning up this horrible mess. Just think: If we did this, these unreliable application managers like Adept would no longer be needed!
The OGP had started out by saying that they wanted to produce hardware that worked well with Free Software, but due to certain copyright issues, they wanted to keep some of the hardware design locked up. They got no end of flak for that. This was absurd, of course, because the OGP was offering to be far more open than any other graphics vendor had ever been before. It wasn't until Richard Stallman himself said that it would be necessary for the OGP to keep some of the hardware design closed that they received some vindication.
Conclusion? That many people don't understand the principles behind "Free Software" and think it just means "give everything away for no money."
One of the main points of the GPL is to ensure freedom of the end users to acquire source code. Without copyright law, there would be no way to compel someone who had closed up the source code to open it back up again.
Some people, particular when they feel it suits them, feel that any time someone breaks the law, they're wrong and must be punished. Smart people recognize that "legal" and "ethical" are two different things, but apparently, people at record companies aren't smart.
Now, one thing that must be said in their defense is that if you do NOTHING to defend your intellectual property, what's likely to happen is that you'll lose your rights altogether. Under certain IP laws, you are require to defend your IP. But let's ask what would happen if the recording industry did NOTHING to defend their rights? That's easy. Everyone would assume they didn't care, piracy would run rampant, and the general idea of copyright would degrade. You'll notice that in certain Asian countries, IP rights are not important and infringement on copyrights, patents, and trademarks is completely unchecked.
One of the reasons that music piracy actually increased revenue for record companies is because people using Napster knew in the back of their minds that this was illegal or wrong in some way. Some people even managed to think it through far enough to realize that artists might be harmed by not being paid for their work.
So, we all agree that RIAA and MPAA are bastards and what they're doing is wrong. But we cannot let the whole idea of copyright be annihilated. Individual authors should be afforded the right to influence how the fruits of their labors are handled, and they should have the right to profit from their labor. Copyright and patent have been taken to an absurd extreme, with the fundamental concepts totally abused. But we should fix the system, not abolish it altogether.
Just remember this: Without copyright law, the GPL wouldn't have the power it has to keep greedy people from taking your code and closing it up in their application.
Anyone with half a brain for business is fully aware that MONEY is not the only currency. How about contacts? Owed favors? Fame? Influence over people? Authority? Brand identity, trademarks, patents. And COPYRIGHTS. Anything that has value can be traded for something else of value.
Explain to your superiors that Linux is not given away "for free." With Linux, you are "free" (liberated) to not pay money if you play by the rules (the GPL). You are free to learn from and modify the software to suit your needs. You are free to not be beholden to a company that may take away your ability to use the software you've paid for at a moment's notice. They key statement is that YOU are free. But the software is not.
Linux and other Free Software is the result of years and years of sweat and cleverness from countless fantastic developers. They offer this to you for your benefit, and what they ask of you, the cost that you incur, is that you are never allowed to take what they've done and lock it up and release it so that no one else can ever see what you've done to it. This inability to lock it up counts as a huge cost to many companies who want nothing more than to grab whatever they can and not share it with anyone.
What people don't realize is that paying money to Microsoft doesn't give you a better deal. It's not just inferior. You're shackled. When you use proprietary software, YOU are no longer free.
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Ok, what do I know about cooling, right? For ages, Intel processors have had a facility to protect against overheating should the CPU fan fall off or whatever. When the temperature gets too high, the CPU is made to sleep for periods of time necessary to keep it cool enough. The key point is that the system keeps running, just more slowly. Now, why can't data centers emply something like that? Servers that sleep to keep cool and then just ventilation systems that circulate air with the outside. Server response is slower, but nothing goes down.
It seems to me that it's common knowledge that Comcast are bastards. I pity anyone who is unfortunate enough to live in a place where they have to get their internet service from Comcast.
If Apple had just sold unlocked phones, there MIGHT have done just fine. But I think this deal with AT&T dramatically improved their chances. A lot of the process of rolling out a new product is publicity, and making this deal with AT&T gave them an immediate advertizing channel. Plus, Apple is very careful about this "experience" thing, where they control the environment so as to minimize problems. MacOS is awesome for the novice, but to make it usable for an expert does require a fair amount of tweaking with some add-on programs and such. The thing is, if Apple were to ship with these things, they'd be increasing their chances of problems. If you install a third-party app, and the system does something funny, then it's your fault or the fault of the app developer. But Apple does not by any means PRECLUDE these add-ons when you know what you're doing.
This goes along with the current lack of dev kit or the iPhone. The launch MUST go smoothly, with minimal problems. Delaying the introduction of a dev kit gives Apple the opportunity to demonstrate how a virgin iPhone works. If a dev kit had been released with the phone, the market would have been flooded with 3rd part apps that would muddy the waters--people won't necessarily be able to distinguish whether a major problem was the fault of Apple or the 3rd party. People are most likely to blame Apple. Once we're used to virgin iPhones, then when 3rd party apps break things, Apple benefits because we automatically blame the app developer instead.
So, back to the locking issue, supporting a single carrier is FAR easier than supporting everyone. For one thing, AT&T were actually willing to work with Apple in order to support interesting features like the visual voice mail. That is, certain features exist ONLY because of the relationship. If Apple had tried to work with every carrier, then some carriers would not provide services that are an integral part of the iPhone experience that is making everyone drool over it. Add to that the complications of activating a phone. With one carrier, it's trivial. With every carrier, just associating the phone with the network requires technical knowledge that many people don't have. Even if the problems were relatively slight, they would have MASSIVE impact on adoption.
So, I maintain that stricking a deal with a carrier (any carrier, but a specific one) was CRITICAL to the market penetration of the iPhone. This gives Apple the control they need over the network. The contract with AT&T goes both ways. If you can't use your unlocked iPhone with T-Mobile's feature X, you're screwed. If you can't get it to work with AT&T, you call customer service, and they fix it for you. Indeed, you're not going to want to have an iPhone with a carrier that Apple doesn't have a contract with. You WILL run into some technical problem along the way, and you're going to want to have a supported device on a supported carrier. The only difference is that all the carriers use the same phone and would let you migrate between them. (Or they better, else Apple will be doing something stupid or inexplicably failing in the market.)
BTW, those who already own iPhones probably hope that, once the AT&T contract is over, Apple will provide a way to unlock your phone. This might or might not happen. Apple's far better than other PC makers about supporting older hardware, but they also engage in tactical obsolescence. A first-gen iPod will work fine with the latest iTunes, but there are no firmware updates for it, so you don't get, for instance, memory as to where you left off when you were last listening to an audiobook or podcast. Every time you patch a device's firmware, you take a risk of breaking it, so there are not just profit but also engineering reasons to not provide an "it ain't broke" update like that, even if the newer iPhones are unlocked.
It's a two-year deal.
That's MARKET penetration, for the dirty-minded of you out there.
Listen, I'm not going to buy an iPhone any time soon. I'm a grad student and just can't afford it. In fact, by the time I can afford one, every other cell phone manufacturer will have something that copies all its features, although Apple will also keep up and have some better phones, etc. But I think Apple is doing absolutely the right thing with the iPhone, and as annoying as some of their actions have been, they're ultimately going to our benefit as well as theirs. This isn't altruism. They want profit. It's just that they know about user demand, but they presently have their hands tied.
Here's something you need to realize: Apple doesn't like this lockin any more than you do. Oh, sure, they like the kickbacks, no doubt. But the lockin has caused them untold grief from both technical and PR angles. And the KNEW this even before setting out.
So why put us through all this bullshit? Because before there was an iPhone, there was no specific demand for it. As an idea, there was GENERAL demand, but there wasn't a phone from Apple already that you could play with to tell that you really want a phone from Apple. If Apple were to start out with an unlocked phone, they would shoot themselves in the foot--no carrier would pick up their phone, because there wouldn't be enough guaranteed profit in it. As it is, Apple and AT&T have going basically the only way to go about it and not have the iPhone be a total waste of time that tanked before it started. The key factors here are (1) to get users familiar with it and addicted do it, and (2) make significant profit. The only way to do these things is to sell them by the millions. The only way to sell by the millions AN UNPROVEN PRODUCT is to make a deal with a major carrier who will see enough profit in it to help push it on buyers.
In short, what Apple did was SMART. Oh, it wasn't NICE. But it was SMART, because frankly, it's the only way to meet these basic business requirements.
I guarantee you that before iPhone+AT&T, T-Mobile was only passingly interested in it, considering it to be a very risky thing to take on. NOW, they're shitting themselves and are about ready to beg Apple to sell to them. Apple knows this. This is why Apple did what they did. They had to prove themselves, and now everyone wants them. One way to prove yourself is to sell the product successfully. The best way for them to sell the iPhone successfully THE FIRST TIME was to take another route.
Apple is smart and is going to take advantage of their popularity. Once AT&T becomes dependent on the iPhone because they see it as highly profitable, they'll agree to terms more favorable to Apple, which is that Apple will sell to other carriers, and the phones they sell will be unlocked! Apple is not only aware of what the users want; they've ancipated what the users want and are preparing to give us those features. They just can't yet. Apple is fighting tooth and nail with the unlockers, not because they give a shit about unlocking. They WANT unlocking. In fact, they're probably elated that users are able to use the phones on other networks. But they have to put on a good show for AT&T! They have a contract with AT&T that requires them to maintain the lockin. And they MUST maintain that lockin, because they have not YET achieved that critical mass of adoption.
Oh, BTW, if Apple doesn't do as I predict, users will become jaded and lose interest in the iPhone as the competition catches up and DOES provide what people want. I don't think Apple is that blind or stupid. Otherwise, they wouldn't get half their Mac sales from people who've never before owned a Mac.
This wouldn't be the first time someone who ostensibly was out to "do the right thing" resorted to blatantly unethical tactics. The fact is that most people can't understand the difference between some learned set of rules they call "morality" from the more general concept of right and wrong called "ethics." This is why fundies have no problems killing abortion doctors or terrorists killing thousands of innocents. Their moral high-ground is the only definition of right and wrong to them, and that gives them license to do anything the hell they want in the name of their morality. It's been this way throughout all of human history, and it's unlikely to change. People get it in their minds that anything counter to what they believe is evil and should be eradicated.
Now and then, I get an unsolicited email from someone, usually a job recruiter, in Word format. Sometimes it's an attachment, and sometimes, it's the whole damn email. I sometimes tell them that it's rude to send emails in a format that is not an open standard, especially if I'm totally interested in what they have to say. This one time, some recruiter women kept sending me short emails in Word format, where the whole email was in Word format. I asked her not to do that, but she kept doing it. I think she must had Word tied to Outlook with the wrong box checked, and she didn't know enough to fix the problem. It was incredibly frustrating for me, because I was using a Linux box, and I had to exlicitly download and load each email into OOo just to read it.
I've sometimes wondered... why don't drive manufactures make drives that have more than one read/write head arm? Random access times would be dramatically improved, no?
Cost? Reliability? With what they're spending to add flash, they could afford the cost of another head. Of course, it also occurs to me that if you want multiple heads, you can go for some kind of RAID configuration.
As far as I understand both the dairy allergy in the other patient I mentioned and the soy allergy that I have are things that run in the family. My mother has a mild soy allergy, and the other patient's mother and grandmother have problems with dairy. I would agree with you that, often, some other thing can be the cause of the sensitivity, but in these two cases, they seem to be more examples of "genetic defects."
I'd say that, far more than people realize, health problems can be nailed down to nutritional issues. I don't mean "too much fat" or that sort of thing. People suffer weird symptoms from specific vitamin deficiencies and the like.
For instance, I know one person who suffered from "hypothyroidism" for a long time and had to take T4 supplements. It turned out that her real problem was an iodine deficiency, that itself was likely caused by being on the birth control pill. Taking high doses of an iodine supplement cleared up the problem very quickly, and her thyroid began functioning properly again.
I know another patient who was inexplicably ill for many years. After an IgG panel blood test, it was determined that she had a food alergy to casein, the principal protein in milk and other dairy derivatives. This isn't the sort of IgE alergy that causes itching or anaphalaxis, but the IgG kind that takes days to set in, and the symptoms are less severe and can be flu-like. Part of the reason she never considered cutting out dairy was that she is not, in fact, lactose intolerant, so lactase ensyme didn't help. Eliminating dairy entirely solved her problem.
Just like the preceding case, I have an IgG reaction to soy protein. Imagine trying to avoid soy in the U.S. Soybean oil is the default "vegetable oil," soya lecithin is used as an emusifier in lots of foods, and soy protein isolate (not considered to be a food by the FDA) is added to lots of things that want to report having high protein content. Oh, and don't forget the estrogen analogues found in soy. Anyhow, challenging as it was, eliminating soy products resulted in a huge improvement to my energy level. (I suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, and my nutritionist believes that it was caused by the soy alergy compromising my immune system.)
I know lots of people who have suffered from prolonged illness that was completely blown off by MDs that was then remedied very quickly by a nutritionist. And it frustrates me to no end how ignorant MDs are about nutritional effects and that they never refer people to nutritionists!
Ok, so what's my point? That in a lot of cases, I would not be surprised of there was some kind of food that people are sensitive to or which is eaten to excess that has compromised part of their metabolism. Taking insulin shots was a bandaid for diabetics. Taking something to inhibit PKCepsilon production is a BETTER bandaid, but it's still a bandaid. Someone's got to figure out the root cause.
Oh, did you know that a significant number of autism cases, when caught early enough, show remarkable improvement when wheat and dairy are removed from their diets? Many neurologists will tell you otherwise, but that's because they just don't study nutrition in school. The nutritionists know otherwise.
Oh, and BTW, I'm not against MDs. I just know their limitations. Got a broken bone, lyme disease, or a structural organ failure? Better go to an MD. But many of the little things that affect people's health are not in the "take this pill" or "let me operate" categories but rather in the "don't eat this" and "eat this instead" categories. The effect of environment and intake has a HUGE impact on the human body!
I wonder if eventually the speed and latency of USB will reach a point where SATA, for instance, becomes unnecessary. Or how about ethernet? We'll always need REALLY fast links like PCIe or dedicated ones like DVI. But when it comes to busses, perhaps it would be good to settle on one standard. I'm envisioning something along the lines of 100 gigabit ethernet, except all computers would have a whole bunch of dedicated ports, rather than just one network.
I'm going to give you an "If I were them, I would have...", but in this case, it's not hollow. I've actually done this before, to positive effect. If you're going to use someone else's code under terms slightly different from what they clearly intended, I see an obvious course of action: ASK PERMISSION.
They say that it's often easier to get forgiveness than permission. This is absolutely not the case in the FOSS community. Yes, Theo is a hot-head, and he's clearly over-reacting. But at the same time, some Linux contributor didn't think very hard about the wishes of the original author of the code they borrowed. They just took it. In the FOSS community, we're not about copyright. We're about ethical sharing of ideas and the rights of both software developers and software users.
How long could it have taken to ask? "May I use your code?" "May I alter the license on your code?" "If not, is there some compromise we can reach?"
Learn some manners!
I think Free Software is important, I share a lot of Stallman's ideals, and I use terms like "Free Software" and "GNU/Linux". I think it's important to have ethical ideals and stick to them.
What I don't like is all of this useless bickering. I'm not particularly religious, but I like inter-faith organizations, because they try to look past their differences a work together for common good. I think RMS, ESR, and LBT should stop bitching at each other and start cooperating.
Because it seems like a total waste and a potential point of failure to have a package manager when a better system design would eliminate the need for it entirely. Seems straight forward to me. It's always a win if you can make a system simpler, more reliable, and more intuitive all in one fell swoop.
You should consider studying a bit of cognitive engineering.
For practical reasons, people often find they have to use Windows. There are a lot of practical people out there, trying to actually GET STUFF DONE, so they make choices based on need.
/bin, /usr, /etc, /usr/local and who knows where else that has pushed me away from most Linux distros towards using BogoLinux, PC-BSD, and MacOS X.
In a similar vein, it is frustration with the out-dated UNIX system of spreading bits of applications around inconsistent places in
Ok, well, I've been using NetBeans on a Mac, and it looks really nice. You say it looks good on Windows. So it sounds like they need to really seriously work on the Linux version.
Why do we see do may articles that mention Eclipse as though it's the default IDE for Java development and whatnot, when so many of the professional programmers I know say they prefer NetBeans because it's a more intuitive, less busy interface?
Well, this is how Ubuntu Feisty Fawn did it.
You seem to forget that they ALREADY have this tool. It runs when you install the OS! It's very smart and figures out exactly what card you have and everything!
The problems occur when you do something as simple as move the graphics card to a different slot after installation. X is not smart enough to figure out that it just needs to substitute a different PCI bus ID.
Ok, I'm sure others have too, but I filed a bug report on this problem a LOOOONG time ago. It's taken them quite a long time to get around to fixing this, a rather significant usability problem.
Plenty disagree, but just as many agree. The UNIX file system organization that splits a single app across multiple different places (/bin, /usr, /etc) is unintuitive and needs to go away. Moreover, how each app is organized is not necessary the same as every other. Plenty of people learn how things are organized, but having to memorize these arbitrary things increases the cognitive load for experts and makes it harder to learn for novices. Just starting by putting each app in its own self-contained directory under /Programs or /Applications like GoboLinux or MacOS would be a good start in cleaning up this horrible mess. Just think: If we did this, these unreliable application managers like Adept would no longer be needed!
The OGP had started out by saying that they wanted to produce hardware that worked well with Free Software, but due to certain copyright issues, they wanted to keep some of the hardware design locked up. They got no end of flak for that. This was absurd, of course, because the OGP was offering to be far more open than any other graphics vendor had ever been before. It wasn't until Richard Stallman himself said that it would be necessary for the OGP to keep some of the hardware design closed that they received some vindication.
Conclusion? That many people don't understand the principles behind "Free Software" and think it just means "give everything away for no money."
One of the main points of the GPL is to ensure freedom of the end users to acquire source code. Without copyright law, there would be no way to compel someone who had closed up the source code to open it back up again.
Some people, particular when they feel it suits them, feel that any time someone breaks the law, they're wrong and must be punished. Smart people recognize that "legal" and "ethical" are two different things, but apparently, people at record companies aren't smart.
Now, one thing that must be said in their defense is that if you do NOTHING to defend your intellectual property, what's likely to happen is that you'll lose your rights altogether. Under certain IP laws, you are require to defend your IP. But let's ask what would happen if the recording industry did NOTHING to defend their rights? That's easy. Everyone would assume they didn't care, piracy would run rampant, and the general idea of copyright would degrade. You'll notice that in certain Asian countries, IP rights are not important and infringement on copyrights, patents, and trademarks is completely unchecked.
One of the reasons that music piracy actually increased revenue for record companies is because people using Napster knew in the back of their minds that this was illegal or wrong in some way. Some people even managed to think it through far enough to realize that artists might be harmed by not being paid for their work.
So, we all agree that RIAA and MPAA are bastards and what they're doing is wrong. But we cannot let the whole idea of copyright be annihilated. Individual authors should be afforded the right to influence how the fruits of their labors are handled, and they should have the right to profit from their labor. Copyright and patent have been taken to an absurd extreme, with the fundamental concepts totally abused. But we should fix the system, not abolish it altogether.
Just remember this: Without copyright law, the GPL wouldn't have the power it has to keep greedy people from taking your code and closing it up in their application.
Anyone with half a brain for business is fully aware that MONEY is not the only currency. How about contacts? Owed favors? Fame? Influence over people? Authority? Brand identity, trademarks, patents. And COPYRIGHTS. Anything that has value can be traded for something else of value.
Explain to your superiors that Linux is not given away "for free." With Linux, you are "free" (liberated) to not pay money if you play by the rules (the GPL). You are free to learn from and modify the software to suit your needs. You are free to not be beholden to a company that may take away your ability to use the software you've paid for at a moment's notice. They key statement is that YOU are free. But the software is not.
Linux and other Free Software is the result of years and years of sweat and cleverness from countless fantastic developers. They offer this to you for your benefit, and what they ask of you, the cost that you incur, is that you are never allowed to take what they've done and lock it up and release it so that no one else can ever see what you've done to it. This inability to lock it up counts as a huge cost to many companies who want nothing more than to grab whatever they can and not share it with anyone.
What people don't realize is that paying money to Microsoft doesn't give you a better deal. It's not just inferior. You're shackled. When you use proprietary software, YOU are no longer free.
Who wants to pay money to get fewer rights?