A similar list of Bosnian crimes would qualify the Serbian leadership as evil, too. And how about Indonesia's oppression of the East Timorese?
What worries me is that the Chinese (Tibet, Tiannanmen Square) and the Russians (Chechniya) are almost as bad but we are forced to turn a blind eye because they are too big for even the United Nations to deal with. Hell, the UN even got ass-whipped in Indonesia.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
But your brain might get confused and the reflexes that get called into play turn out to be the ones you learned playing Carmageddon or Grand Theft Auto. Pedestrians might not be too keen on the results.
"Hey - *I'm* walking here..." Fthlurp!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You may not like playing the next version of Tomb Raider. Lara tends to die by falling occasionally. That could be rather scary. Actually that's a masterpiece of understatement. Something tells me this is a feature that would *not* appear in the official version of any game.
Right, I'm off to patent a vomit-proof keyboard - the next Big Thing.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think you overestimate the involvement of conscious mental activity in colour classification. Colour perception is really a preconscious phenomenon.
It has been known since Young and Helmholtz in the 19th century that the division of the spectrum into perceived bands of colour is completely determined by genetically determined neural wiring and retinal pigments. And lower animals endowed with colour vision are able to classify colour stimuli - without any equipment for language or abstract reasoning. Bees have colour vision extending into the ultraviolet. But most scientists wouldn't contend that bees must think about what they see in order to recognise flower petals.
In the Berlin-Kay experiment the subjects placed their marks on the diagram according to eg. their perception of "red" and "blue". It's hardly possible to consciously analyze such a basic perceptual experience. It can only be done on "feel". In that limited sense we hardly differ from the bees.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
If you ask someone to classify a colour, there is very little abstract reasoning taking place! In any case, the reporting of which I speak was really non-verbal - the subjects in the Berlin-Kay "Basic Color Terms" experiment only had to put a dot in the middle of each perceived colour region and draw around its boundaries. Neither speaking, nor verbal nor abstract reasoning, was necessary. Are we talking about the same experiment or not?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I hope you're not suggesting that we all share a common language structure genetically preconfigured in our brains.
I admit that there will be practical limits to the complexity of utterances, in terms of the number of nested clauses etc., because of the (largely) shared limitations of our brains. But apart from that, grammar evolves within a culture simply according to need.
If a language is to be complete, some elements *need* to exist - nouns, verbs - just as procedural computer languages must have variables and executable instructions representing sequence and selection between conditions to be useful. And since the physical world is made of objects existing in time and space, acting and being acted upon, it is necessary for grammars to share constructs expressing relative proximity, tense, and who did what to whom. Necessity is the mother of invention, as Plato says. Or, to paraphrase Voltaire - if grammar did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.
But I see no solid evidence that any specific grammar or metagrammar beyond that is genetically preconfigured in our brains. If you think you have such evidence, then please share it.
Chomsky never succeedes in providing such evidence. And in the last few months, the most outspoken critic of Chomsky has become Chomsky himself; he's finally abandoned the burgeoning edifice of complexity he's been promoting for the last 50 years and now favours a "minimalist" grammar.
Ha! Vindicated at last...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
If you redefine cognitive science to include any scientific data about human minds, I'll agree that the only scientific inputs linguistics is getting come from CogSci. But by that definition, most linguists are cognitive scientists.
I'd have to disagree there. Cognitive Science is a fairly well-defined (if multidisciplinary) field and it relies heavily on neuroanatomical studies. I contend that in CogSci, a psychological theory (including anything in Linguistics) without neuroanatomical evidence to support it, is just pure speculation.
I could argue that the data coming from computer science, while helpful, isn't science at all.
It'd be a weak argument. Computer science really is a science, in the sense that it is a study of the behaviour of real systems - both physical ones and abstract ones. It allows us to put the math into motion, so to speak. It comprises both theory and practical experimentation; results can be numerically quantified, predicted by theory and verified by experiment. There is no meaningful definition of "science" I know of, which doesn't include Computer Science. Maybe you're still thinking more in terms of the old notion of "Natural Philosophy".
More recently, it has become harder to be taken seriously as a young linguist without some knowledge of AI methods. (This doesn't apply to the hard-core Chomskyans, who don't believe in AI, as if that made any difference.)
That's truly excellent news. About time! I believe Chomsky is vastly overrated. It's probably because he had the whole field of theoretical linguistics mostly to himself for so long.
...[mini-resume]...
The science credentials you claim are certainly more than adequate. I'm glad to see that science is creeping into the curriculum in some places at least. Perhaps you're talking about Linguistics as currently taught in the US? Not that it should make much difference - but my most direct experience of the field comes from my sister who's now doing her Master's at the University of York in the UK. From what she tells me, the field is still mainly about descriptive theories which provide very little in the way of testable predictions. That, in my book, is not science.
my citation of Berlin and Kay is not inappropriate. If the strongest form of Sapir-Whorf were true, this experiment should not have turned out that way. It covers more ground than the neurology of vision processing, since it shows that the mental manipulation of visual signals is independent of the native language of the subject.
I won't argue with that; vision is much older than language and all the neurology involved is highly specialised and mostly physically remote and separate from the associative cortex and other structures (Broca's, Wernicke's) involved in language processing and abstract reasoning. I agree that language doesn't shape vision at least on a low level. It is silly to advance a theory that *every* single aspect of our experience is constrained by language. Nothing is ever so simple or clear cut in complex emergent systems like human minds. But even a misconstrued "Strong" Whorf hypothesis doesn't claim any such thing. And I don't believe anyone here is supporting the strong form (I might like to, but I wouldn't dare;o)
I said your citation was inappropriate because I believed you were advancing it in support of the idea that language does not even partially constrain abstract thought. I hold that reports about the experience of simple visual stimuli are too limited in scope to have much to say on that subject. In any case, Berlin and Kay's conclusions in Basic Color Terms have been effectively disputed (and I for one fail to see how their results are supposed to *disprove* the dependence of subtle colour perception upon language), and Sapir and Whorf have been unjustly denounced most likely for sociopolitical reasons. It's just not done, these days, to suggest that culture or ethnicity could possibly have any deterministic effect on behaviour. Bah.
Still, thanks for the flame-free argument. I always enjoy debate when it's conducted on a civilised level. Kudos to you for that.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Perhaps you think that if we don't use numbers, it's not science.
I can't think offhand of any cases where this wouldn't be at least partly true. Science is about hypothesis, experiment and measurement.
perhaps you think that there's nothing behind the eyes doing the processing that allows you to describe color
No! You miss my point. An assertion about the role of language in the reporting of direct visual experiences says nothing about its role in abstract reasoning. Which is where the real controversy lies. Does our language guide and inform our mental habits - I think it does.
If science is infiltrating the linguistics field in some institutions now, I'm glad to hear it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Well yes, but at least processes are fairly easy to understand. Network traffic however is a bit more complicated. We could definitely do with some more visual tools to deal with the network side.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
We definitely need graphical network monitoring tools. I just can't hack it with the command line stuff because I can't get my head around the documentation for it all - you need to be a TCP/IP expert to get anywhere with it.
For example, it would be nice to have a graphical tool which would dynamically display the traffic on an interface, including any combination of fields in each packet as specified by the user in an onscreen dialogue. It would be nice to be able to monitor DNS requests and see the address and host name returned. It would be nice to be able to graph things like socket usage.
It occurs to me that maybe the TCP/IP stuff in Linux hasn't received a lot of attention because most of the mindshare involved doesn't really exist in the Linux community. The whole thing was brought over wholesale from NetBSD. That would probably also explain why we're still waiting for a multithreaded IP stack.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
How did you arrive at that conclusion? The general consensus seems to be that NFS on Linux still sucks badly (security problems). OTOH, in my own experience Samba is pretty reliable. And all the commercial sites I've seen that use Linux as a file server use Samba rather than NFS. There must be a reason for that.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Paul's right; the Berlin and Kay paper is about human vision processing and not about the manipulation of abstract conceptual structures. The two could hardly be farther apart. But this is the problem with linguistics in general - it's roots are in a descriptive field much like botany or zoology. These two became modern "hard" sciences only with the advent of biophysics, genetics and molecular biology.
Linguistics is still waiting to cross that threshhold. Its only truly scientific inputs are from computer science and cognitive science, and both of these are still relatively new. Linguistics is still taught more like an arts subject like anything else, a bit like psychology used to be.
This affects both the type of students attracted to the field, and their subsequent education. As a result, the majority of linguistics students have a relatively poor understanding of (and no instinctive feel for) science as a result. Your inappropriate citation of the Berlin and Kay study is a good example of this.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hey, wait up: I want to know more details about this home entertainment system you say you built, particularly what components you've used.
What sound card do you have? How have you addressed the video side? What size and type of TV or monitor display? What is the best solution for fast 3D graphics and high quality TV out? Are you using DVD with a hardware MPEG decoder? Do you have an hardware MPEG encoder to compress video on the fly? Does your solution allow you to override DVD region coding? What kind of hard drive setup do you have for recording video?
Apologies for the brusque interrogation but I just can't seem to find someone who's actually done this sort of PC-based media system and achieved quality approaching "domestic" consumer equipment.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Does anyone know if the new Red Hat Enterprise Edition supposedly carrying this IBM Java stuff will include (as standard) those kernel performance tweaks published by that IBM research lab the other day?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I agree. I think the problem is Scott McNealy himself. The only thing he's been consistent about is contradicting himself, cynically switching horses whenever he sees an advantage in doing so. Clearly he won't be satisfied until he's ousted Microsoft and replaced Gates with himself as king of the world's biggest software empire.
This Solaris 8 giveaway is the biggest threat to the continued growth of the Linux community that we've ever seen.
But Sun's real target (for the moment at any rate) is NT2000, not Linux. Just think about that for a moment. It can be difficult to replace NT with Linux in an organisation run by besuited ignorami. But it won't be so difficult to replace NT with Solaris now, will it?
May I take a moment to remind you all of the last time a large software corporation did something like this; that was when Microsoft decided to own the browser market and began giving away Internet Explorer. The result was the decline of Netscape Communications Inc, and the opening up of the Communicator source code.
Maybe in a year or two Microsoft, in an attempt to win support and revive their flagging market presence after a thorough beating from Sun, will be forced to open up the source to Windows2K. I wonder what Windows will look like after the hackers have been at it.
Winux! (shudder)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:Down, rabid linux puppy, down!!
on
Free Solaris 8
·
· Score: 2
You made a few good points there which were quite sufficient to vanquish the poster you responded; provable facts always speak for themselves.
But then you had to go and spoil it with all that personal vitriol.
And if you gave up using Linux just because there are *some* users who are a bit over-enthusiastic, then more fool you. I'm still using Linux and all the flaming doesn't seem to affect the functionality of the system one bit.
Explain to me again: what exactly *is* the difference between rabid Linux zealots and rabid Solaris zealots?
Maybe we'd all be better off if we could just lay off the ad hominem attacks and stick to the technical discussion. Otherwise they might as well rename this website "News for Thugs".
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:He can be amazed all he wants
on
Free Solaris 8
·
· Score: 2
Solaris was released for Intel chips because of Linux.
Not true. Sun had their Unix on x86 long before Linux became credible as a commercial platform.
If a business owns a number of Sparcs, they'd have Solaris on them. With Solaris 8 coming out, it makes it even more rosier for these guys to install it due to being free of charge. Not free as in free beer tho.
This *is* true. I'd go further; a lot of businesses currently considering whether to take the plunge and deploy Linux will quite probably decide to take the freebie from Sun instead. Especially for database applications.
Sun has a lot of respect. For example in the City of London (one of the biggest financial centres in the world) almost *all* server applications live on Solaris boxes. IMO this offer will be just too tempting for most commercial IT buyers to resist.
Of course Sun have to make their money somehow. I think we ought to expect the price of their other software (development tools) and their support services to suffer a substantial hike soon.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's an intriguing idea, in terms of hitting them where it hurts. But you have to think about what it would mean.
This very thread is evidence enough that not every geek is on our side. Yet, an effective strike requires that everybody is out and stays out. So that means picket lines, and probably confrontation. Thatcher destroyed the right of Unions to picket in the UK back in the early 1980'S, when she sent the police in against the National Union of Miners.
I think it's safe to say that Trade Union rights are hardly better protected in the US.
So, go ahead, but you'd better have the belly for a real fight!
Seriously, I just don't believe this is going to happen, or anything like it. Only a couple of people are really hurting; the vast majority of us are much too comfortable, selfish, stupid and lazy to put our money, our jobs and our lives where our collective mouth is.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
These data havens have already existed for some time. They are called warez sites. The location of the infringing data varies over time, the warez site itself usually just carries links to the files. Each warez site indexes the contents of multiple servers, each server is indexed by multiple warez sites.
This multiple redundancy is why warez are impossible to eradicate - and the reason why the MPAA can NEVER make the DeCSS source go away, no matter what they do. (Has anybody told them yet?)
Anybody can host forbidden files for a warez site by putting them in a directory of the free web site granted by their ISP, though they might want to make that directory unreadable by HTTP, to limit snooping by narks.
IMO your open source project would still be very useful as it would allow more data havens to be set up. Currently people have to hack up their own, all of them are ugly (and festooned with porn ads, voting buttons, darned popups etc).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Er...at 2AM in the morning, what else can you do? How many lawyers do *you* know whose offices are open at 2AM? And where other than Slashdot would be a better place to get the word out to people sympathetic to his cause?
It's your post that sounds bogus, IMHO. I wonder...who would have a vested interest in dampening the public reaction to this jackboot raid?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot Mirror
A similar list of Bosnian crimes would qualify the Serbian leadership as evil, too. And how about Indonesia's oppression of the East Timorese?
What worries me is that the Chinese (Tibet, Tiannanmen Square) and the Russians (Chechniya) are almost as bad but we are forced to turn a blind eye because they are too big for even the United Nations to deal with. Hell, the UN even got ass-whipped in Indonesia.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
That wouldn't surprise me.
Emacs is a fine operating system. But I've seen better editors...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
But your brain might get confused and the reflexes that get called into play turn out to be the ones you learned playing Carmageddon or Grand Theft Auto. Pedestrians might not be too keen on the results.
"Hey - *I'm* walking here..." Fthlurp!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You may not like playing the next version of Tomb Raider. Lara tends to die by falling occasionally. That could be rather scary. Actually that's a masterpiece of understatement. Something tells me this is a feature that would *not* appear in the official version of any game.
Right, I'm off to patent a vomit-proof keyboard - the next Big Thing.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think you overestimate the involvement of conscious mental activity in colour classification. Colour perception is really a preconscious phenomenon.
It has been known since Young and Helmholtz in the 19th century that the division of the spectrum into perceived bands of colour is completely determined by genetically determined neural wiring and retinal pigments. And lower animals endowed with colour vision are able to classify colour stimuli - without any equipment for language or abstract reasoning. Bees have colour vision extending into the ultraviolet. But most scientists wouldn't contend that bees must think about what they see in order to recognise flower petals.
In the Berlin-Kay experiment the subjects placed their marks on the diagram according to eg. their perception of "red" and "blue". It's hardly possible to consciously analyze such a basic perceptual experience. It can only be done on "feel". In that limited sense we hardly differ from the bees.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I see no contradiction here.
If you ask someone to classify a colour, there is very little abstract reasoning taking place! In any case, the reporting of which I speak was really non-verbal - the subjects in the Berlin-Kay "Basic Color Terms" experiment only had to put a dot in the middle of each perceived colour region and draw around its boundaries. Neither speaking, nor verbal nor abstract reasoning, was necessary. Are we talking about the same experiment or not?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I hope you're not suggesting that we all share a common language structure genetically preconfigured in our brains.
I admit that there will be practical limits to the complexity of utterances, in terms of the number of nested clauses etc., because of the (largely) shared limitations of our brains. But apart from that, grammar evolves within a culture simply according to need.
If a language is to be complete, some elements *need* to exist - nouns, verbs - just as procedural computer languages must have variables and executable instructions representing sequence and selection between conditions to be useful. And since the physical world is made of objects existing in time and space, acting and being acted upon, it is necessary for grammars to share constructs expressing relative proximity, tense, and who did what to whom. Necessity is the mother of invention, as Plato says. Or, to paraphrase Voltaire - if grammar did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.
But I see no solid evidence that any specific grammar or metagrammar beyond that is genetically preconfigured in our brains. If you think you have such evidence, then please share it.
Chomsky never succeedes in providing such evidence. And in the last few months, the most outspoken critic of Chomsky has become Chomsky himself; he's finally abandoned the burgeoning edifice of complexity he's been promoting for the last 50 years and now favours a "minimalist" grammar.
Ha! Vindicated at last...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If you redefine cognitive science to include any scientific data about human minds, I'll agree that the only scientific inputs linguistics is getting come from CogSci. But by that definition, most linguists are cognitive scientists.
;o)
I'd have to disagree there. Cognitive Science is a fairly well-defined (if multidisciplinary) field and it relies heavily on neuroanatomical studies. I contend that in CogSci, a psychological theory (including anything in Linguistics) without neuroanatomical evidence to support it, is just pure speculation.
I could argue that the data coming from computer science, while helpful, isn't science at all.
It'd be a weak argument. Computer science really is a science, in the sense that it is a study of the behaviour of real systems - both physical ones and abstract ones. It allows us to put the math into motion, so to speak. It comprises both theory and practical experimentation; results can be numerically quantified, predicted by theory and verified by experiment. There is no meaningful definition of "science" I know of, which doesn't include Computer Science. Maybe you're still thinking more in terms of the old notion of "Natural Philosophy".
More recently, it has become harder to be taken seriously as a young linguist without some knowledge of AI methods. (This doesn't apply to the hard-core Chomskyans, who don't believe in AI, as if that made any difference.)
That's truly excellent news. About time! I believe Chomsky is vastly overrated. It's probably because he had the whole field of theoretical linguistics mostly to himself for so long.
...[mini-resume]...
The science credentials you claim are certainly more than adequate. I'm glad to see that science is creeping into the curriculum in some places at least. Perhaps you're talking about Linguistics as currently taught in the US? Not that it should make much difference - but my most direct experience of the field comes from my sister who's now doing her Master's at the University of York in the UK. From what she tells me, the field is still mainly about descriptive theories which provide very little in the way of testable predictions. That, in my book, is not science.
my citation of Berlin and Kay is not inappropriate. If the strongest form of Sapir-Whorf were true, this experiment should not have turned out that way. It covers more ground than the neurology of vision processing, since it shows that the mental manipulation of visual signals is independent of the native language of the subject.
I won't argue with that; vision is much older than language and all the neurology involved is highly specialised and mostly physically remote and separate from the associative cortex and other structures (Broca's, Wernicke's) involved in language processing and abstract reasoning. I agree that language doesn't shape vision at least on a low level. It is silly to advance a theory that *every* single aspect of our experience is constrained by language. Nothing is ever so simple or clear cut in complex emergent systems like human minds. But even a misconstrued "Strong" Whorf hypothesis doesn't claim any such thing. And I don't believe anyone here is supporting the strong form (I might like to, but I wouldn't dare
I said your citation was inappropriate because I believed you were advancing it in support of the idea that language does not even partially constrain abstract thought. I hold that reports about the experience of simple visual stimuli are too limited in scope to have much to say on that subject. In any case, Berlin and Kay's conclusions in Basic Color Terms have been effectively disputed (and I for one fail to see how their results are supposed to *disprove* the dependence of subtle colour perception upon language), and Sapir and Whorf have been unjustly denounced most likely for sociopolitical reasons. It's just not done, these days, to suggest that culture or ethnicity could possibly have any deterministic effect on behaviour. Bah.
Still, thanks for the flame-free argument. I always enjoy debate when it's conducted on a civilised level. Kudos to you for that.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Perhaps you think that if we don't use numbers, it's not science.
I can't think offhand of any cases where this wouldn't be at least partly true. Science is about hypothesis, experiment and measurement.
perhaps you think that there's nothing behind the eyes doing the processing that allows you to describe color
No! You miss my point. An assertion about the role of language in the reporting of direct visual experiences says nothing about its role in abstract reasoning. Which is where the real controversy lies. Does our language guide and inform our mental habits - I think it does.
If science is infiltrating the linguistics field in some institutions now, I'm glad to hear it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Well yes, but at least processes are fairly easy to understand. Network traffic however is a bit more complicated. We could definitely do with some more visual tools to deal with the network side.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
We definitely need graphical network monitoring tools. I just can't hack it with the command line stuff because I can't get my head around the documentation for it all - you need to be a TCP/IP expert to get anywhere with it.
For example, it would be nice to have a graphical tool which would dynamically display the traffic on an interface, including any combination of fields in each packet as specified by the user in an onscreen dialogue. It would be nice to be able to monitor DNS requests and see the address and host name returned. It would be nice to be able to graph things like socket usage.
It occurs to me that maybe the TCP/IP stuff in Linux hasn't received a lot of attention because most of the mindshare involved doesn't really exist in the Linux community. The whole thing was brought over wholesale from NetBSD. That would probably also explain why we're still waiting for a multithreaded IP stack.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
IMO both nfs and coda are superior
How did you arrive at that conclusion? The general consensus seems to be that NFS on Linux still sucks badly (security problems). OTOH, in my own experience Samba is pretty reliable. And all the commercial sites I've seen that use Linux as a file server use Samba rather than NFS. There must be a reason for that.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Paul's right; the Berlin and Kay paper is about human vision processing and not about the manipulation of abstract conceptual structures. The two could hardly be farther apart. But this is the problem with linguistics in general - it's roots are in a descriptive field much like botany or zoology. These two became modern "hard" sciences only with the advent of biophysics, genetics and molecular biology.
Linguistics is still waiting to cross that threshhold. Its only truly scientific inputs are from computer science and cognitive science, and both of these are still relatively new. Linguistics is still taught more like an arts subject like anything else, a bit like psychology used to be.
This affects both the type of students attracted to the field, and their subsequent education. As a result, the majority of linguistics students have a relatively poor understanding of (and no instinctive feel for) science as a result. Your inappropriate citation of the Berlin and Kay study is a good example of this.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hey, wait up: I want to know more details about this home entertainment system you say you built, particularly what components you've used.
What sound card do you have?
How have you addressed the video side?
What size and type of TV or monitor display?
What is the best solution for fast 3D graphics and high quality TV out?
Are you using DVD with a hardware MPEG decoder? Do you have an hardware MPEG encoder to compress video on the fly?
Does your solution allow you to override DVD region coding?
What kind of hard drive setup do you have for recording video?
Apologies for the brusque interrogation but I just can't seem to find someone who's actually done this sort of PC-based media system and achieved quality approaching "domestic" consumer equipment.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Does anyone know if the new Red Hat Enterprise Edition supposedly carrying this IBM Java stuff will include (as standard) those kernel performance tweaks published by that IBM research lab the other day?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
What's the probability that he was *really* seeking to do a positive writeup? I mean, come on.
Oh...First post?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I want everyone who supports Jon to go there and vote if they haven't done so already. The current score is quite revealing...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
This shouldn't have been posted as a new separate story, it's really just an update to the original "Jon Johansen Indicted..." one IMHO.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I agree. I think the problem is Scott McNealy himself. The only thing he's been consistent about is contradicting himself, cynically switching horses whenever he sees an advantage in doing so. Clearly he won't be satisfied until he's ousted Microsoft and replaced Gates with himself as king of the world's biggest software empire.
This Solaris 8 giveaway is the biggest threat to the continued growth of the Linux community that we've ever seen.
But Sun's real target (for the moment at any rate) is NT2000, not Linux. Just think about that for a moment. It can be difficult to replace NT with Linux in an organisation run by besuited ignorami. But it won't be so difficult to replace NT with Solaris now, will it?
May I take a moment to remind you all of the last time a large software corporation did something like this; that was when Microsoft decided to own the browser market and began giving away Internet Explorer. The result was the decline of Netscape Communications Inc, and the opening up of the Communicator source code.
Maybe in a year or two Microsoft, in an attempt to win support and revive their flagging market presence after a thorough beating from Sun, will be forced to open up the source to Windows2K. I wonder what Windows will look like after the hackers have been at it.
Winux! (shudder)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You made a few good points there which were quite sufficient to vanquish the poster you responded; provable facts always speak for themselves.
But then you had to go and spoil it with all that personal vitriol.
And if you gave up using Linux just because there are *some* users who are a bit over-enthusiastic, then more fool you. I'm still using Linux and all the flaming doesn't seem to affect the functionality of the system one bit.
Explain to me again: what exactly *is* the difference between rabid Linux zealots and rabid Solaris zealots?
Maybe we'd all be better off if we could just lay off the ad hominem attacks and stick to the technical discussion. Otherwise they might as well rename this website "News for Thugs".
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Solaris was released for Intel chips because of Linux.
Not true. Sun had their Unix on x86 long before Linux became credible as a commercial platform.
If a business owns a number of Sparcs, they'd have Solaris on them. With Solaris 8 coming out, it makes it even more rosier for these guys to install it due to being free of charge. Not free as in free beer tho.
This *is* true. I'd go further; a lot of businesses currently considering whether to take the plunge and deploy Linux will quite probably decide to take the freebie from Sun instead. Especially for database applications.
Sun has a lot of respect. For example in the City of London (one of the biggest financial centres in the world) almost *all* server applications live on Solaris boxes. IMO this offer will be just too tempting for most commercial IT buyers to resist.
Of course Sun have to make their money somehow. I think we ought to expect the price of their other software (development tools) and their support services to suffer a substantial hike soon.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
He used some else's computer, you stupid twat.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's an intriguing idea, in terms of hitting them where it hurts. But you have to think about what it would mean.
This very thread is evidence enough that not every geek is on our side. Yet, an effective strike requires that everybody is out and stays out. So that means picket lines, and probably confrontation. Thatcher destroyed the right of Unions to picket in the UK back in the early 1980'S, when she sent the police in against the National Union of Miners.
I think it's safe to say that Trade Union rights are hardly better protected in the US.
So, go ahead, but you'd better have the belly for a real fight!
Seriously, I just don't believe this is going to happen, or anything like it. Only a couple of people are really hurting; the vast majority of us are much too comfortable, selfish, stupid and lazy to put our money, our jobs and our lives where our collective mouth is.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
These data havens have already existed for some time. They are called warez sites. The location of the infringing data varies over time, the warez site itself usually just carries links to the files. Each warez site indexes the contents of multiple servers, each server is indexed by multiple warez sites.
This multiple redundancy is why warez are impossible to eradicate - and the reason why the MPAA can NEVER make the DeCSS source go away, no matter what they do. (Has anybody told them yet?)
Anybody can host forbidden files for a warez site by putting them in a directory of the free web site granted by their ISP, though they might want to make that directory unreadable by HTTP, to limit snooping by narks.
IMO your open source project would still be very useful as it would allow more data havens to be set up. Currently people have to hack up their own, all of them are ugly (and festooned with porn ads, voting buttons, darned popups etc).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Er...at 2AM in the morning, what else can you do? How many lawyers do *you* know whose offices are open at 2AM? And where other than Slashdot would be a better place to get the word out to people sympathetic to his cause?
It's your post that sounds bogus, IMHO. I wonder...who would have a vested interest in dampening the public reaction to this jackboot raid?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction