Hey, that's completely fucking *unfair*, unjustified and completely WRONG.
When NASA had proper government support they sent men to the Moon. With basically 1950's technology ferchrissakes! Now we look back at what they achieved with the Apollo moonshots and gawp in wonder.
Since then instead of continued support they've had nothing but indifference from the public and he Whitehouse and hostility from Congress, which seems to be largely composed of people bickering over their share of the pork barrel. So NASA's budget has been squeezed tighter and tighter. Add on top of that the fact that space travel is expensive, all their stuff has to be custom made by large aerospace contractors who thoroughly rip them off in the process.
Experimental space vehicles like Pioneer and Voyager are bound to suffer failures, if only a couple of them were built then they are by definition prototypes only. Do you know *any* group on Earth who can design and build perfect, infallible machines for such a hostile environment, on a tight budget, using crooked contractors - and get it right the first time, every time?
The Space Shuttle of course has had time to evolve over the course of its 19-year career. And that's why out of 96 (so far, I think) LEO space missions only ONE of them had casualties. Just think about that for a moment. Remember, we're not talking about a quick trip down to the shops in the motor. We're talking about riding an enormous stack of burning high explosive right out of the atmosphere and back, in craft now nearly twenty years old whose design dates back to the early seventies. How many organisations do you know that can build CARS that last for twenty years, never mind spacecraft.
As to your final point, is it really NASA's fault that they couldn't get the funding for the right experiments in Viking? No. What would you have had them do - go home in a sulk? They were right to send a probe anyway, even one with NO scientific mission because, first and foremost, they are in the business of space travel technology development and exploration. For that reason they built and flew the thing and their part of that was a success. It was Congress who failed, because they were too damn ignorant and too damn cheap to pay for the right payload.
I won't bother to admonish you to cut NASA some slack because it's quite clear that your judgment of them is so ill-considered it's hardly even worthy of consideration.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think of Slashdot as being the twenty-first century equivalent of the newspaper. I have no doubt that Slashdot has a relatively large influence on the active agenda of the internet geek community by helping to shape opinion, mobilise popular support etc. Maybe the reason Rob and Jeff don't want to open up the submissions queue is because they'd lose editorial control. After all, it's a very big thing to own your own newspaper and have that amount of influence.
So why am I mentioning this here? Bear with me a moment.
It just occurred to me that a similar sort of thinking could be behind their reluctance to release the current version of the Slash source code. The currently available version is missing all the whizzy moderation features etc that make Slashdot different from other sites.
Now if the dynamic duo did release the current version as Open Source, I'll bet you space credits to navy beans that within a couple of weeks there would be at least one Slashdot-alike up on the net with the very features that so many readers seem to want but Rob and Jeff don't want to implement.
And the Slashdot crew would then be forced to follow suit or else risk seeing their readership melt away as they abandon Slashdot for a more open, democratic news site.
To put it more succinctly, if the above scenario is likely then opening up the current source would inevitably (i) lead to (i) stiffer competition (ii) force Slashdot to evolve according to public demand and (iii) cause a major loss of editorial control.
Even if Rob and Jeff were prepared to take the risk, Andover might not be.
Of course this line of reasoning assumes that readers would want moderation-style influence over the selection of headline stories. But there's plenty of evidence that this is in fact the case, just read the rest of the comments to see for yourself.
And just think what evolution in that direction would mean. The Slash system with added open submissions moderation system would provide a truly open forum along the lines of Usenet, but with active moderation. It would be what Usenet was meant to be, what it could have been if not for the terrible signal-to-noise ratio and the horrible time lag between post and response. It would be the Usenet that we always wanted.
However, Rob and Jeff and Andover at large have their own interests to protect.
For that reason, I don't believe we will see the current version released under the GPL until someone else releases an open sourced and functionally equivalent system thus making the issue moot.
Who can blame them, really.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
If it is not safe enough to land a probe there, we can forget about manned mars missions.
That's an entirely unwarranted conclusion. In the first place, manned vehicles aren't *planned* to smash into the planet at hundreds of miles per hour. And when you have an experienced human pilot you can pick a landing spot with far better precision than is possible via onboard AI and telemetry.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Well done Crutcher, 7/7: that's the only credible list of predictions I'vd seen posted here.
You've really got to laugh at the cluelessness of the authors of that Time piece. Linux more important in embedded apps? What?!? Look, even if Linux completely replaced every other embedded OS the world, no-one would notice or care. We'd still all be salivating over the next release of KDE or Gnome or name your particular poison.
As as far as the great unwashed are concerned, it's those same advances in the desktop that will make Linux pop up on their radar for the first time. That's when Linux fever, incubated for ten years by us meme carriers, will literally sweep the world. Bye bye to Microsoft soon after, I think. I wouldn't call this a prediction really, it's a no-brainer.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I agree though that its going to be difficult to make money out of the traffic. Traditional per-click banner advertising fees aren't much use, it requires massive volumes. I know the more serious financial web businesses are moving away from that model altogether, in favour of partnerships of various kinds involving referral fees and commissions. However, it's hard to imagine what could generate significant levels of income from a geek demographic. You can only buy so many toys etc. And most of us surely buy our hardware and software from sources we've sought out ourselves rather than on impulse after clicking on an ad.
Personally, I rarely pay any attention to banner ads at all, and the only way for a hardware or software seller to get *my* business is to be indexed effectively in my search engine of choice (at present that's google).
Some people commenting on this list have implied that Andover had difficulty getting the IPO because they still don't have the revenue to justify the share price they want. How can this be? Surely they had a *plan* in mind when they bought Slashdot? Was their plan simply to jump on the bandwagon and hope that someone else would figure it all out later?
I wounder how many internet companies filing for IPO's have done so in the knowledge that their business model was a pipe dream, and with the intention of using the capital thus raised to build a *real* business?
It's kind of reminiscent of the old story about the soup stone.
The upshot of all this has to be that unless businesses like Andover manage to find a completely new revenue model *very soon* that no-one's even thought of yet, their investors will surely wake up and realise that their trendy internet stocks have no underlying value.
Rob and Hemos may well find that they're running Slashdot as a hobby again before the year is out; if Andover owes them money they should try to get hold of it while they still can. Though they're probably going to get worthless stock options instead, that seems to be the way these things work. Everybody's paying each other in promises these days.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I doubt that very much. A month would get you something more or less working but not really much more than a prototype. I'd estimate it at about three months including testing and debugging, possibly more than that to get it almost 100% right.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
The inventor and holder of the patents for fractal compression is Iterated Systems.
I'd thought they'd had these techniques rolled into JPEG and MPEG already but it looks like you're right, they've kept the techniques for their own products.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Ventura never got attacked for being an atheist. He got attacked for attacking other people's beliefs. Of course, tolerance only goes one way for Europeans.
What's your problem with Europeans? I think we should all be much more tolerant of other people attacking our beliefs.
So for example it's OK for Ventura to attack religious bigots if that's what he feels is right, and it's OK to attack homosexuals and other perverts too if you feel it's wrong.
People performing these attacks are just expressing themselves in a completely natural way. It's unhealthy (as well as unfair) to force people to repress their deepest feelings.
(I think...)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Thanks very much for that link, Skinka. I downloaded the shareware and scanned the C: drive but no viruses were recognised. So either it's super-stealthy or else it's just a routine Win98SE screwup. They do happen often enough I suppose. It's just odd that it should have died so spectacularly at that particular time.
Why me! WHY ME???? Boo hoo - now I'm facing the umpteenth reformat and reinstall along with twenty apps and all their patches:o((
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I rebooted my Win98SE box about 2am local time (GMT) and it promptly refused to go back into windows (gets stuck at the waving flag boot logo). My motherboard and BIOS are supposed to be fully Y2K compliant (and DOS boots OK anyway), and the Microsoft Y2K page doesn't list *any* known problems at all. And my Linux box which has the same Aopen AX59Pro (rev1.0) motherboard in it, is still going strong.
So, either Win98SE *does* have a fatal Y2K bug and Microsoft just aren't talking...or else I've been hit by one of those Y2K viruses. I *did* have Norton Antivirus on my system a few months ago but was forced to remove it because of the stability problems it seemed to be causing:o(
Catch 22 eh?
I'm running that old NAV from the rescue disks right now. It's been going for about 9 hours now and still hasn't found anything. But they are not exactly up-to-date anyway.
Has anyone experienced any similar problems? And does anyone just happen to have, handily downloadable from their home page, a set of NAV rescue floppy images with up-to-date virus defs? Pleeeeeease?
Happy new year everybody. Even Microsoft.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Funny thing is, everybody expected a worst-case-scenario.
Not here in Europe we didn't. Millennium paranoia (stockpiling water, food, guns & ammo etc) seems to be almost uniquely an American phenomenon.
British concerns are really more or less limited to the effects upon business. Apart from that I guess we're only expecting some minor inconveniences over the next couple of months.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Self-styled "industry analysts" like Forrester, Butler Bloor, Gartner etc have repeatedly shown themselves to be clueless where open source is concerned. But they can't afford to be silent about the current biggest thing or they'd lose credibility so they try to come up with what they think are safe predictions based on an extrapolation of what they see today. The problem is that since they don't really *get* it, all they can do is extrapolate from how things appear on the surface to the ignorant.
For example, their feeling that the prominence of Linux will fade is based on the misapprehension that its rise has been based on hype, like so many other media darlings. But, as so many here can surely testify, this is not so. Linux is where it is today because of the real benefits and the real potential it has.
Their prediction that CIO's will not switch to Linux is based on a similar theory that Linux is in some fundamental way not a serious OS, and also on an assumption that Microsoft will continue to represent the safe choice for budget holders. We already know the truth about the former. My own prediction as regards the latter is that Windows 2000 will be an unmitigated PR disaster because of the risks inherent in such a bloated product stuffed with such a huge amount of new and relatively untested code. Sensible CIO's will at least recognise the possibility of major technical problems and will keep W2K at arm's length at least until the first major service pack appears. In the meantime they will be much more open to experimentation with alternative platforms such as Linux.
Finally, to suggest that binary compatibility will be achieved by 2004 is to betray an embarrassing level of ignorance about the subject they're discussing. We already have binary compatibility by and large across a number of OS running on the x86 platform by virtue of compatibility libraries; applications compiled for Linux will already run on SCO and BSD and I believe Solaris will provide this too very soon. In any case, Linux has provided iBSCD compatibility support in the kernel for a number of years, allowing one to run compliant native SCO and (as was) Interactive Unix applications under Linux.
With Linux's current substantial (and increasing) market share and developer mind share, this level of compatibility only needs to advance modestly for across-the-board compatibility to be commonplace within two years at the most.
Their predictions are worthless nonsense. I say again, these guys have no clue; their opinions are only of interest in that they are indicative of how equally clueless PHB's think.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Most (educated) people today understand that the stories about the miracles etc. are most probably exaggerated if not outright fiction. But you only make yourself look foolish by claiming he didn't exist.
Ieshua ben-Iussef (known to us today as Jesus Christ) was almost certainly a real person; He was written about by a contemporary Roman historian by the name of Josephus.
I haven't read Josephus' writing myself but I'm told it wasn't very flattering (he said Jesus was a hunchback whose eyebrows met in the middle). It's likely the piece was politically motivated, since as we all know the Roman government fought a continual war against cultism and particularly Christianity.
The point is, if the Roman authorites at the time could have gotten away with claiming he didn't exist they most certainly would have done so. But any attempts to that effect were stymied by the fact that their own political commentators had already put him on the record.
If further evidence is required, please refer to the Bethlehem census data for 4BC;o)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Really? Then how come there were newborn lambs for the shepherds' gifts? Lambs are born in the spring I believe.
If the "official" date is Jan 6 regardless of the above, is that why we have 12 days of Christmas (culimating with the supposedly actual night of his birth)?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
This is largely myth, born of an appearance he made in a Saturday Night Live sketch about a fan convention with Mike Myers as the adoring fan. "Get a Life!" said Shatner in the sketch. Ever since then the sentiment has been unfairly ascribed to Shatner himself. But a sketch is all it was.
Admittedly he's not always been as active on the convention circuit as his co-stars and I'm fairly sure the typecasting he suffered as a result of Star Trek caused him serious career disappointment. It's a real shame because he was never a bad actor (compared to the typical Hollywood lot anyway). So that probably explains his relative stand-offishness.
His last book, called "Get a Life" after the fateful SNL sketch, describes his reconciliation with the convention circuit and the fans. So, even if he was ever disparaging about fans, that ceased to be the case some time ago.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to be a regular Slashdot poster, you're going to have to learn how to pass stuff you've blown out your ass through a thesaurus.
God save the Anonymous Cowards! Thanks for making me laugh!
I'm *still* laughing!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hey, that's completely fucking *unfair*, unjustified and completely WRONG.
When NASA had proper government support they sent men to the Moon. With basically 1950's technology ferchrissakes! Now we look back at what they achieved with the Apollo moonshots and gawp in wonder.
Since then instead of continued support they've had nothing but indifference from the public and he Whitehouse and hostility from Congress, which seems to be largely composed of people bickering over their share of the pork barrel. So NASA's budget has been squeezed tighter and tighter. Add on top of that the fact that space travel is expensive, all their stuff has to be custom made by large aerospace contractors who thoroughly rip them off in the process.
Experimental space vehicles like Pioneer and Voyager are bound to suffer failures, if only a couple of them were built then they are by definition prototypes only. Do you know *any* group on Earth who can design and build perfect, infallible machines for such a hostile environment, on a tight budget, using crooked contractors - and get it right the first time, every time?
The Space Shuttle of course has had time to evolve over the course of its 19-year career. And that's why out of 96 (so far, I think) LEO space missions only ONE of them had casualties. Just think about that for a moment. Remember, we're not talking about a quick trip down to the shops in the motor. We're talking about riding an enormous stack of burning high explosive right out of the atmosphere and back, in craft now nearly twenty years old whose design dates back to the early seventies. How many organisations do you know that can build CARS that last for twenty years, never mind spacecraft.
As to your final point, is it really NASA's fault that they couldn't get the funding for the right experiments in Viking? No. What would you have had them do - go home in a sulk? They were right to send a probe anyway, even one with NO scientific mission because, first and foremost, they are in the business of space travel technology development and exploration. For that reason they built and flew the thing and their part of that was a success. It was Congress who failed, because they were too damn ignorant and too damn cheap to pay for the right payload.
I won't bother to admonish you to cut NASA some slack because it's quite clear that your judgment of them is so ill-considered it's hardly even worthy of consideration.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think of Slashdot as being the twenty-first century equivalent of the newspaper. I have no doubt that Slashdot has a relatively large influence on the active agenda of the internet geek community by helping to shape opinion, mobilise popular support etc. Maybe the reason Rob and Jeff don't want to open up the submissions queue is because they'd lose editorial control. After all, it's a very big thing to own your own newspaper and have that amount of influence.
So why am I mentioning this here? Bear with me a moment.
It just occurred to me that a similar sort of thinking could be behind their reluctance to release the current version of the Slash source code. The currently available version is missing all the whizzy moderation features etc that make Slashdot different from other sites.
Now if the dynamic duo did release the current version as Open Source, I'll bet you space credits to navy beans that within a couple of weeks there would be at least one Slashdot-alike up on the net with the very features that so many readers seem to want but Rob and Jeff don't want to implement.
And the Slashdot crew would then be forced to follow suit or else risk seeing their readership melt away as they abandon Slashdot for a more open, democratic news site.
To put it more succinctly, if the above scenario is likely then opening up the current source would inevitably (i) lead to (i) stiffer competition (ii) force Slashdot to evolve according to public demand and (iii) cause a major loss of editorial control.
Even if Rob and Jeff were prepared to take the risk, Andover might not be.
Of course this line of reasoning assumes that readers would want moderation-style influence over the selection of headline stories. But there's plenty of evidence that this is in fact the case, just read the rest of the comments to see for yourself.
And just think what evolution in that direction would mean. The Slash system with added open submissions moderation system would provide a truly open forum along the lines of Usenet, but with active moderation. It would be what Usenet was meant to be, what it could have been if not for the terrible signal-to-noise ratio and the horrible time lag between post and response. It would be the Usenet that we always wanted.
However, Rob and Jeff and Andover at large have their own interests to protect.
For that reason, I don't believe we will see the current version released under the GPL until someone else releases an open sourced and functionally equivalent system thus making the issue moot.
Who can blame them, really.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If it is not safe enough to land a probe there, we can forget about manned mars missions.
That's an entirely unwarranted conclusion. In the first place, manned vehicles aren't *planned* to smash into the planet at hundreds of miles per hour. And when you have an experienced human pilot you can pick a landing spot with far better precision than is possible via onboard AI and telemetry.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Well done Crutcher, 7/7: that's the only credible list of predictions I'vd seen posted here.
You've really got to laugh at the cluelessness of the authors of that Time piece. Linux more important in embedded apps? What?!? Look, even if Linux completely replaced every other embedded OS the world, no-one would notice or care. We'd still all be salivating over the next release of KDE or Gnome or name your particular poison.
As as far as the great unwashed are concerned, it's those same advances in the desktop that will make Linux pop up on their radar for the first time. That's when Linux fever, incubated for ten years by us meme carriers, will literally sweep the world. Bye bye to Microsoft soon after, I think. I wouldn't call this a prediction really, it's a no-brainer.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot swallows up pseudo-HTML tags without a trace. You should have used the preview button!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I agree though that its going to be difficult to make money out of the traffic. Traditional per-click banner advertising fees aren't much use, it requires massive volumes. I know the more serious financial web businesses are moving away from that model altogether, in favour of partnerships of various kinds involving referral fees and commissions. However, it's hard to imagine what could generate significant levels of income from a geek demographic. You can only buy so many toys etc. And most of us surely buy our hardware and software from sources we've sought out ourselves rather than on impulse after clicking on an ad.
Personally, I rarely pay any attention to banner ads at all, and the only way for a hardware or software seller to get *my* business is to be indexed effectively in my search engine of choice (at present that's google).
Some people commenting on this list have implied that Andover had difficulty getting the IPO because they still don't have the revenue to justify the share price they want. How can this be? Surely they had a *plan* in mind when they bought Slashdot? Was their plan simply to jump on the bandwagon and hope that someone else would figure it all out later?
I wounder how many internet companies filing for IPO's have done so in the knowledge that their business model was a pipe dream, and with the intention of using the capital thus raised to build a *real* business?
It's kind of reminiscent of the old story about the soup stone.
The upshot of all this has to be that unless businesses like Andover manage to find a completely new revenue model *very soon* that no-one's even thought of yet, their investors will surely wake up and realise that their trendy internet stocks have no underlying value.
Rob and Hemos may well find that they're running Slashdot as a hobby again before the year is out; if Andover owes them money they should try to get hold of it while they still can. Though they're probably going to get worthless stock options instead, that seems to be the way these things work. Everybody's paying each other in promises these days.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I doubt that very much. A month would get you something more or less working but not really much more than a prototype. I'd estimate it at about three months including testing and debugging, possibly more than that to get it almost 100% right.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If you mean Starfleet Academy, those cut scenes looked pretty dire (the colour was terrible).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
There was meant to be a pseudo html tag for "irony" in that post but Slashdot swallowed it...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The inventor and holder of the patents for fractal compression is Iterated Systems.
I'd thought they'd had these techniques rolled into JPEG and MPEG already but it looks like you're right, they've kept the techniques for their own products.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Nah, that's somebody who never leaves his own website and doesn't let other people visit it either.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Ventura never got attacked for being an atheist. He got attacked for attacking other people's beliefs. Of course, tolerance only goes one way for Europeans.
What's your problem with Europeans? I think we should all be much more tolerant of other people attacking our beliefs.
So for example it's OK for Ventura to attack religious bigots if that's what he feels is right, and it's OK to attack homosexuals and other perverts too if you feel it's wrong.
People performing these attacks are just expressing themselves in a completely natural way. It's unhealthy (as well as unfair) to force people to repress their deepest feelings.
(I think...)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I knew that!!!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Thanks very much for that link, Skinka. I downloaded the shareware and scanned the C: drive but no viruses were recognised. So either it's super-stealthy or else it's just a routine Win98SE screwup. They do happen often enough I suppose. It's just odd that it should have died so spectacularly at that particular time.
:o((
Why me! WHY ME???? Boo hoo - now I'm facing the umpteenth reformat and reinstall along with twenty apps and all their patches
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Actually I was referring to my original post which appeared at 5.01 AM by your clock.
Notice how my manque first post has been moderated down twice as a troll, but the winner has been moderated up to +4 "funny".
Go figure.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I rebooted my Win98SE box about 2am local time (GMT) and it promptly refused to go back into windows (gets stuck at the waving flag boot logo). My motherboard and BIOS are supposed to be fully Y2K compliant (and DOS boots OK anyway), and the Microsoft Y2K page doesn't list *any* known problems at all. And my Linux box which has the same Aopen AX59Pro (rev1.0) motherboard in it, is still going strong.
:o(
So, either Win98SE *does* have a fatal Y2K bug and Microsoft just aren't talking...or else I've been hit by one of those Y2K viruses. I *did* have Norton Antivirus on my system a few months ago but was forced to remove it because of the stability problems it seemed to be causing
Catch 22 eh?
I'm running that old NAV from the rescue disks right now. It's been going for about 9 hours now and still hasn't found anything. But they are not exactly up-to-date anyway.
Has anyone experienced any similar problems? And does anyone just happen to have, handily downloadable from their home page, a set of NAV rescue floppy images with up-to-date virus defs? Pleeeeeease?
Happy new year everybody. Even Microsoft.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Funny thing is, everybody expected a worst-case-scenario.
Not here in Europe we didn't. Millennium paranoia (stockpiling water, food, guns & ammo etc) seems to be almost uniquely an American phenomenon.
British concerns are really more or less limited to the effects upon business. Apart from that I guess we're only expecting some minor inconveniences over the next couple of months.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Aaargh! You #@£*$ bastard! You beat me by one minute!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
First post of the millennium! Yay!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Self-styled "industry analysts" like Forrester, Butler Bloor, Gartner etc have repeatedly shown themselves to be clueless where open source is concerned. But they can't afford to be silent about the current biggest thing or they'd lose credibility so they try to come up with what they think are safe predictions based on an extrapolation of what they see today. The problem is that since they don't really *get* it, all they can do is extrapolate from how things appear on the surface to the ignorant.
For example, their feeling that the prominence of Linux will fade is based on the misapprehension that its rise has been based on hype, like so many other media darlings. But, as so many here can surely testify, this is not so. Linux is where it is today because of the real benefits and the real potential it has.
Their prediction that CIO's will not switch to Linux is based on a similar theory that Linux is in some fundamental way not a serious OS, and also on an assumption that Microsoft will continue to represent the safe choice for budget holders. We already know the truth about the former. My own prediction as regards the latter is that Windows 2000 will be an unmitigated PR disaster because of the risks inherent in such a bloated product stuffed with such a huge amount of new and relatively untested code. Sensible CIO's will at least recognise the possibility of major technical problems and will keep W2K at arm's length at least until the first major service pack appears. In the meantime they will be much more open to experimentation with alternative platforms such as Linux.
Finally, to suggest that binary compatibility will be achieved by 2004 is to betray an embarrassing level of ignorance about the subject they're discussing. We already have binary compatibility by and large across a number of OS running on the x86 platform by virtue of compatibility libraries; applications compiled for Linux will already run on SCO and BSD and I believe Solaris will provide this too very soon. In any case, Linux has provided iBSCD compatibility support in the kernel for a number of years, allowing one to run compliant native SCO and (as was) Interactive Unix applications under Linux.
With Linux's current substantial (and increasing) market share and developer mind share, this level of compatibility only needs to advance modestly for across-the-board compatibility to be commonplace within two years at the most.
Their predictions are worthless nonsense. I say again, these guys have no clue; their opinions are only of interest in that they are indicative of how equally clueless PHB's think.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Most (educated) people today understand that the stories about the miracles etc. are most probably exaggerated if not outright fiction. But you only make yourself look foolish by claiming he didn't exist.
;o)
Ieshua ben-Iussef (known to us today as Jesus Christ) was almost certainly a real person; He was written about by a contemporary Roman historian by the name of Josephus.
I haven't read Josephus' writing myself but I'm told it wasn't very flattering (he said Jesus was a hunchback whose eyebrows met in the middle). It's likely the piece was politically motivated, since as we all know the Roman government fought a continual war against cultism and particularly Christianity.
The point is, if the Roman authorites at the time could have gotten away with claiming he didn't exist they most certainly would have done so. But any attempts to that effect were stymied by the fact that their own political commentators had already put him on the record.
If further evidence is required, please refer to the Bethlehem census data for 4BC
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Jesus was born on January 6th
Really? Then how come there were newborn lambs for the shepherds' gifts? Lambs are born in the spring I believe.
If the "official" date is Jan 6 regardless of the above, is that why we have 12 days of Christmas (culimating with the supposedly actual night of his birth)?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
BOTH are available on-line:
Visit to a Weird Planet here and here.
Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited (the better story I reckon) is available here
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Shatner...looks upon all fans with scorn
This is largely myth, born of an appearance he made in a Saturday Night Live sketch about a fan convention with Mike Myers as the adoring fan. "Get a Life!" said Shatner in the sketch. Ever since then the sentiment has been unfairly ascribed to Shatner himself. But a sketch is all it was.
Admittedly he's not always been as active on the convention circuit as his co-stars and I'm fairly sure the typecasting he suffered as a result of Star Trek caused him serious career disappointment. It's a real shame because he was never a bad actor (compared to the typical Hollywood lot anyway). So that probably explains his relative stand-offishness.
His last book, called "Get a Life" after the fateful SNL sketch, describes his reconciliation with the convention circuit and the fans. So, even if he was ever disparaging about fans, that ceased to be the case some time ago.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction