Yes, but aren't they going to be hit by the new US legslation extending copyright up to 75 years or so after the author's death? There aren't all that many books written more than 75 years ago that I'd care to read.
Just another example of how the megacorporation-owned US Government is screwing you and you and you. Information wants to be free, but they've got it under lock and key.
If all the legislation currently under consideration goes through you soon won't be able to fart without violating someone's copyright and it'll be illegal to lock the door when you go to the toilet, in case you might do something secret.
Boy am I glad I don't live in the US. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Methinks the rise of Linux has a lot to do with this. If you a need a thin client to provide basic OS services to a JVM you don't need to look any further than Linux which runs on just about everything already, and is modular enough that it can easily be slimmed down as much as you need for each platform.
As both companies now see Linux growing happily in similar niches it doesn't really make sense for either of them to be spending money on developing and maintaining yet another proprietary "open" platform. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I hate the new names. They are so hard to pronounce. Given that we all know the difference between the SI meaning of the Greek prefixes and the computer memory meaning, I think the old names should stay.
All we need is legislation to force the HD manufacturers to stick to the powers-of-two convention universally used with computers. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" has never had anything much to do with changing the internet itself but it sure had a significant effect in a related area.
It was "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" that prompted the board of Netscape Communications to launch the Mozilla project, and thus to become the first household-name company to publicly espouse open source.
As an open source project Mozilla itself may be viewed by some as a failure, but the shift in public perception that it created changed everything.
It was only after the Mozilla project took off, finally lending corporate credibility to open source and open source products like Linux, that dozens of other blue chip companies followed suit. Within a year, it had become a PR necessity for many companies to jump on the bandwagon in order to be perceived by the techie community - an important demographic in their markets - as "white hats" rather than "black hats".
It is the geek community's joint hope that while this fashion lasts those companies, and others as yet unconverted, will measure the benefits of the open source development model and the potential size of the market for open source platforms, and find them worthwhile for the longer term.
If you are asking "so what?" I'd like to remind you that before all this happened, one of the most powerful and most frequently uttered criticisms of Linux was that there were hardly any important applications available for the platform. Particularly, as far as server deployment was concerned, industrial strength databases.
But within just a few months of Netscape's surprise move, this had ceased to be true. All of the most important database platforms (Oracle, Informix, Sybase, DB2) were ported. This was followed by commitments from Corel, Intel, Lotus, even SAP. and many others too.
I don't want to underestimate the effect of Microsoft's hamstringing by the DOJ trial, in freeing these companies to exploit new platforms. But without Eric Raymond's evangelical essay, Netscape would probably have simply sold out to AOL much earlier and very probably none of the above would have happened at all because those companies would still have been insufficiently unaware of the existence (let alone the quality) of Linux and open source in general for them to have taken such a radical course.
In that parallel universe, there are still hardly any apps for Linux, and the number of open source user and developers is still relatively tiny. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Too bad you all willingly gave him your guns. Bet one madman in Scotland doesn't look quite so dangerous any more.
What an idiotic remark! What good would guns be against the Home Secretary or the Prime Minister?
There were never enough guns floating around in the UK for a rebellious population to outgun the police, let alone the army. And the UK police are hardly bristling with firepower. Anyway, that's just not the way we do things here. We just hurl bricks and bottles. It's much friendlier that way.
If you imagine that the laws allowing US citizens to bear arms are a significant factor holding your own government in check, you're probably indulging in pure fantasy. Your own police forces and National Guard are probably better armed than the rest of you are. And the US government has tanks and F-15's. I don't suppose they'd be that shy about using deadly force against you when you're shooting at them.
I support the UK Govt's action to restrict private ownership of handguns. It might not disarm all the criminals but it sure does reduce the number of madmen armed with automatic or semi-automatic weapons.
As a father of two small children I was deeply affected by the Dunblane massacre. I would have felt the same if the incident had taken place in your own country (though to me the mass shooting of twenty innocent infants is a thousand times worse than the shooting of twenty adolescents).
If you are the sort of person who thinks that the right to strut around feeling self-important with a gun is worth a tragedy on the scale of Dunblane then you are a senseless and selfish shit who doesn't deserve to live. In my opinion.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Right on. I still have constant problems with all my VIA chipset machines. It's not just on Windows either, for example Netscape on Linux seems to segfault much more frequently on the VIA mobo + K6 systems.
I just can't afford this unreliability; I've already decided to go back to using Intel CPUs and chipsets. I'll be staying well away from K7-based systems until the chipsets and motherboards have grown long white beards. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I thought two particles, gravitons and anti-gravitons, are expected to exist, each with an opposite gravitational "pole". The existence of these quantum particles is vital for exotic matter (and consequently, fun things like exploiting wormholes and warp drives). Right?
Well now, that would be nice. However, neither exotic matter nor wormholes nor warp drives are known to exist. Also, there is no comprehensive gravitational theory, whether GR or QM-based, which requires antigravitons and which has also been backed up by observational data.
So for the moment at least, the things of which you speak belong solely to the domain of science fiction. Unfortunately. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm really not worried about the risk posed by a microscopic black hole burning out in a tiny flash of gamma radiation lasting a millionth of a second.
I am however concerned about what happens when these colliders finally reach what they call the 'Grand Unification' energy.
A popular suite of cosmological theories has it that at certain very high temperatures, spacetime flips over into other metastable states in which the four physical forces attain the same values and become merged. The highest of these temperatures corresponds to the earliest epoch of the big bang, in which conditions it is thought that there is only one physical force.
If that wasn't bad enough, the inflationary theories suggest that at some critical point during this process the affected volume of spacetime undergoes a runaway expansion or 'inflation' which creates matter out of nothing just like droplets of moisture condensing out of humid air, as it expands and cools.
This is supposedly how our own Universe formed from an infinitesimal speck of hot nothingness. So, if we do ever manage to recreate in our colliders the energy density that prevailed at time T=0, it's quite possible that mini black holes will be the least of our worries. What would be the local effect of a new big bang in an Earthbound collider?
In his novel Cosm, Gregory Benford suggests that all Universes are created this way, like children born from a parent. That even our own universe was caused by someone's physics experiment (and that someone isn't necessarily much more technologically advanced then we are).
He also suggests that creating a baby universe in this way won't hurt. In his story, the baby was connected to the parent via a relatively big but stable wormhole, and its expansion did not disturb our local spacetime.
That was just a story device though. Wormholes are generally thought to be both very small and also hightly unstable (i.e. short lived).
What would be the energy release from a collapsing wormhole pinched off from a baby universe even if the universe's expansion didn't itself disturb the local domain?
Is somebody going to tell us or do we have to do the experiment?
As a lot of people have mentioned in jest, including (elsewhere) Arthur C Clarke, maybe this is why you don't see too many other advanced civilisations out there cluttering up the airwaves. The final experiment is just too easy to do.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
[Black holes]... *do* have gravitational attraction, of course, but we're talking about a miniscule mass. Any singularity with this mass will be indescribably small, and even if it survives Hawking radiation it will only rarely hit a proton or electron just right to effect capture. I'm reminded of Rutherford's experiments shooting electrons at gold foil -- and in that case the few bounces where due to an electrostatic force many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity.
You're wrong about that because the analogy that guides you is inappropriate.
The intensity of an unshielded electromagnetic field does, like gravity, fall off in proportion to the square of the distance from the source.
However the gold nuclei at which Rutherford was firing his helium nuclei were not unshielded. The repulsive effect of the target protons was attenuated by the enveloping electron cloud (or 'shell' as he saw it). An alpha particle completely outside of the electron cloud would, on average, feel no net repulsion at all.
Gravity is not polar and there is no (known) means of shielding it. Consequently, any small black hole exerts a small but finite attaction upon every particle in the universe; and for any particle whose relative motion does not exceed the escape velocity for the gravitational field at its own position, it is only a matter of time before its centre of mass coincides with that of the black hole.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
In Arthur C Clarke's final sequel to 2001:A Space Odyssey he suggests (with tongue firmly in cheek) that most observed supernovae are caused by industrial accidents like this; specifically, accelerator experiments that reach the energy density threshold which releases the zero point energy of the vacuum. This is supposed to cause inflation of a new spacetime domain (i.e. create a baby universe).
The same theme was explored, with non-catastrophic results, in Greg Benford's Cosm. IIRC, in that book the collider used was the same one at Brookhaven mentioned in the above article.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I don't agree with a lot of Crawford's crystal ball gazing, it's attempting to extrapolate much too far into the future in too much detail.
I see that a lot of posters have suggested an alternate view, i.e. that because of consumer choice issues we'll see still more pluggable modules, i.e. the complete opposite of the PCOAC.
I think the market will continue to support the current diversity. PCOAC for low-end 'commodity' PC's and embedded applications such as set top boxes, and a wide range of compatible, function-specific modules for custom, high-end applications.
The configurability issues will likely be settled by standard. Odd that one poster quoted Bill Joy as championing hardware integration. Isn't it more likely that he's rather see all those chip manufacturers licensing JINI for auto-setup capabilities. Then you can plug in all your cards and chips and they'll negotiate their configuration directly with each other and the OS. In other words, son of plug'n'play.
By using a standard but flexible protocol like JINI this would remove the responsibility for troublesome plug'n'play from the OS altogether (hooray!). The hardware would decide and the OS would just do as it's told. The hardware could even instruct the OS precisely which driver to use and where to get the latest version.
That's the way it should work ideally. Just like plug'n'play does today, but controlled directly from the hardware.
Let's face it, Scotty or Geordie LaForge would be pretty lost in a crisis if they couldn't cobble together a repair to the engines out of transporter components because the whole of the USS Enterprise ran on a single ship!
In my opinion this is what the market wants: the flexibility to combine function-specific multi-vendor hardware in whatever combination we choose. On the other hand Michael Crawford's vision allows only for one or two massive hardware manufacturers putting out a homogenous product line of inflexible PC devices. Assuming a free market, the minute that happened, more hardware companies would spring up to fill the demand for pluggable components. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're overreacting. Sure the BBC will put a little spin on the "ha ha" human interest stories but for unbiased serious news coverage they can't be beat. Remember, they are an independent body paid out of public funds and do not rtake any advertising revenue; and they have a charter which enforces their impartiality. Several times they have even stood up to the UK government when the latter has tried to bring them under political control. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot isn't all that reliable. I have problems with it all the time. (Connection refused, partial pages, broken HTML, extra blank stories, etc...)
I know people who have been 'bugged' hate to hear this kind of reply, but...I'd bet a mountain of money that I've spent as much time on slashdot as you have this year (I'm too ashamed to admit how much) and I don't remember having any problems with the site at all.
Isn't it possible that the problem lies in some corrupting influence somewhere between the internet and your screen? Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're right about everything you said, except in your assessment about OSS constributions after 1.0 is launched.
There are lots of places where useful enhancements could be made, and which would be sufficiently small in scope for just one or two hackers to handle in isolation. These are all usability features rather than HTML rendering issues, or Java support issues or anything else requiring specialist knowledge.
Put it this way, every single usability feature that IE5 has which is better than Mozilla's equivalent or which is absent from Mozilla, will be fair game and will probably be conquered within three months. Count on it. And there are lots of ways in which the mail client could be improved.
These kinds of interface issues are all things which would have been difficult to address when the project was far from complete.
I'm personally waiting until version 1.0 is released because the day I download Mozilla will be the day I delete Communicator 4.x forever. When I begin depending on Mozilla I'll be that much more motivated to fix it, but at the moment it's not complete enough to even consider adopting as my main browser and email client.
I wonder how many other people stayed away from the project for similar reasons. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
The management didn't think adding tesla coils, jacobs ladders and a full height lava lamp to our big servers was a good idea. Even after I explained the concept of retro-computing.
Jacob's ladder? Is that the "bzzzt" thing?
Mmmm. Now that's a real computer. Where can I buy one? Does it also come with programming that goes wrong so it falls in love with its creator and tries to take over the world? Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're absolutely right about that, at least in my case. I spent a lot of time on the mozilla mailing lists right at the very beginning and I very quickly decided to wait for the first stable release.
I simply felt I could handle fixing a bug or adding a feature to a finished product but I didn't have enough experience of the relevant technology skills to tackle the big issues that were under consideration back then, even when they were still working with the old code base. I knew the code was a mess even before it was released. Just look at the way it eats up every last byte of memory until it crashes, even now.
When a finished mozilla is released I'll hack away happily and who knows, maybe I'll contribute something. I'm sure a lot of wannabee hackers will come out of the woodwork when they see that they've got something mostly unbroken to start with. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Who cares what colour it's in - pink, blue or violet?
(sorry, couldn't resist...)
I can't help feeling like it's the end of an era. Before this, Slashdot's charm was that it was just two guys on a roll, that's a lot cooler than being owned by a corporation even if you do still have creative control.
Still, it's a fact in this life that nothing stays the same forever. Congratulations for all you've achieved. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:What a tangled web we weave...
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
You raised some interesting points and I find myself in agreement with some of what you say but I think your detestation of RMS' use of the word 'free' is based upon a misapprehension.
When we say 'free beer' it is the beer itself that is free - free (gratis) to the user that is.
When we say 'free men' it is the men who are free - unencumbered by restriction upon their own liberty.
When RMS talks about 'free software' it is the software itself that is free (at liberty), not the user. I think you disagree with the term because you have misinterpreted it as meaning 'free (libre) for the user to do whatever they want with'. In other words you are conjoining the second definition of the word 'free' inappropriately in the manner of the first definition. This is a mistake as it corrupts the meaning.
'Free software' means that not the user but the software itself is free from being captured, suborned, or otherwise further restricted. RMS is quite frank about the restrictions on and responsibilities of the user. But GPL'd software is itself free in perpetuity and cannot be enslaved to proprietary interests.
I really don't think there is any attempt by RMS to corrupt or misuse the word 'free'. It's just that the English language has multiple uses for many words and this particular meaning of this particular word doesn't really have any useful synonyms without borrowing from other languages. And we know how good Americans are with other languages and cultures;o) However, I suggest that his use of the word 'free' is more logical than yours which is a confusion between the two established usages.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Get away with you! There were never any hard drives fitting that description in 1970! In 1970 most computers still only had magnetic tape for mass storage, I don't think even drum storage was widespread yet. The biggest hard drives in the mid-1980's were about that size and capacity.
How old are you? I suppose you think everything before 1980 was in black and white, etc. etc. Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
If you don't want to use YaST you don't have to. It's still Linux without it, it's just Linux for adults.
IMO YaST has its limitations anyway. Better in every respect to use the Caldera-sponsored COAS if you can. That is at least distribution agnostic and if it ever gets adopted by RedHat, SuSE and the rest, that will answer one of the outstanding criticisms of Linux (sysadm tools differ too much between distros). Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Yeah, I know what you mean. And even when you do get a reply, 8 times out of ten it's just to say 'Sorry but that isn't included in installation support'.
However there are a lot of good people on the suse-linux-e@suse.com mailing list who are willing to help. It's getting a bit crowded these days though.
Damn newbies!!! Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot Mirror
Oh don't we? Where can I find these pictures?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Yes, but aren't they going to be hit by the new US legslation extending copyright up to 75 years or so after the author's death? There aren't all that many books written more than 75 years ago that I'd care to read.
Just another example of how the megacorporation-owned US Government is screwing you and you and you. Information wants to be free, but they've got it under lock and key.
If all the legislation currently under consideration goes through you soon won't be able to fart without violating someone's copyright and it'll be illegal to lock the door when you go to the toilet, in case you might do something secret.
Boy am I glad I don't live in the US.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Methinks the rise of Linux has a lot to do with this. If you a need a thin client to provide basic OS services to a JVM you don't need to look any further than Linux which runs on just about everything already, and is modular enough that it can easily be slimmed down as much as you need for each platform.
As both companies now see Linux growing happily in similar niches it doesn't really make sense for either of them to be spending money on developing and maintaining yet another proprietary "open" platform.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I hate the new names. They are so hard to pronounce. Given that we all know the difference between the SI meaning of the Greek prefixes and the computer memory meaning, I think the old names should stay.
All we need is legislation to force the HD manufacturers to stick to the powers-of-two convention universally used with computers.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" has never had anything much to do with changing the internet itself but it sure had a significant effect in a related area.
It was "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" that prompted the board of Netscape Communications to launch the Mozilla project, and thus to become the first household-name company to publicly espouse open source.
As an open source project Mozilla itself may be viewed by some as a failure, but the shift in public perception that it created changed everything.
It was only after the Mozilla project took off, finally lending corporate credibility to open source and open source products like Linux, that dozens of other blue chip companies followed suit. Within a year, it had become a PR necessity for many companies to jump on the bandwagon in order to be perceived by the techie community - an important demographic in their markets - as "white hats" rather than "black hats".
It is the geek community's joint hope that while this fashion lasts those companies, and others as yet unconverted, will measure the benefits of the open source development model and the potential size of the market for open source platforms, and find them worthwhile for the longer term.
If you are asking "so what?" I'd like to remind you that before all this happened, one of the most powerful and most frequently uttered criticisms of Linux was that there were hardly any important applications available for the platform. Particularly, as far as server deployment was concerned, industrial strength databases.
But within just a few months of Netscape's surprise move, this had ceased to be true. All of the most important database platforms (Oracle, Informix, Sybase, DB2) were ported. This was followed by commitments from Corel, Intel, Lotus, even SAP. and many others too.
I don't want to underestimate the effect of Microsoft's hamstringing by the DOJ trial, in freeing these companies to exploit new platforms.
But without Eric Raymond's evangelical essay, Netscape would probably have simply sold out to AOL much earlier and very probably none of the above would have happened at all because those companies would still have been insufficiently unaware of the existence (let alone the quality) of Linux and open source in general for them to have taken such a radical course.
In that parallel universe, there are still hardly any apps for Linux, and the number of open source user and developers is still relatively tiny.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Too bad you all willingly gave him your guns. Bet one madman in Scotland doesn't look quite so dangerous any more.
What an idiotic remark! What good would guns be against the Home Secretary or the Prime Minister?
There were never enough guns floating around in the UK for a rebellious population to outgun the police, let alone the army. And the UK police are hardly bristling with firepower. Anyway, that's just not the way we do things here. We just hurl bricks and bottles. It's much friendlier that way.
If you imagine that the laws allowing US citizens to bear arms are a significant factor holding your own government in check, you're probably indulging in pure fantasy. Your own police forces and National Guard are probably better armed than the rest of you are. And the US government has tanks and F-15's. I don't suppose they'd be that shy about using deadly force against you when you're shooting at them.
I support the UK Govt's action to restrict private ownership of handguns. It might not disarm all the criminals but it sure does reduce the number of madmen armed with automatic or semi-automatic weapons.
As a father of two small children I was deeply affected by the Dunblane massacre. I would have felt the same if the incident had taken place in your own country (though to me the mass shooting of twenty innocent infants is a thousand times worse than the shooting of twenty adolescents).
If you are the sort of person who thinks that the right to strut around feeling self-important with a gun is worth a tragedy on the scale of Dunblane then you are a senseless and selfish shit who doesn't deserve to live. In my opinion.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Right on. I still have constant problems with all my VIA chipset machines. It's not just on Windows either, for example Netscape on Linux seems to segfault much more frequently on the VIA mobo + K6 systems.
I just can't afford this unreliability; I've already decided to go back to using Intel CPUs and chipsets. I'll be staying well away from K7-based systems until the chipsets and motherboards have grown long white beards.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I thought two particles, gravitons and anti-gravitons, are expected to exist, each with an opposite gravitational "pole". The existence of these quantum particles is vital for exotic matter (and consequently, fun things like exploiting wormholes and warp drives). Right?
Well now, that would be nice. However, neither exotic matter nor wormholes nor warp drives are known to exist. Also, there is no comprehensive gravitational theory, whether GR or QM-based, which requires antigravitons and which has also been backed up by observational data.
So for the moment at least, the things of which you speak belong solely to the domain of science fiction. Unfortunately.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm really not worried about the risk posed by a microscopic black hole burning out in a tiny flash of gamma radiation lasting a millionth of a second.
I am however concerned about what happens when these colliders finally reach what they call the 'Grand Unification' energy.
A popular suite of cosmological theories has it that at certain very high temperatures, spacetime flips over into other metastable states in which the four physical forces attain the same values and become merged. The highest of these temperatures corresponds to the earliest epoch of the big bang, in which conditions it is thought that there is only one physical force.
If that wasn't bad enough, the inflationary theories suggest that at some critical point during this process the affected volume of spacetime undergoes a runaway expansion or 'inflation' which creates matter out of nothing just like droplets of moisture condensing out of humid air, as it expands and cools.
This is supposedly how our own Universe formed from an infinitesimal speck of hot nothingness. So, if we do ever manage to recreate in our colliders the energy density that prevailed at time T=0, it's quite possible that mini black holes will be the least of our worries. What would be the local effect of a new big bang in an Earthbound collider?
In his novel Cosm, Gregory Benford suggests that all Universes are created this way, like children born from a parent. That even our own universe was caused by someone's physics experiment (and that someone isn't necessarily much more technologically advanced then we are).
He also suggests that creating a baby universe in this way won't hurt. In his story, the baby was connected to the parent via a relatively big but stable wormhole, and its expansion did not disturb our local spacetime.
That was just a story device though. Wormholes are generally thought to be both very small and also hightly unstable (i.e. short lived).
What would be the energy release from a collapsing wormhole pinched off from a baby universe even if the universe's expansion didn't itself disturb the local domain?
Is somebody going to tell us or do we have to do the experiment?
As a lot of people have mentioned in jest, including (elsewhere) Arthur C Clarke, maybe this is why you don't see too many other advanced civilisations out there cluttering up the airwaves. The final experiment is just too easy to do.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
[Black holes]... *do* have gravitational attraction, of course, but we're talking about a miniscule mass. Any singularity with this mass will be indescribably small, and even if it survives Hawking radiation it will only rarely hit a proton or electron just right to effect capture. I'm reminded of Rutherford's experiments shooting electrons at gold foil -- and in that case the few bounces where due to an electrostatic force many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity.
You're wrong about that because the analogy that guides you is inappropriate.
The intensity of an unshielded electromagnetic field does, like gravity, fall off in proportion to the square of the distance from the source.
However the gold nuclei at which Rutherford was firing his helium nuclei were not unshielded. The repulsive effect of the target protons was attenuated by the enveloping electron cloud (or 'shell' as he saw it). An alpha particle completely outside of the electron cloud would, on average, feel no net repulsion at all.
Gravity is not polar and there is no (known) means of shielding it. Consequently, any small black hole exerts a small but finite attaction upon every particle in the universe; and for any particle whose relative motion does not exceed the escape velocity for the gravitational field at its own position, it is only a matter of time before its centre of mass coincides with that of the black hole.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
In Arthur C Clarke's final sequel to 2001:A Space Odyssey he suggests (with tongue firmly in cheek) that most observed supernovae are caused by industrial accidents like this; specifically, accelerator experiments that reach the energy density threshold which releases the zero point energy of the vacuum. This is supposed to cause inflation of a new spacetime domain (i.e. create a baby universe).
The same theme was explored, with non-catastrophic results, in Greg Benford's Cosm. IIRC, in that book the collider used was the same one at Brookhaven mentioned in the above article.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You have to laugh at those poor saps who said the internet was just a passing fad.
Happy Graduation day, internet!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I don't agree with a lot of Crawford's crystal ball gazing, it's attempting to extrapolate much too far into the future in too much detail.
I see that a lot of posters have suggested an alternate view, i.e. that because of consumer choice issues we'll see still more pluggable modules, i.e. the complete opposite of the PCOAC.
I think the market will continue to support the current diversity. PCOAC for low-end 'commodity' PC's and embedded applications such as set top boxes, and a wide range of compatible, function-specific modules for custom, high-end applications.
The configurability issues will likely be settled by standard. Odd that one poster quoted Bill Joy as championing hardware integration. Isn't it more likely that he's rather see all those chip manufacturers licensing JINI for auto-setup capabilities. Then you can plug in all your cards and chips and they'll negotiate their configuration directly with each other and the OS. In other words, son of plug'n'play.
By using a standard but flexible protocol like JINI this would remove the responsibility for troublesome plug'n'play from the OS altogether (hooray!). The hardware would decide and the OS would just do as it's told. The hardware could even instruct the OS precisely which driver to use and where to get the latest version.
That's the way it should work ideally. Just like plug'n'play does today, but controlled directly from the hardware.
Let's face it, Scotty or Geordie LaForge would be pretty lost in a crisis if they couldn't cobble together a repair to the engines out of transporter components because the whole of the USS Enterprise ran on a single ship!
In my opinion this is what the market wants: the flexibility to combine function-specific multi-vendor hardware in whatever combination we choose. On the other hand Michael Crawford's vision allows only for one or two massive hardware manufacturers putting out a homogenous product line of inflexible PC devices. Assuming a free market, the minute that happened, more hardware companies would spring up to fill the demand for pluggable components.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're overreacting. Sure the BBC will put a little spin on the "ha ha" human interest stories but for unbiased serious news coverage they can't be beat. Remember, they are an independent body paid out of public funds and do not rtake any advertising revenue; and they have a charter which enforces their impartiality. Several times they have even stood up to the UK government when the latter has tried to bring them under political control.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm sorry to hear that you missed ROTJ and saw another movie instead.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The first translation made more sense than that!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot isn't all that reliable. I have problems with it all the time. (Connection refused, partial pages, broken HTML, extra blank stories, etc...)
I know people who have been 'bugged' hate to hear this kind of reply, but...I'd bet a mountain of money that I've spent as much time on slashdot as you have this year (I'm too ashamed to admit how much) and I don't remember having any problems with the site at all.
Isn't it possible that the problem lies in some corrupting influence somewhere between the internet and your screen?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're right about everything you said, except in your assessment about OSS constributions after 1.0 is launched.
There are lots of places where useful enhancements could be made, and which would be sufficiently small in scope for just one or two hackers to handle in isolation. These are all usability features rather than HTML rendering issues, or Java support issues or anything else requiring specialist knowledge.
Put it this way, every single usability feature that IE5 has which is better than Mozilla's equivalent or which is absent from Mozilla, will be fair game and will probably be conquered within three months. Count on it. And there are lots of ways in which the mail client could be improved.
These kinds of interface issues are all things which would have been difficult to address when the project was far from complete.
I'm personally waiting until version 1.0 is released because the day I download Mozilla will be the day I delete Communicator 4.x forever. When I begin depending on Mozilla I'll be that much more motivated to fix it, but at the moment it's not complete enough to even consider adopting as my main browser and email client.
I wonder how many other people stayed away from the project for similar reasons.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The management didn't think adding tesla coils, jacobs ladders and a full height lava lamp to our big servers was a good idea. Even after I explained the concept of retro-computing.
Jacob's ladder? Is that the "bzzzt" thing?
Mmmm. Now that's a real computer. Where can I buy one? Does it also come with programming that goes wrong so it falls in love with its creator and tries to take over the world?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're absolutely right about that, at least in my case. I spent a lot of time on the mozilla mailing lists right at the very beginning and I very quickly decided to wait for the first stable release.
I simply felt I could handle fixing a bug or adding a feature to a finished product but I didn't have enough experience of the relevant technology skills to tackle the big issues that were under consideration back then, even when they were still working with the old code base. I knew the code was a mess even before it was released. Just look at the way it eats up every last byte of memory until it crashes, even now.
When a finished mozilla is released I'll hack away happily and who knows, maybe I'll contribute something. I'm sure a lot of wannabee hackers will come out of the woodwork when they see that they've got something mostly unbroken to start with.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Who cares what colour it's in - pink, blue or violet?
(sorry, couldn't resist...)
I can't help feeling like it's the end of an era. Before this, Slashdot's charm was that it was just two guys on a roll, that's a lot cooler than being owned by a corporation even if you do still have creative control.
Still, it's a fact in this life that nothing stays the same forever. Congratulations for all you've achieved.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You raised some interesting points and I find myself in agreement with some of what you say but I think your detestation of RMS' use of the word 'free' is based upon a misapprehension.
;o) However, I suggest that his use of the word 'free' is more logical than yours which is a confusion between the two established usages.
When we say 'free beer' it is the beer itself that is free - free (gratis) to the user that is.
When we say 'free men' it is the men who are free - unencumbered by restriction upon their own liberty.
When RMS talks about 'free software' it is the software itself that is free (at liberty), not the user. I think you disagree with the term because you have misinterpreted it as meaning 'free (libre) for the user to do whatever they want with'. In other words you are conjoining the second definition of the word 'free' inappropriately in the manner of the first definition. This is a mistake as it corrupts the meaning.
'Free software' means that not the user but the software itself is free from being captured, suborned, or otherwise further restricted. RMS is quite frank about the restrictions on and responsibilities of the user. But GPL'd software is itself free in perpetuity and cannot be enslaved to proprietary interests.
I really don't think there is any attempt by RMS to corrupt or misuse the word 'free'. It's just that the English language has multiple uses for many words and this particular meaning of this particular word doesn't really have any useful synonyms without borrowing from other languages. And we know how good Americans are with other languages and cultures
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Get away with you! There were never any hard drives fitting that description in 1970! In 1970 most computers still only had magnetic tape for mass storage, I don't think even drum storage was widespread yet. The biggest hard drives in the mid-1980's were about that size and capacity.
How old are you? I suppose you think everything before 1980 was in black and white, etc. etc.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If you don't want to use YaST you don't have to. It's still Linux without it, it's just Linux for adults.
IMO YaST has its limitations anyway. Better in every respect to use the Caldera-sponsored COAS if you can. That is at least distribution agnostic and if it ever gets adopted by RedHat, SuSE and the rest, that will answer one of the outstanding criticisms of Linux (sysadm tools differ too much between distros).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Yeah, I know what you mean. And even when you do get a reply, 8 times out of ten it's just to say 'Sorry but that isn't included in installation support'.
However there are a lot of good people on the suse-linux-e@suse.com mailing list who are willing to help. It's getting a bit crowded these days though.
Damn newbies!!!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction