The oil companies at least in the United States
aren't capable of supressing anything. If they
were they'd also be allowed to drill offshore,
which they aren't except in the Gulf of Mexico.
The funny thing is that oil exploration is
hindered here, but oil usage isn't. I don't think there
are any 100 mpg car designs out there; there are
electric cars, but they plug into the power grid which
_really does_ use oil and coal (which is worse!) to
generate most of its power; hydroelectric power
is at the saturation level, and California had to tear
down a lot of their windmills because of bird kills
and the repair costs from said bird kills. The
electric cars just produce the illusion of ecological
correctness because the power plant is belching
CO2 in another state.
Blaming an oil industry which isn't allowed to
drill for your inability to use carbon-based-fuel-
generated grid power in your car is stupid.
Unless, of course, you want to say that they've
been suppressing nuclear energy...
Someone was mentioning Ariane 5... basically, a lot of the problem there was that they tried to recycle a lot of software elements wholesale from the Ariane 4.
Could rewriting in Eiffel from scratch have prevented the crash? Yes. Could rewriting from scratch in forth have worked too? Yes. BFD.
And on top of that, he gets lionized by ignorant Americans who have forgotten that Government could ever be a problem to people's individual liberty, in their zeal to rewrite the nation's ideology into some pseudo-Marxist class struggle nonsense about international corporations.
(Yes, international corporations can be a problem, but comparing them to the modern state is like comparing a mugger to a mongol horde. Even today.
To the person who asked how we could track asteroids if we couldn't even track space junk, the answer is simple: space junk is a lot smaller than asteroids. Like space junk is old one inch bolts and screws while asteroids are hundreds of meters across.
And besides, we're close to tracking most of the space junk with radar anyway.
I recently upgraded from 1.2 to 1.0 because I needed to use the mosaic effect on something, and it wasn't present in the version of 1.2 I had. Will they be putting it back in anytime soon?
You want to know who is really getting ripped off by Microsoft's quest to make money. The small businesses...
Believe it or not, they are starting to catch on. I'm starting to have people ask me out of the blue to help them convert. It's scary.
And law offices in particular have always tended to stay away from M$ Office and preferred WordPerfect and the like. Among other things, Office has had security problems way beyond the worms and VB scripts, like the way a single document file contains multiple drafts of a document... I've heard of law firms using that hole against people they negotiate with, to look at their first draft of a proposed contract. All that needs to be done to make sure Linux succeeds, IMHO, is to make sure they run into a friendlier version of Linux than Red Hat, which seems to have problems.
I've always wondered what Apple's profit margins on their hardware is; I suspect that besides the iBook, their margins are much higher than in the Intel world. Now if they were to switch to selling software instead, they'd have to be making those margins on software, and I wonder if people would pay it if price differential for the OS were out in the open (their hardware profits subsidize the OS research) instead of hidden in the price of a piece of hardware whose price can't be directly compared to an Intel PC thanks to the different chip architecture et cetera.
Also, in the scenario outlined, Apple would have basically destroyed the viability of the only real non-X86 CPU while carrying out its business plan, with its "noone may produce PowerPC Mac machines but us but anyone who wants to can now produce intel-based macs.
I'd rather use a Commodore 64 than a Macintosh. Do they even let you open the case on those things yet?
This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Apple has excellent cases on the G4's, that open very easily. There's a lot wrong with Apple; there's no need to make up outlandish lies if you want to say something bad about them. But the Apple people do the same about Motorola, so it balances out.
Now I know it's as popular amoung apple partisans to bash Motorola as it is for Slashdot people in general to bash apple, but don't believe everything you hear. The bit about how G4's would be at 800 Mhz by now except for that Nasty Motorola Keeping IBM From Supplying Them is probably nothing more than a typical Apple-management started rumor, or so I've heard from former Motorola employees with no real love of Motorola. Yah, I know I have no real proof, but noone else here does, and at least I bothered to check.
I think this is part of the whole overarching problem in that Apple takes a lot of heat for things they don't really do, but they've done enough stupid or venal things that an aura of doubt has attached to them.
Christopher, could you explain your statement about how apple had to discard Newton because they'd lost the ability to maintain it?
How exactly did they lose the ability to maintain it, and would they have if they hadn't wanted to discard it?
I always wanted a newton, but never could afford it; I will probably be buying a portable mac soon, although I don't like a lot of stuff apple's done (a lot of that decision has to do with a couple hundred CAD files in a mac-only format) over the past couple years.
I looked at the site you linked to, BTW, and it seemed to be a Newton-Soup-like data structure rather than a Soup itself, from the description.
I also checked back into the site from the top level, and it's somewhat interesting too.
I am beginning to think I still need to get a Newton, just to see what Newtonscript and the interface was like.
How much of soups could be implemented in python? Would it be more appropriate to make it a more basic service of the OS, more like a "soup file system?"
First, I wish they'd try the solar sail concept on something closer to home, like an asteroid survey probe. It would really be useful there.
For an outer system survey like this, I almost wonder if it might be more effective to use a different propulsion method: maybe a big chemical rocket, or maybe Zubrin's nuclear salt water rocket. (Don't laugh about the chemical idea: I've seen papers for proposed chemical rocket launched probes to Pluto that didn't use gravitational assist...
Personally, I don't think what's being shown is a fundamental weakness of capitalism so much as a fundamental weakness of western business training.
Business training is important, but a lot of programmers don't get it at all, and the management models the "business majors" get in college aren't helpful in the modern age.
Why are two of the more successful computer companies (M$ and Apple) being run by people without business degrees (Gates and Jobs)? Could it be that what they teach in business school is as much a liability as an asset?
The statement "Motif isn't dead" brings to mind Frank Zappa's "Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" statement. I don't know if Motif is "dead" or not, but based on my distant experience with it, it's been smelling funny for a long long time.
There's a strong element in the left, and to a lesser extent on the right, that claims that libertarians don't care about society.
The implicit assumption that they don't really want to say they're saying is that society and the state are equivalent. To most libertarians, this is about as stupid as the Sun King's "L'etat, c'est moi."
Just as an example, look at how the author mentioned librarians; many of the libraries in the early US were founded with private donations; the institution is only as strong in the US as it is now because in the 19th century, Andrew Carnegie went around endowing large numbers of them. There are countries around with much stronger government involvement in the economy, without a library system as extensive as the US's, because it wasn't part of their society.
To me, it looks like the author just had an axe to grind, and is spinning the conference for all it's worth.
Funny thing is, according to your criteria, Schumann (who suffered from manic depression during all of his adult life) wasn't ill until he actually managed to commit suicide. Needless to say, I doubt this conclusion.
BTW, if anyone here really wants to read more about manic depression, from someone who actually has a clue, I'd recommend _Touched With Fire_ by Kay Redfield Jamison, which is a fascinating account of the interaction of manic depression with the history of the creative arts. She's also a co-author of the standard psychiatric reference to the illness, _Manic Depressive Illness_; and finally, she also wrote _An Unquiet Mind_, which is about her own struggles against the illness.
It suddenly occured to me that it would probably be better to read this thread with a threshold of zero; anybody with any real experience with bipolar disorder is likely to be posting down at zero with all the grits trolls and the like.
Yah, I know noone will probably read this comment, but your comment about the clone makers not having any R&D is kinda hypocritical. Apple _refused_ to license the MacOS for anything besides an Apple- licensed motherboard. During the second phase of cloning, the clone companies were going to be allowed to make their own designs, but it was at that point, after they spent the money but before they got the license, that the clones were "steved."
Funny you should mention file formats. M$ has an incentive to make sure the file conversion utilities in its programs don't work, to force you to upgrade to Office. And it seems that it's used that to great advantage. Not to mention incompatible file formats between various versions of Office, to force upgrades.
Slashdot Mirror
The oil companies at least in the United States aren't capable of supressing anything. If they were they'd also be allowed to drill offshore, which they aren't except in the Gulf of Mexico.
The funny thing is that oil exploration is hindered here, but oil usage isn't. I don't think there are any 100 mpg car designs out there; there are electric cars, but they plug into the power grid which _really does_ use oil and coal (which is worse!) to generate most of its power; hydroelectric power is at the saturation level, and California had to tear down a lot of their windmills because of bird kills and the repair costs from said bird kills. The electric cars just produce the illusion of ecological correctness because the power plant is belching CO2 in another state.
Blaming an oil industry which isn't allowed to drill for your inability to use carbon-based-fuel- generated grid power in your car is stupid. Unless, of course, you want to say that they've been suppressing nuclear energy...
Someone was mentioning Ariane 5... basically, a lot of the problem there was that they tried to recycle a lot of software elements wholesale from the Ariane 4.
Could rewriting in Eiffel from scratch have prevented the crash? Yes. Could rewriting from scratch in forth have worked too? Yes. BFD.
And on top of that, he gets lionized by ignorant Americans who have forgotten that Government could ever be a problem to people's individual liberty, in their zeal to rewrite the nation's ideology into some pseudo-Marxist class struggle nonsense about international corporations.
(Yes, international corporations can be a problem, but comparing them to the modern state is like comparing a mugger to a mongol horde. Even today.
To the person who asked how we could track asteroids if we couldn't even track space junk, the answer is simple: space junk is a lot smaller than asteroids. Like space junk is old one inch bolts and screws while asteroids are hundreds of meters across.
And besides, we're close to tracking most of the space junk with radar anyway.
Pinky! They're too distracted thinking about Flowers for Algernon and the Secret of NIMH! This could be our chance to sieze control!
I recently upgraded from 1.2 to 1.0 because I needed to use the mosaic effect on something, and it wasn't present in the version of 1.2 I had. Will they be putting it back in anytime soon?
So this is good for anonymous posting.
Somehow I'd feel a little better if it had some sort of immunity to spoofing.
You want to know who is really getting ripped off by Microsoft's quest to make money. The small businesses...
Believe it or not, they are starting to catch on. I'm starting to have people ask me out of the blue to help them convert. It's scary.
And law offices in particular have always tended to stay away from M$ Office and preferred WordPerfect and the like. Among other things, Office has had security problems way beyond the worms and VB scripts, like the way a single document file contains multiple drafts of a document... I've heard of law firms using that hole against people they negotiate with, to look at their first draft of a proposed contract. All that needs to be done to make sure Linux succeeds, IMHO, is to make sure they run into a friendlier version of Linux than Red Hat, which seems to have problems.
I've always wondered what Apple's profit margins on their hardware is; I suspect that besides the iBook, their margins are much higher than in the Intel world. Now if they were to switch to selling software instead, they'd have to be making those margins on software, and I wonder if people would pay it if price differential for the OS were out in the open (their hardware profits subsidize the OS research) instead of hidden in the price of a piece of hardware whose price can't be directly compared to an Intel PC thanks to the different chip architecture et cetera.
Also, in the scenario outlined, Apple would have basically destroyed the viability of the only real non-X86 CPU while carrying out its business plan, with its "noone may produce PowerPC Mac machines but us but anyone who wants to can now produce intel-based macs.
This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Apple has excellent cases on the G4's, that open very easily. There's a lot wrong with Apple; there's no need to make up outlandish lies if you want to say something bad about them. But the Apple people do the same about Motorola, so it balances out.
Now I know it's as popular amoung apple partisans to bash Motorola as it is for Slashdot people in general to bash apple, but don't believe everything you hear. The bit about how G4's would be at 800 Mhz by now except for that Nasty Motorola Keeping IBM From Supplying Them is probably nothing more than a typical Apple-management started rumor, or so I've heard from former Motorola employees with no real love of Motorola. Yah, I know I have no real proof, but noone else here does, and at least I bothered to check.
I think this is part of the whole overarching problem in that Apple takes a lot of heat for things they don't really do, but they've done enough stupid or venal things that an aura of doubt has attached to them.
Christopher, could you explain your statement about how apple had to discard Newton because they'd lost the ability to maintain it?
How exactly did they lose the ability to maintain it, and would they have if they hadn't wanted to discard it?
I always wanted a newton, but never could afford it; I will probably be buying a portable mac soon, although I don't like a lot of stuff apple's done (a lot of that decision has to do with a couple hundred CAD files in a mac-only format) over the past couple years.
I looked at the site you linked to, BTW, and it seemed to be a Newton-Soup-like data structure rather than a Soup itself, from the description.
I also checked back into the site from the top level, and it's somewhat interesting too.
I am beginning to think I still need to get a Newton, just to see what Newtonscript and the interface was like.
How much of soups could be implemented in python? Would it be more appropriate to make it a more basic service of the OS, more like a "soup file system?"
Phil
First, I wish they'd try the solar sail concept on something closer to home, like an asteroid survey probe. It would really be useful there.
For an outer system survey like this, I almost wonder if it might be more effective to use a different propulsion method: maybe a big chemical rocket, or maybe Zubrin's nuclear salt water rocket. (Don't laugh about the chemical idea: I've seen papers for proposed chemical rocket launched probes to Pluto that didn't use gravitational assist...
Personally, I don't think what's being shown is a fundamental weakness of capitalism so much as a fundamental weakness of western business training.
Business training is important, but a lot of programmers don't get it at all, and the management models the "business majors" get in college aren't helpful in the modern age.
Why are two of the more successful computer companies (M$ and Apple) being run by people without business degrees (Gates and Jobs)? Could it be that what they teach in business school is as much a liability as an asset?
The statement "Motif isn't dead" brings to mind Frank Zappa's "Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" statement. I don't know if Motif is "dead" or not, but based on my distant experience with it, it's been smelling funny for a long long time.
Just asking, but I was under the impression that MOL and Dynasoar were either not secret or have been declassified since 1970, at least.
Another good site along these lines is the Encyclopedia Astronautica, if I could remember where it is.
Is AOL/Time Warner really "conservative"? Watch CNN sometime, or check out Ted Turner's political views.
Hmm. What about Joseph of Arimathea? Wasn't he a minor figure in the legend of the grail?
Allow me to say I agree.
There's a strong element in the left, and to a lesser extent on the right, that claims that libertarians don't care about society.
The implicit assumption that they don't really want to say they're saying is that society and the state are equivalent. To most libertarians, this is about as stupid as the Sun King's "L'etat, c'est moi."
Just as an example, look at how the author mentioned librarians; many of the libraries in the early US were founded with private donations; the institution is only as strong in the US as it is now because in the 19th century, Andrew Carnegie went around endowing large numbers of them. There are countries around with much stronger government involvement in the economy, without a library system as extensive as the US's, because it wasn't part of their society.
To me, it looks like the author just had an axe to grind, and is spinning the conference for all it's worth.
But water doesn't always freeze at 32 degrees F. It depends on the salinity.
Yes, but the problem is, with your system, by the time someone needs help by your criteria, they've either killed themselves or someone else.
Funny thing is, according to your criteria, Schumann (who suffered from manic depression during all of his adult life) wasn't ill until he actually managed to commit suicide. Needless to say, I doubt this conclusion.
BTW, if anyone here really wants to read more about manic depression, from someone who actually has a clue, I'd recommend _Touched With Fire_ by Kay Redfield Jamison, which is a fascinating account of the interaction of manic depression with the history of the creative arts. She's also a co-author of the standard psychiatric reference to the illness, _Manic Depressive Illness_; and finally, she also wrote _An Unquiet Mind_, which is about her own struggles against the illness.
It suddenly occured to me that it would probably be better to read this thread with a threshold of zero; anybody with any real experience with bipolar disorder is likely to be posting down at zero with all the grits trolls and the like.
Yah, I know noone will probably read this comment, but your comment about the clone makers not having any R&D is kinda hypocritical. Apple _refused_ to license the MacOS for anything besides an Apple- licensed motherboard. During the second phase of cloning, the clone companies were going to be allowed to make their own designs, but it was at that point, after they spent the money but before they got the license, that the clones were "steved."
Funny you should mention file formats. M$ has an incentive to make sure the file conversion utilities in its programs don't work, to force you to upgrade to Office. And it seems that it's used that to great advantage. Not to mention incompatible file formats between various versions of Office, to force upgrades.