(parent) By promoting copyleft, some
people are attempting to usurp the Public
Domain
No they're not. They're trying to pump up the Public Domain in the same way that commercial IP users have pumped up Copyrighted Material.
Copyleft!="Public Domain". To equate them is one of the biggest deceptions of the Free Software movement.
Public Domain is uncopyrighted. You can incorporate Public Domain material into other works without restriction. Copyleft is attempting to replace the Public Domain with something else.
One other thing to say; it's interesting that you describe Soros as a philanthropist. It seems like a lot of these wealthy donors favor systems that make it difficult for small business to enter the market. Copylefting software is a tool that does that. I have a theory about why the elites like copyleft. They saw Bill Gates, who was a nerd, rise to a position of power. BG shunned philanthropy until his father browbeat him into it. BG ignored the government until it attacked him. BG lobbied nobody until his enemies lobbied. Plainly, BG is not "one of them" and because proprietary software can allow people with nothing more than a good idea and a few thousand dollars to become billionaires, it plainly represents a threat to the power elites. They have to keep the nerds out of the country club. Nobody talked about the irrelevancy of government until BG got rich. Free Software everywhere would help the ruling class maintain their position. Policy wonks like Soros would become important again, free to force their ideas down people's throats. RMS and Lessig are nothing more than mouth-pieces funded by the power elites. If RMS's hadn't received the MacArthur grant, we might not even be talking about him.
1. If defined as "using a common standard" globalism falls short for the same reason that monoculture crops, or everybody using the same e-mail program falls short: any failure in the system is exported everywhere.
2. If defined as "free trade", it falls short because of the hidden costs that don't make it into the accountant's ledgers. For example, allowing international shipping on the Great Lakes seems like the obvious choice until you realize that trout are disappearing because of pests transported from foreign waters. From the Black Death of the middle ages, to the great flu epidemic of WWI, trade and travel has always brought these increased risks. These risks almost never appear on the balance sheet when free trade proponents make their arguments. The rational way to maintain the benefits of trade and ensure against such losses is to impose reasonable tarrifs. The proceeds of said tarrifs must be used to inspect imported goods, write regulations, etc. That is the only fair way to pay for such activities because the revenue collected will be proportional to trade. Pulling revenues out of the general fund won't work because the temptation to skimp on inspections is already too great. At the very least, import-export companies should pay into some sort of insurance fund to pay for ecological disasters and epidemics.
3. If defined as "world government" the problem is so painfully obvious that it almost lends credence to the conspiracy theorists who believe that globalism is a plot designed to start a world war and kill a few billion people. It's hard enough to keep Great Britain under one law. Can anyone seriously imagine bringing the entire world under one law without some serious butt-kicking? And for what? All because it looks so good on paper? And then when the government becomes evil where do you run? That brings us back to point 1--a monoculture government with no place for asylum seekers.
4. Some people have argued that "we have to expand free trade to help the economy". More painfully obvious fallacies. If we need to expand free trade to help the economy, then the economy is helpless because there is a finite world in which to expand.
5. If defined as "the UN" globalism is just a waste of time. Everybody has been marketed into believing that without the UN the world would sink into chaos. Bollox! Without the UN diplomats would continue to have ad-hoc meetings in times of crisis, and some left-leaning committees staffed by the wives of wealthy CEOs would no longer exist.
Yeah, George Soros thinks something is a great idea... whatever. These are the same kind of people who brought us Keynes and the "fine tuning" of the economy.
When I was a kid in the early 1970s they told us that "some day people will have computers in their homes". Naturally, I pictured the only compter I had ever seen--a room-filling Univac with fridge-sized tape drives and walls of blinkenlights.
Nobody saw MS's exclusive OEM contracts for what they were--an opportunity. They were an opportunity for someone to market PCs with greater vertical control of the manufacturing process, the way Apple does. IBM ran scared in the PC market because they were scared of being labeled a monopoly again, but the fear was unfounded. At least it didn't deter them from the laptop market, where if they still wanted to they could market OS/2, but NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE WANT IT.
As for Free Software (see footnote) being capitalist, that's just bunk. It threatens to drive competition out of the market just like MS did. The only difference is that when they have achieved that goal they will turn to direct government funding. That has the potential to be far worse because once the government becomes the relied-upon provider of a good or service it is extremely difficult for them to exit the market. The public school system is a good example of this. Even with the people that they claim to help pushing for change, Liberals insist that "the public system must remain to serve the poor and minorities" when in reality it serves the teachers unions and Democrats.
The public school movement started as a grass-roots effort just like Free Software. I fear that it may follow the same path as the public schools.
(footnote) by Free Software, I mean anything that is "copylefted". Open Source that is not copylefted, and can be turned back into Closed Source is OK because it does not create a sink for IP. Licenses like the GPL were intentionally created as IP sinks. I used to refer to the GPL as a problem, but this is unfair and creates the impression that I have a personal vendetta againsts RMS and his supporters. This is not the case. It is important to distinguish that copyleft is the real problem, and not any particular license that uses it. It is also important for people to realize that the realm of copyleft is not the same as the Public Domain. By promoting copyleft, some people are attempting to usurp the Public Domain and effectively collectivize or unionize IP and "knowledge workers". I also want people to realize that I'm not trying to insult everyone who uses the GPL. Many of them are innocent or don't see it as that big of a problem. Hopefully I can change their minds and I certainly don't want to insult them.
I'm completely in favor of bringing back "thou." You may have noticed various attempts at pluralizing "you." These efforts are pointless as "you" is already plural.
That's why I'm so glad to live in Virginia, where I can use "you" (or better yet, y') for the singular and "y'all" for a group. In more formal settings, "you all" is applied to the group. If it's a crowd full of snobs, just use "you" and assume they can deduce the meaning from context. You can also use "everybody" to refer to a group of snobs. Unless they are also grammar nazis, they will assume that "everybody" is short for "everybody in the room". Of course, if you have to speak to a room full of Yankee grammar nazis, may God have mercy on your soul. Maybe some day those Yankee bumpkins will figure out how to talk.:)
Oh for the love of God, or King James, or Shakespeare, it's "thou" not "you". A hundred years from now people may read "Arctic" in some old book and the teacher will inform her students that "this is the archaic spelling of Artic".
Yeah, but when they pull up to the Siberian equivalent of 7-11 for a hot cup of coffee, there will be no place to park. Actually come to think of it, what with globalization and all, the Siberian equivalent of 7-11 is probably... 7-11.
Re:The best he can build is a disintegration chamb
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2
Of course, in the parallel universe the sock becomes dirty again. I believe Einstein described it as "stinky action at a distance".
Nevermind the (subtle) difference in taste. When you pour Coke that uses corn syrup over ice, it builds an obnoxious head. At least, that's a problem that seemed to develop for no good reason that I could think of, other than a change in Coke. Maybe our water quality changed. Possibly, your ice cubes got rougher which caused more bubbles. Either way it's a moot point because I can't drink Coke any more. Too much acid. Too much sugar. Too much caffeine.
Ford's cars were more than just "good enough", this implies that he was somehow lucky to land that
No it doesn't. Otherwise, I wouldn't have described this as a tactic.
To say that his cars were merely good enough is to blindly dismiss his accomplishments
No it isn't. You are right to attribute genius to Ford's ability to bring economical cars to market, but the fact remains that other cars were much better--if you could afford them.
Once again, go back and read what I wrote. I didn't ignore Apple at all. I likened Apple to Daimler-Benz, not Xerox to Daimler-Benz.
I can agree with you that Gates is nowhere near the genius that Ford was. It's arguable that someone else could have done what Gates did. It is less arguable that someone could have done what Ford did; mass-produced cars would have come eventually, but perhaps not in so distinguished a fashion as Ford's.
To end on a more pleasant note, here's a nice piece of Ford lore that was related to me by my father: The dimensions, material and construction of wooden crates used to ship engines were specified with precision by Ford. Why? Because when the engine was un-crated, the crate was disassembled and re-used as floor boards for the model-T.
...would make it a point to do a little amature surgery shortly after the abduction. I mean, many of them are just going to rape and kill the kid anyway, what difference does a little scanning and cutting make? If they hit an artery, no biggy, just find another kid.
So did Ford! The plants were famous for their five dollar day (just google that phrase and you can get a lot more links) which was considerably more than the typical daily wage at the time. Ford believed that if the workers made enough to buy the product, it would ultimately be good for the company too.
Of course we can only speculate, but I think people will look back at Gates the way they look back at Henry Ford. Gates never claimed to invent the GUIs or OSs. He simply produced an OS that was popular and you could have your applications in any color you liked, as long as they were Windows applications. Likewise, Ford never claimed to invent the automobile. Daimler and Benz had the first practical car, but it was Ford that put them in the hands of millions of Americans and sparked the real revolution. Much like Gates' OS, Ford's cars were "good enough" and offered little choice in style. That was the right tactic for the first few years of the auto, and it was the right tactic for the first few years of computing.
Of course Daimler and Benz did just fine and became a premium brand--like Apple. There were certainly automobiles prior to Daimler-Benz. These would be analogous to the prototypes turned out by Xerox PARC or the DoD. They failed to reach the market either because the inventors were hogtied by short-sighted backers (Xerox) or because the projects were not suitable for the mass market (ENIAC).
...what Yasser Arafat's peace plan is. Everybody knows Microsoft wants to push Open Source into the Meditaranean. MS already has two strategies for Open Source: 1. Make token agreements with it, then break them. 2. Continue to exploit Truly Free bits of Open Source (e.g., JPEG, ZLIB, PNG, TCP/IP, etc.).
However, I think that an independant Microsoft and Open Source could peacefully exist if... 1. MS and the Free Software advocates both recognize the rights of the other to exist. 2. MS agrees to adheer to open standards and not sponsor features that wander into the open standards and detonate.
I just pulled up stats for Feb and Mar '02 and there were absolutely NO *NIX clients in the top 30. The report provided by my hosting company only shows the top 30 user agents. Strangely enough, I actually had a Mac user in Feb... let me see how long it takes to download the Jan report... unfortunately... the user agents are at the end... OK, there's that Mac agent again! It ranked 28. Mozilla/3.01 ranks 23, but doesn't identify itself as Netscape. Everything else is either MSIE or a search bot. My site only averages about 100 visits per day, so this is by no means a broad survey. Let's pull up July 01, that's when I got a big surge in hits from my infamous GPL PacMan chart and many of these guys were probably Slashdotters. The PacMan received 7068 hits. Konq surged to number 6 and 10 in the rankings with 698 and 412 hits respectively (there were two different versions being used). Gecko was 8 with 446 hits. Notice, these are hits for the entire month, and not for a particular URL. IE occupied the top 5 slots which comprised about 8000 hits. There is a surprising diversity of user agents. There are a lot of hits that aren't in the top 30. Total hits that month were about 33 thousand. There were 1829 unique user agents. The report doesn't track user agents for a particular URL. Maybe the raw data does, but I'm not curious enough to go looking for more sophisticated analysis tools.
Unfortunately, tracking clients "Netcraft style" is a lot more difficult, since the results depend so much on the content. For example, a breakdown of user agents on msn.com is obviously going to be different than on redhat.com. Even something that you might think of as "OS neutral" like Yahoo probably has some kind of skew to it. I don't see how you can get a fair breakdown of user agents without doing something sneaky, like monitoring http traffic through an ISP. Let's not go there.
Afghan kid: Because you don't understand why we hate you.
Re:Its about -concentration- of wealth
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Globalism Post 9/11
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think I heard somewhere that this is almost always true for countries that derive their wealth from natural resources. So, paradoxicly, striking oil can actually be bad news for the economy.
It's probably part economics and part psychology. People get the idea that they don't really have to create to be wealthy. They figure they can just sell all their natural resources, and that will supply the wealth. In the short run, this is true. In the long run, they are actually depleting their wealth.
Now, that need not be the case if people turn towards activities that are sustainable and not dependant on the resource (gold, oil, diamonds, whatever).
To do this, the Saudis need to develop industries that don't have anything to do with oil. The problem is, that's such a leap, and because they are still swimming in oil wealth it is probably a very hard sell.
If I were the King of Saudi Arabia (that sounds so quaint, doesn't it?) I would be pushing for the development of automotive plants, chip fabs, irrigation projects, and innovative urban designs to take advantage of the desert environment (think ubiquitous solar power). That's plainly the future after the oil runs out and/or the west stops needing it. However, can you imagine trying to sell this vision to the Saudis now?
So, the Saudis supply the raw material, but we supply the "human capital" and in the process of doing so we enrich ourselves while the Saudis impoverish their land. They are in very deep doo-doo if they don't wake up.
I can't put an exact figure to it, but you are probably not far off. Whenever I get a real level-5 "zinger" in on/., I naturally get a lot more referrers from/. There is some correlation between that spike, and the number of hits from Linux clients. I suspect that if I didn't post on/. I'd almost never get hit by a Linux client. At any rate, the surge in hits on those days contains only a small fraction of *NIX user agents.
An interesting side note: The surge in popularity of Konquerer was very sudden and obvious. One month I had a smattering of Lynx and X11 Mozilla clients on my site, the next I had something like 20 or 30 Konq hits. For a while, it seemed like Konq was the only *NIX browser to hit my site.
Re:The real editors of Slashdot today
on
April Fools Wrap Up
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· Score: 3, Funny
Who says nobody in America has to wear a burqa?
If you are the guy in the Clippy suit, please check one or more of the following:
[x] vodka
[x] pot
[x] witness relocation program
[x] dying from shame
[x] comitting suicide immediately afterwords
[x] comitting suicide while picture is being taken
[x] am actually the goatsex guy, this seemed like a step up
[x] better than having to walk around with a temporary ID badge
...Bill Gates open sources Windows, RMS says it was all "just a fraternity prank. We at Skull and Bones never thought we could convince so many people to give away their work. I'm going to clean my self up and take that job with Texaco that W promised me."
On the international front, Arafat converted to the obscure "snake handling" sect of fundamentalist Christianity. Preachers from eastern Kentucky are en route to the West Bank.
Blah, blah, blah, April 1, Yada, yada, yada... I've pretty much written off/. for the rest of the day. Hey/. editors, it's called finesse. Look into it.
Except that if you consider that the first tower to come down was the second hit, and that it was hit below the 70th floor, it becomes quite clear that the asbestos that was there did little to help.
I don't think you can make a rational statement one way or the other, since we are dealing with two different crashes which probably cut different beams and spilled fuel in different patterns. Also, the beams on the 70th floor were bearing a lot more weight. So, they required less heat before they lost their cohesion.
As for all the people slinging accusations of greed, I agree that's bollox.
The WTC was designed to withstand an 8.0 earthquake. It handled the impact of the planes just fine. This hardly seems like the work of companies that were cutting corners. That the slurry wall holding back the Hudson river held is simply amazing considering it contained the epicenter of a minor earthquake. If that had broken, we would be looking at a huge lake there today. No recovery efforts would have been possible until a new slurry wall was built, and that would have taken months.
That said, I do have to question the use of "trusses". On the Discovery Channel they quoted a fireman who said that they always say "don't trust the truss" because they have a tendancy to melt quickly. Perhaps there should be a review of what types of trusses can be used in all new construction. Would it have been possible to build the WTC's wide-open design with heavier cross beams instead of trusses?
As bad as all this is, I'm sure we can learn from it. What will buildings of the future use for fire suppression? How about active cooling systems for structural components? Perhaps insulation can be coated with a material that is resistant to blast waves so that the material will be retained. From now on, architects will be thinking more about explosions and huge incendiary bombs. Perhaps they will improve design, thus resulting in safer buildings for everyone.
That's National Programmers Association. It will be a union--the geeks counterpart of the NEA.
This is of course, if the nightmare scenario plays out. RMS et al. are the same kind of people who insist that public schools have to be preserved even when they are plainly failing.
They want to do to programming what they did to education. It may take decades, but Liberals are nothing if not persistant. Where Free Software dominates a market, we already see some characteristics of the educational situation emerging: Wealthy people get to choose, poor people are left with the inferior "public" version.
There is already a lot of "stealth" government funding of free software. However, I'm not a total pessimist. At this stage, I doubt the Free Software movement can develop enough political clout to squash IP rights for software developers. The market should remain free enough so that consumers will still be able to choose shareware or shrink-wrapped packages if their needs are met better that way. However, ESR is right to the extent that the days of "easy money" are over.
Developers who want to make money will have to target much smaller markets, and serve them in particular ways. Going back to the school example, the private companies have an advantage in that they can supply religious instruction whereas the public schools can't. So, most private schools are religious. The software industry will have to find something that only *they* can supply, but Free Software can't. That something might be "brand loyalty" or "author reputation". Perhaps successful commercial software will take the form of "The latest release from Geekney Spears, girl geek extraordinaire, featuring here latest GUI mail client!".
Slashdot Mirror
(parent) By promoting copyleft, some people are attempting to usurp the Public Domain
No they're not. They're trying to pump up the Public Domain in the same way that commercial IP users have pumped up Copyrighted Material.
Copyleft!="Public Domain". To equate them is one of the biggest deceptions of the Free Software movement.
Public Domain is uncopyrighted. You can incorporate Public Domain material into other works without restriction. Copyleft is attempting to replace the Public Domain with something else.
One other thing to say; it's interesting that you describe Soros as a philanthropist. It seems like a lot of these wealthy donors favor systems that make it difficult for small business to enter the market. Copylefting software is a tool that does that. I have a theory about why the elites like copyleft. They saw Bill Gates, who was a nerd, rise to a position of power. BG shunned philanthropy until his father browbeat him into it. BG ignored the government until it attacked him. BG lobbied nobody until his enemies lobbied. Plainly, BG is not "one of them" and because proprietary software can allow people with nothing more than a good idea and a few thousand dollars to become billionaires, it plainly represents a threat to the power elites. They have to keep the nerds out of the country club. Nobody talked about the irrelevancy of government until BG got rich. Free Software everywhere would help the ruling class maintain their position. Policy wonks like Soros would become important again, free to force their ideas down people's throats. RMS and Lessig are nothing more than mouth-pieces funded by the power elites. If RMS's hadn't received the MacArthur grant, we might not even be talking about him.
1. If defined as "using a common standard" globalism falls short for the same reason that monoculture crops, or everybody using the same e-mail program falls short: any failure in the system is exported everywhere.
2. If defined as "free trade", it falls short because of the hidden costs that don't make it into the accountant's ledgers. For example, allowing international shipping on the Great Lakes seems like the obvious choice until you realize that trout are disappearing because of pests transported from foreign waters. From the Black Death of the middle ages, to the great flu epidemic of WWI, trade and travel has always brought these increased risks. These risks almost never appear on the balance sheet when free trade proponents make their arguments. The rational way to maintain the benefits of trade and ensure against such losses is to impose reasonable tarrifs. The proceeds of said tarrifs must be used to inspect imported goods, write regulations, etc. That is the only fair way to pay for such activities because the revenue collected will be proportional to trade. Pulling revenues out of the general fund won't work because the temptation to skimp on inspections is already too great. At the very least, import-export companies should pay into some sort of insurance fund to pay for ecological disasters and epidemics.
3. If defined as "world government" the problem is so painfully obvious that it almost lends credence to the conspiracy theorists who believe that globalism is a plot designed to start a world war and kill a few billion people. It's hard enough to keep Great Britain under one law. Can anyone seriously imagine bringing the entire world under one law without some serious butt-kicking? And for what? All because it looks so good on paper? And then when the government becomes evil where do you run? That brings us back to point 1--a monoculture government with no place for asylum seekers.
4. Some people have argued that "we have to expand free trade to help the economy". More painfully obvious fallacies. If we need to expand free trade to help the economy, then the economy is helpless because there is a finite world in which to expand.
5. If defined as "the UN" globalism is just a waste of time. Everybody has been marketed into believing that without the UN the world would sink into chaos. Bollox! Without the UN diplomats would continue to have ad-hoc meetings in times of crisis, and some left-leaning committees staffed by the wives of wealthy CEOs would no longer exist.
Yeah, George Soros thinks something is a great idea... whatever. These are the same kind of people who brought us Keynes and the "fine tuning" of the economy.
unlimited bandwidth IS capitalism
I thought capitalism was millions of peaches, peaches for free, millions of peaches, peaches for me.
When I was a kid in the early 1970s they told us that "some day people will have computers in their homes". Naturally, I pictured the only compter I had ever seen--a room-filling Univac with fridge-sized tape drives and walls of blinkenlights.
Nobody saw MS's exclusive OEM contracts for what they were--an opportunity. They were an opportunity for someone to market PCs with greater vertical control of the manufacturing process, the way Apple does. IBM ran scared in the PC market because they were scared of being labeled a monopoly again, but the fear was unfounded. At least it didn't deter them from the laptop market, where if they still wanted to they could market OS/2, but NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE WANT IT.
As for Free Software (see footnote) being capitalist, that's just bunk. It threatens to drive competition out of the market just like MS did. The only difference is that when they have achieved that goal they will turn to direct government funding. That has the potential to be far worse because once the government becomes the relied-upon provider of a good or service it is extremely difficult for them to exit the market. The public school system is a good example of this. Even with the people that they claim to help pushing for change, Liberals insist that "the public system must remain to serve the poor and minorities" when in reality it serves the teachers unions and Democrats.
The public school movement started as a grass-roots effort just like Free Software. I fear that it may follow the same path as the public schools.
(footnote) by Free Software, I mean anything that is "copylefted". Open Source that is not copylefted, and can be turned back into Closed Source is OK because it does not create a sink for IP. Licenses like the GPL were intentionally created as IP sinks. I used to refer to the GPL as a problem, but this is unfair and creates the impression that I have a personal vendetta againsts RMS and his supporters. This is not the case. It is important to distinguish that copyleft is the real problem, and not any particular license that uses it. It is also important for people to realize that the realm of copyleft is not the same as the Public Domain. By promoting copyleft, some people are attempting to usurp the Public Domain and effectively collectivize or unionize IP and "knowledge workers". I also want people to realize that I'm not trying to insult everyone who uses the GPL. Many of them are innocent or don't see it as that big of a problem. Hopefully I can change their minds and I certainly don't want to insult them.
I'm completely in favor of bringing back "thou." You may have noticed various attempts at pluralizing "you." These efforts are pointless as "you" is already plural.
That's why I'm so glad to live in Virginia, where I can use "you" (or better yet, y') for the singular and "y'all" for a group. In more formal settings, "you all" is applied to the group. If it's a crowd full of snobs, just use "you" and assume they can deduce the meaning from context. You can also use "everybody" to refer to a group of snobs. Unless they are also grammar nazis, they will assume that "everybody" is short for "everybody in the room". Of course, if you have to speak to a room full of Yankee grammar nazis, may God have mercy on your soul. Maybe some day those Yankee bumpkins will figure out how to talk. :)
Oh for the love of God, or King James, or Shakespeare, it's "thou" not "you". A hundred years from now people may read "Arctic" in some old book and the teacher will inform her students that "this is the archaic spelling of Artic".
Yeah, but when they pull up to the Siberian equivalent of 7-11 for a hot cup of coffee, there will be no place to park. Actually come to think of it, what with globalization and all, the Siberian equivalent of 7-11 is probably... 7-11.
Of course, in the parallel universe the sock becomes dirty again. I believe Einstein described it as "stinky action at a distance".
This was widely reported. They didn't finish this one, but who knows what else they have?
Nevermind the (subtle) difference in taste. When you pour Coke that uses corn syrup over ice, it builds an obnoxious head. At least, that's a problem that seemed to develop for no good reason that I could think of, other than a change in Coke. Maybe our water quality changed. Possibly, your ice cubes got rougher which caused more bubbles. Either way it's a moot point because I can't drink Coke any more. Too much acid. Too much sugar. Too much caffeine.
WTF? Go back and re-read what I wrote.
Ford's cars were more than just "good enough", this implies that he was somehow lucky to land that
No it doesn't. Otherwise, I wouldn't have described this as a tactic.
To say that his cars were merely good enough is to blindly dismiss his accomplishments
No it isn't. You are right to attribute genius to Ford's ability to bring economical cars to market, but the fact remains that other cars were much better--if you could afford them.
Once again, go back and read what I wrote. I didn't ignore Apple at all. I likened Apple to Daimler-Benz, not Xerox to Daimler-Benz.
I can agree with you that Gates is nowhere near the genius that Ford was. It's arguable that someone else could have done what Gates did. It is less arguable that someone could have done what Ford did; mass-produced cars would have come eventually, but perhaps not in so distinguished a fashion as Ford's.
To end on a more pleasant note, here's a nice piece of Ford lore that was related to me by my father: The dimensions, material and construction of wooden crates used to ship engines were specified with precision by Ford. Why? Because when the engine was un-crated, the crate was disassembled and re-used as floor boards for the model-T.
...would make it a point to do a little amature surgery shortly after the abduction. I mean, many of them are just going to rape and kill the kid anyway, what difference does a little scanning and cutting make? If they hit an artery, no biggy, just find another kid.
MS treats it's employees well!
So did Ford! The plants were famous for their five dollar day (just google that phrase and you can get a lot more links) which was considerably more than the typical daily wage at the time. Ford believed that if the workers made enough to buy the product, it would ultimately be good for the company too.
Of course we can only speculate, but I think people will look back at Gates the way they look back at Henry Ford. Gates never claimed to invent the GUIs or OSs. He simply produced an OS that was popular and you could have your applications in any color you liked, as long as they were Windows applications. Likewise, Ford never claimed to invent the automobile. Daimler and Benz had the first practical car, but it was Ford that put them in the hands of millions of Americans and sparked the real revolution. Much like Gates' OS, Ford's cars were "good enough" and offered little choice in style. That was the right tactic for the first few years of the auto, and it was the right tactic for the first few years of computing.
Of course Daimler and Benz did just fine and became a premium brand--like Apple. There were certainly automobiles prior to Daimler-Benz. These would be analogous to the prototypes turned out by Xerox PARC or the DoD. They failed to reach the market either because the inventors were hogtied by short-sighted backers (Xerox) or because the projects were not suitable for the mass market (ENIAC).
...what Yasser Arafat's peace plan is. Everybody knows Microsoft wants to push Open Source into the Meditaranean. MS already has two strategies for Open Source: 1. Make token agreements with it, then break them. 2. Continue to exploit Truly Free bits of Open Source (e.g., JPEG, ZLIB, PNG, TCP/IP, etc.).
However, I think that an independant Microsoft and Open Source could peacefully exist if... 1. MS and the Free Software advocates both recognize the rights of the other to exist. 2. MS agrees to adheer to open standards and not sponsor features that wander into the open standards and detonate.
I just pulled up stats for Feb and Mar '02 and there were absolutely NO *NIX clients in the top 30. The report provided by my hosting company only shows the top 30 user agents. Strangely enough, I actually had a Mac user in Feb... let me see how long it takes to download the Jan report... unfortunately... the user agents are at the end... OK, there's that Mac agent again! It ranked 28. Mozilla/3.01 ranks 23, but doesn't identify itself as Netscape. Everything else is either MSIE or a search bot. My site only averages about 100 visits per day, so this is by no means a broad survey. Let's pull up July 01, that's when I got a big surge in hits from my infamous GPL PacMan chart and many of these guys were probably Slashdotters. The PacMan received 7068 hits. Konq surged to number 6 and 10 in the rankings with 698 and 412 hits respectively (there were two different versions being used). Gecko was 8 with 446 hits. Notice, these are hits for the entire month, and not for a particular URL. IE occupied the top 5 slots which comprised about 8000 hits. There is a surprising diversity of user agents. There are a lot of hits that aren't in the top 30. Total hits that month were about 33 thousand. There were 1829 unique user agents. The report doesn't track user agents for a particular URL. Maybe the raw data does, but I'm not curious enough to go looking for more sophisticated analysis tools.
Unfortunately, tracking clients "Netcraft style" is a lot more difficult, since the results depend so much on the content. For example, a breakdown of user agents on msn.com is obviously going to be different than on redhat.com. Even something that you might think of as "OS neutral" like Yahoo probably has some kind of skew to it. I don't see how you can get a fair breakdown of user agents without doing something sneaky, like monitoring http traffic through an ISP. Let's not go there.
(from Southpark)
One of the kids: Why do you hate us?
Afghan kid: Because you don't understand why we hate you.
I think I heard somewhere that this is almost always true for countries that derive their wealth from natural resources. So, paradoxicly, striking oil can actually be bad news for the economy.
It's probably part economics and part psychology. People get the idea that they don't really have to create to be wealthy. They figure they can just sell all their natural resources, and that will supply the wealth. In the short run, this is true. In the long run, they are actually depleting their wealth.
Now, that need not be the case if people turn towards activities that are sustainable and not dependant on the resource (gold, oil, diamonds, whatever).
To do this, the Saudis need to develop industries that don't have anything to do with oil. The problem is, that's such a leap, and because they are still swimming in oil wealth it is probably a very hard sell.
If I were the King of Saudi Arabia (that sounds so quaint, doesn't it?) I would be pushing for the development of automotive plants, chip fabs, irrigation projects, and innovative urban designs to take advantage of the desert environment (think ubiquitous solar power). That's plainly the future after the oil runs out and/or the west stops needing it. However, can you imagine trying to sell this vision to the Saudis now?
So, the Saudis supply the raw material, but we supply the "human capital" and in the process of doing so we enrich ourselves while the Saudis impoverish their land. They are in very deep doo-doo if they don't wake up.
I can't put an exact figure to it, but you are probably not far off. Whenever I get a real level-5 "zinger" in on /., I naturally get a lot more referrers from /. There is some correlation between that spike, and the number of hits from Linux clients. I suspect that if I didn't post on /. I'd almost never get hit by a Linux client. At any rate, the surge in hits on those days contains only a small fraction of *NIX user agents.
An interesting side note: The surge in popularity of Konquerer was very sudden and obvious. One month I had a smattering of Lynx and X11 Mozilla clients on my site, the next I had something like 20 or 30 Konq hits. For a while, it seemed like Konq was the only *NIX browser to hit my site.
Who says nobody in America has to wear a burqa?
If you are the guy in the Clippy suit, please check one or more of the following:
[x] vodka
[x] pot
[x] witness relocation program
[x] dying from shame
[x] comitting suicide immediately afterwords
[x] comitting suicide while picture is being taken
[x] am actually the goatsex guy, this seemed like a step up
[x] better than having to walk around with a temporary ID badge
...Bill Gates open sources Windows, RMS says it was all "just a fraternity prank. We at Skull and Bones never thought we could convince so many people to give away their work. I'm going to clean my self up and take that job with Texaco that W promised me."
On the international front, Arafat converted to the obscure "snake handling" sect of fundamentalist Christianity. Preachers from eastern Kentucky are en route to the West Bank.
Blah, blah, blah, April 1, Yada, yada, yada... I've pretty much written off /. for the rest of the day. Hey /. editors, it's called finesse. Look into it.
Except that if you consider that the first tower to come down was the second hit, and that it was hit below the 70th floor, it becomes quite clear that the asbestos that was there did little to help.
I don't think you can make a rational statement one way or the other, since we are dealing with two different crashes which probably cut different beams and spilled fuel in different patterns. Also, the beams on the 70th floor were bearing a lot more weight. So, they required less heat before they lost their cohesion.
As for all the people slinging accusations of greed, I agree that's bollox.
The WTC was designed to withstand an 8.0 earthquake. It handled the impact of the planes just fine. This hardly seems like the work of companies that were cutting corners. That the slurry wall holding back the Hudson river held is simply amazing considering it contained the epicenter of a minor earthquake. If that had broken, we would be looking at a huge lake there today. No recovery efforts would have been possible until a new slurry wall was built, and that would have taken months.
That said, I do have to question the use of "trusses". On the Discovery Channel they quoted a fireman who said that they always say "don't trust the truss" because they have a tendancy to melt quickly. Perhaps there should be a review of what types of trusses can be used in all new construction. Would it have been possible to build the WTC's wide-open design with heavier cross beams instead of trusses?
As bad as all this is, I'm sure we can learn from it. What will buildings of the future use for fire suppression? How about active cooling systems for structural components? Perhaps insulation can be coated with a material that is resistant to blast waves so that the material will be retained. From now on, architects will be thinking more about explosions and huge incendiary bombs. Perhaps they will improve design, thus resulting in safer buildings for everyone.
That's National Programmers Association. It will be a union--the geeks counterpart of the NEA.
This is of course, if the nightmare scenario plays out. RMS et al. are the same kind of people who insist that public schools have to be preserved even when they are plainly failing.
They want to do to programming what they did to education. It may take decades, but Liberals are nothing if not persistant. Where Free Software dominates a market, we already see some characteristics of the educational situation emerging: Wealthy people get to choose, poor people are left with the inferior "public" version.
There is already a lot of "stealth" government funding of free software. However, I'm not a total pessimist. At this stage, I doubt the Free Software movement can develop enough political clout to squash IP rights for software developers. The market should remain free enough so that consumers will still be able to choose shareware or shrink-wrapped packages if their needs are met better that way. However, ESR is right to the extent that the days of "easy money" are over.
Developers who want to make money will have to target much smaller markets, and serve them in particular ways. Going back to the school example, the private companies have an advantage in that they can supply religious instruction whereas the public schools can't. So, most private schools are religious. The software industry will have to find something that only *they* can supply, but Free Software can't. That something might be "brand loyalty" or "author reputation". Perhaps successful commercial software will take the form of "The latest release from Geekney Spears, girl geek extraordinaire, featuring here latest GUI mail client!".