In other words, it tries to be just as big, hot, and power hungry as a desktop.
Huh? I thought all that means is that it would replace main _function_ of a desktop system, while providing the benefit of being portable.
But without completely sacrificing ergonomics,
or reasonable performance.
Just like mobile phones can be replacements of regular wired phones.
I think you may have read too much into that one sentence there.
Interesting point, definitely. Same thing can be said about Hitler -- it's ironic that the party name was national-socialistic, even though it really didn't aim at nationalizing corporations. The party was definitely about
nationalism, but not about socialism.
Rather, it seemed to be more about aligning benefits of (big) corporations and nationalistic state more closely.
On the other hand, it's really not good/fair to compare Bush (or any other current world leader) in general with Hitler -- there may be similarities, but there are obviously (and fortunately!) many striking differences.
In many ways Mussolini is a safer choice -- he was much more act, and less substance (which once again is fortunate; considering there were already 2 fairly efficient murderous leaders in Europe at that point). Brutal, uncivilized, but less efficient.
Your first statement is true, for the simple reason that there are many, many more workers than executives in the world, if not for anything else.
But otherwise it's just incoherent rambling.
Could it be that many Slashdotters have also seen big problems with quality, related to off-shoring?
And although much of it can be attributed to lack of normal decent oversight, resulting from greedy optimism, there are also some inherent problems... at least with the common system of half-ass transitioning of "boring" tasks to remote countries like India (remote as in having significant timezone different to US).
Personally I'm not all that afraid of losing my job (either the current one, or in general) -- I'm good enough to earn my living, with my talent, skills and experience, even with lower-paid competition. But I despise most of current off-shoring efforts, since as an engineer, it's obvious to me why they have problems. And although I could work on improving it (there are many things that could be done to improve things), there's little benefit. I can get things done using local workers, to be profitable, it's less hassle (out of sight, out of mind...); and on top of that, I can see competitors wasting good money on bad ideas. What's not to like?
Well, it's just a typical action/reaction cycle: since there are so many overpaid undertalented "leaders", who are gung ho about offshoring ("gee! we can get 4x as many code monkeys for the same amount of money!"), it's only natural that others view it as utter madness, when they see the failures. I have seen my share of total disasters,; first when 25 top-notch engineers not only had to develop a billion-dollar piece of software, "helped" by 200 low-paid (even compared to local rates in India) recent college graduates, but also had to (try to) train said junior programmers, and get blamed for problems crappy code received from India caused. And I have seen some sort of success stories, particularly in QA testing: with 2-to-1 ratio (2 remote indian junior testers are roughly equal to 1 local US tester) things kind of seemed to work ok, at least when using traditional water-fallish heavy-weight testing.
As such, I can understand that due to lack of really phenomenal success, and due to some colossal failures, it's hard NOT to laugh at morons who push off-shoring as the ultimate solution.
Thats not to say outsourcing is an inherently bad thing. In many cases companies will gain from outsourcing to specialist companies who can offer greater competency than could be achieved inhouse.
That's probably because most often, when word "outsourcing" is used, people think it means off-shoring for cost savings: moving your operations to a third-grade third-world place, costing a fraction of original cost, and getting at most what you pay for. They do not think of it as simple task of calling the plumber to fix your pipes, instead of doing it yourself.
I agree that sometimes proper outsourcing of non-core pieces to REAL expert group helps. Problem is that if you do not have expertise to do it yourself, you probably don't have expertise to even figure out who has it... And that's how scum-sucking consulting companies get their victims: they are legal con-men.
and there aren't all that many geeks who care about hardware openness enough to give up the value.
It all depends. For my needs, 1996 Matrox MGA cards were more than good enough. Just like with CPUs, or memory amounts, or even hard drive sizes, I have more than enough for my needs, and have had for a while. I have no use for 3D to begin with, but if I did, low-end 3D cards would be fulfilling those needs.
That's all just saying that any gfx card using whatever common chipsets they can buy would be plenty fast for most users, possibly excluding gamers. But how big is the 3D gaming market for Free OSes?
Like someone else pointed out, having 90% of 5% (or even 50% of it) would be big enough for small enough player. But they would definitely have to have the right strategy: to make low-end/medium cards, but with high-quality drivers, and then market appropriately to the target crowd. And team up with linux vendors like Red Hat and SuSE (Novell)... and maybe JDS (Sun).
There's nothing honorable about being a hacker in the "I will invade your stuff for whatever reason" sense of the word.
Hmmh? There is no such sense for the word "hacker" (and if there was, mr. Graham would definitely not abuse word 'hacker' like that).
It's like saying "... being a programmer in.. 'I will piss in your morning cereal' sense of the word".
Well, to be quite honest it was a light-hearted smart-ass comment, not actually even based on my liking or disliking libertarianism. You can find actual serious notes on my other comment.
I would have made the same comment about any other strongly ideology-based political party, from republicans to rabid environmentalists.:-)
(and also about democrats, if only they had an ideology to speak of, instead of being "republican lite" soft-version of same quaint old-fashioned outdated "american" values... but they seem to lack actual ideology these days).
I think distinction is that whereas many claims by (other) extremists (right-wing, socialists, extreme environmentalist) are so inconsistent that they are funny, libertarians manage to create ideal/value cocktail that just turns my stomach, without being very amusing. It's just combination of 2-year olds' "no that's mine!" selfishness and pot-smokin' "but people are good" ("educated consumer" or whatever term they use for mythical free agent that supposedly in the end guarantees laissez-faire system works... it's very similar to socialist ideals of everyone sharing etc) fairy tale.
In a way, either aspect by itself would be amusing (toddlers are cute when they declare everything to be "MINE!"; and obviously ultra-optimistic hippish views are amusing too).
What's unfortunate is that beside these problems, there are things that are more sensible, regarding actual freedoms ("An it harm none, do as thou will"); they just get buried behind unrealistic idealism and barely covered greed and selfishness.
From the GPL: Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program... To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
Hmmh. This is from preamble, however, not from actual license that distributor needs to agree to. That is, it explains ideology (spirit of the license), not actual requirements.
Section 7 does talk about patents, however... and I guess it does relate to what you talked about incompatibility, although at first it looks more like "if someone sues you when you distribute GPL'ed code and imposes additional restrictions, you can not distribute that code at all". But probably that can be applied also to situation where author would try to distribute GPL'ed code and then sue someone for patent violations?
In case of Novell, it's doubtful their patent portfolio is so much related to the Open/Free s/w they distribute, so it may be a moot point. It's more likely they would use patents related to proprietary products, to use against someone who would attack GPL'ed software Novell is distributing. Nonetheless, it would be relevant for patents they hold that GPL code infringes on, if any, as long as they would be suing for those infringements.
I'm not "you people", and you failed to answer my simple question. How about you go and read GPL and then explain me how does that contradict with whatever patent strategy Novell may have.
I assume you are just ranting and fighting with strawmen here. I don't care whether you like or dislike the announcements; if your arguments don't hold water, try to come up with better ones instead of referring with imaginary arguments "we people" allegedly use.
The only problem I see is a direct conflict with the terms of the GPL
What on earth are you talking about? GPL says precious little about patents: it has NOTHING to do with patents whatsoever. So whatever they chose to do with their patent portfolio is orthogonal to their enforcing of (or being enforced by) licensing, including GPL (which is not the only free/open source license in the world, nor only one used by s/w Novell distributes).
I tell you, if they open source Solaris (yeah right)
Actually, Sun has announced open sourcing in a way (google should find press releases) that you can be 97% certain it will get open sourced (say, 2% chance Sun gets bought out by another company before it happens, 1% that Jonathan S gets canned; either way canceling the plans).
I could bet big amount of money that it happens (not that I strongly care either way, personally). It's not some vague "Should Sun buy Novell" idea that's been speculated about... Solaris group has pretty much been mandated to go and open source Solaris.
Good rebuttal? Uh, he's reading the original blog article like the devil reading bible... and then doing plenty of strawman attacks.
Original article didn't say anything about "Sun not wanting to help with Linux kernel development". It is only saying it wouldn't make sense to (try to) dump Open Sourced Solaris code in Linux, to port Solaris features. Neither does the article claim that Linux developers do not value good engineering principles -- just that highest priorities are different from those of Solaris kernel development team. What's wrong with such a statement? Quite obviously priorities are different; what else would you expect between a "traditional" engineering effort of a big corporation, and a leading-edge open-source development effort?
What a crappy rebuttal. Wonder why the linux kernel hacker even bother with such a knee-jerk writing I have no idea. I'm not sure if he even read the writing he was replying to; and certainly didn't try to understand it even if he did.
The thing is, long after earth rotating around the sun was proven, the majority still believed otherwise and the wiki article would still have a nice picture with 3 turtles.
As for the source, I hope encyclopedias are written by experts on the subject who are also known for objective thinking. I kind of hope the real ones are not revised by popular vote of current readers.
That is assuming Wikipedia was modeled after current western democracy (or worse, TV programming system based on ratings), and specifically where voters felt strongly like voting. That could only be the case for some of the most controversial issues, but for most of the articles there's generally not a whole lot of active interest by readers (interested enough to want to get changes to the article). And this leads to one useful trend: "voting" (modifications) is generally done by people who do care about the subject, which, surprise surprise, usually ARE the experts.
Contributions (new articles, refinements to existing ones) are much MUCH more likely to come from experts than others, just because they actually care about the issue. You think Joe Blow would want to offer his suggestions on improving an article about, say, Efficient Data Structures or Eating Habits of a Horned Owl? Nope.
It almost sounds like you think of Wikipedia as an equivalent of Fox TV-channel, with its mob rule to see their latest "reality" craze. I tend to disagree; but time will tell.
Finally, I do think it'd be useful to have "staging" areas of Wikipedia and similar projects; maybe even model the whole process after, say, distribution mechanism of open source software projects. That is, to have "stable branch", into which new updates are accepted (after more or less brief peer reviews), but without slowing down the bleeding edge "development" of the up-to-date Live Wikipedia. Editor (or whatever one wants to call them) would act as gatekeepers, but without having to worry about writing new content as much as trying to do some form of QA.
Huh? I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. Neither Wikipedia nor, say, Britannica, would have added such information, and for good reasons. In Copernicus' case, he was eventually proven "right" (ie. his model more accurately describing natural world than the one commonly believed in previously), but before that happened, it was just one goofball theory amongst others. Encyclopedias by definition can not and should not include all interesting new theories; especially since most of them end up being shown to be garbage.
Maybe you are confusing the role of scientific publications with the role of encyclopedias?
And as to getting important beliefs from Google, Slashdot or Wikipedia... what exactly would you promote as the "right" source? Trusty Olde newspapers with their own biases? Money-grubbing attention-whoring TV networks? None of the sources is perfect, or even close; but most have their days, including 3 you derided.
By the time someone has fixed the vandalism, they've already cited it, and it's as valid a citation as any.
No, how would that work? Anyone who'd check the citation would see the fixed version, and would question the author about incorrect reference, wouldn't they? There wouldn't be "tainted" information, except in revision history. I'm not sure I see the problem in this particular case?
That could obviously be a problem as well, when your citation may become invalid over time, even without any malice on anyone's part.
One possibility for creating less transient references would be for Wikipedia to have annual (monthly, weekly) snapshots, and then people could indeed refer to static knowledge. It would have its problems obviously, but for reference purposes might be good.
still contains many articles of dubious nature, inlcuding the GNAA, and one rather spitefully entitled "Gay Disease"
I had never heard of GNAA before (although I had seen the reference to the movie that apparently inspired the name on an earlier Slashdot discussion), but having now read the article I'm curious as to why exactly do you think it's of dubious nature? I mean, what exactly was so bad about it? That it uses a Bad Word, Nigger, in it?
Or just that it's about a subject that is a rather niche thing? But if latter, isn't 90%+ of material encyclopedias have mostly of interest to rather small groups of specialists?
Or maybe you just made assumptions based on the title of the article and assumed it's some kind of hate speech?
Also, patents are invalid if the idea was published
ANYWHERE prior to being patented.
Nope. In US there's the 1 year time period after publishing during which one can file patent applications; obviously as long as applicant published the invention (built something that implements the invention).
There really should be a Slashdot Patent FAQ; this same claim has been refuted a number of times.
For purposes of Open Sourcing things this doesn't have much effect, except that the author can both Open Source something AND patent couple of "inventions" contained therein...:-)
It doesn't look you are trying too hard to understand his situation here.
Maybe the choice was simpler: even if he had saved up much or most of costs, the fact is that losing his job meant that he not only would have had to pay for the education but to also support the rest of the family. That is, having a job you can maintain your own life with income, and use savings for your children; without any income, you HAVE to start eating your savings pretty soon. Plus, during unemployment, there's no guarantee it will only be 11 months; it'd be rather short-sighted to continue investing if you don't know if it takes 2, 3 or 5 years to get a job.
In the end, there's also a chance that he would have let the youngest child start her/his studies, only to find out that after one year, he couldn't afford to pay for it any more. That wouldn't have been too optimal either.
I personally think this and other examples show why so-called "socialistic" welfare systems of Europe are superior to US "winner takes it all" approach, with respect to health care and education; especially since there's actual fairness and equality. Values that used to be respected in USA originally, and up to 20th century, too, but that have fallen out of favour for past few decades.
Subsidizing the health-care and education systems ensures benefits go to people that would otherwise suffer the most, the children; allow them a somewhat even playing field.
Actually, this is not true -- as far as authors go, he and his work are reasonably well-known, and I read the catcher in high school (in a nothern european country, late 80s) as one of about 20 choices (which, incidentally, also had mr. Huxley's Brave New World and 1984) from which I had to choose, for a literacy presentation.
Ronald Regan and Gorge H. Bush restored some of the real original direction of the GOPs historic great leaders like Lincoln and made it about personal responsibility and freedome to choose,
Like being able to choose whether to have a sex or not (instead of silly "abstinence" crap some folks peddle), to abort the fetus or not; for 2 consenting adults (gay or not) to have legally binding relationships? This must be part of the Great Republican agenda I haven't been aware of so far.
In economic matters, yes, republicans have been "get your hands of my loot" liberals for the longest time, but with social issues they are the control freaks.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, it tries to be just as big, hot, and power hungry as a desktop.
Huh? I thought all that means is that it would replace main _function_ of a desktop system, while providing the benefit of being portable. But without completely sacrificing ergonomics, or reasonable performance. Just like mobile phones can be replacements of regular wired phones.
I think you may have read too much into that one sentence there.
On the other hand, it's really not good/fair to compare Bush (or any other current world leader) in general with Hitler -- there may be similarities, but there are obviously (and fortunately!) many striking differences. In many ways Mussolini is a safer choice -- he was much more act, and less substance (which once again is fortunate; considering there were already 2 fairly efficient murderous leaders in Europe at that point). Brutal, uncivilized, but less efficient.
Could it be that many Slashdotters have also seen big problems with quality, related to off-shoring? And although much of it can be attributed to lack of normal decent oversight, resulting from greedy optimism, there are also some inherent problems... at least with the common system of half-ass transitioning of "boring" tasks to remote countries like India (remote as in having significant timezone different to US).
Personally I'm not all that afraid of losing my job (either the current one, or in general) -- I'm good enough to earn my living, with my talent, skills and experience, even with lower-paid competition. But I despise most of current off-shoring efforts, since as an engineer, it's obvious to me why they have problems. And although I could work on improving it (there are many things that could be done to improve things), there's little benefit. I can get things done using local workers, to be profitable, it's less hassle (out of sight, out of mind...); and on top of that, I can see competitors wasting good money on bad ideas. What's not to like?
As such, I can understand that due to lack of really phenomenal success, and due to some colossal failures, it's hard NOT to laugh at morons who push off-shoring as the ultimate solution.
That's probably because most often, when word "outsourcing" is used, people think it means off-shoring for cost savings: moving your operations to a third-grade third-world place, costing a fraction of original cost, and getting at most what you pay for. They do not think of it as simple task of calling the plumber to fix your pipes, instead of doing it yourself.
I agree that sometimes proper outsourcing of non-core pieces to REAL expert group helps. Problem is that if you do not have expertise to do it yourself, you probably don't have expertise to even figure out who has it... And that's how scum-sucking consulting companies get their victims: they are legal con-men.
It all depends. For my needs, 1996 Matrox MGA cards were more than good enough. Just like with CPUs, or memory amounts, or even hard drive sizes, I have more than enough for my needs, and have had for a while. I have no use for 3D to begin with, but if I did, low-end 3D cards would be fulfilling those needs.
That's all just saying that any gfx card using whatever common chipsets they can buy would be plenty fast for most users, possibly excluding gamers. But how big is the 3D gaming market for Free OSes?
Like someone else pointed out, having 90% of 5% (or even 50% of it) would be big enough for small enough player. But they would definitely have to have the right strategy: to make low-end/medium cards, but with high-quality drivers, and then market appropriately to the target crowd. And team up with linux vendors like Red Hat and SuSE (Novell)... and maybe JDS (Sun).
Hmmh? There is no such sense for the word "hacker" (and if there was, mr. Graham would definitely not abuse word 'hacker' like that). It's like saying "... being a programmer in .. 'I will piss in your morning cereal' sense of the word".
Well, to be quite honest it was a light-hearted smart-ass comment, not actually even based on my liking or disliking libertarianism. You can find actual serious notes on my other comment. I would have made the same comment about any other strongly ideology-based political party, from republicans to rabid environmentalists. :-)
(and also about democrats, if only they had an ideology to speak of, instead of being "republican lite" soft-version of same quaint old-fashioned outdated "american" values... but they seem to lack actual ideology these days).
What's unfortunate is that beside these problems, there are things that are more sensible, regarding actual freedoms ("An it harm none, do as thou will"); they just get buried behind unrealistic idealism and barely covered greed and selfishness.
Hmmh. This is from preamble, however, not from actual license that distributor needs to agree to. That is, it explains ideology (spirit of the license), not actual requirements.
Section 7 does talk about patents, however... and I guess it does relate to what you talked about incompatibility, although at first it looks more like "if someone sues you when you distribute GPL'ed code and imposes additional restrictions, you can not distribute that code at all". But probably that can be applied also to situation where author would try to distribute GPL'ed code and then sue someone for patent violations?
In case of Novell, it's doubtful their patent portfolio is so much related to the Open/Free s/w they distribute, so it may be a moot point. It's more likely they would use patents related to proprietary products, to use against someone who would attack GPL'ed software Novell is distributing. Nonetheless, it would be relevant for patents they hold that GPL code infringes on, if any, as long as they would be suing for those infringements.
Actually, I have always thought they are downright comical... especially when they explain their bizarre political beliefs! :-D
I assume you are just ranting and fighting with strawmen here. I don't care whether you like or dislike the announcements; if your arguments don't hold water, try to come up with better ones instead of referring with imaginary arguments "we people" allegedly use.
I think the term for those is Patents of Mass Desctruction (PMD)...
What on earth are you talking about? GPL says precious little about patents: it has NOTHING to do with patents whatsoever. So whatever they chose to do with their patent portfolio is orthogonal to their enforcing of (or being enforced by) licensing, including GPL (which is not the only free/open source license in the world, nor only one used by s/w Novell distributes).
Actually, Sun has announced open sourcing in a way (google should find press releases) that you can be 97% certain it will get open sourced (say, 2% chance Sun gets bought out by another company before it happens, 1% that Jonathan S gets canned; either way canceling the plans). I could bet big amount of money that it happens (not that I strongly care either way, personally). It's not some vague "Should Sun buy Novell" idea that's been speculated about... Solaris group has pretty much been mandated to go and open source Solaris.
Good rebuttal? Uh, he's reading the original blog article like the devil reading bible... and then doing plenty of strawman attacks.
Original article didn't say anything about "Sun not wanting to help with Linux kernel development". It is only saying it wouldn't make sense to (try to) dump Open Sourced Solaris code in Linux, to port Solaris features. Neither does the article claim that Linux developers do not value good engineering principles -- just that highest priorities are different from those of Solaris kernel development team. What's wrong with such a statement? Quite obviously priorities are different; what else would you expect between a "traditional" engineering effort of a big corporation, and a leading-edge open-source development effort?
What a crappy rebuttal. Wonder why the linux kernel hacker even bother with such a knee-jerk writing I have no idea. I'm not sure if he even read the writing he was replying to; and certainly didn't try to understand it even if he did.
As for the source, I hope encyclopedias are written by experts on the subject who are also known for objective thinking. I kind of hope the real ones are not revised by popular vote of current readers.
That is assuming Wikipedia was modeled after current western democracy (or worse, TV programming system based on ratings), and specifically where voters felt strongly like voting. That could only be the case for some of the most controversial issues, but for most of the articles there's generally not a whole lot of active interest by readers (interested enough to want to get changes to the article). And this leads to one useful trend: "voting" (modifications) is generally done by people who do care about the subject, which, surprise surprise, usually ARE the experts.
Contributions (new articles, refinements to existing ones) are much MUCH more likely to come from experts than others, just because they actually care about the issue. You think Joe Blow would want to offer his suggestions on improving an article about, say, Efficient Data Structures or Eating Habits of a Horned Owl? Nope.
It almost sounds like you think of Wikipedia as an equivalent of Fox TV-channel, with its mob rule to see their latest "reality" craze. I tend to disagree; but time will tell.
Finally, I do think it'd be useful to have "staging" areas of Wikipedia and similar projects; maybe even model the whole process after, say, distribution mechanism of open source software projects. That is, to have "stable branch", into which new updates are accepted (after more or less brief peer reviews), but without slowing down the bleeding edge "development" of the up-to-date Live Wikipedia. Editor (or whatever one wants to call them) would act as gatekeepers, but without having to worry about writing new content as much as trying to do some form of QA.
Maybe you are confusing the role of scientific publications with the role of encyclopedias?
And as to getting important beliefs from Google, Slashdot or Wikipedia... what exactly would you promote as the "right" source? Trusty Olde newspapers with their own biases? Money-grubbing attention-whoring TV networks? None of the sources is perfect, or even close; but most have their days, including 3 you derided.
No, how would that work? Anyone who'd check the citation would see the fixed version, and would question the author about incorrect reference, wouldn't they? There wouldn't be "tainted" information, except in revision history. I'm not sure I see the problem in this particular case?
That could obviously be a problem as well, when your citation may become invalid over time, even without any malice on anyone's part.
One possibility for creating less transient references would be for Wikipedia to have annual (monthly, weekly) snapshots, and then people could indeed refer to static knowledge. It would have its problems obviously, but for reference purposes might be good.
I had never heard of GNAA before (although I had seen the reference to the movie that apparently inspired the name on an earlier Slashdot discussion), but having now read the article I'm curious as to why exactly do you think it's of dubious nature? I mean, what exactly was so bad about it? That it uses a Bad Word, Nigger, in it? Or just that it's about a subject that is a rather niche thing? But if latter, isn't 90%+ of material encyclopedias have mostly of interest to rather small groups of specialists?
Or maybe you just made assumptions based on the title of the article and assumed it's some kind of hate speech?
One would assume so... I didn't really think I implied otherwise? Nor that that was the issue; the issue was mistaken there was no such grace period.
Nope. In US there's the 1 year time period after publishing during which one can file patent applications; obviously as long as applicant published the invention (built something that implements the invention).
There really should be a Slashdot Patent FAQ; this same claim has been refuted a number of times.
For purposes of Open Sourcing things this doesn't have much effect, except that the author can both Open Source something AND patent couple of "inventions" contained therein... :-)
In the end, there's also a chance that he would have let the youngest child start her/his studies, only to find out that after one year, he couldn't afford to pay for it any more. That wouldn't have been too optimal either.
I personally think this and other examples show why so-called "socialistic" welfare systems of Europe are superior to US "winner takes it all" approach, with respect to health care and education; especially since there's actual fairness and equality. Values that used to be respected in USA originally, and up to 20th century, too, but that have fallen out of favour for past few decades.
Subsidizing the health-care and education systems ensures benefits go to people that would otherwise suffer the most, the children; allow them a somewhat even playing field.
Actually, this is not true -- as far as authors go, he and his work are reasonably well-known, and I read the catcher in high school (in a nothern european country, late 80s) as one of about 20 choices (which, incidentally, also had mr. Huxley's Brave New World and 1984) from which I had to choose, for a literacy presentation.
Like being able to choose whether to have a sex or not (instead of silly "abstinence" crap some folks peddle), to abort the fetus or not; for 2 consenting adults (gay or not) to have legally binding relationships? This must be part of the Great Republican agenda I haven't been aware of so far.
In economic matters, yes, republicans have been "get your hands of my loot" liberals for the longest time, but with social issues they are the control freaks.