As most of the above posters mention, like him or not, RMS has been pretty constant in his beliefs.
Where did I accuse him of being inconstant? He is quite "constant" in his beliefs, he is simply wrong on the facts when it comes to Mono.
Your 2nd paragraph seems like straight out of the Mono-lovers handbook.
If FOSS doesn't move beyond C, C++, and Perl/Python/Ruby, we might as well give up and cede the industry to Microsoft right now, because nobody in their right mind is going to continue developing applications in those languages in the years to come.
Mono right now is the best alternative. If Stallman wants people to use something different, he needs to put up or shut up.
No, the GNU project isnt the same as mono so dont even try it.
No, the GNU project is not the same as Mono. The GNU project, at its core, gives us a bunch of 30 year old command line tools, a compiler for a bunch of obsolete languages, a debugger that barely works, and an editor/IDE that nobody uses anymore. Everything else has been created by other people.
As for Redmond's commitment. Please read a bit of tech history if youre too young to remember the last 20, 10 or 5 years....
Microsoft's commitment is legally binding.
The only group that gets screwed more than MS competitors are its partners.
The relationship between Mono and Microsoft is not a partnership.
When Stallman started the GNU project, the software he was cloning had been created by a big, litigious, evil monopoly called "AT&T". There was a good chance that they were going to shut him down for copyright and patent infringement. He took that risk, and the rest is history.
The situation surrounding Mono is actually far less serious. Yes, Microsoft is a big, litigious, evil monopoly, but they actually have made a pretty watertight commitment to keeping those portions of.NET that Mono relies on open and free.
I'm interested in transitioning biology from being sort of a craft, where every time you do something it's done slightly differently, often in ad hoc ways, to an engineering discipline with standardized methods of arranging information and standardized sets of parts that you can assemble to do things.
Well, that's nice. I want a pony, too. But that's not how biology works.
In fact, it's not even how engineering works anymore.
A century ago, people built big things from small numbers of standardized parts. People could buy devices, take them apart, repair them, modify them, etc. These days, many mass produced products are built around custom-designed and custom-manufactured parts, from specially moulded cases to custom integrated circuits.
Building things from standardized parts really only works if performance and efficiency are secondary; they rarely are in biology.
You say that as a joke, but it's actually been working over the last few years: Microsoft has been trying to improve, it's just that their ability to do so is limited.
Your implied argument makes no sense. What do "pickpockets and undesirables" have to do with "terrorism and illegal immigration"? And what do immigration controls at airports have to do with illegal immigrants? Are you saying that Europe has a large numbers of illegal immigrants flying in on airplanes from the US and then go out on the street pickpocketing and being undesirable? Or what?
I don't think that's true. There's probably less police on the street in day-to-day life. What is different is immigration enforcement: employers can--and do--check that you have the right to work.
In the real world, people use Microsoft Word change bars, instead of SVN and tkdiff. When people do everything right, they fulfill the same function. You can also run diff-like tools over word processing documents.
I've organized some international events, and US border control policies and visa requirements are a big argument against holding them in the US.
Border control in Europe is very simple in my experience; people check whether your passport is on a list, and if it's not, they just wave you through. No fingerprinting, photographs, long lines, tricky questions, pre-registration, or interrogation booths. And despite that, Europe seems to have been doing no worse on terrorism or illegal immigration than the US.
Apple and any inventor should be ashamed to put their name on such a crappy patent; there is not a bit on an idea in there.
However, if this serves to keep others from implementing carrier-based restrictions, I'm all for it: implementing this is going to hurt Apple and help everybody else.
The law firm serving the order is Blaney's own law firm. The whole thing sounds like a publicity stunt. The reason Blaney isn't serving the order in California is because it would be worthless: you can't copyright a name, and people have a right to anonymous free speech and satire. For an anonymous author to use a slightly offensive variation of Blaney's name to make fun of him and his positions is precisely what US free speech laws are about.
Noise may be an issue of an army of geeks starts playing with their new toy. But if two or three people collaborate on a project using Wave, it probably won't be any more of a distraction than simultaneous edits in Google Docs.
The new Palm is a reasonably nice platform, but it's too little too late. Before iPhone, they had a reasonable chance. Before Android, they had a fighting chance. Now, they don't have much of anything. In addition to iPhone and Android, they're competing with Maemo, Symbian/Qt, Moblin, and WinMo. And they have given up on those features that traditionally made the Palm nice and competitive: full programmability, simple hardware switches, and pen-based input. Android, in particular, offers the same development model if you like, but also offers traditional application development. And Android has the buzz and the carriers signed up.
Palm should have come out with a Linux based successor to PalmOS 10 years ago. Now their best bet is to be acquired, although I don't quite see who would even bother.
Enable companies to watch and report on the merchants accounts
There are much simpler ways than "watching merchant accounts": banks and credit card companies simply need to use standard security procedures. For example, banks and credit card companies could have all large transactions confirmed by text message. Or they can use hardware tokens or smart cards.
The biggest problem is that they can't be bothered as the fraud is profitable for them.
Exactly. If banks and credit card companies wanted to eliminate most fraud, they could do so easily.
The way to fix this is to penalize banks for fraud, for the trouble they are causing to their customers.
Well, recently, Microsoft has been trying harder since OpenOffice, Google Docs, Apple, and Linux are becoming a real threat to them. Same with.NET: it's much better than the crap Microsoft had produced before than, but it wouldn't have happened without the push from Java.
However, if Microsoft actually had to compete in the market on equal terms, they still wouldn't succeed. Nobody would bother with MS Office or Windows 7 if they entered the market fresh and without legacy apps and users that depend on backwards compatibility; they are just too bloated, complicated, and hard to use.
OpenOffice comes free... For ease of Use, i prefer MS Office 2003.
Functionally and in terms of UI, I don't see that much difference between OpenOffice and MS Office 2003, and I prefer OpenOffice. But I think office suites are obsolete anyway and prefer not using them at all.
The Chinese government originally mandated that Green Dam be shipped on all new PCs but this pre-installation has been delayed.
The Chinese government never mandated that Green Dam be shipped "on" or "pre-installed". It mandated that it ship with new PCs. It was sufficient simply to stick a CD in the shipping box, although preinstalling the software was also OK. Manufacturers could decide how to satisfy the requirement. It was up to the end user to decide whether to use it or not. The idea was to give parents the option of using filtering software for their children. If they didn't want to use it, they didn't have to.
The software described in TFA is no more a blow for freedom than software that lets kids get around NetNanny.
It may have taken Microsoft backroom deals to come to the top
Exactly what I'm saying.
but it takes excellence to stay there.
After killing most of their competition, it doesn't take excellence, merely mediocrity, to stay at the top, because nobody was seriously trying to compete with Microsoft on their own turf. What is the point of investing $100m in a better desktop OS or office suite if Microsoft was simply going to kill you through backroom deals anyway, just like they did to your predecessors?
Just ask any IT admin which systems he would prefer to administer: 4,000 seats of Windows XP or 4,000 seats of Ubuntu.
In my experience, almost any IT admin who is actually qualified to make that choice (i.e., expert in both) would prefer Ubuntu, because it's easier, cheaper, and takes less time.
Re:Do we need the anti-smoking jab
on
A Geek Funeral
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· Score: 1
How is this different from any of the other horrible things parents do to their kids? Bad diet, bad dietary habits, fundamentalist religion, abusive marriages, etc.
Sadly, the government simply can't intervene in families to make everything alright for kids; if we gave it that power, we'd have an Orwellian state on our hands. The best the government can try to do is keep parents from seriously hurting their kids physically and try to provide options for education. Everything else is parental responsibility.
Re:What to do with our corporeal remains
on
A Geek Funeral
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· Score: 1
When we die our remains will be nothing more than a snapshot of the atoms we occupied right before we died
And the arrangement of those atoms is what represents you.
Had we lived a year longer, a good proportion of those atoms would have been replaced
Atoms of the same isotope are indistinguishable from one another, so they aren't "replaced".
I was a wave, and all that remains of me are ripples left behind in a shared pool of memories.
It doesn't have to be that way.
it's not quite that bleak
on
A Geek Funeral
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· Score: 1
And then you think that they would bother to revive you.
Archaeologists may well want to revive any human they can find. It probably won't be very expensive.
reverse your aging as well?
Probably not. In fact, I doubt they'd bother resurrecting the bodies at all; more likely, they'd just upload the minds.
Maybe if you were properly dead you'd be in heaven (not that I believe in that). Instead you get to spend the next thousand years being really freaking cold.
Resurrection in Christianity takes place after the end of the universe. It shouldn't make a difference whether you're a popsicle or dust until then.
Symantec's vice president of engineering, dismissed MSE as a "poor product" that will "never be up to snuff."
That has been true of every major Microsoft product when it was released; it has never stopped Microsoft from killing its competitors through persistence, pressure, backroom deals, marketing, and deep pockets.
Like an army of dead zombies, Microsoft products may be ugly, stinky, and brainless, but they just won't die.
When I said that their tablets and pdas do have good handwriting recognition, I mean exactly that. I mean, it is good. I've used it, it works. It understands what I am trying to write.
That doesn't mean it's innovation.
I'm not sure why it needs to be relative to anything, but if you NEED a comparison,
In order to be innovation, it needs to be good relative to what was there before. Otherwise, it may be a good product, but not an innovative product.
how about: "It is very good compared to not having handwriting recognition."
Yes, how about that. Particularly, since Microsoft is largely to blame for killing commercial handwriting recognition and tablet computers the first couple of times around.
handwriting recognition" you will find many other devices/products/software packages that allow for handwriting recognition that are NOT produced by Microsoft.
Yes, you can find lots of devices that purport to do handwriting recognition. And Microsoft is probably good relative to them.
But if your contribution to the conversation starts and ends with, "Good relative to what?"
But that is the right question to ask.
Comparing Microsoft against the leftovers after Microsoft butchered the market only shows that Microsoft is currently better than the competition. In many cases, they achieved that not through innovation, but simply through killing anybody who was better than them (and in some cases buying the people or companies).
I have seen nothing that would suggest that Microsoft has innovated in handwriting recognition. They seem to be using the same technologies that were there 20 years ago: HMMs and statistical language models, and they don't seem to be getting any better results than those old systems (accounting for more powerful machines and more training data).
Microsoft Research is not a bad place and they do publish some useful stuff (and also a lot of crap, like any research lab). But in terms of actual products, Microsoft is innovating very little.
Sorry you aren't very good at using the Internet.
Sorry, but you aren't very good at using the Internet. It isn't sufficient to just type "handwriting recognition" into Google, you need to understand what the results mean. Obviously, you don't.
Slashdot Mirror
As most of the above posters mention, like him or not, RMS has been pretty constant in his beliefs.
Where did I accuse him of being inconstant? He is quite "constant" in his beliefs, he is simply wrong on the facts when it comes to Mono.
Your 2nd paragraph seems like straight out of the Mono-lovers handbook.
If FOSS doesn't move beyond C, C++, and Perl/Python/Ruby, we might as well give up and cede the industry to Microsoft right now, because nobody in their right mind is going to continue developing applications in those languages in the years to come.
Mono right now is the best alternative. If Stallman wants people to use something different, he needs to put up or shut up.
No, the GNU project isnt the same as mono so dont even try it.
No, the GNU project is not the same as Mono. The GNU project, at its core, gives us a bunch of 30 year old command line tools, a compiler for a bunch of obsolete languages, a debugger that barely works, and an editor/IDE that nobody uses anymore. Everything else has been created by other people.
As for Redmond's commitment. Please read a bit of tech history if youre too young to remember the last 20, 10 or 5 years....
Microsoft's commitment is legally binding.
The only group that gets screwed more than MS competitors are its partners.
The relationship between Mono and Microsoft is not a partnership.
When Stallman started the GNU project, the software he was cloning had been created by a big, litigious, evil monopoly called "AT&T". There was a good chance that they were going to shut him down for copyright and patent infringement. He took that risk, and the rest is history.
The situation surrounding Mono is actually far less serious. Yes, Microsoft is a big, litigious, evil monopoly, but they actually have made a pretty watertight commitment to keeping those portions of .NET that Mono relies on open and free.
I'm interested in transitioning biology from being sort of a craft, where every time you do something it's done slightly differently, often in ad hoc ways, to an engineering discipline with standardized methods of arranging information and standardized sets of parts that you can assemble to do things.
Well, that's nice. I want a pony, too. But that's not how biology works.
In fact, it's not even how engineering works anymore.
A century ago, people built big things from small numbers of standardized parts. People could buy devices, take them apart, repair them, modify them, etc. These days, many mass produced products are built around custom-designed and custom-manufactured parts, from specially moulded cases to custom integrated circuits.
Building things from standardized parts really only works if performance and efficiency are secondary; they rarely are in biology.
You say that as a joke, but it's actually been working over the last few years: Microsoft has been trying to improve, it's just that their ability to do so is limited.
Your implied argument makes no sense. What do "pickpockets and undesirables" have to do with "terrorism and illegal immigration"? And what do immigration controls at airports have to do with illegal immigrants? Are you saying that Europe has a large numbers of illegal immigrants flying in on airplanes from the US and then go out on the street pickpocketing and being undesirable? Or what?
I don't think that's true. There's probably less police on the street in day-to-day life. What is different is immigration enforcement: employers can--and do--check that you have the right to work.
1> The patent isn't on the idea of restricting phones, it's on a specific method.
Like all patents, it has to pretend that it is on a specific method. If you had actually bothered to read it, you'd see that it isn't.
I guess actually understanding an issue before commenting is beyond the free-beer-trolls.
Yeah, you should take that to heart.
If you look at how much money Californians pay in federal taxes and how much less they get back, this "pony" has been paid for many times over.
In fact, much of the infrastructure of the whiny Republican heartland has been paid for by the liberals in California, NYC, and New England.
In the real world, people use Microsoft Word change bars, instead of SVN and tkdiff. When people do everything right, they fulfill the same function. You can also run diff-like tools over word processing documents.
I've organized some international events, and US border control policies and visa requirements are a big argument against holding them in the US.
Border control in Europe is very simple in my experience; people check whether your passport is on a list, and if it's not, they just wave you through. No fingerprinting, photographs, long lines, tricky questions, pre-registration, or interrogation booths. And despite that, Europe seems to have been doing no worse on terrorism or illegal immigration than the US.
Apple and any inventor should be ashamed to put their name on such a crappy patent; there is not a bit on an idea in there.
However, if this serves to keep others from implementing carrier-based restrictions, I'm all for it: implementing this is going to hurt Apple and help everybody else.
The law firm serving the order is Blaney's own law firm. The whole thing sounds like a publicity stunt. The reason Blaney isn't serving the order in California is because it would be worthless: you can't copyright a name, and people have a right to anonymous free speech and satire. For an anonymous author to use a slightly offensive variation of Blaney's name to make fun of him and his positions is precisely what US free speech laws are about.
Noise may be an issue of an army of geeks starts playing with their new toy. But if two or three people collaborate on a project using Wave, it probably won't be any more of a distraction than simultaneous edits in Google Docs.
The new Palm is a reasonably nice platform, but it's too little too late. Before iPhone, they had a reasonable chance. Before Android, they had a fighting chance. Now, they don't have much of anything. In addition to iPhone and Android, they're competing with Maemo, Symbian/Qt, Moblin, and WinMo. And they have given up on those features that traditionally made the Palm nice and competitive: full programmability, simple hardware switches, and pen-based input. Android, in particular, offers the same development model if you like, but also offers traditional application development. And Android has the buzz and the carriers signed up.
Palm should have come out with a Linux based successor to PalmOS 10 years ago. Now their best bet is to be acquired, although I don't quite see who would even bother.
Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?
You say that as if it's a bad thing.
Enable companies to watch and report on the merchants accounts
There are much simpler ways than "watching merchant accounts": banks and credit card companies simply need to use standard security procedures. For example, banks and credit card companies could have all large transactions confirmed by text message. Or they can use hardware tokens or smart cards.
The biggest problem is that they can't be bothered as the fraud is profitable for them.
Exactly. If banks and credit card companies wanted to eliminate most fraud, they could do so easily.
The way to fix this is to penalize banks for fraud, for the trouble they are causing to their customers.
MS Office and Windows 7 are not jokes.
Well, recently, Microsoft has been trying harder since OpenOffice, Google Docs, Apple, and Linux are becoming a real threat to them. Same with .NET: it's much better than the crap Microsoft had produced before than, but it wouldn't have happened without the push from Java.
However, if Microsoft actually had to compete in the market on equal terms, they still wouldn't succeed. Nobody would bother with MS Office or Windows 7 if they entered the market fresh and without legacy apps and users that depend on backwards compatibility; they are just too bloated, complicated, and hard to use.
OpenOffice comes free ... For ease of Use, i prefer MS Office 2003.
Functionally and in terms of UI, I don't see that much difference between OpenOffice and MS Office 2003, and I prefer OpenOffice. But I think office suites are obsolete anyway and prefer not using them at all.
The Chinese government originally mandated that Green Dam be shipped on all new PCs but this pre-installation has been delayed.
The Chinese government never mandated that Green Dam be shipped "on" or "pre-installed". It mandated that it ship with new PCs. It was sufficient simply to stick a CD in the shipping box, although preinstalling the software was also OK. Manufacturers could decide how to satisfy the requirement. It was up to the end user to decide whether to use it or not. The idea was to give parents the option of using filtering software for their children. If they didn't want to use it, they didn't have to.
The software described in TFA is no more a blow for freedom than software that lets kids get around NetNanny.
It may have taken Microsoft backroom deals to come to the top
Exactly what I'm saying.
but it takes excellence to stay there.
After killing most of their competition, it doesn't take excellence, merely mediocrity, to stay at the top, because nobody was seriously trying to compete with Microsoft on their own turf. What is the point of investing $100m in a better desktop OS or office suite if Microsoft was simply going to kill you through backroom deals anyway, just like they did to your predecessors?
Just ask any IT admin which systems he would prefer to administer: 4,000 seats of Windows XP or 4,000 seats of Ubuntu.
In my experience, almost any IT admin who is actually qualified to make that choice (i.e., expert in both) would prefer Ubuntu, because it's easier, cheaper, and takes less time.
How is this different from any of the other horrible things parents do to their kids? Bad diet, bad dietary habits, fundamentalist religion, abusive marriages, etc.
Sadly, the government simply can't intervene in families to make everything alright for kids; if we gave it that power, we'd have an Orwellian state on our hands. The best the government can try to do is keep parents from seriously hurting their kids physically and try to provide options for education. Everything else is parental responsibility.
When we die our remains will be nothing more than a snapshot of the atoms we occupied right before we died
And the arrangement of those atoms is what represents you.
Had we lived a year longer, a good proportion of those atoms would have been replaced
Atoms of the same isotope are indistinguishable from one another, so they aren't "replaced".
I was a wave, and all that remains of me are ripples left behind in a shared pool of memories.
It doesn't have to be that way.
And then you think that they would bother to revive you.
Archaeologists may well want to revive any human they can find. It probably won't be very expensive.
reverse your aging as well?
Probably not. In fact, I doubt they'd bother resurrecting the bodies at all; more likely, they'd just upload the minds.
Maybe if you were properly dead you'd be in heaven (not that I believe in that). Instead you get to spend the next thousand years being really freaking cold.
Resurrection in Christianity takes place after the end of the universe. It shouldn't make a difference whether you're a popsicle or dust until then.
Symantec's vice president of engineering, dismissed MSE as a "poor product" that will "never be up to snuff."
That has been true of every major Microsoft product when it was released; it has never stopped Microsoft from killing its competitors through persistence, pressure, backroom deals, marketing, and deep pockets.
Like an army of dead zombies, Microsoft products may be ugly, stinky, and brainless, but they just won't die.
When I said that their tablets and pdas do have good handwriting recognition, I mean exactly that. I mean, it is good. I've used it, it works. It understands what I am trying to write.
That doesn't mean it's innovation.
I'm not sure why it needs to be relative to anything, but if you NEED a comparison,
In order to be innovation, it needs to be good relative to what was there before. Otherwise, it may be a good product, but not an innovative product.
how about: "It is very good compared to not having handwriting recognition."
Yes, how about that. Particularly, since Microsoft is largely to blame for killing commercial handwriting recognition and tablet computers the first couple of times around.
handwriting recognition" you will find many other devices/products/software packages that allow for handwriting recognition that are NOT produced by Microsoft.
Yes, you can find lots of devices that purport to do handwriting recognition. And Microsoft is probably good relative to them.
But if your contribution to the conversation starts and ends with, "Good relative to what?"
But that is the right question to ask.
Comparing Microsoft against the leftovers after Microsoft butchered the market only shows that Microsoft is currently better than the competition. In many cases, they achieved that not through innovation, but simply through killing anybody who was better than them (and in some cases buying the people or companies).
I have seen nothing that would suggest that Microsoft has innovated in handwriting recognition. They seem to be using the same technologies that were there 20 years ago: HMMs and statistical language models, and they don't seem to be getting any better results than those old systems (accounting for more powerful machines and more training data).
Microsoft Research is not a bad place and they do publish some useful stuff (and also a lot of crap, like any research lab). But in terms of actual products, Microsoft is innovating very little.
Sorry you aren't very good at using the Internet.
Sorry, but you aren't very good at using the Internet. It isn't sufficient to just type "handwriting recognition" into Google, you need to understand what the results mean. Obviously, you don't.