Meet the press just spent 30 minutes on this issue.
Unfortunately it looks like the debate in the US senate is going to be very one sided, and the senate will vote like the house did and pass a bill banning cloning research in broad strokes...including the research that was just announced, which is not meant to clone entire human beings, but an effort to conduct stem cell research to produce transplantable organs by taking dna from a patient and cloning compatible organ cells, to reduce the risk of rejection.
The long term plan for this company is to be able to use a synthetic process and skip the reproductive cells altogether, but to get there there needs to be intense research on how the stem cell process works, so that a organ specific process can be developed, which doesn't run the ethical risk of creating a whole person if some cells were quickly stolen from the lab and placed in a womb.
I find it somewhat ironic that so much research goes on with materials that have the potential to kill large amounts of human life...but research with the potential to create human life is so strongly opposed.
True enough...and this is the point. Windows IS generally used as a GUI environment in a home consumer market, the orignal post in this thread was talking about the GUI interface being shotty, the reply I flamebaited was trying to make the point that the interface XP has isn't all that important...the underlying OS kernel is much much better and that is the important thing to MS....and I disagree. Let me also say that I didn't think clearly though the last post...I was trying to avoid the server agruments hence why I said ignore NT...though my comments about a useful shell environment was totally wrong headed...because commandline tools really are server argument and that just garbled my main thrust...which is XP for the consumer desktop solution is all about the interface....and that's what MS has put the time and effort into developing in XP...the things geared toward the consumer desktop market (including the product activation) my point about the commandline and shell interfaces was that in the consumer desktop market these are not important factors...
MS is putting the big dollar developing into the spit and polish of XP...you as a home desktop PC owner are not paying for the promise of stability...you are paying for the features...and MS knows this. The people who paid for the stability were the companies that shelled out big bucks for NT support in the good old days and MS is finally giving the home consumer a taste of a stable system in w2k and now xp.
You've obviously never looked at Windows Update [microsoft.com]. Microsoft does a pretty good job of offering critical updates
Are you honestly telling me that I can get enough windows updates for my win98 systems to bring the stability up to the point to match xp? I'm not talking about new feature rich explorer updates or messenger updates...I'm talking about basic stability issues, which I think are as critically important to keeping data intact as updates to prevent viri and internet exploits. I don't expect any release of any software to be perfect...but I don't think it unreasonable to expect the purchase of a product gives me access to continued updates that help prevent system crashes or system lockups. MS wants to release XP chock full of new kernel and new extra features and abilities, fine that's great...but to drop support for the older Oses which still have glaring stability problems and force people to buy into a new Os yet again...with new hardware yet again...seems a tad disrespectful.
Good think the EULA washes MS clean of any responsbility to make a best effort to ensure the product actually works as claimed before you even open the software box. I'm not asking for a path from 95 to XP...I dont want XP's features I want a computer i bought 4 years ago that met the specs of win98 to be reach a decent level of stability...I don't think I should have to buy a whole new Os with a whole new hardware spec to finally get to the point where the Os can claim to be stable and can last a week without rebooting...hence why I run BSD and linux on the older boxes now...I can be confident that updates affecting stability will be made available for the older architecture. I have no problem paying for productivity updates, (new features, new tools) but I have a big problem being told I have to buy a stability update, when the product I bought should have been stable to begin with.
The same holds true for Windows. Sure, the interface may be full of goofy alpha blending and unnecessary menu fade-ins and mouse pointer shadows and other things, but when you replace explorer.exe with a third-party shell (or merely disable the extra eye candy via the Control Panel), all that stuff goes away and you're left with what is without a doubt the most stable version of Windows I've ever seen.
stablest windows version isn't saying a whole heck of a lot. An analogous quote would something like "the new twinkie xp is the healthiest twinkie hostess has ever made"
So after paying for 3.1, 3.11, win95, win98, win2k, winme, (forget winNT for the moment becuase it was never marketed for home consumer use), we finally have a windows product that might actually be stable enough to be worth its cost...now if I could only trade in all those old MS licenses for all the MS Oses that I have kicking around for a stable windows product. MS calls it a new Os, I call it a sorely needed basic upgrade...too bad I have to pay through the nose once again for basic functionality I should have had a decade ago.
As far as interface!=windows xp. Show me a major windows application that can fully function from the commandline. Show me a useful scriptable terminal shell environment that comes with windows xp. The interface IS MS windows. You might be able to graft on a less functional 3rd party wm/file manager other than explorer, but what you are paying for when you buy xp is the interface and all the time and effort spent getting the bells and whistles (and MSN ads...dont forget those) in place. If you were paying for the effort MS put into stability from Os release to release, each version of windows would have a fair price of about $2...and the upgrade to xp would be free patch, like the virus patches are. I've never really understood that, poor stability leads to data loss just like virus do...but MS doesn't hand out free stability upgrades, they sell them as new Os releases. I shouldn't have to keep paying for promised stability. Paying for new features is one thing...pay for basic features I should have had when I bought the Os is extortion...but that's okay pretty soon we will all be paying a monthly fee to get access to or windows system thanks to.net....so we will never have to "buy" a MS Os again, ever.
rant off
-jef
My zombies are better than yer zombies....
on
RIAA to DoS Pirates?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't think the RIAA's new on-line music distribution systems are going to fair very well, when all the rogue file swapping DoS-etteers target the Pressplay and MusicNet servers, bringing them to their knees. In an all out DoS war, my money is on the seedy underbelly of the internet versus a collection of music corporations intent on seeing thier profit margins increase.
They RIAA might be able to DoS a few file swappers out there, and knock them off the net for a few days at a time...but they are going to be placing a huge target on themselves for every script kiddie out there with an army of @home windows zombies just waiting for a reason to unleash them.
A script kiddie knocking down the Pressplay or MusicNet servers for even a few hours at a time is going to hurt the RIAA bottom line more than the handful of file-swappers they will be able to DoS off the net.
PPPL: Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (www.pppl.gov)
DoE's facility dedicated to Fusion Energy research.
MRX: Magnetic Reconnection eXperiment, i think the name is
self-explanatory (w3.pppl.gov/~mrx)
TRANSP: I don't know what it stands for....I know what it is...its a
plasma simulation "package", which is actually a number of simulation
codes that look at certain aspects of the plasma physics in a magnetic
confinement device like NSTX or TFTR. TRANSP interacts with all the
little codes and produces a more accurate picture of what is going
on....and its a huge CPU suck. It's such a hard computation problem....and
TRANSP is only looking at 2-d behavior. I'm really amazed TRANSP runs at
all. The scientific codes being used are old...and not really written to
be a component of a larger "package"...so I'd imagine its a really big
pain to get all these specialized codes working together...when there
isn't a component framework in mind at the time the each of the codes are
written...especially when all of these codes are works in progress and are
being updated to handle the spherical torus(ST) configurations like NSTX.
ics645 (www.ics-ltd.com) is a digitizer board...and it could be used to
digitize sound....but why would you need to digitize sound at 2.5Mhz and
at $9k a board. It's used to capture a number of diagnostic signals hooked into the MRX plasma....most importantly is probably signals from
the small magnetic pick-up coils that sense fluxuation is the magnetic
fields due to plasma instabilities....I'd imagine digitizers like this
have wide ranging industrial testing uses as well. And at this point PCI
based data acquisition equipment like this doesn't have a lot of linux
support. Some of National Instrument's equipment has kernel drivers...but
this is the only available board with linux support that can get 16bit 2.5
Mhz sampling per channel right now.
Yep Solaris 2.5 and 2.6 are still here running the more mundane NFS and AFS filesystem stuff..but there is a linux terabyte server coming online to replace the core filesystem things...so rumor has it, and all the DAQ for NSTX still runs off of VMS...the TFTR legacy...but the high end computing is going over to linux in quick order. I'm not sure when the last sparc station was purchased. The NT/now win2000 stuff is stuck primaryly in the one general use computer lab...and on some administrative desktop to talk to the PU resources. Windows and mac hang around primarily for Word/Excel/Powerpoint reasons. If MS would release office for any Unix flavoe...the lab would probavbly buy it and have everyone replace the desktop systems with thinclients. There is win2000 network using a VNC-like citrix client that will give you access to a win2k desktop from linux or unix...but it doesnt seem like its ever really working. Its pretty obvious that from this point on the high end computation resource purchases will be linux machines...but even here its going to be hard to get linux on the desktop as a labwide policy...
Most of the big iron at DoE's PPPL is running linux.
Here's the run down:
We have a linux cluster running a high resolution display wall for large scale simulation presentations (and to play quake3 on;-> 400Mhz processors i think).
One general purpose linux cluster (16 dual process machines of the 800 Mhz vintage)
There are several dual processor alphas running linux as stand-alone servers....A lot of the scientific computational stuff happens on these....think fortran
There are 2 or 3 intel based clusters (32 or 64 dual processor 1.7 GHz machines per cluster) in the works...and another one just to run the TRANSP code that I can't play on is operational...mutter grumble
The lab got part of a big computing grant from NFS i think to drasticly expand its computing power....so I'd imagine a large (100+ node) linux cluster is in the works for PPPL as well
On the more mundane side of things....
I just got a linux box up and running with 5 ics645 digitizer boards (32 channels 2.5 Mhz per channel) to be used as the main data aquisition computer for MRX....if more PCI DAQ equipment becomes available for linux, I'd imagine a lot of the smaller experiments at the lab would jump to linux.
There was also talk of replacing alot of the old er desktop pc and xterminals with stripped down linux thin-clients....but I dont think that's gonna fly.
It's hard for me to keep up with the specifics since I'm just a user....
The point is most if not all the scientific computing power at PPPL will be on Linux in the near future. The desktop space at the lab is firmly in the hands of the large mac user base right now.
-jef
Re:i have no problem with your bizarre taste in ga
on
Loki Goes Postal
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· Score: 2
whether or not you like diablo 2 you should be aware it is a fantastically popular game. tens of thousands of people play it every day
Millions of people run windows.........
I run linux, and something tells me the types of games people like me like to play is different than the types of games all the M$ sheep like to play.
Billions of people live in China......
Doesn't mean there isn't money to be made selling american flags to americans.
Should Loki be trying to market the popular windows games to Linux users...I don't think so.
I think, porting games well suited for linux and linux users is what Loki needs to do. There are a lot of chinese people, but you'd have a hard time making a lot of money selling chinese flags to americans. Better to sell american flags to US citizens even though they are not the majority of the world's population.
Loki needs to pick a good product for the Linux market...Loki doesn't need to try to emulate the success of the most popular games of the windows market...it just won't work. Taking older less popular games in windows that would make sense in Linux (ie network and customizable games with a community base) makes a lot more sense.
It might sound pedantic, but the shift from the word tokamak to the word torus in the US fusion program is politically motivated. Somewhere along the like the standard tokamak concept got a very bad rap in the congressional funding circles...I don't know why exactly, but the US fusion program pointedly decided to call ST's spherical tori to distant the concept away from the aging tokamak design. So in the US, you won't hear ST's called spherical tokamaks very often. Spherical torus, spherical tokamak...its the same thing...a rose is a rose...but try explaining that to congress.
MAST is a spherical torus....and ST's are suppose to solve a few issues that tokamaks (doughnuts) where found to have. First Tokamaks reuire a very large magnetic field for containment. Producing the magnetic field is probably the biggest overall cost money and energy-wise. An ST, like MAST or NSTX (www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/nstx.html) or the machine I'm chained to NSTX's little brother CDX (w3.pppl.gov/~cdx) use proportionately less external field that a tokamak would need for the same plasma current. For fusion reactor design that's a big advantage for the ST.
The ST also hopes to solve a real plasma physics issue...MHD instabilities. Making cold plasmas isn't all to difficult. Once you start pumping energy into the plasma you get very exotic plasma wave physics that can tear the plasma apart. You can design some of the instabilities away, if your design is clever enough....is the ST a clever enough desgin? I don't know. but ST's do allow access to a new regime of labortory plasmas
There are a lot of unresolved issues in magnetic confinement fusion. The ST machines are definitely worth exploring but it's not clear that a working fusion reactor will be based on anything like MAST.
The second issue is that people seem to think high speed Internet is a right that should be nearly free
This is a really complicated issue. Is high speed internet a right...I dont think anyone is suggesting that. But in a future where more and more government services and commerse happen on-line. Having a garunteed internet connection to all US citizen's streamlines the system dramtically, becuase you could spend less on duplicate resources, to provide service through several competing communication channels.
Right now high-speed internet access is really a toy. Yes I could stay at work longer and do everything I needed to do, but I pay for the luxury of being able to work at home. If however US citizens could be garunteed internet connectivity, then you can start imagining government agencies providing much better supported services over the net becuase they could focus on online services as a primary means of commication.
That would be more work than just a straight port block. Hopefully Verizon is working on some type of filtering solution to replace across the board port block....hopefully.
-jef
Re:Verizon DSL is NOT THAT EVIL
on
Broadband Crackdown
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Okay so I replied to myself...deal.
I just called verizon tech support, and here's the scoop.
Verizon IS blocking port 80 from outside verizon's network, and the reason verizon has been giving its tech support people, is that this is a temporary port block becuase of Code Red.
The block started yesterday, and affects in bound traffic into verizon's network. I can get to my website from other verizon addresses, but not from outside of verizon's net. I couldn't get a specific time frame on how long the block is going to be up, but the tech support people have been told that its not permenant.
Does Verizon have a legitimate concern about Code Red investation across its network? Maybe...but since I'm not running in MS products on my LAN and I take the time to secure my stuff, I'm pretty unhappy that my services get knocked off the net like I'm one of the clueless masses.
The best solution to get Verizon to hurry up and unblock the port is for everyone who has a verizon DSL account to call them and tell them in a very nice calm manner that if the block stays in place, your business will go elsewhere. I was call 25 this morning. Let's see if the slashdot effect works over the phone as well....I want to see the number of complaint calls jump to 2000 in the next 30 minutes.
Verizon Tech Support:
1-800-567-6789
-jef
Re:Verizon DSL is NOT THAT EVIL
on
Broadband Crackdown
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· Score: 3, Informative
The top of this thread needs to be modded up to 5. I've had verizon since last October, and I'm running a web server and smtp server just fine off my LAN. I've nmaped myself from outside verizon and they don't seem to be blocking any ports.
I just re-read the Verizon TOS. An in attachment B, there is a clause that explicitly states that DIAL-UP users can not run servers, and that DSL users are exempt. Attachment B-3q is the clause.
My reading of the Verizon TOS, which covers Dial-ups and DSL users, indiecates that DSL users can do whatever they want with the bandwidth they have, as long as what they do doesn't interfere with network operations and is not illegal. So if you had a Code-Red infected server...they could shut off yer whole account to prevent network degration.
I think someone is confusing Verizon's statement to restrict use of their mail server's to email that includings a valid verizon.net account in the From header, to mean blocking smtp ports...Ttoally inaccurate.
1) Verizon is not blocking web servers
2) Verizon is not blocking smtp servers
3) Verizon isn't blocking any ports as far as I can tell
4) Verizon IS preventing spam from being generated from their mail servers by requiring every piece of mail sent from their smtp servers to have a valid userid@verizon.net.
5) Verizon will shutdown DSL accounts on a case by case basis if you computer account is being used to degrade overall network service (ie you are a spam or virus factory, and Verizon can trace the network congestion back to you)
I wonder what the legality of this is?
Having the infected system which is attacking you power down, is not viral, and actually sounds like a very good disarming mechanism. In legal terms this seems like a very clear "self-defense" action aimed exclusively at stopping the illegal trespass. It's sort of like having tire spike strips in your parking lot to prevent people from coming in the wrong way
You are allowed a certain modicum of property damage when acting in self-defence. How much damage you can do to the violator, is subjective and depends on the threat being presented to you and your property. I don't see how an non-invasive shutdown of the attacking system is out-of-line considering the threat to your computer system and to the larger community a virus represents.
It's true that the polite thing to do is to just email the offending system's maintainer, but in situations where a virus has a potential to cause large material harm(i'm thinking virus infected machines as trojaned DoS zombies, or mail server clogging becuase of the virus spawned emails) you could argue that forcing an attacking infected server to shutdown is a legit self-defense action to prevent your own property damage.
-jef
1)Um, are you under the misapprehension that Linux et al are secure OSs on the basis that there haven't been any viruses targeted at it to speak of?
I believe linux...and pretty much any Unix i've dealt with (Solaris,OSF, Ultrix...) are much more secure OS's, becuase it's much harder to write an exploit for a unix box than for a windows box. Writing a buffer flow exploit to compromise a server process is order of magnitudes more work than sitting down and writing and emailing a Word document that takes advantage of the VBscripting to erase you harddrive.
There are "talented" crackers out there that do target unix machines. You can do a lot of real damage if you can compromise a large corporate Unix system....but you have to expend real effort to discover a new exploit on a unix system. With windows on the other hand....the same "feature" is being exploiting repeatedly to cause damage....how many differently named viruses have to circulate before MS removes this exploitable "feature."
Point out a "feature" of linux, or unix that gets repeated used for malicious activity...but people refuse to fix. Bind and sendmail, mainstays of unixland have had a history of exploits but the software makers make it a point to fix the problems asap. Software will be buggy, and bugs can turn into exploits, and then they get fixed. But a FEATURE like VBscripting is not a bug. VBscripting is a very powerful and woefully insecure FEATURE, but MS refuses to strip out the VBscripting features or add a layer of security to their use. MS viruses...don't use bugs in the code...they use perfectly acceptable scripting commands...to do bad things, and MS refuses to do anything about this FEATURE!
2)
On the general subject of quality, Linux still hasn't got anything to compare with the Office suite.
No i think there are some candidates for comparision. Take Staroffice...is as slow as MSOffice, and for me staroffice does crash on occasion just like MSOffice...the big difference I've seen is that staroffice doesn't take down the entire OS with a BSOD when it desides to stop working.
You need to upgrade your gnome. I'm living in Ximian gnome on my PC and I haven't had the GNOME Desktop crash yet. But I'll be damned to figure out why my windows PC won't get past the logon box without causing a GPF.
3) I used to buy into this idea that OSS necessarily produced better quality software, but it just isn't true. Large products are flawed for many reasons: release deadlines, unforseen design errors, resource constraints, but mostly because people in general just aren't smart enough
I still believe OSS development makes far better products, but my reasons have nothing to do with being able to make product deadlines or whatever. I do not believe that OSS makes products more quickly. I don't care about release deadlines...the OSS products will get done when they get done....as long as products are making steady progress, that's what matters. How long did it take MS to make a stable OS worth actually paying for? From MS-DOS upto win200...how many manyears or should i say mancenturies of development time went into that development cycle.
If want to believe in the pay for every yearly broken release, and call it a full product fine...I'm sick of it. Just don't bring your timeline baggade to the OSS community. Products get done when they get done. I believe that OSS development makes better products, for the simple fact that the source code is available. I believe OSS makes better products becuase in the long run those OSS products are far more adaptible and allow for more innovation.
-jef
3) The general was able to use the technology from the ship and construct some kind of spacecraft, go through the storm before the main character could get back and conquered earth before he arrived.
This explanation is straight out of the transformers beast machines storyline.....I just wish the writer's for beast machines would get the credit for coming up with the solution to the age old question "how do we make a sequal if we have the good guy winning in the end of the first installment"
but seriously...this explanation is very viable. They didnt kill the general...they left him in an operation control room of the space station....we know there are atleast a couple of unaccounted for space pod ships, that might have survived the crash.
-jef
About 4 years ago now, I was at a SIAM conference at WPI, and the keynote speaker outline a procedure to use links to sort webpages...and I still haven't seen a search engine impliment this.
It basically involves two weighted listing of sites. Sites in the second list pointed to by sites in the first list earn weight points based on the weighted value of sites in the first list. Sites in the first list earn weighted value based on the site that they point to in the second list.
You iterate this a few times and you end up with the first list being a listing of "Link Pages" which have a lot of useful links on the subject. The second list becomes an ordered listing of "authortive sites", sites that are pointed to by many other sites.
What's really neat about this is this method has the ability to find seperate communities. For instances, search for the word jaguar and this method will give you authoritive sites and link pages for the car, the animal, and the atari games system quite easily....becuase each meaning of the word jaguar would have a distinct grouping of authortive sties and link pages.
What's more is this type of problem can be formulated as a eigenvector calculation for the matrix of link pages, and authoritive sites.
Well bigger isn't necessarily better...but comparing NSTX to a tokamak like TFTR...is literally comparing apples to doughnuts.
NSTX is an ST...not a tokamak. One of the motivations behind ST development, is to do better than the reactor size requirement need by a tokamak (doughnut). But there is still and economics of scale even for devices like NSTX. An ST reactor still has to be a certain size...the hope is that that certain size for an ST is an order of magnitude smaller than a tokamak reactor would require.
I work on NSTX's tiny brother at princeton, CDX. And the economics of scale still holds for ST's. It's better to build one "large" ST rather than 40 small ST's. What's different is that the word "large" for an ST doesn't mean the same size as when applied to a tokamak design
You are trying to compare apples to doughnuts....a large apple is better than a small apple...a large doughnut is better than a small doughnut...the hope is that a large apple is better and smaller than a large doughnut...that's what NSTX was built to explore.
-jef
I'm not denying that the tokamak effort is more mature than other designs....but i take issue with the idea that the general fusion community believe the solutions to the tokamak problems are well understood...scale well...and scale economically.
When was the last tokamak in the US built?
And yes alternative devices...aren't well developed...this is research afterall. They won't be well developed unless we invest some time and money to look at them. If you take a look at the money needed to realize one full-scale tokamak reactor experiment and weight that against the money needed to perform a larger number of smaller
devices aimed at looking at new innovative physics concepts...you have to ask yourself...is it worth putting all of our resources into one large reactor experiment...and experiment so large and scrutinized that real innovative, risky research would be difficult to perform becuase of the political pressure to keep the reseach simple and predictable to gain a PR success.
IF we threw enough money at a fusion reactor design we can get decent power out...but the cost to build and run an advanced tokamak reactor would make the power produced orders of magnitude more expensive than current power sources. That doesn't make a tokamak a very attractive design.
-jef
The ITER project is very old....The version they are planning to build in Canada is a stripped down version of the original project. The US pulled out of the original ITER project partly becuase the US scientific community is divided on whether money spent on a reactor sized tokamak is a good idea or not. We've learned alot about the limitations of a tokamak design in the last 20 years or so. There is now strong interest in the US to look at other designs other than the standard tokamak doughnut. Low aspect ratio devices(think an apple shape rather than a doughnut) which solves some stability problems that plague tokamak operation. There is also alot of interest in bringing back the stellarator..which is a fully 3-D device (think doughnut, but a french crueller)..now that we have to computing power to start thinking about doing fully 3-D plasma physics. Numerical simulation of fusion temp plasma physics is...HARD....and we are just getting to the point of having enough affordable computers (beowolf) to start doing 3-d modelling of plasma systems.
My understand of reactor design...is that bigger is better for tokamak designs for energy density reasons. It costs a lot to produce the magnetic fields, and it only cost marginally more to produce a slightly bigger magnetic container....where as the bigger the device the more fusionable material you have to play with. So if you want a reactor that actually produced more power than it takes to ignite it..you need to scale up.
I think that even applies to low aspect ratio designs. I work on a small low aspect ratio plasma device CDX-U at PPPL. It's not a fusion device...since the temp isnt really hot enough for fusion...
User #463951 Info) Unless I'm given a good reason to hate this change, I think its something Microsoft should be congratulated on for taking a step in the right direction. This doesn't mean we should love them. It means we should send them a sign that says "That's a start, now keep going."
The reason to hate this change is that, microsoft is only doing this to look good for the next round of legal actions. They have to now go back to court and figure out the remedy phase. They can point to this action and go see, ew ARE working on it, so they aren't punished in ways that will hamper the monopolistic behavior in emerging areas where they really want to make the next round of money. MS did not listen to users, or to partners. They are giving away this "flexibility" to OEM's in the hopes of dodging a legal straight-jacket. This might be a step in the right direction, but microsoft is being led there kicking and screaming. The analogy that comes to mind is having a theif stop stealing apples from one store becuase the store-owner threatened to cut off his hands....better to lose access to the apples than to lose the hands that can steal from another store. I'm not going to congradulate MS for this. This is damage control...and not altruism.
Okay I'm ducking out of this, becuase I can't seem to track down your problem in ximian's bugzilla..and I jsut checked ximian's chat server and no one else there seems to be having this problem. I've spent a fair amount of timeon the chat in the last month figuring out work arounds and dealing with weird configuration problems and I haven't seem the sawfish crash problems showing up. I havent seen the problem...so it's hard for me to say that what you are experiencing is really a bug or some type of misconfiguration.
-jef
GNOME guys, what the hell is going on? Isn't this stuff supposed to get _better_ with time? What ever happened to "release early, release often"? And Ximian, where's the quality control? Where's the rapid release schedule? Where's the communication and feedback?
That one paragraph of questions is a huge nest of paradoxal expectations. What do you want stability and usability or bledding-edge "up to the minute" versions? It's hard to get both
"Release early, release often", does not mean "release useable stable productive code early and often". It means, keep your open source nose clean by regularly releasing the code you have, so those interested in the work and the code can get their hands on it, regardless of the state of the codebase. If it takes a year and a half to make the code useable, fine...but you should make code releases more frequently than that.
Software projects evovle like the stock market. Averaged of a period of time, the stock market has averaged something like 11% annual gains..hence why an index fund investment is a very good idea in the long term. But the market as a whole take downturns, and indvidual stocks have even wilder rides. The GNOME project, like any large scale project has similar behavior. There will be times when the whole project looks like its going backwards, and individual libraries might break completely for ahile but in the average everything moves forward. Mozilla is another example, the project is going in the right direction, but the nightly build certainly dont always work, and from "release" to "release" bugs crop up. I think your expectations are a bit high.
Your beef with Ximian, is the same problem all the distros have. You need time to test and integrate package updates into your distro, so you either have very up-to-date changes that will cuase problems or you have a more stable distro that doesn't have the newest and latest versions. Redhat gets around this by having the rawhide distro, that new package updates go into for testing by the very brave in the userbase. I have no expectation that the Rawhide packages will work on my system....but if I want the latest and greatest updates I can usually find them there. Ximian doesn't have a "bleeding-edge" distro, or I should say channel...yet. In some ways Gnome 1.4 is still bleeding edge, even Ximian's packaged version of it. If you want Ximian to crank up the QA then you won't get any updates for a couple of months. They'd be approching the Gnome 1.4 release like redhat is, slowly.
I will agree with you that Ximian has not used their red-carpet news channel effectively to keep users updated. The mailing lists are active, but the red-carpet news facility isn't being used. So there is fedback coming out of xim, but not on the most obvious of ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately it looks like the debate in the US senate is going to be very one sided, and the senate will vote like the house did and pass a bill banning cloning research in broad strokes...including the research that was just announced, which is not meant to clone entire human beings, but an effort to conduct stem cell research to produce transplantable organs by taking dna from a patient and cloning compatible organ cells, to reduce the risk of rejection.
The long term plan for this company is to be able to use a synthetic process and skip the reproductive cells altogether, but to get there there needs to be intense research on how the stem cell process works, so that a organ specific process can be developed, which doesn't run the ethical risk of creating a whole person if some cells were quickly stolen from the lab and placed in a womb.
I find it somewhat ironic that so much research goes on with materials that have the potential to kill large amounts of human life...but research with the potential to create human life is so strongly opposed.
-jef
True enough...and this is the point. Windows IS generally used as a GUI environment in a home consumer market, the orignal post in this thread was talking about the GUI interface being shotty, the reply I flamebaited was trying to make the point that the interface XP has isn't all that important...the underlying OS kernel is much much better and that is the important thing to MS....and I disagree. Let me also say that I didn't think clearly though the last post...I was trying to avoid the server agruments hence why I said ignore NT...though my comments about a useful shell environment was totally wrong headed...because commandline tools really are server argument and that just garbled my main thrust...which is XP for the consumer desktop solution is all about the interface....and that's what MS has put the time and effort into developing in XP...the things geared toward the consumer desktop market (including the product activation) my point about the commandline and shell interfaces was that in the consumer desktop market these are not important factors...
MS is putting the big dollar developing into the spit and polish of XP...you as a home desktop PC owner are not paying for the promise of stability...you are paying for the features...and MS knows this. The people who paid for the stability were the companies that shelled out big bucks for NT support in the good old days and MS is finally giving the home consumer a taste of a stable system in w2k and now xp.
You've obviously never looked at Windows Update [microsoft.com]. Microsoft does a pretty good job of offering critical updates
Are you honestly telling me that I can get enough windows updates for my win98 systems to bring the stability up to the point to match xp? I'm not talking about new feature rich explorer updates or messenger updates...I'm talking about basic stability issues, which I think are as critically important to keeping data intact as updates to prevent viri and internet exploits. I don't expect any release of any software to be perfect...but I don't think it unreasonable to expect the purchase of a product gives me access to continued updates that help prevent system crashes or system lockups. MS wants to release XP chock full of new kernel and new extra features and abilities, fine that's great...but to drop support for the older Oses which still have glaring stability problems and force people to buy into a new Os yet again...with new hardware yet again...seems a tad disrespectful.
Good think the EULA washes MS clean of any responsbility to make a best effort to ensure the product actually works as claimed before you even open the software box. I'm not asking for a path from 95 to XP...I dont want XP's features I want a computer i bought 4 years ago that met the specs of win98 to be reach a decent level of stability...I don't think I should have to buy a whole new Os with a whole new hardware spec to finally get to the point where the Os can claim to be stable and can last a week without rebooting...hence why I run BSD and linux on the older boxes now...I can be confident that updates affecting stability will be made available for the older architecture. I have no problem paying for productivity updates, (new features, new tools) but I have a big problem being told I have to buy a stability update, when the product I bought should have been stable to begin with.
-jef
stablest windows version isn't saying a whole heck of a lot. An analogous quote would something like "the new twinkie xp is the healthiest twinkie hostess has ever made"
So after paying for 3.1, 3.11, win95, win98, win2k, winme, (forget winNT for the moment becuase it was never marketed for home consumer use), we finally have a windows product that might actually be stable enough to be worth its cost...now if I could only trade in all those old MS licenses for all the MS Oses that I have kicking around for a stable windows product. MS calls it a new Os, I call it a sorely needed basic upgrade...too bad I have to pay through the nose once again for basic functionality I should have had a decade ago.
As far as interface!=windows xp. Show me a major windows application that can fully function from the commandline. Show me a useful scriptable terminal shell environment that comes with windows xp. The interface IS MS windows. You might be able to graft on a less functional 3rd party wm/file manager other than explorer, but what you are paying for when you buy xp is the interface and all the time and effort spent getting the bells and whistles (and MSN ads...dont forget those) in place. If you were paying for the effort MS put into stability from Os release to release, each version of windows would have a fair price of about $2...and the upgrade to xp would be free patch, like the virus patches are. I've never really understood that, poor stability leads to data loss just like virus do...but MS doesn't hand out free stability upgrades, they sell them as new Os releases. I shouldn't have to keep paying for promised stability. Paying for new features is one thing...pay for basic features I should have had when I bought the Os is extortion...but that's okay pretty soon we will all be paying a monthly fee to get access to or windows system thanks to
rant off
-jef
I don't think the RIAA's new on-line music distribution systems are going to fair very well, when all the rogue file swapping DoS-etteers target the Pressplay and MusicNet servers, bringing them to their knees. In an all out DoS war, my money is on the seedy underbelly of the internet versus a collection of music corporations intent on seeing thier profit margins increase.
They RIAA might be able to DoS a few file swappers out there, and knock them off the net for a few days at a time...but they are going to be placing a huge target on themselves for every script kiddie out there with an army of @home windows zombies just waiting for a reason to unleash them.
A script kiddie knocking down the Pressplay or MusicNet servers for even a few hours at a time is going to hurt the RIAA bottom line more than the handful of file-swappers they will be able to DoS off the net.
-jef
PPPL: Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (www.pppl.gov)
DoE's facility dedicated to Fusion Energy research.
MRX: Magnetic Reconnection eXperiment, i think the name is
self-explanatory (w3.pppl.gov/~mrx)
TRANSP: I don't know what it stands for....I know what it is...its a
plasma simulation "package", which is actually a number of simulation
codes that look at certain aspects of the plasma physics in a magnetic
confinement device like NSTX or TFTR. TRANSP interacts with all the
little codes and produces a more accurate picture of what is going
on....and its a huge CPU suck. It's such a hard computation problem....and
TRANSP is only looking at 2-d behavior. I'm really amazed TRANSP runs at
all. The scientific codes being used are old...and not really written to
be a component of a larger "package"...so I'd imagine its a really big
pain to get all these specialized codes working together...when there
isn't a component framework in mind at the time the each of the codes are
written...especially when all of these codes are works in progress and are
being updated to handle the spherical torus(ST) configurations like NSTX.
ics645 (www.ics-ltd.com) is a digitizer board...and it could be used to
digitize sound....but why would you need to digitize sound at 2.5Mhz and
at $9k a board. It's used to capture a number of diagnostic signals hooked into the MRX plasma....most importantly is probably signals from
the small magnetic pick-up coils that sense fluxuation is the magnetic
fields due to plasma instabilities....I'd imagine digitizers like this
have wide ranging industrial testing uses as well. And at this point PCI
based data acquisition equipment like this doesn't have a lot of linux
support. Some of National Instrument's equipment has kernel drivers...but
this is the only available board with linux support that can get 16bit 2.5
Mhz sampling per channel right now.
-jef
Yep Solaris 2.5 and 2.6 are still here running the more mundane NFS and AFS filesystem stuff..but there is a linux terabyte server coming online to replace the core filesystem things...so rumor has it, and all the DAQ for NSTX still runs off of VMS...the TFTR legacy...but the high end computing is going over to linux in quick order. I'm not sure when the last sparc station was purchased. The NT/now win2000 stuff is stuck primaryly in the one general use computer lab...and on some administrative desktop to talk to the PU resources. Windows and mac hang around primarily for Word/Excel/Powerpoint reasons. If MS would release office for any Unix flavoe...the lab would probavbly buy it and have everyone replace the desktop systems with thinclients. There is win2000 network using a VNC-like citrix client that will give you access to a win2k desktop from linux or unix...but it doesnt seem like its ever really working. Its pretty obvious that from this point on the high end computation resource purchases will be linux machines...but even here its going to be hard to get linux on the desktop as a labwide policy...
Here's the run down:
We have a linux cluster running a high resolution display wall for large scale simulation presentations (and to play quake3 on
One general purpose linux cluster (16 dual process machines of the 800 Mhz vintage)
There are several dual processor alphas running linux as stand-alone servers....A lot of the scientific computational stuff happens on these....think fortran
There are 2 or 3 intel based clusters (32 or 64 dual processor 1.7 GHz machines per cluster) in the works...and another one just to run the TRANSP code that I can't play on is operational...mutter grumble
The lab got part of a big computing grant from NFS i think to drasticly expand its computing power....so I'd imagine a large (100+ node) linux cluster is in the works for PPPL as well
On the more mundane side of things....
I just got a linux box up and running with 5 ics645 digitizer boards (32 channels 2.5 Mhz per channel) to be used as the main data aquisition computer for MRX....if more PCI DAQ equipment becomes available for linux, I'd imagine a lot of the smaller experiments at the lab would jump to linux.
There was also talk of replacing alot of the old er desktop pc and xterminals with stripped down linux thin-clients....but I dont think that's gonna fly.
It's hard for me to keep up with the specifics since I'm just a user....
The point is most if not all the scientific computing power at PPPL will be on Linux in the near future. The desktop space at the lab is firmly in the hands of the large mac user base right now.
-jef
Millions of people run windows.........
I run linux, and something tells me the types of games people like me like to play is different than the types of games all the M$ sheep like to play.
Billions of people live in China......
Doesn't mean there isn't money to be made selling american flags to americans.
Should Loki be trying to market the popular windows games to Linux users...I don't think so.
I think, porting games well suited for linux and linux users is what Loki needs to do. There are a lot of chinese people, but you'd have a hard time making a lot of money selling chinese flags to americans. Better to sell american flags to US citizens even though they are not the majority of the world's population.
Loki needs to pick a good product for the Linux market...Loki doesn't need to try to emulate the success of the most popular games of the windows market...it just won't work. Taking older less popular games in windows that would make sense in Linux (ie network and customizable games with a community base) makes a lot more sense.
-jef
It might sound pedantic, but the shift from the word tokamak to the word torus in the US fusion program is politically motivated. Somewhere along the like the standard tokamak concept got a very bad rap in the congressional funding circles...I don't know why exactly, but the US fusion program pointedly decided to call ST's spherical tori to distant the concept away from the aging tokamak design. So in the US, you won't hear ST's called spherical tokamaks very often. Spherical torus, spherical tokamak...its the same thing...a rose is a rose...but try explaining that to congress.
anybody got any info on what tech problems?
MAST is a spherical torus....and ST's are suppose to solve a few issues that tokamaks (doughnuts) where found to have. First Tokamaks reuire a very large magnetic field for containment. Producing the magnetic field is probably the biggest overall cost money and energy-wise. An ST, like MAST or NSTX (www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/nstx.html) or the machine I'm chained to NSTX's little brother CDX (w3.pppl.gov/~cdx) use proportionately less external field that a tokamak would need for the same plasma current. For fusion reactor design that's a big advantage for the ST.
The ST also hopes to solve a real plasma physics issue...MHD instabilities. Making cold plasmas isn't all to difficult. Once you start pumping energy into the plasma you get very exotic plasma wave physics that can tear the plasma apart. You can design some of the instabilities away, if your design is clever enough....is the ST a clever enough desgin? I don't know. but ST's do allow access to a new regime of labortory plasmas
There are a lot of unresolved issues in magnetic confinement fusion. The ST machines are definitely worth exploring but it's not clear that a working fusion reactor will be based on anything like MAST.
-jef
im too tired to write anything longer
This is a really complicated issue. Is high speed internet a right...I dont think anyone is suggesting that. But in a future where more and more government services and commerse happen on-line. Having a garunteed internet connection to all US citizen's streamlines the system dramtically, becuase you could spend less on duplicate resources, to provide service through several competing communication channels.
Right now high-speed internet access is really a toy. Yes I could stay at work longer and do everything I needed to do, but I pay for the luxury of being able to work at home. If however US citizens could be garunteed internet connectivity, then you can start imagining government agencies providing much better supported services over the net becuase they could focus on online services as a primary means of commication.
-jef
That would be more work than just a straight port block. Hopefully Verizon is working on some type of filtering solution to replace across the board port block....hopefully. -jef
Verizon IS blocking port 80 from outside verizon's network, and the reason verizon has been giving its tech support people, is that this is a temporary port block becuase of Code Red.
The block started yesterday, and affects in bound traffic into verizon's network. I can get to my website from other verizon addresses, but not from outside of verizon's net. I couldn't get a specific time frame on how long the block is going to be up, but the tech support people have been told that its not permenant.
Does Verizon have a legitimate concern about Code Red investation across its network? Maybe...but since I'm not running in MS products on my LAN and I take the time to secure my stuff, I'm pretty unhappy that my services get knocked off the net like I'm one of the clueless masses.
The best solution to get Verizon to hurry up and unblock the port is for everyone who has a verizon DSL account to call them and tell them in a very nice calm manner that if the block stays in place, your business will go elsewhere. I was call 25 this morning. Let's see if the slashdot effect works over the phone as well....I want to see the number of complaint calls jump to 2000 in the next 30 minutes.
Verizon Tech Support:
1-800-567-6789
-jef
I just re-read the Verizon TOS. An in attachment B, there is a clause that explicitly states that DIAL-UP users can not run servers, and that DSL users are exempt. Attachment B-3q is the clause.
My reading of the Verizon TOS, which covers Dial-ups and DSL users, indiecates that DSL users can do whatever they want with the bandwidth they have, as long as what they do doesn't interfere with network operations and is not illegal. So if you had a Code-Red infected server...they could shut off yer whole account to prevent network degration.
I think someone is confusing Verizon's statement to restrict use of their mail server's to email that includings a valid verizon.net account in the From header, to mean blocking smtp ports...Ttoally inaccurate.
1) Verizon is not blocking web servers
2) Verizon is not blocking smtp servers
3) Verizon isn't blocking any ports as far as I can tell
4) Verizon IS preventing spam from being generated from their mail servers by requiring every piece of mail sent from their smtp servers to have a valid userid@verizon.net.
5) Verizon will shutdown DSL accounts on a case by case basis if you computer account is being used to degrade overall network service (ie you are a spam or virus factory, and Verizon can trace the network congestion back to you)
You are allowed a certain modicum of property damage when acting in self-defence. How much damage you can do to the violator, is subjective and depends on the threat being presented to you and your property. I don't see how an non-invasive shutdown of the attacking system is out-of-line considering the threat to your computer system and to the larger community a virus represents.
It's true that the polite thing to do is to just email the offending system's maintainer, but in situations where a virus has a potential to cause large material harm(i'm thinking virus infected machines as trojaned DoS zombies, or mail server clogging becuase of the virus spawned emails) you could argue that forcing an attacking infected server to shutdown is a legit self-defense action to prevent your own property damage. -jef
1)Um, are you under the misapprehension that Linux et al are secure OSs on the basis that there haven't been any viruses targeted at it to speak of?
I believe linux...and pretty much any Unix i've dealt with (Solaris,OSF, Ultrix...) are much more secure OS's, becuase it's much harder to write an exploit for a unix box than for a windows box. Writing a buffer flow exploit to compromise a server process is order of magnitudes more work than sitting down and writing and emailing a Word document that takes advantage of the VBscripting to erase you harddrive.
There are "talented" crackers out there that do target unix machines. You can do a lot of real damage if you can compromise a large corporate Unix system....but you have to expend real effort to discover a new exploit on a unix system. With windows on the other hand....the same "feature" is being exploiting repeatedly to cause damage....how many differently named viruses have to circulate before MS removes this exploitable "feature."
Point out a "feature" of linux, or unix that gets repeated used for malicious activity...but people refuse to fix. Bind and sendmail, mainstays of unixland have had a history of exploits but the software makers make it a point to fix the problems asap. Software will be buggy, and bugs can turn into exploits, and then they get fixed. But a FEATURE like VBscripting is not a bug. VBscripting is a very powerful and woefully insecure FEATURE, but MS refuses to strip out the VBscripting features or add a layer of security to their use. MS viruses...don't use bugs in the code...they use perfectly acceptable scripting commands...to do bad things, and MS refuses to do anything about this FEATURE!
2) On the general subject of quality, Linux still hasn't got anything to compare with the Office suite.
No i think there are some candidates for comparision. Take Staroffice...is as slow as MSOffice, and for me staroffice does crash on occasion just like MSOffice...the big difference I've seen is that staroffice doesn't take down the entire OS with a BSOD when it desides to stop working.
You need to upgrade your gnome. I'm living in Ximian gnome on my PC and I haven't had the GNOME Desktop crash yet. But I'll be damned to figure out why my windows PC won't get past the logon box without causing a GPF.
3) I used to buy into this idea that OSS necessarily produced better quality software, but it just isn't true. Large products are flawed for many reasons: release deadlines, unforseen design errors, resource constraints, but mostly because people in general just aren't smart enough
I still believe OSS development makes far better products, but my reasons have nothing to do with being able to make product deadlines or whatever. I do not believe that OSS makes products more quickly. I don't care about release deadlines...the OSS products will get done when they get done....as long as products are making steady progress, that's what matters. How long did it take MS to make a stable OS worth actually paying for? From MS-DOS upto win200...how many manyears or should i say mancenturies of development time went into that development cycle. If want to believe in the pay for every yearly broken release, and call it a full product fine...I'm sick of it. Just don't bring your timeline baggade to the OSS community. Products get done when they get done. I believe that OSS development makes better products, for the simple fact that the source code is available. I believe OSS makes better products becuase in the long run those OSS products are far more adaptible and allow for more innovation. -jef
3) The general was able to use the technology from the ship and construct some kind of spacecraft, go through the storm before the main character could get back and conquered earth before he arrived.
This explanation is straight out of the transformers beast machines storyline.....I just wish the writer's for beast machines would get the credit for coming up with the solution to the age old question "how do we make a sequal if we have the good guy winning in the end of the first installment"
but seriously...this explanation is very viable. They didnt kill the general...they left him in an operation control room of the space station....we know there are atleast a couple of unaccounted for space pod ships, that might have survived the crash. -jef
It basically involves two weighted listing of sites. Sites in the second list pointed to by sites in the first list earn weight points based on the weighted value of sites in the first list. Sites in the first list earn weighted value based on the site that they point to in the second list.
You iterate this a few times and you end up with the first list being a listing of "Link Pages" which have a lot of useful links on the subject. The second list becomes an ordered listing of "authortive sites", sites that are pointed to by many other sites.
What's really neat about this is this method has the ability to find seperate communities. For instances, search for the word jaguar and this method will give you authoritive sites and link pages for the car, the animal, and the atari games system quite easily....becuase each meaning of the word jaguar would have a distinct grouping of authortive sties and link pages.
What's more is this type of problem can be formulated as a eigenvector calculation for the matrix of link pages, and authoritive sites.
-jef
Well bigger isn't necessarily better...but comparing NSTX to a tokamak like TFTR...is literally comparing apples to doughnuts.
NSTX is an ST...not a tokamak. One of the motivations behind ST development, is to do better than the reactor size requirement need by a tokamak (doughnut). But there is still and economics of scale even for devices like NSTX. An ST reactor still has to be a certain size...the hope is that that certain size for an ST is an order of magnitude smaller than a tokamak reactor would require.
I work on NSTX's tiny brother at princeton, CDX. And the economics of scale still holds for ST's. It's better to build one "large" ST rather than 40 small ST's. What's different is that the word "large" for an ST doesn't mean the same size as when applied to a tokamak design
You are trying to compare apples to doughnuts....a large apple is better than a small apple...a large doughnut is better than a small doughnut...the hope is that a large apple is better and smaller than a large doughnut...that's what NSTX was built to explore. -jef
When was the last tokamak in the US built?
And yes alternative devices...aren't well developed...this is research afterall. They won't be well developed unless we invest some time and money to look at them. If you take a look at the money needed to realize one full-scale tokamak reactor experiment and weight that against the money needed to perform a larger number of smaller devices aimed at looking at new innovative physics concepts...you have to ask yourself...is it worth putting all of our resources into one large reactor experiment...and experiment so large and scrutinized that real innovative, risky research would be difficult to perform becuase of the political pressure to keep the reseach simple and predictable to gain a PR success.
IF we threw enough money at a fusion reactor design we can get decent power out...but the cost to build and run an advanced tokamak reactor would make the power produced orders of magnitude more expensive than current power sources. That doesn't make a tokamak a very attractive design. -jef
The ITER project is very old....The version they are planning to build in Canada is a stripped down version of the original project. The US pulled out of the original ITER project partly becuase the US scientific community is divided on whether money spent on a reactor sized tokamak is a good idea or not. We've learned alot about the limitations of a tokamak design in the last 20 years or so. There is now strong interest in the US to look at other designs other than the standard tokamak doughnut. Low aspect ratio devices(think an apple shape rather than a doughnut) which solves some stability problems that plague tokamak operation. There is also alot of interest in bringing back the stellarator..which is a fully 3-D device (think doughnut, but a french crueller)..now that we have to computing power to start thinking about doing fully 3-D plasma physics. Numerical simulation of fusion temp plasma physics is...HARD....and we are just getting to the point of having enough affordable computers (beowolf) to start doing 3-d modelling of plasma systems.
I think that even applies to low aspect ratio designs. I work on a small low aspect ratio plasma device CDX-U at PPPL. It's not a fusion device...since the temp isnt really hot enough for fusion...
The reason to hate this change is that, microsoft is only doing this to look good for the next round of legal actions. They have to now go back to court and figure out the remedy phase. They can point to this action and go see, ew ARE working on it, so they aren't punished in ways that will hamper the monopolistic behavior in emerging areas where they really want to make the next round of money. MS did not listen to users, or to partners. They are giving away this "flexibility" to OEM's in the hopes of dodging a legal straight-jacket. This might be a step in the right direction, but microsoft is being led there kicking and screaming. The analogy that comes to mind is having a theif stop stealing apples from one store becuase the store-owner threatened to cut off his hands....better to lose access to the apples than to lose the hands that can steal from another store. I'm not going to congradulate MS for this. This is damage control...and not altruism.
Okay I'm ducking out of this, becuase I can't seem to track down your problem in ximian's bugzilla..and I jsut checked ximian's chat server and no one else there seems to be having this problem. I've spent a fair amount of timeon the chat in the last month figuring out work arounds and dealing with weird configuration problems and I haven't seem the sawfish crash problems showing up. I havent seen the problem ...so it's hard for me to say that what you are experiencing is really a bug or some type of misconfiguration.
-jef
That one paragraph of questions is a huge nest of paradoxal expectations. What do you want stability and usability or bledding-edge "up to the minute" versions? It's hard to get both
"Release early, release often", does not mean "release useable stable productive code early and often". It means, keep your open source nose clean by regularly releasing the code you have, so those interested in the work and the code can get their hands on it, regardless of the state of the codebase. If it takes a year and a half to make the code useable, fine...but you should make code releases more frequently than that.
Software projects evovle like the stock market. Averaged of a period of time, the stock market has averaged something like 11% annual gains..hence why an index fund investment is a very good idea in the long term. But the market as a whole take downturns, and indvidual stocks have even wilder rides. The GNOME project, like any large scale project has similar behavior. There will be times when the whole project looks like its going backwards, and individual libraries might break completely for ahile but in the average everything moves forward. Mozilla is another example, the project is going in the right direction, but the nightly build certainly dont always work, and from "release" to "release" bugs crop up. I think your expectations are a bit high.
Your beef with Ximian, is the same problem all the distros have. You need time to test and integrate package updates into your distro, so you either have very up-to-date changes that will cuase problems or you have a more stable distro that doesn't have the newest and latest versions. Redhat gets around this by having the rawhide distro, that new package updates go into for testing by the very brave in the userbase. I have no expectation that the Rawhide packages will work on my system....but if I want the latest and greatest updates I can usually find them there. Ximian doesn't have a "bleeding-edge" distro, or I should say channel...yet. In some ways Gnome 1.4 is still bleeding edge, even Ximian's packaged version of it. If you want Ximian to crank up the QA then you won't get any updates for a couple of months. They'd be approching the Gnome 1.4 release like redhat is, slowly.
I will agree with you that Ximian has not used their red-carpet news channel effectively to keep users updated. The mailing lists are active, but the red-carpet news facility isn't being used. So there is fedback coming out of xim, but not on the most obvious of ways.