Interesting concept, but your analogy is a strawman.
So in your world, there are only physical products and labor. What about other intellectual property that can't be 'performed'? I can't 'perform' my software as a software developer, but it can be distributed at zero cost. If I'm a scientist/researcher, I can't 'perform' a medical drug, but it can be distributed at low cost. I can't 'perform' a book -- well, not in a form people will want to hear -- but I can sure write one, and the book, too, can be distributed at zero cost. There are myriad other examples.
You are turning the clock back about two centuries, and your world will be one where the only great works of art and science are funded by philanthropy and patronage. The founding fathers understood the need for protection for science and authorship, and that's why they wrote the "Progress Clause" into the Constitution:
"Congress shall have the power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
You're conflating social libertarianism and economic libertarianism. Not your fault, so is everyone else on this forum.
"Live and let live" is social libertarianism. You're saying, "personal / private freedoms must not be infringed". Economic libertarianism says, "there should not be ANY government regulation on the 'free' market". Someone who buys into both of these (or, more commonly, conflates them) is a social/economic libertarian. In other words, a modern libertarian.
Most American-style liberals (i.e., people who believe in the power of government to help society) are also social libertarians, just not economic ones. An example of a policy offensive to an economic libertarian but not a liberal is the minimum wage, or the 40-hour work-week. Interestingly, most American-style conservatives are economic libertarians, but NOT social ones. They don't mind eliminating the minimum wage, but they do want to tell you what you can and can't do in your bedroom with your consenting adult partner.
You would think that modern libertarians would hate both parties, and some do, but you find many more of them supporting Republicans than Democrats.
The reason? Modern-day libertarianism really has more to do with Milton Friedman than it does with the ACLU. They are just brainwashed Chicago school amateur economists. They think that the "invisible hand of the market" will fix everything, while they benefit from the fruits of a century of progressive policies that are only recently being dismantled.
They conflate social and economic libertarianism because it is convenient to do so; the latter is so vulgar that if presented alone to most compassionate human beings, would seem completely insane. No 40-hour work week? No controls on foods and substances? No safety labels on medicines? No nutrition labels on food? No seatbelts in cars? No environmental regulations on dumping and pollution? Yep -- that's economic libertarianism. The "market" will sort things out. Just let the invisible hand do its work, and all these things will magically go away.
Social libertarianism, on the other hand, jives with American sensibilities and our Constitution. And so, through the sheep's clothing of social and personal freedoms, comes the wolf of the business-run "free" market.
Tell him/her the truth: Linux is a freely available system, with tens of thousands of pieces of Free/Open Source Software that run on it. It doesn't have the overall polish of commercial systems like Windows and Mac OS, but is "getting there" and getting better on the desktop everyday.
Raise the various issues that Linux and the F/OSS ecosystem truly addresses:
* Taking control of your computer, with full transparency as to how your operating system and your software works.
* Taking advantage of our existing gigahertz CPUs and gigabyte memory stores, instead of requiring us to upgrade our hardware to support bloated software from Redmond.
* Documentation driven by users and strong user-based support communities (rather than 1-800 numbers with a call center employee on the other line).
* Avoiding most malware due to the double-whammy of obscurity of a less popular operating system and a generally more secure design.
Linux as a desktop system is plagued by myths and misconceptions. One of them is certainly that "Everyone can use Linux." Linux isn't for everyone. Others of these misconceptions mostly stem from FUD and the bad state of certain parts of the software industry. For my opinions on this, you can read a recent post on my blog, called "Common Criticisms of Linux, parsed and analyzed."
If you are working on a big project, write helpful comments, and when a major milestone release comes out, write a nice, detailed document which you can call the "Maintainer's Guide," which is the first thing a future developer working on your project will look at to understand the project.
All developers should do this.
Here's my advice for developers who find themselves with a terminal illness:
(1) Stop using a computer, and give all your source code/documents to your closest coworkers.
(2) Sell all your posessions.
(3) Pick a country where global economical differentials and exchange rates make your couple hundred thousand dollars a huge amount of usable capital.
(4) Move there.
(5) Start a business you can do in the sunlight, smelling a nearby ocean breeze, hopefully. Or simply live off the money you saved.
(6) Really, just _don't_ use your computer anymore.
I know that there is a Stamford University, and everyone always jokes that it's for people who want to pretend they went to Stanford, but, this just makes things really confusing. The Register article says Coverity used a verifier from Stamford University, when really the program came from Stanford. In fact, AFAIK, UCONN-Stamford doesn't even have a CS department.
"I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?" she asked.
Isn't that something! Maybe you didn't get the memo, but this is how everything works now. Songs play on a radio, but people still buy CDs, because who wants to go recording all the songs. Books are given away for free online, but people pay for the bound version. Artists give tracks away on their website, but people still buy their CDs.
It's called making money off distribution and convenience of medium, rather than off the production of the intellectual property in question. In fact, considering that most software (proprietary or not) has a one-time "production" cost which exists independent of the number of copies distributed. this makes a bit of sense.
The reason we don't mind if people sell copies of Firefox is because the Firefox developers, if they care about the "marketplace" of their product at all (which many developers I'm sure do not), they care only about one thing: more people using the software. If that means Joe in Indiana who only has dial-up and won't download Firefox would rather pay someone $5 for a CD, so be it.
The question asked above shows the general "negative" attitude of the state of our anti-piracy laws. In particular, it seems unfathomable to "let" another company make money off something you give away for free. We're already giving the software away, so how is this in any way a "harm" to us, the developers of the software? We don't "lose" money when another company sells our free product; instead, we simply gain marketshare. Isn't that good enough reason to allow it? Or, put better, wouldn't it be downright silly to disallow it?
I wish more people would sell Firefox. Like, say, Linux machines loaded with Firefox, at Circuit City or Best Buy, for $200 less than the Windows counterparts. Then we'd really be losing money on the OEM deals, us open source developers! We'd have to call the FBI upon all those piraters.
This article is somehow refreshing. Dealing with open source software usually means you see how dark and restrictive the proprietary/commercial world has become.
I never understood why CS departments started switching to Java. It's a proprietary language, a behemoth library, uses confusing concepts even in early programs (such as the Hello World program requiring a class declaration), and has a compiler/VM to which you have no source code access! (True, nowadays you have gcj to look at, but that's by no means the reference implementation.)
CS departments, I think, should be using Python for instruction. Not only is Python an easier language to learn, but it's more intuitive and more closely resembles pseudocode you see written for theoretical computer science. For example, in a theory of computation book, you may find a definition of a Turing Machine as a 6-tuple. Well, Python has tuples, so you can just say
# turing machine M is a 6-tuple M = (Q, T, s, b, F, f)
If you need to pass to a function (the encoding for M), it's easy to do so: just pass M. etc.
Python also supports other concepts common in pseudocode, like "for i in x" syntax, and associative arrays being a built-in type really helps with dynamic programming problems. Etc.
Python has an interactive shell where students can try out code to play with the language, a very helpful learning tool. It also has a high degree of transparency and allows introspection, so students can see how something like an object system actually works.
Also important, the main Python implementation (CPython) is open source, and the development of the language is done in a community-oriented fashion.
Finally, Python has two extremely high quality books written about it, which are also 100% free. One is called "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python" and is found here, and the other is called "Dive Into Python" for experienced programmers, and is found here.
I'm not saying that Python is the ultimate language, but I think everyone has to agree that it's a better choice than Java for programming courses in universities. I know my data structures/Java course was 90% about "how Java works" and 10% about "how to solve programming problems." In a Python course, I think that ratio would be inverted.
Yea, didn't the conservative bloggers just get finished telling us that the Constant Gardener was nothing but leftist conspiracy theory nonsense? Anti-capitalism propaganda?
Or was it just that the movie actually raised the ethical question of what corporations can and cannot do in an effort to lower costs and raise profits, particularly Big Pharma? Now that we see it is happening, maybe we should start discussing it, rather than brushing it under the rug as the "pro-business" people do.
Hey, look, I like Gmail and Google Maps and all that just as much as the next guy, but as someone who's done rich desktop application UI design with Windows and Linux toolkits, I can't really see AJAX as anything but a big hack.
UI toolkits are built to be event-driven, multi-threaded, and highly interactive. A lot of thought has gone into them, and modern OO languages really let you take advantage of the whole way of doing things (think C#/.NET or Python/GTK+, or C++/QT).
But AJAX is what? An XML message being tossed between server and client in an inline frame. What beefy programming language do we have to deal with that XML message and respond to it, produce our UI elements, etc? Oh yea, Javascript. Where do these applications live? Not within some virtual machine, not with the help of some powerful runtime, but within a *web browser*.
(I just think about the day when all the thought that has gone into making Operating Systems fast and flexible for multiple interactive applications is for naught because the only application anyone runs is IE/Firefox/Safari).
Isn't this the kind of stuff that makes you feel like we're always *regressing* into worse architectural designs, even as the applications get better? AJAX was a hack to squeeze interactivity into web applications. It definitely isn't elegant, and I'd be very wary of calling it a wonderful, powerful industry standard. It may become a standard, but it certainly didn't rise to prominence thanks to the elegance of its design. Javascript, DHTML, etc. aren't even solid standards, just ask Google who wrote three Gmaps versions: one for IE, one for Firefox, one for Safari.
What's funny is that for the next few years, everyone is gonna go bananas to produce AJAX applications instead of rich clients using mature UI toolkits. And it'll just become more and more entrenched--thousands of lines of Javascript spaghetti codes, all over the user's computer and the enterprise.
I like the apps produced by AJAX, but AJAX as a technology? Not that impressed. With all the work that has gone into UIs and UI toolkits in the last few years (especially great stuff like i18n and l10n for free, cross-platform native look and feel, performance, vector graphics, and on and on), it's a shame to see things go in this direction--UI by web browser hack--so rapidly. Alas, I guess that's "the industry!" Demand drives quote-unquote "innovation".
Intellisense #1 feature, pay Bram to add it
on
Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I just wanted to point out that Intellisense (context-sensitive completion based on parsing or "understanding" code) is the #1 most voted VIM feature. You should add your own votes (with your hard-earned cash, if you will) if you want to see this feature come to VIM.
I personally do want this feature. It would make VIM the perfect text editor, IMO. Right now, VIM's completion is already pretty good, and a couple people have implemented completion as a plugin, but it usually ends up being a hack. I think Bram can figure out a nice way to do it for Vim 7.
People who know how to use VIM well find themselves really productive in it. But, that said, I end up being slightly more productive writing Java code in Eclipse, ONLY because of completion, even though all my other editing features from VIM aren't there (or are buried).
What I usually end up doing is keeping a console handy and switching between Eclipse and VIM when I have to do Java, but that's not that nice. I think Vim can pull this off.
I had SageTV and BeyondTV for quite some time, playing around with timed video recordings with my excellent Hauppauge PVR250.
Unfortunately, for the last couple years, I was never able to get "Tivo" functionality, since all the channels that matter to me come in digitally through the cable box, and I can only grab output (RCA audio and S-Video) from the cable box to my Hauppauge card. Recently, however, I invested in a My.TV IR Blaster device, and set up SageTV to use it as a tuning device.
Now, I finally have real Tivo functionality. And it rocks.
I don't have lots of demands. I like to keep a queue of The Daily Show, Lou Dobbs on CNN, BBC World News, RAI News from Italy, and the occasional one-time recording off TV. I also do Family Guy quite a bit now. Recording all this stuff with Sage is a snap, and Sage manages my free space to always keep the most recent and unwatched stuff. I skip commercials, which saves loads of time. And the quality is excellent. Important shows that I catch I burn to DVDs and give to friends. It's really nice.
Couple SageTV, a Hauppauge 250, an My.TV Blaster with the ATI Remote Wonder RF remote control and the free plugin for SageTV available on the ATI Remote Wonder plugin website, and you have a real nice PVR solution.
I am finally happy with this stuff. Computers are actually working for me, not the other way around!
Normally, I'd agree with the commentator in this article. If you sell software, you should be subject to the same liability as if you sold any other thing. For example, if you sell me banking software, it's assumed that this software is secure and won't easily let hackers steal my account information. If you sell a car, it better not explode every time it gets rear-ended, or have tires that explode when going over certain speeds.
But if you give me a car, or if my hobbyist mechanic friend builds me a car and then gives it to me, I can't really hold him responsible for it not functioning properly. Same thing if my programmer friend just gives me custom banking software he built. When you get something for free, it needn't be licensed in such a way. If it had to be, then no one would ever give anything away from free, which is bad for the public. The better solution is for people who are worried about this potential to simply not accept things which are given away for free.
We have such restrictions on sold goods because otherwise our market can be completely tampered with. Without them, it allows companies to claim goods perform a certain function safely and reliably when in fact they don't.
I do agree though--there was a general trend in EULA's for software developers to say, "Listen, what happens now that you've bought this software is YOUR problem. If it fries your hard drive, or sends all your most personal files to my friends, that's YOUR problem." Yea, that's bad. But the GPL simply doesn't enter into it. The GPL is a license about copying and redistributing software. If you start selling GPL software to a company, then maybe the company that sold it can be held a bit responsible for it not working well (they should, after all, be testing the configuration; otherwise, why are you paying them?).
Unfortunately, I don't think the "security" issue is really the critical one. After all, car manufacturers aren't held responsible for making car theft easy (even though it actually is quite easy). Software developers (especially open source ones) spend a lot of time on making software secure, but we can't possibly hold them responsible for every hack. No products, be they physical or in the software world, are really completely secure.
"So a human who is sleeping, and thus not conscious would have no moral value?"
Sorry, again, here I was assuming some background reading about what "consciousness " is. Unfortunately, in Philosophy (this is a flaw of the subject), terms are often quite vague to start off with, and Philosophers make a habit of trying to really define a term. When debating with people who haven't studied it, I forget that consciousness takes on a different meaning in regular discussion. "Consciousness" as I'm using it has nothing to do with "being awake" or "being asleep." Whether you are awake or asleep, you are conscious. You are not "unconscious" when asleep, merely with a potential to awake--your brain doesn't "shut off" when you're asleep. It simply doesn't provide you with the constant stream of sense-input you associate with a waking state.
Comas are definitely a gray area. I really don't know enough about the brain states of humans in comas to make any judgement about whether they are still "conscious," but I'd say they probably aren't, especially if it's a coma from which that person will never recover. If it is a coma which one can recover from (and, after which, be conscious) I can only assume that the brain was either a) in a conscious state the whole time or b) "broken" into an unconscious state (i.e., it no longer functioned) but then "healed" and went into a conscious state again. Again, this (b) possibility makes comas very much a gray area. However, as I like to say to friends: gray areas don't mean you have the wrong principle, as long as your principle works when we have clear-cut cases. For example, the moral principle that "killing is wrong" has lots of grey areas: what if the person you are killing killed your entire family? What if you fire a gun at a target on a wall and slip and shoot your friend instead? But that's not to say the moral principle--"killing is wrong"--is bad, just because one can find "grey area cases" in which killing may not be wrong. It just means that things like time and causation can be confused, and things like intent or potential to avoid an accident or negligent action are hard to measure.
Even some concepts we have that seem very clear-cut have gray areas. Take your concept of a "table". What is a table? Think of modern artists in furniture design who fused the concept of "table" and "chair" to produce something that seems to be a hybrid between the two. Okay, so maybe you define table functionally: something onto which one can place objects. But now imagine a "table" whose surface spins around at high speed, so that nothing can be placed on it. Is it still a table? Okay, so maybe you define it physically, like a surface atop any number of "legs". But now imagine a table that hangs from the ceiling by steel wire. Etc. etc. I know this seems rather nit-picky, but that's really what gray areas are, and that's why I think they're fun to think about, but ultimately one should evaluate a moral principle by its general-case performance, and then make sure it doesn't do "insane" things in rational gray areas.
What my argument above tried to do is show that a) since embryos are clearly not conscious beings (nor were they ever conscious beings), they don't demand a special moral protection and b) moral protection has only been granted to them because embryos have the potential to become conscious beings, the so-called potentiality principle, which has other unacceptable implications.
I really think some great points were raised, however.
For example, one problem with my consciousness argument is what another poster raised: that "strong AI", should it ever come about (and thinkers like Jeff Hawkins in "On Intelligence" make me believe it just may some day) would give us responsibility to give these new robots moral value. I don't know if there's something wrong with that, it just may seem unnatural because AI machines are so different from us, but then again so is the example I gave of an alien life form.
See response above for why this nonsense about "humans are just collections of cells" is missing the point. Consciousness is the key thing.
You say, "and also by missing the fact that people are more sympathetic to an animal than to a rock or a chair is not because we know they feel pain. It is because they are more like us than a rock or a chair. Hate to break it to you but a fetus is still more like us than any deer that i've ever seen."
Wrong. This may be your intuition, but it's pretty easy to see past. For example, imagine some alien life form comes down from another planet which is made up of completely different materials than we have ever seen. However, we can tell that the alien life form experiences pain, is conscious, can communicate with us, has goals and aspirations which might be halted by harm caused to him. He may not be anything like us from a physical point of view, or even from an aesthetic point of view, but we still would think it wrong to hurt him.
Your statement is raising the question, "but how are the animals like us? In what way?" The answer is that they are conscious.
To say we should make moral judgements based on how things look is really insanity. My perfect likeness carved in wood and painted photorealistically should not deserve any moral protection. The alien life form who looks nothing like me but is a thinking being does deserve some, however.
Fetuses do look like us, and that's why many people feel a sentimental attachment to them. But that's just playing into the same reason a really good 3D model of a baby that does something funny might make us laugh. It's because our brain, constantly drawing connections based on our senses, begins to equate the 3D model with an actual human, and thus allows us to feel all the sympathetic connections. If you see that really good 3D model die, you feel sad, for example.
Our brain does this same trick for a fetus, especially since fetuses have been photographed and seen so closely in macro lenses, and seen to resemble humans so much. But we shouldn't be making moral arguments just based on how things look, and if you don't see the reason why not, I'm not sure where you're coming from.
I don't think many serious people would take up your line of reasoning. Potentiality works much better, and they toss the argument of what gives someone inherent moral value off to the side, to be debated at a later debt.
"You can't use philosophy to determine whether or not a physical being, regardless of its current state of development, exists or merely has the potential to exist. It clearly exists and it is clearly human. What some folks choose to say is that the embryo/fetus isn't a 'person'."
It "clearly" exists and it is clearly human? I assume it here refers to the embryo. Saying an embryo is "clearly human" leaves you with a very implausible definition of humanity. It, for example, allows that dead people are "people" to, whose bodies should be protected as vigorously as live ones. Since, after all, your definition of humanity has nothing to do with any qualitative aspects of it (like consciousness, having and leading a life, conceptualizing one's future, etc.) but instead focuses on what you term as a kind of "raw physicality of the thing," that is, that the embryo is physically human since it came from two humans conceiving/reproducing. But then, so did the dead person. And so did any other configuration of my cells (my donated kidney, my cells washed off when I wash my hands). But these aren't people. I'm me, but these cells aren't me.
When I say embryos are just configurations of human cells, and you mockingly reply "so are people," you make it seem like I forgot that. I didn't. I pointed out that what makes human beings, well, human beings, is this magical thing called "consciousness," which you can debate separately if you like, but we all agree embryos aren't conscious. When I say embryos are just lumps of cells, I meant that's "all" embryos are. People are lumps of cells configured in such a way that they are conscious beings.
It's not that some refuse to call an embryo a person. It's that some people insist on calling an embryo a person, even though they can't provide any criteria to show us why it deserves to be called a person. I provided mine: it's consciousness. At some point in human development, humans get it... psychologists are still debating whether it's in the couple months prior to birth or whether it's even a bit later than that, and the consciousness debate will rage on for a long time probably, but we're about as close as our postmodern intellectual culture gets to being "sure" that embryos don't have consciousness.
Typical Slashdot--fine, I'll bite. You guys don't read much actual Philosophy, do you? Makes it kind of hard to analyze Ethics if you've only done it from the comfort of the omniscient armchair.
Embryos being disposed of and prisoners who are given life terms being killed early are two very, very different things.
The main argument trumpeted by people against embryonic stem cell research is that embryos are worthy of "being saved," which is to say, they have "moral value." These same people, to be consistent, have to be against forms of very early abortion and even some forms (if not all forms) of contraception.
The basic thing that vexes these people is that they have never studied the potentiality principal. They think the mere fact that an embryo has the potential to become a human being gives it moral value, makes it "worthy of being saved." This is because they know human beings have moral value, and so conflate "a thing with potential to be something of moral value" with "a thing that has moral value." However, this argument is spurious, as I'll try to show.
For one thing, many things have the potential (i.e., have some causal relationship) to the creation of a healthy infant child. As someone else once suggested to me, one such thing is a glance of flirtation toward a fertile young woman. From that glance, there exists the potential for intercourse; from that intercourse, the potential of conception; from that conception, the potential of a human child in the form of an embryo.
If that example seems too cooked up, think about miscarriages. Hundreds of thousands of "babies" die from miscarriages every year. So, since that constitutes an essential mass death of a significant portion of the human "population," shouldn't we be devoting massive scientific research dollars to stopping miscarriages?
The reason both these things seem absurd is because saying that embryos have moral value is completely arbitrary. Harm cannot be done to embryos in the same way harm cannot be done to chairs or rocks. The chair or rock doesn't have a hope, an aspiration, or a direction which is thwarted by the said harm. The rock or chair doesn't care about the said harm. The crux of the matter is, the rock or chair isn't conscious, and that's why they have no moral value.
The only people who might care about the rock or chair's harm is the owner of the said rock or chair. But that is only due to a relational property between the owner and his objects, and hasn't a thing to do with morality. (For example, when considering whether humans have the right to harm other humans, it serves no one to say, "Okay, but what if the person harmed were your mother?" Introducing the familial relationship simply distorts the inherent morality of a thing, since it makes the decision relational, based on other notions such as loyalty to one's family, etc.)
The reason we see harms to dogs or cows as worse than harms to chairs is because we know that dogs or cows can a) experience pain, b) in dying or being severely harmed, be deprived of their right to continue the life they were already living. Chairs experience no pain, conceive of no harm, and have no life of which to be deprived.
One can make an argument for defending the late-term fetus (which may be conscious) from abortion, but preventing the embryo from use in scientific research based on the idea that the embryo is a "human life" is, morally speaking, quite unsound. This is because embryos have no moral value of their own. They are things which may, one day, become things of moral value, but that does not mean they are morally valuable now.
To take to your prisoner example, human beings have moral value even if they are savage criminals sentenced to life imprisonment. This is because they are conscious human beings who still have a right to life within our moral framework. Using them from scientific research sets a moral example that humans, in general, are usable in har
I have to chime in here and say that when I entered college, I too thought that the theory courses were useless. But there is lots of interesting stuff in these courses.
I'm not a math guy, but I am a computer science guy. I don't think you necessarily have to be a math guy to be a computer science guy (it probably helps for some things, hurts for others). For example, I hate doing computation. I can't multiply a 3-digit number by a 2-digit in my number in my head like some of my colleagues without stressing myself out. Someone recently asked me the square root of 144 and I quickly responded "15" before correcting myself to "12."
I'm also embarassed by how much of a distaste I have for computation. I reassure myself that this is okay because I really am much more creative than mathematical (not that those two are opposites, just that often they tend to be mutually exclusive).
Computer programming can be a creative form, and in fact it usually is. (If it weren't creative, you wouldn't have so many hobbyists playing with it.) I think on a very powerful development team you should have mathy computer science guys and less-mathy, more creative ones, because they really can complement each other quite well. Us creative computer science guys often see problems in a completely different light, and come up with sometimes-strange, but usually elegant solutions. The mathy guys often see problems in terms of a powerful mathematical model, and come up with elegant solutions of their own. Together, they can really cover the bases.
Anyway, the bottom line is, I never found computation particularly interesting.
But I did find computers quite interesting, not surprisingly. I found that with computers problems could be understood in terms of the necessary computation, but then you could have the machine do the actual computation. In my Linear Algebra course, often for fun, rather than solving problems I used to write programs to solve problems, and then have the programs solve them. I found it much more enjoyable to write a matrix multiplication routine than to just carry out the algorithm myself, using pen and paper. (I know, I know, there's MATLAB, but coding the program actually helped me understand the algorithm better.)
So what did Computer Science do for me? It largely hardened my conception of the world as a world of patterns and algorithms. I'm talking about courses like "Basic Algorithms", where I learned to grok and describe algorithms in plain language, as well as in formal, symbolic, mathematical logic. Almost everything can be understood as a pattern or algorithm, the trick in being a good developer is finding the most elegant pattern to point to.
"Computer Architecture" taught me about low-level hardware, how it is designed and why it is designed the way it is designed. It also gave me an appreciation that sometimes our algorithms don't take into consideration hardware concerns, like cache hits/misses, locality, etc. So this added yet another layer for coming up with good ideas toward practical computation.
"Computer Systems Organization" (which at my college is a fancy name for "Operating Systems") introduced me to assembly language, and let me see the intimate connection an OS often has with the underlying hardware, and how small changes of algorithmic approach can completely change performance. This course was also the most "software engineering-like" course, since we worked with large codebases, often complicated and filled with operating systems concepts and algorithms.
I enjoyed the systems stuff so much, I took a high-level Operating Systems course, which was my best course thus far because we coded a small kernel basically from scratch in C. We had to work alone, and we had to work weekends, and my social life sucked that semester, but I think it was worth it. In my final project, in which I implemented an in-kernel debugger with C symbol support (!!!), when the damn thing fin
Keynote is not as... feature-filled? As Powerpoint?
Are you nuts, or something?
I may be a Linux user, but I've had to put together my share of presentations. I've used Powerpoint, I've used OpenOffice. But then one time, while I was borrowing a friend's Powerbook G4 for a few weeks, I put one together in Keynote. It is, at the very least, the best presentation software ever written, and what's more, it's a pleasure to use. Aligning elements is easy with smartly-coded guides, the output for the presentations are wonderful with elegant themes and fonts, and the transitions are elegant with accelerated 3D transitions and such. But more than anything else, the damn program just "got out of my way." I didn't spend hours tweaking this or that text element a few pixels to the left or right. The damn presentation just came out beautifully even though I had never used the application before.
What a load of horse shit. Try actually studying history, not being taught the pseudo-history of our high schools and middle schools.
So the reason the US was justified in dropping the bombs was because we're big and powerful and you just don't mess with big and powerful countries? You say their government sealed the fate of their children, but that is a total logical fallacy (as, sadly, is often employed by writers on Slashdot). US wouldn't have dropped bombs if Japan hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor. Therefore, Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor caused the US to drop the bombs.
The problem with the argument is that Japan didn't know we'd decide to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in response to Pearl Harbor. Although the US wouldn't have dropped the bombs without Pearl Harbor, the US could have done a lot of other things as a military response.
I too was taught that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed in order to save the 1 million American lives that would have been lost in an invasion (since learning that, the figures have been dropped by historians to well under 300,000 American lives, making the argument much less compelling even if one buys into the amoral numbers game). Unfortunately, there's a difference between a soldier's life and a civilian's life, and there's a difficulty in measuring either's value. A soldier is an instrument of his or her country, and his or her purpose is to die in battle with enemy forces. One might say that all soldiers ascend the plane of morality, since they are given the right to kill others without remorse, and likewise to be killed by unregretful forces.
But innocent lives are innocent lives. Yes, there were SOME soldiers (or even people helping the Japanese government's attacks on the US) in Nagasaki, in arms plants and elsewhere. But there were also enormous numbers of completely innocent people, who were wiped out in an instant. This mass killing is more than just that: it's murder, on the largest instantaneous scale we've ever seen. And, to put it lightly, it is highly immoral and intolerable.
-President Truman claimed that Hiroshima was attacked because it was a "military center." But over 120,000 people died outright in the bombing, and 95% of them were civilians.
-The second bomb was prefaced by leaflets which were dropped upon Nagasaki, informing the people that Hiroshima had been destroyed, and that they were next if they didn't tell their leaders to surrender. Since their leaders didn't surrender promptly, they had no choice but to face death. Another 100,000 lives, of which 95% (perhaps more) were innocent civilians.
-We are taught in high schools that this was the "hardest decision a president ever had to make." I disagree. I think it was the easiest decision any immoral person could make, if he were placed in that same situation. It's easy to wipe out a thousands upon thousands of innocent families in order to break the enemy into surrender. It's much more difficult to conduct a war in a manner that still makes it possible for us to be "the good guy" and keep intact our general moral framework with its respect for human life. In exchange for committing a greatly immoral act, Truman was not placed in jail or made into a great villain by the Western World; instead, Truman was attributed with having "ended the war," and received such accolades for this feat that he was even at one point awarded an honorary degree at Oxford University for his peacemaking.
If Japan would have won the war, would they hesitate bombing New York? I don't know, but clearly from the way you pose the question, you find it a highly disgusting and immoral act for a government to bomb a great city like New York (which is full of innocent life, great history, and hardly any military bases) to respond in a military battle with the US. So why should we, the US, have done the same? As beautifully put by Elizabeth Anscombe ("Mr. Truman's Degree"), whose brilliant simplicity casts much light on the reality of
There is plenty of linux software that only runs on linux, should they all be sued for anti competitive beahviour too?
It depends. Do the developers you're talking about make and profit from selling copies of Linux to users? Do they therefore have an interest in locking you down to their operating system and preventing alternatives?
The answer is no. That's because no one company makes and profits from Linux--it's open source, and Free. But even if it were true that a single source profited directly from say, downloads of Linux, and also developed and profited from all the software in question, your argument would still not hold up. Most OSS developers like the idea of running on more than one OS or platform, and that's because the toolkits and architectures are built that way. Microsoft intentionally builds its tools to encourage lock-down (so much so that it will even go so far as to label a technology "cross platform", like.NET, but only provide a full implementation for one platform--namely, theirs. At least Sun ported its Java VM to every major OS/platform).
I appreciate your comments, Napolean. I think what most people complain about with Microsoft is that they rarely make it easy to use another product (F/OSS or otherwise) with their own products. The example you stated (MySQL with ASP.NET) is not due to any achievement of Microsoft. MySQL is an database system that was designed by its creators to run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and a host of platforms. But Microsoft SQL server only runs on Windows, and it's that way with most of MS's products.
PHP runs on any platform. But Microsoft's ASP/ASP.NET only runs on Windows/IIS..NET is supposed to be a cross-platform framework, but so far the only ones working on making it cross-platform are a bunch of open source developers at the Mono project, who don't even have assurance from Microsoft that their efforts won't be squashed when MS sees a competetive threat. Meanwhile, Java and Python, two non-Microsoft languages and runtimes, run on everything under the sun, including Windows.
I remember six months ago when my brother was starting to manage his small web development business out of our house, I was tasked to setup a system to manage contacts in some sort of sane, unified way. One option I saw available was what Microsoft calls their Business Solutions CRM, or Customer Relationship Manager. I tried the online demo, and I liked what I saw. So I started to price it out.
Well, MS CRM required Microsoft Outlook 2003, which we had, but it also required a web server, ASP.NET support, a database server, and an e-mail server.
Now, with any other product of its kind on the net, the web server, DB server, and e-mail server are just "options," because these have become in today's software ecosystem components with very clearly-defined roles, on top of which a lot of components can be layered due to the standards at each of these product boundaries. This is great because it allows you to build up complex systems by choosing the components that make sense for your needs. If you want to do Apache, MySQL and Postfix/Courier-IMAP or if you want to use Savant, PostgresSQL, and Argosoft Mail Server, the choice is really up to you.
But MS's CRM product wasn't like that at all. It _required_ Windows Server 2003 (so much so that it wouldn't install unless I had it installed, with a MsgBox that said, "Sorry, you must have Windows Server 2003 to install this product"). It required IIS with ASP.NET support. It required MS Exchange. And it required MS SQL Server 2000.
Suddenly, CRM's cost (which was already pretty high) went through the roof for me and my brother. Sad, considering that I would have been able to afford CRM if it had been built atop standards, rather than every proprietary MS solution under the sun.
One could go on and on with examples of Microsoft's general "lock-in" strategies.
MS Office file formats weren't open until recently (and, not having done the research, I'm not sure if they really will be fully open when the new XML format takes hold), and the only way you could view those files on Linux was by reverse engineering the specification (as projects like AbiWord tried to do).
You talk about hooking up MS products with MySQL as if Microsoft is the enabler here. But it's really MySQL who is the enabler. And it's that way with basically every open source project that "can be used" with MS products. Microsoft isn't porting anything to their platform that could possibly compete with something they have coded themselves. Major desktop applications that originate in the Linux/OSS world get ported to Windows due to the smart design of the underlying toolkits (GTK+ applications are ported to Windows all the time; I run Abiword, Workrave, GAIM and The Gimp under Windows). That's because OSS developers really just want to give the users freedom to use their products on whatever platforms they want. If OSS developers thought and acted the way Microsoft developers do, Apache would only run on Linux, and so would PHP, Perl, Python, as well
Creative Commons isn't about gaining any rights over your work. It is about voluntarily giving up some rights on your work in order to promote the sharing of knowledge and art, or, more generally, content.
Everyone here is right: Creative Commons doesn't give you more rights than traditional copyright laws. But Creative Commons isn't about GIVING you, the content creator, more rights. It's about giving the READER/AUDIENCE more rights to be CREATIVE with that content and do something with it, without having to worry about getting sued.
Under current copyright law, if I take a photograph and put it on a website, no one else has the right to use that photograph, commercial or otherwise. (If they do use it, I have a choice: sue or not, and let them debate "fair use" in court). Likewise, if I am an independent film maker and want to use a photograph in my movie, I need to be especially wary, since if I don't get clearance and I release my movie, I can be seriously sued.
In that sense, what Mr. Lessig and his associates have tried to do is "expand the commons," which has been shrinking due to "automatic copyright protection." These licenses allow you to opt out of that automatic protection, while still explicitly stating the protection you want (for example, the "By" license allows you attribution for works reused in derivative works).
This is a noble goal. For anyone who has read Lessig's material (he has a book called "Free Culture" available for free online), his big crusade is simply to allow creativity to still flourish in a society where corporate Intellectual Property interests have made the copyright system tilted "too far in favor of content creators." Everyone wants protection for creative work, but sometimes creative goods can come out of building upon prior creative works (such as remixing music, altering/compositing photographs, rephrasing texts, etc.) But what we don't want is a public who is fearful to remix, reuse, or even just show off creative works, for fear of serious legal penalty.
Perhaps Dvorak should actually research why CC was founded before he mounts a criticism. His conclusion says it all: "Apparently simplicity was more than some people could handle, so they invented Creative Commons to add some artificial paperwork and complexity to the mechanism. And it seems to actually weaken the copyrights you have coming to you without Creative Commons." That's right Dvorak. That's because weakening the copyright protections you have is the point. How else do you expand the commons? By giving yourself a stronger right to sue?
Wow, I actually expected more, considering how much MS has been hyping the "new UI" of Longhorn.
In no particular order:
(1) Explorer seems to have taken a cue from PathFinder's directory browsing, a concept which has also been integrated into the GTK File Open Chooser Widget in the Linux world. Definitely a step in the right direction, but perhaps bundled up with a couple steps backward. Notice the new "My Computer", which sports all sorts of useless widgets everywhere, a mixture of task- and object-oriented interfaces, and more panes than one can possibly be expected to comprehend quickly. Typical Microsoft "toolbaritis," now applied to the file manager.
(2) Media Player continues to amaze in how far it distances itself from any UI sanity. Yet another argument for why toolkit consistency does not matter to normal users. File menu: gone, or just "annoyingly mouseover hidden"? I can only imagine what that menacing "Online Stores" button is for (can anyone say software-as-advertisement money?)
(3) Transparency: ooh, eye-candy. But wait, why does my desktop look like so many stained glass windows, who are, at the same time, light sources? Yet another Microsoft imitation gone bad. Notice how the borders of applications turn into transparent "stained glass" areas, serving to do nothing but make it more difficult to see, grab, and interact with the border of an application. For some reason, toolbar areas are also "semi-transparent," I guess just so you can make sure your graphics driver is working. Notice also how even when the eye candy features are enabled (transparent borders, shadows), Media Player refuses to comply! Stubborn lil' guy, aren't ya? heh heh.
(4) I'm utterly not surprised to see that Windows still makes use of dialogs whom cannot be resized, as in the displayed (and New) Copy Dialog. Yet another great "feature," as my 1920x1280 screen real estate can't even be utilized to show me the full directory name of a the path I'm copying from. Instead, I must make due with two halves of a path concatenated by three dots '...'
(5) Internet Explorer 7. Does this even need comment? What a UI disaster. First, the "toolbar" area is a different color than the rest of the application, which gives us some sort of Carbon/Cocoa hybrid in a single application. Then, the menubar exists below the tabs, implying that these options are on a per-tab basis, when this is clearly not the case (It's true sometimes, like in View Source or Save As, but not true others, like Work Offline or New Tab, which alter the whole application and not just a single tab).
In conclusion, Longhorn, at least from a UI innovation standpoint (but probably from others, too), looks to be the vaporware we were all expecting. Let's keep our eyes and minds pointed at where the real innovation is happening: in ANY of the alternative OSes, proprietary or Free. Maybe by the time Longhorn is released, we won't even need it anymore. We'll just send Microsoft a memo: "Dear Sirs, you can have it back."
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting concept, but your analogy is a strawman.
So in your world, there are only physical products and labor. What about other intellectual property that can't be 'performed'? I can't 'perform' my software as a software developer, but it can be distributed at zero cost. If I'm a scientist/researcher, I can't 'perform' a medical drug, but it can be distributed at low cost. I can't 'perform' a book -- well, not in a form people will want to hear -- but I can sure write one, and the book, too, can be distributed at zero cost. There are myriad other examples.
You are turning the clock back about two centuries, and your world will be one where the only great works of art and science are funded by philanthropy and patronage. The founding fathers understood the need for protection for science and authorship, and that's why they wrote the "Progress Clause" into the Constitution:
"Congress shall have the power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
You're conflating social libertarianism and economic libertarianism. Not your fault, so is everyone else on this forum.
"Live and let live" is social libertarianism. You're saying, "personal / private freedoms must not be infringed". Economic libertarianism says, "there should not be ANY government regulation on the 'free' market". Someone who buys into both of these (or, more commonly, conflates them) is a social/economic libertarian. In other words, a modern libertarian.
Most American-style liberals (i.e., people who believe in the power of government to help society) are also social libertarians, just not economic ones. An example of a policy offensive to an economic libertarian but not a liberal is the minimum wage, or the 40-hour work-week. Interestingly, most American-style conservatives are economic libertarians, but NOT social ones. They don't mind eliminating the minimum wage, but they do want to tell you what you can and can't do in your bedroom with your consenting adult partner.
You would think that modern libertarians would hate both parties, and some do, but you find many more of them supporting Republicans than Democrats.
The reason? Modern-day libertarianism really has more to do with Milton Friedman than it does with the ACLU. They are just brainwashed Chicago school amateur economists. They think that the "invisible hand of the market" will fix everything, while they benefit from the fruits of a century of progressive policies that are only recently being dismantled.
They conflate social and economic libertarianism because it is convenient to do so; the latter is so vulgar that if presented alone to most compassionate human beings, would seem completely insane. No 40-hour work week? No controls on foods and substances? No safety labels on medicines? No nutrition labels on food? No seatbelts in cars? No environmental regulations on dumping and pollution? Yep -- that's economic libertarianism. The "market" will sort things out. Just let the invisible hand do its work, and all these things will magically go away.
Social libertarianism, on the other hand, jives with American sensibilities and our Constitution. And so, through the sheep's clothing of social and personal freedoms, comes the wolf of the business-run "free" market.
Tell him/her the truth: Linux is a freely available system, with tens of thousands of pieces of Free/Open Source Software that run on it. It doesn't have the overall polish of commercial systems like Windows and Mac OS, but is "getting there" and getting better on the desktop everyday.
Raise the various issues that Linux and the F/OSS ecosystem truly addresses:
* Taking control of your computer, with full transparency as to how your operating system and your software works.
* Taking advantage of our existing gigahertz CPUs and gigabyte memory stores, instead of requiring us to upgrade our hardware to support bloated software from Redmond.
* Documentation driven by users and strong user-based support communities (rather than 1-800 numbers with a call center employee on the other line).
* Avoiding most malware due to the double-whammy of obscurity of a less popular operating system and a generally more secure design.
Linux as a desktop system is plagued by myths and misconceptions. One of them is certainly that "Everyone can use Linux." Linux isn't for everyone. Others of these misconceptions mostly stem from FUD and the bad state of certain parts of the software industry. For my opinions on this, you can read a recent post on my blog, called "Common Criticisms of Linux, parsed and analyzed."
All this talk without a single mention of the Sokal Affair? It's pretty relevant. Also be sure to check out Paul Boghossian's article, "What the Sokal Hoax Ought to Teach Us." Great reading.
If you are working on a big project, write helpful comments, and when a major milestone release comes out, write a nice, detailed document which you can call the "Maintainer's Guide," which is the first thing a future developer working on your project will look at to understand the project.
All developers should do this.
Here's my advice for developers who find themselves with a terminal illness:
(1) Stop using a computer, and give all your source code/documents to your closest coworkers.
(2) Sell all your posessions.
(3) Pick a country where global economical differentials and exchange rates make your couple hundred thousand dollars a huge amount of usable capital.
(4) Move there.
(5) Start a business you can do in the sunlight, smelling a nearby ocean breeze, hopefully. Or simply live off the money you saved.
(6) Really, just _don't_ use your computer anymore.
That's my advice.
I know that there is a Stamford University, and everyone always jokes that it's for people who want to pretend they went to Stanford, but, this just makes things really confusing. The Register article says Coverity used a verifier from Stamford University, when really the program came from Stanford. In fact, AFAIK, UCONN-Stamford doesn't even have a CS department.
"I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?" she asked.
Isn't that something! Maybe you didn't get the memo, but this is how everything works now. Songs play on a radio, but people still buy CDs, because who wants to go recording all the songs. Books are given away for free online, but people pay for the bound version. Artists give tracks away on their website, but people still buy their CDs.
It's called making money off distribution and convenience of medium, rather than off the production of the intellectual property in question. In fact, considering that most software (proprietary or not) has a one-time "production" cost which exists independent of the number of copies distributed. this makes a bit of sense.
The reason we don't mind if people sell copies of Firefox is because the Firefox developers, if they care about the "marketplace" of their product at all (which many developers I'm sure do not), they care only about one thing: more people using the software. If that means Joe in Indiana who only has dial-up and won't download Firefox would rather pay someone $5 for a CD, so be it.
The question asked above shows the general "negative" attitude of the state of our anti-piracy laws. In particular, it seems unfathomable to "let" another company make money off something you give away for free. We're already giving the software away, so how is this in any way a "harm" to us, the developers of the software? We don't "lose" money when another company sells our free product; instead, we simply gain marketshare. Isn't that good enough reason to allow it? Or, put better, wouldn't it be downright silly to disallow it?
I wish more people would sell Firefox. Like, say, Linux machines loaded with Firefox, at Circuit City or Best Buy, for $200 less than the Windows counterparts. Then we'd really be losing money on the OEM deals, us open source developers! We'd have to call the FBI upon all those piraters.
This article is somehow refreshing. Dealing with open source software usually means you see how dark and restrictive the proprietary/commercial world has become.
I never understood why CS departments started switching to Java. It's a proprietary language, a behemoth library, uses confusing concepts even in early programs (such as the Hello World program requiring a class declaration), and has a compiler/VM to which you have no source code access! (True, nowadays you have gcj to look at, but that's by no means the reference implementation.)
CS departments, I think, should be using Python for instruction. Not only is Python an easier language to learn, but it's more intuitive and more closely resembles pseudocode you see written for theoretical computer science. For example, in a theory of computation book, you may find a definition of a Turing Machine as a 6-tuple. Well, Python has tuples, so you can just say
# turing machine M is a 6-tuple
M = (Q, T, s, b, F, f)
If you need to pass to a function (the encoding for M), it's easy to do so: just pass M. etc.
Python also supports other concepts common in pseudocode, like "for i in x" syntax, and associative arrays being a built-in type really helps with dynamic programming problems. Etc.
Python has an interactive shell where students can try out code to play with the language, a very helpful learning tool. It also has a high degree of transparency and allows introspection, so students can see how something like an object system actually works.
Also important, the main Python implementation (CPython) is open source, and the development of the language is done in a community-oriented fashion.
Finally, Python has two extremely high quality books written about it, which are also 100% free. One is called "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python" and is found here, and the other is called "Dive Into Python" for experienced programmers, and is found here.
I'm not saying that Python is the ultimate language, but I think everyone has to agree that it's a better choice than Java for programming courses in universities. I know my data structures/Java course was 90% about "how Java works" and 10% about "how to solve programming problems." In a Python course, I think that ratio would be inverted.
Yea, didn't the conservative bloggers just get finished telling us that the Constant Gardener was nothing but leftist conspiracy theory nonsense? Anti-capitalism propaganda?
Or was it just that the movie actually raised the ethical question of what corporations can and cannot do in an effort to lower costs and raise profits, particularly Big Pharma? Now that we see it is happening, maybe we should start discussing it, rather than brushing it under the rug as the "pro-business" people do.
Hey, look, I like Gmail and Google Maps and all that just as much as the next guy, but as someone who's done rich desktop application UI design with Windows and Linux toolkits, I can't really see AJAX as anything but a big hack.
UI toolkits are built to be event-driven, multi-threaded, and highly interactive. A lot of thought has gone into them, and modern OO languages really let you take advantage of the whole way of doing things (think C#/.NET or Python/GTK+, or C++/QT).
But AJAX is what? An XML message being tossed between server and client in an inline frame. What beefy programming language do we have to deal with that XML message and respond to it, produce our UI elements, etc? Oh yea, Javascript. Where do these applications live? Not within some virtual machine, not with the help of some powerful runtime, but within a *web browser*.
(I just think about the day when all the thought that has gone into making Operating Systems fast and flexible for multiple interactive applications is for naught because the only application anyone runs is IE/Firefox/Safari).
Isn't this the kind of stuff that makes you feel like we're always *regressing* into worse architectural designs, even as the applications get better? AJAX was a hack to squeeze interactivity into web applications. It definitely isn't elegant, and I'd be very wary of calling it a wonderful, powerful industry standard. It may become a standard, but it certainly didn't rise to prominence thanks to the elegance of its design. Javascript, DHTML, etc. aren't even solid standards, just ask Google who wrote three Gmaps versions: one for IE, one for Firefox, one for Safari.
What's funny is that for the next few years, everyone is gonna go bananas to produce AJAX applications instead of rich clients using mature UI toolkits. And it'll just become more and more entrenched--thousands of lines of Javascript spaghetti codes, all over the user's computer and the enterprise.
I like the apps produced by AJAX, but AJAX as a technology? Not that impressed. With all the work that has gone into UIs and UI toolkits in the last few years (especially great stuff like i18n and l10n for free, cross-platform native look and feel, performance, vector graphics, and on and on), it's a shame to see things go in this direction--UI by web browser hack--so rapidly. Alas, I guess that's "the industry!" Demand drives quote-unquote "innovation".
I just wanted to point out that Intellisense (context-sensitive completion based on parsing or "understanding" code) is the #1 most voted VIM feature. You should add your own votes (with your hard-earned cash, if you will) if you want to see this feature come to VIM.
I personally do want this feature. It would make VIM the perfect text editor, IMO. Right now, VIM's completion is already pretty good, and a couple people have implemented completion as a plugin, but it usually ends up being a hack. I think Bram can figure out a nice way to do it for Vim 7.
People who know how to use VIM well find themselves really productive in it. But, that said, I end up being slightly more productive writing Java code in Eclipse, ONLY because of completion, even though all my other editing features from VIM aren't there (or are buried).
What I usually end up doing is keeping a console handy and switching between Eclipse and VIM when I have to do Java, but that's not that nice. I think Vim can pull this off.
http://www.vim.org/sponsor/vote_results.php
I had SageTV and BeyondTV for quite some time, playing around with timed video recordings with my excellent Hauppauge PVR250.
Unfortunately, for the last couple years, I was never able to get "Tivo" functionality, since all the channels that matter to me come in digitally through the cable box, and I can only grab output (RCA audio and S-Video) from the cable box to my Hauppauge card. Recently, however, I invested in a My.TV IR Blaster device, and set up SageTV to use it as a tuning device.
Now, I finally have real Tivo functionality. And it rocks.
I don't have lots of demands. I like to keep a queue of The Daily Show, Lou Dobbs on CNN, BBC World News, RAI News from Italy, and the occasional one-time recording off TV. I also do Family Guy quite a bit now. Recording all this stuff with Sage is a snap, and Sage manages my free space to always keep the most recent and unwatched stuff. I skip commercials, which saves loads of time. And the quality is excellent. Important shows that I catch I burn to DVDs and give to friends. It's really nice.
Couple SageTV, a Hauppauge 250, an My.TV Blaster with the ATI Remote Wonder RF remote control and the free plugin for SageTV available on the ATI Remote Wonder plugin website, and you have a real nice PVR solution.
I am finally happy with this stuff. Computers are actually working for me, not the other way around!
Normally, I'd agree with the commentator in this article. If you sell software, you should be subject to the same liability as if you sold any other thing. For example, if you sell me banking software, it's assumed that this software is secure and won't easily let hackers steal my account information. If you sell a car, it better not explode every time it gets rear-ended, or have tires that explode when going over certain speeds.
But if you give me a car, or if my hobbyist mechanic friend builds me a car and then gives it to me, I can't really hold him responsible for it not functioning properly. Same thing if my programmer friend just gives me custom banking software he built. When you get something for free, it needn't be licensed in such a way. If it had to be, then no one would ever give anything away from free, which is bad for the public. The better solution is for people who are worried about this potential to simply not accept things which are given away for free.
We have such restrictions on sold goods because otherwise our market can be completely tampered with. Without them, it allows companies to claim goods perform a certain function safely and reliably when in fact they don't.
I do agree though--there was a general trend in EULA's for software developers to say, "Listen, what happens now that you've bought this software is YOUR problem. If it fries your hard drive, or sends all your most personal files to my friends, that's YOUR problem." Yea, that's bad. But the GPL simply doesn't enter into it. The GPL is a license about copying and redistributing software. If you start selling GPL software to a company, then maybe the company that sold it can be held a bit responsible for it not working well (they should, after all, be testing the configuration; otherwise, why are you paying them?).
Unfortunately, I don't think the "security" issue is really the critical one. After all, car manufacturers aren't held responsible for making car theft easy (even though it actually is quite easy). Software developers (especially open source ones) spend a lot of time on making software secure, but we can't possibly hold them responsible for every hack. No products, be they physical or in the software world, are really completely secure.
"So a human who is sleeping, and thus not conscious would have no moral value?"
Sorry, again, here I was assuming some background reading about what "consciousness " is. Unfortunately, in Philosophy (this is a flaw of the subject), terms are often quite vague to start off with, and Philosophers make a habit of trying to really define a term. When debating with people who haven't studied it, I forget that consciousness takes on a different meaning in regular discussion. "Consciousness" as I'm using it has nothing to do with "being awake" or "being asleep." Whether you are awake or asleep, you are conscious. You are not "unconscious" when asleep, merely with a potential to awake--your brain doesn't "shut off" when you're asleep. It simply doesn't provide you with the constant stream of sense-input you associate with a waking state.
Comas are definitely a gray area. I really don't know enough about the brain states of humans in comas to make any judgement about whether they are still "conscious," but I'd say they probably aren't, especially if it's a coma from which that person will never recover. If it is a coma which one can recover from (and, after which, be conscious) I can only assume that the brain was either a) in a conscious state the whole time or b) "broken" into an unconscious state (i.e., it no longer functioned) but then "healed" and went into a conscious state again. Again, this (b) possibility makes comas very much a gray area. However, as I like to say to friends: gray areas don't mean you have the wrong principle, as long as your principle works when we have clear-cut cases. For example, the moral principle that "killing is wrong" has lots of grey areas: what if the person you are killing killed your entire family? What if you fire a gun at a target on a wall and slip and shoot your friend instead? But that's not to say the moral principle--"killing is wrong"--is bad, just because one can find "grey area cases" in which killing may not be wrong. It just means that things like time and causation can be confused, and things like intent or potential to avoid an accident or negligent action are hard to measure.
Even some concepts we have that seem very clear-cut have gray areas. Take your concept of a "table". What is a table? Think of modern artists in furniture design who fused the concept of "table" and "chair" to produce something that seems to be a hybrid between the two. Okay, so maybe you define table functionally: something onto which one can place objects. But now imagine a "table" whose surface spins around at high speed, so that nothing can be placed on it. Is it still a table? Okay, so maybe you define it physically, like a surface atop any number of "legs". But now imagine a table that hangs from the ceiling by steel wire. Etc. etc. I know this seems rather nit-picky, but that's really what gray areas are, and that's why I think they're fun to think about, but ultimately one should evaluate a moral principle by its general-case performance, and then make sure it doesn't do "insane" things in rational gray areas.
What my argument above tried to do is show that a) since embryos are clearly not conscious beings (nor were they ever conscious beings), they don't demand a special moral protection and b) moral protection has only been granted to them because embryos have the potential to become conscious beings, the so-called potentiality principle, which has other unacceptable implications.
I really think some great points were raised, however.
For example, one problem with my consciousness argument is what another poster raised: that "strong AI", should it ever come about (and thinkers like Jeff Hawkins in "On Intelligence" make me believe it just may some day) would give us responsibility to give these new robots moral value. I don't know if there's something wrong with that, it just may seem unnatural because AI machines are so different from us, but then again so is the example I gave of an alien life form.
See response above for why this nonsense about "humans are just collections of cells" is missing the point. Consciousness is the key thing.
You say, "and also by missing the fact that people are more sympathetic to an animal than to a rock or a chair is not because we know they feel pain. It is because they are more like us than a rock or a chair. Hate to break it to you but a fetus is still more like us than any deer that i've ever seen."
Wrong. This may be your intuition, but it's pretty easy to see past. For example, imagine some alien life form comes down from another planet which is made up of completely different materials than we have ever seen. However, we can tell that the alien life form experiences pain, is conscious, can communicate with us, has goals and aspirations which might be halted by harm caused to him. He may not be anything like us from a physical point of view, or even from an aesthetic point of view, but we still would think it wrong to hurt him.
Your statement is raising the question, "but how are the animals like us? In what way?" The answer is that they are conscious.
To say we should make moral judgements based on how things look is really insanity. My perfect likeness carved in wood and painted photorealistically should not deserve any moral protection. The alien life form who looks nothing like me but is a thinking being does deserve some, however.
Fetuses do look like us, and that's why many people feel a sentimental attachment to them. But that's just playing into the same reason a really good 3D model of a baby that does something funny might make us laugh. It's because our brain, constantly drawing connections based on our senses, begins to equate the 3D model with an actual human, and thus allows us to feel all the sympathetic connections. If you see that really good 3D model die, you feel sad, for example.
Our brain does this same trick for a fetus, especially since fetuses have been photographed and seen so closely in macro lenses, and seen to resemble humans so much. But we shouldn't be making moral arguments just based on how things look, and if you don't see the reason why not, I'm not sure where you're coming from.
I don't think many serious people would take up your line of reasoning. Potentiality works much better, and they toss the argument of what gives someone inherent moral value off to the side, to be debated at a later debt.
"You can't use philosophy to determine whether or not a physical being, regardless of its current state of development, exists or merely has the potential to exist. It clearly exists and it is clearly human. What some folks choose to say is that the embryo/fetus isn't a 'person'."
It "clearly" exists and it is clearly human? I assume it here refers to the embryo. Saying an embryo is "clearly human" leaves you with a very implausible definition of humanity. It, for example, allows that dead people are "people" to, whose bodies should be protected as vigorously as live ones. Since, after all, your definition of humanity has nothing to do with any qualitative aspects of it (like consciousness, having and leading a life, conceptualizing one's future, etc.) but instead focuses on what you term as a kind of "raw physicality of the thing," that is, that the embryo is physically human since it came from two humans conceiving/reproducing. But then, so did the dead person. And so did any other configuration of my cells (my donated kidney, my cells washed off when I wash my hands). But these aren't people. I'm me, but these cells aren't me.
When I say embryos are just configurations of human cells, and you mockingly reply "so are people," you make it seem like I forgot that. I didn't. I pointed out that what makes human beings, well, human beings, is this magical thing called "consciousness," which you can debate separately if you like, but we all agree embryos aren't conscious. When I say embryos are just lumps of cells, I meant that's "all" embryos are. People are lumps of cells configured in such a way that they are conscious beings.
It's not that some refuse to call an embryo a person. It's that some people insist on calling an embryo a person, even though they can't provide any criteria to show us why it deserves to be called a person. I provided mine: it's consciousness. At some point in human development, humans get it... psychologists are still debating whether it's in the couple months prior to birth or whether it's even a bit later than that, and the consciousness debate will rage on for a long time probably, but we're about as close as our postmodern intellectual culture gets to being "sure" that embryos don't have consciousness.
Typical Slashdot--fine, I'll bite. You guys don't read much actual Philosophy, do you? Makes it kind of hard to analyze Ethics if you've only done it from the comfort of the omniscient armchair.
Embryos being disposed of and prisoners who are given life terms being killed early are two very, very different things.
The main argument trumpeted by people against embryonic stem cell research is that embryos are worthy of "being saved," which is to say, they have "moral value." These same people, to be consistent, have to be against forms of very early abortion and even some forms (if not all forms) of contraception.
The basic thing that vexes these people is that they have never studied the potentiality principal. They think the mere fact that an embryo has the potential to become a human being gives it moral value, makes it "worthy of being saved." This is because they know human beings have moral value, and so conflate "a thing with potential to be something of moral value" with "a thing that has moral value." However, this argument is spurious, as I'll try to show.
For one thing, many things have the potential (i.e., have some causal relationship) to the creation of a healthy infant child. As someone else once suggested to me, one such thing is a glance of flirtation toward a fertile young woman. From that glance, there exists the potential for intercourse; from that intercourse, the potential of conception; from that conception, the potential of a human child in the form of an embryo.
If that example seems too cooked up, think about miscarriages. Hundreds of thousands of "babies" die from miscarriages every year. So, since that constitutes an essential mass death of a significant portion of the human "population," shouldn't we be devoting massive scientific research dollars to stopping miscarriages?
The reason both these things seem absurd is because saying that embryos have moral value is completely arbitrary. Harm cannot be done to embryos in the same way harm cannot be done to chairs or rocks. The chair or rock doesn't have a hope, an aspiration, or a direction which is thwarted by the said harm. The rock or chair doesn't care about the said harm. The crux of the matter is, the rock or chair isn't conscious, and that's why they have no moral value.
The only people who might care about the rock or chair's harm is the owner of the said rock or chair. But that is only due to a relational property between the owner and his objects, and hasn't a thing to do with morality. (For example, when considering whether humans have the right to harm other humans, it serves no one to say, "Okay, but what if the person harmed were your mother?" Introducing the familial relationship simply distorts the inherent morality of a thing, since it makes the decision relational, based on other notions such as loyalty to one's family, etc.)
The reason we see harms to dogs or cows as worse than harms to chairs is because we know that dogs or cows can a) experience pain, b) in dying or being severely harmed, be deprived of their right to continue the life they were already living. Chairs experience no pain, conceive of no harm, and have no life of which to be deprived.
One can make an argument for defending the late-term fetus (which may be conscious) from abortion, but preventing the embryo from use in scientific research based on the idea that the embryo is a "human life" is, morally speaking, quite unsound. This is because embryos have no moral value of their own. They are things which may, one day, become things of moral value, but that does not mean they are morally valuable now.
To take to your prisoner example, human beings have moral value even if they are savage criminals sentenced to life imprisonment. This is because they are conscious human beings who still have a right to life within our moral framework. Using them from scientific research sets a moral example that humans, in general, are usable in har
I have to chime in here and say that when I entered college, I too thought that the theory courses were useless. But there is lots of interesting stuff in these courses.
.)
I'm not a math guy, but I am a computer science guy. I don't think you necessarily have to be a math guy to be a computer science guy (it probably helps for some things, hurts for others). For example, I hate doing computation. I can't multiply a 3-digit number by a 2-digit in my number in my head like some of my colleagues without stressing myself out. Someone recently asked me the square root of 144 and I quickly responded "15" before correcting myself to "12."
I'm also embarassed by how much of a distaste I have for computation. I reassure myself that this is okay because I really am much more creative than mathematical (not that those two are opposites, just that often they tend to be mutually exclusive).
Computer programming can be a creative form, and in fact it usually is. (If it weren't creative, you wouldn't have so many hobbyists playing with it.) I think on a very powerful development team you should have mathy computer science guys and less-mathy, more creative ones, because they really can complement each other quite well. Us creative computer science guys often see problems in a completely different light, and come up with sometimes-strange, but usually elegant solutions. The mathy guys often see problems in terms of a powerful mathematical model, and come up with elegant solutions of their own. Together, they can really cover the bases.
Anyway, the bottom line is, I never found computation particularly interesting.
But I did find computers quite interesting, not surprisingly. I found that with computers problems could be understood in terms of the necessary computation, but then you could have the machine do the actual computation. In my Linear Algebra course, often for fun, rather than solving problems I used to write programs to solve problems, and then have the programs solve them. I found it much more enjoyable to write a matrix multiplication routine than to just carry out the algorithm myself, using pen and paper. (I know, I know, there's MATLAB, but coding the program actually helped me understand the algorithm better
So what did Computer Science do for me? It largely hardened my conception of the world as a world of patterns and algorithms. I'm talking about courses like "Basic Algorithms", where I learned to grok and describe algorithms in plain language, as well as in formal, symbolic, mathematical logic. Almost everything can be understood as a pattern or algorithm, the trick in being a good developer is finding the most elegant pattern to point to.
"Computer Architecture" taught me about low-level hardware, how it is designed and why it is designed the way it is designed. It also gave me an appreciation that sometimes our algorithms don't take into consideration hardware concerns, like cache hits/misses, locality, etc. So this added yet another layer for coming up with good ideas toward practical computation.
"Computer Systems Organization" (which at my college is a fancy name for "Operating Systems") introduced me to assembly language, and let me see the intimate connection an OS often has with the underlying hardware, and how small changes of algorithmic approach can completely change performance. This course was also the most "software engineering-like" course, since we worked with large codebases, often complicated and filled with operating systems concepts and algorithms.
I enjoyed the systems stuff so much, I took a high-level Operating Systems course, which was my best course thus far because we coded a small kernel basically from scratch in C. We had to work alone, and we had to work weekends, and my social life sucked that semester, but I think it was worth it. In my final project, in which I implemented an in-kernel debugger with C symbol support (!!!), when the damn thing fin
You make money for a living? Tell me, what kind of technical background is required to work at the Department of Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing?
Keynote is not as... feature-filled? As Powerpoint?
Are you nuts, or something?
I may be a Linux user, but I've had to put together my share of presentations. I've used Powerpoint, I've used OpenOffice. But then one time, while I was borrowing a friend's Powerbook G4 for a few weeks, I put one together in Keynote. It is, at the very least, the best presentation software ever written, and what's more, it's a pleasure to use. Aligning elements is easy with smartly-coded guides, the output for the presentations are wonderful with elegant themes and fonts, and the transitions are elegant with accelerated 3D transitions and such. But more than anything else, the damn program just "got out of my way." I didn't spend hours tweaking this or that text element a few pixels to the left or right. The damn presentation just came out beautifully even though I had never used the application before.
Powerpoint more featureful? Give me a break.
What a load of horse shit. Try actually studying history, not being taught the pseudo-history of our high schools and middle schools.
So the reason the US was justified in dropping the bombs was because we're big and powerful and you just don't mess with big and powerful countries? You say their government sealed the fate of their children, but that is a total logical fallacy (as, sadly, is often employed by writers on Slashdot). US wouldn't have dropped bombs if Japan hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor. Therefore, Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor caused the US to drop the bombs.
The problem with the argument is that Japan didn't know we'd decide to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in response to Pearl Harbor. Although the US wouldn't have dropped the bombs without Pearl Harbor, the US could have done a lot of other things as a military response.
I too was taught that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed in order to save the 1 million American lives that would have been lost in an invasion (since learning that, the figures have been dropped by historians to well under 300,000 American lives, making the argument much less compelling even if one buys into the amoral numbers game). Unfortunately, there's a difference between a soldier's life and a civilian's life, and there's a difficulty in measuring either's value. A soldier is an instrument of his or her country, and his or her purpose is to die in battle with enemy forces. One might say that all soldiers ascend the plane of morality, since they are given the right to kill others without remorse, and likewise to be killed by unregretful forces.
But innocent lives are innocent lives. Yes, there were SOME soldiers (or even people helping the Japanese government's attacks on the US) in Nagasaki, in arms plants and elsewhere. But there were also enormous numbers of completely innocent people, who were wiped out in an instant. This mass killing is more than just that: it's murder, on the largest instantaneous scale we've ever seen. And, to put it lightly, it is highly immoral and intolerable.
-President Truman claimed that Hiroshima was attacked because it was a "military center." But over 120,000 people died outright in the bombing, and 95% of them were civilians.
-The second bomb was prefaced by leaflets which were dropped upon Nagasaki, informing the people that Hiroshima had been destroyed, and that they were next if they didn't tell their leaders to surrender. Since their leaders didn't surrender promptly, they had no choice but to face death. Another 100,000 lives, of which 95% (perhaps more) were innocent civilians.
-We are taught in high schools that this was the "hardest decision a president ever had to make." I disagree. I think it was the easiest decision any immoral person could make, if he were placed in that same situation. It's easy to wipe out a thousands upon thousands of innocent families in order to break the enemy into surrender. It's much more difficult to conduct a war in a manner that still makes it possible for us to be "the good guy" and keep intact our general moral framework with its respect for human life. In exchange for committing a greatly immoral act, Truman was not placed in jail or made into a great villain by the Western World; instead, Truman was attributed with having "ended the war," and received such accolades for this feat that he was even at one point awarded an honorary degree at Oxford University for his peacemaking.
If Japan would have won the war, would they hesitate bombing New York? I don't know, but clearly from the way you pose the question, you find it a highly disgusting and immoral act for a government to bomb a great city like New York (which is full of innocent life, great history, and hardly any military bases) to respond in a military battle with the US. So why should we, the US, have done the same? As beautifully put by Elizabeth Anscombe ("Mr. Truman's Degree"), whose brilliant simplicity casts much light on the reality of
There is plenty of linux software that only runs on linux, should they all be sued for anti competitive beahviour too?
.NET, but only provide a full implementation for one platform--namely, theirs. At least Sun ported its Java VM to every major OS/platform).
It depends. Do the developers you're talking about make and profit from selling copies of Linux to users? Do they therefore have an interest in locking you down to their operating system and preventing alternatives?
The answer is no. That's because no one company makes and profits from Linux--it's open source, and Free. But even if it were true that a single source profited directly from say, downloads of Linux, and also developed and profited from all the software in question, your argument would still not hold up. Most OSS developers like the idea of running on more than one OS or platform, and that's because the toolkits and architectures are built that way. Microsoft intentionally builds its tools to encourage lock-down (so much so that it will even go so far as to label a technology "cross platform", like
I appreciate your comments, Napolean. I think what most people complain about with Microsoft is that they rarely make it easy to use another product (F/OSS or otherwise) with their own products. The example you stated (MySQL with ASP.NET) is not due to any achievement of Microsoft. MySQL is an database system that was designed by its creators to run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and a host of platforms. But Microsoft SQL server only runs on Windows, and it's that way with most of MS's products.
.NET is supposed to be a cross-platform framework, but so far the only ones working on making it cross-platform are a bunch of open source developers at the Mono project, who don't even have assurance from Microsoft that their efforts won't be squashed when MS sees a competetive threat. Meanwhile, Java and Python, two non-Microsoft languages and runtimes, run on everything under the sun, including Windows.
PHP runs on any platform. But Microsoft's ASP/ASP.NET only runs on Windows/IIS.
I remember six months ago when my brother was starting to manage his small web development business out of our house, I was tasked to setup a system to manage contacts in some sort of sane, unified way. One option I saw available was what Microsoft calls their Business Solutions CRM, or Customer Relationship Manager. I tried the online demo, and I liked what I saw. So I started to price it out.
Well, MS CRM required Microsoft Outlook 2003, which we had, but it also required a web server, ASP.NET support, a database server, and an e-mail server.
Now, with any other product of its kind on the net, the web server, DB server, and e-mail server are just "options," because these have become in today's software ecosystem components with very clearly-defined roles, on top of which a lot of components can be layered due to the standards at each of these product boundaries. This is great because it allows you to build up complex systems by choosing the components that make sense for your needs. If you want to do Apache, MySQL and Postfix/Courier-IMAP or if you want to use Savant, PostgresSQL, and Argosoft Mail Server, the choice is really up to you.
But MS's CRM product wasn't like that at all. It _required_ Windows Server 2003 (so much so that it wouldn't install unless I had it installed, with a MsgBox that said, "Sorry, you must have Windows Server 2003 to install this product"). It required IIS with ASP.NET support. It required MS Exchange. And it required MS SQL Server 2000.
Suddenly, CRM's cost (which was already pretty high) went through the roof for me and my brother. Sad, considering that I would have been able to afford CRM if it had been built atop standards, rather than every proprietary MS solution under the sun.
One could go on and on with examples of Microsoft's general "lock-in" strategies.
MS Office file formats weren't open until recently (and, not having done the research, I'm not sure if they really will be fully open when the new XML format takes hold), and the only way you could view those files on Linux was by reverse engineering the specification (as projects like AbiWord tried to do).
You talk about hooking up MS products with MySQL as if Microsoft is the enabler here. But it's really MySQL who is the enabler. And it's that way with basically every open source project that "can be used" with MS products. Microsoft isn't porting anything to their platform that could possibly compete with something they have coded themselves. Major desktop applications that originate in the Linux/OSS world get ported to Windows due to the smart design of the underlying toolkits (GTK+ applications are ported to Windows all the time; I run Abiword, Workrave, GAIM and The Gimp under Windows). That's because OSS developers really just want to give the users freedom to use their products on whatever platforms they want. If OSS developers thought and acted the way Microsoft developers do, Apache would only run on Linux, and so would PHP, Perl, Python, as well
Creative Commons isn't about gaining any rights over your work. It is about voluntarily giving up some rights on your work in order to promote the sharing of knowledge and art, or, more generally, content.
Everyone here is right: Creative Commons doesn't give you more rights than traditional copyright laws. But Creative Commons isn't about GIVING you, the content creator, more rights. It's about giving the READER/AUDIENCE more rights to be CREATIVE with that content and do something with it, without having to worry about getting sued.
Under current copyright law, if I take a photograph and put it on a website, no one else has the right to use that photograph, commercial or otherwise. (If they do use it, I have a choice: sue or not, and let them debate "fair use" in court). Likewise, if I am an independent film maker and want to use a photograph in my movie, I need to be especially wary, since if I don't get clearance and I release my movie, I can be seriously sued.
In that sense, what Mr. Lessig and his associates have tried to do is "expand the commons," which has been shrinking due to "automatic copyright protection." These licenses allow you to opt out of that automatic protection, while still explicitly stating the protection you want (for example, the "By" license allows you attribution for works reused in derivative works).
This is a noble goal. For anyone who has read Lessig's material (he has a book called "Free Culture" available for free online), his big crusade is simply to allow creativity to still flourish in a society where corporate Intellectual Property interests have made the copyright system tilted "too far in favor of content creators." Everyone wants protection for creative work, but sometimes creative goods can come out of building upon prior creative works (such as remixing music, altering/compositing photographs, rephrasing texts, etc.) But what we don't want is a public who is fearful to remix, reuse, or even just show off creative works, for fear of serious legal penalty.
Perhaps Dvorak should actually research why CC was founded before he mounts a criticism. His conclusion says it all: "Apparently simplicity was more than some people could handle, so they invented Creative Commons to add some artificial paperwork and complexity to the mechanism. And it seems to actually weaken the copyrights you have coming to you without Creative Commons." That's right Dvorak. That's because weakening the copyright protections you have is the point. How else do you expand the commons? By giving yourself a stronger right to sue?
Wow, I actually expected more, considering how much MS has been hyping the "new UI" of Longhorn.
In no particular order:
(1) Explorer seems to have taken a cue from PathFinder's directory browsing, a concept which has also been integrated into the GTK File Open Chooser Widget in the Linux world. Definitely a step in the right direction, but perhaps bundled up with a couple steps backward. Notice the new "My Computer", which sports all sorts of useless widgets everywhere, a mixture of task- and object-oriented interfaces, and more panes than one can possibly be expected to comprehend quickly. Typical Microsoft "toolbaritis," now applied to the file manager.
(2) Media Player continues to amaze in how far it distances itself from any UI sanity. Yet another argument for why toolkit consistency does not matter to normal users. File menu: gone, or just "annoyingly mouseover hidden"? I can only imagine what that menacing "Online Stores" button is for (can anyone say software-as-advertisement money?)
(3) Transparency: ooh, eye-candy. But wait, why does my desktop look like so many stained glass windows, who are, at the same time, light sources? Yet another Microsoft imitation gone bad. Notice how the borders of applications turn into transparent "stained glass" areas, serving to do nothing but make it more difficult to see, grab, and interact with the border of an application. For some reason, toolbar areas are also "semi-transparent," I guess just so you can make sure your graphics driver is working. Notice also how even when the eye candy features are enabled (transparent borders, shadows), Media Player refuses to comply! Stubborn lil' guy, aren't ya? heh heh.
(4) I'm utterly not surprised to see that Windows still makes use of dialogs whom cannot be resized, as in the displayed (and New) Copy Dialog. Yet another great "feature," as my 1920x1280 screen real estate can't even be utilized to show me the full directory name of a the path I'm copying from. Instead, I must make due with two halves of a path concatenated by three dots '...'
(5) Internet Explorer 7. Does this even need comment? What a UI disaster. First, the "toolbar" area is a different color than the rest of the application, which gives us some sort of Carbon/Cocoa hybrid in a single application. Then, the menubar exists below the tabs, implying that these options are on a per-tab basis, when this is clearly not the case (It's true sometimes, like in View Source or Save As, but not true others, like Work Offline or New Tab, which alter the whole application and not just a single tab).
In conclusion, Longhorn, at least from a UI innovation standpoint (but probably from others, too), looks to be the vaporware we were all expecting. Let's keep our eyes and minds pointed at where the real innovation is happening: in ANY of the alternative OSes, proprietary or Free. Maybe by the time Longhorn is released, we won't even need it anymore. We'll just send Microsoft a memo: "Dear Sirs, you can have it back."