I don't know if it still is, but once upon a time Matlab was built on top of the public domain (publicly funded) LINPACK linear algebra libraries. By the same authors, IIRC.
This is a perfect example of how it's possible to take something that anyone can have for free, add value to it, and make money selling it.
Those who doubt the commercial viability of Free software had best not learn about Matlab.
Cost to send first all-groups Usenet spam: Probably a couple $thousand Profit: less than $200,000 (according to the spammer) Value of bandwidth and storage costs for that one spam: Many $thousands at least Value of bandwidth and storage costs for the angry outbursts it prompted: Many $100,000s Value of time spent on angry outbursts by outraged Netizens as a result of that one spam: Many $millions Value of time wasted as a result of all spam by all Netizens since: $billions per year Cost of destructive effecto on society by scum like him: Incalculable.
Return on Canter's investment: 100-to-1 for him, negative 1,000,000-to-1 or worse for EVERYONE ELSE. Way to go, asshole.
I remember that day very well. "Self," I said, "Today is the day that Usenet became a commercial shit-hole." Happily (for Usenet), some newsgroups nowadays actually do still have a low SNR, probably due to the rise of (unhappily, for everyone) direct email spam.
The last thing we need is to bring up yet another generation on the idea that they can weasel out of any obligation they find inconvinient. Many of the problems society has today stem from peoples' basic unwillingness to take responsibility for their own actions.
Verisign used deceitful means to trick me into prematurely renewing my domain, too. Only, in this case, Verisign (NetSol) *is* my registar (there were no others when I got the domain). They sent me an email stating, "Your domain is expiring soon! Renew now or lose it!" So I did.
Stupid me for failing to remember that I had renewed it a few weeks prior. Imagine my surprise when I got the confirmation back telling me I was good until 2006.
Yes, it's my fault for not remembering whether or not I had renewed my own domain. And it's also my fault for paying $30/yr for a domain name that doesn't even come with any services.
That does not in any way alter the fact that VERISIGN DELIBERATELY LIED TO ME to get money from me today, that they probably would have gotten in a year or two anyway. After all, Verisign has been my domain registrar for 6 years already.
It should go without saying that that is the last money that Verisign will ever get from me.
H1Bs do not take jobs from Americans. There aren't enough educated Americans to fill the demand.
There wouldn't need to be as many H1Bs if more kids in American schools would actually learn some math and science and become engineers.
Immigrants have always contributed to success and prosperity in America, and more than in simple proportion to their numbers. A steady influx of the greatest minds and most diligent workers from other parts of the world keeps America in top form. Without it, this country would stagnate into mediocrity.
Don't believe me? Just ask yourself: What is the background of most engineers in the US? Where do our doctors come from? Where do our professors come from? Now ask yourself: Where do our used car salesmen come from? Insurance agents? Lobbyists?
I use *hack, cough* Microsoft Outlook *gag* as my email client, and it has simple filtering features that can make it work like TMDA or a whitelist.
What you can do: 1. Set a rule to recognize and mark senders who are in your address book. Stop processing after this rule. 2. Set a second rule to divert everything else to a folder. 3. If you want, then set rules to delete known spam offenders. For example, I delete all emails whose subject line includes a certain number of spaces in them.
Review your holding pen periodically to rescue the legit messages and flush the rest. To grant privileges to a new sender, just add them to your address book (2 keystrokes on my system).
"Tell me HOW I WILL GET PAID!" ... "If Stallman could somehow decree that No One Can Ever Sell Software Again, then 90% of programmers would find themselves out of work, and demand would trickle almost to a stop."
I think you are very, very mistaken. On at least two counts.
First, Stallman is NOT against selling software. He is against selling software without the source code. There is a big difference.
Second, I don't think you realize how many programmers are employed to write software that will never see public distribution. I would guess that somewhere in excess of 90% of all programmers do NOT write software for shrink-wrapped, retail distribution. In many of those cases, the customer DOES get the source code.
Finally... how long did it take Linux to become usable? About 4 years. Windows? 10. Apache? 2 to 4. IIS? I'm still waiting. But try turning it around. How much better have Linux, Apache, and KDE gotten in the last 5 years? How much better are Windows and IIS? Now which development model do you think is more effective?
"... and, honest, our engineers are working around the clock to try and figure out why suddenly Windows XP can't play any movies or music on Columbia labels."
"(Putting 50% of the taxes on 3% of the voters is not likely to get you kicked out of office.)"
Two objections: 1. Yes, it will. Our tax system favors the rich so much, it's appalling. 2. What's so unreasonable about it? That same 3% of the people own 80% of the wealth.
TVs these days are complicated. Every TV, VCR, and DVD player has a different set of nonintuitive part-iconic, part-textual menus for configuration. On top of that, every single piece of home electronics you buy comes with a multifunction remote designed to control 3 additional devices that you will never own, and that you will not use because you have a third-party universal remote to replace all of them (but need a PhD to program). That's a heck of a lot of complication for something that I will use to watch a video once or twice a month.
Compared to the quagmire of setting up and using a modern home theater system, my Mac is dead simple, and I use it for several hours every day. What it lacks in intrinsic simplicity, it makes up in uniformity and consistency. (For purposes of this discussion, we'll ignore my Linux machines.)
Given the orders of magnitude more time I spend using computers, it is no surprise at all that I understand them better than a television.
Use MMM. Then there's no way anyone will be mistaken, whether you go least-to-most significant or most-to-least
2002-Feb-10 10-Feb-2002
10 Feb Feb 10
Anyone who speaks a romantic or germanic language will have no trouble with this. So simple, no?
Counterpoint: I haven't switched
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 1
Dark Paladin suggests that the key to loving MacOS X may be not knowing MacOS 9 and below. Maybe he's right. I've been watching MacOS X mature for years, but I still haven't quite been pursuaded to switch.
Mac OS 9 is just too good.
Do I know what I'm missing? Sure I do. I have an awesome dual-screen Athlon running Red Hat at work, and am no stranger to Windows. My roommate runs OS X. It looks very pretty.
I'm still not switching. Mac OS 9 is too good.
My tower also boots into MacOS 8 (as well as Linux). That was a fine system, too. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
What do I stand to gain from OS X?
Memory protection -- I don't have problems with rogue apps in MacOS 9. My MacOS 9 system is very stable. Memory protection is overrated.
Multitasking -- Cooperative multitasking actually works very well. It is often more responsive than my X-windows desktop, despite having a CPU half as fast. Preemptive multitasking is overrated.
Unix -- Oh joy, I can run thousands of nonintuitive CLI utilities and inconsistent, mentally taxing X programs. Does this program use alt or control for its accelerator keys? Can I paste with the mouse, or do I have to use a menu? Can I copy from this window and paste into that one? Only under some conditions! Yeah, gimme some more of that Unix lovin'.
Aqua -- I really need my desktop picture to bleed through my windows. Give me a break, I only have a 400-MHz G3 and 256 MB of RAM. I don't have enough resources to run Aqua. Funny how OS 9 runs fine on it, though.
Broken HI guidelines -- Some things in Classic MacOS are just better thought out than their OS X counterparts. A photograph of a hard drive mechanism to represent a volume of storage? Sure, I know what it means, but my mom doesn't. Nor does she want to. Go back to school, propellerheads. Learn the difference between "we can" and "we should".
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I'll stop using Mac OS 9 when it no longer meets my needs. And not a day sooner.
"It's... certainly less obtrusive than TV commercials."
I hardly think so.
TV commercials are always there; it's only a question of whose.
In order for TV commercials to be intrusive, you have to watch TV. TV is entertainment. It is a well-understood bargain that there will be commercials if you seek cheap entertainment watching TV.
Mail is different. You check your mail because it contains important communication with people you care about. Checking your mail is not optional.
Junk snail-mail is easily identified by the packaging.
Identifying junk email mandates the effort of writing filters and scanning headers for the shit that gets through the filters.
Insinuating your message into an activity that I essentially must perform is PRETTY DAMNED INTRUSIVE!
A snake can deny being a snake all it likes, but that doesn't make it any less a snake. Spammers are spammers and they know it, no matter which side of an imaginary legal chalk line they stand on. Spammers are snakes.
That is, High Quality television. Shows that are intellectually and artisitically stimulating, and not written by teams of morons. Series that don't get weird-but-still-predictable and just plain stupid after precisely 4.5 seasons, or at least have the decency to end before they do.
Until this happens, I don't care if the friggin' production truck carries the sets and actors into my house. I won't watch crap, no matter how excellent the display quality.
I respectfully disagree. I'd say a cluster of Macs in many cases is much more practical than a case full of Yellow Dog modules.
* MacOS is easier to use/administer/maintain than Linux. * A cluster of towers can be used by a cluster of users as well as perform parallel computations. * AppleSeed is easier to set up than Beowulf. * Mac towers are much cheaper than Briqs.***
*** Briq: $1900 for 500 MHz; Mac: $1300 for 733 MHz --- although the Briq will save you $400/yr per node in electricity, so will pay for itself in 2 years.
"I believe anyone can have an opinion. Even someone who is not a so-called expert."
Sure. However, I will continue to hold my opinion that anyone who disregards the word of an expert in any area still does so at their own peril. Dismissing evidence because it disagrees with your preconceived notion (or opinion, if you prefer) is nonscientific at best, and probably quite foolish. Dismissing the word of someone who has collected and studied the evidence, when you have not, even if you suspect them of bias, is likewise almost certainly foolish. If you want to stand in opposition to the word of someone who is expert at what they do, it certainly behooves you to have a good reason for it. You can't do that without developing expertise of your own.
"And a shiny ugly green theme is still an ugly green theme."
What are you talking about? apple.slashdot.org gives me exactly the same, widgetless, dingbatless, minimal HTML representation as the regular slashdot.org.:-)
"Mickey Mouse is a very important piece of Disneys brand"
Yes. Mickey is a very important Disney trademark. Releasing the copyright on specific Mickey Mouse films does not jeopardize their ongoing trademark use of Mickey. In fact, it would enhance the value of their current exploitation considerably.
He also gave us sin and the ability to choose not to do it. Do you choose to sin? Do you choose to waste and pollute?
Just because your senses and intellect do not grasp something does not mean it does not exist. We hire experts all the time to analyze and understand matters that we do not have the background or time to understand ourselves: Lawyers, doctors, auto mechanics, investment advisors, clergy, etc. It is generally considered foolish to disagree with these experts unless you are an expert yourself. Why do you hold scientists in lower regard than these other experts? If anything, you should respect the word of scientists more than these others -- because, of the list I mentioned, scientists are the only ones who are not trying to directly extract money from you.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if it still is, but once upon a time Matlab was built on top of the public domain (publicly funded) LINPACK linear algebra libraries. By the same authors, IIRC.
This is a perfect example of how it's possible to take something that anyone can have for free, add value to it, and make money selling it.
Those who doubt the commercial viability of Free software had best not learn about Matlab.
Cost to send first all-groups Usenet spam: Probably a couple $thousand
Profit: less than $200,000 (according to the spammer)
Value of bandwidth and storage costs for that one spam: Many $thousands at least
Value of bandwidth and storage costs for the angry outbursts it prompted: Many $100,000s
Value of time spent on angry outbursts by outraged Netizens as a result of that one spam: Many $millions
Value of time wasted as a result of all spam by all Netizens since: $billions per year
Cost of destructive effecto on society by scum like him: Incalculable.
Return on Canter's investment: 100-to-1 for him, negative 1,000,000-to-1 or worse for EVERYONE ELSE. Way to go, asshole.
I remember that day very well. "Self," I said, "Today is the day that Usenet became a commercial shit-hole." Happily (for Usenet), some newsgroups nowadays actually do still have a low SNR, probably due to the rise of (unhappily, for everyone) direct email spam.
The last thing we need is to bring up yet another generation on the idea that they can weasel out of any obligation they find inconvinient. Many of the problems society has today stem from peoples' basic unwillingness to take responsibility for their own actions.
Verisign used deceitful means to trick me into prematurely renewing my domain, too. Only, in this case, Verisign (NetSol) *is* my registar (there were no others when I got the domain). They sent me an email stating, "Your domain is expiring soon! Renew now or lose it!" So I did.
Stupid me for failing to remember that I had renewed it a few weeks prior. Imagine my surprise when I got the confirmation back telling me I was good until 2006.
Yes, it's my fault for not remembering whether or not I had renewed my own domain. And it's also my fault for paying $30/yr for a domain name that doesn't even come with any services.
That does not in any way alter the fact that VERISIGN DELIBERATELY LIED TO ME to get money from me today, that they probably would have gotten in a year or two anyway. After all, Verisign has been my domain registrar for 6 years already.
It should go without saying that that is the last money that Verisign will ever get from me.
H1Bs do not take jobs from Americans. There aren't enough educated Americans to fill the demand.
There wouldn't need to be as many H1Bs if more kids in American schools would actually learn some math and science and become engineers.
Immigrants have always contributed to success and prosperity in America, and more than in simple proportion to their numbers. A steady influx of the greatest minds and most diligent workers from other parts of the world keeps America in top form. Without it, this country would stagnate into mediocrity.
Don't believe me? Just ask yourself: What is the background of most engineers in the US? Where do our doctors come from? Where do our professors come from? Now ask yourself: Where do our used car salesmen come from? Insurance agents? Lobbyists?
Thank goodness for immigration.
I use *hack, cough* Microsoft Outlook *gag* as my email client, and it has simple filtering features that can make it work like TMDA or a whitelist.
What you can do:
1. Set a rule to recognize and mark senders who are in your address book. Stop processing after this rule.
2. Set a second rule to divert everything else to a folder.
3. If you want, then set rules to delete known spam offenders. For example, I delete all emails whose subject line includes a certain number of spaces in them.
Review your holding pen periodically to rescue the legit messages and flush the rest. To grant privileges to a new sender, just add them to your address book (2 keystrokes on my system).
"Tell me HOW I WILL GET PAID!"
...
"If Stallman could somehow decree that No One Can Ever Sell Software Again, then 90% of programmers would find themselves out of work, and demand would trickle almost to a stop."
I think you are very, very mistaken. On at least two counts.
First, Stallman is NOT against selling software. He is against selling software without the source code. There is a big difference.
Second, I don't think you realize how many programmers are employed to write software that will never see public distribution. I would guess that somewhere in excess of 90% of all programmers do NOT write software for shrink-wrapped, retail distribution. In many of those cases, the customer DOES get the source code.
Finally... how long did it take Linux to become usable? About 4 years. Windows? 10. Apache? 2 to 4. IIS? I'm still waiting. But try turning it around. How much better have Linux, Apache, and KDE gotten in the last 5 years? How much better are Windows and IIS? Now which development model do you think is more effective?
... doesn't make it bad to reduce pollution.
"... and, honest, our engineers are working around the clock to try and figure out why suddenly Windows XP can't play any movies or music on Columbia labels."
Sound sleep of thorough exhaustion.
"(Putting 50% of the taxes on 3% of the voters is not likely to get you kicked out of office.)"
Two objections:
1. Yes, it will. Our tax system favors the rich so much, it's appalling.
2. What's so unreasonable about it? That same 3% of the people own 80% of the wealth.
TVs these days are complicated. Every TV, VCR, and DVD player has a different set of nonintuitive part-iconic, part-textual menus for configuration. On top of that, every single piece of home electronics you buy comes with a multifunction remote designed to control 3 additional devices that you will never own, and that you will not use because you have a third-party universal remote to replace all of them (but need a PhD to program). That's a heck of a lot of complication for something that I will use to watch a video once or twice a month.
Compared to the quagmire of setting up and using a modern home theater system, my Mac is dead simple, and I use it for several hours every day. What it lacks in intrinsic simplicity, it makes up in uniformity and consistency. (For purposes of this discussion, we'll ignore my Linux machines.)
Given the orders of magnitude more time I spend using computers, it is no surprise at all that I understand them better than a television.
Use MMM. Then there's no way anyone will be mistaken, whether you go least-to-most significant or most-to-least
2002-Feb-10
10-Feb-2002
10 Feb
Feb 10
Anyone who speaks a romantic or germanic language will have no trouble with this. So simple, no?
Dark Paladin suggests that the key to loving MacOS X may be not knowing MacOS 9 and below. Maybe he's right. I've been watching MacOS X mature for years, but I still haven't quite been pursuaded to switch.
Mac OS 9 is just too good.
Do I know what I'm missing? Sure I do. I have an awesome dual-screen Athlon running Red Hat at work, and am no stranger to Windows. My roommate runs OS X. It looks very pretty.
I'm still not switching. Mac OS 9 is too good.
My tower also boots into MacOS 8 (as well as Linux). That was a fine system, too. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
What do I stand to gain from OS X?
Memory protection -- I don't have problems with rogue apps in MacOS 9. My MacOS 9 system is very stable. Memory protection is overrated.
Multitasking -- Cooperative multitasking actually works very well. It is often more responsive than my X-windows desktop, despite having a CPU half as fast. Preemptive multitasking is overrated.
Unix -- Oh joy, I can run thousands of nonintuitive CLI utilities and inconsistent, mentally taxing X programs. Does this program use alt or control for its accelerator keys? Can I paste with the mouse, or do I have to use a menu? Can I copy from this window and paste into that one? Only under some conditions! Yeah, gimme some more of that Unix lovin'.
Aqua -- I really need my desktop picture to bleed through my windows. Give me a break, I only have a 400-MHz G3 and 256 MB of RAM. I don't have enough resources to run Aqua. Funny how OS 9 runs fine on it, though.
Broken HI guidelines -- Some things in Classic MacOS are just better thought out than their OS X counterparts. A photograph of a hard drive mechanism to represent a volume of storage? Sure, I know what it means, but my mom doesn't. Nor does she want to. Go back to school, propellerheads. Learn the difference between "we can" and "we should".
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I'll stop using Mac OS 9 when it no longer meets my needs. And not a day sooner.
Out of that whole list, the only thing I'm going to miss is Miramax films.
Oh, and I'm not selling my Disney stock. I'm keeping it so I can vote against the board of directors when they come up for renewal.
Nah, April 1 is the day all the other labs publish corroborating results.
We have a new moron who thinks he deserves your place on the podium.
"It's ... certainly less obtrusive than TV commercials."
I hardly think so.
TV commercials are always there; it's only a question of whose.
In order for TV commercials to be intrusive, you have to watch TV. TV is entertainment. It is a well-understood bargain that there will be commercials if you seek cheap entertainment watching TV.
Mail is different. You check your mail because it contains important communication with people you care about. Checking your mail is not optional.
Junk snail-mail is easily identified by the packaging.
Identifying junk email mandates the effort of writing filters and scanning headers for the shit that gets through the filters.
Insinuating your message into an activity that I essentially must perform is PRETTY DAMNED INTRUSIVE!
A snake can deny being a snake all it likes, but that doesn't make it any less a snake. Spammers are spammers and they know it, no matter which side of an imaginary legal chalk line they stand on. Spammers are snakes.
Then again, politicians are lawyers.
That is, High Quality television. Shows that are intellectually and artisitically stimulating, and not written by teams of morons. Series that don't get weird-but-still-predictable and just plain stupid after precisely 4.5 seasons, or at least have the decency to end before they do.
/. -- go fig.
Until this happens, I don't care if the friggin' production truck carries the sets and actors into my house. I won't watch crap, no matter how excellent the display quality.
Ironically, however, I do read
I respectfully disagree. I'd say a cluster of Macs in many cases is much more practical than a case full of Yellow Dog modules.
* MacOS is easier to use/administer/maintain than Linux.
* A cluster of towers can be used by a cluster of users as well as perform parallel computations.
* AppleSeed is easier to set up than Beowulf.
* Mac towers are much cheaper than Briqs.***
*** Briq: $1900 for 500 MHz; Mac: $1300 for 733 MHz --- although the Briq will save you $400/yr per node in electricity, so will pay for itself in 2 years.
"I believe anyone can have an opinion. Even someone who is not a so-called expert."
Sure. However, I will continue to hold my opinion that anyone who disregards the word of an expert in any area still does so at their own peril. Dismissing evidence because it disagrees with your preconceived notion (or opinion, if you prefer) is nonscientific at best, and probably quite foolish. Dismissing the word of someone who has collected and studied the evidence, when you have not, even if you suspect them of bias, is likewise almost certainly foolish. If you want to stand in opposition to the word of someone who is expert at what they do, it certainly behooves you to have a good reason for it. You can't do that without developing expertise of your own.
"the best balance of cost effective and easy in terms of clustering"
e ed .html
...is almost certainly AppleSeed.
http://exodus.physics.ucla.edu/appleseed/apples
"And a shiny ugly green theme is still an ugly green theme."
:-)
What are you talking about? apple.slashdot.org gives me exactly the same, widgetless, dingbatless, minimal HTML representation as the regular slashdot.org.
"Mickey Mouse is a very important piece of Disneys brand"
Yes. Mickey is a very important Disney trademark. Releasing the copyright on specific Mickey Mouse films does not jeopardize their ongoing trademark use of Mickey. In fact, it would enhance the value of their current exploitation considerably.
He also gave us sin and the ability to choose not to do it. Do you choose to sin? Do you choose to waste and pollute?
Just because your senses and intellect do not grasp something does not mean it does not exist. We hire experts all the time to analyze and understand matters that we do not have the background or time to understand ourselves: Lawyers, doctors, auto mechanics, investment advisors, clergy, etc. It is generally considered foolish to disagree with these experts unless you are an expert yourself. Why do you hold scientists in lower regard than these other experts? If anything, you should respect the word of scientists more than these others -- because, of the list I mentioned, scientists are the only ones who are not trying to directly extract money from you.