> Why are they still building houses with oil heating?
Are they? They use geothermical heating quite a lot.
> Similarly why build power stations that burn oil or gas?
Gas is not oil. I'd guess most of their power stations runs on coal anyway (actually water and nuclear power are probably the foundation). Does anyone still run (or even build) oil based power plants?
> Sweden should be applauded for trying to dump fossil fuels, > but it will be a lot to ask for in only 14 years.
They didn't say fossil fuel in 14 years, just oil. Fossil fuels was "eventually".
Largest problem with oil dependence is old oil based heating, which needs to be changes anyway, and gasolin for cars. I don't believe they can switch their car park in 14 years.
> I don't understand what doing business has to do with spreading democracy
I know the new American Way(TM) is to spread democracy by bombing the country back to the stone age.
Doing business (the old American Way(TM)) works much better, in order for trade to function, information must be passed, and the more trade you do, the harder it will be for a totalitarian state to prevent "dangerous ideas" to slip into the country.
China is actually pretty open, much of the censorship is just for show. Most educated Chinese can get access to all the same information that are available in the rest of the world. I don't see the current regime as stable.
Not doing trade can also spread democracy, but only when the government actually care about a sufficient large fraction of the people to be concerned about the negative economic impact. That is why trade sanctions were effective in South Africa, but not in North Korea.
The "you will" was followed by "and the company that will bring it to you: AT&T".
The fun thing is that while most of their predictions was true, and they actually had all this great technology working in the labs and even as products, they were copmpletely unable to market it. The AT&T commercials were about brand, not products. So all the incredible cool stuff the brilliant people at Bell Labs cooked up, never reached the consumers. A huge waste.
Or rather, global warming now has status as a scientific theory, while the gulf stream change is still merely a scientific hypothesis.
There is no longer any significant opposition to the global warming theory amongst scientifically literate people. There are of course lots of discussion about how large it is going to be, and political differences on whether we should try to limit it, or merely adapt to it. (Mostly the "adaption" side wins, since we can't really do anything without US cooperation. The study in this article is just one of many adaption research projects going on, all over the world.)
The situation was quite different 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago, and many scientifically illiterate people still quote the controversy from back then.
The gulf stream change hypothesis is where global warming was 25 years ago. A very interesting hypothesis, of which we cannot really say the likelihood of, nor the magnitude or speed. More research are needed.
The *sea* has a moderating effect (because of the huge heat capacity of water). The gulf stream has a overall warming effect. The average temeprature of Britain is much higher than the corresponding part of Siberia, even if summer temeperatures may be lower.
Our part of the world would not be warm enough for agriculture (just like Siberia isn't) if it was not for the gulf stream.
> They just want to create software, without having to get bogged down with legalities.
We all do. Unfortunately, with software patents and DMCA it is no longer really an option.
If you don't want to be a lawyer or a criminal, you will have to get involved in software politics. Those people who do shape our laws don't care that some of us would rather "just write software".
Well, you can of course alaso work for some large company (like IBM or Microsoft), that can hire people to be lawyers for you.
>..about downloading and trying any GPL library because ultimately I've found > too many unclear explanations on what I can and cannot do with it related to code > I make money on.
I find them quite clear. My experience is that people who find it unclear are generally trying to do something against the spirit of the license, that might or might not be against the letter of the license. In that case, I'd suggest you find another way.
> In some cases, I'd like to pay for the right to use it commercially but can't even > figure out who to write the check to and for how much.
It is exactly the same as for all other software.
If there are multiple contributors to the software and no indication of a "transfer of copyright" procedure for patches, don't bother. It is too complicated to get permission from all the copyright holds.
If the copyright holder is the FSF, don't bother. They are not for sale.
Otherwise, send an email to the copyright holder (i.e. either the sole author, or the address the "copyright transfer proecedure" refers to= and ask.
I would think the reason is completely obvious: It's a really bad idea to have your critical infrastructure depend on something external you can't control.
Which is why all mission critical software components of your organizations business infrastructure should either be 1) internally developed, or 2) free software. You do not want (if you are smart) an external organization to hold that kind of control over you as traditional commercial licenses imply.
This and not any claimed ethically or techincally superiority should be the primary argument for free/libre/open source software.
If we want the EU to support floss that is the angle we need to take. How independent are we when our entire economy and administration is run on closed software from an American company?
The bad effects could happen under any operating system, as long as users can and will install and run software from unreliable sites.
Of course, if you are admin for some too trusting people, installing some comparable obscure system would be a good idea, but only because there aren't many of these traps targeted towards users of such systems.
Yes, Denmark has more windmill power per capita than anyone else. And the Danish windmill producers have half the global marketshare, chances is that the NY windmills will be of Danish origin.
No Danish electricity supply is not untrustworthy. The avarage time between a power grid failure (affecting a specific houshold) is around 10 years. Apart from one (which was a network configuration error in Sweden), the ones I have experienced have all been extreme weather related (trees blown into power lines, stuff like that). I don't know anyone with an UPS, I don't see them marketed in the stores, but sometimes they are in catalogues, so there must be some people who buy them.
Hearing about the power problems in Californaia made most Danes shake their head in disbelief. To us, it sounds like a third world situation, and we don't think of USA that way. I have even heard unstable power used as an argument to keep Turkey out of EU. If they can't even keep their power grid running, they are clearly not ready for the EU.
However, this has nothing to do with wind mills. Winds mills can save use of fossil foil, but cannot contribute to the stability of the grid. We still need enough coal based power plants to supply the nation with electricty, even when there is no wind. So it is not a question of whether you want to build a coal plant or 100 wind mills, but whether you want the coal plant alone, or the plant plus 100 wind mills.
The Danish power grid has until recently been run by regional companies, mostly owned by municipals, with a monopoly. They build the grid to have excess capacity. With deregulation coming, they even upgraded their capacity further in order to be able to export power (and increase their value for comming buyers). My guess is that the main problem with unstable grid come from deregulated markets with strong competion and low profit margins, not leaving money for any excess capacity.
The wind mills are not particular popular among the local population in Denmark either. Not because of any health issues, but because they a huge (only the largest mills are anything near cost efficient compared to coal), and not everybody think they are pretty. There are hate-organizations such as "Neighbors to Wind-mills" in Denmark as well. The trend is that ever larger mills are build out on the sea. More wind, less neighbors.
The current 20% is considered the maximum technically possible, without any means for efficiently storing the energy. The hydrogen based economy is interesting to us, as it would allow the wind-mills to store convert the energy to hydrogen to be taped later.
More important than the wind-mills are probably the local combined heat and power plants, which allows a very high utilization of the coal. They are clean and noiseless, and provide a local community with heat, while the power goes to the grid. We still need some of the large dedicated power plants to when we want power, but not heat.
I'm not sure the author is aware of it, but he basically advocate a materialist view of free software history rather than an idealist view.
This is a fundamental schism in history as an academic discpline, and it is kind of fun to see it applied here.
Basically idealist history writting is the "old fashioned" way of teaching history, where your learn the names (and years) of the big men (philosofers and kings), and how their ideas and actions formed history.
Materialist history writting instead focus on the basis for change found in the natural environment, the means of production, and the power struggle between classes. In materialist history, such as Marxism, individuals hardly matter, the development of history is inevitable, and governed by much stronger forces than the individuals who get the credit.
With Marxism going out of vogue, idealist history writting has yet again become dominating. Nonetheless, I suspect most researchers would agree that both viewpoints have their value. Great ideas don't matter unless the materialistic circumstances are the right for them,but they can greatly influence the form the change is taking.
Here, this would mean that the ideas of people like RMS and ESR has to a high degree shaped the form of the current free software world, but that it is the material foundation of the PC and the Internet that has provided the fertilie ground for these ideas to flourish in.
The actual list is a mixture of free software projects, and user editable web sites. At least reading the description, it often seems to refer to the software, not the web-site. Despite what the blurp in the article claims.
Unless you count CO2 as pollution, a modern coal based power plant is close to polution free. And rather efficient if you use a combined heat and electricity generation plant.
Except for the rare cases where you have direct experience about the subject. Then they are never right.
That is the experience just about everyone has with the media.
If we integrate all these experiences, we can only come to the conclusion that the media are almost never right. Which is what I believe. At least intellectually, when I actually read (or watch) a news story, I still intuitively believe that is what happened.
One good thing about the Internet is that it is usually easy to verify a news story from first hand accounts on the net. I try to do that from time to time, for subjects outside my own area of expertice. Each time, the media got it wrong.
They do have profitable hardware and software units, but that is not where their core is. Support and service require more man power than selling ads or software, which is the core of the two other companies
It has also been my experience than being open about your opinions bring more respect most places from management than being a yes man, even when the yes men are as technically qualified. Just don't be an immature about it, if you have stated your opinion once, assume management understood it and have taken it into account. Don't go repeating the criticism just because they don't draw the conclusion you want. Respect goes both ways.
Google could easily make their own browser based on a branch of Firefox (or Gecho), instead of raw Firefox. They will then get additional development for free by backmerging additions from the main trunk when and if they feel like it. And they will have the same control of their own branch, as they would have with Opera.
The only reasons I can see for going with Opera is if they believe more in the techonological basis.
...will be that life will become harder for the saboteurs. That is, the people that always infest any place on the net where somebody try to build a community, and then tears it apart.
In the good old days with fixed IP numbers, they could somewhat be countered by blocking by IP number. But that doesn't work any more. Instead we have to rely on various moderation systems, which never work well.
Sure, good come from anonymity too, whistle-blowers who can reveal wrongdoing from inside, protected by anonymity. But it is very rare, and have to be hold up against the bad created from the continious large scale community destruction by some trolls and kooks without a life of their own.
Slashdot Mirror
> Why are they still building houses with oil heating?
Are they? They use geothermical heating quite a lot.
> Similarly why build power stations that burn oil or gas?
Gas is not oil. I'd guess most of their power stations runs on coal anyway (actually water and nuclear power are probably the foundation). Does anyone still run (or even build) oil based power plants?
> Sweden should be applauded for trying to dump fossil fuels,
> but it will be a lot to ask for in only 14 years.
They didn't say fossil fuel in 14 years, just oil. Fossil fuels was "eventually".
Largest problem with oil dependence is old oil based heating, which needs to be changes anyway, and gasolin for cars. I don't believe they can switch their car park in 14 years.
> I don't understand what doing business has to do with spreading democracy
I know the new American Way(TM) is to spread democracy by bombing the country back to the stone age.
Doing business (the old American Way(TM)) works much better, in order for trade to function, information must be passed, and the more trade you do, the harder it will be for a totalitarian state to prevent "dangerous ideas" to slip into the country.
China is actually pretty open, much of the censorship is just for show. Most educated Chinese can get access to all the same information that are available in the rest of the world. I don't see the current regime as stable.
Not doing trade can also spread democracy, but only when the government actually care about a sufficient large fraction of the people to be concerned about the negative economic impact. That is why trade sanctions were effective in South Africa, but not in North Korea.
The "you will" was followed by "and the company that will bring it to you: AT&T".
The fun thing is that while most of their predictions was true, and they actually had all this great technology working in the labs and even as products, they were copmpletely unable to market it. The AT&T commercials were about brand, not products. So all the incredible cool stuff the brilliant people at Bell Labs cooked up, never reached the consumers. A huge waste.
Doen't look that bad.
Worth slightly more than 10 years ago.
Or rather, global warming now has status as a scientific theory, while the gulf stream change is still merely a scientific hypothesis.
There is no longer any significant opposition to the global warming theory amongst scientifically literate people. There are of course lots of discussion about how large it is going to be, and political differences on whether we should try to limit it, or merely adapt to it. (Mostly the "adaption" side wins, since we can't really do anything without US cooperation. The study in this article is just one of many adaption research projects going on, all over the world.)
The situation was quite different 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago, and many scientifically illiterate people still quote the controversy from back then.
The gulf stream change hypothesis is where global warming was 25 years ago. A very interesting hypothesis, of which we cannot really say the likelihood of, nor the magnitude or speed. More research are needed.
The *sea* has a moderating effect (because of the huge heat capacity of water). The gulf stream has a overall warming effect. The average temeprature of Britain is much higher than the corresponding part of Siberia, even if summer temeperatures may be lower.
Our part of the world would not be warm enough for agriculture (just like Siberia isn't) if it was not for the gulf stream.
Fixed broken Wintel boxes was not a course taught in CS classes at my university.
If they get that basic concept right, I don't care what else they know about computers.
> They just want to create software, without having to get bogged down with legalities.
We all do. Unfortunately, with software patents and DMCA it is no longer really an option.
If you don't want to be a lawyer or a criminal, you will have to get involved in software politics. Those people who do shape our laws don't care that some of us would rather "just write software".
Well, you can of course alaso work for some large company (like IBM or Microsoft), that can hire people to be lawyers for you.
> ..about downloading and trying any GPL library because ultimately I've found
> too many unclear explanations on what I can and cannot do with it related to code
> I make money on.
I find them quite clear. My experience is that people who find it unclear are generally trying to do something against the spirit of the license, that might or might not be against the letter of the license. In that case, I'd suggest you find another way.
> In some cases, I'd like to pay for the right to use it commercially but can't even
> figure out who to write the check to and for how much.
It is exactly the same as for all other software.
If there are multiple contributors to the software and no indication of a "transfer of copyright" procedure for patches, don't bother. It is too complicated to get permission from all the copyright holds.
If the copyright holder is the FSF, don't bother. They are not for sale.
Otherwise, send an email to the copyright holder (i.e. either the sole author, or the address the "copyright transfer proecedure" refers to= and ask.
How difficult can it be?
The brand name is old enough that people associate it with old and (comparable) slow computers. And old is not a good association for computers.
I thought journalists copied from each other all the time.
This and not any claimed ethically or techincally superiority should be the primary argument for free/libre/open source software. If we want the EU to support floss that is the angle we need to take. How independent are we when our entire economy and administration is run on closed software from an American company?
The bad effects could happen under any operating system, as long as users can and will install and run software from unreliable sites.
Of course, if you are admin for some too trusting people, installing some comparable obscure system would be a good idea, but only because there aren't many of these traps targeted towards users of such systems.
Yes, Denmark has more windmill power per capita than anyone else. And the Danish windmill producers have half the global marketshare, chances is that the NY windmills will be of Danish origin.
No Danish electricity supply is not untrustworthy. The avarage time between a power grid failure (affecting a specific houshold) is around 10 years. Apart from one (which was a network configuration error in Sweden), the ones I have experienced have all been extreme weather related (trees blown into power lines, stuff like that). I don't know anyone with an UPS, I don't see them marketed in the stores, but sometimes they are in catalogues, so there must be some people who buy them.
Hearing about the power problems in Californaia made most Danes shake their head in disbelief. To us, it sounds like a third world situation, and we don't think of USA that way. I have even heard unstable power used as an argument to keep Turkey out of EU. If they can't even keep their power grid running, they are clearly not ready for the EU.
However, this has nothing to do with wind mills. Winds mills can save use of fossil foil, but cannot contribute to the stability of the grid. We still need enough coal based power plants to supply the nation with electricty, even when there is no wind. So it is not a question of whether you want to build a coal plant or 100 wind mills, but whether you want the coal plant alone, or the plant plus 100 wind mills.
The Danish power grid has until recently been run by regional companies, mostly owned by municipals, with a monopoly. They build the grid to have excess capacity. With deregulation coming, they even upgraded their capacity further in order to be able to export power (and increase their value for comming buyers). My guess is that the main problem with unstable grid come from deregulated markets with strong competion and low profit margins, not leaving money for any excess capacity.
The wind mills are not particular popular among the local population in Denmark either. Not because of any health issues, but because they a huge (only the largest mills are anything near cost efficient compared to coal), and not everybody think they are pretty. There are hate-organizations such as "Neighbors to Wind-mills" in Denmark as well. The trend is that ever larger mills are build out on the sea. More wind, less neighbors.
The current 20% is considered the maximum technically possible, without any means for efficiently storing the energy. The hydrogen based economy is interesting to us, as it would allow the wind-mills to store convert the energy to hydrogen to be taped later.
More important than the wind-mills are probably the local combined heat and power plants, which allows a very high utilization of the coal. They are clean and noiseless, and provide a local community with heat, while the power goes to the grid. We still need some of the large dedicated power plants to when we want power, but not heat.
I'm not sure the author is aware of it, but he basically advocate a materialist view of free software history rather than an idealist view.
This is a fundamental schism in history as an academic discpline, and it is kind of fun to see it applied here.
Basically idealist history writting is the "old fashioned" way of teaching history, where your learn the names (and years) of the big men (philosofers and kings), and how their ideas and actions formed history.
Materialist history writting instead focus on the basis for change found in the natural environment, the means of production, and the power struggle between classes. In materialist history, such as Marxism, individuals hardly matter, the development of history is inevitable, and governed by much stronger forces than the individuals who get the credit.
With Marxism going out of vogue, idealist history writting has yet again become dominating. Nonetheless, I suspect most researchers would agree that both viewpoints have their value. Great ideas don't matter unless the materialistic circumstances are the right for them,but they can greatly influence the form the change is taking.
Here, this would mean that the ideas of people like RMS and ESR has to a high degree shaped the form of the current free software world, but that it is the material foundation of the PC and the Internet that has provided the fertilie ground for these ideas to flourish in.
By decoupling the browser and mail agent, they decrease the time to market for new development of either client, as well as for the core.
And while I suspect most Thunderbird users are also Firefox users, the opposite is far from the case.
It is a well understood problem incomputer science, coupling vs. sharing, which well known trade-offs.
Don't let project your own ignorance onto the developers.
The actual list is a mixture of free software projects, and user editable web sites. At least reading the description, it often seems to refer to the software, not the web-site. Despite what the blurp in the article claims.
Both Wikipedia and MediaWiki is on the list.
Unless you count CO2 as pollution, a modern coal based power plant is close to polution free. And rather efficient if you use a combined heat and electricity generation plant.
Except for the rare cases where you have direct experience about the subject. Then they are never right.
That is the experience just about everyone has with the media.
If we integrate all these experiences, we can only come to the conclusion that the media are almost never right. Which is what I believe. At least intellectually, when I actually read (or watch) a news story, I still intuitively believe that is what happened.
One good thing about the Internet is that it is usually easy to verify a news story from first hand accounts on the net. I try to do that from time to time, for subjects outside my own area of expertice. Each time, the media got it wrong.
They do have profitable hardware and software units, but that is not where their core is. Support and service require more man power than selling ads or software, which is the core of the two other companies
My guess is that US$ 10 is the standard fine for spam, and the additional amount is because he forged someone elses address.
Which is fine, a forged address spam is in my opinion at least 10 times more immoral than a regular spam.
It has also been my experience than being open about your opinions bring more respect most places from management than being a yes man, even when the yes men are as technically qualified. Just don't be an immature about it, if you have stated your opinion once, assume management understood it and have taken it into account. Don't go repeating the criticism just because they don't draw the conclusion you want. Respect goes both ways.
... is that there are so many to choose from.
-- Andrew S. Tannenbaumaum
The sad thing is that when Andy first wrote this, everybody understood that it was a joke.
That argument doesn't hold up.
Google could easily make their own browser based on a branch of Firefox (or Gecho), instead of raw Firefox. They will then get additional development for free by backmerging additions from the main trunk when and if they feel like it. And they will have the same control of their own branch, as they would have with Opera.
The only reasons I can see for going with Opera is if they believe more in the techonological basis.
...will be that life will become harder for the saboteurs. That is, the people that always infest any place on the net where somebody try to build a community, and then tears it apart.
In the good old days with fixed IP numbers, they could somewhat be countered by blocking by IP number. But that doesn't work any more. Instead we have to rely on various moderation systems, which never work well.
Sure, good come from anonymity too, whistle-blowers who can reveal wrongdoing from inside, protected by anonymity. But it is very rare, and have to be hold up against the bad created from the continious large scale community destruction by some trolls and kooks without a life of their own.