Basically, project get funded on the basis of "chance of success" times "expected reward on success".
If a "cure" has a smaller expected reward than a "supresion of symptons", more money will be directed towards the later. It is not a conspiracy, just business economics.
In any case, there is little money in either a cure or sympton supression for Creutzfeldt-Jakob, and no money on either for BSE, both are extremely rare, and for BSE you would want destroy the cattle in any case.
Whedon use some obviously unrealistic settings in order to tell some very realistic stories about being human. Unlike almost all other TV which use some apparently realistic settings to tell very unrealistic stories about humans.
Firefly had the markings of a show that could have been great, had it not been for the interference from the network and the premature death.
At least, they have never demanded that Georgia is called "Former Russian Republic of Georgia" just because there is an american state with the same name.
With regard to "core" code of GNU/linux, Java is only just on top-10 accodung to this analysis, which count lines of code in a distribution. But Java is much more popular for specialised situations, than for general purpose tools.
Gosh, I'm tired of the/.'er quest to "expose" double standards by comparing incomparable situations.
Orkut is a part-time project done by a single enthusiastic employee, a project which Google does not seem to have any idea what to do with. The appropriate comparison isn't with a MSIE a highly strategic product for Microsoft that thousands of developers have participated in.
A comparable situation with be if Windows Installer XML contained code which Microsoft does not have the right. It is a one person, part-time project, which Microsoft does not seem to know what to do with. If someone then sued Microsoft, I'd say the situation was similar. , and the suers were just going for the big pockets.
A comparable situation to the MSIE scenario would be if Google hadn't the rights to the code for the search or ad-matching technologies.
With the current US govenrment, there is no connection between government spending and taxes. The two are treated entirely seperately, with a huge deficit as a result.
However, less spending will mean one or two thing: Smaller taxes once you elect a responsible government who start paying of the dept, or a delay of the day where the us governemnt is unable to borrow enough money to pay of interest of its depth, resulting in a crash of both the us and global economics. Whatever happens first.
Mandating Linux would be a big mistake, mandating a specific technology is almost as bad as mandating a specific vendor.
However making requirements to the license is a completely different matter. There are many good reasons to require all government software to be released under a license that meet the open source specification, or something close. This would not prevent any vendor from submitting any product using any technology. It would prevent them from keeping that part of the working of the government secret from the public.
And since you asked, I would love if they all switched to FreeBSD.
I suspect almost all free software developers use services provided by Google. I certainly feel Google in so many ways have made the net a better place for me, that I feel more than compensated for any software of mine they may use.
It might be a good idea and in their own interest for them to contribute financially to some of the free "core" technologies they use. I don't see them in the osdl memberlist for example.
Reality check: The project I'm working on is just over 80.000 lines of code. I have been working on it for just under 8 years. That is 10.000 lines of code per year netto growth. The brutto growth is higher, since I have deleted lots of code as well. And I'm in no way a fast coder, plus I have to write documentation, do support and even some teaching as well.
They get free of SCO, the customer upgrade path from cheap Linux pc hardware to high-end Sun servers will be simpler, they get free access to all the improvements made by the other backers of Linux, in particular device drivers and other hardware support. Including XFS and JFS which would help lure some IBM and SGI customers to Sun. They will no longer have to duplicate every innovation made by others themselves in order to stay at the front. Running a vendor independend OS will help fight the FUD factor of whether Sun will be around.
> Linux/Open source software (can) make them MANY TIMES more productive.
There are actually political movements against making people more productive. From a narrow, short sighted point of view, making people more productive leads to unemployment, as less people can do the same amount of work. Whenever new technology or new business methods improve productivity, the Luddites will try to stop it.
Of course, from a broad, long sighted point of view, improved productivity makes the society richer, as the amount of people can produce more. This is why we are not spending our entire (short) life hunting and gathering foot.
This kind of stuff happens all the time with proprietary software. Sudenly, the company has a new "vision", and you no longer seem to be part of it. But with proprietary software you are screwed. You can try to keep using the software, even though either the license, pricing structure or direction of development is no longer a good match for your need. Or you can change to an entirely different product, which can be very expensive in retraining.
This mod made perfertly sense. The message pointed out that computer games is not really a reliably source of truth, which is what the parent message implied.
This *is* better free software marketing!
on
More From Tanenbaum
·
· Score: 1
At the end of the article, Tanenbaum write
> When The Brown Book comes out, there will no doubt > be a lot of publicity in the mainstream media. Any > of you with contacts in the media are actively > encouraged to point reporters to this page and my > original statement to provide some balance.
Believe it or not, some of us on/. has contacts in the mainstream media. Some of us even *is* in mainstream media. While the core segment of/. readers are probably already true believers, we need better arguments than "this is so" when we tell the media Brown as a fluke. One argument that any journalist can understand is "look at what Brown's own sources have to say on the matter". Because/. and Groklaw linked to Tanenbaums statement, we will be in a much better position to combat the fud once Browns books is send to the media.
> Microsoft has not sued over Mono. As far as I can see, they're not going to.
I read that before. Back when FSF was urging everyone to avoid LZW compression (used by "compress" and "gif"), because it was patented by Unisys. FSF even introduced their own patent free "gzip" utility, and zlib library to be used in other apllications (unusually for FSF, even proprietary ones).
There were also people harrasing the FSF for that, claiming they were fanatics creating unnecessarty disruptions (compress was the de-facto standard), and refering to low-ranging Unisys people the think had said they were only interested in LZW build into hardware like modems.
Of course, this changed once Unisys out of the blue started demanding royalities for gif creation tools.
The FSF demanding paperwork for contributions to their code is a similar case. Long time before the SCO case.
The sad thing is, when it comes to "intellectual property right", the paranoid tin-foil hats unfortunately tend to be right. And the "happy go lucky" people (like your argument: nothing bad has happened YET, so nothing bad will happen EVER) tend to get burned.
1. Being add based, they have to accept them as ethical. The ethical limit they can put is that the adds must be clearly marked, the practical is that they must not scare too many of the users away.
2. Again, being a data retrieval company, they have to accept public information as being fully public. The ethical limit is keeping private data private.
3. See 2.
4. They should only intervene to keep the results maximally useful to the people who search, or when legally ordered to. Trsutworthyness of the search results is googles reason to exist.
5. No. Taste and decensy is subjective and local. Google must appear objective on a glob al scale. The most they can do is to try volunter filters like "safe search", and that is stretching it.
6. No. See answer 4.
7. I dont understand the premise for the question. Why should size mater on ethics?
8. Yes, no and no.
9. Google should strife to do the best job possible, but not strife to make the competition any worse. That is how capitalism works when it works.
And it is good Google is taking it. They are the most obvious example that you can make money without being evil, so many look to them for leadership. And rhetorics does matter in the world.
The only IPO connection I can see, is that formulating such policies openly will make it harder for the new shareholders to pressure google into evilness. I doubt such a statement help raise the IPO value, an IPO is not an election. Investors buy shares because they think they can make a profit, not out of ethical concerns.
Slashdot is, and has always been, an advocacy for Linux, with a playful (what you call childish) attitude. Slashdots covers other issues, but Linux advocacy is as it has always been, the center.
What is ridiculous isn't/.'s attitude, but the attitude of those who whine about it. There is no lack of web-sites out there who pretends to be all serious and business, about any subject whatsoever. Also Linux. Go read those, instead of staying here complaining that/. isn't what it was never intended to be.
A few other answers: Microsoft *is* the "bad guy" by most common definitions, they have repeatedly been convicted of abusing their monopoly with illegal business practices. And technologically, they have been dragging the industry behind until NT on the business side and XP Home on the private side.
And yes, the Microsoft stand on Linux *is* of essensial important to the future of Linux, and thus very relevant to this site.
And yes, preventing people from sharing with each other *is* a sin, according to at least one moral system which some people here subscribe to. Read the GNU manifesto. Claiming that people should not argue based on their own moral beliefs is not very productive. Your moral beliefts aren't universal.
In economic terms, Microsoft software is developed like in a planned economy, while Linux is developed like in a market economy. With the usual bebefits and drawbacks to each. Microsoft can, in theory, make huge leaps forwards thanks to their five year plans (e.g. Longhorn). Linux, being market driven, can only take baby-steps. But it takes these steps in every direction at once, so while 9 out 10 steps leads to dead ends, the 10'th step ensure a steady progress. Microsoft, on the other hand, is depending on the brilliance of their "central planners".
It is kind of ironic, given that some people compare free software to communism, and even believe the monopolies are good representives for capitalism.
First off, most Linux developers don't code to make money, at least not off of linux; hell, Linus Torvalds was, up until recently, an embedded systems engineer.
While it is probably true that most Linux developers are either hoobyists or do their Linux work as a "side-effect" of their real job, most Linux code is developed by people who are paid to do that, as their primary job. Basically, you can write a lot more code if it is your primary job. You can convince yourself that is true by looking at the maintainers and main contributors major components of the kernel, and notice who they work for. It is companies like Red Hat, SUSE and IBM, who have a strategic interst in a great kernel.
And no, obviously these people do not starve. The original posters comment were way off base.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, project get funded on the basis of "chance of success" times "expected reward on success".
If a "cure" has a smaller expected reward than a "supresion of symptons", more money will be directed towards the later. It is not a conspiracy, just business economics.
In any case, there is little money in either a cure or sympton supression for Creutzfeldt-Jakob, and no money on either for BSE, both are extremely rare, and for BSE you would want destroy the cattle in any case.
Unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Whedon use some obviously unrealistic settings in order to tell some very realistic stories about being human. Unlike almost all other TV which use some apparently realistic settings to tell very unrealistic stories about humans.
Firefly had the markings of a show that could have been great, had it not been for the interference from the network and the premature death.
At least, they have never demanded that Georgia is called "Former Russian Republic of Georgia" just because there is an american state with the same name.
Gosh, I'm tired of the /.'er quest to "expose" double standards by comparing incomparable situations.
Orkut is a part-time project done by a single enthusiastic employee, a project which Google does not seem to have any idea what to do with. The appropriate comparison isn't with a MSIE a highly strategic product for Microsoft that thousands of developers have participated in.
A comparable situation with be if Windows Installer XML contained code which Microsoft does not have the right. It is a one person, part-time project, which Microsoft does not seem to know what to do with. If someone then sued Microsoft, I'd say the situation was similar. , and the suers were just going for the big pockets.
A comparable situation to the MSIE scenario would be if Google hadn't the rights to the code for the search or ad-matching technologies.
> Explain to me why we're re-doing comics for other
> locales? Can't they make their own comics?
Why does Hollywood re-make foreign movies? Cant they make their own movies?
With the current US govenrment, there is no connection between government spending and taxes. The two are treated entirely seperately, with a huge deficit as a result.
However, less spending will mean one or two thing: Smaller taxes once you elect a responsible government who start paying of the dept, or a delay of the day where the us governemnt is unable to borrow enough money to pay of interest of its depth, resulting in a crash of both the us and global economics. Whatever happens first.
Mandating Linux would be a big mistake, mandating a specific technology is almost as bad as mandating a specific vendor.
However making requirements to the license is a completely different matter. There are many good reasons to require all government software to be released under a license that meet the open source specification, or something close. This would not prevent any vendor from submitting any product using any technology. It would prevent them from keeping that part of the working of the government secret from the public.
And since you asked, I would love if they all switched to FreeBSD.
It might be a good idea and in their own interest for them to contribute financially to some of the free "core" technologies they use. I don't see them in the osdl memberlist for example.
The both have a very strong artistic vision, having both of them on the same show would "end in fire".
Reality check: The project I'm working on is just over 80.000 lines of code. I have been working on it for just under 8 years. That is 10.000 lines of code per year netto growth. The brutto growth is higher, since I have deleted lots of code as well. And I'm in no way a fast coder, plus I have to write documentation, do support and even some teaching as well.
> Why bother, when it's already in Solaris?
They get free of SCO, the customer upgrade path from cheap Linux pc hardware to high-end Sun servers will be simpler, they get free access to all the improvements made by the other backers of Linux, in particular device drivers and other hardware support. Including XFS and JFS which would help lure some IBM and SGI customers to Sun. They will no longer have to duplicate every innovation made by others themselves in order to stay at the front. Running a vendor independend OS will help fight the FUD factor of whether Sun will be around.
I pay 80 øre (approx. 12 cent) per minute for phoning with the cell-phone, and 20 øre (approx. 3 cents) per text message. And no subscription fee.
But it is not really the price that matters. I send an SMS if the message is not important enough to interrupt the other person for.
> Linux/Open source software (can) make them MANY TIMES more productive.
There are actually political movements against making people more productive. From a narrow, short sighted point of view, making people more productive leads to unemployment, as less people can do the same amount of work. Whenever new technology or new business methods improve productivity, the Luddites will try to stop it.
Of course, from a broad, long sighted point of view, improved productivity makes the society richer, as the amount of people can produce more. This is why we are not spending our entire (short) life hunting and gathering foot.
This kind of stuff happens all the time with proprietary software. Sudenly, the company has a new "vision", and you no longer seem to be part of it. But with proprietary software you are screwed. You can try to keep using the software, even though either the license, pricing structure or direction of development is no longer a good match for your need. Or you can change to an entirely different product, which can be very expensive in retraining.
This mod made perfertly sense. The message pointed out that computer games is not really a reliably source of truth, which is what the parent message implied.
At the end of the article, Tanenbaum write
/. has contacts in the mainstream media. Some of us even *is* in mainstream media. While the core segment of /. readers are probably already true believers, we need better arguments than "this is so" when we tell the media Brown as a fluke. One argument that any journalist can understand is "look at what Brown's own sources have to say on the matter". Because /. and Groklaw linked to Tanenbaums statement, we will be in a much better position to combat the fud once Browns books is send to the media.
> When The Brown Book comes out, there will no doubt
> be a lot of publicity in the mainstream media. Any
> of you with contacts in the media are actively
> encouraged to point reporters to this page and my
> original statement to provide some balance.
Believe it or not, some of us on
> Microsoft has not sued over Mono. As far as I can see, they're not going to.
I read that before. Back when FSF was urging everyone to avoid LZW compression (used by "compress" and "gif"), because it was patented by Unisys. FSF even introduced their own patent free "gzip" utility, and zlib library to be used in other apllications (unusually for FSF, even proprietary ones).
There were also people harrasing the FSF for that, claiming they were fanatics creating unnecessarty disruptions (compress was the de-facto standard), and refering to low-ranging Unisys people the think had said they were only interested in LZW build into hardware like modems.
Of course, this changed once Unisys out of the blue started demanding royalities for gif creation tools.
The FSF demanding paperwork for contributions to their code is a similar case. Long time before the SCO case.
The sad thing is, when it comes to "intellectual property right", the paranoid tin-foil hats unfortunately tend to be right. And the "happy go lucky" people (like your argument: nothing bad has happened YET, so nothing bad will happen EVER) tend to get burned.
Church of Emacs.
1. Being add based, they have to accept them as ethical. The ethical limit they can put is that the adds must be clearly marked, the practical is that they must not scare too many of the users away.
2. Again, being a data retrieval company, they have to accept public information as being fully public. The ethical limit is keeping private data private.
3. See 2.
4. They should only intervene to keep the results maximally useful to the people who search, or when legally ordered to. Trsutworthyness of the search results is googles reason to exist.
5. No. Taste and decensy is subjective and local. Google must appear objective on a glob al scale. The most they can do is to try volunter filters like "safe search", and that is stretching it.
6. No. See answer 4.
7. I dont understand the premise for the question. Why should size mater on ethics?
8. Yes, no and no.
9. Google should strife to do the best job possible, but not strife to make the competition any worse. That is how capitalism works when it works.
10. No. By continue to do the best job they can.
Gee, ethics is easy.
And it is good Google is taking it. They are the most obvious example that you can make money without being evil, so many look to them for leadership. And rhetorics does matter in the world.
The only IPO connection I can see, is that formulating such policies openly will make it harder for the new shareholders to pressure google into evilness. I doubt such a statement help raise the IPO value, an IPO is not an election. Investors buy shares because they think they can make a profit, not out of ethical concerns.
Slashdot is, and has always been, an advocacy for Linux, with a playful (what you call childish) attitude. Slashdots covers other issues, but Linux advocacy is as it has always been, the center.
/.'s attitude, but the attitude of those who whine about it. There is no lack of web-sites out there who pretends to be all serious and business, about any subject whatsoever. Also Linux. Go read those, instead of staying here complaining that /. isn't what it was never intended to be.
What is ridiculous isn't
A few other answers: Microsoft *is* the "bad guy" by most common definitions, they have repeatedly been convicted of abusing their monopoly with illegal business practices. And technologically, they have been dragging the industry behind until NT on the business side and XP Home on the private side.
And yes, the Microsoft stand on Linux *is* of essensial important to the future of Linux, and thus very relevant to this site.
And yes, preventing people from sharing with each other *is* a sin, according to at least one moral system which some people here subscribe to. Read the GNU manifesto. Claiming that people should not argue based on their own moral beliefs is not very productive. Your moral beliefts aren't universal.
In economic terms, Microsoft software is developed like in a planned economy, while Linux is developed like in a market economy. With the usual bebefits and drawbacks to each. Microsoft can, in theory, make huge leaps forwards thanks to their five year plans (e.g. Longhorn). Linux, being market driven, can only take baby-steps. But it takes these steps in every direction at once, so while 9 out 10 steps leads to dead ends, the 10'th step ensure a steady progress. Microsoft, on the other hand, is depending on the brilliance of their "central planners".
It is kind of ironic, given that some people compare free software to communism, and even believe the monopolies are good representives for capitalism.
And no, obviously these people do not starve. The original posters comment were way off base.
Or will be, once/if the technology get ready.