First of all, I don't believe in the death penalty. Over here (Greece) nobody was sentenced to death for decades, and the last couple of them are serving for life instead of being executed.
However, one must distinguish between the two schools of thought when it comes to punishment:
One school of thought thinks that criminals must be punished as much as required so that they are corrected or something.
The other school of thought thinks of sentences are more effective if they're used as means to make people think twice about comitting a crime.
I'm not gonna argue about which is better or which increases the happiness/lawfullness quotient of a society, but consider this example:
Illegal parking is a Bad Thing. Usually you merely get a ticket for a few bucks or something, right?
Now consider Illegal parking in front of a fire exit or something. Is it sufficient to merely issue a parking ticket to that offender? If a fire occured on that building, many people could die simply because he decided that he could ignore the sign and risk the lifes of other people until he got his job done across the street or whatever.
Followers of the secnod school of thought would probably propose very radical punishment for such a crime, say 5 years or someting. This of course doesn't make sense to the followers of the first school of thought, since its to severe a punishment (unless a fire really occured and people really died because of the offenders negligence)
Now, assume that the law said that if you park in an area designated specificaly as a fire exit and thus block it, you'll be sentenced to no less than 5 years, fire or no fire.
You'd be a bloody fool and asking for it if you parked there, and deserve to do 5 years. Extreme laws like this can save lifes, since I fail to imagine a moron go what the heck, I'll park here, I might get 5 years for that but so what. In that light, severe penalties (defined by law) aren't fascist - they serve a purpose.
So, don't think of punishment just as a *correctional* measure for the criminal, but think of it as a *proactive* measure to reduce criminal activity.
I mean, would you consider stealing 87,000 bucks while in China now? Hell no!
Hmmm... "respectfully" disagree - that must be a novel concept over there at Microsoft, considering all the forged evidence they presented at the court - I'm surprised they were not found to be in contempt to be frank.
Anyway... how does one disagree with FACTS?
Now IANAL, but its not the judges opinion we're talking about, its merely the facts as were established by the proceedings until now that he summed up. So, they can disagree as much as they want, it doesn't matter anyway.
Everything well said, appart from a minor detail you missed...
XMMX *is* X11AMP... changed name along development. There goes that silly argument too I guess =)
Anyway... take SuSE 6.3 for example... 6 bloody CDs with software! it'd be hard to find something that isn't already included with it... RH definitely is not doing/that/ kind of a distribution, they are more picky, but you can always go to freshmeat and download more software.
Point is, thereare lots of POP3 servers, lots of Web proxies, lots of http servers etc. - even if RH becomes a 'standard' in the sense of a high market share, we will not be locked in as we would be if NT/IIS became the norm... most important of all, there would be no incentive for RH to muck with the protocols to proliferate their clients... it doesn't make sense - for starters, the source is there... if they stop putting the source up there (ie develop proprietary services, closed source) RH will be history and we'll move on to another distro... easy as that.
...that I get to use my DVD-ROM for something useful
I was getting kinda worried about splashing out all that cash for a DVD-ROM a year or so ago and ending up using it for bog standard CD-ROMs and the odd pr0n DVD =)
Come on... we know there's a problem with the CPUs, and thats a risk they took when they let people preorder them. I don't think Apple is to blame for the problem, but that PR spamfest wasn't much help for their customers that are trying hard not to loose their temper.
I mean, its like they're chatting over press releases; we don't care how they arrive to a decision about resolving the matter, we want to know the decision when they make it. This is the definition of adding insult to injury.
Apple seems unable to realize that they can't treat their customers like idiots and expect the G4 to be the big success they need it to be.
I agree with most of your points, but I still believe that its nearly impossible for them to comply with all laws.
For example in some countries it is illegal to get more than one loan for a particular purpose (this is done to protect borrowers from running up debts they can't afford I guess).
Basically it means that if you go to bank A and get a loan to buy a new car, and then go to bank B to get a second loan (since its a more expensive car than your bankmanager thinks you can afford:), bank B would be violating law if they loaned you the money. Same thing in principle to VISA violating law by loaning you money for gambling in my book.
This is usually worked around by forcing you to sign a decleration that you haven't got another loan for that purpose, so if you made the bank break the law you're responsible.
I believe this is the way to go - transfer responsibility/liability to the customer, but then again that's just me.
Why should VISA prohibit their merchant account holders from charging money for gambling because its illegal in a couple of US states and countries?
Or are you suggesting that they filter transactions? In which case, what consitutes an illegal loan... if the cardholder's address is in a state where its illegal (ie CA) or if the cardholder is accessing the internet from a state where its illegal?
How on earth would a system like that be practical?
Besides, its not only loaning for gambling, chances are there are loads of other similar laws in other countries, restricting merchants or filtering transactions cannot possibly work.
In the end of the day the cardholder should be responsible for whatever he does with his account, or he should not be using it at all. I guess its VISA's fault for not putting a suitable disclaimer somewhere.
Perhaps they thought they could win the case but decided to settle because their lawyers have better things to do - who knows.
I mean, VISA loans her money for gambling, she looses, she sues, VISA doesn't charge her (duh).
Suppose she won. Could the 'gambling establishment' refuse to give her the winnings on the grounds that she used an illegal loan?
Still trying to get my head around this ridiculous judging.
Now I'm not a lawyer, but when you apply for a loan, you usually are asked to specify the reason - if you put "Gambling" then the bank should refuse it if its illegal... if you however put "general expenditure" and go about gambling, why on earth would the bank be held liable for that? Besides VISA accounts are not really loans, they're more like a general expenditure overdrafts.
VISA had knowledge of where the money was going, but stop and think for a while: VISA is international, there are god knows how many weird or even contradicting laws, hence its not only ridiculous, its impossible for them to filter transactions.
Oh well. I guess they could just add another disclaimer in their next version of the contract. Yet another proof that the US legal system needs a healthy dose of common sense.
Please, don't take that out of context - I didn't say it's none of my business if I offend *anyone*, and I assure you I'm not a total arsehole;)
I understand your point of being polite perfectly, but I didn't say that I'd call her a freeloader to her face - that is something *you* suggested. I agree totally with showing courtesy and respect to people that deserve it.
Maybe it's my greek egalitarian ideology, maybe I'm nuts, bottomline is I do not and will not show extra courtesy or respect to someone *just* because they have a title of honour. I do not, and will not recognize them as valid - in my book, the Queen or any queen for that matter is equal to every other person on this planet. Now, if a person holding a title of honour *expects* everyone to treat them with extra courtesy and respect, compared to 'mere mortals' so to speak, and they are offended because someone doesn't *that's* their problem, and they should get over it.
I stated from the start that I don't particularly like the idea of Monarchy, but I like to belive that I am a reasonable person. I hope that clears it up.
I agree with you 100% - KDE is an extremely important project, and a significant factor in the acceptance of using operating systems like xBSD and Linux by average desktop users.
Oh, and before I'm flamed/moderated down:
I hope this doesn't degenerate to a KDE vs Gnome flamefest, but IMHO, KDE has been more important to OSS until now. It's KDE that is bundled as a desktop environment by default w/ SuSE Linux, Caldera OpenLinux, Mandrake, and probably others.
I like (and use) gnome, but it's too fidly right now for Joe Average, and not as usable as KDE. Hopefully that will change soon, and even non technical users will have a real choice.
I don't have a problem calling the president of a corporation or a country 'president'. I have a problem with calling someone "Your Majesty". Greece for example is a presidential republic. I do refer to our president as "president". Difference is, he is:
1) elected by the people 2) remains an equal person, paying taxes and all.
In that sense, it's nothing more than a job title. I can't really say that about "Majesty" -it is VERY different. I am quite confident that the majority of people out there can discern the difference, and I wouldn't like to explain it in detail.
As for not addressing a queen as "Her Majesty" I don't find that disrespectful, since I simply don't recognize "Her Majesty" and I have no reason to do so. I am not being a troll here - don't misunderstand me. I'm just trying to make a point - I am a citizen of a country that all people are equal, and I find titles of honour redundant and offending. You wouldn't find me using them, and if a Queen of some other contry is offended or something if I don't address her as "Your Majesty", well, that's none of my business, she should get over it.
I sincerely don't think that it will work this way.
Corporations/individuals can invest large sums of money in obscure projects, but these tend to be down to earth ones ('scuse the pun) and often promise a return sooner rather than later, and in hard currency, not scientific/engineering advances. Wether we like it or not, space exploration doesn't fit this description well.
The peak of humanity's space exploration was a period of a paranoid cold war. This is no coincidence - the goverments then could afford to spend large amounts of cash on projects that people knew would not improve their life significantly, at least in the short term, and not risk public anger. Today, this is not the case. I don't think I have to proove this.
I believe that today, the moon landings wouldn't happen, because they cost wouldn't be justified. That, or some environmentalists would claim that the project didn't take sufficient measures to ensure no distruption of the moon would occur. Or some other group would come up and cause trouble. You know what I mean:)
Please, don't misunderstand me - I'm all for science, but in the last decade or so, it became much harder for governments to spend money on projects that don't yield obvious benefits for the taxpayers. That, and they lost interest. The same applies for other research; it's hard today to get a grant on research that will not yield results in 2-3 years that would be of interest to the industry. This is really sad, and hurts science, but it's sadly true. History teaches us that significant discoveries were made years (some times thousands of years actually) before a practical application was found.
There is no such thing as justification for doing science - this notion is obsurd. However, when it comes to someone funding a project, he'd better know that something's good gonna come out of it. Almost noone is willing to give something for nothing, and that's just capitalism's ugly side. We have to live with it - no system is perfect unfortunately.
If sufficient money are collected for this project, or other projects that might choose this way of funding, that's good. I, however, doubt that it will.
What we need is another Isabella crazy enough to sell her crown jewels and fund another Colombus' insane project.
Well, that is nitpicking, but why should anyone that is not a citizen of the UK address her as if she was their queen?
To me, a Greek citizen (that has lived for several years in Scotland btw), she is just another person. I would probably ignore her or just say "Hi there, what's up?" if I met her.
Just FYI, The Greek constitution prohibits Greek citizens from accepting titles of honour. Which makes sense. After all, how can all people be equal if some are more equal than others (as George Orwell put it very eloquently)?
No offence, but in my book absolutely noone has to address British Lords, Sirs, Dukes and whatnot with their title. If they are offended, tough. I don't care. If they are disappointed that people in other countries don't treat them in a special way, again, that's tough. Expecting to be treated as royalty outside the empire (what's left of it anyway) is really backwards. They should just be glad that the majority of the brits still do them the courtesy of using their titles and maintaining monarchy, for it will not last long IMHO.
Maybe she found Solaris licensees to expensive to maintain. Hmmm. Pehaps not - I guess there must have been another reason to switch to Red Hat. I wonder what.
Microsoft was smart enough to realize that people were reluctant to change from DOS to OS/2 even though it was better. They also realized that people wanted the GUI stuff, but didn't care about the other advanced stuff of OS/2 (mostly because it also meant increased hardware requirements). So what did they do? Get rid of OS/2 to IBM, and develop Windows. 1.0 was a bad joke, 2.0 wasn't even funny, and to cut a long story short, by Windows 3.1 they had a project that people actually wanted to buy. Observe a strategy here?
It's bells & whistles vs. os features again.
Customers wanted the bells & whistles of a modern GUI, but didn't bother about a new solid OS, and really wanted DOS compatibility. So Microsoft gave them just that. In the meantime they hacked together NT, which was better, and slapped on a similar interface, and got the windows users to use it as a server (familiarity being a major selling point).
Now that most software basically runs on both Windows and Windows NT, they can make the transition to a 'real' OS after all. Too bad that it took them so long and the damn OS got bloated along the way.
So what about linux, xBSD and whatnot, you say?
Consider the opposite: Power users. They want a rock solid server and they don't care if it doesn't have the bestest GUI -- or ANY GUI for that matter. After all, if someone wants to click-through system administration, he souldn't be doing it in the first place. Well, it kinda worked. The reduced hardware requirements of linux/freebsd to get full blown servers up did attract and continue to attract interest even from die hard MS fans. Heck, even Microsoft themselves are using unix for hotmail. It now even reached the point that many not-really-computer-literate persons are using it at home. That's the customers prefering features over bells and whistles buying it here.
I can see the percentage of those sensible users increasing and the percentage of users that only care about bloat decreasing. Add a bit of bloat like gnome & kde, and halfpoint there needs of users & features of free OSs meet.
All I'm waiting for now is for that moron-proof desktop environment to kill of Win2K as a desktop OS too.
Win2K will be a biggest disaster than Y2K, as they say, and lets be frank, they made a 30 million lines of code monster which should be hard to maintain, and linux/bsd hackers are more than the whole population of the state of washington:)
I completely disagree with Apple's strategies - and I sincerely do not understand why anyone would like to invest in a platform that is so tightly controlled (G3->G4 upgrade? WHAT upgrade?).
I'd like to think myself as a rational person, and not an anti-Mac fanatic and I do acknowledge that some people simply do not have a choice (for example some great hard disk recording tools are only available on Mac IIRC).
I agree with you that their strategies (good or bad, ethical or unethical, whatver) clearly are producing good results for the company.
Now the thing is: G4 looks like a decent processor. Can I get a G4 CPU and a G4 motherboard, like I can buy x86 components for example?
I ask this because I see two markets for the new G4:
Previous Mac users (small percentage of total computer users, say 10%) and users of other platforms that might be tempted to migrate. Most seem to me of similar importance (ie they could attract more or less similar sales).
These oter plaforms wether we like it or not means mostly windows. I consider it unlikely that any windows user will be migrating to MacOS any time soon, so they're pretty much locked in to x86.
Now, for people that are using unix on their production machines, there are several choices, including pentium, athlon, alpha etc. Linux runs well on all these platforms for instance, and is quite popular.
For Apple to gain a foothold in this potential market they will have to make their stuff available in the way that people using these OSes (like linux) like them: Ie not in 5 different predetermined take it or leave it configurations, but pretty much DIY.
Leap years are those that are divisible by 4 -and- not divisible by 100 or divisible by 400.
Many, many programers failed to put the checks for 100/400 divisibility. Even I am guilty of this sin.
This means that 1900 would be (incorrectly) considered a leap year, and so would 2100 and other non 400 divisible centuries. Fortunately 2000 is one of the 'exceptions' so bad code won't cause much grief.
The knife is not included. So what if my knife is NOT y2k compliant? How can they guarantee that it will work after 23:59:59.99 December 31st since it explicitly requires a knife to do the task it is designed for?
They should provide a list of aprooved Y2K compliant knifes and bread manufacturers.
Come to think of it, we need a certifying agency to ensure that those products are INDEED Y2K compliant.
I hope my swiss army knife is Y2K compliant. I'd hate life without it.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, I don't believe in the death penalty. Over here (Greece) nobody was sentenced to death for decades, and the last couple of them are serving for life instead of being executed.
However, one must distinguish between the two schools of thought when it comes to punishment:
One school of thought thinks that criminals must be punished as much as required so that they are corrected or something.
The other school of thought thinks of sentences are more effective if they're used as means to make people think twice about comitting a crime.
I'm not gonna argue about which is better or which increases the happiness/lawfullness quotient of a society, but consider this example:
Illegal parking is a Bad Thing. Usually you merely get a ticket for a few bucks or something, right?
Now consider Illegal parking in front of a fire exit or something. Is it sufficient to merely issue a parking ticket to that offender? If a fire occured on that building, many people could die simply because he decided that he could ignore the sign and risk the lifes of other people until he got his job done across the street or whatever.
Followers of the secnod school of thought would probably propose very radical punishment for such a crime, say 5 years or someting. This of course doesn't make sense to the followers of the first school of thought, since its to severe a punishment (unless a fire really occured and people really died because of the offenders negligence)
Now, assume that the law said that if you park in an area designated specificaly as a fire exit and thus block it, you'll be sentenced to no less than 5 years, fire or no fire.
You'd be a bloody fool and asking for it if you parked there, and deserve to do 5 years. Extreme laws like this can save lifes, since I fail to imagine a moron go what the heck, I'll park here, I might get 5 years for that but so what. In that light, severe penalties (defined by law) aren't fascist - they serve a purpose.
So, don't think of punishment just as a *correctional* measure for the criminal, but think of it as a *proactive* measure to reduce criminal activity.
I mean, would you consider stealing 87,000 bucks while in China now? Hell no!
Think.
-W
Butt ugly it might be, but it works for me on those VT340s that are always free even in full labs - now if it could handle tables properly :)
-W
...but fun too!
Ranks high in my book of fun-things-to-do along with RC5 =)
-W
Hmmm... "respectfully" disagree - that must be a novel concept over there at Microsoft, considering all the forged evidence they presented at the court - I'm surprised they were not found to be in contempt to be frank.
Anyway... how does one disagree with FACTS?
Now IANAL, but its not the judges opinion we're talking about, its merely the facts as were established by the proceedings until now that he summed up. So, they can disagree as much as they want, it doesn't matter anyway.
-W
Yeah, LNUX looks much better than LINX.
Talking about tickers... is TWD (as in total world domination) still available?
How about... FREE?
heh... imagine trading FREE shares. Or even CRAP shares.
'nuff
-W
Everything well said, appart from a minor detail you missed...
/that/ kind of a distribution, they are more picky, but you can always go to freshmeat and download more software.
XMMX *is* X11AMP... changed name along development. There goes that silly argument too I guess =)
Anyway... take SuSE 6.3 for example... 6 bloody CDs with software! it'd be hard to find something that isn't already included with it... RH definitely is not doing
Point is, thereare lots of POP3 servers, lots of Web proxies, lots of http servers etc. - even if RH becomes a 'standard' in the sense of a high market share, we will not be locked in as we would be if NT/IIS became the norm... most important of all, there would be no incentive for RH to muck with the protocols to proliferate their clients... it doesn't make sense - for starters, the source is there... if they stop putting the source up there (ie develop proprietary services, closed source) RH will be history and we'll move on to another distro... easy as that.
-W
...that I get to use my DVD-ROM for something useful
I was getting kinda worried about splashing out all that cash for a DVD-ROM a year or so ago and ending up using it for bog standard CD-ROMs and the odd pr0n DVD =)
-W
Another minor correction:
DM 1.863 might be USD 1, but USD 1 buys you DM 0.537866.
Hence, DM 36 is USD 19.36 =)
OK, that was pedantic, I admit it.
yahoo has a nice exchange rate table/calculator that often comes in handy!
-W
Come on... we know there's a problem with the CPUs, and thats a risk they took when they let people preorder them. I don't think Apple is to blame for the problem, but that PR spamfest wasn't much help for their customers that are trying hard not to loose their temper.
I mean, its like they're chatting over press releases; we don't care how they arrive to a decision about resolving the matter, we want to know the decision when they make it. This is the definition of adding insult to injury.
Apple seems unable to realize that they can't treat their customers like idiots and expect the G4 to be the big success they need it to be.
-W
The Register has a funny story on this case.
;)
Well, I laughed
-W
I agree with most of your points, but I still believe that its nearly impossible for them to comply with all laws.
:), bank B would be violating law if they loaned you the money. Same thing in principle to VISA violating law by loaning you money for gambling in my book.
For example in some countries it is illegal to get more than one loan for a particular purpose (this is done to protect borrowers from running up debts they can't afford I guess).
Basically it means that if you go to bank A and get a loan to buy a new car, and then go to bank B to get a second loan (since its a more expensive car than your bankmanager thinks you can afford
This is usually worked around by forcing you to sign a decleration that you haven't got another loan for that purpose, so if you made the bank break the law you're responsible.
I believe this is the way to go - transfer responsibility/liability to the customer, but then again that's just me.
-W
Hmmm... no, it's not as simple as that.
Why should VISA prohibit their merchant account holders from charging money for gambling because its illegal in a couple of US states and countries?
Or are you suggesting that they filter transactions? In which case, what consitutes an illegal loan... if the cardholder's address is in a state where its illegal (ie CA) or if the cardholder is accessing the internet from a state where its illegal?
How on earth would a system like that be practical?
Besides, its not only loaning for gambling, chances are there are loads of other similar laws in other countries, restricting merchants or filtering transactions cannot possibly work.
In the end of the day the cardholder should be responsible for whatever he does with his account, or he should not be using it at all.
I guess its VISA's fault for not putting a suitable disclaimer somewhere.
Perhaps they thought they could win the case but decided to settle because their lawyers have better things to do - who knows.
-W (who is not a lawyer)
I mean, VISA loans her money for gambling, she looses, she sues, VISA doesn't charge her (duh).
Suppose she won. Could the 'gambling establishment' refuse to give her the winnings on the grounds that she used an illegal loan?
Still trying to get my head around this ridiculous judging.
Now I'm not a lawyer, but when you apply for a loan, you usually are asked to specify the reason - if you put "Gambling" then the bank should refuse it if its illegal... if you however put "general expenditure" and go about gambling, why on earth would the bank be held liable for that? Besides VISA accounts are not really loans, they're more like a general expenditure overdrafts.
VISA had knowledge of where the money was going, but stop and think for a while: VISA is international, there are god knows how many weird or even contradicting laws, hence its not only ridiculous, its impossible for them to filter transactions.
Oh well. I guess they could just add another disclaimer in their next version of the contract. Yet another proof that the US legal system needs a healthy dose of common sense.
-W
Interesting indeed, but what then?
Meta-moderate the moderators of the front page?
Ick... sounds hairy
Still rather interesting though.
With this implemented, all thats left is to
accept submission for slashdot boxes and
rate them too.
Now take a step back and look at the bigger
picture... pretty darn awesome, innit?
Ah... significance out of chaos, gotta love
that.
WTF am I mumbling about
-W
Please, don't take that out of context - I didn't say it's none of my business if I offend *anyone*, and I assure you I'm not a total arsehole ;)
I understand your point of being polite perfectly, but I didn't say that I'd call her a freeloader to her face - that is something *you* suggested. I agree totally with showing courtesy and respect to people that deserve it.
Maybe it's my greek egalitarian ideology, maybe I'm nuts, bottomline is I do not and will not show extra courtesy or respect to someone *just* because they have a title of honour. I do not, and will not recognize them as valid - in my book, the Queen or any queen for that matter is equal to every other person on this planet. Now, if a person holding a title of honour *expects* everyone to treat them with extra courtesy and respect, compared to 'mere mortals' so to speak, and they are offended because someone doesn't *that's* their problem, and they should get over it.
I stated from the start that I don't particularly like the idea of Monarchy, but I like to belive that I am a reasonable person. I hope that clears it up.
-W
I agree with you 100% - KDE is an extremely important project, and a significant factor in the acceptance of using operating systems like xBSD and Linux by average desktop users.
Oh, and before I'm flamed/moderated down:
I hope this doesn't degenerate to a KDE vs Gnome flamefest, but IMHO, KDE has been more important to OSS until now. It's KDE that is bundled as a desktop environment by default w/ SuSE Linux, Caldera OpenLinux, Mandrake, and probably others.
I like (and use) gnome, but it's too fidly right now for Joe Average, and not as usable as KDE. Hopefully that will change soon, and even non technical users will have a real choice.
-W
I don't have a problem calling the president of a corporation or a country 'president'. I have a problem with calling someone "Your Majesty". Greece for example is a presidential republic. I do refer to our president as "president". Difference is, he is:
1) elected by the people
2) remains an equal person, paying taxes and all.
In that sense, it's nothing more than a job title. I can't really say that about "Majesty" -it is VERY different. I am quite confident that the majority of people out there can discern the difference, and I wouldn't like to explain it in detail.
As for not addressing a queen as "Her Majesty" I don't find that disrespectful, since I simply don't recognize "Her Majesty" and I have no reason to do so. I am not being a troll here - don't misunderstand me. I'm just trying to make a point - I am a citizen of a country that all people are equal, and I find titles of honour redundant and offending. You wouldn't find me using them, and if a Queen of some other contry is offended or something if I don't address her as "Your Majesty", well, that's none of my business, she should get over it.
-W
I sincerely don't think that it will work this way.
:)
Corporations/individuals can invest large sums of money in obscure projects, but these tend to be down to earth ones ('scuse the pun) and often promise a return sooner rather than later, and in hard currency, not scientific/engineering advances. Wether we like it or not, space exploration doesn't fit this description well.
The peak of humanity's space exploration was a period of a paranoid cold war. This is no coincidence - the goverments then could afford to spend large amounts of cash on projects that people knew would not improve their life significantly, at least in the short term, and not risk public anger. Today, this is not the case. I don't think I have to proove this.
I believe that today, the moon landings wouldn't happen, because they cost wouldn't be justified. That, or some environmentalists would claim that the project didn't take sufficient measures to ensure no distruption of the moon would occur. Or some other group would come up and cause trouble. You know what I mean
Please, don't misunderstand me - I'm all for science, but in the last decade or so, it became much harder for governments to spend money on projects that don't yield obvious benefits for the taxpayers. That, and they lost interest. The same applies for other research; it's hard today to get a grant on research that will not yield results in 2-3 years that would be of interest to the industry. This is really sad, and hurts science, but it's sadly true. History teaches us that significant discoveries were made years (some times thousands of years actually) before a practical application was found.
There is no such thing as justification for doing science - this notion is obsurd. However, when it comes to someone funding a project, he'd better know that something's good gonna come out of it. Almost noone is willing to give something for nothing, and that's just capitalism's ugly side. We have to live with it - no system is perfect unfortunately.
If sufficient money are collected for this project, or other projects that might choose this way of funding, that's good. I, however, doubt that it will.
What we need is another Isabella crazy enough to sell her crown jewels and fund another Colombus' insane project.
-W
Well, that is nitpicking, but why should anyone that is not a citizen of the UK address her as if she was their queen?
To me, a Greek citizen (that has lived for several years in Scotland btw), she is just another person. I would probably ignore her or just say "Hi there, what's up?" if I met her.
Just FYI, The Greek constitution prohibits Greek citizens from accepting titles of honour. Which makes sense. After all, how can all people be equal if some are more equal than others (as George Orwell put it very eloquently)?
No offence, but in my book absolutely noone has to address British Lords, Sirs, Dukes and whatnot with their title. If they are offended, tough. I don't care. If they are disappointed that people in other countries don't treat them in a special way, again, that's tough. Expecting to be treated as royalty outside the empire (what's left of it anyway) is really backwards. They should just be glad that the majority of the brits still do them the courtesy of using their titles and maintaining monarchy, for it will not last long IMHO.
-W
Maybe she found Solaris licensees to expensive to maintain. Hmmm. Pehaps not - I guess there must have been another reason to switch to Red Hat. I wonder what.
-W
It's been a long time since I used an OS/2 box.
:)
Microsoft was smart enough to realize that people were reluctant to change from DOS to OS/2 even though it was better. They also realized that people wanted the GUI stuff, but didn't care about the other advanced stuff of OS/2 (mostly because it also meant increased hardware requirements). So what did they do? Get rid of OS/2 to IBM, and develop Windows. 1.0 was a bad joke, 2.0 wasn't even funny, and to cut a long story short, by Windows 3.1 they had a project that people actually wanted to buy. Observe a strategy here?
It's bells & whistles vs. os features again.
Customers wanted the bells & whistles of a modern GUI, but didn't bother about a new solid OS, and really wanted DOS compatibility. So Microsoft gave them just that. In the meantime they hacked together NT, which was better, and slapped on a similar interface, and got the windows users to use it as a server (familiarity being a major selling point).
Now that most software basically runs on both Windows and Windows NT, they can make the transition to a 'real' OS after all. Too bad that it took them so long and the damn OS got bloated along the way.
So what about linux, xBSD and whatnot, you say?
Consider the opposite: Power users. They want a rock solid server and they don't care if it doesn't have the bestest GUI -- or ANY GUI for that matter. After all, if someone wants to click-through system administration, he souldn't be doing it in the first place. Well, it kinda worked. The reduced hardware requirements of linux/freebsd to get full blown servers up did attract and continue to attract interest even from die hard MS fans. Heck, even Microsoft themselves are using unix for hotmail. It now even reached the point that many not-really-computer-literate persons are using it at home. That's the customers prefering features over bells and whistles buying it here.
I can see the percentage of those sensible users increasing and the percentage of users that only care about bloat decreasing. Add a bit of bloat like gnome & kde, and halfpoint there needs of users & features of free OSs meet.
All I'm waiting for now is for that moron-proof desktop environment to kill of Win2K as a desktop OS too.
Win2K will be a biggest disaster than Y2K, as they say, and lets be frank, they made a 30 million lines of code monster which should be hard to maintain, and linux/bsd hackers are more than the whole population of the state of washington
just my 0.02 EUR
-W
I completely disagree with Apple's strategies - and I sincerely do not understand why anyone would like to invest in a platform that is so tightly controlled (G3->G4 upgrade? WHAT upgrade?).
:)
I'd like to think myself as a rational person, and not an anti-Mac fanatic and I do acknowledge that some people simply do not have a choice (for example some great hard disk recording tools are only available on Mac IIRC).
I agree with you that their strategies (good or bad, ethical or unethical, whatver) clearly are producing good results for the company.
Now the thing is: G4 looks like a decent processor. Can I get a G4 CPU and a G4 motherboard, like I can buy x86 components for example?
I ask this because I see two markets for the new G4:
Previous Mac users (small percentage of total computer users, say 10%) and users of other platforms that might be tempted to migrate.
Most seem to me of similar importance (ie
they could attract more or less similar sales).
These oter plaforms wether we like it or not means mostly windows. I consider it unlikely that any windows user will be migrating to MacOS any time soon, so they're pretty much locked in to x86.
Now, for people that are using unix on their production machines, there are several choices, including pentium, athlon, alpha etc. Linux runs well on all these platforms for instance, and is quite popular.
For Apple to gain a foothold in this potential market they will have to make their stuff available in the way that people using these OSes (like linux) like them: Ie not in 5 different predetermined take it or leave it configurations, but pretty much DIY.
I dunno. Good luck to apple.
Ewww... lots of ranting, apologies
-W
I know what sarcasm is, thank you. Could you enlighten me now and explain to me what was his sarcastic remark about?
:)"
"BTW, Mr. 2001 is the new millenium, is 2000 a leap year? was 1900?
-W
2000 is a leap year. 1900 wasn't.
Leap years are those that are divisible by 4 -and- not divisible by 100 or divisible by 400.
Many, many programers failed to put the checks for 100/400 divisibility. Even I am guilty of this sin.
This means that 1900 would be (incorrectly) considered a leap year, and so would 2100 and other non 400 divisible centuries. Fortunately 2000 is one of the 'exceptions' so bad code won't cause much grief.
-W
The knife is not included. So what if my
knife is NOT y2k compliant? How can they
guarantee that it will work after 23:59:59.99
December 31st since it explicitly requires
a knife to do the task it is designed for?
They should provide a list of aprooved Y2K
compliant knifes and bread manufacturers.
Come to think of it, we need a certifying
agency to ensure that those products are
INDEED Y2K compliant.
I hope my swiss army knife is Y2K compliant.
I'd hate life without it.
root@brain# set rant=off
-W