The problem with examples like OpenOffice, Mozilla, Opera, etc., is that they are functional copies of proprietary applications.
People use Office not for the joy of using Word, or PowerPoint, or Access, or Excel, or Outlook, or Internet Explorer. They use Office because they need to write, to draw, to store and manipulate data, to calculate, to communicate, to deal with the web. What Microsoft is really selling is a solution to that problem.
By concentrating on building software that mimics the proprietary software that is already meeting those needs, open source is simply playing catchup. More importantly, all those open source apps will become useless overnight when someone successfully markets a better way to write, draw, store, calculate, communicate, etc.
To conjure a poor analogy, who cares about free VHS recorders when the DVD guy shows up?
O'Reilly was simply pointing out that a license that is premised on developers modifying and distributing code isn't necessarily relevant when the people using and modifying the code have no intention of ever distributing it. Not only does this include folks like Amazon and Yahoo, it also includes millions of ordinary consumers who buy and use open source. Because they will never modify any code, the GPL is relevant to them only if it results in the availabily of better programs.
The guy's right. Before a company commits to spending significant amounts of money on software and IT support, you'd better bet they want to feel very comfortable about the company they are about to keep.
Why would you expect businesses to trust and deal with a culture that sees business as the enemy?
BTW, the availability of "stable, fast, powerful code for FREE, source code and binaries, packaged up all ready to go with easy installation" really doesn't impress businesses all that much. Now, if someone provide a free, in-house, 24/7 IT staff, that might be attractive.
I dont think this is about the ability to tweak, tune and skin on OS. It's deeper.
Most people perceive tweaking and tuning an OS as a deficiency. They might ask something like this: If I hafta to waste my time getting this thing to run faster and more conveniently, why didn't it come that way in the first place?
Apple successfully controls what it means to be a Mac program. They do that by forcefully controlling the code and the API's that are the platform's core.
In many ways, the "choice" touted by the open source community benefits open source developers more than it benefits open source consumers. Developers have the choice to modify code as they see fit. Unfortunately, what consumers often get is another half-finished, idiosyncratic product with a very high annoyance factor. This is the kind of choice we don't need.
But, the individual consumer buying an Apple product really doesn't care about licenses. Apple's relationship with open source is, almost certainly, unknown to that consumer. It is relevant only because it allows Apple to market an attractive product.
O'Reilly noted that keying a license to distribution rights and obligations loses impact when the application is something like Amazon ot Yahoo, i.e. an app that won't be distributed. That applies, too, to millions of consumers of open source code who will never modify or distribute any code.
The GPL and other open source licenses assume that code consumers are also code producers, i.e., developers. That is no longer the case.
Here's the Real Privacy Issue: False Imprisonment
on
Twist on DNA Privacy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Retaining or acquiring DNA is no more of a privacy issue than retaining or acquiring fingerprints. Use of DNA increases the precision with which we can identify both the innocent and the guilty.
If folks are concerned about DNA privacy issues, perhaps they really ought to ponder the privacy lost when an innocent person is sent to prison because no DNA evidence was available.
You don't need modern CPU's to get to the Moon. You need large boosters, working life support systems, storable propellant that can be counted on to lift the crew off the Moon, and a heat shield that will protect the reentry vehicle wehn it hits Earth's atmosphere at 26,000 mph.
The Chinese are quite capable of building all those, but they have not done so, yet. Their current LEO vehicle is a moderate adaptation of the orbital vehicle used by the Soviets in the 60's. (Today's Russian vehicles share a similar lineage.)
Since you can get to the Moon and back using 1960's technology, all this is evidence that space travel shouldn't be held hostage to bleeding edge technology.
Dunno about the others, but I doubt Microsoft can afford to buy IBM. IBM reported $20.1 billion in revenue for the first quarter. That puts it at more than $80 billion in revenue for the calendar year.
By comparison, Microsoft's revenue for the quarter was $7.1 billion.
The market will find the cheapest labor available. There's nothing wrong with that. No one is forcing anyone to work for anyone else.
The only way to stop the market is to put up artificial and destructive political barriers. There is much that is wrong with that.
From where I sit, anti-globalization is simply elite and pampered Western ideologues who idealize what it is like to live in a backward, ill-governed, non-technological society. They seem to be working hard to keep these people "in their place". In other words, anti-globalization is just racism and imperialism repackaged for the country-hating neo-Marxist crowd.
Sounds familiar. Place I once worked did that: No attachments, period. If a staffer needed someone to send them a file, they had to get their boss to sign off, and then make arrangments for a small staff using standalones to get it via FTP or HTTP. Everything was tracked and recorded, just in case.
Note that a staffer had to set this up; an outsider could not make the arrangements. Internal distribution to the intended recipient was via floppy or CD, who had to sign for it.
Nice rant, but what are your talking about?? The original post was about DARPA. DARPA is a government organization, not a corporation. But, you knew that, eh? Right??
You've been spending far too much time imbibing at the trough of the know-nothing anti-technology, anti-globalization racists who pass as "progressives" these day (think A.N.S.W.E.R) Reading between the lines of your post, you obviously want to return to the dark ages of pre-industrialized life. Please leave as soon as possible.
And judging from the actual text of your post, you're incapable of presenting a single shred of evidence to support your assertions.
Now that you've turned your brain off, enjoy your life as a follower of liars and miscreants.
You are correct to say that space isn't a shortcut. Rather, "space" is everything, period. We just happen to be confined, thanks to technological immaturity, to one tiny mote of dust in one tiny little backwater.
With that in mind, maybe a better analogy than European migration to the Americas would be the broader human migration from Africa throughout the globe. If there were political debates about the wisdom of expanding beyond the immediate neighborhood of the Olduvai, I'd guess that some folks rejected the notion, asserting that the Olduvai was home and that resources shouldnt' be spent on exploration until everyone in the valley was well-fed, comfortable and disease-free. Others expected to see it happen slowly, in response to population pressures and the growing demand for the territory that could support game for food. A third faction, I'm pretty sure, was just curious and wanted to see what was over the next hill and the horizon. Maybe it was better than where they were.
I side with the third group. The first two choices lead to stagnation.
The only honest reason to send machines into space is to pave the way for people. The exploration of space is no more about science than was any other migration in history.
What am I wrong about? I just said there's no race. If there is a race, who's the competition?
You're right, though, in that the U.S. should have established a permanent base on the Moon in the 70's, put people on Mars in the 80's, and built a real space station instead of the current Tinker Toy contraption.
Sure, the U.S. will get interested again if China puts people on the Moon. After all, it was only a failure of political will that kept us from putting a permanent base on the Moon in the '70s and people on Mars in the 80's. We should have done all that, whether or not anyone else was in the game.
But that doesn't mean there's a race going on today. China is playing catchup. They can use cloned Soviet hardware from the 60's to put people in orbit, and maybe, just maybe, do a circumlunar mission. But, since the Soviets never went to the Moon, China will have to develop and use its own hardware for that.
It's not a race because the race is already over. Humans in orbit, probes to the Moon, Mars and Venus, and humans on the Moon all happened in the 60's.
The Saturn V was built to carry the Apollo to the Moon. It did that quite well. The Shuttle (neither mine nor "super-duper-tech") was designed in the 70's to (A) be reusable, and (b) ferry people and cargo to and from a space station. That's all. It was never designed to do anything else. I'm not a fan of the shuttle, but don't disparage it for failing to do something it was never intended to do.
What are you talking about? Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Shuttle, Atlas, Titan, Saturn, SkyLab, Mariner, Voyager, Viking, etc., etc., were copies of Soviet hardware??
Going by current experience (ISS) any effort at international cooperation will just bog down progress. Budgets will explode and accomplishments will implode.
Also, I've no real idea what China is spending on space, but it is a common myth that "insane sums of money" are needed. No nation has ever allocated more than a small fraction of its budget to space. Even if China were to end its space efforts and give all the money to "the people" it wouldn't raise living standards. The last thing a government should do to improve the permanent welfare of its citizens is give them money.
>> I don't think...NASA is going to even bother trying to beat China.
Ummm, NASA has already done everything China says it wants to do, at least 30 years ago. The Apollo missions were preceded by several unmanned missions (Surveyor, et al) throughout the 60's; the Viking landings on Mars in the 70's were preceded by Mariner missions. (The Soviets didn't pull off a manned lunar landing, but did land several unmanned mobile explorers on the lunar surface in the 70's.)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with examples like OpenOffice, Mozilla, Opera, etc., is that they are functional copies of proprietary applications.
People use Office not for the joy of using Word, or PowerPoint, or Access, or Excel, or Outlook, or Internet Explorer. They use Office because they need to write, to draw, to store and manipulate data, to calculate, to communicate, to deal with the web. What Microsoft is really selling is a solution to that problem.
By concentrating on building software that mimics the proprietary software that is already meeting those needs, open source is simply playing catchup. More importantly, all those open source apps will become useless overnight when someone successfully markets a better way to write, draw, store, calculate, communicate, etc.
To conjure a poor analogy, who cares about free VHS recorders when the DVD guy shows up?
O'Reilly was simply pointing out that a license that is premised on developers modifying and distributing code isn't necessarily relevant when the people using and modifying the code have no intention of ever distributing it. Not only does this include folks like Amazon and Yahoo, it also includes millions of ordinary consumers who buy and use open source. Because they will never modify any code, the GPL is relevant to them only if it results in the availabily of better programs.
The guy's right. Before a company commits to spending significant amounts of money on software and IT support, you'd better bet they want to feel very comfortable about the company they are about to keep.
Why would you expect businesses to trust and deal with a culture that sees business as the enemy?
BTW, the availability of "stable, fast, powerful code for FREE, source code and binaries, packaged up all ready to go with easy installation" really doesn't impress businesses all that much. Now, if someone provide a free, in-house, 24/7 IT staff, that might be attractive.
I dont think this is about the ability to tweak, tune and skin on OS. It's deeper.
Most people perceive tweaking and tuning an OS as a deficiency. They might ask something like this: If I hafta to waste my time getting this thing to run faster and more conveniently, why didn't it come that way in the first place?
Apple successfully controls what it means to be a Mac program. They do that by forcefully controlling the code and the API's that are the platform's core.
In many ways, the "choice" touted by the open source community benefits open source developers more than it benefits open source consumers. Developers have the choice to modify code as they see fit. Unfortunately, what consumers often get is another half-finished, idiosyncratic product with a very high annoyance factor. This is the kind of choice we don't need.
But, the individual consumer buying an Apple product really doesn't care about licenses. Apple's relationship with open source is, almost certainly, unknown to that consumer. It is relevant only because it allows Apple to market an attractive product.
O'Reilly noted that keying a license to distribution rights and obligations loses impact when the application is something like Amazon ot Yahoo, i.e. an app that won't be distributed. That applies, too, to millions of consumers of open source code who will never modify or distribute any code.
The GPL and other open source licenses assume that code consumers are also code producers, i.e., developers. That is no longer the case.
Retaining or acquiring DNA is no more of a privacy issue than retaining or acquiring fingerprints. Use of DNA increases the precision with which we can identify both the innocent and the guilty.
If folks are concerned about DNA privacy issues, perhaps they really ought to ponder the privacy lost when an innocent person is sent to prison because no DNA evidence was available.
You don't need modern CPU's to get to the Moon. You need large boosters, working life support systems, storable propellant that can be counted on to lift the crew off the Moon, and a heat shield that will protect the reentry vehicle wehn it hits Earth's atmosphere at 26,000 mph.
The Chinese are quite capable of building all those, but they have not done so, yet. Their current LEO vehicle is a moderate adaptation of the orbital vehicle used by the Soviets in the 60's. (Today's Russian vehicles share a similar lineage.)
Since you can get to the Moon and back using 1960's technology, all this is evidence that space travel shouldn't be held hostage to bleeding edge technology.
Dunno about the others, but I doubt Microsoft can afford to buy IBM. IBM reported $20.1 billion in revenue for the first quarter. That puts it at more than $80 billion in revenue for the calendar year.
By comparison, Microsoft's revenue for the quarter was $7.1 billion.
Where'd that "$1 per share" stuff come from? All the reports I've seen today speculate about an increase from 8 to 26 cents per share, max.
But then, Slashdot could only troll about Gates taking 2 billion, not 10 billion. I'm sure it was just an editorial typo. Heh.
What?? "Cheaping"??? Is that a word?
The market will find the cheapest labor available. There's nothing wrong with that. No one is forcing anyone to work for anyone else.
The only way to stop the market is to put up artificial and destructive political barriers. There is much that is wrong with that.
From where I sit, anti-globalization is simply elite and pampered Western ideologues who idealize what it is like to live in a backward, ill-governed, non-technological society. They seem to be working hard to keep these people "in their place". In other words, anti-globalization is just racism and imperialism repackaged for the country-hating neo-Marxist crowd.
Sounds familiar. Place I once worked did that: No attachments, period. If a staffer needed someone to send them a file, they had to get their boss to sign off, and then make arrangments for a small staff using standalones to get it via FTP or HTTP. Everything was tracked and recorded, just in case.
Note that a staffer had to set this up; an outsider could not make the arrangements. Internal distribution to the intended recipient was via floppy or CD, who had to sign for it.
If the attachments can be reasonably assumed not to be work-related, don't let them in.
I worked at a security-conscious place a few years ago. Executables, zip files and the like were stripped off incoming mail.
Nice rant, but what are your talking about?? The original post was about DARPA. DARPA is a government organization, not a corporation. But, you knew that, eh? Right??
You've been spending far too much time imbibing at the trough of the know-nothing anti-technology, anti-globalization racists who pass as "progressives" these day (think A.N.S.W.E.R) Reading between the lines of your post, you obviously want to return to the dark ages of pre-industrialized life. Please leave as soon as possible.
And judging from the actual text of your post, you're incapable of presenting a single shred of evidence to support your assertions.
Now that you've turned your brain off, enjoy your life as a follower of liars and miscreants.
>> "...stupid editors...I work at a newspaper..."
How endearing. You, presumably an IT guy at that paper, think using Mozilla takes precedence over the editors' work.
You are correct to say that space isn't a shortcut. Rather, "space" is everything, period. We just happen to be confined, thanks to technological immaturity, to one tiny mote of dust in one tiny little backwater.
With that in mind, maybe a better analogy than European migration to the Americas would be the broader human migration from Africa throughout the globe. If there were political debates about the wisdom of expanding beyond the immediate neighborhood of the Olduvai, I'd guess that some folks rejected the notion, asserting that the Olduvai was home and that resources shouldnt' be spent on exploration until everyone in the valley was well-fed, comfortable and disease-free. Others expected to see it happen slowly, in response to population pressures and the growing demand for the territory that could support game for food. A third faction, I'm pretty sure, was just curious and wanted to see what was over the next hill and the horizon. Maybe it was better than where they were.
I side with the third group. The first two choices lead to stagnation.
The only honest reason to send machines into space is to pave the way for people. The exploration of space is no more about science than was any other migration in history.
Everything you say is accurate, but this isn't a race because no one else is even trying to be competitive, and because it's all been done before.
What am I wrong about? I just said there's no race. If there is a race, who's the competition?
You're right, though, in that the U.S. should have established a permanent base on the Moon in the 70's, put people on Mars in the 80's, and built a real space station instead of the current Tinker Toy contraption.
Sure, the U.S. will get interested again if China puts people on the Moon. After all, it was only a failure of political will that kept us from putting a permanent base on the Moon in the '70s and people on Mars in the 80's. We should have done all that, whether or not anyone else was in the game.
But that doesn't mean there's a race going on today. China is playing catchup. They can use cloned Soviet hardware from the 60's to put people in orbit, and maybe, just maybe, do a circumlunar mission. But, since the Soviets never went to the Moon, China will have to develop and use its own hardware for that.
It's not a race because the race is already over. Humans in orbit, probes to the Moon, Mars and Venus, and humans on the Moon all happened in the 60's.
The Saturn V was built to carry the Apollo to the Moon. It did that quite well. The Shuttle (neither mine nor "super-duper-tech") was designed in the 70's to (A) be reusable, and (b) ferry people and cargo to and from a space station. That's all. It was never designed to do anything else. I'm not a fan of the shuttle, but don't disparage it for failing to do something it was never intended to do.
>> Copying Russia got the US into space...
Hoo ha. That's funny.
What are you talking about? Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Shuttle, Atlas, Titan, Saturn, SkyLab, Mariner, Voyager, Viking, etc., etc., were copies of Soviet hardware??
Please.
China's planned manned orbiter is a copy of the Soviet orbiter.
Von Braun, who died in 1977, had little, if any, involvement in the shuttle design. He made his mark prior to that.
In point of fact, the Shuttle is better than Soviet technology, but you obviously don't know or care, so why bother trying to tell you.
However, the point is that there can't be a race if China is simply offering conjecture (not commitments) to do things others did 30-40 years ago.
Going by current experience (ISS) any effort at international cooperation will just bog down progress. Budgets will explode and accomplishments will implode.
Also, I've no real idea what China is spending on space, but it is a common myth that "insane sums of money" are needed. No nation has ever allocated more than a small fraction of its budget to space. Even if China were to end its space efforts and give all the money to "the people" it wouldn't raise living standards. The last thing a government should do to improve the permanent welfare of its citizens is give them money.
>> I don't think...NASA is going to even bother trying to beat China.
Ummm, NASA has already done everything China says it wants to do, at least 30 years ago. The Apollo missions were preceded by several unmanned missions (Surveyor, et al) throughout the 60's; the Viking landings on Mars in the 70's were preceded by Mariner missions. (The Soviets didn't pull off a manned lunar landing, but did land several unmanned mobile explorers on the lunar surface in the 70's.)
If this is a race, it finished a long time ago.