Open Source is much more like capitalism than marxism... Excellent point. To summarize my favorite responses to the "Open Source is Communism" chestnut:
1. It is literally untrue, and there is no figurative way to interpret it that stands up; i.e., it is a meaningless "argument".
2. Open Source means Free Software. Lack of freedom is supposed to be the biggest danger of communism; Open Source is the opposite.
3. Open Source works. Linux, sendmail, PERL, etc. are far, far more reliable than NT, Exchange, ASP, etc. Incompetence and market failure are the second biggest danger of communism; Open Source is the opposite.
4. Open Source is the marketplace of ideas. The currency is attention and respect. The positive externalities are fun, and a sense of (voluntarily) contributing to make the world nicer. Most people would say this is the opposite of communism, and the best environment that capitalism could provide.
5. Red-baiting is evil. Disparaging a person or idea as communistic does as much to degrade a dialogue as comparing someone to Hitler. Neither trick is "cute", since both try to connect someone to systems of slavery, oppression, and murder.
They had a preview screening at the Seattle film festival a few weeks back. Here's my reaction.
Spoiler: Microsoft wins. Focus is on the early days, around the Altair. It then goes through to the Apple/Microsoft investment with the devil a few years back, with screen time decreasing exponentially with historical time. So the end of the story is Big Brother Bill smirking down on Steve from the big screen.
It's hard to know what a non-technical person would like and dislike. I already knew of almost every historical event portrayed, so there weren't many surprises (BillG used to get in trouble speeding? Woah!). But more interesting to me than the anecdotes, or even the performances (pretty good), was the eerie sense of watching this unfold on a big screen.
Your TV screen will be smaller, but it will still be eerie. If you were there in the early days, even as an AppleII owner rather than a bigwig, you know how small and unknown the PC world was. Seeing it onscreen is like seeing a movie about, say, yourself in elementary school. You felt at the time that someday Posterity would recognize the importance of your 4th-grade world, but you eventually gave up that belief. Now all of a sudden it's there and it's real. It's so freaky a sensation that you have to admit you could still be in 4th grade and having a long and convincing dream. An Ur-nerd won't learn much new from this flick, but it's definitely worth checking out for that sensation.
On the other hand, it's a bit disappointing that they made this movie, if it means that the subject is "done" and no one's likely to do another one soon. Because it would be nice to see a movie about the early days that's written better. There are several klunky transitions, and Jobs and Gates are forced to spew out semi-meaningless chunks of their philosophies in places that don't flow nicely. One fun surprise was the Steve Ballmer character, which captures his humor. It doesn't show off his intelligence, though (e.g., he beat Bill in a math competition at Harvard). Perhaps this is a reflection of the scope of the project; how can you really show what any one person is like when you try to show the lives of half a dozen people in events spanning ten years?
(p.s. - the director and A.M. Hall were there and answered some questions. A good time had by all. Steve and Bill have not asked to see it, we were told. A thick notebook of research exists to backup every scene, for legal reasons. Still, some scenes have been slightly massaged for dramatic purposes.)
Since the brain works best as a fuzzy, distributive store, that's what you should use it for if (in your ghoulish dreams) you wanted it to be a useful, reliable device. The brain is not good at memorizing long strings of numbers, and if you try to use it for that you'd find its capacity to be far, far below 1 Mbyte. But if you want to store associations, imagery, sensations, etc, and if you don't try to force these fuzzy memories to be 100% accurate (a 'digital' paradigm), you'll do great.
Studies of how much humans can remember are not very on point if you're talking about creating a wetware device. You are going through human consciousness as an interface, which makes the process both less accurate and SLOWER. Imagine searching for primes using a virtual machine written in JavaScript running on IE5 running on Win98. Now imagine running hand-tuned machine code. That's the difference you'd see in performance if you bypassed the human as an interface.
As with the abortion issue, you end up needing to create categories but not being able to draw firm lines. Or you do draw firm lines, and have to face their arbitrary nature when someone goes to court.
I see two basic categories in the clone issue. First is growth from a single cell to some early fetus state. In this stage one could _arguably_ say that the being does not have consciousness or a soul or whatever, and that we can ethically harvest stem cells or other products for use in people with serious diseases. _Arguably_, I said. Some people would go further and say we could use the cells for any purpose (cosmetic surgery, or vanity brain pumping through neural injections), while some would say using any products to save human lives or quality of life already goes too far.
The second stage starts roughly when a fetus achieves some form of consciousness or "humanness", after which it should be illegal to kill, abandon, or exploit the fetus (person). This would be an extremely hard definition to draw. It differs from the "viability" test in the abortion issue if we are talking about clones in a general sense without host mothers (think Brave New World or The Matrix), as the fetus is never dependent on another human's body.
Despite the difficulty in drawing such a line, to me it is crystal clear that a human child or adult born from cloning technology, even from a Brave New World vat, is a human. Just as a twin is a human, as is his/her twin. A "cloned person" (which is a slightly nicer term for someone than a "clone"; would you want to be called a "f*ck"?) is a person, and you cannot harvest a person's kidneys without their permission. Unless you are some Dr. Mendele freak living in Brazil, in which case you are already a serious criminal trying to live outside of the law. For the Mayo Clinic, there should never be any question that a cloned person is a person with rights.
Thus to me the most interesting question is at what point I would say "leave that zygote/fetus alone, it's a person you're now committed to 'birthing'."
I agree (in part) that Lucas wants lines around the block on opening night. But I also think he wants to give everyone an equal chance at getting in on opening night.
Let's say Microsoft decided to reward the Windows 2000 dev team with a free screening. They do, in fact, rent out theaters on the Eastside all the time to do this. For the last ten years, they've had to suffer with lame Star Trek releases, but that's another story.
Why should George allow the Microsoft Borg a treat at the expense of everyone else in the region? He shouldn't. BUT..... while it's a good policy in general, George might be open to pursuasion that SPECIFIC exceptions should be made, where non-profit groups (including 1. Linux Expo attendees, who are the metaphorical underdogs against the Empire, 2. local Star Wars fan clubs, who have been loyal for 20 years, and 3. possibly charities of interest to LucasFilms) could rent out theaters.
Now you could still get the lines around the block on opening night simply by HOLDING the pre-bought tickets for the people at the theater, and say that you have to pick up the tickets 30-60 minutes before show time. It's just that at special, rented-out theaters, only people in the affiliated group would have tickets available to them. (Or for charities, only people who bought their tickets through those charities, at a premium price.)
George loves the underdog, and I think he could be pursuaded by this concept, even to include Linux Expo (Tux might be the linchpin). He doesn't reeeeeally care about squeezing every last dime out of this picture; he wants to do the right thing. If you want some verification of this interpretation, check out the feature story on him in this past (Sunday's?) New York Times.
I'm sorry to say that, like the VolanoMark (not 'Volcano', actually), my Java server code gets much poorer performance under linux than under NT. And on linux I bog down terribly after threading to 100 simultaneous TCP connections. NT allows me to handle 1,000 clients pretty easily.
This is very discouraging, and I hope the new Blackdown release (which advertises native threads) will improve performance there.
Note that the VolanoMark benchmark is essentially a chat server, so if you do other kinds of Java work, your results will vary.
I heard from a few people on this, and I am removing for now the link to HistoryTree. It's a shareware program that, yes, runs only on Windows, and I wrote it some time ago. It was in the sidebar because TheNoodle.com is just a server for misc. projects of mine and others.
I don't think it's necessarily wrong to have a link to Windows software on the Windows Refund page, but it became clear that a) not everyone knew at first that it was Windows-only, and b) it's not clear that it's a home-grown project and not an outside ad. I don't accept outside advertising. So thanks for the feedback, folks. That's my position for now.
Well, it seems enough people think this is a pretty cool idea, so I've whipped up a new site, the Windows Refund Center, as a place where we can organize and help each other on this. http://www.thenoodle.com/refund/ . Comments or acts of volunteering should go to admin@thenoodle.com. Let's do it.
In my EULA, that section is titled [2](g) Single COMPUTER. That gives the context to interpret this as forbidding copies to other computers. The "single INTEGRATED product" reading is arguably meaningless or inaccurate. I can certainly put in a boot disk and use a different OS, so Windows is not integrated so tightly with the hardware as to make the hardware useless without Windows. Perhaps the emphasis should be "SINGLE integrated product", since this clause is talking about copying to other machines, not divorcing the software from the hardware.
The quote from the license speaks of the singular "SOFTWARE PRODUCT", so I take the phrase "contact Manufacturer for instructions on return of the product(s)" to mean that it's your choice; you can either return the MS SOFTWARE PRODUCT to the (computer) Manufacturer for a refund, or you can return all the products (plural) you bought from the Manufacturer, which means the computer and software. That, your honor, is why the "s" is in brackets; it's my option.
A couple of months ago, the NYT had a long story following up on some of those rocket science investment firms. According to the story, they're not being terribly profitable. And they were, I think, severely hammered by the unpredictable ups and downs of 1998. Those are the big unpredictable activities, like devaluation, etc., of 1998, which are arguably not predictable in a chaos model based on the prior 2 years of data. (I'm not sure if they were in this article, but the firm with the highest profile is probably The Prediction Company, in the Santa Fe area, run by Farmer and other chaos gurus from the Santa Fe Institute.)
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Open Source is much more like capitalism than marxism ...
Excellent point. To summarize my favorite responses to the "Open Source is Communism" chestnut:
1. It is literally untrue, and there is no figurative way to interpret it that stands up; i.e., it is a meaningless "argument".
2. Open Source means Free Software. Lack of freedom is supposed to be the biggest danger of communism; Open Source is the opposite.
3. Open Source works. Linux, sendmail, PERL, etc. are far, far more reliable than NT, Exchange, ASP, etc. Incompetence and market failure are the second biggest danger of communism; Open Source is the opposite.
4. Open Source is the marketplace of ideas. The currency is attention and respect. The positive externalities are fun, and a sense of (voluntarily) contributing to make the world nicer. Most people would say this is the opposite of communism, and the best environment that capitalism could provide.
5. Red-baiting is evil. Disparaging a person or idea as communistic does as much to degrade a dialogue as comparing someone to Hitler. Neither trick is "cute", since both try to connect someone to systems of slavery, oppression, and murder.
They had a preview screening at the Seattle film festival a few weeks back. Here's my reaction.
Spoiler: Microsoft wins. Focus is on the early days, around the Altair. It then goes through to the Apple/Microsoft investment with the devil a few years back, with screen time decreasing exponentially with historical time. So the end of the story is Big Brother Bill smirking down on Steve from the big screen.
It's hard to know what a non-technical person would like and dislike. I already knew of almost every historical event portrayed, so there weren't many surprises (BillG used to get in trouble speeding? Woah!). But more interesting to me than the anecdotes, or even the performances (pretty good), was the eerie sense of watching this unfold on a big screen.
Your TV screen will be smaller, but it will still be eerie. If you were there in the early days, even as an AppleII owner rather than a bigwig, you know how small and unknown the PC world was. Seeing it onscreen is like seeing a movie about, say, yourself in elementary school. You felt at the time that someday Posterity would recognize the importance of your 4th-grade world, but you eventually gave up that belief. Now all of a sudden it's there and it's real. It's so freaky a sensation that you have to admit you could still be in 4th grade and having a long and convincing dream. An Ur-nerd won't learn much new from this flick, but it's definitely worth checking out for that sensation.
On the other hand, it's a bit disappointing that they made this movie, if it means that the subject is "done" and no one's likely to do another one soon. Because it would be nice to see a movie about the early days that's written better. There are several klunky transitions, and Jobs and Gates are forced to spew out semi-meaningless chunks of their philosophies in places that don't flow nicely. One fun surprise was the Steve Ballmer character, which captures his humor. It doesn't show off his intelligence, though (e.g., he beat Bill in a math competition at Harvard). Perhaps this is a reflection of the scope of the project; how can you really show what any one person is like when you try to show the lives of half a dozen people in events spanning ten years?
(p.s. - the director and A.M. Hall were there and answered some questions. A good time had by all. Steve and Bill have not asked to see it, we were told. A thick notebook of research exists to backup every scene, for legal reasons. Still, some scenes have been slightly massaged for dramatic purposes.)
Studies of how much humans can remember are not very on point if you're talking about creating a wetware device. You are going through human consciousness as an interface, which makes the process both less accurate and SLOWER. Imagine searching for primes using a virtual machine written in JavaScript running on IE5 running on Win98. Now imagine running hand-tuned machine code. That's the difference you'd see in performance if you bypassed the human as an interface.
As with the abortion issue, you end up needing to create categories but not being able to draw firm lines. Or you do draw firm lines, and have to face their arbitrary nature when someone goes to court.
I see two basic categories in the clone issue.
First is growth from a single cell to some early fetus state. In this stage one could _arguably_ say that the being does not have consciousness or a soul or whatever, and that we can ethically harvest stem cells or other products for use in people with serious diseases. _Arguably_, I said. Some people would go further and say we could use the cells for any purpose (cosmetic surgery, or vanity brain pumping through neural injections), while some would say using any products to save human lives or quality of life already goes too far.
The second stage starts roughly when a fetus achieves some form of consciousness or "humanness", after which it should be illegal to kill, abandon, or exploit the fetus (person). This would be an extremely hard definition to draw. It differs from the "viability" test in the abortion issue if we are talking about clones in a general sense without host mothers (think Brave New World or The Matrix), as the fetus is never dependent on another human's body.
Despite the difficulty in drawing such a line, to me it is crystal clear that a human child or adult born from cloning technology, even from a Brave New World vat, is a human. Just as a twin is a human, as is his/her twin. A "cloned person" (which is a slightly nicer term for someone than a "clone"; would you want to be called a "f*ck"?) is a person, and you cannot harvest a person's kidneys without their permission. Unless you are some Dr. Mendele freak living in Brazil, in which case you are already a serious criminal trying to live outside of the law. For the Mayo Clinic, there should never be any question that a cloned person is a person with rights.
Thus to me the most interesting question is at what point I would say "leave that zygote/fetus alone, it's a person you're now committed to 'birthing'."
I agree (in part) that Lucas wants lines around the block on opening night. But I also think he wants to give everyone an equal chance at getting in on opening night.
Let's say Microsoft decided to reward the Windows 2000 dev team with a free screening. They do, in fact, rent out theaters on the Eastside all the time to do this. For the last ten years, they've had to suffer with lame Star Trek releases, but that's another story.
Why should George allow the Microsoft Borg a treat at the expense of everyone else in the region? He shouldn't. BUT..... while it's a good policy in general, George might be open to pursuasion that SPECIFIC exceptions should be made, where non-profit groups (including 1. Linux Expo attendees, who are the metaphorical underdogs against the Empire, 2. local Star Wars fan clubs, who have been loyal for 20 years, and 3. possibly charities of interest to LucasFilms) could rent out theaters.
Now you could still get the lines around the block on opening night simply by HOLDING the pre-bought tickets for the people at the theater, and say that you have to pick up the tickets 30-60 minutes before show time. It's just that at special, rented-out theaters, only people in the affiliated group would have tickets available to them. (Or for charities, only people who bought their tickets through those charities, at a premium price.)
George loves the underdog, and I think he could be pursuaded by this concept, even to include Linux Expo (Tux might be the linchpin). He doesn't reeeeeally care about squeezing every last dime out of this picture; he wants to do the right thing. If you want some verification of this interpretation, check out the feature story on him in this past (Sunday's?) New York Times.
I'm sorry to say that, like the VolanoMark (not 'Volcano', actually), my Java server code gets much poorer performance under linux than under NT. And on linux I bog down terribly after threading to 100 simultaneous TCP connections. NT allows me to handle 1,000 clients pretty easily.
This is very discouraging, and I hope the new Blackdown release (which advertises native threads) will improve performance there.
Note that the VolanoMark benchmark is essentially a chat server, so if you do other kinds of Java work, your results will vary.
Wasn't it PCWeek that just published benchmarks on identical machines, showing Apache outserve IIS by 50%?
By the way, that doesn't even include a 2.2 kernel.
... they'd be able to spell "scalar" correctly in their press release. :-)
I heard from a few people on this, and I am removing for now the link to HistoryTree. It's a shareware program that, yes, runs only on Windows, and I wrote it some time ago. It was in the sidebar because TheNoodle.com is just a server for misc. projects of mine and others.
I don't think it's necessarily wrong to have a link to Windows software on the Windows Refund page, but it became clear that a) not everyone knew at first that it was Windows-only, and b) it's not clear that it's a home-grown project and not an outside ad. I don't accept outside advertising. So thanks for the feedback, folks. That's my position for now.
-MattJ
Well, it seems enough people think this is a pretty cool idea, so I've whipped up a new site, the Windows Refund Center, as a place where we can organize and help each other on this. http://www.thenoodle.com/refund/ . Comments or acts of volunteering should go to admin@thenoodle.com. Let's do it.
In my EULA, that section is titled [2](g) Single COMPUTER. That gives the context to interpret this as forbidding copies to other computers. The "single INTEGRATED product" reading is arguably meaningless or inaccurate. I can certainly put in a boot disk and use a different OS, so Windows is not integrated so tightly with the hardware as to make the hardware useless without Windows. Perhaps the emphasis should be "SINGLE integrated product", since this clause is talking about copying to other machines, not divorcing the software from the hardware.
The quote from the license speaks of the singular "SOFTWARE PRODUCT", so I take the phrase "contact Manufacturer for instructions on return of the product(s)" to mean that it's your choice; you can either return the MS SOFTWARE PRODUCT to the (computer) Manufacturer for a refund, or you can return all the products (plural) you bought from the Manufacturer, which means the computer and software. That, your honor, is why the "s" is in brackets; it's my option.
It took a long time, but they finally gave the guy his refund. Give them credit for that. Especially since:
1. They're a big corporation with many procedures, and this guy was asking for something unheard of (literally, they hadn't heard of it before).
2. As another poster suggested, they may have not have understood until the end that he was using a different OS and not pulling a fast one.
3. They DO have a contract (required by current market forces) with a certain OS vendor known for very, very hardball tactics, in and out of court.
If enough slashdotters were to buy laptops from Toshiba, they might just start to openly market to us. (Assuming MS doesn't try to fix their wagon.)
A couple of months ago, the NYT had a long story following up on some of those rocket science investment firms. According to the story, they're not being terribly profitable. And they were, I think, severely hammered by the unpredictable ups and downs of 1998.
Those are the big unpredictable activities, like devaluation, etc., of 1998, which are arguably not predictable in a chaos model based on the prior 2 years of data.
(I'm not sure if they were in this article, but the firm with the highest profile is probably The Prediction Company, in the Santa Fe area, run by Farmer and other chaos gurus from the Santa Fe Institute.)