You're not the first person to carry this opinion, and you won't be the last. However, I think it's very flawed.
For example, what if, Alessandro Volta, and other early experimenters with electricity had decided that their intellectual curiosity would be better served by turning it towards more pressing problems? Same thing for Einstein, Bohr, and the other physicists working at the dawn of quantum theory. At the time, it certainly didn't look like any of this stuff would benefit anyone, but look at it now. Without the work done by these people, the WWW wouldn't exist, slashdot wouldn't exist (and those are just some very pedestrian examples).
I submit that by supporting these kinds of projects, we are "looking to ourselves." The application of this work might not be immediately obvious, but I say so what? Sometime in the future this stuff might just come in handy, but if nobody does the work now, it won't be available when we might need it. Long term, open-ended ended research is absolutely imperitive, simply because we never know where or when the next big break-through will be made.
Gas in thermal equilibrium would still be detectable as very narrow, but strong aborption lines along the line of site to other galaxies. Such clouds of gas and dust have been detected, but not on the scale required to make up for the "missing" mass. Given that, I don't think the gas and dust explanation is strong enough, even though I do agree that it's still the simplest and therefore best explanation. Unfortunately, the data does not seem to bear that out right now.
I guess, ultimately, I have to question why you're judging this so harshly? It's a borderline personal attack, which IMHO is just in poor taste. These guys don't seem to be pulling a Pons and Fleischman here, and in fact I really don't see anything too unusual about thier press release either, given the fact that 90% of press releases end up completely misrepresenting the research anyway: A problem I had the misfortune of encountering about a year ago, there are some "editors" that I would love to see strung up by their finger-nails after the way they rewrote a press release I co-authored!
Well, newer, more recently derived values of the Hubble variable are better! Aren't they?:)
I know what you mean. I think it's part of the side effect of scientists being human, and wanting their own latest wiz-bang efforts to be better than all the previous ones to date, whether they really are or not.
As for press releases, I know couple of "editors" that I would love to string up in various painful ways for what they've done to some of my press releases.:)
So a bunch of extra-galactic types dusted off their hands and said "well, that's done"
Where in the heck did you get this idea? As someone who has done a little extragalactic astronomy, I can say that nobody has ever, claimed that they could close the book on the age of the universe problem. In fact, most astronomers, if pressed, will say that the age of the universe is somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years, but none will give a definitive answer, but may point you at a lot of research that will claim ages from as little 6 or 7 billion to as high as 20!
By the way, the figure of 13 billion lightyears has absolutely no bearing on the age of the universe either. The 13 billion comes about by calibrating the redshift against H0, which is a number that still has a great deal of uncertainty in it. A better value of H0 will pin down the age of the universe, not the observation of high redshift quasars.
Did read the article? Have you ever taken a particle physics course? Do you even understand how science works? I don't mean to flame here, but frankly your quick dismissal of this possible discovery as bovine fecal material seems extremely premature.
As someone who actually has taken a course in QM (not particle physics in particular), I do know that interaction cross-sections depend on a number of factors, and mass is only one of them. And the mass is usually not even the most significant factor for calculating a cross-section. More often then not, a particle's charge (or lack thereof) is much more important than it's mass.
I think some healthy skepticism is warranted here, but an out-right dismissal is totally unfounded, at least until some other groups have had a chance to look over the data and attempt to confirm the experiment.
The thing is, judging by the majority of *posts* that show up after a Katz article, it is true that most of the *posters* find the articles to be simplistic. As for people who email Katz and don't post, how are they participating in the slashdot community? If they have such wonderful things to say about Katz, why won't they post them, at least under AC if not (for some reason known only to them) under their own names?
Speaking for myself (and I don't necessarily have glowing things to say about Katz all the time). The reason I might not post a glowing message to the threads is simply because I'd rather have an intelligent exchange of ideas rather than what often passes for it in the threads.
Secondly, however, I still think your attitude is irresponsible. If you mean the religious right, then say the religious right! As it so happens, I agree with you. But believe it or not, many many Christians don't agree with the religious right's tactics. It is unfair to associate us with them, even by default.
That attitude may be irresponsible, but I think your post misses a deeper point. The religious right gets all the press, and as result they have become the face of religion in this country. I would dearly love to see the invisible minions come forward and assert a position contrary to the craziness that the far right continues to push, but as far as I can tell, that isn't something that's going to happen anytime soon.
Frankly this really sounds like one of those meaningless deconstructionist philosophy rants. The ideas presented appear to be self-consistent but have no bearing on the real world, unless your sense of self is so far gone that the real world is too difficult for you to comprehend and you must make up a fantasy-world that works according to your own rules.
This actually reminds of the stir that Alan Sokal created a few years ago by submitting a phony paper to Social Text, and blew the lid off some of the really idiotic (and totally irrelavent) ideas coming out of a certain school of philosophy. The editors and they're supposedly intelligent insights had become so disconnected from reality that when someone (Sokal) came along and suggested that the real world doesn't really exist, they fell for it, hook, line, and sinker...
Actually, it probably wouldn't look like a solar eclipse, or at least not the kind that we're used to seeing pictures.
One of the reasons solar eclipses (on Earth) look so spectacular comes from a rather interesting little coincidence. The moon and the sun subtend nearly the same solid angle (they appear to be about the same size from Earth). So during a solar eclipse, the moon blocks out the surface of the sun nearly perfectly, allowing you to see solar prominences as well as the sun's corona. Also, there are such things as annular eclipses which occur when the moon is a little further away (and therefore appears smaller) and as a result the moon doesn't completely block out the sun as seen from earth, instead the sun appears as an annulus around the moon.
On the moon, what you would get is the reverse of an annular eclipse, the earth will appear much larger than the sun, and will completely cover it during totallity. However, sunlight refracting through the earth's atmosphere could be just as spectacular a sight...but I don't think anyone's seen such a thing. I suspect that some of the sun's corona might be visible as well, but I haven't done the calculation, so I don't really know for sure.
Well, that's an interesting idea. But think about it for a second. Yeah, the ET's might send a probe or even go there themselves (assuming it's possible to do that in a reasonable amount of time), but they're not going to pack up their entire civilization. The chances of picking up a stray signal from somebody's "home-world" is much more likely than picking up the signal from some probe with barely enough power send a signal back home, much less make it anywhere else.
You want to look at the population centers where there will be lots more activity. I don't think you're going to find aliens flocking to live near a pulsating red giant star. You never know when the star might just decide to expand out and engulf your nice little planet or spaceship, or, in the case of Betelgeuse, go supernova.
Yes, Betelgeuse is the brightest star in Orion, but it's a lot further away, about 520 light-years. It's also a rather unstable star, so I wouldn't expect it to be a very good candidate for SETI to watch.
Reddening due to intersteller dust is not the same thing as a redshift. The redshift refers to an actual shift in the spectrum of an object as result of it's recession velocity. Intersteller reddening is a result of dust that more readily absorbs/scatters blue light than red light. Intersteller reddening doesn't cause spectral lines to shift, it just attenuates the blue end of the spectrum as "seen" by the dust doing the absorbing. For a good example of interstellar redening go outside tonight and watch the sun set, what happens there is exactly the same process that happens in an interstellar dust cloud.
I don't know what kind of analyis was applied or what methods were used to come up with this, so I won't commment on that.
What bothers me though, is that there are people who have been studying the orbits of comets for a very long time. People like Brian Marsdan at Harvard-CFA. Why hasn't Brian seen this sort of thing? He has access to a lots of data, a lot more than a mere 13 comets. It makes me wonder if this "discovery" may be nothing more than a selection effect (the 13 comets selected just happen to produce this sort of effect, but when you include a larger body of data, the phenomenon disappears).
Read what I posted. I never stated that there would be no free oxygen, only that significant quantities of free oxygen cannot be maintained in the atmosphere without some other process acting to replenish it.
And in response to your points:
1. Are you sure? I am not familiar enough with the geology literature that you claim has proven that the early earth did not have a reducing atmosphere, references please.
2. Think about that for a second, CO2 and CO? Looks like the oxygen has been bound up to me. And as for the Carbon abundance in the universe, Carbon is one of the more abundant elements, and in fact is somewhat more abundant than oxygen, and by the way, the CO molecule has the largest binding energy of any molecule...once you get oxygen bound up in CO, it's rather difficult to break the bond....
3. I don't mean to flame you here, but clearly you seem to be missing some science in your background. Amino acids and proteins have been discovered in carbonacous chondrites (a certain kind of meteor), experiments have shown that bombarding the materials in chondrites with cosmic rays will often form amino acids, and if I'm not mistaken, even simple proteins. And you get the O2 from anaerobic bacteria.... The link you point to is almost completely meaningless, what are the "assumptions?" A single bad assumption will completely screw up your calculation (see also the Drake equation). There are too many numbers that we don't know well enough to even make a decent guess about the probability IMHO.
4. How do you select the desirable compounds? Geez, They were already there! What are the primary components of life? Take a look, it's H, C, N, and, O, among the most abundant elements in the universe! Add a little heat, and some electricity and/or UV radiation, and bingo! Granted, that's still a long way from a living cell, but producing lots of "desirable" compounds is easy!
I'm not a chemist, I'm an astronomer, but one of the things an astronomer knows is that oxygen is fairly reactive. In this context, this results in a rather short "life-time" for free oxygen...the oxygen gets bound up with other atoms fairly quickly so that what you end up with *is* a reducing atmosphere. Oxygen did not become a significant component of the earth's atmosphere until life (algae, etc) began producing large quantities of free oxygen. Hence, prior to the formation of plants, the earth *did* have a reducing atmosphere.
And if you want an astronomical argument... you never see free oxygen in the atmospheres of the cooler stars, it will always be bound up with carbon or in a metal-oxide (depending on the carbon/metal abundance ratio). In other words, you don't normally see free oxygen in a dense atmosphere unless there's something producing it in large quantities (eg plants).
This really isn't anything new. Linux has been supplanting old unix workstations in astronomy for years. In my research group, we started making the switch about 3 years ago, and today we're almost completely a linux shop (we still have an old sparc that I'm keeping around just for grins).
In reponse to the question of what can the community do, I would give two suggestions:
Help out the saoimage development project, the latest beta release is finally starting to have features that it should've had 3 years ago (eg. true color support). Btw, saoimage isn't just useful for x-ray astronomers, us folks working in the optical and infrared use it too.
If you're perl minded, check out the perl data language project. In order to keep future astronomy analysis software free and open source, the PDL project needs to succeed (as well as improving perl's bindings to gtk). The reason I say this, is that a certain segment of the astronomy community is moving towards IDL, a proprietary scripting and data analysis package from RSI. IDL has some nice plusses, but it's non-free, and in the long run I think perl could be a much more powerful environment. Iraf, may be free and it gets the job done, but IMHO it's a real mess, and too poorly documented to be able to last much longer.
When Raster left Red Hat, he made several statements that seemed to indicate that E was going to become a full "desktop environment" in it's own right. Does this mean that E's gnome support may disappear in some later release? Or do you plan to continue to support gnome with-in E?
Yeah, it'll probably alter the orbit slightly, but the active jets that form on the surface of a comet during a pass through the inner solar system will probably change the orbit even more.
The orbital mechanics folks have seen orbital anomalies in comets that have been partially attributed to outgassing in particularly active regions on a comet, the rest can usually be blamed on Jupiter.
Come on folks! One guy starts spouting off about RedHat making exclusive contracts when there is absolutely NO evidence to suggest that this has happened, nor has there EVER been any indication from RedHat that they were interested in making any exclusive deals with anyone. Has anyone read any of the interviews and various articles with/from Bob Young?! Young, has stated several times that RedHat's intensions were not along these lines, and has given several good reasons for why RedHat couldn't get away with this kind of stunt even if they wanted to. If we have a bone to pick with anyone, it's Metroworks, not RedHat.
Frankly I think we need to take a good look at ourselves to see if we aren't suffering from paranoia. Think about it, we've been dealing with monopolistic technology companies for so long that the second one of our own starts to become successful, it automatically must mean that they are monopolistic too! Get Real!
I, for one, am not concerned about RedHat. If such things as RH is being accused of actually occur, most of us will move to another distro so fast it will make Bob Young's head spin...and he know's it.
Other companies targeting a specific distribution is cause for concern, but until the LSB gets out the door and people adhere to it, this is the kind of thing we're going to get. What else would you expect!?
On the other hand, one must be careful not to let this sort of directed paranoia cause unecessary hard feelings.
But that's the rub though, isn't it? I don't have a problem with discussions about what kind of actions should be taken if our worst fears are realized. But in the mean time, there really isn't any good reason to trash RedHat for anything beyond the "I hate RedHat because of feature/bloatware/glibc/package x." (Which, by the way, I think are legitimate complaints.)
The only reason people are going after RH is because it's been successful. I would bet that if debian were the popular distribution right now, people would be going after debian in exactly the same way. This kind of bickering isn't constructive, it's destructive to the linux movement as a whole and hurtful to the guys at RedHat who have worked hard to make RedHat what it is (whether you like RH or not).
Until we have hard proof that RH is doing anything really wrong (aside from being successful), I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
True enough. But given RedHat's current track record, I think it's unlikely that they've been dishonest with respect to exclusive contracts. Nor has anyone come up with a cogent argument for why RedHat would go in this direction, it's been more FUD than facts as far as I've seen. Like I said, people see RedHat as becoming THE distribution of linux, and everyone starts freaking out as if it's the end of the freaking world. Geez, If that bothers you, go get Debian. I'd hate to see the reaction people would have if Caldera were in the same position as RedHat. At least with the proprietary stuff in Caldera, there would be a legitimate cause for concern. As it is, it's just a bunch of people with unsupported paranoid delusions.
If RH were going in a proprietary direction, why release rpm source code? Why support gnome in an open source fashion? Why even put thier distribution up for ftp? They could very well have decided to build a proprietary desktop, and then be in the exact same position as Trolltech. Proprietary and exlusive contracts just don't jibe with RedHat's current business model.
As for the IPO news, I'm not familiar with the process that one might have to go through to get an IPO. But it seems easily concievable that there could be some legitimate reasons for not making the news public until the time was right. Besides, was it really a surprise to anyone? Everyone knew it was going to happen sooner or later.
It just seems to me that everyone is so concerned about what RedHat could be doing, or what they could become, that nobody's paying any attention to what they are really doing....they are simply expanding their business. If that bothers people, then take your money elsewhere.
Ummm...I don't think QM and Relativity are unified
on
Black Holes...Pink?
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· Score: 1
To my knowledge, relativity and qm have not been merged, that is the whole point of all the work that has been done on grand unified theories (guts).
You wouldn't happen to be from Fresno would you? People from Fresno might be able to confirm your theory. (Now that's an obscure reference, anyone get it?;)
On unix, we already have something better than BBedit, it's called XEmacs. Believe me, if you like BBedit, you'll probably like XEmacs even better (I'm not dissing BBedit, it's a good tool, XEmacs just does pretty much everything BBedit does and more). As for GoLive, I can't comment, I've never used it.
I seriously doubt that we'll ever see a port of BBedit to unix due to the existence of XEmacs. A port to windows would be useful to a lot of people though.
I do have to laugh at your implication that all "cutting edge designers" use macs. That kind of statement is simply ignorant...or delusional.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not the first person to carry this opinion, and you won't be the last. However, I think it's very flawed.
For example, what if, Alessandro Volta, and other early experimenters with electricity had decided that their intellectual curiosity would be better served by turning it towards more pressing problems? Same thing for Einstein, Bohr, and the other physicists working at the dawn of quantum theory. At the time, it certainly didn't look like any of this stuff would benefit anyone, but look at it now. Without the work done by these people, the WWW wouldn't exist, slashdot wouldn't exist (and those are just some very pedestrian examples).
I submit that by supporting these kinds of projects, we are "looking to ourselves." The application of this work might not be immediately obvious, but I say so what? Sometime in the future this stuff might just come in handy, but if nobody does the work now, it won't be available when we might need it. Long term, open-ended ended research is absolutely imperitive, simply because we never know where or when the next big break-through will be made.
Gas in thermal equilibrium would still be detectable as very narrow, but strong aborption lines along the line of site to other galaxies. Such clouds of gas and dust have been detected, but not on the scale required to make up for the "missing" mass. Given that, I don't think the gas and dust explanation is strong enough, even though I do agree that it's still the simplest and therefore best explanation. Unfortunately, the data does not seem to bear that out right now.
I guess, ultimately, I have to question why you're judging this so harshly? It's a borderline personal attack, which IMHO is just in poor taste. These guys don't seem to be pulling a Pons and Fleischman here, and in fact I really don't see anything too unusual about thier press release either, given the fact that 90% of press releases end up completely misrepresenting the research anyway: A problem I had the misfortune of encountering about a year ago, there are some "editors" that I would love to see strung up by their finger-nails after the way they rewrote a press release I co-authored!
Well, newer, more recently derived values of the Hubble variable are better! Aren't they? :)
I know what you mean. I think it's part of the side effect of scientists being human, and wanting their own latest wiz-bang efforts to be better than all the previous ones to date, whether they really are or not.
As for press releases, I know couple of "editors" that I would love to string up in various painful ways for what they've done to some of my press releases. :)
Where in the heck did you get this idea? As someone who has done a little extragalactic astronomy, I can say that nobody has ever, claimed that they could close the book on the age of the universe problem. In fact, most astronomers, if pressed, will say that the age of the universe is somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years, but none will give a definitive answer, but may point you at a lot of research that will claim ages from as little 6 or 7 billion to as high as 20!
By the way, the figure of 13 billion lightyears has absolutely no bearing on the age of the universe either. The 13 billion comes about by calibrating the redshift against H0, which is a number that still has a great deal of uncertainty in it. A better value of H0 will pin down the age of the universe, not the observation of high redshift quasars.
Did read the article? Have you ever taken a particle physics course? Do you even understand how science works? I don't mean to flame here, but frankly your quick dismissal of this possible discovery as bovine fecal material seems extremely premature.
As someone who actually has taken a course in QM (not particle physics in particular), I do know that interaction cross-sections depend on a number of factors, and mass is only one of them. And the mass is usually not even the most significant factor for calculating a cross-section. More often then not, a particle's charge (or lack thereof) is much more important than it's mass.
I think some healthy skepticism is warranted here, but an out-right dismissal is totally unfounded, at least until some other groups have had a chance to look over the data and attempt to confirm the experiment.
- The thing is, judging by the majority of *posts* that show up after a Katz article, it is true that most of the *posters* find the articles to be simplistic. As for people who email Katz and don't post, how are they participating in the slashdot community? If they have such wonderful things to say about Katz, why won't they post them, at least under AC if not (for some reason known only to them) under their own names?
Speaking for myself (and I don't necessarily have glowing things to say about Katz all the time). The reason I might not post a glowing message to the threads is simply because I'd rather have an intelligent exchange of ideas rather than what often passes for it in the threads.That attitude may be irresponsible, but I think your post misses a deeper point. The religious right gets all the press, and as result they have become the face of religion in this country. I would dearly love to see the invisible minions come forward and assert a position contrary to the craziness that the far right continues to push, but as far as I can tell, that isn't something that's going to happen anytime soon.
Hrm...How much you wanna bet that you can remove the drugs from this equation and get the same result? I would be willing to bet big money.
Frankly this really sounds like one of those meaningless deconstructionist philosophy rants. The ideas presented appear to be self-consistent but have no bearing on the real world, unless your sense of self is so far gone that the real world is too difficult for you to comprehend and you must make up a fantasy-world that works according to your own rules.
This actually reminds of the stir that Alan Sokal created a few years ago by submitting a phony paper to Social Text, and blew the lid off some of the really idiotic (and totally irrelavent) ideas coming out of a certain school of philosophy. The editors and they're supposedly intelligent insights had become so disconnected from reality that when someone (Sokal) came along and suggested that the real world doesn't really exist, they fell for it, hook, line, and sinker...
Actually, it probably wouldn't look like a solar eclipse, or at least not the kind that we're used to seeing pictures.
One of the reasons solar eclipses (on Earth) look so spectacular comes from a rather interesting little coincidence. The moon and the sun subtend nearly the same solid angle (they appear to be about the same size from Earth). So during a solar eclipse, the moon blocks out the surface of the sun nearly perfectly, allowing you to see solar prominences as well as the sun's corona. Also, there are such things as annular eclipses which occur when the moon is a little further away (and therefore appears smaller) and as a result the moon doesn't completely block out the sun as seen from earth, instead the sun appears as an annulus around the moon.
On the moon, what you would get is the reverse of an annular eclipse, the earth will appear much larger than the sun, and will completely cover it during totallity. However, sunlight refracting through the earth's atmosphere could be just as spectacular a sight...but I don't think anyone's seen such a thing. I suspect that some of the sun's corona might be visible as well, but I haven't done the calculation, so I don't really know for sure.
Well, that's an interesting idea. But think about it for a second. Yeah, the ET's might send a probe or even go there themselves (assuming it's possible to do that in a reasonable amount of time), but they're not going to pack up their entire civilization. The chances of picking up a stray signal from somebody's "home-world" is much more likely than picking up the signal from some probe with barely enough power send a signal back home, much less make it anywhere else.
You want to look at the population centers where there will be lots more activity. I don't think you're going to find aliens flocking to live near a pulsating red giant star. You never know when the star might just decide to expand out and engulf your nice little planet or spaceship, or, in the case of Betelgeuse, go supernova.
Yes, Betelgeuse is the brightest star in Orion, but it's a lot further away, about 520 light-years. It's also a rather unstable star, so I wouldn't expect it to be a very good candidate for SETI to watch.
Reddening due to intersteller dust is not the same thing as a redshift. The redshift refers to an actual shift in the spectrum of an object as result of it's recession velocity. Intersteller reddening is a result of dust that more readily absorbs/scatters blue light than red light. Intersteller reddening doesn't cause spectral lines to shift, it just attenuates the blue end of the spectrum as "seen" by the dust doing the absorbing. For a good example of interstellar redening go outside tonight and watch the sun set, what happens there is exactly the same process that happens in an interstellar dust cloud.
I don't know what kind of analyis was applied or what methods were used to come up with this, so I won't commment on that.
What bothers me though, is that there are people who have been studying the orbits of comets for a very long time. People like Brian Marsdan at Harvard-CFA. Why hasn't Brian seen this sort of thing? He has access to a lots of data, a lot more than a mere 13 comets. It makes me wonder if this "discovery" may be nothing more than a selection effect (the 13 comets selected just happen to produce this sort of effect, but when you include a larger body of data, the phenomenon disappears).
You're right, I kind of skipped a step for the sake of simplicity...
Read what I posted. I never stated that there would be no free oxygen, only that significant quantities of free oxygen cannot be maintained in the atmosphere without some other process acting to replenish it.
And in response to your points:
1. Are you sure? I am not familiar enough with the geology literature that you claim has proven that the early earth did not have a reducing atmosphere, references please.
2. Think about that for a second, CO2 and CO? Looks like the oxygen has been bound up to me. And as for the Carbon abundance in the universe, Carbon is one of the more abundant elements, and in fact is somewhat more abundant than oxygen, and by the way, the CO molecule has the largest binding energy of any molecule...once you get oxygen bound up in CO, it's rather difficult to break the bond....
3. I don't mean to flame you here, but clearly you seem to be missing some science in your background. Amino acids and proteins have been discovered in carbonacous chondrites (a certain kind of meteor), experiments have shown that bombarding the materials in chondrites with cosmic rays will often form amino acids, and if I'm not mistaken, even simple proteins. And you get the O2 from anaerobic bacteria.... The link you point to is almost completely meaningless, what are the "assumptions?" A single bad assumption will completely screw up your calculation (see also the Drake equation). There are too many numbers that we don't know well enough to even make a decent guess about the probability IMHO.
4. How do you select the desirable compounds? Geez, They were already there! What are the primary components of life? Take a look, it's H, C, N, and, O, among the most abundant elements in the universe! Add a little heat, and some electricity and/or UV radiation, and bingo! Granted, that's still a long way from a living cell, but producing lots of "desirable" compounds is easy!
I'm not a chemist, I'm an astronomer, but one of the things an astronomer knows is that oxygen is fairly reactive. In this context, this results in a rather short "life-time" for free oxygen...the oxygen gets bound up with other atoms fairly quickly so that what you end up with *is* a reducing atmosphere. Oxygen did not become a significant component of the earth's atmosphere until life (algae, etc) began producing large quantities of free oxygen. Hence, prior to the formation of plants, the earth *did* have a reducing atmosphere.
And if you want an astronomical argument... you never see free oxygen in the atmospheres of the cooler stars, it will always be bound up with carbon or in a metal-oxide (depending on the carbon/metal abundance ratio). In other words, you don't normally see free oxygen in a dense atmosphere unless there's something producing it in large quantities (eg plants).
This really isn't anything new. Linux has been supplanting old unix workstations in astronomy for years. In my research group, we started making the switch about 3 years ago, and today we're almost completely a linux shop (we still have an old sparc that I'm keeping around just for grins).
In reponse to the question of what can the community do, I would give two suggestions:
Ciao
When Raster left Red Hat, he made several statements that seemed to indicate that E was going to become a full "desktop environment" in it's own right. Does this mean that E's gnome support may disappear in some later release? Or do you plan to continue to support gnome with-in E?
Yeah, it'll probably alter the orbit slightly, but the active jets that form on the surface of a comet during a pass through the inner solar system will probably change the orbit even more.
The orbital mechanics folks have seen orbital anomalies in comets that have been partially attributed to outgassing in particularly active regions on a comet, the rest can usually be blamed on Jupiter.
Come on folks! One guy starts spouting off about RedHat making exclusive contracts when there is absolutely NO evidence to suggest that this has happened, nor has there EVER been any indication from RedHat that they were interested in making any exclusive deals with anyone. Has anyone read any of the interviews and various articles with/from Bob Young?! Young, has stated several times that RedHat's intensions were not along these lines, and has given several good reasons for why RedHat couldn't get away with this kind of stunt even if they wanted to. If we have a bone to pick with anyone, it's Metroworks, not RedHat.
Frankly I think we need to take a good look at ourselves to see if we aren't suffering from paranoia. Think about it, we've been dealing with monopolistic technology companies for so long that the second one of our own starts to become successful, it automatically must mean that they are monopolistic too! Get Real!
I, for one, am not concerned about RedHat. If such things as RH is being accused of actually occur, most of us will move to another distro so fast it will make Bob Young's head spin...and he know's it.
Other companies targeting a specific distribution is cause for concern, but until the LSB gets out the door and people adhere to it, this is the kind of thing we're going to get. What else would you expect!?
But that's the rub though, isn't it? I don't have a problem with discussions about what kind of actions should be taken if our worst fears are realized. But in the mean time, there really isn't any good reason to trash RedHat for anything beyond the "I hate RedHat because of feature/bloatware/glibc/package x." (Which, by the way, I think are legitimate complaints.)
The only reason people are going after RH is because it's been successful. I would bet that if debian were the popular distribution right now, people would be going after debian in exactly the same way. This kind of bickering isn't constructive, it's destructive to the linux movement as a whole and hurtful to the guys at RedHat who have worked hard to make RedHat what it is (whether you like RH or not).
Until we have hard proof that RH is doing anything really wrong (aside from being successful), I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
True enough. But given RedHat's current track record, I think it's unlikely that they've been dishonest with respect to exclusive contracts. Nor has anyone come up with a cogent argument for why RedHat would go in this direction, it's been more FUD than facts as far as I've seen. Like I said, people see RedHat as becoming THE distribution of linux, and everyone starts freaking out as if it's the end of the freaking world. Geez, If that bothers you, go get Debian. I'd hate to see the reaction people would have if Caldera were in the same position as RedHat. At least with the proprietary stuff in Caldera, there would be a legitimate cause for concern. As it is, it's just a bunch of people with unsupported paranoid delusions.
If RH were going in a proprietary direction, why release rpm source code? Why support gnome in an open source fashion? Why even put thier distribution up for ftp? They could very well have decided to build a proprietary desktop, and then be in the exact same position as Trolltech. Proprietary and exlusive contracts just don't jibe with RedHat's current business model.
As for the IPO news, I'm not familiar with the process that one might have to go through to get an IPO. But it seems easily concievable that there could be some legitimate reasons for not making the news public until the time was right. Besides, was it really a surprise to anyone? Everyone knew it was going to happen sooner or later.
It just seems to me that everyone is so concerned about what RedHat could be doing, or what they could become, that nobody's paying any attention to what they are really doing....they are simply expanding their business. If that bothers people, then take your money elsewhere.
To my knowledge, relativity and qm have not been merged, that is the whole point of all the work that has been done on grand unified theories (guts).
You wouldn't happen to be from Fresno would you? People from Fresno might be able to confirm your theory. (Now that's an obscure reference, anyone get it? ;)
On unix, we already have something better than BBedit, it's called XEmacs. Believe me, if you like BBedit, you'll probably like XEmacs even better (I'm not dissing BBedit, it's a good tool, XEmacs just does pretty much everything BBedit does and more). As for GoLive, I can't comment, I've never used it.
I seriously doubt that we'll ever see a port of BBedit to unix due to the existence of XEmacs. A port to windows would be useful to a lot of people though.
I do have to laugh at your implication that all "cutting edge designers" use macs. That kind of statement is simply ignorant...or delusional.