Re Clarke's First Law, I think it can be applied with some rational analysis rather than just being used as a blunt instrument to essentially claim that "anything's possible".
Most often, the distinguished but elderly scientists are looking at a problem too narrowly, in the context of their own experience, and the breakthrough comes from solving the problem in a different way. In this case, the original poster is almost certainly correct in his specific claim, that it's not going to be possible to read much of use from "brainwaves", i.e. from the external electrical manifestations of the brain's inner processes. That's a bit like trying to debug a program on your Pentium 4 by analyzing its heat signature.
Perhaps someone will come up with a different way of monitoring brain activity than e.g. electrodes on the skull. It would probably have to involve implants of some kind. Short of that, I think the distinguished elderly scientists would be right to say "it's never going to work". To borrow a Clintonism, it depends on what the meaning of the word "it" is...
BTW, I should point out that I am neither distinguished nor elderly, therefore the above claims are exempt from Clarke's law and thus must be true!
Funny, I was just thinking how maybe McCartney wasn't the total pop airhead I always thought he was... Nah, I must be wrong!
Still, there is a kind of genius in being able to consistently create those "cheesy mindless" songs. The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson come to mind. If he hadn't teamed up with McCartney, Lennon might not have received nearly as much exposure. (Then again, maybe he'd still be alive...)
Buy her a ring with an embedded MP3 player which plays a single song, over and over:
I'll buy you a diamond ring my friend if it makes you feel alright
I'll get you anything my friend if it makes you feel alright
'cause I don't care too much for money, and money can't buy me love
...
Say you don't need no diamond ring and I'll be satisfied
Tell me that you want the kind of thing that money just can't buy
I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love
For extra points, throw in an extra verse or two about caring for free software... I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Anyone want to take up the challenge?
Isn't that based on the concept that the woman didn't want to get laid?
Yes, but that's a valid concept. Sociobiologically speaking, woman are necessarily much more selective than men about getting laid, since it "costs" them more - a bit of pre-contraceptive logic which has not yet been bred out of the human genetic makeup. The usual way to be selective is to demand proof of worth and commitment, both of which have been socially encoded in diamond rings (by a DeBeers ad campaign;)
I have a Twiddler 2, and I've never been able to type much more than about 13 wpm with it. My normal speed on a Qwerty is closer to 60 wpm.
Although for wearable applications, the Twiddler is no doubt one of the best of its kind, the criticism mentioned in the article is very valid: with a Twiddler, you're holding the keyboard in place with your palm, your thumb, and a strap around the back of your hand. Pressing the control/shift/alt/num keys - which requires use of the thumb that also helps hold your Twiddler in place - is a problem. To avoid having to deal with getting finger positions back to optimal, I often simply use my other hand. So in practice, the Twiddler is sorta one-handed, and pretty slow. I'm sure there are people plenty faster than me on it, but I doubt the average user will be able to achieve even half the performance of a Qwerty (considering you only use one hand, that's a fairly safe assumption).
It's not clear that this new keyboard will improve on all of this, but the point is there's certainly room for improvement.
BTW, the Twiddler2 (latest available version) does not have a gyroscopic mouse, afaik. It's simply the IBM-style eraser mouse (TouchPoint?)
This is easy - innovate. Don't just buy new hardware and upgrade software, do something that IMPROVES life at the office.
Absolutely. A big problem with the dot-com boom was overambition - people thought (or claimed) they could do much more with the technology, in much too short a space of time. Only the technology wasn't quite ready to deliver everything that was being imagined, at the flick of a switch. I mean, we're still dealing with HTTP and things like SOAP as state of the art in protocols, for example (similar examples abound). In many senses, software technology is still in the dark ages, having only recently moved out of the stone age (adjust metaphor to taste).
Before the dot-com boom, some of the most successful companies were those which had used IT to improve services, reduce costs, and increase scalability. There's still enormous opportunity for that kind of thing at most companies: the ones who are truly using technology to best advantage are rare.
So, with a couple of exceptions, the fundamentals of the tech business have barely changed. All that's really changed is the unrealistic expectations created by the boom. The exceptions I mentioned are PC manufacturers, who are selling into a flattening market and can no longer rely on their customers to upgrade as constantly, due to the unprecedented power of the hardware; and OS manufacturers (i.e. Microsoft), who are going to have increasing difficulty convincing people to shell out regular bucks just to keep their PCs running. But the fact that these things are changing could ultimately become an enabling factor: it means that there's a level of the industry that is beginning to mature, and hopefully stabilize, which might provide a base that can be leveraged more successfully than was previously possible. We're still a ways from that, though - the Internet has had a large impact, and a lot of new things have to be assimilated and integrated. These things happen much, much slower than many people are willing to understand or concede.
Nothing's going to happen in a big hurry, no matter how much money is thrown at it. The dot-com boom, in a sense, was venture capitalists attempting to disprove Brooks' Mythical Man Month concept, that you can make technology happen faster by throwing more money at it. It certainly helped to build an infrastructure quickly, and a few businesses of questionable viability, but now we're going to need time to take full advantage of what's been achieved, at a more normal pace. We were going nowhere fast, and now we've gotten there - time to slow down and do something useful.
Transmeta had a demo which executed Java bytecode directly on a Crusoe CPU, I'm too lazy to look for a link right now. It didn't go anywhere commercially, afaik.
Also, Sun has made chips that run Java bytecode, iirc "picoJava" was one such effort.
Right now, though, if you're an OEM designer, there's more support for traditional architectures, in terms of development tools and the functionality provided by traditional embedded operating environments. Performance is not usually such an issue that a JPM would be a necessity to the success of a project. In short, there just isn't a good enough reason to make the leap. It might become more viable in future, as tool support and the capabilities of the Java "platform" converge to provide everything that's needed.
I think if someone spelled that out for Pres.Bush his head would rotate 720 degrees and pop off as he tries to decide if he's "with the terrorists" or against them.
This raises an interesting constitutional question: does Pres. Bush have the constitutional authority to issue an order to have himself bombed???
How does being an aethist make you unAmerican? I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts on this.
Sorry to break it to ya, but this has recently been proven an incontrovertible fact. By far the majority seems to agree that the USA is "one nation under God" - or if they don't agree, they're too scared to say so. Therefore, if you're an atheist, you can't be part of the nation, so you're un-American.
BTW, I'm an atheist, and not an American, but I live in the USA. I was rather disappointed to see the selfish "my religion wins because there are more of us than you" attitude that prevailed in the recent "debate". Tolerance and equality is well and good as long as it doesn't interfere with the national superstition.
P.S. the original post was making the atheist=unamerican claim ironically, as others have pointed out.
I type at 90+ WPM as certified by the State of California.
Finally, the mystery of trolls explained - government employees. Your postings on/. a pitiful cry for help, a plea for rescue from your truly hellish existence. Our hearts go out to you. It is a far, far better thing that you do now, than I have ever done...
I'm no artist, but even for pretty basic web page editing, or photo or video viewing, laptop LCDs tend to suck - minor color differences can completely disappear. If you want to simulate being subtly color blind, using an LCD will do it.
Sheesh, you didn't say anything about the FMA Copilot in your earlier messages. You implied that a standard X-Cell with heading hold gyro was as good as the Draganflyer, and that's what I was taking issue with. In fact, you said you'd been flying "for 8 years now. This is nothing new." That's incredibly misleading, because 8 years ago there was nothing like the FMA Copilot available to ordinary hobbyists - it came out within the past year or so, afaik. The Draganflyer did too.
I wasn't trying to say that the Draganflyer guys invented the idea of stabilization, but the fact is that most R/C helis today have no such technology.
In case you're just not understanding what the DraganFlyer does, you can think of it like your heading-hold gyro, but applied to more dimensions. It uses piezo gyros in multiple dimensions, in a similar way to what the FMA Copilot does using infrared differential.
In addition to that, the DraganFlyer's four rotor design and computerized control mechanism means that flying is intuitive - you don't have to deal with collective, pitch, etc. to make it fly, the computer translates the direction you want to go into the appropriate instructions for the aircraft.
In short, it seems you just haven't yet understood what the Draganflyer does. Hope I've cleared it up a bit for you.
Yeah, way to totally avoid the point. In real life, there's usually wind, which your X-Cell can't deal with without inputs. I'll rephrase. Would you hand your controls over to a random passer-by with no flight experience, to try out? No? Didn't think so. That's why the Draganflyer is something new, because you can actually do that.
And the robotics professor who tried controlling it by computer really only got it to fly up 15 centimeters and land without help. That was a bit disappointing, as I'd love to work on programming one of these puppies.
The Draganflyer is limited to 5 minutes because it's so small and light, and runs on batteries. If you go with one of the more established conventional helis, you can get longer flight times. The longest times are still achieved by combustion engines, using either model fuel or regular gasoline, and it's quite easy to achieve more than 15 minutes with one of those.
However, I don't think it's any accident that the Draganflyer has an unconventional four-rotor design - this allows it to avoid many of the instabilities that a regular helicopter suffers from, and probably makes the job of programming an autopilot for it much easier.
Still, computer-controlled regular helis, even fully autonomous ones, are possible and have been done. There's even an annual International Aerial Robotics Contest. The site doesn't seem to be responding right now (secondary/. effect?), but here's one of the previous entries, the MIT/Draper Autonomous Helicopter Project.
In the past, these have been pretty expensive devices to put together. Nowadays, as the Draganflyer proves, it's not as expensive as it used to be. The piezo gyros are pretty cheap - in the $100 range for a decent one. Building your own computer-controlled helicopter is definitely doable. The Sourceforge project is probably a good place to start, especially since it'll be a lot easier if it's not a one-man project.
As you know, but most Slashdot readers probably don't, to fly a standard R/C heli, you first have to learn to hover, which is a surprisingly difficult operation to master - it's sometimes compared to balancing on the top of a ball, you have to continually make adjustments to avoid losing stability. How long does your X-Cell maintain a hover if you let go of the sticks? Tell you what, I'll give you a dollar for every second over 30 seconds that you can avoid controlling it without losing a stable hover. (By picking 30 seconds, I'm being incredibly conservative about not having to pay up - 5 seconds would probably be pretty safe.)
What's being claimed for the Draganflyer is claiming is that hovering is essentially taken care of by the onboard processors, and all a novice flyer has to learn to do is move the joysticks in the direction they want to go. Compared to flying a regular R/C helicopter, this is trivial to learn. With a R/C heli, you have to understand quite a lot about how the collective, the "ailerons", the main rotor pitch, and the tail rotor pitch all interact in order to learn to fly, and you certainly can't just point it in the direction you want it to go and expect it to go there. With the Draganflyer, you apparently can.
This has already been answered in this thread - the thing about companies not wanting to use the word "small". The problem with 7-Eleven is that the "Gulp" really should be called the "Small Gulp". Then you would have:
Small Gulp: 16 oz
Gulp: 32 oz
Super Gulp: 44 oz
Double Gulp: 64 oz
...which makes more sense. The problem with this is twofold: you're not allowed to use the word "small", and using the word "big" as much as possible is good. So you end up with something that doesn't make sense. Marketing beats out technical every time...
I thought that was "nee Adabas D", where Adabas D was the non-mainframe little brother of big Adabas. Since it was originally developed by Nixdorf and sold as DDB/4, it didn't even share a codebase with big Adabas.
I'd take Sapdb over MySQL any day, and probably over Postgres too.
Where would you fit Interbase/Firebird into this picture? Just curious.
I come here the same reason why people buy Weekly World News. Most the shit is stupid, but it's entertaining. This isn't a news site. If it was, they'd employ journalists, right?
And you deny having a preconceived position? The above is it. I'll summarize my position: you have an amazingly narrow view of what Slashdot has to offer. It doesn't matter how long you've been around, if the above is what you think of it, then that's what you'll get out of it, and that's what happens with prejudices and preconceived ideas. Perhaps your ideas about Slashdot come from when it was small - but open your eyes and look around you now.
What I've gotten out of Slashdot are useful references and insight relating to my professional life (software development), to politics and law, to theoretical topics of interest to me, and quite a bit else. Slashdot adds value to what you get from the usual news media because *some* of the people who post here actually know what they're talking about. Yeah, you have to filter it - the "weekly world news" stuff you talk about, I mostly gloss over. It sounds like that's all you focus on.
There've been some excellent threads here just in the past few days which have been very informative, on a variety of topics. The click-through licensing article comes to mind, and the research at Brookhaven, which included postings from at least one of the researchers.
I have another exercise for you: the next time you're reading a/. article (and its comments) about a serious topic, as opposed to the latest case mod, try ignoring the trolls and flamebait, and look instead for comments which give you information that you might not otherwise have known about. Come back to me once you've done that a few times and let me know if you still think this is nothing but the weekly world news.
To relate this back to the point about the regular news media, the point about Slashdot is that biases and misleading articles are often exposed by the comments here, and in many cases, if the subject in question is something unfamiliar, the issues raised would not otherwise have been obvious. With the mainstream news media, you can have a similar experience if you discuss it with a friend who's knowledgeable in areas you aren't, but no-one has enough friends to give the perspective that a site like/. can provide. That's what allows/. to be a useful source of news, better, as I have pointed out, than some of the mainstream media.
BTW, where this all started was the idea that real news involves fact, not opinion. I still laugh when I think about that, since probably over 95% of what you see in the mainstream news media is opinion-based, and clear distinctions are not usually drawn. Criticizing/. for using the word "News" is just silly, and shows a total lack of understanding and thought about what "news" is.
I don't really know how good BEA's reason to be scared is, I was really just saying that Dietzen's statement seems to demonstrate that they're scared, or perhaps in denial.
The problem with Dietzen's statement is that it's not really plausible - he's saying that BEA's OK because Microsoft won't find a sweet spot in the application server space. The obvious problem with this is that Microsoft will certainly find a sweet spot in that space, it's just a matter of time. So Dietzen's statement, instead of showing why BEA has a future, actually calls its future into question. He's drawing attention to their weakness, which seems like a questionable strategy. Of course, the weakness is fairly obvious, but if that's the best defense he can come up with, then man, BEA's toast!!
I'm not saying it's inevitable that BEA will be trampled by Microsoft, but a comment like Dietzen's seems pretty revealing as to what he thinks of their prospects.
It seems that one of the most vexing business challenges of this age is "how do we compete in the same market as Microsoft?"
I agree - as a software developer, I've run into this issue personally. It's a big reason I focus heavily on free software, where appropriate, and recommend it to my clients, many of whom have been burned by Microsoft's shifts in direction, lack of standards, and lack of openness. In a sense, Microsoft has been one the best motivating factors for free software. I doubt, for example, that IBM would be doing so much free software if it weren't for Microsoft.
In a way, BEA is actually caught between Microsoft and free software. Open source J2EE servers are pretty much in their infancy, but the problem for BEA is that the "intellectual property" inherent in today's application servers is really not that difficult to duplicate. So you get free servers like JBoss, and cheap servers (with source) like Resin. I doubt many BEA clients are quite ready to jump ship today, but over time, the standardization and network effects of free & open solutions can become quite compelling. I don't think time is on BEA's side...
Dietzen's comment is aimed at his customers and investors, not at Microsoft. He's simply saying "I hereby concede everything that doesn't matter to us", in a rather pathetic and transparent attempt to stake out a space within which BEA can still matter.
The fact that he's coming out and making such a statement so early in the.NET lifecycle is presumably an indication that BEA is under big pressure from customers and/or investors to come up with a coherent story of where BEA will fit into the brave new.NET.
I'm not sure that laying your head down dog-like on the ground and exposing your jugular to Microsoft is really the way to stay in business, though. BEA may think Microsoft doesn't have a sweet spot on the server, but that's a bit like the old joke about dinosaurs: it's OK, dinosaurs won't eat you, they're herbivores. Yeah, but do the dinosaurs know that? I don't think Microsoft knows it's not supposed to have a sweet spot on servers, and Dietzen's position isn't going to make a whit of difference to Microsoft.
I find MathCad really useful, even for day to day calculations. It supports units, so you can type in "5 mi/3 sec =" and ask for the answer in mph (or whatever). [If only NASA's Mars team had used it...]
It also licenses Maple (or parts thereof), so it can solve equations symbolically.
MathCAD is also the cheapest program of its kind. There are free tools, but none of them have GUIs like MathCAD, and dealing with complex mathematical formulae is one place where a GUI can make a big difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Most often, the distinguished but elderly scientists are looking at a problem too narrowly, in the context of their own experience, and the breakthrough comes from solving the problem in a different way. In this case, the original poster is almost certainly correct in his specific claim, that it's not going to be possible to read much of use from "brainwaves", i.e. from the external electrical manifestations of the brain's inner processes. That's a bit like trying to debug a program on your Pentium 4 by analyzing its heat signature.
Perhaps someone will come up with a different way of monitoring brain activity than e.g. electrodes on the skull. It would probably have to involve implants of some kind. Short of that, I think the distinguished elderly scientists would be right to say "it's never going to work". To borrow a Clintonism, it depends on what the meaning of the word "it" is...
BTW, I should point out that I am neither distinguished nor elderly, therefore the above claims are exempt from Clarke's law and thus must be true!
Still, there is a kind of genius in being able to consistently create those "cheesy mindless" songs. The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson come to mind. If he hadn't teamed up with McCartney, Lennon might not have received nearly as much exposure. (Then again, maybe he'd still be alive...)
Thanks. If I'd thought about it, I knew that! The sentiment of anti-diamond bit somehow seems more Lennonish...
Yes, but that's a valid concept. Sociobiologically speaking, woman are necessarily much more selective than men about getting laid, since it "costs" them more - a bit of pre-contraceptive logic which has not yet been bred out of the human genetic makeup. The usual way to be selective is to demand proof of worth and commitment, both of which have been socially encoded in diamond rings (by a DeBeers ad campaign ;)
The problem with your bug is that there's not a developer alive who can fix that one, no matter how 1337 their coding skillz may be...
Although for wearable applications, the Twiddler is no doubt one of the best of its kind, the criticism mentioned in the article is very valid: with a Twiddler, you're holding the keyboard in place with your palm, your thumb, and a strap around the back of your hand. Pressing the control/shift/alt/num keys - which requires use of the thumb that also helps hold your Twiddler in place - is a problem. To avoid having to deal with getting finger positions back to optimal, I often simply use my other hand. So in practice, the Twiddler is sorta one-handed, and pretty slow. I'm sure there are people plenty faster than me on it, but I doubt the average user will be able to achieve even half the performance of a Qwerty (considering you only use one hand, that's a fairly safe assumption).
It's not clear that this new keyboard will improve on all of this, but the point is there's certainly room for improvement.
BTW, the Twiddler2 (latest available version) does not have a gyroscopic mouse, afaik. It's simply the IBM-style eraser mouse (TouchPoint?)
Absolutely. A big problem with the dot-com boom was overambition - people thought (or claimed) they could do much more with the technology, in much too short a space of time. Only the technology wasn't quite ready to deliver everything that was being imagined, at the flick of a switch. I mean, we're still dealing with HTTP and things like SOAP as state of the art in protocols, for example (similar examples abound). In many senses, software technology is still in the dark ages, having only recently moved out of the stone age (adjust metaphor to taste).
Before the dot-com boom, some of the most successful companies were those which had used IT to improve services, reduce costs, and increase scalability. There's still enormous opportunity for that kind of thing at most companies: the ones who are truly using technology to best advantage are rare.
So, with a couple of exceptions, the fundamentals of the tech business have barely changed. All that's really changed is the unrealistic expectations created by the boom. The exceptions I mentioned are PC manufacturers, who are selling into a flattening market and can no longer rely on their customers to upgrade as constantly, due to the unprecedented power of the hardware; and OS manufacturers (i.e. Microsoft), who are going to have increasing difficulty convincing people to shell out regular bucks just to keep their PCs running. But the fact that these things are changing could ultimately become an enabling factor: it means that there's a level of the industry that is beginning to mature, and hopefully stabilize, which might provide a base that can be leveraged more successfully than was previously possible. We're still a ways from that, though - the Internet has had a large impact, and a lot of new things have to be assimilated and integrated. These things happen much, much slower than many people are willing to understand or concede.
Nothing's going to happen in a big hurry, no matter how much money is thrown at it. The dot-com boom, in a sense, was venture capitalists attempting to disprove Brooks' Mythical Man Month concept, that you can make technology happen faster by throwing more money at it. It certainly helped to build an infrastructure quickly, and a few businesses of questionable viability, but now we're going to need time to take full advantage of what's been achieved, at a more normal pace. We were going nowhere fast, and now we've gotten there - time to slow down and do something useful.
Also, Sun has made chips that run Java bytecode, iirc "picoJava" was one such effort.
Right now, though, if you're an OEM designer, there's more support for traditional architectures, in terms of development tools and the functionality provided by traditional embedded operating environments. Performance is not usually such an issue that a JPM would be a necessity to the success of a project. In short, there just isn't a good enough reason to make the leap. It might become more viable in future, as tool support and the capabilities of the Java "platform" converge to provide everything that's needed.
This raises an interesting constitutional question: does Pres. Bush have the constitutional authority to issue an order to have himself bombed???
Sorry to break it to ya, but this has recently been proven an incontrovertible fact. By far the majority seems to agree that the USA is "one nation under God" - or if they don't agree, they're too scared to say so. Therefore, if you're an atheist, you can't be part of the nation, so you're un-American.
BTW, I'm an atheist, and not an American, but I live in the USA. I was rather disappointed to see the selfish "my religion wins because there are more of us than you" attitude that prevailed in the recent "debate". Tolerance and equality is well and good as long as it doesn't interfere with the national superstition.
P.S. the original post was making the atheist=unamerican claim ironically, as others have pointed out.
Finally, the mystery of trolls explained - government employees. Your postings on /. a pitiful cry for help, a plea for rescue from your truly hellish existence. Our hearts go out to you. It is a far, far better thing that you do now, than I have ever done...
I wasn't trying to say that the Draganflyer guys invented the idea of stabilization, but the fact is that most R/C helis today have no such technology.
In case you're just not understanding what the DraganFlyer does, you can think of it like your heading-hold gyro, but applied to more dimensions. It uses piezo gyros in multiple dimensions, in a similar way to what the FMA Copilot does using infrared differential.
In addition to that, the DraganFlyer's four rotor design and computerized control mechanism means that flying is intuitive - you don't have to deal with collective, pitch, etc. to make it fly, the computer translates the direction you want to go into the appropriate instructions for the aircraft.
In short, it seems you just haven't yet understood what the Draganflyer does. Hope I've cleared it up a bit for you.
Yes. I've also written code to do stabilization on a Scenix microprocessor.
Yeah, way to totally avoid the point. In real life, there's usually wind, which your X-Cell can't deal with without inputs. I'll rephrase. Would you hand your controls over to a random passer-by with no flight experience, to try out? No? Didn't think so. That's why the Draganflyer is something new, because you can actually do that.
Others have already pointed out the open source Autopilot project.
The Draganflyer is limited to 5 minutes because it's so small and light, and runs on batteries. If you go with one of the more established conventional helis, you can get longer flight times. The longest times are still achieved by combustion engines, using either model fuel or regular gasoline, and it's quite easy to achieve more than 15 minutes with one of those.
However, I don't think it's any accident that the Draganflyer has an unconventional four-rotor design - this allows it to avoid many of the instabilities that a regular helicopter suffers from, and probably makes the job of programming an autopilot for it much easier.
Still, computer-controlled regular helis, even fully autonomous ones, are possible and have been done. There's even an annual International Aerial Robotics Contest. The site doesn't seem to be responding right now (secondary /. effect?), but here's one of the previous entries, the MIT/Draper Autonomous Helicopter Project.
In the past, these have been pretty expensive devices to put together. Nowadays, as the Draganflyer proves, it's not as expensive as it used to be. The piezo gyros are pretty cheap - in the $100 range for a decent one. Building your own computer-controlled helicopter is definitely doable. The Sourceforge project is probably a good place to start, especially since it'll be a lot easier if it's not a one-man project.
What's being claimed for the Draganflyer is claiming is that hovering is essentially taken care of by the onboard processors, and all a novice flyer has to learn to do is move the joysticks in the direction they want to go. Compared to flying a regular R/C helicopter, this is trivial to learn. With a R/C heli, you have to understand quite a lot about how the collective, the "ailerons", the main rotor pitch, and the tail rotor pitch all interact in order to learn to fly, and you certainly can't just point it in the direction you want it to go and expect it to go there. With the Draganflyer, you apparently can.
I thought that was "nee Adabas D", where Adabas D was the non-mainframe little brother of big Adabas. Since it was originally developed by Nixdorf and sold as DDB/4, it didn't even share a codebase with big Adabas.
I'd take Sapdb over MySQL any day, and probably over Postgres too.
Where would you fit Interbase/Firebird into this picture? Just curious.
Thanks!
And you deny having a preconceived position? The above is it. I'll summarize my position: you have an amazingly narrow view of what Slashdot has to offer. It doesn't matter how long you've been around, if the above is what you think of it, then that's what you'll get out of it, and that's what happens with prejudices and preconceived ideas. Perhaps your ideas about Slashdot come from when it was small - but open your eyes and look around you now.
What I've gotten out of Slashdot are useful references and insight relating to my professional life (software development), to politics and law, to theoretical topics of interest to me, and quite a bit else. Slashdot adds value to what you get from the usual news media because *some* of the people who post here actually know what they're talking about. Yeah, you have to filter it - the "weekly world news" stuff you talk about, I mostly gloss over. It sounds like that's all you focus on.
There've been some excellent threads here just in the past few days which have been very informative, on a variety of topics. The click-through licensing article comes to mind, and the research at Brookhaven, which included postings from at least one of the researchers.
I have another exercise for you: the next time you're reading a /. article (and its comments) about a serious topic, as opposed to the latest case mod, try ignoring the trolls and flamebait, and look instead for comments which give you information that you might not otherwise have known about. Come back to me once you've done that a few times and let me know if you still think this is nothing but the weekly world news.
To relate this back to the point about the regular news media, the point about Slashdot is that biases and misleading articles are often exposed by the comments here, and in many cases, if the subject in question is something unfamiliar, the issues raised would not otherwise have been obvious. With the mainstream news media, you can have a similar experience if you discuss it with a friend who's knowledgeable in areas you aren't, but no-one has enough friends to give the perspective that a site like /. can provide. That's what allows /. to be a useful source of news, better, as I have pointed out, than some of the mainstream media.
BTW, where this all started was the idea that real news involves fact, not opinion. I still laugh when I think about that, since probably over 95% of what you see in the mainstream news media is opinion-based, and clear distinctions are not usually drawn. Criticizing /. for using the word "News" is just silly, and shows a total lack of understanding and thought about what "news" is.
The problem with Dietzen's statement is that it's not really plausible - he's saying that BEA's OK because Microsoft won't find a sweet spot in the application server space. The obvious problem with this is that Microsoft will certainly find a sweet spot in that space, it's just a matter of time. So Dietzen's statement, instead of showing why BEA has a future, actually calls its future into question. He's drawing attention to their weakness, which seems like a questionable strategy. Of course, the weakness is fairly obvious, but if that's the best defense he can come up with, then man, BEA's toast!!
I'm not saying it's inevitable that BEA will be trampled by Microsoft, but a comment like Dietzen's seems pretty revealing as to what he thinks of their prospects.
It seems that one of the most vexing business challenges of this age is "how do we compete in the same market as Microsoft?"
I agree - as a software developer, I've run into this issue personally. It's a big reason I focus heavily on free software, where appropriate, and recommend it to my clients, many of whom have been burned by Microsoft's shifts in direction, lack of standards, and lack of openness. In a sense, Microsoft has been one the best motivating factors for free software. I doubt, for example, that IBM would be doing so much free software if it weren't for Microsoft.
In a way, BEA is actually caught between Microsoft and free software. Open source J2EE servers are pretty much in their infancy, but the problem for BEA is that the "intellectual property" inherent in today's application servers is really not that difficult to duplicate. So you get free servers like JBoss, and cheap servers (with source) like Resin. I doubt many BEA clients are quite ready to jump ship today, but over time, the standardization and network effects of free & open solutions can become quite compelling. I don't think time is on BEA's side...
The fact that he's coming out and making such a statement so early in the .NET lifecycle is presumably an indication that BEA is under big pressure from customers and/or investors to come up with a coherent story of where BEA will fit into the brave new .NET.
I'm not sure that laying your head down dog-like on the ground and exposing your jugular to Microsoft is really the way to stay in business, though. BEA may think Microsoft doesn't have a sweet spot on the server, but that's a bit like the old joke about dinosaurs: it's OK, dinosaurs won't eat you, they're herbivores. Yeah, but do the dinosaurs know that? I don't think Microsoft knows it's not supposed to have a sweet spot on servers, and Dietzen's position isn't going to make a whit of difference to Microsoft.
It also licenses Maple (or parts thereof), so it can solve equations symbolically.
MathCAD is also the cheapest program of its kind. There are free tools, but none of them have GUIs like MathCAD, and dealing with complex mathematical formulae is one place where a GUI can make a big difference.