Those quotes seem like a blatant, misleading scare tactic. Even if they're real, it seems like SCO is using them to hint at some sort of sinister infringement conspiracy. Despicable.
"Linux is a copy of UNIX. There is very little new stuff in Linux." (from link in parent post)
Suppose Stallman really DID say that. He would, of course, be referring to just the kernel, otherwise he would say GNU/Linux:) So what if Linux is a copy of UNIX? If I see a product I like and want to replicate its functionality, I'm free to do so as long as I don't use the original code! Heck, back in 3rd grade I wrote my own LOGO interpreter in GW-BASIC...
Re: I've used genetic algorithms
on
Digital Darwin
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· Score: 1
Exactly! Creationists seem to get hung up on this all the time.
A creationist (admittedly a fairly foolish one) told me, "Sure, dogs can evolve, but when have you ever seen a dog become something that is not a dog?" Well at what point do you consider it not to be a dog? It's just a convenient term.
What I told the creationist: Suppose a group of isolated dogs evolve genitals that physically don't couple with other "normal" dogs. Sure, we can still call them dogs, but these are clearly different species since there is NO WAY that they can naturally interbreed. If they continue to evolve separately, they may eventually diverge to the point that their common ancestry is unrecognizable.
Even a clear case of synchronically irreducible complexity, should one ever be found, is not sufficient to disprove evolution.
Consider the (silly) example of a creature whose head attaches to its body via a three-prong connector and socket, so that its head would literally fall off if either were not exactly the way it is. Assume the connector and socket to be irreducible.
One might claim that it is unlikely that this creature could have evolved because both the socket and the connector mutation would have had to appear simultaneously. But this is wrong: perhaps an earlier form of the organism had a different way to hold its head onto its body. Then the three prong connector appeared on the creature's neck due to a mutation, and proved beneficial because it allowed the creature to recharge from a wall socket.:-) Much later, the socket appeared at the top of the abdomen and the organisms were able to plug their heads into their abdomens! Then the old head-attachment mechanism was no longer needed, and gradually disappeared over many generations.
It sounds dumb, but I think similar arguments have been used to argue that the anatomy of a whale couldn't have evolved naturally, ignoring the fact that many of a whale ancestor's parts served different functions when they lived on land.
Re: I've used genetic algorithms
on
Digital Darwin
·
· Score: 1
Avida's digital organisms compete for CPU time in at least two ways, last time I looked:
Each organism is allocated a fixed number of CPU cycles to start out, so all other things being equal, more efficient programs (genomes) are better.
Organisms that learn to perform mathematical operations (such as addition, equality test, etc.) by processing random numbers receive extra CPU time (the actual amount of the reward is adjustable).
So the only resource that Avida organisms require is CPU time, which will allow them to reproduce faster than their neighbors if they are efficient. This is certainly quite simplistic. Nonetheless, I believe that Avidans' and real organisms' resource requirements have similar fundamental value and necessity, although they differ in complexity.
Also, evolving the ability to perform mathematical operations might be compared to "wet" organisms gaining the ability to extract energy from a food source. Adjusting the rewards for various operations over the course of an Avida run would then be analogous to varying the supply of a certain food source.
Language evolves. And terms for downtrodden groups often acquire negative meanings. The English word "villain" originally meant a peasant, a poor uneducated country person. Now it means a bad person and has utterly lost its earlier association.
So while using "gay" to mean "stupid" may be offensive to gay people, it's nothing new. And if it continues to be used in this way, people will probably find a new slang word to refer to homosexuals...
Hmm, regardless of what the author personally thinks of Gnutella, his paper is based on mathematics and logic which appear correct to me.
So if you accept his numbers on the bandwidth, number of users, etc., on the Gnutella network, then you must logically also accept his conclusion that your search will send 18 gigs across the network!
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
The whole thing sounds like a great idea, by I think that the 16mb Flash Card is ridiculous... a 2 or 3 gig hard drive probably is as cheap as the flash card in bulk, and having a hard drive would allow people to use it for something other than just net access.
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
Believe it or not, you CAN make web pages with LaTeX. There's a package called hyperref that allows you to make hyperlinks and all sorts of neat stuff. It works with teTeX under Linux, and many other versions of TeX.
If you then make your output a PDF file, or if you convert it to HTML with latex2html, then you can see the hyperlinks. You can also make hyper-tables-of-contents and indices and stuff like that.
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
My great grandma rented an AT&T phone for 70 years or so. Then when she died, the phone company demanded that my grandma give back the phone, by driving it out to some God-forsaken warehouse on the outskirts of New York City, otherwise they were gonna keep billing her estate for it. Isn't that just ridiculous?
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
I for one am confident that the "uneducated" majority will eventually realize that AMD is way better than Intel. I'm doing my part by trying to convince my friends, family, and boss to buy AMD. The only one I haven't yet won over is my boss... figures;-)
Five years ago I bought a Cyrix 486 clone, because it was the best I could afford... it wasn't great, but it was cheap, and I haven't bought an Intel since. My AMD K6-2 was as good as a Pentium II, and my AMD K6-3 is better than a Pentium III, plus I saved about $200 on it. What a long way AMD has come... when I bought the K6-2, it was being touted as a bare-bones processor for low end machines. Now AMD is clearly pulling ahead of Intel in the race for the best possible processor, and they are still cheaper!
As for Power PCs, there are two major problems with them: (1) Apple is the only manufacturer to adopt them heavily (2) Mac hardware is ridiculously overpriced. Now that Power PCs and x86s can both run Linux, I'd be happy to have a PPC system, except that I would pay way too much for peripherals. My roommate paid $30 for a mouse for his Mac and $100 for a CD-ROM drive, that is ridiculous!
Finally, I'd like to get an Alpha system if I can. I've heard they're super fast and pretty cheap and they can use most standard PC peripherals as far as I know... am I right about that?
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
I've been using Mandrake for about a year now and I've found that there is practically nothing not to like about it. It installs very easily, is easily adminable, and yet doesn't dumb down the system at all in my opinion. I occassionally use the graphical admin tools and they don't seem to interfere with console based configuration in any way.
Mandrake isn't just a good distro for newbies... I'm using it to run an IP masquerading router and web server (on an old Pentium!) and a pretty powerful development workstation as well. It seems to perform quite well in both functions.
I also appreciate the fact that Mandrake optimizes their RPMs for Pentium-class processors. I've noticed that the Pentium packages for GCC and other heavy number/text crunching programs tend to noticeably outperform the 386 packages on my system.
Another thing that Mandrake has really done well is hardware detection. I was amazed when I installed Mandrake 7.1 and didn't have to manually configure my Ultra/66 card, it was autodetected! The only things I wish they'd support better are my Lexmark 3200 printer and Aureal Vortex sound card:-(
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
I would be interested to know if you would support the federal government's adoption or development of open source or free software to be used in a wide variety of government programs.
Many of us in the open source community wonder if it's right or safe for a government to rely on a commercial vendor for its software needs, whether for word processing or email or space flight simulations. What especially concerns me is that vast amounts of government data may be stored in proprietary file formats which cannot be read or converted without the commercial software that created them. Thus the government can almost be held hostage by a commercial software vendor that refuses to describe its file formats or write a program to extract the data from them.
Government use of software is not too different from, say, an order for airplanes or a contract to build a block of offices. In these cases, the government would surely demand access to blueprints or information about parts and building materials. Imagine if Boeing delivered a new Air Force One with a "License Agreement" prohibiting mechanics from opening up the plane if it had engine trouble!
Why does our federal government not demand the same access to the source code of the software it uses?
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
First of all, I am sure that the air traffic control software is very large, but is it really boring for everyone? I'll bet there are many competent hackers out there who would be very interested in designing such a system. For me, writing kernels and device drivers sounds pretty boring, but Linux has been developed nonetheless.
Secondly, do people develop better code for "large boring systems" just because they are paid for it? I guess that's an open question since, unfortunately, we have no basis for comparison in most of these cases. My guess is that if and when an open source ATC system is developed, it will be so good that governments worldwide will flock to it.
You guessed right, jamie. When the French text of the proposed law refers to "personne physique ou morale", this means "a human being or a collective entity recognized as such for certain legal purposes." Basically, the law says that any person, organization, or corporation has the right to develop compatible software.
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Those quotes seem like a blatant, misleading scare tactic. Even if they're real, it seems like SCO is using them to hint at some sort of sinister infringement conspiracy. Despicable.
"Linux is a copy of UNIX. There is very little new stuff in Linux." (from link in parent post)
Suppose Stallman really DID say that. He would, of course, be referring to just the kernel, otherwise he would say GNU/Linux :) So what if Linux is a copy of UNIX? If I see a product I like and want to replicate its functionality, I'm free to do so as long as I don't use the original code! Heck, back in 3rd grade I wrote my own LOGO interpreter in GW-BASIC...
Exactly! Creationists seem to get hung up on this all the time.
A creationist (admittedly a fairly foolish one) told me, "Sure, dogs can evolve, but when have you ever seen a dog become something that is not a dog?" Well at what point do you consider it not to be a dog? It's just a convenient term.
What I told the creationist: Suppose a group of isolated dogs evolve genitals that physically don't couple with other "normal" dogs. Sure, we can still call them dogs, but these are clearly different species since there is NO WAY that they can naturally interbreed. If they continue to evolve separately, they may eventually diverge to the point that their common ancestry is unrecognizable.
Even a clear case of synchronically irreducible complexity, should one ever be found, is not sufficient to disprove evolution.
:-) Much later, the socket appeared at the top of the abdomen and the organisms were able to plug their heads into their abdomens! Then the old head-attachment mechanism was no longer needed, and gradually disappeared over many generations.
Consider the (silly) example of a creature whose head attaches to its body via a three-prong connector and socket, so that its head would literally fall off if either were not exactly the way it is. Assume the connector and socket to be irreducible.
One might claim that it is unlikely that this creature could have evolved because both the socket and the connector mutation would have had to appear simultaneously. But this is wrong: perhaps an earlier form of the organism had a different way to hold its head onto its body. Then the three prong connector appeared on the creature's neck due to a mutation, and proved beneficial because it allowed the creature to recharge from a wall socket.
It sounds dumb, but I think similar arguments have been used to argue that the anatomy of a whale couldn't have evolved naturally, ignoring the fact that many of a whale ancestor's parts served different functions when they lived on land.
So the only resource that Avida organisms require is CPU time, which will allow them to reproduce faster than their neighbors if they are efficient. This is certainly quite simplistic. Nonetheless, I believe that Avidans' and real organisms' resource requirements have similar fundamental value and necessity, although they differ in complexity.
Also, evolving the ability to perform mathematical operations might be compared to "wet" organisms gaining the ability to extract energy from a food source. Adjusting the rewards for various operations over the course of an Avida run would then be analogous to varying the supply of a certain food source.
Language evolves. And terms for downtrodden groups often acquire negative meanings. The English word "villain" originally meant a peasant, a poor uneducated country person. Now it means a bad person and has utterly lost its earlier association.
So while using "gay" to mean "stupid" may be offensive to gay people, it's nothing new. And if it continues to be used in this way, people will probably find a new slang word to refer to homosexuals...
Just my $0.02 as a linguist...
First post :)
So if you accept his numbers on the bandwidth, number of users, etc., on the Gnutella network, then you must logically also accept his conclusion that your search will send 18 gigs across the network!
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
If you then make your output a PDF file, or if you convert it to HTML with latex2html, then you can see the hyperlinks. You can also make hyper-tables-of-contents and indices and stuff like that.
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
Five years ago I bought a Cyrix 486 clone, because it was the best I could afford ... it wasn't great, but it was cheap, and I haven't bought an Intel since. My AMD K6-2 was as good as a Pentium II, and my AMD K6-3 is better than a Pentium III, plus I saved about $200 on it. What a long way AMD has come ... when I bought the K6-2, it was being touted as a bare-bones processor for low end machines. Now AMD is clearly pulling ahead of Intel in the race for the best possible processor, and they are still cheaper!
As for Power PCs, there are two major problems with them: (1) Apple is the only manufacturer to adopt them heavily (2) Mac hardware is ridiculously overpriced. Now that Power PCs and x86s can both run Linux, I'd be happy to have a PPC system, except that I would pay way too much for peripherals. My roommate paid $30 for a mouse for his Mac and $100 for a CD-ROM drive, that is ridiculous!
Finally, I'd like to get an Alpha system if I can. I've heard they're super fast and pretty cheap and they can use most standard PC peripherals as far as I know ... am I right about that?
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
Mandrake isn't just a good distro for newbies ... I'm using it to run an IP masquerading router and web server (on an old Pentium!) and a pretty powerful development workstation as well. It seems to perform quite well in both functions.
I also appreciate the fact that Mandrake optimizes their RPMs for Pentium-class processors. I've noticed that the Pentium packages for GCC and other heavy number/text crunching programs tend to noticeably outperform the 386 packages on my system.
Another thing that Mandrake has really done well is hardware detection. I was amazed when I installed Mandrake 7.1 and didn't have to manually configure my Ultra/66 card, it was autodetected! The only things I wish they'd support better are my Lexmark 3200 printer and Aureal Vortex sound card :-(
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
Many of us in the open source community wonder if it's right or safe for a government to rely on a commercial vendor for its software needs, whether for word processing or email or space flight simulations. What especially concerns me is that vast amounts of government data may be stored in proprietary file formats which cannot be read or converted without the commercial software that created them. Thus the government can almost be held hostage by a commercial software vendor that refuses to describe its file formats or write a program to extract the data from them.
Government use of software is not too different from, say, an order for airplanes or a contract to build a block of offices. In these cases, the government would surely demand access to blueprints or information about parts and building materials. Imagine if Boeing delivered a new Air Force One with a "License Agreement" prohibiting mechanics from opening up the plane if it had engine trouble!
Why does our federal government not demand the same access to the source code of the software it uses?
"If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
Secondly, do people develop better code for "large boring systems" just because they are paid for it? I guess that's an open question since, unfortunately, we have no basis for comparison in most of these cases. My guess is that if and when an open source ATC system is developed, it will be so good that governments worldwide will flock to it.
King Phillip Came Over From Granada, Spain worked for me ... I guess the whole conquistador idea kind of clicked in my mind.
You guessed right, jamie. When the French text of the proposed law refers to "personne physique ou morale", this means "a human being or a collective entity recognized as such for certain legal purposes." Basically, the law says that any person, organization, or corporation has the right to develop compatible software.