I'm not saying whether or not I agree with that, but that's the way it is.
No, it is not. Research is expensive, but a lot of that is already paid for by taxes. Furthermore, the resulting medicines are themselves very profitable and expensive, and a lot of that profit is, again, derived from the government.
Additionally, market forces aren't working: profitable drugs (the ones drug companies have an incentive to develop) are not the drugs that people actually need. Drug companies love to develop drugs that reduce the symptoms of uncurable diseases and need to be taken for life; the drugs we actually need are drugs that cure diseases with a single dose. They also prefer to develop lifestyle drugs and drugs for common but harmless ailments, instead of developing drugs for curing serious disease.
According to them, without patents, there would be no research and progress in this field whatsoever.
We'd have to increase public funding for research and clinical trials somewhat, but on balance, we'd pay a lot less and get better drugs.
The market works for a lot of things, but it doesn't work well for either research or drugs.
The last 2 are not covered by Windows but because its already got the marketshare then the apps are easy to find. Not trying to troll but that is why it does "just work", even with bugs and holes aplenty.
That's not my experience. I just spent hours reinstalling my laptop, and very little "just worked". And screen resolution, wireless networks and audio settings in particular remain a game of chance: sometimes they work, sometimes they fail mysteriously, both because of bad drivers and because of pathetically bad user interfaces.
On drivers, screen, audio, and hardware, Windows is at best equal to Ubuntu. On installation, maintenance, and user interface it is already clearly worse. The only reason Windows still is going strong is inertia and installed base. If Windows were a new product, people would just laugh at it.
How can you tolerate a country that has "we will kill all jews world-wide" in it's constitution
You don't need to "tolerate the country", you need to make peace with its people. But that's not going to happen as long as the entire population is effectively punished for the acts of some terrorists.
And many more Muslim countries have the death penalty for atheism, so as a Jew and a person "of the book", you're actually somewhat better off. Yet, I don't go around calling for the occupation of Muslim lands until they change their laws.
The only way Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are going to change is to persuade their followers to join the 21st century and accept reason, not superstition, as the basis for ethics and human affairs. Force, pressure, or coercion is ineffective against religious nuts, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jewish--it just radicalizes you.
Of course, the fact that anyone who has anything better to do in his life than killing Jews has long since left is the main cause of that.
Yes, and Israel shares a significant degree of responsibility for the exodus of moderates.
As of this version, however, local users will need to enter the root password before they can install software (as they do on almost all other Linux distributions).'"
You don't need to enter the root password on Ubuntu or Debian; you enter your own password. And that works if you have administrator privileges, which is a choice while setting up accounts.
I know many Jewish Israeli people who had their bag shot just because they left it unwatched for a couple of minutes. Yes, this is the unfortunate reality that Israelis live in,
Israel is a wealthy democracy. Unlike other actors in the Middle East, Israelis have both the political and economic power to change the "unfortunate reality" that they live in.
At least the volcanoes don’t invade us, when there is some resource to exploit...
Unless you're from Iraq or Afghanistan, your comment is rather misplaced.
If you are from Europe or Asia, you really have no grounds for such comments. You may whine about the Americans, but you have no qualms about reaping the benefits, your countries depend on Middle Eastern oil much more than the US, your countries ship weapons to dictators, and you simply won't invest enough in your own defense.
Most of those projects are projects that weren't done by Stallman or FSF members, they were merely assigned to the FSF for copyright reasons. Some of those projects, the FSF simply took existing open source code and put their name and license on it, sometimes against the wishes of the original authors. Most of those projects also have replacements by now that are completely unconnected with the FSF. And many of those projects are simply obsolete anyway.
And neither the FSF nor Stallman have contributed much recently as far as I can tell, even to gcc. If the FSF and Stallman disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, the effect on Linux or open source would be nil. Even if we had to remove every line of code ever written by Stallman, we'd hardly notice today.
I'm grateful for what RMS did 15 years ago and for what he started, but that doesn't mean I need to pay attention to what he's saying today. They have lost credibility, not because of their controversial statements (which they have always had), but because of their lack of contributions and innovation in recent years.
OK, they fire me, who's going to setup, configure, and maintain the cloud VM's?
Which part of "the cost of setting up instances is the same" did you not understand?
There is no magic pixie dust despite what IBM and PHB's would like to think, companies need digital janitor's to feed and care for the complex machines that run the company and that's exactly what I do.
So? Even if your company is so small that you're the single IT person and you spend x% of your time setting up virtualization infrastructure (not instances), x% of your salary and overhead needs to count towards that. That's likely at least $50k/year right there (I'm assuming you aren't paid that well). Add to that the time and money spent on (your) training, purchasing, janitorial staff, rent, planning, insurance, rent, and that easily doubles.
And you can only compare things if you have 100% utilization; if you have 50% utilization, what you're paying per compute hour in-house just doubled, since all those costs are mostly fixed.
Sorry, you may know how to install a VM, but your economics leave a lot to be desired.
You're really confused when you compare the size of machines to host virtual instances with the size of the actual instances themselves. For instances, 32G is big, even today.
And it's nice that "you" are moving to "90% virtualization internally", but what that tells me is that you get paid to do that sort of thing, so I hope you put your salary and the salary of everybody else needed to order, deploy, and maintain your virtualization into the computation (the cost of setting up instances is the same).
Basically, the savings from cloud computing come from firing people like you and reusing your machine rooms and other space for offices. The fact that Amazon provides these CPUs without having to interact with primadonnas is an added bonus.
minus admin time as the admin time will be roughly the same either way.
Admin time is not at all "the same"; do you have any idea how much time it costs and how much risk is involved in ordering, configuring, and high-end machines? Then there's the room, the power supplies, the racks, all the supporting infrastructure.
Also, when you buy them, you are stuck with those machines--you have sunk costs. The less you use them, the more you pay for the hours that you do use them.
the GNU project are about neither economics nor technology. They're about politics. They're about freedom.
Politics is about economics and technology and freedom.
The GNU tools changed the world and continue to change the world every day.
Tell me, what code has Stallman or anybody else at the FSF actually written in the last five years that I actually care about? Most of what they have done is stamp their name on other people's projects, and even there, they have been making bad calls.
They don't need to "innovate."
They need to if they want to stay relevant. People are more and more developing in Python, Qt, Gnome, Eclipse, KDE, PHP, Java, Mono, Ruby, and other environments. Gnome may dissolve even its tenuous association with GNU. Little of what the GNU project actually does has much relevance anymore.
I don't know whether Stallman's latest diatribe is about VMware, Mono, or whatever other thing he happens to be ill informed about these days, but it may be time for Gnome to sever ties with him and GNU. He has contributed a lot, but it looks to me like he's losing touch both with the economics and the technology of free software.
Stallman should perhaps rather worry about the future of GNU itself; I haven't seen much innovation coming out of the GNU project itself recently, and GNU is getting rather long in the tooth.
Yeah, you sit on one of the largest and richest pieces of real estate on the globe, lets other nations do your dirty work, benefit handsomely from the usually strong economy and innovation of your southern neighbor, and then whine about why everybody can't be as wonderful as you. Aren't you wonderful.
US drug laws and prisons are there because the democratic process has created them. In many places in the US, you can't get elected if you aren't a law-and-order conservative. If you want to change them, you need to convince people, and you're not going to do that with your frothing-at-the-mouth tirades.
Do people with an agenda spread misinformation and FUD about drugs and do voters make illogical decisions because of it? Of course they do. But that's also part of the political process and it's true in every nation, including yours.
Sorry to break your bubble, but your country is not doing well because you are nicer, better, or smarter people, it's because you have a powerful and stable southern neighbor and because your ancestors managed to grab a huge landmass rich in natural resources and with no hostile neighbors, and to keep people out so that it remains settled sparsely.
As for those laws that people keep imposing on you, that's related to your political and economic significance. Where do you think companies and activists are going to lobby? Canada? Why would they bother? They lobby in the biggest and strongest nation because that's the nation that can then push other nations to comply. If the US weren't kicking you around, the same kind of laws would be imposed on you by some other nation. And if you were big and strong, you would be imposing these laws on others.
But you may get your wish: Americans are getting really tired of foreign adventures. If the US turns inwards, you may find yourself getting pushed around by the EU (British, French, Germans). But you already have experience with that, don't you?
It won't be inconvenient for Mac users; Apple is Microsoft's lap-dog, their token competition. That's why Microsoft will license this to Apple one way or another.
Microsoft wants a duopoly, with them getting most of the market, Apple keeping the feds off their back, and no open source anywhere (or if there is open source, they want to control it through patents).
So, you're saying that we should continue to engage in a worldwide experiment that has a good chance of causing catastrophic climate change, and is certain to continue to cost the US trillions a year in security, lost productivity, and military expenditures?
Sorry, nobody has to prove that large scale CO2 emissions are unsafe, people who advocate keeping the status quo have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the current policies are safe.
You have to hand it to the oil, gas, and military industries: they are doing a great PR job. After 9/11, energy independence and energy conservation should be a no brainer to even the most die-hard conservative, even if they aren't concerned about dwindling oil resources, pollution, efficiency, and climate change.
Instead, these industries have managed to shift the debate in such a way that the entire question has become the link between CO2 emissions and anthropogenic global warming. These industries have firmly planted the idea in people's minds that if we can't prove anthropogenic global warming, we can just keep going as if nothing had happened.
Wake up, people. Anthropogenic global warming, hockey stick curves, and all that is totally irrelevant. The US needs to become energy independent and Europe needs to figure out how to meet its own energy needs, so that we can get out of the social and religious cesspool call the "Middle East". We need to reduce the burning of fossil fuels because those fuels are far more valuable as raw materials for future generations and because there is only a limited supply of them. The fact that there is a reasonable chance that continuing along the current path may also lead to global climate catastrophe might be considered by some to be cause for alarm, but it doesn't even matter compared to those other certainties.
Although scientists do have an obligation to communicate scientific results and issues clearly to the public, the public needs to have basic scientific literacy to follow; it's something both sides need to invest work in. But people want to use all the nifty things that science produces, but they don't actually want to bother to actually learn to understand how science works. That's a serious problem for the world, because people with no understanding of science end up needing to make policy decisions--sometimes life-and-death decisions for millions of people--involving scientific questions.
We really should let people only use the level of technology that they actually understand; for most people on this earth, including the majority of Americans and Europeans, that means basically living like the Amish.
How many network cards have been released which despite having error detection at the ethernet, IP, TCP, UDP, and interface levels, still managed to corrupt data on a regular basis?
None, since some of the error detection/correction is already taking place above the network card level.
All of these may have individual protection but what about the intervening DMA and bus mastering state machines?
If those need error correction to function with a low enough error rate, they should implement it themselves, not leave it up to user programs.
Having two different display technologies in the same device is hell in terms of UI design and development. Those hassles mean that you're probably better off just using two LCDs instead of trying to combine e-ink and LCD technology into one gadget.
Long ago, tiling window managers were more popular than they are today. They allow you to split the screen into a bunch of non-overlapping regions and then place windows within each region, usually using some sort of tab or menu selection mechanism.
You can still get these today in the form of Ion and RatPoison and similar window managers. Unfortunately, window managers like Ion have a horrendously bad user interface, using myriads of keyboard commands and providing little in the way of visual guidance.
It would be really nice if some of the major desktop environments actually provided a user-friendly tiling window manager. This would mean using standard "split window" components for splitting the screen, and indicating available windows within each tile using tabs. Tabs could be dragged and dropped between tiles.
I think this would actually help a lot of beginners, since overlapping windows still confuse many users.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying whether or not I agree with that, but that's the way it is.
No, it is not. Research is expensive, but a lot of that is already paid for by taxes. Furthermore, the resulting medicines are themselves very profitable and expensive, and a lot of that profit is, again, derived from the government.
Additionally, market forces aren't working: profitable drugs (the ones drug companies have an incentive to develop) are not the drugs that people actually need. Drug companies love to develop drugs that reduce the symptoms of uncurable diseases and need to be taken for life; the drugs we actually need are drugs that cure diseases with a single dose. They also prefer to develop lifestyle drugs and drugs for common but harmless ailments, instead of developing drugs for curing serious disease.
According to them, without patents, there would be no research and progress in this field whatsoever.
We'd have to increase public funding for research and clinical trials somewhat, but on balance, we'd pay a lot less and get better drugs.
The market works for a lot of things, but it doesn't work well for either research or drugs.
The last 2 are not covered by Windows but because its already got the marketshare then the apps are easy to find. Not trying to troll but that is why it does "just work", even with bugs and holes aplenty.
That's not my experience. I just spent hours reinstalling my laptop, and very little "just worked". And screen resolution, wireless networks and audio settings in particular remain a game of chance: sometimes they work, sometimes they fail mysteriously, both because of bad drivers and because of pathetically bad user interfaces.
On drivers, screen, audio, and hardware, Windows is at best equal to Ubuntu. On installation, maintenance, and user interface it is already clearly worse. The only reason Windows still is going strong is inertia and installed base. If Windows were a new product, people would just laugh at it.
How can you tolerate a country that has "we will kill all jews world-wide" in it's constitution
You don't need to "tolerate the country", you need to make peace with its people. But that's not going to happen as long as the entire population is effectively punished for the acts of some terrorists.
And many more Muslim countries have the death penalty for atheism, so as a Jew and a person "of the book", you're actually somewhat better off. Yet, I don't go around calling for the occupation of Muslim lands until they change their laws.
The only way Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are going to change is to persuade their followers to join the 21st century and accept reason, not superstition, as the basis for ethics and human affairs. Force, pressure, or coercion is ineffective against religious nuts, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jewish--it just radicalizes you.
Of course, the fact that anyone who has anything better to do in his life than killing Jews has long since left is the main cause of that.
Yes, and Israel shares a significant degree of responsibility for the exodus of moderates.
As of this version, however, local users will need to enter the root password before they can install software (as they do on almost all other Linux distributions).'"
You don't need to enter the root password on Ubuntu or Debian; you enter your own password. And that works if you have administrator privileges, which is a choice while setting up accounts.
I know many Jewish Israeli people who had their bag shot just because they left it unwatched for a couple of minutes. Yes, this is the unfortunate reality that Israelis live in,
Israel is a wealthy democracy. Unlike other actors in the Middle East, Israelis have both the political and economic power to change the "unfortunate reality" that they live in.
At least the volcanoes don’t invade us, when there is some resource to exploit...
Unless you're from Iraq or Afghanistan, your comment is rather misplaced.
If you are from Europe or Asia, you really have no grounds for such comments. You may whine about the Americans, but you have no qualms about reaping the benefits, your countries depend on Middle Eastern oil much more than the US, your countries ship weapons to dictators, and you simply won't invest enough in your own defense.
Most of those projects are projects that weren't done by Stallman or FSF members, they were merely assigned to the FSF for copyright reasons. Some of those projects, the FSF simply took existing open source code and put their name and license on it, sometimes against the wishes of the original authors. Most of those projects also have replacements by now that are completely unconnected with the FSF. And many of those projects are simply obsolete anyway.
And neither the FSF nor Stallman have contributed much recently as far as I can tell, even to gcc. If the FSF and Stallman disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, the effect on Linux or open source would be nil. Even if we had to remove every line of code ever written by Stallman, we'd hardly notice today.
I'm grateful for what RMS did 15 years ago and for what he started, but that doesn't mean I need to pay attention to what he's saying today. They have lost credibility, not because of their controversial statements (which they have always had), but because of their lack of contributions and innovation in recent years.
OK, they fire me, who's going to setup, configure, and maintain the cloud VM's?
Which part of "the cost of setting up instances is the same" did you not understand?
There is no magic pixie dust despite what IBM and PHB's would like to think, companies need digital janitor's to feed and care for the complex machines that run the company and that's exactly what I do.
So? Even if your company is so small that you're the single IT person and you spend x% of your time setting up virtualization infrastructure (not instances), x% of your salary and overhead needs to count towards that. That's likely at least $50k/year right there (I'm assuming you aren't paid that well). Add to that the time and money spent on (your) training, purchasing, janitorial staff, rent, planning, insurance, rent, and that easily doubles.
And you can only compare things if you have 100% utilization; if you have 50% utilization, what you're paying per compute hour in-house just doubled, since all those costs are mostly fixed.
Sorry, you may know how to install a VM, but your economics leave a lot to be desired.
You're really confused when you compare the size of machines to host virtual instances with the size of the actual instances themselves. For instances, 32G is big, even today.
And it's nice that "you" are moving to "90% virtualization internally", but what that tells me is that you get paid to do that sort of thing, so I hope you put your salary and the salary of everybody else needed to order, deploy, and maintain your virtualization into the computation (the cost of setting up instances is the same).
Basically, the savings from cloud computing come from firing people like you and reusing your machine rooms and other space for offices. The fact that Amazon provides these CPUs without having to interact with primadonnas is an added bonus.
minus admin time as the admin time will be roughly the same either way.
Admin time is not at all "the same"; do you have any idea how much time it costs and how much risk is involved in ordering, configuring, and high-end machines? Then there's the room, the power supplies, the racks, all the supporting infrastructure.
Also, when you buy them, you are stuck with those machines--you have sunk costs. The less you use them, the more you pay for the hours that you do use them.
the GNU project are about neither economics nor technology. They're about politics. They're about freedom.
Politics is about economics and technology and freedom.
The GNU tools changed the world and continue to change the world every day.
Tell me, what code has Stallman or anybody else at the FSF actually written in the last five years that I actually care about? Most of what they have done is stamp their name on other people's projects, and even there, they have been making bad calls.
They don't need to "innovate."
They need to if they want to stay relevant. People are more and more developing in Python, Qt, Gnome, Eclipse, KDE, PHP, Java, Mono, Ruby, and other environments. Gnome may dissolve even its tenuous association with GNU. Little of what the GNU project actually does has much relevance anymore.
Now we have special world summits for underpowered laptops. Innovation!
I don't know whether Stallman's latest diatribe is about VMware, Mono, or whatever other thing he happens to be ill informed about these days, but it may be time for Gnome to sever ties with him and GNU. He has contributed a lot, but it looks to me like he's losing touch both with the economics and the technology of free software.
Stallman should perhaps rather worry about the future of GNU itself; I haven't seen much innovation coming out of the GNU project itself recently, and GNU is getting rather long in the tooth.
So far, all we have is his side of the story, and I don't find it particularly consistent. But, yes, it is possible: border guards sometimes screw up.
The incident has almost certainly been video taped, so we should just wait for the legal system to work it out.
Yeah, you sit on one of the largest and richest pieces of real estate on the globe, lets other nations do your dirty work, benefit handsomely from the usually strong economy and innovation of your southern neighbor, and then whine about why everybody can't be as wonderful as you. Aren't you wonderful.
US drug laws and prisons are there because the democratic process has created them. In many places in the US, you can't get elected if you aren't a law-and-order conservative. If you want to change them, you need to convince people, and you're not going to do that with your frothing-at-the-mouth tirades.
Do people with an agenda spread misinformation and FUD about drugs and do voters make illogical decisions because of it? Of course they do. But that's also part of the political process and it's true in every nation, including yours.
Yeah, why can't we all be like Canadians?
Sorry to break your bubble, but your country is not doing well because you are nicer, better, or smarter people, it's because you have a powerful and stable southern neighbor and because your ancestors managed to grab a huge landmass rich in natural resources and with no hostile neighbors, and to keep people out so that it remains settled sparsely.
As for those laws that people keep imposing on you, that's related to your political and economic significance. Where do you think companies and activists are going to lobby? Canada? Why would they bother? They lobby in the biggest and strongest nation because that's the nation that can then push other nations to comply. If the US weren't kicking you around, the same kind of laws would be imposed on you by some other nation. And if you were big and strong, you would be imposing these laws on others.
But you may get your wish: Americans are getting really tired of foreign adventures. If the US turns inwards, you may find yourself getting pushed around by the EU (British, French, Germans). But you already have experience with that, don't you?
Since exFAT apparently is referenced in the SD standard, people will be forced to use it
It's only the default formatting; you can reformat the cards if you like.
It's still evil on the part of Microsoft and incredibly stupid on the part of embedded device manufacturers (many of whom depend on Linux by now).
It won't be inconvenient for Mac users; Apple is Microsoft's lap-dog, their token competition. That's why Microsoft will license this to Apple one way or another.
Microsoft wants a duopoly, with them getting most of the market, Apple keeping the feds off their back, and no open source anywhere (or if there is open source, they want to control it through patents).
So, you're saying that we should continue to engage in a worldwide experiment that has a good chance of causing catastrophic climate change, and is certain to continue to cost the US trillions a year in security, lost productivity, and military expenditures?
Sorry, nobody has to prove that large scale CO2 emissions are unsafe, people who advocate keeping the status quo have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the current policies are safe.
You have to hand it to the oil, gas, and military industries: they are doing a great PR job. After 9/11, energy independence and energy conservation should be a no brainer to even the most die-hard conservative, even if they aren't concerned about dwindling oil resources, pollution, efficiency, and climate change.
Instead, these industries have managed to shift the debate in such a way that the entire question has become the link between CO2 emissions and anthropogenic global warming. These industries have firmly planted the idea in people's minds that if we can't prove anthropogenic global warming, we can just keep going as if nothing had happened.
Wake up, people. Anthropogenic global warming, hockey stick curves, and all that is totally irrelevant. The US needs to become energy independent and Europe needs to figure out how to meet its own energy needs, so that we can get out of the social and religious cesspool call the "Middle East". We need to reduce the burning of fossil fuels because those fuels are far more valuable as raw materials for future generations and because there is only a limited supply of them. The fact that there is a reasonable chance that continuing along the current path may also lead to global climate catastrophe might be considered by some to be cause for alarm, but it doesn't even matter compared to those other certainties.
Although scientists do have an obligation to communicate scientific results and issues clearly to the public, the public needs to have basic scientific literacy to follow; it's something both sides need to invest work in. But people want to use all the nifty things that science produces, but they don't actually want to bother to actually learn to understand how science works. That's a serious problem for the world, because people with no understanding of science end up needing to make policy decisions--sometimes life-and-death decisions for millions of people--involving scientific questions.
We really should let people only use the level of technology that they actually understand; for most people on this earth, including the majority of Americans and Europeans, that means basically living like the Amish.
How many network cards have been released which despite having error detection at the ethernet, IP, TCP, UDP, and interface levels, still managed to corrupt data on a regular basis?
None, since some of the error detection/correction is already taking place above the network card level.
All of these may have individual protection but what about the intervening DMA and bus mastering state machines?
If those need error correction to function with a low enough error rate, they should implement it themselves, not leave it up to user programs.
Having two different display technologies in the same device is hell in terms of UI design and development. Those hassles mean that you're probably better off just using two LCDs instead of trying to combine e-ink and LCD technology into one gadget.
Long ago, tiling window managers were more popular than they are today. They allow you to split the screen into a bunch of non-overlapping regions and then place windows within each region, usually using some sort of tab or menu selection mechanism.
You can still get these today in the form of Ion and RatPoison and similar window managers. Unfortunately, window managers like Ion have a horrendously bad user interface, using myriads of keyboard commands and providing little in the way of visual guidance.
It would be really nice if some of the major desktop environments actually provided a user-friendly tiling window manager. This would mean using standard "split window" components for splitting the screen, and indicating available windows within each tile using tabs. Tabs could be dragged and dropped between tiles.
I think this would actually help a lot of beginners, since overlapping windows still confuse many users.