The best learning games I have ever encountered were the ones produced by Sierra before it went down the crapper. Like somebody has already said, KQ1, SQ1, QG1, were all great games and so were their sequels. Not only did they build up puzzle solving skills, but they were also very creative. Then there were the games that were actually branded "educational". I thought EcoQuest was great. It was certainly much better than Number Munchers or Oregon Trail which was all they had in schools. I haven't seen anything good come out of that company since it was sold, though.:(
Errm, parents with a higher income are more likely to be college educated, but that certainly doesn't mean they are smart or good parents. Those three attributes overlap to some degree, but one doesn't necessarily lead to the others.
People I know who I consider to be good parents make a decent living, but they aren't rich by any means. Some of the college educated people I know are quite smart, but a lot of them are quite dumb. Of course smart is a somewhat subjective term, but let's just say that knowing a lot of facts and/or having a particular skill set doesn't make you smart.
Don't get me wrong, I want to see companies that knowingly fuck over the consumer get their comeuppance, but at the same time, throwing out this ruling would open the floodgates for millions of lawsuits over the smallest infractions that a lawyer could find a scientist to support.
Well, maybe at first. I think the problem is that a large segment of the population is incredibly ignorant about science and is too apathetic to put in some effort to learn something about science. Scientific evidence should be admitted into court, but, like a previous poster said, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Scientific findings are treated that way in the scientific community, and they should be treated that way by everybody else as well. Judges and juries need to turn on the bs filters and be able to distinguish what's crap (or even just questionable) from what's not. And to do that you need to know something about science.
The question the article now asks is simply: Who is to blame, when something goes terribly wrong. When sth. with SAP goes terribly wrong: Sue them. When somebody distributes virus contaminated software: Sue them. But what, if the Linux kernel contains some backdoor? Blame Linus? Alan? Redhat?
That doesn't sound, to me, to be much different than the situation in the US. And it is something PHBs always claim to be worried about. Who can I hold responsible if the software deletes my database? The solution has been the creation of companies like RedHat that provide support and guarantee the reliability of the software they distribute (even if they don't write it themselves).
I think most people will agree you can't hold someone (like Linus) responsible for software they develop as a hobby and distribute for free because they want to. If you decide to download it and use it without some kind of support contract than you are on your own if something goes wrong (though I would like to think most developers would respond to problems/bugs provided you weren't a jerk about it). So how is it any different in Germany?
Yes, but then because there is no copyright, one person can buy the software and distribute it freely to his friends. The GPL is meant to protect the programmer from buying back his own work. A company doesn't really benefit from stealing source code if it can't sell the product it creates.
Typical/. "monopoly == you can't do anything" mentality.
Hey man, the phrase "what the market will bear" only applies if there is a competitive market, which is not the case when you have a monopoly. If I need to run a Windows program for some reason (which is true in >95% of all current situations) I have no choice but to run Windows. So if I don't like Microsoft's licensing turns, tough, there is no other option.
If, however, I am running a Linux program and I don't like RedHat's licensing terms, I can easily switch to one of a hundred different distro's and buy support contracts from a number of different companies. The "we have the right to audit you" is a bend over clause for the consumer in any license. But when there is a healthy amount of competition it is slightly more acceptable because the consumer is not forced to buy the software if he disagrees with the license.
Erm... At issue here is not the technical merits of OSX, but the legal ability of Apple to use the name Unix. The Open Group owns the trademark Unix, so to use the name you have to have their permission. Just as you would have to have the permission of Linus to use the name Linux even if your operating system was an exact clone of the original.
Dude, he can post anywhere he wants. Just chill out and learn how to listen to a different opinion. He wasn't disputing the fact that Microsoft was in the US. He was saying the location of Microsoft is irrelevant when it comes to adoption by the government. Lobbying pressure, monetary incentive, and popular adoption is still there. The only difference is that Microsoft has managed to be successful here and is now entrenched.
On the software side, Lindows can't run a lot of Windows software,
Amazing Gomer Pyle! You've figured out that Lindows isn't Windows! Sheesh, why do people keep making these sorts of comments? If you are running Lindows, you are not running Windows and you can't run Windows programs. But, you're in luck because there are thousands of native linux programs that you can use instead. And they are easy to download and install with Lindows if you use the Click'n'Run warehouse.
People who would buy Lindows (home users) will be just fine with what OO can offer. The non-compatibilities between OO and Microsoft Office you speak of are only for complicated and obscurely formatted documents. Unless you are a so-called "power user" you shouldn't have any trouble converting your Microsoft Office documents into OO format.
If you are a finance manager who needs Quicken, then you probably can't make do with Gnucash. If you are a technical writer or editor and you use a lot of Word's complex features (although you should be using LaTex), then you probably can't make do with OpenWriter. If you are heavily reliant on a FileMaker or Access database, you probably can't make do with the current db alternatives in linux until some better front ends are written. However, these are not most people (most home users, that is). Most people just keep a running check record, write letters to their family, and maybe use a spreadsheet every once in a while. You do not need to pay $200 for Windows plus $400 for Office to do this.
Running games, however, is stil a hurdle for people using linux. That issue seems to be shaping up a little bit, but if you really need to play StarCraft, you had better stick to Windows.
I think the reason sales of CD's are down is because people are disgusted with the behavior of the Music industry. In particular, the RIAA has acted in a manner that is not only disturbing, but only questionably legal.
The problem with this statement is you have to qualify it. People who know what the RIAA is doing are disgusted by it. Most people, however, are completely oblivious. It's kind of like the Patriot Act. Ask somebody on the street what they think about it, and I bet close to 90% will say "What the hell is that?"
Who's to blame? Hard to say. News media, apathy, ignorance... People can't take a stand for or against an issue if they don't know about it or don't care.
I agree with you in principle. Users should ultimately be responsible for the security of their accounts. After all, you do usually change the locks after buying a new house, right? The problem with this point of view, however, is that, as a computer geek, I am completely aware of how important it is to have good passwords for any kind of system. For other people this is not so obvious, and that is especially true in this case.
People are starting to realize that networking passwords need to be secure if you care about protecting your data and your system at all. But the voicemail password issue is different. For a lot of people the default password is easiest to remember, and what is somebody going to do? Listen to your messages before you get to them? Change your greeting? I doubt it occurred to very many people, even on Slashdot, that such an exploit could be engineered. Hijacking risk doesn't usually occur to people not accustomed to thinking about such things.
So in this case I side with the victims. AT&T should not have such a lousy authentication system and SBC should have issued better default passwords. If somebody had been the victim of an NFS exploit, we may have criticized them for using NFS and/or not setting it up securely. But ultimately the problem is with NFS for using a lousy authentication system that trusts the client.
Imagine trying to determine the effect of internal combustion engine on the environment before you've actually built one. Kinda hard, no?
How about the first nuclear reactor built in the US? Nobody knew for sure what was going to happen, but they had a pretty good idea. They had all the theory worked out, so there were expectations even if there were also uncertainties. If something had gone wrong, redundant safety systems were in place to immediately stop the chain reaction.
I do agree with you somewhat, though. Stopping all research is foolish. How are you supposed to learn more about nanotechnology if you don't perform any research? Health risk should be considered yes, but that certainly can't be effectively evaluated on paper alone. It reminds me of the opposition to genetic research. People want to halt genetic engineering research because of potential health effects, but, as in the case with the nuclear reactor, you don't know what is really going to happen until you try it. Theory is great, important, useful, but ultimately not perfect. You need to know what really happens, not what you think will happen. Safety considerations are, of course, both necessary and appropriate always, though.
Re:I thought so.
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Genome Surprise
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The brightest minds of biology did, over 10 years ago... and so the central dogma of biology ("one gene => one protein => one function") was taught to a generation of students.
Actually that is not the central dogma of biology. The central dogma is DNA -> RNA -> Polypeptide (Ref: Russell, Genetics, 1998). The one-gene one-enzyme hypothesis was proposed a long time ago, and yes it did earn a Nobel Prize, but it has since been altered to the one-gene one-polypeptide hypothesis. Gene expression has proved to be much more complicated than anyone initially thought.
Your proposed method would be slightly skewed, as the half-life of the material would give you an "expected" number of events in your sampling period, which would cause the result to lean towards either even or odd. The effect would be small, but present.
Actually that would only be true if the sampling time was about equal to the half-life. Extrapolations from the half-life become much less reliable with smaller sampling times. So if you use something like plutonium, which has a huge half-life, and a sampling time of 1 second, you will get a distribution that is quite random. It would be pretty easy to set up too. All you need is a gas-filled detector in the GM region and some electronics.
It's not that it's bad. It's just that there are plenty of open source formats that are much better than WMF. So why use a proprietary format when you can use a completely free one? We already have binary compatibility with WMF in mplayer using Windows DLL's. The only benefit we stand to gain would be seeing the codec source, which will never happen. So it's not bad, but it's not great either.
What about just building a single or a handful of good products, supporting them, and being the best in the business at what you do? People will buy quality. As long as you make a good product, customers will stay with it. In many cases, if you make a mediocre product people will still stay with it. Why? It is simply too much trouble to change without a compelling reason.
This is one reason why SGI has lasted as long as it has. Same with Apple. Apple can't compete in price (and some say with speed), but they can compete with quality. Apple certainly isn't a struggling business.
The problem is companies continually want more. They want to capture more market and can't be satisfied with what they've got. It's not about making a living, it's about being the richest kid in town. That is why companies "diversify." Make one good product, have a loyal customer base, and a good income? Or make hundreds of lousy products, use marketing tactics and monopoly power to force people to use those products, and have a huge income (for a while)? Unfortunately, if you have shareholders, the latter choice inevitably wins.
It took nearly 5 years to get to version 1. At that rate, a few monkeys accessorized with keyboards could have accomplished that.
Well, yes...but some things to keep in mind.
(1) The original Netscape code was thrown out and rewritten from scratch. (2) Mozilla is much more than just a browser. It is a suite of programs (Browser, Mail/News, Composer, Java Tools...) (3)...it is also a development environment. (4)...it is also cross-platform. (5) Version 1 is when it was officially declared stable, but Mozilla was perfectly useable by the later Milestone releases. (6) Gecko, the rendering component, was coded in ~1.5 yrs. IIRC
As far as I'm concerned, Mozilla is an awesome project and a hallmark of open source development. Also, it took a while to get to version 1, but look at how much farther it has come since then (less than a year)!!
Media Player and IE are both FULLY REUSABLE ActiveX components that come with windows.
I agree, components are good. They make it easier to implement certain functionality in a program and they allow for code reuse. But, as the user/administrator of a computer, I should be able to choose which components are installed on my machine. If I don't want to use Microsoft's HTML library, but a competitor's product instead, I should be able to uninstall it. If I am an OEM dealer, I should be able to offer a unique solution to my customers and not be forced to do things the Microsoft way.
As a developer, if you want to use ActiveX components, you just need to include them as a dependency for your program. If somebody wants to use it, they have to have the right libraries installed. By the same reasoning, if I want to use IE I have to have the Microsoft HTML library installed, but if I would rather use a competitor's product I should be able to uninstall both the bundled library and the app that requires it.
Take a look at the Linux world for an example. Galeon requires the gnome-libraries to run. The gnome-libraries come bundled with distributions like RedHat, so I can run Galeon out of the box if I want to. If, however, I don't want to use the gnome-libraries I can easily uninstall them (or choose not to install them in the first place) and use something like the kde-libraries instead. I won't be able to use Galeon, but I can use a product like Konqueror written to be used with the kde-libraries.
I totally agree. But you will notice I did not say graduate institutions. I said medical and law schools. That is a very different game, and a lot of emphasis is placed on the GPA over, say, recommendations. I am not saying GPA is a good indicator of anything, I am just saying that is how they it is interpreted and used.
Also, in practice, grading using a curve-like system does not work the way you describe. The mean of an exam is usually a B- or C+. People who score above the mean get better grades and people who score below get lower grades. The mean of an exam usually works out to be 65-75%. If everybody is scoring 90%+ on your exams then it is probably too easy. Likewise, if everybody is scoring 50% on your exams then they are too hard.
As long as a GPA is carefully interpreted, I think this works fine. This fails when the GPA is used to represent something it doesn't, such as mastery of the material (nevermind such a concept being completely arbitrary to begin with).
Except that to grade based on mastery of the material you have to have an accurate method of assessment. Despite the popular practice of reducing a person's knowledge to a single number, standardized testing is not such a method. So what is an accurate method? It is hard to say.
Additionally, why are GPA's important? Why do medical schools and law school cut people off if they don't have a 3.8 GPA? For them school is a competition, and they want a number representing where you were placed in that competition. This used to be the GPA. No, a GPA measured in that sense does not really tell you much about how they have mastered the material, but it does say something about your work ethic. Did you (apparently) work harder than your classmates? Can you make it in the grind that is medical or law school?
The current state of video on Linux sucks ass. Especially on RH7.2. You dont want to have to patch your kernel or change distros? Ok, I can see that. Don't want to install Gnome2? Hey, it's your decision.
On that note, I think it is unreasonable to expect a good user experience if you aren't willing to use updated software or install the necessary dependencies. GNOME2 encompasses a huge remodeling of the GNOME development framework and usability of the desktop in general. Likewise, RH8 includes many usability improvements. So you are really limiting your options if you stick with software released over a year ago.
Open source development happens very rapidly and you have to be willing to make frequent upgrades if you want to be on top of all the improvements. This is especially true if you are running a desktop machine. GNOME 2.2 is going to be out soon with many improvements over 2.0, and then development on 2.4 is going to begin.
Now, if you are running a server you probably don't want to upgrade every 6 months and that is perfectly understandable. It is also unnecessary. Aside from security patches and bug fixes, once a service is running it should stay running. If you are still using the 2.2 kernel, fine, who cares as long as it works on your hardware. But if you want the latest and greatest (which should be true if you are writing a review on CURRENT technology), you have to keep upgrading.
Oh, and just to clarify that I do understand, you can sell your software, but the fact that you also have to give it away, under the GPL, sorta obviates the fact that you *can* charge for it.
Well...you have to distribute your changes, but that doesn't mean you have to give them away. You can still charge $100/head and distribute a binary/source package. You don't have to additionally make the source available for free like some people think.
The problem people have with this is that you can incorporate copy protection measures into a binary, but you can't really do that with source which is just text. So there is a perceived notion that pirating of their software will increase if they distribute the source.
It is kind of silly, really, because despite copy protection it is still almost as easy to copy a binary as it is the source. There are intellectual property issues, but it seems to me you shouldn't have to worry about that if you have the appropriate copyrights, patents, and license. Your source may be available, but that doesn't make it legal for a competitor to make use of your code in any way if you take the right precautions.
Re:And how would this help me with home electronic
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Linux for Home Electronics
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So putting widely known operating systems into devices saves money for both the manufacturer and the consumer.
Assuming, of course, said operating system can perform the job effectively and efficiently. Thanks to our superb kernel hackers, linux is quite scalable. It works good both on the embedded scale and the supercomputer scale. But one can imagine situations where linux would not be the best solution. In fact, until recently linux wasn't very scalable at all and it would have been a terrible idea to try and use it in embedded devices, even if it IS familiar to most geeks.
Remember Windows CE? I actually think it is still around, but when it first came out it was vastly inferior to PalmOS. Windows was designed to work on a desktop, not in an embedded device. It didn't matter that it was an interface that was already familiar to a lot of people. It wasn't a good tool for the job.
This assumes that they have write/change and execute in the same dir.
But you see that is just it. In order to lock down a Windows box you have to cripple your users. Why shouldn't I be able to write files and execute programs in my home directory?
Using a locked down Windows box is a pain in the ass because you can't do anything with them. Need to install a secure ftp client, too bad. Want to compile something, sorry you can only use Word here.
My linux box is effectively locked down. I can't change anything on the system without the root password. But I can do anything I want in my home directory.
I think his point was that you don't have to accept the terms of the GPL. Don't use the copyrighted work and you don't have to adhere to the license.
The major difference is that if you include a copyrighted image/paragraph/etc in your original work (whether by permission or via fair use) the copyright on the cited work does not infect the remaining 90% of your original work.
Actually it does. The GPL is a statement of terms just like permission to copy an image is. In the case of the GPL you have to redistribute your changes to the GPL'd code. In the case of the image you may be required to do any number of things: include a copyright statement, limit distribution, pay huge royalties, etc....
The GPL may seem viral, but it is just a license agreement like any other. And, like any other licesne agreement, you don't have to accept it. You can negotiate alternative terms with the author if you want. Personally, I would consider a Microsoft EULA to be much more viral than the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
The best learning games I have ever encountered were the ones produced by Sierra before it went down the crapper. Like somebody has already said, KQ1, SQ1, QG1, were all great games and so were their sequels. Not only did they build up puzzle solving skills, but they were also very creative. Then there were the games that were actually branded "educational". I thought EcoQuest was great. It was certainly much better than Number Munchers or Oregon Trail which was all they had in schools. I haven't seen anything good come out of that company since it was sold, though. :(
Errm, parents with a higher income are more likely to be college educated, but that certainly doesn't mean they are smart or good parents. Those three attributes overlap to some degree, but one doesn't necessarily lead to the others.
People I know who I consider to be good parents make a decent living, but they aren't rich by any means. Some of the college educated people I know are quite smart, but a lot of them are quite dumb. Of course smart is a somewhat subjective term, but let's just say that knowing a lot of facts and/or having a particular skill set doesn't make you smart.
Don't get me wrong, I want to see companies that knowingly fuck over the consumer get their comeuppance, but at the same time, throwing out this ruling would open the floodgates for millions of lawsuits over the smallest infractions that a lawyer could find a scientist to support.
Well, maybe at first. I think the problem is that a large segment of the population is incredibly ignorant about science and is too apathetic to put in some effort to learn something about science. Scientific evidence should be admitted into court, but, like a previous poster said, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Scientific findings are treated that way in the scientific community, and they should be treated that way by everybody else as well. Judges and juries need to turn on the bs filters and be able to distinguish what's crap (or even just questionable) from what's not. And to do that you need to know something about science.
The question the article now asks is simply: Who is to blame, when something goes terribly wrong. When sth. with SAP goes terribly wrong: Sue them. When somebody distributes virus contaminated software: Sue them. But what, if the Linux kernel contains some backdoor? Blame Linus? Alan? Redhat?
That doesn't sound, to me, to be much different than the situation in the US. And it is something PHBs always claim to be worried about. Who can I hold responsible if the software deletes my database? The solution has been the creation of companies like RedHat that provide support and guarantee the reliability of the software they distribute (even if they don't write it themselves).
I think most people will agree you can't hold someone (like Linus) responsible for software they develop as a hobby and distribute for free because they want to. If you decide to download it and use it without some kind of support contract than you are on your own if something goes wrong (though I would like to think most developers would respond to problems/bugs provided you weren't a jerk about it). So how is it any different in Germany?
No comment on the copylefting stuff. IANAL
Yes, but then because there is no copyright, one person can buy the software and distribute it freely to his friends. The GPL is meant to protect the programmer from buying back his own work. A company doesn't really benefit from stealing source code if it can't sell the product it creates.
Typical /. "monopoly == you can't do anything" mentality.
Hey man, the phrase "what the market will bear" only applies if there is a competitive market, which is not the case when you have a monopoly. If I need to run a Windows program for some reason (which is true in >95% of all current situations) I have no choice but to run Windows. So if I don't like Microsoft's licensing turns, tough, there is no other option.
If, however, I am running a Linux program and I don't like RedHat's licensing terms, I can easily switch to one of a hundred different distro's and buy support contracts from a number of different companies. The "we have the right to audit you" is a bend over clause for the consumer in any license. But when there is a healthy amount of competition it is slightly more acceptable because the consumer is not forced to buy the software if he disagrees with the license.
Erm... At issue here is not the technical merits of OSX, but the legal ability of Apple to use the name Unix. The Open Group owns the trademark Unix, so to use the name you have to have their permission. Just as you would have to have the permission of Linus to use the name Linux even if your operating system was an exact clone of the original.
You're full of shit, dont post here.
Dude, he can post anywhere he wants. Just chill out and learn how to listen to a different opinion. He wasn't disputing the fact that Microsoft was in the US. He was saying the location of Microsoft is irrelevant when it comes to adoption by the government. Lobbying pressure, monetary incentive, and popular adoption is still there. The only difference is that Microsoft has managed to be successful here and is now entrenched.
On the software side, Lindows can't run a lot of Windows software,
Amazing Gomer Pyle! You've figured out that Lindows isn't Windows! Sheesh, why do people keep making these sorts of comments? If you are running Lindows, you are not running Windows and you can't run Windows programs. But, you're in luck because there are thousands of native linux programs that you can use instead. And they are easy to download and install with Lindows if you use the Click'n'Run warehouse.
People who would buy Lindows (home users) will be just fine with what OO can offer. The non-compatibilities between OO and Microsoft Office you speak of are only for complicated and obscurely formatted documents. Unless you are a so-called "power user" you shouldn't have any trouble converting your Microsoft Office documents into OO format.
If you are a finance manager who needs Quicken, then you probably can't make do with Gnucash. If you are a technical writer or editor and you use a lot of Word's complex features (although you should be using LaTex), then you probably can't make do with OpenWriter. If you are heavily reliant on a FileMaker or Access database, you probably can't make do with the current db alternatives in linux until some better front ends are written. However, these are not most people (most home users, that is). Most people just keep a running check record, write letters to their family, and maybe use a spreadsheet every once in a while. You do not need to pay $200 for Windows plus $400 for Office to do this.
Running games, however, is stil a hurdle for people using linux. That issue seems to be shaping up a little bit, but if you really need to play StarCraft, you had better stick to Windows.
I think the reason sales of CD's are down is because people are disgusted with the behavior of the Music industry. In particular, the RIAA has acted in a manner that is not only disturbing, but only questionably legal.
The problem with this statement is you have to qualify it. People who know what the RIAA is doing are disgusted by it. Most people, however, are completely oblivious. It's kind of like the Patriot Act. Ask somebody on the street what they think about it, and I bet close to 90% will say "What the hell is that?"
Who's to blame? Hard to say. News media, apathy, ignorance... People can't take a stand for or against an issue if they don't know about it or don't care.
Users did not change that default password.
I agree with you in principle. Users should ultimately be responsible for the security of their accounts. After all, you do usually change the locks after buying a new house, right? The problem with this point of view, however, is that, as a computer geek, I am completely aware of how important it is to have good passwords for any kind of system. For other people this is not so obvious, and that is especially true in this case.
People are starting to realize that networking passwords need to be secure if you care about protecting your data and your system at all. But the voicemail password issue is different. For a lot of people the default password is easiest to remember, and what is somebody going to do? Listen to your messages before you get to them? Change your greeting? I doubt it occurred to very many people, even on Slashdot, that such an exploit could be engineered. Hijacking risk doesn't usually occur to people not accustomed to thinking about such things.
So in this case I side with the victims. AT&T should not have such a lousy authentication system and SBC should have issued better default passwords. If somebody had been the victim of an NFS exploit, we may have criticized them for using NFS and/or not setting it up securely. But ultimately the problem is with NFS for using a lousy authentication system that trusts the client.
Imagine trying to determine the effect of internal combustion engine on the environment before you've actually built one. Kinda hard, no?
How about the first nuclear reactor built in the US? Nobody knew for sure what was going to happen, but they had a pretty good idea. They had all the theory worked out, so there were expectations even if there were also uncertainties. If something had gone wrong, redundant safety systems were in place to immediately stop the chain reaction.
I do agree with you somewhat, though. Stopping all research is foolish. How are you supposed to learn more about nanotechnology if you don't perform any research? Health risk should be considered yes, but that certainly can't be effectively evaluated on paper alone. It reminds me of the opposition to genetic research. People want to halt genetic engineering research because of potential health effects, but, as in the case with the nuclear reactor, you don't know what is really going to happen until you try it. Theory is great, important, useful, but ultimately not perfect. You need to know what really happens, not what you think will happen. Safety considerations are, of course, both necessary and appropriate always, though.
The brightest minds of biology did, over 10 years ago... and so the central dogma of biology ("one gene => one protein => one function") was taught to a generation of students.
Actually that is not the central dogma of biology. The central dogma is DNA -> RNA -> Polypeptide (Ref: Russell, Genetics, 1998). The one-gene one-enzyme hypothesis was proposed a long time ago, and yes it did earn a Nobel Prize, but it has since been altered to the one-gene one-polypeptide hypothesis. Gene expression has proved to be much more complicated than anyone initially thought.
Your proposed method would be slightly skewed, as the half-life of the material would give you an "expected" number of events in your sampling period, which would cause the result to lean towards either even or odd. The effect would be small, but present.
Actually that would only be true if the sampling time was about equal to the half-life. Extrapolations from the half-life become much less reliable with smaller sampling times. So if you use something like plutonium, which has a huge half-life, and a sampling time of 1 second, you will get a distribution that is quite random. It would be pretty easy to set up too. All you need is a gas-filled detector in the GM region and some electronics.
It's not that it's bad. It's just that there are plenty of open source formats that are much better than WMF. So why use a proprietary format when you can use a completely free one? We already have binary compatibility with WMF in mplayer using Windows DLL's. The only benefit we stand to gain would be seeing the codec source, which will never happen. So it's not bad, but it's not great either.
What about just building a single or a handful of good products, supporting them, and being the best in the business at what you do? People will buy quality. As long as you make a good product, customers will stay with it. In many cases, if you make a mediocre product people will still stay with it. Why? It is simply too much trouble to change without a compelling reason.
This is one reason why SGI has lasted as long as it has. Same with Apple. Apple can't compete in price (and some say with speed), but they can compete with quality. Apple certainly isn't a struggling business.
The problem is companies continually want more. They want to capture more market and can't be satisfied with what they've got. It's not about making a living, it's about being the richest kid in town. That is why companies "diversify." Make one good product, have a loyal customer base, and a good income? Or make hundreds of lousy products, use marketing tactics and monopoly power to force people to use those products, and have a huge income (for a while)? Unfortunately, if you have shareholders, the latter choice inevitably wins.
It took nearly 5 years to get to version 1. At that rate, a few monkeys accessorized with keyboards could have accomplished that.
...it is also a development environment. ...it is also cross-platform.
Well, yes...but some things to keep in mind.
(1) The original Netscape code was thrown out and rewritten from scratch.
(2) Mozilla is much more than just a browser. It is a suite of programs (Browser, Mail/News, Composer, Java Tools...)
(3)
(4)
(5) Version 1 is when it was officially declared stable, but Mozilla was perfectly useable by the later Milestone releases.
(6) Gecko, the rendering component, was coded in ~1.5 yrs. IIRC
As far as I'm concerned, Mozilla is an awesome project and a hallmark of open source development. Also, it took a while to get to version 1, but look at how much farther it has come since then (less than a year)!!
Media Player and IE are both FULLY REUSABLE ActiveX components that come with windows.
I agree, components are good. They make it easier to implement certain functionality in a program and they allow for code reuse. But, as the user/administrator of a computer, I should be able to choose which components are installed on my machine. If I don't want to use Microsoft's HTML library, but a competitor's product instead, I should be able to uninstall it. If I am an OEM dealer, I should be able to offer a unique solution to my customers and not be forced to do things the Microsoft way.
As a developer, if you want to use ActiveX components, you just need to include them as a dependency for your program. If somebody wants to use it, they have to have the right libraries installed. By the same reasoning, if I want to use IE I have to have the Microsoft HTML library installed, but if I would rather use a competitor's product I should be able to uninstall both the bundled library and the app that requires it.
Take a look at the Linux world for an example. Galeon requires the gnome-libraries to run. The gnome-libraries come bundled with distributions like RedHat, so I can run Galeon out of the box if I want to. If, however, I don't want to use the gnome-libraries I can easily uninstall them (or choose not to install them in the first place) and use something like the kde-libraries instead. I won't be able to use Galeon, but I can use a product like Konqueror written to be used with the kde-libraries.
I totally agree. But you will notice I did not say graduate institutions. I said medical and law schools. That is a very different game, and a lot of emphasis is placed on the GPA over, say, recommendations. I am not saying GPA is a good indicator of anything, I am just saying that is how they it is interpreted and used.
Also, in practice, grading using a curve-like system does not work the way you describe. The mean of an exam is usually a B- or C+. People who score above the mean get better grades and people who score below get lower grades. The mean of an exam usually works out to be 65-75%. If everybody is scoring 90%+ on your exams then it is probably too easy. Likewise, if everybody is scoring 50% on your exams then they are too hard.
As long as a GPA is carefully interpreted, I think this works fine. This fails when the GPA is used to represent something it doesn't, such as mastery of the material (nevermind such a concept being completely arbitrary to begin with).
Except that to grade based on mastery of the material you have to have an accurate method of assessment. Despite the popular practice of reducing a person's knowledge to a single number, standardized testing is not such a method. So what is an accurate method? It is hard to say.
Additionally, why are GPA's important? Why do medical schools and law school cut people off if they don't have a 3.8 GPA? For them school is a competition, and they want a number representing where you were placed in that competition. This used to be the GPA. No, a GPA measured in that sense does not really tell you much about how they have mastered the material, but it does say something about your work ethic. Did you (apparently) work harder than your classmates? Can you make it in the grind that is medical or law school?
The current state of video on Linux sucks ass. Especially on RH7.2. You dont want to have to patch your kernel or change distros? Ok, I can see that. Don't want to install Gnome2? Hey, it's your decision.
On that note, I think it is unreasonable to expect a good user experience if you aren't willing to use updated software or install the necessary dependencies. GNOME2 encompasses a huge remodeling of the GNOME development framework and usability of the desktop in general. Likewise, RH8 includes many usability improvements. So you are really limiting your options if you stick with software released over a year ago.
Open source development happens very rapidly and you have to be willing to make frequent upgrades if you want to be on top of all the improvements. This is especially true if you are running a desktop machine. GNOME 2.2 is going to be out soon with many improvements over 2.0, and then development on 2.4 is going to begin.
Now, if you are running a server you probably don't want to upgrade every 6 months and that is perfectly understandable. It is also unnecessary. Aside from security patches and bug fixes, once a service is running it should stay running. If you are still using the 2.2 kernel, fine, who cares as long as it works on your hardware. But if you want the latest and greatest (which should be true if you are writing a review on CURRENT technology), you have to keep upgrading.
Oh, and just to clarify that I do understand, you can sell your software, but the fact that you also have to give it away, under the GPL, sorta obviates the fact that you *can* charge for it.
Well...you have to distribute your changes, but that doesn't mean you have to give them away. You can still charge $100/head and distribute a binary/source package. You don't have to additionally make the source available for free like some people think.
The problem people have with this is that you can incorporate copy protection measures into a binary, but you can't really do that with source which is just text. So there is a perceived notion that pirating of their software will increase if they distribute the source.
It is kind of silly, really, because despite copy protection it is still almost as easy to copy a binary as it is the source. There are intellectual property issues, but it seems to me you shouldn't have to worry about that if you have the appropriate copyrights, patents, and license. Your source may be available, but that doesn't make it legal for a competitor to make use of your code in any way if you take the right precautions.
So putting widely known operating systems into devices saves money for both the manufacturer and the consumer.
Assuming, of course, said operating system can perform the job effectively and efficiently. Thanks to our superb kernel hackers, linux is quite scalable. It works good both on the embedded scale and the supercomputer scale. But one can imagine situations where linux would not be the best solution. In fact, until recently linux wasn't very scalable at all and it would have been a terrible idea to try and use it in embedded devices, even if it IS familiar to most geeks.
Remember Windows CE? I actually think it is still around, but when it first came out it was vastly inferior to PalmOS. Windows was designed to work on a desktop, not in an embedded device. It didn't matter that it was an interface that was already familiar to a lot of people. It wasn't a good tool for the job.
This assumes that they have write/change and execute in the same dir.
But you see that is just it. In order to lock down a Windows box you have to cripple your users. Why shouldn't I be able to write files and execute programs in my home directory?
Using a locked down Windows box is a pain in the ass because you can't do anything with them. Need to install a secure ftp client, too bad. Want to compile something, sorry you can only use Word here.
My linux box is effectively locked down. I can't change anything on the system without the root password. But I can do anything I want in my home directory.
I think his point was that you don't have to accept the terms of the GPL. Don't use the copyrighted work and you don't have to adhere to the license.
The major difference is that if you include a copyrighted image/paragraph/etc in your original work (whether by permission or via fair use) the copyright on the cited work does not infect the remaining 90% of your original work.
Actually it does. The GPL is a statement of terms just like permission to copy an image is. In the case of the GPL you have to redistribute your changes to the GPL'd code. In the case of the image you may be required to do any number of things: include a copyright statement, limit distribution, pay huge royalties, etc....
The GPL may seem viral, but it is just a license agreement like any other. And, like any other licesne agreement, you don't have to accept it. You can negotiate alternative terms with the author if you want. Personally, I would consider a Microsoft EULA to be much more viral than the GPL.