You know an astronomer has found an unusually accurate measuring technique when the error bars get as low as 50%. Now that best value for the mass of the Milky Way has 1-sigma error bars of 50%, I'm glad to be able to say with 95% statistical confidence that its mass is greater than zero. On the other hand, for the "glass is half empty" folks, there's still a 5% chance that its mass is negative.
Re:I also give the book a 9...I own it
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Ubuntu Kung Fu
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've never had a problem that ubuntuforums.org didn't have the answer to.
Yep. I have "Ubuntu Linux Bible" by von Hagen sitting on the bookshelf right next to my desk. I've never opened it. Maybe it's a fine book, but ubuntuforums is such a good resource that I've never reached for the book. One problem with printed books is that they get out of date fast. My biggest hassles with ubuntu have always been with things that were changing rapidly. E.g., for a while with Hardy I couldn't get java applets to work on my x64 box. The von Hagen book was published long before the problem started occurring, and the problem no longer occurs on Intrepid, so there was no way a printed book was ever going to provide useful info on it. Ubuntuforums also does better at stuff that's out in the long tails. E.g., I had a lot of hassles trying to get Amazon.com's mp3 selling service to work right, and once I finally figured it out I posted a howto on ubuntuforms. This is the kind of thing that not enough people care about to justify putting it in a printed book.
Why bother rewriting your scripts from Perl 5 to Perl 6? Why not simply rewrite them in Python and be done with it.
Because Perl 6 will automagically run Perl 5 modules without the need for any translation, and because if you do want to translate a module there will be an automatic converter. In other words, a transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6 will be automatic and require little or no effort on your part, while a rewrite in Python would be a huge amount of manual work.
The perpetual moaning on/. about the slow pace of Perl 6 is really getting tedious. It's starting to be like the "BSD is dying" meme, but even less funny. Nothing about the Perl 6 project makes Perl 5 worse. As pointed out in the/. summary, Perl is 21 years old. In that time, the language, and its standard implementation, have become extremely solid and bug-free, and CPAN has gotten ever more full of goodies that keep me from having to reinvent the wheel. Perl 5 is such a high quality language that it would be stupid to replace it with something that wasn't also of extremely high quality. They could have done a half-assed job on Perl 6 and rushed it out the door, and that would have been stupid, because people would have been faced with a choice of using an obsolete version and a buggy version. Instead, they've decided not to release it until it's done. Other languages with mature designs (C, C++, Fortran, and Haskell come to mind) have similar decade-long cycles before they release a new, incompatible version. That's not a bug, it's a feature. It shows that, e.g., C does what it was designed to do, and does it very well. The fact that a language like Ruby has new versions coming out much more frequently is a bad thing, not a good thing; it shows that Ruby is not a very mature language (e.g., they've been futzing around for years about the best way to handle unicode). If you want your code to break frequently, use a language that has a 1-year release cycle.
It's amazing that GNU is 25 years old now. In 1984 I was using a TRS-80, and the latest thing I knew about proprietary versus nonproprietary software was that Radio Shack had given up on the idea that customers would only be able to buy software from Radio Shack -- they had finally come around to the point of view that it was OK for third-party software houses to sell applications that would run on their OS. How many people are as far ahead of their time as Stallman was in 1984?
There are plenty of obstacles remaining, but I think it's impressive as hell how much you can do with free software today, and how easy it is to do it. My mother in law, who's in her 80s, installed Ubuntu on her computer this year, with just a little help from me over the phone. She actually had more trouble installing java (which she needed for her favorite online Scrabble app) than she did installing the OS. My neighbor came over for a beer yesterday and asked to see my Linux box. His main reaction to Gnome was, "Wow, I didn't expect anything so professional looking." When he contemplated the idea of using Linux in his home office, the main concern I couldn't answer satisfactorily was whether or not it would work with his multifunction fax machine/copier. So, okay, no, he probably won't run Linux in the foreseeable future. But it's amazing to me that the big obstacles are now confined to issues as peripheral as that. Heck, you'd probably have a lot of the same concerns if you were contemplating switching to MacOS from Windows.
Intellectually, I think Stallman was very clever with his invention of the GPL framework. No matter how many BSD-versus-GPL flamewars there are on slashdot, I think any impartial observer has to admit that the general approach (using copyright for a purpose diametrically opposed to most people's idea of the purpose of copyright) was pretty novel in 1984, and it's been wildly successful, even in other contexts. Wikipedia is a good example. The fact that WP is GFDL licensed is what makes people comfortable contributing to it.
Huh? As far as I can tell from the links, they gave about 6 weeks' notices for all these things. That seems to me like a very reasonable amount of advance notice, considering this is a free service. If users had a small amount of content, then they can just cut and paste it into a word processor to preserve it. If they had the world's most extensive blog, with hundreds of thousands of words scattered through thousands of posts, and six weeks isn't enough time to evacuate... well, they shouldn't have entrusted such an important part of their life to a free service without making regular backups.
the other is just a normal feeding activity and the real reason why breasts exist.
I agree with your post in spirit, but actually there's an argument that this is incorrect. Other primates don't have breasts. They have mammary glands and nipples, but H sap is the only species of primates that has big lumps of fatty tissue on the female's chest. For that matter, a lot of men have the fatty tissue without having mammary glands. Lots of women are flatchested, and yet their mammary glands work just fine. H sap has several unusual evolutionary innovations in females that are probably the result of sexual selection, just like peacock feathers. These innovations include concealed ovulation, fatty breasts, and a narrow waist. So I hate to say it, but the real reason breasts exist is probably to turn on the male of the species. Most likely it evolved as a sort of advertising strategy that said, "Hey, I'm female, I'm sexually mature, and I'm so goddamn healthy and well fed that I could afford to build up all this fat tissue for no other reason than to give me the broadest possible selection of males to mate with."
IMO the real reason to pressure private organizations (Facebook, restaurants, sports stadiums,...) to mellow out about breast feeding is that breast feeding is so much better for babies than bottle feeding. My reaction to Facebook's prohibition on breast feeding photos is about the same reaction I'd have if Facebook prohibited photos of women getting prenatal care, or of children eating carrots, or of children running around outside and playing.
As an experiment, I put an LED bulb in the reading lamp on the table next to the bed, where I often do a lot of reading at night. It worked out
pretty well. It's very directional, but that's fine for a reading lamp. I also have a low-wattage CFL lamp to light up the room just a little bit so that I don't have so much of a feeling of reading with a flashlight in a tent.
I would love to have LEDs. But they need to raise their efficiency. They don't generate heat as such, but AC->DC conversion does, index of refraction of the casing material presents a problem, as well that leds don't generate white light by themselves (they use phosphor?) and all that reduces the light given off.
Efficiency isn't the relevant number for an application like the reading lamp where the directionality is something you want. In my bedroom setup, with both lamps turned on simultaneously, I use 15 W for the CFL and <1 W for the LED reading lamp, but the LED lights up my book more than the ambient light from the CFL.
Software history tends to repeat itself. I remember back in the 1980s, when software distributed on floppy disks often had copy protection. Legitimate users voted with their feet, because it was too much of a nuisance -- e.g., you couldn't back up your software. Software houses eventually got the message and stopped doing it. Now, a generation later, we seem to be going through the same silliness again, except that now they call it DRM.
Similar deal with these little proprietary pieces of crapware. Back in the 90s, there was a period when the internet had gained quite a bit of mindshare, but OSS hadn't. During that time, you'd get people posting lots of trivial little pieces of software on the web, with various schemes intended to extract some small amount of money from the customer: nagware, adware, shareware, crippleware,... That whole scene was a total dead end. In most cases, programmers found that the amount of revenue they got was essentially zero; this was the users indicating that although the software was somewhat useful to them, it wasn't useful enough to pay money for. Then OSS started getting popular, and most clueful users started to realize that it was a better way to go. Now we have some new software platforms -- firefox+xul, browser+ajax, and the iPhone -- and everyone seems to need to learn the same lesson all over again. At some point, the users who didn't go through this in the 90s are going to realize some of the same things. They're going to realize that spending $5 or $10 on lots of little pieces of software will eventually add up to real money. They're going to realize that it's a hassle to have to keep track of all the software, registration numbers, etc. They're going to realize that it's no fun to have to go back and reproduce this whole set of proprietary apps every time they buy new hardware.
Some of the most frequent Technocrat contributors habitually proselytized non-mainstream ideology which I personally found alarming and repugnant: Market Fundamentalist / Extremist Libertarianism, Nationalism & Jingoism, Christian Reconstructionism, Militancy, Fascism, Racism... it's a profoundly scary list.
You're lumping an awful lot of things together there. As a libertarian, I'm not quite sure what you would mean by an extremist libertarian; libertarians essentially don't want government to exist, and I'm not clear on what would be more extreme than nonexistence. Anyway, the site ran slashcode and had a fairly small number of users, so if, say, someone expressed racist views, couldn't you just put that person on your foes list and not see his posts anymore?
IIRC, they said their Ghostscript software was used as an "integrated component".
What I'm saying is that their "integrated component" idea doesn't make any sense. The GPL doesn't anything about "integrated components." This FAQ entry may be relevant. What's clearly not allowed is linking non-GPL code to GPL'd code. All Diebold did was to put both GPL'd and non-GPL'd software on a special-purpose Windows machine, and sell the Windows machine.
Re the supposed GPL violation, the mailing list post linked to from the article doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
We do not consider bundling as an integrated component intended
to work with other software as "mere aggregation" under the GPL.
This seems nutty to me. As far as I understand, there's never been any prohibition on simply loading GPL software onto a machine that has a proprietary OS and other proprietary apps.
The GNU GPL
and our own "AFPL" license which explictly disallows commercial
distribution.
However, registration *is* required before filing a lawsuit.
I believe you can sue without having registered. However, you can only sue for actual damages, not punitive damages. For someone who writes an OSS app, typically the actual damages are zero, since the product isn't being sold for money. That's why the EFF encourages programmers to register and transfer their copyrights on OSS to them; a lawyer isn't going to take such a case on a contingent fee basis if the only damages possible are the (zero) actual damages. But Apple is selling MacOS X as a commercial product, and would have actual damages.
There was a time when you could lose copyright protection completely by not following the formalities. E.g., the famous horror movie Night of the Living Dead is now in the public domain because the distributor inadvertently messed up and omitted the copyright notice from the film. But that hasn't been the case for a long time.
The only thing I've tried by Scalzi is The Android's Dream, which according to WP is set in a different universe than Zoe's Tale. The problem I had with The Android's Dream was that it seemed to take international relations on Planet Earth and translate them verbatim into an interstellat context. Commodities are shipped between solar systems; sorry, but that doesn't make sense, because the amount of energy required to accelerate something to 0.01% of light speed would cost a ridiculous amount of money compared to the cost of obtaining the commodity in some other way. All the species are at comparable levels of technology; sorry, but that doesn't make sense either, because the time-scale for the evolution of intelligent life is on the order of 10^9 years, so by the laws of probability the chances of two species being within 1000 years of each other in technological level is extremely small. It seemed like the Star Trek universe, where everything is basically set up so that actors can walk on stage wearing latex masks and interact as the whole thing had been set on Earth aboard sailing vessels in the 18th century.
But seriously, what's up with the "Miss?" Whiteox seems to be parroting it from the Herald article. Last time I checked, we were living in the 21st century. She's presumably a PhD, so either "Dr." or "Ms." would be fine. (In academia there tends to be a kind of reverse snobbery about that. If you look at the listing of faculty at a snobby place like Berkeley, it's all "Mr." and "Ms.," because of course everybody has a PhD. At a community college it's more common to see the "Dr." for people who have PhDs.) I can't remember ever seeing a female academic in the US referred to as "Miss." Not in writing, not in speech. Is this more common in Australia, or is the author of the Herald piece the type of crotchety 95-year-old guy who smokes a pipe, wears suspenders, and uses "Miss" for any female who doesn't remember the Depression?
For commercial software (or software distributed to end users in a large corporation), it is going to get run on the hardware the users have right now, period. If it performs well, the users will like it and it will (all other aspects being good) develop a good reputation.
Unfortunately what often happens instead is somewhat different. Users aren't usually in a good position to decide how software will perform on their machine. If the software is not OSS, for example, they may not have the option of trying it on their actual hardware, using it they way they'd actually use it in real life. Also, people often have no real choice but to upgrade their software, even if the newer version is slower. So what actually happens a lot of the time is that you have software houses putting out slow software with the excuse that hardware is getting faster anyway, so there's no point in working hard on performance. As time goes on, the inefficiency of software tends to get worse faster than the speed of hardware can make up for. That's why my word-processor today takes longer to load than the word-processor I used in 1981, on a machine with a clock speed and disk drive that was orders of magnitude slower. There are real economic losses from all this, but they're economic losses due to millions of people sitting around waiting for their software. Because the problem is spread around evenly across the economy, nobody really takes enough of a hit to get upset.
Re:The author is wrong about accupuncture
on
Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 1
Acupuncture has been shown to work, and it works according to principles that are well understood. Basically, the irritation from the needle distracts you from your pain. However, some forms of acupuncture involve breaking the skin with a needle, which is totally unnecessary. You can get the same counter-irritation effect from having someone rub sandpaper against your skin. So the problems with acupuncture are: (a) it's unnecessarily invasive, (b) it costs money, (c) the person you're paying the money to typically is ignorant enough to believe in all the chi stuff, which would give me strong doubts about trusting that person to provide me with safe and effective health care, and (d) it may only be effective for some tiny subset of all the conditions for which its advocates claim it's helpful.
Don't turn it off! Computers that are turned on/off every day last a few years. Servers that are babysat, running 24x7 at a consistent temperature run damn near forever. This costs money, so run the numbers to see what uptimes vs power consumption really costs you.
Lots of problems with this statement:
On modern hardware, I believe the best evidence is that leaving the machine on continuously doesn't increase its longevity. In any case, the correlation has always been extremely tenuous, to the point where its existence is extremely difficult to detect.
A server left on 24 hours a day may maintain a fairly constant temperature, but a desktop machine will not. While you're not using the computer, it cools off.
Your advice to run the numbers doesn't make sense, because there is no reliable data quantifying the supposed cost savings from leaving it on in hopes of making it live longer. Those cost savings are probably within error bars of zero.
Your advice to run the numbers also ignores the environmental damage you're doing.
Most people replace desktop machines within about 3 years. The mean time to failure is much longer than 3 years. Therefore even very high-value maintenance, like dusting, is unlikely to make the difference between failing before replacement and failing after replacement.
Another problem is with your advice to buy cheap power supplies. Cheap power supplies are made out of less environmentally friendly materials, and are also less efficient. The lower efficiency is both an environmental issue and a money issue.
and to think, some people made fun of the thought that 2009 will be the year of Linux on the desktop. [...] I have several [desktop systems] that are nearly 8 years old and running Ubuntu quite well.
Yep. I have a somewhat different set of circumstances that have led me to the same conclusion. I teach physics at a community college. There are 7 school-provided Windows boxes in the room where I teach lab classes of 10-25 students, so I decided that if I didn't want one member of each lab group making the graphs while the others watched, I needed to buy some cheap Linux boxes. Good Will has tons of perfectly reasonable systems in the $80-90 price range. They work great with Ubuntu, but they're basically useless if you want to run Windows on them, because (a) they're probably full of malware, (b) they don't come with the Windows install disks, drivers, etc., so you can't do a fresh install, and (c) the version of Windows installed on them is obsolete.
The recession clearly makes the case for Linux on used hardware stronger. I'm in California, which is in a massive budget meltdown due to the credit crisis, low tax revenues, and inability to sell its bonds. If I request a new machine for classroom use, it's likely to be at least five years until it happens, and maybe not even then. The school hasn't been buying new machines for years now, and that means that even older machines aren't available to be transferred from department X to department Y when X upgrades. The problem is that IT is focused on buying high-quality, new machines, because that's what makes their lives easier. Okay, I can kind of see that considering that they have a low ratio of IT staff to boxes, but there's some point at which you have to ask how it can make sense to insist on paying $1000 for a new machine when you could get a used one at literally one tenth of that price.
Sorry, but the answer to this one is really easy. There's no evidence that giving laptops out to K-12 students has any positive effect on education whatsoever. Since their educational effectiveness is zero, the educational impact of any of these decisions that you make will also be zero. If you want to make absolutely sure you don't get sued by parents who are upset about how their kids were damaged for life by seeing porn, uncable all the hard disks before you hand out the computers.
Flash is a serious security problem and it's not 100% available across all browsers and operating systems. My Ubuntu 64 bit OS is a perfect example.
Flash runs fine on my 64-bit ubuntu box.
Anyway, the audio issue for JS is probably not going to go away for a long, long time. Right now, there is very little browser support for the html 5 audio tag. Support will be coming fairly soon in Epiphany and Firefox, but it will take years before most users of those browsers have switched over to versions that support it. Then there's the question of whether IE will ever support it, and if so, when. Add on to that the fact that there's no codec you can choose that is guaranteed to work. I think the day will be here very soon when you'll be able to make a JS game with audio and put it on a web page that says, "This game will work if you're running Safari, Chrome, or Firefox 3.x.y+." But as a mainstream option in the near future, I'm very skeptical. Currently, there does not seem to be any nonproprietary browser that will run on my linux box that supports the audio tag.
There's also the issue that although html 5 will have audio, video, and vector support, it won't necessarily be good enough to do all the things you could do in flash.
Long before html 5 audio becomes a widely supported option in browsers, I think it's likely that Gnash will have gotten good enough to be a usable replacement for Adobe's Flash player. There is also a surprisingly good OSS toolchain for developing flash, although you still have to be pretty hard core to try to develop a flash app without any proprietary software.
Agreed, I'm so sick and tired of playing with this old in-memory relational database with a separate record for every atom in my house.
Yeah, I hear you, brother. I got to the same point, and I was getting ready to make the database of all the atoms in the computer with the database on it, but then my wife was like, "Honey, the computer's already way too big. I can't even get through the living room." We finally agreed to put the computer in the garage, because then the atoms in the computer don't count as atoms in the house.
But seriously, if Moore's law holds, the size of the address bus you need only grows linearly with time. It's taken me about 25 years to go from owning a machine that filled its 16-bit address space to one that's roughly filling its 32-bit address space. At a rate of 16 bits per 25 years, it should be 2058 before we fill a 64-bit address space.
What I'm really looking forward to is 256-bit addressing, because then I can have an in-memory relational database with a separate record for every atom in the planet.
Sun has always made it a royal pain to use their java. For years they've always wrapped everything in click-through licenses, so you couldn't just download it and install it using your distro's packaging system. This version seems like more of the same, or maybe even worse. I went to the java.net page linked to from the article, downloaded the file. It's a shell script, and when you run it, the first thing it does is print out a license and ask if you agree to it. Some of the contents of the license:
3.1 Licensee may not duplicate Licensed Software other than for a single copy of Licensed Software for archival purposes only.
3.3 Except as otherwise provided by law, Licensee may not modify or create derivative works of the Licensed Software, or reverse engineer, disassemble or decompile binary portions
of the Licensed Software, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code from such portions.
3.5 Licensee shall have no right to use the Licensed Software for productive or commercial use.
6.1 This Agreement will commence on the date on which Licensee receives Licensed Software (the "Effective Date") and will expire twelve (12) months from the Effective Date, unless
terminated earlier as provided herein.
6.2 Either party may terminate this Agreement upon ten (10) days' written notice to the other party.
I think it's great that Sun has GPL'd their implementation of java. Three cheers for Sun for doing that. But they've proved over and over again that any open-source project they control will have a closed development process, will ignore their user community, and will be a massive pain to install and work with. So the really good thing about Sun GPLing their version of java is that now, finally, we've gotten to the point where people other than Sun -- people who Get It about open source -- can take the ball and run with it.
Well it's not dirt cheap for 500GB - that's $75/month.
The OP specified "decades if possible." So we have two problems here. One is that 30 years at $75/mo comes out to $27,000, which is a little pricey. For that amount of money he could probably hire someone to come to his house once a year, verify the readability of his media for him, and transfer them to new media as the old ones become obsolete. $1,000 for a few hours' work? I'd take it.
The other problem is that the probability that Amazon S3 will exist in 30 years is very low. This is basically the problem with any possible answer to his question. There isn't any computer-related service or equipment that you can be sure will still be there in 30 years. A more realistic goal would be to do it in 10-year steps; if that's all he wants, then the shoebox full of flash drives should work fine, and then 10 years from now he can transfer those data to something else.
But who really has 500GB of critical data.
I initially misread that as 500 Mb, which is about the amount of critical data I have that needs backing up. 500 gigabytes is kind of a crazy amount of data. One way to get that much might be that he has a gigantic collection of mp3s, or possibly a moderately huge collection of music in a less lossy format. But then that's not critical personal data, it's just a music collection. And the chances are that as the decades go by, he'll realize that the music he thought was so important and wonderful in 2008 no longer seems so important to him. I know plenty of people who still have their Kool and the Gang LP's from the 1970's, but it's not like they're willing to spend a thousand dollars a year to obsessively maintain them.
Slashdot Mirror
You know an astronomer has found an unusually accurate measuring technique when the error bars get as low as 50%. Now that best value for the mass of the Milky Way has 1-sigma error bars of 50%, I'm glad to be able to say with 95% statistical confidence that its mass is greater than zero. On the other hand, for the "glass is half empty" folks, there's still a 5% chance that its mass is negative.
Yep. I have "Ubuntu Linux Bible" by von Hagen sitting on the bookshelf right next to my desk. I've never opened it. Maybe it's a fine book, but ubuntuforums is such a good resource that I've never reached for the book. One problem with printed books is that they get out of date fast. My biggest hassles with ubuntu have always been with things that were changing rapidly. E.g., for a while with Hardy I couldn't get java applets to work on my x64 box. The von Hagen book was published long before the problem started occurring, and the problem no longer occurs on Intrepid, so there was no way a printed book was ever going to provide useful info on it. Ubuntuforums also does better at stuff that's out in the long tails. E.g., I had a lot of hassles trying to get Amazon.com's mp3 selling service to work right, and once I finally figured it out I posted a howto on ubuntuforms. This is the kind of thing that not enough people care about to justify putting it in a printed book.
Because Perl 6 will automagically run Perl 5 modules without the need for any translation, and because if you do want to translate a module there will be an automatic converter. In other words, a transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6 will be automatic and require little or no effort on your part, while a rewrite in Python would be a huge amount of manual work.
The perpetual moaning on /. about the slow pace of Perl 6 is really getting tedious. It's starting to be like the "BSD is dying" meme, but even less funny. Nothing about the Perl 6 project makes Perl 5 worse. As pointed out in the /. summary, Perl is 21 years old. In that time, the language, and its standard implementation, have become extremely solid and bug-free, and CPAN has gotten ever more full of goodies that keep me from having to reinvent the wheel. Perl 5 is such a high quality language that it would be stupid to replace it with something that wasn't also of extremely high quality. They could have done a half-assed job on Perl 6 and rushed it out the door, and that would have been stupid, because people would have been faced with a choice of using an obsolete version and a buggy version. Instead, they've decided not to release it until it's done. Other languages with mature designs (C, C++, Fortran, and Haskell come to mind) have similar decade-long cycles before they release a new, incompatible version. That's not a bug, it's a feature. It shows that, e.g., C does what it was designed to do, and does it very well. The fact that a language like Ruby has new versions coming out much more frequently is a bad thing, not a good thing; it shows that Ruby is not a very mature language (e.g., they've been futzing around for years about the best way to handle unicode). If you want your code to break frequently, use a language that has a 1-year release cycle.
It's amazing that GNU is 25 years old now. In 1984 I was using a TRS-80, and the latest thing I knew about proprietary versus nonproprietary software was that Radio Shack had given up on the idea that customers would only be able to buy software from Radio Shack -- they had finally come around to the point of view that it was OK for third-party software houses to sell applications that would run on their OS. How many people are as far ahead of their time as Stallman was in 1984?
There are plenty of obstacles remaining, but I think it's impressive as hell how much you can do with free software today, and how easy it is to do it. My mother in law, who's in her 80s, installed Ubuntu on her computer this year, with just a little help from me over the phone. She actually had more trouble installing java (which she needed for her favorite online Scrabble app) than she did installing the OS. My neighbor came over for a beer yesterday and asked to see my Linux box. His main reaction to Gnome was, "Wow, I didn't expect anything so professional looking." When he contemplated the idea of using Linux in his home office, the main concern I couldn't answer satisfactorily was whether or not it would work with his multifunction fax machine/copier. So, okay, no, he probably won't run Linux in the foreseeable future. But it's amazing to me that the big obstacles are now confined to issues as peripheral as that. Heck, you'd probably have a lot of the same concerns if you were contemplating switching to MacOS from Windows.
Intellectually, I think Stallman was very clever with his invention of the GPL framework. No matter how many BSD-versus-GPL flamewars there are on slashdot, I think any impartial observer has to admit that the general approach (using copyright for a purpose diametrically opposed to most people's idea of the purpose of copyright) was pretty novel in 1984, and it's been wildly successful, even in other contexts. Wikipedia is a good example. The fact that WP is GFDL licensed is what makes people comfortable contributing to it.
Huh? As far as I can tell from the links, they gave about 6 weeks' notices for all these things. That seems to me like a very reasonable amount of advance notice, considering this is a free service. If users had a small amount of content, then they can just cut and paste it into a word processor to preserve it. If they had the world's most extensive blog, with hundreds of thousands of words scattered through thousands of posts, and six weeks isn't enough time to evacuate ... well, they shouldn't have entrusted such an important part of their life to a free service without making regular backups.
I agree with your post in spirit, but actually there's an argument that this is incorrect. Other primates don't have breasts. They have mammary glands and nipples, but H sap is the only species of primates that has big lumps of fatty tissue on the female's chest. For that matter, a lot of men have the fatty tissue without having mammary glands. Lots of women are flatchested, and yet their mammary glands work just fine. H sap has several unusual evolutionary innovations in females that are probably the result of sexual selection, just like peacock feathers. These innovations include concealed ovulation, fatty breasts, and a narrow waist. So I hate to say it, but the real reason breasts exist is probably to turn on the male of the species. Most likely it evolved as a sort of advertising strategy that said, "Hey, I'm female, I'm sexually mature, and I'm so goddamn healthy and well fed that I could afford to build up all this fat tissue for no other reason than to give me the broadest possible selection of males to mate with."
IMO the real reason to pressure private organizations (Facebook, restaurants, sports stadiums, ...) to mellow out about breast feeding is that breast feeding is so much better for babies than bottle feeding. My reaction to Facebook's prohibition on breast feeding photos is about the same reaction I'd have if Facebook prohibited photos of women getting prenatal care, or of children eating carrots, or of children running around outside and playing.
I think you mean watts, not watts per hour.
As an experiment, I put an LED bulb in the reading lamp on the table next to the bed, where I often do a lot of reading at night. It worked out pretty well. It's very directional, but that's fine for a reading lamp. I also have a low-wattage CFL lamp to light up the room just a little bit so that I don't have so much of a feeling of reading with a flashlight in a tent.
Efficiency isn't the relevant number for an application like the reading lamp where the directionality is something you want. In my bedroom setup, with both lamps turned on simultaneously, I use 15 W for the CFL and <1 W for the LED reading lamp, but the LED lights up my book more than the ambient light from the CFL.
Software history tends to repeat itself. I remember back in the 1980s, when software distributed on floppy disks often had copy protection. Legitimate users voted with their feet, because it was too much of a nuisance -- e.g., you couldn't back up your software. Software houses eventually got the message and stopped doing it. Now, a generation later, we seem to be going through the same silliness again, except that now they call it DRM.
Similar deal with these little proprietary pieces of crapware. Back in the 90s, there was a period when the internet had gained quite a bit of mindshare, but OSS hadn't. During that time, you'd get people posting lots of trivial little pieces of software on the web, with various schemes intended to extract some small amount of money from the customer: nagware, adware, shareware, crippleware, ... That whole scene was a total dead end. In most cases, programmers found that the amount of revenue they got was essentially zero; this was the users indicating that although the software was somewhat useful to them, it wasn't useful enough to pay money for. Then OSS started getting popular, and most clueful users started to realize that it was a better way to go. Now we have some new software platforms -- firefox+xul, browser+ajax, and the iPhone -- and everyone seems to need to learn the same lesson all over again. At some point, the users who didn't go through this in the 90s are going to realize some of the same things. They're going to realize that spending $5 or $10 on lots of little pieces of software will eventually add up to real money. They're going to realize that it's a hassle to have to keep track of all the software, registration numbers, etc. They're going to realize that it's no fun to have to go back and reproduce this whole set of proprietary apps every time they buy new hardware.
You're lumping an awful lot of things together there. As a libertarian, I'm not quite sure what you would mean by an extremist libertarian; libertarians essentially don't want government to exist, and I'm not clear on what would be more extreme than nonexistence. Anyway, the site ran slashcode and had a fairly small number of users, so if, say, someone expressed racist views, couldn't you just put that person on your foes list and not see his posts anymore?
What I'm saying is that their "integrated component" idea doesn't make any sense. The GPL doesn't anything about "integrated components." This FAQ entry may be relevant. What's clearly not allowed is linking non-GPL code to GPL'd code. All Diebold did was to put both GPL'd and non-GPL'd software on a special-purpose Windows machine, and sell the Windows machine.
Re the supposed GPL violation, the mailing list post linked to from the article doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
This seems nutty to me. As far as I understand, there's never been any prohibition on simply loading GPL software onto a machine that has a proprietary OS and other proprietary apps.
Huh? This is just plain wrong.
I believe you can sue without having registered. However, you can only sue for actual damages, not punitive damages. For someone who writes an OSS app, typically the actual damages are zero, since the product isn't being sold for money. That's why the EFF encourages programmers to register and transfer their copyrights on OSS to them; a lawyer isn't going to take such a case on a contingent fee basis if the only damages possible are the (zero) actual damages. But Apple is selling MacOS X as a commercial product, and would have actual damages.
There was a time when you could lose copyright protection completely by not following the formalities. E.g., the famous horror movie Night of the Living Dead is now in the public domain because the distributor inadvertently messed up and omitted the copyright notice from the film. But that hasn't been the case for a long time.
The only thing I've tried by Scalzi is The Android's Dream, which according to WP is set in a different universe than Zoe's Tale. The problem I had with The Android's Dream was that it seemed to take international relations on Planet Earth and translate them verbatim into an interstellat context. Commodities are shipped between solar systems; sorry, but that doesn't make sense, because the amount of energy required to accelerate something to 0.01% of light speed would cost a ridiculous amount of money compared to the cost of obtaining the commodity in some other way. All the species are at comparable levels of technology; sorry, but that doesn't make sense either, because the time-scale for the evolution of intelligent life is on the order of 10^9 years, so by the laws of probability the chances of two species being within 1000 years of each other in technological level is extremely small. It seemed like the Star Trek universe, where everything is basically set up so that actors can walk on stage wearing latex masks and interact as the whole thing had been set on Earth aboard sailing vessels in the 18th century.
But seriously, what's up with the "Miss?" Whiteox seems to be parroting it from the Herald article. Last time I checked, we were living in the 21st century. She's presumably a PhD, so either "Dr." or "Ms." would be fine. (In academia there tends to be a kind of reverse snobbery about that. If you look at the listing of faculty at a snobby place like Berkeley, it's all "Mr." and "Ms.," because of course everybody has a PhD. At a community college it's more common to see the "Dr." for people who have PhDs.) I can't remember ever seeing a female academic in the US referred to as "Miss." Not in writing, not in speech. Is this more common in Australia, or is the author of the Herald piece the type of crotchety 95-year-old guy who smokes a pipe, wears suspenders, and uses "Miss" for any female who doesn't remember the Depression?
Unfortunately what often happens instead is somewhat different. Users aren't usually in a good position to decide how software will perform on their machine. If the software is not OSS, for example, they may not have the option of trying it on their actual hardware, using it they way they'd actually use it in real life. Also, people often have no real choice but to upgrade their software, even if the newer version is slower. So what actually happens a lot of the time is that you have software houses putting out slow software with the excuse that hardware is getting faster anyway, so there's no point in working hard on performance. As time goes on, the inefficiency of software tends to get worse faster than the speed of hardware can make up for. That's why my word-processor today takes longer to load than the word-processor I used in 1981, on a machine with a clock speed and disk drive that was orders of magnitude slower. There are real economic losses from all this, but they're economic losses due to millions of people sitting around waiting for their software. Because the problem is spread around evenly across the economy, nobody really takes enough of a hit to get upset.
Acupuncture has been shown to work, and it works according to principles that are well understood. Basically, the irritation from the needle distracts you from your pain. However, some forms of acupuncture involve breaking the skin with a needle, which is totally unnecessary. You can get the same counter-irritation effect from having someone rub sandpaper against your skin. So the problems with acupuncture are: (a) it's unnecessarily invasive, (b) it costs money, (c) the person you're paying the money to typically is ignorant enough to believe in all the chi stuff, which would give me strong doubts about trusting that person to provide me with safe and effective health care, and (d) it may only be effective for some tiny subset of all the conditions for which its advocates claim it's helpful.
Lots of problems with this statement:
Another problem is with your advice to buy cheap power supplies. Cheap power supplies are made out of less environmentally friendly materials, and are also less efficient. The lower efficiency is both an environmental issue and a money issue.
Yep. I have a somewhat different set of circumstances that have led me to the same conclusion. I teach physics at a community college. There are 7 school-provided Windows boxes in the room where I teach lab classes of 10-25 students, so I decided that if I didn't want one member of each lab group making the graphs while the others watched, I needed to buy some cheap Linux boxes. Good Will has tons of perfectly reasonable systems in the $80-90 price range. They work great with Ubuntu, but they're basically useless if you want to run Windows on them, because (a) they're probably full of malware, (b) they don't come with the Windows install disks, drivers, etc., so you can't do a fresh install, and (c) the version of Windows installed on them is obsolete.
The recession clearly makes the case for Linux on used hardware stronger. I'm in California, which is in a massive budget meltdown due to the credit crisis, low tax revenues, and inability to sell its bonds. If I request a new machine for classroom use, it's likely to be at least five years until it happens, and maybe not even then. The school hasn't been buying new machines for years now, and that means that even older machines aren't available to be transferred from department X to department Y when X upgrades. The problem is that IT is focused on buying high-quality, new machines, because that's what makes their lives easier. Okay, I can kind of see that considering that they have a low ratio of IT staff to boxes, but there's some point at which you have to ask how it can make sense to insist on paying $1000 for a new machine when you could get a used one at literally one tenth of that price.
Sorry, but the answer to this one is really easy. There's no evidence that giving laptops out to K-12 students has any positive effect on education whatsoever. Since their educational effectiveness is zero, the educational impact of any of these decisions that you make will also be zero. If you want to make absolutely sure you don't get sued by parents who are upset about how their kids were damaged for life by seeing porn, uncable all the hard disks before you hand out the computers.
Flash runs fine on my 64-bit ubuntu box.
Anyway, the audio issue for JS is probably not going to go away for a long, long time. Right now, there is very little browser support for the html 5 audio tag. Support will be coming fairly soon in Epiphany and Firefox, but it will take years before most users of those browsers have switched over to versions that support it. Then there's the question of whether IE will ever support it, and if so, when. Add on to that the fact that there's no codec you can choose that is guaranteed to work. I think the day will be here very soon when you'll be able to make a JS game with audio and put it on a web page that says, "This game will work if you're running Safari, Chrome, or Firefox 3.x.y+." But as a mainstream option in the near future, I'm very skeptical. Currently, there does not seem to be any nonproprietary browser that will run on my linux box that supports the audio tag.
There's also the issue that although html 5 will have audio, video, and vector support, it won't necessarily be good enough to do all the things you could do in flash.
Long before html 5 audio becomes a widely supported option in browsers, I think it's likely that Gnash will have gotten good enough to be a usable replacement for Adobe's Flash player. There is also a surprisingly good OSS toolchain for developing flash, although you still have to be pretty hard core to try to develop a flash app without any proprietary software.
You got unitarianism in there twice.
Yeah, I hear you, brother. I got to the same point, and I was getting ready to make the database of all the atoms in the computer with the database on it, but then my wife was like, "Honey, the computer's already way too big. I can't even get through the living room." We finally agreed to put the computer in the garage, because then the atoms in the computer don't count as atoms in the house.
But seriously, if Moore's law holds, the size of the address bus you need only grows linearly with time. It's taken me about 25 years to go from owning a machine that filled its 16-bit address space to one that's roughly filling its 32-bit address space. At a rate of 16 bits per 25 years, it should be 2058 before we fill a 64-bit address space.
What I'm really looking forward to is 256-bit addressing, because then I can have an in-memory relational database with a separate record for every atom in the planet.
What already works for me on 64-bit Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex is this:
Sun has always made it a royal pain to use their java. For years they've always wrapped everything in click-through licenses, so you couldn't just download it and install it using your distro's packaging system. This version seems like more of the same, or maybe even worse. I went to the java.net page linked to from the article, downloaded the file. It's a shell script, and when you run it, the first thing it does is print out a license and ask if you agree to it. Some of the contents of the license:
So in other words, it's not open source under the Open Source Definition.
I think it's great that Sun has GPL'd their implementation of java. Three cheers for Sun for doing that. But they've proved over and over again that any open-source project they control will have a closed development process, will ignore their user community, and will be a massive pain to install and work with. So the really good thing about Sun GPLing their version of java is that now, finally, we've gotten to the point where people other than Sun -- people who Get It about open source -- can take the ball and run with it.
The OP specified "decades if possible." So we have two problems here. One is that 30 years at $75/mo comes out to $27,000, which is a little pricey. For that amount of money he could probably hire someone to come to his house once a year, verify the readability of his media for him, and transfer them to new media as the old ones become obsolete. $1,000 for a few hours' work? I'd take it.
The other problem is that the probability that Amazon S3 will exist in 30 years is very low. This is basically the problem with any possible answer to his question. There isn't any computer-related service or equipment that you can be sure will still be there in 30 years. A more realistic goal would be to do it in 10-year steps; if that's all he wants, then the shoebox full of flash drives should work fine, and then 10 years from now he can transfer those data to something else.
I initially misread that as 500 Mb, which is about the amount of critical data I have that needs backing up. 500 gigabytes is kind of a crazy amount of data. One way to get that much might be that he has a gigantic collection of mp3s, or possibly a moderately huge collection of music in a less lossy format. But then that's not critical personal data, it's just a music collection. And the chances are that as the decades go by, he'll realize that the music he thought was so important and wonderful in 2008 no longer seems so important to him. I know plenty of people who still have their Kool and the Gang LP's from the 1970's, but it's not like they're willing to spend a thousand dollars a year to obsessively maintain them.