This is one of those fairly bogus, highly overblown stories that keeps cropping up every so often. A similar one is the supposed shortage of scientists and engineers in the US, which has never existed, and is always supposed to be coming Real Soon Now; in fact, the data to support this claim are always either nonexistent or wrong. (E.g., they compare Indian college graduates with US college graduates, but the Indian degree they're comparing with a U.S. bachelor's is more equivalent to an AA degree in the U.S.)
First off, the concern about incompatibility of physical media was valid 30 years ago, but it's a false analogy to try to apply it to today's situation. Thirty years ago, I had data on a mixture of 8-inch floppies and 9-track tapes. I can't read an 8-inch floppy anymore, and although 9-track tapes still exist, most 9-tracks from that era are no longer readable due to physical deterioration of the media. But that was all in an era when hard disks were expensive, and the internet didn't exist. Today, I have all my data on hard disks of various computers, and I use file synchronization software to keep them all in sync. If one of my hard disks dies, I replace it, and I haven't lost any of my data. (I also have backups on optical media, but I basically never need those.)
There's also the concern about formats. People tend to bring up, for example, the image of rooms full of physically deteriorating 9-track tapes with data from old NASA space probe missions. The formats are often not documented. The thing is, most of our data isn't at all analogous to the raw data from Mariner or Voyager or Viking. Those were unique historical events, and the only way to get more data like the data they collected is by sending another space probe. (People also tend to vastly overestimate the value of scientific raw data. It's extremely uncommon for raw data to be of interest decades later.)
Most of the world's data isn't in some obscure NASA format, it's stored in formats that are used by tons of people, and are extremely well documented. Sorry, but I just don't believe that the knowledge of how to decode Adobe Acrobat format is going to be lost to future generations. Ditto for html, jpeg, and mp3.
Another thing to keep in mind is that nowadays you can emulate old computers with excellent performance. For instance, my first home computer was a TRS-80. I can still run my old TRS-80 games on my linux box, using an emulator. Sure, emulation isn't perfect, and some information may be lost. But the claimed threat of data loss is vastly overblown.
The biggest threat to the preservation of information isn't technological change, it's copyright. The most likely reason that I wouldn't be able to get back an old piece of digital data is that the people who tried to preserve it and put it on the web got sued by the people who own the copyright -- the same people who let it go out of print. The economic incentives are to hold on to your copyrights (because that doesn't cost you any money) and send out DMCA notices to anyone who puts it on the net (because that doesn't cost you any money either), all in the hope that your content will be worth eleven cents fifty years from now. This is exactly what we see happening, for instance, with ROMs for old video games, which you can play in MAME, except that you have to find an illegal source for the data, because the owners of the copyrights aren't willing to sell you a copy.
The senate ethics committee can recommend that the he be expelled from senate by a 2/3 vote. The ethics committee has recommended such things before, but nobody's ever been expelled because they all resign first.
Here's a good scenario for you. Stevens gets reelected. The new senate ends up being 59 democrats and 41 republicans -- one short of the 60-40 majority the democrats would need in order to override republican filibusters. The senate votes on expelling Stevens, and the vote is 59 yea, 41 nay.
It's been years and years now that Mac users haven't had a decent version of OOo to catch their interest.
It was called NeoOffice, a third-party project that took the OpenOffice.org code and added some sort of Java layer to allow it to run natively in Aqua.
That's why I added the qualifier "decent." When I tried it, NeoOffice was simply horrible.
No, we have to count Macs. One of the big bullet points on the OpenOffice 3 release notes was its new native Aqua support on OS X.
Ah, thanks for the update -- my info was out of date, then. But I still wouldn't expect OOo 3 to have built up any significant market share on MacOS X on the day it came out. It's been years and years now that Mac users haven't had a decent version of OOo to catch their interest. That lack of mindshare isn't going to change overnight.
Why is 80% surprising? The article makes it sound like that's high, but Windows has more than 80% of the desktop market, so it's still a lower percentage.
In fact, I think 80% is surprisingly low.
First off, we really shouldn't count Macs as part of the equation. I haven't checked recently, but for a long time, OOo's support for MacOS X lagged way, way behind. It was essentially unusable.
So of OOo's potential audience, I would guess 99% would be Windows users, 1% Linux users. I would therefore expect 99% of OOo downloads to be the Windows version. Not only that, but a lot of Linux users probably aren't going to download it from the OOo web site, they're going to get it when it becomes the default through their distro's packaging infrastructure, and therefore they presumably won't be counted in this statistic. Let's guess (pulling numbers out of my rear end, I admit) that 90% of Linux desktop users won't downloaad directly, and will get it via their distro. So based on these factors, I would have expected the percentages to be more like 99.9% Windows and 0.1% Linux, a ratio of 1000 to 1.
It's actually pretty darn depressing that the Windows figure is as low as 80%. That's a 4:1 ratio rather than the 1000:1 ratio I would have expected. That suggests that the Windows market for OOo is hundreds of times smaller than it would be based merely on the market share of the operating systems. Some possible interpretations, none of which are pretty:
The Windows users who have never heard of OOo outnumber those who have, by hundreds to one.
For every Windows user who's willing and able to switch, there are hundreds of others who can't, because it's impractical for them. (E.g., they don't get to choose what's on their computer at work, or they have too many documents already in Word format that they're afraid would be a huge hassle to convert 100% correctly.)
For every Windows user who thinks OOo is better than MS Office, there are hundreds who hold the opposite opinion.
I wouldn't be surprised of #3 captured the essential truth of the situation. OOo is one of the worst pieces of OSS I use. I've searched systematically for something better, and haven't found it. At this point, I feel like OOo was a dead end that had the unfortunate effect of killing off interest in competing OSS office software.
I used VMS for years, and I don't think I'd want to go back to its versioning system. It was actually kind of annoying. You kept on having to do the purge command to get rid of all the old versions of files that were cluttering up your account and using up your disk space.
For my day-to-day activities on Linux, I get along just fine without that kind of automatic versioning. Emacs makes ~ files, which gives me versioning one level deep, and that's almost always all I ever need. I also use Unison to mirror and synchronize my files among several different machines, and that means that when I have a real "Oh, shit!" moment because I deleted an important file or made a really bad change, I can always get the old version back off the mirror right away. For longer time scales, I have backups on CDs.
The problem with richer filesystems and metadata is that they create hassles on the internet. Back in the MacOS <=9 days, all the mac metadata was a total hassle. You had to go through conniptions with.hqx files just to hand files back and forth over the net. I'm sure Apple thought it over very carefully before they finally made the decision to move away from metadata with MacOS X, and I agree with their decision.
Well, obviously this isn't the answer for the average newbie, but I'm not sure why you didn't do it -- ask her what the name of the file is (check the download link) and then open an xterm and run find.
That's actually pretty similar to what I did eventually end up doing. I had her open a terminal window, and got her to find the file using ls and cd. What was confusing as heck was that the file was in her Desktop folder, but, AFAICT, the Desktop folder wasn't showing up in the GNOME file manager as a subdirectory of her home directory. (I could have this wrong, of course, because I was only getting her description of everything over the phone.)
My mother in law in upstate NY had a Windows box that she used for exactly two purposes: email, and playing online Scrabble. Her Windows machine got full of malware, to the point where it wouldn't even boot. While she was visiting us in California this summer, I set up a machine with Ubuntu for her to use, and she got fairly comfortable with GNOME and Firefox. I sent an Ubuntu install CD home with her on the plane, and she went ahead and installed it with virtually no problems. I only had to talk her through a couple of issues on the phone, the main one being non-Linux-related: her BIOS wasn't set to boot from a CD.
She got going with email, and then it was time to get her set up for scrabble. The one she plays isn't the famous facebook one, it's a java program that accesses a club's server in Romania. Well, I think I spent about an hour with her on the phone, and we still don't have it working. One thing that took us a heck of a long time was that when she downloaded the jar file for the scrabble app, neither of us could figure out where the file had gone. Probably if I'd been in the same room with her it would have only taken me thirty seconds to locate the file, but over the phone, it was more like I was experiencing it from her point of view, and it was completely confusing. She was clicking around in the Firefox download manager, in the GNOME file manager, all with no luck. It seriously took her about 20 minutes, *with my help*, to find the file. It probably didn't help that I use fluxbox myself, and am not familiar with GNOME or its file manager.
(Now we're almost there, except that apparently she's got a completely dysfunctional version of the java runtime installed. You click on the widgets in the program's UI, and it doesn't respond.)
Anyway, what kind of indictment is it of Firefox/GNOME's usability when it's easier to install Linux than to find the file you just downloaded?
Of course now I have to slap a steel helmet on my head to withstand the inevitable onslaught of know-it-all slashdotters telling me what an idiot I am, and how I could have easily found the file. Of course that's always how it is with usability. To the person who already knows how to use the software, it seems painfully obvious.
Same comment as on virtually every Ask Slashdot since the beginning of time:
we really need more info. Does "university physics lab" mean a research lab, or a teaching lab? If the latter, then ease of use and durability extremely important. You want a UI that's easy and simple. On the scopes we use in our teaching labs, we tend to have a lot of problems with the BNC connectors getting damaged because students don't understand how to put on and take off the connectors.
Which raises an interesting question that no one seems to be asking: What if the problem is not Wikipedia at all? What if Wikipedia is a symptom of a much larger problem in our culture?
In fact, I think Wikipedia has some features that make it more reliable than the culture at large.
When I read a WP article on a controversial topic, I always make sure to take a look at the talk page as well. This allows me to see what issues are really controversial, what ideological axes people have to grind, etc. That's something I can't do with the New York Times.
That's incorrect for a couple of reasons. First of all, the experiment has to be done in a vacuum chamber. Making a good vacuum pump requires a pretty high level of technology, e.g., you have to be able to machine pistons to fine tolerances, and that's something that people couldn't do until the industrial revolution. Second, the intensity of the alpha particles from uranium is not high enough to use for this experiment. The actual Rutherford experiment was one of the many experiments that suddenly became possible when the Curies purified radium. I'm a physicist, not a radiochemist, but I suspect that the techniques for purifying radium were pretty darn difficult, hence Marie Curie's Nobel prize at the turn of the 20th century. Definitely not something the ancient Greeks could have accomplished.
You've also got the significance of the Rutherford experiment mixed up a little. It didn't prove the existence of atoms. The atomic theory of matter gradually got more and more solid over a period of centuries. The final piece of evidence for atoms as literal objects came from Einstein's analysis of Brownian motion in 1905. But even decades before that, there had been rough order-of-magnitude estimates of the sizes of atoms, from things like viscosity experiments.
The first evidence for subatomic particles (the electron) was J.J. Thomson, in 1897. (So note that there was at least a decade's worth of overlap between the solidification of the evidence for the existence of atoms, and work that presupposed the existence of atoms and tried to find their subatomic structure.)
By 1909, when Rutherford did the experiment with the backscattering of alpha particles, there was no longer any doubt about the literal existence of atoms, which was really pretty conclusively settled by Einstein in 1905.
Sure, if you prefer, just s/OSS/free/g throughout my whole post.
How exactly do you know if software is good or not by the virtue of it being OSS?
Here you're ignoring the argument of my post, which is that you can tell whether it's good becauese you can install it for free, and test it as much as you like.
There's the tired of argument of 'Well you can read the source code!'
And here you're responding to an argument that I didn't make at all.
So how long should a free trial be? I think what you want, again.. is free software.
Again, you're responding to things that I never actually said. I didn't say anything about a free trial for a limited time. You said that.
You -never- want to pay for it. Maybe you'll make a donation later after you've used it a few years.
Again, you're responding to things that I didn't actually say. I didn't say I never wanted to pay for OSS. In fact, I specifically gave the example of paying for support for OSS. I didn't say I wanted a limited-time free trial of proprietary software. I didn't say I wanted to use shareware whose author requested donations. You said all that.
And as for the long sob story about losing your data, if it's closed or open source, could have the same bugs, and still lose your book. I don't see how this is, again, any sort of argument for OSS.
Well, for one thing, by the time I found out how buggy it was, I was locked into a proprietary file format. Also, what I usually do with OSS software is to start off by messing around with a little, then if it looks promising I use it a little more, on things that matter more to me, and then if I start to gain some confidence in it, I go ahead and hitch my wagon to it for an important project. Not so easy to do that with expensive proprietary software like PageMaker.
Oh wait... that's right, if I write consitent crap no one will buy my software or someone will make a better version.
Except that we see lots of cases where it doesn't work that way. I gave an example where it didn't work that way: Adobe PageMaker. You gave another example where, in my opinion, it didn't work that way: Windows.
So to recap what you just said, Closed source software is crap because they don't have to show the dirty bits, where OSS is good quality because... they have to show their source code that no one reads? My head hurts.
Actually you're recapping what you said and I didn't.
Most of the time your type seems to be particularly young, in one of those phases where you think you have the whole world figured out. It will be ok, you'll grow out of it.
Nice ad hominem attack. I'm 42. But I guess it's easier to attack me personally, and to respond to things I didn't say, that to read my post and respond logically to the things I actually did say.
This isn't really quite as dilberty as the poster indicates. This is a symptom of a more general problem, which is that non-OSS software almost always sucks, because the economics dictate that it has to suck. If it was OSS, users could install it on their machines, try it out for a while, and decide whether it was any good or not. (Note that this still works fine for commercial OSS. E.g., people can try Ubuntu before deciding whether to deploy it widely in their organization and then pay Canonical for support.) If it's not OSS, you don't typically have any way of knowing whether it's good or not. Sure, you could read reviews, talk to friends, etc. But that's sort of like deciding to buy a car without having a chance to test-drive it, just based on your buddy saying he has one and he likes it.
The worst piece of non-OSS software I ever owned was Adobe PageMaker 6.5, but the only way I found out how bad it was was by writing a book using it, and finding out after I'd gotten pretty far into the project that PageMaker was gradually starting to corrupt my files, and was also crashing often enough to cause me real problems. It would crash one day, and I'd lose my file. So then I'd open the file again to page 93, which I'd been working on, and it would crash again because page 93 was corrupted. So then I'd get the file back off of backup. But then I'd click to page 87, and it would crash again. So the backup was no use either, because it was corrupted on page 87. In this example, there's absolutely no way I could have tested the software sufficiently before buying it to find out that I was going to have these horrendous problems.
Because users usually can't evaluate the quality of non-OSS software very effectively, there is absolutely no incentive for non-OSS software houses to work on quality. They can't sell quality. What they can sell is features.
So it's not quite as silly as it sounds to think you can pull the wool over the users' eyes by putting out a beta release and calling it 6.0. The users don't have a lot of other options to go on for evaluating quality.
A slightly different slant on what you're saying ---
From the point of view of the customer, an expensive thin client could be a really stupid choice, since they could do exactly the same thing with a $200 linux box, used along with an existing monitor, mouse, and keyboard. The hypothetical advantage of the thin client is that it requires zero maintenance. However, you can do accomplish the same thing with a general-purpose PC whose hard disk get re-synchronized to a standard image every night. At the community college where I teach, that's essentially what they do (albeit with Windows, because the entire campus is a Windows monoculture), and it seems to work pretty well. No problems with viruses, for example, because if a computer did get a virus, it would just get wiped out the same night.
A computer capable of running a web browser is getting so cheap these days that it's hard for me to imagine any reason to buy thin clients, other than "some sales guy showed me a powerpoint presentation, and it looked really good."
Also, if you end up not liking the thin client, or you find out you have some users who really do need to do something a thin client can't do, you've wasted your money. If the same thing happens with the linux box that gets its hard disk reset every night, you just change the configuration so its hard disk no longer gets reset every night.
What really blows my mind is when you walk into a university library, and every single goddamn computer used for accessing the library's catalog is a Windows machine. What possible justification can they have for paying for that many Windows licenses, just so people can use a web browser? A linux box can easily be configured to work so similarly to Windows that 95% of users will never even know it's not Windows. It seems like a lot of these decisions get driven by the fact that the technical staff simply doesn't know anything but Windows.
Perl was virtually synonymous with CGI programming, but then the web world moved on to embedding code inside the HTML
There have always been some things that you needed to do on the server side (e.g., validate the user's password), and some that were better done on the client side (e.g., warn the user *before* he hits the submit button that his social security number only has 8 digits). That hasn't changed. The only thing that's changed is that more people are doing ajax. An ajax app still needs to have some things happen on the server side, and perl is still a perfectly reasonable language for that.
but then the web world moved on to embedding code inside the HTML, which is a rather crappy combination but is easy to start with.
It doesn't need to be crappy. JavaScript is a very nice programming language, with good support for functional programming, and a lean, simple way of supporting OOP. You also don't need to embed your javascript directly in the HTML. I don't have any experience with php, but anyway I don't see what any of this has to do with perl, which is the language you'd be using on the server, not the client.
So the perl guys produce mod_perl and about a thousand templating kits,
Mod_perl is totally irrelevant here; either use it (if you need the performance boost) or don't (if you don't).
As far as templating kits, if you don't like that kind of thing, don't use it. Generating HTML with perl code isn't exactly rocket science. The horrible mess with frameworks is more of an issue with ajax, which is rocket science to get working well, across browsers.
which 8 years later has just managed to produce a variety of incomplete specifications, and two incomplete prototypes of the language interpreter, with no completion date
So what? Why should it bother me as a perl coder if perl 6 is a long time coming? Perl 5 is a great language.
nor any backwards compatibility
Here you're just misinformed. Perl 6 has always been planned to be 100% backward-compatible with perl 5. I don't know if the current non-release implementations have perl 5 compatibility yet, but they will by the time they're ready for release.
If perl is losing any mindshare (and is it? -- I haven't seen any data to demonstrate that), I don't think any of your reasons hold water. What might be more of an issue is that we've been going through a fad for OOP, but Perl 5's support for OOP is ugly.
Well, no, I don't really think there had been questions at all. OSS licenses are bog-standard licenses that just happen to be used for unusual purposes.
Are Open Source licenses enforceable at all?
Why would this be in doubt? Nobody's ever suggested that software licenses in general aren't enforceable, and OSS licenses are built on the same legal foundations.
Are their terms, calling for a patent detente or disclosure of source code, legal?
Again, why wouldn't they be?
Are they contracts, which require agreement by all parties to be valid, or licenses, which are binding even if you don't agree to then?
Why would anyone ask this question? Of course they're licenses. What does anyone think the "L" in GPL stands for? The software involved in this case was under the Apache License (a BSD-style license). Why does anyone think it's called the Apache License?
What legal penalties can a Free Software developer employ: only token damages, or much more?
Why is this a hard question? The license is the only thing that gives anyone else the right to redistribute the software. If they aren't doing it under the license, they're infringing a copyright. Damages for copyright violation are not a legally uncertain area. In the US, anything you write is automatically copyrighted, but if you want to be able to sue infringers for more than actual damages, you have to file a registration form.
IMO, it should have been news when the lower court ruled against the author of the software: Judge Issues Bizarre Ruling in OSS License Case. It's not news when a higher court reaffirms what everyone always knew about copyright law.
I own 8 linux machines (most of them in a freshman physics lab at the school where I teach), from a variety of OEMs. Not a single one hibernates correctly. From what I've heard, most hardware manufacturers simply don't do a good enough job of documenting the registers publicly, so it's impossible for the linux kernel/driver developers to get hibernation to work.
Except, it doesn't actually add Emacs functionality, so it's kind of worthless.
The OP was about getting keybindings consistent on different machines, because he had certain keybindings in his muscle memory.
Nobody uses Emacs for its default keybindings.
Mm...how did you gain telepathic insight into the mind of every emacs user in the universe? All I care about is the keybindings of emacs. In fact, most of the time I use one of the smaller emacs clones, such as mg, because they're faster. The keybindings are what I care about, because they're in my muscle memory.
There's an add-on for firefox that adds emacs keybindings to firefox.
It added too many of the emacs keybindings for my taste, but it was easy to deactivate the ones I didn't like.
Anyway I think that the Slashdot usage of the term "Creationism" should be replaced by the phrase "Young Earth Creationism"
(YEC for short)
That would be very convenient for the creationists, because YEC is disappearing these days. The creationists have learned that if they make definite scientific statements (e.g, that the Earth is 6000 years old), they risk being proved wrong by scientific evidence. Instead, they've learned to say vague, fuzzy things about intelligent design, while avoiding making testable statements about facts.
There are people of many Faiths that believe in Creation and a Creator, but that the Creation event was many (billions) of years ago, not 4004BC, and that the cosmos and the creatures therin have evolved over that (long) time.
Right, and those people aren't creationists. The wikipedia article gives a good definition of creationism: "Creationism is the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in their original form by a deity (often the Abrahamic God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) or deities, whose existence is presupposed.[1] In relation to the creation-evolution controversy the term creationism (or strict creationism) is commonly used to refer to religiously-motivated rejection of evolution.[2]" In other words, the commonly accepted definition of creationism is that it's in contradistinction to evolution, so the people you're describing, who accept evolution, aren't creationists. "Creationism" is just one of those words that doesn't mean exactly what you'd think it meant based on its etymology. For comparison, "communism" doesn't mean belief that people should live in communes, and a "Republican" in the US isn't defined as someone who's happy that our form of government is a republic.
I have a friend who's a yeast biologist at a university. I thought this was totally cool (I'm a homebrewer), so I got all excited and emailed him about it. He'd seen the paper, and said he was skeptical about whether the thing they'd cultured was actually an ancient yeast. IIRC he said that there were two main modern lineages of yeast, and they split from a common ancestor a long time ago (more than 45 Mya). It's not clear that you can really tell whether a particular yeast is from 45 Mya or not. Just because they cultured it from a sample that was that old, that doesn't mean the yeast spores had really been dormant for all that time. It could be a modern yeast that happened to be living in the old sample. Yeast live all over the place. In Belgium, they traditionally brew certain types of beer just by leaving the stuff in an open vat next to a window, and whatever gets in, that's what ferments it. In the past, a lot of it was probably yeast living on the skins of fruit in nearby orchards. These days it may be living in the walls and equipment of the brewery. Given that the stuff is all over the place, it's not obvious how you'd know whether or not a particular sample was contaminated with modern yeast.
Most people will never need to download software that isn't in the Ubuntu (or insert favorite distro here) repositories.
We will have truly arrived as a desktop O/S when it is possible to buy from Blizzard a World-of-Warcraft.tar.gz tarball that will Just Plain Work no matter which Linux distro we are using.
The GP is basically right, even though he's technically wrong. He's technically wrong, because theoretically people want to run proprietary as well as free software on Linux, and, e.g., Ubuntu isn't normally going to package software that doesn't meet the debian free software guidelines. But he's basically right, because (a) most people don't pick linux because they want to run proprietary software, (b) there is very little proprietary software available on linux, and (c) when proprietary software is available on linux, it's often so poorly supported and debugged that you don't want to use it. On my linux box, there are three closed-source apps I've used within the last year. I have adobe reader installed, and only use it once in a blue moon, e.g., to check that the pdfs I produce are compatible with it; xpdf and evince are better for everyday use. I have at various times had flash player installed, but currently I can't get it to work on my x64 machine. For a while I was using Amazon's mp3 album downloader app (required if you want to buy mp3 albums on amazon), but it was always breaking for obscure reasons, until finally I found out about an OSS command-line app called clamz that replaces it. Using proprietary apps on linux is a nightmare, and it's not a nightmare because of lack of LSB support, it's a nightmare because proprietary software houses know it's not in their best economic interest to put any serious effort into quality and support for an OS that's 1% of the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of those fairly bogus, highly overblown stories that keeps cropping up every so often. A similar one is the supposed shortage of scientists and engineers in the US, which has never existed, and is always supposed to be coming Real Soon Now; in fact, the data to support this claim are always either nonexistent or wrong. (E.g., they compare Indian college graduates with US college graduates, but the Indian degree they're comparing with a U.S. bachelor's is more equivalent to an AA degree in the U.S.)
First off, the concern about incompatibility of physical media was valid 30 years ago, but it's a false analogy to try to apply it to today's situation. Thirty years ago, I had data on a mixture of 8-inch floppies and 9-track tapes. I can't read an 8-inch floppy anymore, and although 9-track tapes still exist, most 9-tracks from that era are no longer readable due to physical deterioration of the media. But that was all in an era when hard disks were expensive, and the internet didn't exist. Today, I have all my data on hard disks of various computers, and I use file synchronization software to keep them all in sync. If one of my hard disks dies, I replace it, and I haven't lost any of my data. (I also have backups on optical media, but I basically never need those.)
There's also the concern about formats. People tend to bring up, for example, the image of rooms full of physically deteriorating 9-track tapes with data from old NASA space probe missions. The formats are often not documented. The thing is, most of our data isn't at all analogous to the raw data from Mariner or Voyager or Viking. Those were unique historical events, and the only way to get more data like the data they collected is by sending another space probe. (People also tend to vastly overestimate the value of scientific raw data. It's extremely uncommon for raw data to be of interest decades later.)
Most of the world's data isn't in some obscure NASA format, it's stored in formats that are used by tons of people, and are extremely well documented. Sorry, but I just don't believe that the knowledge of how to decode Adobe Acrobat format is going to be lost to future generations. Ditto for html, jpeg, and mp3.
Another thing to keep in mind is that nowadays you can emulate old computers with excellent performance. For instance, my first home computer was a TRS-80. I can still run my old TRS-80 games on my linux box, using an emulator. Sure, emulation isn't perfect, and some information may be lost. But the claimed threat of data loss is vastly overblown.
The biggest threat to the preservation of information isn't technological change, it's copyright. The most likely reason that I wouldn't be able to get back an old piece of digital data is that the people who tried to preserve it and put it on the web got sued by the people who own the copyright -- the same people who let it go out of print. The economic incentives are to hold on to your copyrights (because that doesn't cost you any money) and send out DMCA notices to anyone who puts it on the net (because that doesn't cost you any money either), all in the hope that your content will be worth eleven cents fifty years from now. This is exactly what we see happening, for instance, with ROMs for old video games, which you can play in MAME, except that you have to find an illegal source for the data, because the owners of the copyrights aren't willing to sell you a copy.
Nope, there'd be a special election: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/othernationalelectionstories/2008319716_stevens28.html
The senate ethics committee can recommend that the he be expelled from senate by a 2/3 vote. The ethics committee has recommended such things before, but nobody's ever been expelled because they all resign first.
Here's a good scenario for you. Stevens gets reelected. The new senate ends up being 59 democrats and 41 republicans -- one short of the 60-40 majority the democrats would need in order to override republican filibusters. The senate votes on expelling Stevens, and the vote is 59 yea, 41 nay.
That's why I added the qualifier "decent." When I tried it, NeoOffice was simply horrible.
Ah, thanks for the update -- my info was out of date, then. But I still wouldn't expect OOo 3 to have built up any significant market share on MacOS X on the day it came out. It's been years and years now that Mac users haven't had a decent version of OOo to catch their interest. That lack of mindshare isn't going to change overnight.
In fact, I think 80% is surprisingly low.
First off, we really shouldn't count Macs as part of the equation. I haven't checked recently, but for a long time, OOo's support for MacOS X lagged way, way behind. It was essentially unusable.
So of OOo's potential audience, I would guess 99% would be Windows users, 1% Linux users. I would therefore expect 99% of OOo downloads to be the Windows version. Not only that, but a lot of Linux users probably aren't going to download it from the OOo web site, they're going to get it when it becomes the default through their distro's packaging infrastructure, and therefore they presumably won't be counted in this statistic. Let's guess (pulling numbers out of my rear end, I admit) that 90% of Linux desktop users won't downloaad directly, and will get it via their distro. So based on these factors, I would have expected the percentages to be more like 99.9% Windows and 0.1% Linux, a ratio of 1000 to 1.
It's actually pretty darn depressing that the Windows figure is as low as 80%. That's a 4:1 ratio rather than the 1000:1 ratio I would have expected. That suggests that the Windows market for OOo is hundreds of times smaller than it would be based merely on the market share of the operating systems. Some possible interpretations, none of which are pretty:
I wouldn't be surprised of #3 captured the essential truth of the situation. OOo is one of the worst pieces of OSS I use. I've searched systematically for something better, and haven't found it. At this point, I feel like OOo was a dead end that had the unfortunate effect of killing off interest in competing OSS office software.
I used VMS for years, and I don't think I'd want to go back to its versioning system. It was actually kind of annoying. You kept on having to do the purge command to get rid of all the old versions of files that were cluttering up your account and using up your disk space.
For my day-to-day activities on Linux, I get along just fine without that kind of automatic versioning. Emacs makes ~ files, which gives me versioning one level deep, and that's almost always all I ever need. I also use Unison to mirror and synchronize my files among several different machines, and that means that when I have a real "Oh, shit!" moment because I deleted an important file or made a really bad change, I can always get the old version back off the mirror right away. For longer time scales, I have backups on CDs.
The problem with richer filesystems and metadata is that they create hassles on the internet. Back in the MacOS <=9 days, all the mac metadata was a total hassle. You had to go through conniptions with .hqx files just to hand files back and forth over the net. I'm sure Apple thought it over very carefully before they finally made the decision to move away from metadata with MacOS X, and I agree with their decision.
That's actually pretty similar to what I did eventually end up doing. I had her open a terminal window, and got her to find the file using ls and cd. What was confusing as heck was that the file was in her Desktop folder, but, AFAICT, the Desktop folder wasn't showing up in the GNOME file manager as a subdirectory of her home directory. (I could have this wrong, of course, because I was only getting her description of everything over the phone.)
My mother in law in upstate NY had a Windows box that she used for exactly two purposes: email, and playing online Scrabble. Her Windows machine got full of malware, to the point where it wouldn't even boot. While she was visiting us in California this summer, I set up a machine with Ubuntu for her to use, and she got fairly comfortable with GNOME and Firefox. I sent an Ubuntu install CD home with her on the plane, and she went ahead and installed it with virtually no problems. I only had to talk her through a couple of issues on the phone, the main one being non-Linux-related: her BIOS wasn't set to boot from a CD.
She got going with email, and then it was time to get her set up for scrabble. The one she plays isn't the famous facebook one, it's a java program that accesses a club's server in Romania. Well, I think I spent about an hour with her on the phone, and we still don't have it working. One thing that took us a heck of a long time was that when she downloaded the jar file for the scrabble app, neither of us could figure out where the file had gone. Probably if I'd been in the same room with her it would have only taken me thirty seconds to locate the file, but over the phone, it was more like I was experiencing it from her point of view, and it was completely confusing. She was clicking around in the Firefox download manager, in the GNOME file manager, all with no luck. It seriously took her about 20 minutes, *with my help*, to find the file. It probably didn't help that I use fluxbox myself, and am not familiar with GNOME or its file manager. (Now we're almost there, except that apparently she's got a completely dysfunctional version of the java runtime installed. You click on the widgets in the program's UI, and it doesn't respond.)
Anyway, what kind of indictment is it of Firefox/GNOME's usability when it's easier to install Linux than to find the file you just downloaded?
Of course now I have to slap a steel helmet on my head to withstand the inevitable onslaught of know-it-all slashdotters telling me what an idiot I am, and how I could have easily found the file. Of course that's always how it is with usability. To the person who already knows how to use the software, it seems painfully obvious.
Same comment as on virtually every Ask Slashdot since the beginning of time: we really need more info. Does "university physics lab" mean a research lab, or a teaching lab? If the latter, then ease of use and durability extremely important. You want a UI that's easy and simple. On the scopes we use in our teaching labs, we tend to have a lot of problems with the BNC connectors getting damaged because students don't understand how to put on and take off the connectors.
In fact, I think Wikipedia has some features that make it more reliable than the culture at large.
When I read a WP article on a controversial topic, I always make sure to take a look at the talk page as well. This allows me to see what issues are really controversial, what ideological axes people have to grind, etc. That's something I can't do with the New York Times.
That's incorrect for a couple of reasons. First of all, the experiment has to be done in a vacuum chamber. Making a good vacuum pump requires a pretty high level of technology, e.g., you have to be able to machine pistons to fine tolerances, and that's something that people couldn't do until the industrial revolution. Second, the intensity of the alpha particles from uranium is not high enough to use for this experiment. The actual Rutherford experiment was one of the many experiments that suddenly became possible when the Curies purified radium. I'm a physicist, not a radiochemist, but I suspect that the techniques for purifying radium were pretty darn difficult, hence Marie Curie's Nobel prize at the turn of the 20th century. Definitely not something the ancient Greeks could have accomplished.
You've also got the significance of the Rutherford experiment mixed up a little. It didn't prove the existence of atoms. The atomic theory of matter gradually got more and more solid over a period of centuries. The final piece of evidence for atoms as literal objects came from Einstein's analysis of Brownian motion in 1905. But even decades before that, there had been rough order-of-magnitude estimates of the sizes of atoms, from things like viscosity experiments.
The first evidence for subatomic particles (the electron) was J.J. Thomson, in 1897. (So note that there was at least a decade's worth of overlap between the solidification of the evidence for the existence of atoms, and work that presupposed the existence of atoms and tried to find their subatomic structure.)
By 1909, when Rutherford did the experiment with the backscattering of alpha particles, there was no longer any doubt about the literal existence of atoms, which was really pretty conclusively settled by Einstein in 1905.
Sure, if you prefer, just s/OSS/free/g throughout my whole post.
Here you're ignoring the argument of my post, which is that you can tell whether it's good becauese you can install it for free, and test it as much as you like.
And here you're responding to an argument that I didn't make at all.
Again, you're responding to things that I never actually said. I didn't say anything about a free trial for a limited time. You said that.
Again, you're responding to things that I didn't actually say. I didn't say I never wanted to pay for OSS. In fact, I specifically gave the example of paying for support for OSS. I didn't say I wanted a limited-time free trial of proprietary software. I didn't say I wanted to use shareware whose author requested donations. You said all that.
Well, for one thing, by the time I found out how buggy it was, I was locked into a proprietary file format. Also, what I usually do with OSS software is to start off by messing around with a little, then if it looks promising I use it a little more, on things that matter more to me, and then if I start to gain some confidence in it, I go ahead and hitch my wagon to it for an important project. Not so easy to do that with expensive proprietary software like PageMaker.
Except that we see lots of cases where it doesn't work that way. I gave an example where it didn't work that way: Adobe PageMaker. You gave another example where, in my opinion, it didn't work that way: Windows.
Actually you're recapping what you said and I didn't.
Nice ad hominem attack. I'm 42. But I guess it's easier to attack me personally, and to respond to things I didn't say, that to read my post and respond logically to the things I actually did say.
This isn't really quite as dilberty as the poster indicates. This is a symptom of a more general problem, which is that non-OSS software almost always sucks, because the economics dictate that it has to suck. If it was OSS, users could install it on their machines, try it out for a while, and decide whether it was any good or not. (Note that this still works fine for commercial OSS. E.g., people can try Ubuntu before deciding whether to deploy it widely in their organization and then pay Canonical for support.) If it's not OSS, you don't typically have any way of knowing whether it's good or not. Sure, you could read reviews, talk to friends, etc. But that's sort of like deciding to buy a car without having a chance to test-drive it, just based on your buddy saying he has one and he likes it.
The worst piece of non-OSS software I ever owned was Adobe PageMaker 6.5, but the only way I found out how bad it was was by writing a book using it, and finding out after I'd gotten pretty far into the project that PageMaker was gradually starting to corrupt my files, and was also crashing often enough to cause me real problems. It would crash one day, and I'd lose my file. So then I'd open the file again to page 93, which I'd been working on, and it would crash again because page 93 was corrupted. So then I'd get the file back off of backup. But then I'd click to page 87, and it would crash again. So the backup was no use either, because it was corrupted on page 87. In this example, there's absolutely no way I could have tested the software sufficiently before buying it to find out that I was going to have these horrendous problems.
Because users usually can't evaluate the quality of non-OSS software very effectively, there is absolutely no incentive for non-OSS software houses to work on quality. They can't sell quality. What they can sell is features.
So it's not quite as silly as it sounds to think you can pull the wool over the users' eyes by putting out a beta release and calling it 6.0. The users don't have a lot of other options to go on for evaluating quality.
A slightly different slant on what you're saying ---
From the point of view of the customer, an expensive thin client could be a really stupid choice, since they could do exactly the same thing with a $200 linux box, used along with an existing monitor, mouse, and keyboard. The hypothetical advantage of the thin client is that it requires zero maintenance. However, you can do accomplish the same thing with a general-purpose PC whose hard disk get re-synchronized to a standard image every night. At the community college where I teach, that's essentially what they do (albeit with Windows, because the entire campus is a Windows monoculture), and it seems to work pretty well. No problems with viruses, for example, because if a computer did get a virus, it would just get wiped out the same night.
A computer capable of running a web browser is getting so cheap these days that it's hard for me to imagine any reason to buy thin clients, other than "some sales guy showed me a powerpoint presentation, and it looked really good."
Also, if you end up not liking the thin client, or you find out you have some users who really do need to do something a thin client can't do, you've wasted your money. If the same thing happens with the linux box that gets its hard disk reset every night, you just change the configuration so its hard disk no longer gets reset every night.
What really blows my mind is when you walk into a university library, and every single goddamn computer used for accessing the library's catalog is a Windows machine. What possible justification can they have for paying for that many Windows licenses, just so people can use a web browser? A linux box can easily be configured to work so similarly to Windows that 95% of users will never even know it's not Windows. It seems like a lot of these decisions get driven by the fact that the technical staff simply doesn't know anything but Windows.
Oh, God, your sig makes my head hurt. Which George Bush? Carter and Bush I were both good presidents.
There have always been some things that you needed to do on the server side (e.g., validate the user's password), and some that were better done on the client side (e.g., warn the user *before* he hits the submit button that his social security number only has 8 digits). That hasn't changed. The only thing that's changed is that more people are doing ajax. An ajax app still needs to have some things happen on the server side, and perl is still a perfectly reasonable language for that.
It doesn't need to be crappy. JavaScript is a very nice programming language, with good support for functional programming, and a lean, simple way of supporting OOP. You also don't need to embed your javascript directly in the HTML. I don't have any experience with php, but anyway I don't see what any of this has to do with perl, which is the language you'd be using on the server, not the client.
Mod_perl is totally irrelevant here; either use it (if you need the performance boost) or don't (if you don't). As far as templating kits, if you don't like that kind of thing, don't use it. Generating HTML with perl code isn't exactly rocket science. The horrible mess with frameworks is more of an issue with ajax, which is rocket science to get working well, across browsers.
So what? Why should it bother me as a perl coder if perl 6 is a long time coming? Perl 5 is a great language.
Here you're just misinformed. Perl 6 has always been planned to be 100% backward-compatible with perl 5. I don't know if the current non-release implementations have perl 5 compatibility yet, but they will by the time they're ready for release.
If perl is losing any mindshare (and is it? -- I haven't seen any data to demonstrate that), I don't think any of your reasons hold water. What might be more of an issue is that we've been going through a fad for OOP, but Perl 5's support for OOP is ugly.
Yeah. From the article:
Well, no, I don't really think there had been questions at all. OSS licenses are bog-standard licenses that just happen to be used for unusual purposes.
Why would this be in doubt? Nobody's ever suggested that software licenses in general aren't enforceable, and OSS licenses are built on the same legal foundations.
Again, why wouldn't they be?
Why would anyone ask this question? Of course they're licenses. What does anyone think the "L" in GPL stands for? The software involved in this case was under the Apache License (a BSD-style license). Why does anyone think it's called the Apache License?
Why is this a hard question? The license is the only thing that gives anyone else the right to redistribute the software. If they aren't doing it under the license, they're infringing a copyright. Damages for copyright violation are not a legally uncertain area. In the US, anything you write is automatically copyrighted, but if you want to be able to sue infringers for more than actual damages, you have to file a registration form.
IMO, it should have been news when the lower court ruled against the author of the software: Judge Issues Bizarre Ruling in OSS License Case. It's not news when a higher court reaffirms what everyone always knew about copyright law.
I own 8 linux machines (most of them in a freshman physics lab at the school where I teach), from a variety of OEMs. Not a single one hibernates correctly. From what I've heard, most hardware manufacturers simply don't do a good enough job of documenting the registers publicly, so it's impossible for the linux kernel/driver developers to get hibernation to work.
The OP was about getting keybindings consistent on different machines, because he had certain keybindings in his muscle memory.
Mm...how did you gain telepathic insight into the mind of every emacs user in the universe? All I care about is the keybindings of emacs. In fact, most of the time I use one of the smaller emacs clones, such as mg, because they're faster. The keybindings are what I care about, because they're in my muscle memory.
There's an add-on for firefox that adds emacs keybindings to firefox. It added too many of the emacs keybindings for my taste, but it was easy to deactivate the ones I didn't like.
That would be very convenient for the creationists, because YEC is disappearing these days. The creationists have learned that if they make definite scientific statements (e.g, that the Earth is 6000 years old), they risk being proved wrong by scientific evidence. Instead, they've learned to say vague, fuzzy things about intelligent design, while avoiding making testable statements about facts.
Right, and those people aren't creationists. The wikipedia article gives a good definition of creationism: "Creationism is the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in their original form by a deity (often the Abrahamic God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) or deities, whose existence is presupposed.[1] In relation to the creation-evolution controversy the term creationism (or strict creationism) is commonly used to refer to religiously-motivated rejection of evolution.[2]" In other words, the commonly accepted definition of creationism is that it's in contradistinction to evolution, so the people you're describing, who accept evolution, aren't creationists. "Creationism" is just one of those words that doesn't mean exactly what you'd think it meant based on its etymology. For comparison, "communism" doesn't mean belief that people should live in communes, and a "Republican" in the US isn't defined as someone who's happy that our form of government is a republic.
I have a friend who's a yeast biologist at a university. I thought this was totally cool (I'm a homebrewer), so I got all excited and emailed him about it. He'd seen the paper, and said he was skeptical about whether the thing they'd cultured was actually an ancient yeast. IIRC he said that there were two main modern lineages of yeast, and they split from a common ancestor a long time ago (more than 45 Mya). It's not clear that you can really tell whether a particular yeast is from 45 Mya or not. Just because they cultured it from a sample that was that old, that doesn't mean the yeast spores had really been dormant for all that time. It could be a modern yeast that happened to be living in the old sample. Yeast live all over the place. In Belgium, they traditionally brew certain types of beer just by leaving the stuff in an open vat next to a window, and whatever gets in, that's what ferments it. In the past, a lot of it was probably yeast living on the skins of fruit in nearby orchards. These days it may be living in the walls and equipment of the brewery. Given that the stuff is all over the place, it's not obvious how you'd know whether or not a particular sample was contaminated with modern yeast.
The GP is basically right, even though he's technically wrong. He's technically wrong, because theoretically people want to run proprietary as well as free software on Linux, and, e.g., Ubuntu isn't normally going to package software that doesn't meet the debian free software guidelines. But he's basically right, because (a) most people don't pick linux because they want to run proprietary software, (b) there is very little proprietary software available on linux, and (c) when proprietary software is available on linux, it's often so poorly supported and debugged that you don't want to use it. On my linux box, there are three closed-source apps I've used within the last year. I have adobe reader installed, and only use it once in a blue moon, e.g., to check that the pdfs I produce are compatible with it; xpdf and evince are better for everyday use. I have at various times had flash player installed, but currently I can't get it to work on my x64 machine. For a while I was using Amazon's mp3 album downloader app (required if you want to buy mp3 albums on amazon), but it was always breaking for obscure reasons, until finally I found out about an OSS command-line app called clamz that replaces it. Using proprietary apps on linux is a nightmare, and it's not a nightmare because of lack of LSB support, it's a nightmare because proprietary software houses know it's not in their best economic interest to put any serious effort into quality and support for an OS that's 1% of the desktop.
Or rather, you could ask whoever's making the image to click through once.
That doesn't work. It's per user.