which makes this satire mean, pure and simple. Tom seems convinced that RMS is a glory-seeker -- everything I read by and about RMS, indicates that he pushes GNU (as opposed to RMS) because he wants the issue of freedom to be prominent.
Yes, RMS is a political man: duh, humans are political animals! The point is not to escape politics and just quietly make good software -- you can't, because then someone who has NOT escaped politics, will swindle you; the point is to be political in the right direction.
The entire objectivist and libertarian (well, for SOME, more extreme, libertatians) apolitical schtick is much more of a hollow dream than communism ever was. What RMS is doing is The Right Thing, IMO, despite his abrasiveness -- he pushes a political issue that is critical to our (software geeks') survival as a culture. The fact that Tom tries to turn this into personal glory-seeking shows, I think, either misunderstanding of what RMS is talking about, or a personal agenda which Tom is not willing to [publicly] admit to.
Ultimately, it is pure and simple: What RMS is doing is not merely good, is it necessary. What Tom is doing (in this article at least) is partisan and mean.
While the article is rather interesting in and of itself, I think it points to a bigger issue: in computer industry in general, and in benchmarkig in particular, proper scientific tools and methods are often not used.
Statistics is your friend! If some psychologists used similar methodology for their investigation, they would be laughed at -- I won't even talk about hard sciences.
Yet in benchmarking, the perpetrators completely ignore representativeness of their samples -- this is all benchmarks are really supposed to be, controlled investigation of the performance of a representative sample of real-world computing activities. How can you investigate performance if you don't even try to account for various miscellaneous factors by using proper sample selection?..
What can I say?.. The entire thing disgusts me. I would rant more, but I will simply go and sob in the corner about lack of scientific methodology in my field of choice.
Aaaah! pseudo-science and misinformation! Run away, run AWAAAYY!!!
Evolution has been disproven on many levels. One very good example of this is a human eye. The infinite complexity of this organ is beyond a doubt a stumbling stone in an evolutionary biologist's work. If any of you has read "Darwin's Black Box" you would know what I am speaking about.
BS. Darwin's Black Box is a rather badly-thought out piece. I was at the debate between its author (Behe, was it?) and out local Bio professor, here at UMass. basically, all his arguments come down to argument from personal incredulity -- 'well, I can't believe it, so it must not have happened'. The eye HAS evolved -- many times over. There are species living with the eye in what we could term mid-step of evolution. Darwin's famous quote about the eye -- so much loved by creationists -- is followed by something like 'but if it was shown how eye could evolve gradually, this objection would not stand'; this part creationists forget SOOO fast. Eye HAS been shown to be evolvable gradually, both by observation and by simulation, and so have many other of Behe's 'irreducibly complex' systems.
Any physists out there? Take a look at the second law of thermodynamics. " Entorpy in a system increases over time." it is obviously apparent that humans are very structured beings, and to hold the second law of thermodynamics sacred, we would then have to say the human race did not begin with some non-living matter which gradually, over milennia, turned into what it is today. It just does not make sense.
You, sir, are an ignoramus. 2nd law of TD speaks about closed systems -- Earth is NOT a closed system, we get constant energy input from the sun, this is why there is increasing complexity here, at the expense of Sun's deterioration.
Another very basic scientific law states that living tissue can not spawn from non living matter. It was once very popular that when meat was left alone it turned into flys.... anyone?
Which 'scientific law' would that be? One of the 'I make up the laws as is convenient in the process of an argument' laws, by any chance?..
Lastly, it is quite the contrary -- anyone with some brains and a REAL scientific background (or even just some brains only, for pan's sake!) can see that the entire creationist thing is tripe, and that the theory of evolusion is pretty well established, and the fact of evolution is being observed right now -- it's happening in front of our eyes, for those who are willing to look.
I have no idea what I would do with over 200GB of storage. Mind you, that's what we think whenever a new high-capacity technology appears. Within a few years, it's the standard size and we all wonder how we coped with our old "tiny" drives.
I think there is a cruicial difference: Always before, the technology was playing catch-up with demand. We always needed MORE space, memory, speed! The technology has now overtaken popular demand (not the specialized computer needs, of course).
Let me tell you this: Since I got 11G drive a few months ago (in addition to my old 6G) -- rather cheaply, too! -- for the first time in my life, I have actually had free storage. LOTS of it. I have the content of a half-dozen CDs on my disks, a bunch of programs, some CD-games with full installation (you know, the kind which installd 500M straight onto the harddrive) -- and I still have space left. I am now trying to INVENT new uses for that space, whereas before, I was always trying to invent new ways to reduce my space usage.
My point? The existing computer paradigm has nearly exhausted itself. We will need to figure out something radically new to do with our computers, in order to actually use all the power we are getting.
Ultra-high speed backbone technologies... CPUs too fast for most common tasks... ADSL... Now super-duper-humongous harddrives...
I expect that within 2 years, we will have computers more powerful than we know what to do with -- most of our current programs simply do not use the available CPU resources already, and the same will happen with the storage and bandwidth. At that point, some totally new paragidm will spring up -- for nature abhors a vacuum. We will foigure out a Totally New Thing to do with our computers.
What will it be, that will be able to tax all of those resources? True VR? Totally wired environment, with the computers as the master controllers? We have those things already... Heck, I wish I knew what it will be! (I'd probably become very rich if I did). One thing I am fairly certain of -- we are at the edge of a paradigm shift in computing.
The New Thing (tm) is coming! The New Thing (tm) is coming!
Are you trying to say "it doesn't matter how he got there, he just got there"?
You know, I am sometimes amazed by the sheer literal-mindedness and ignorance of the people out there, by their inability to grasp even the simple metaphors, or to comprehend even simple points about logic (present company excluded, of course;)
My point was very simple: You can use the wrong methods, and STILL arrive at the right conclusion. There is nothing in faulty argument to say that the conclusion is incorrect -- the only thing you can infer from argument's invalidity, is that that particular argument does not support that particular conclusion.
The fact that the origional writer's arguments are bogus, does not mean that his conclusion is therefore false.
This essay made many questionable assumptions and assertions; however, it made one excellent (as in, truly excellent point) about reversing the arrangement -- instead of offering a project w/ bounty and trying to find developers who are interested in it, offer developers' ideas and try to find sponsors for them. I think this model has the potential tpo combine the best of classic OSS development with the obvious benefits of the 'bounty model'.
Will it work? I certainly hope so. Has anyone tried something like this yet, the 'sponsor model' rather than the 'bounty model'?
Can you imagine what would happen if someone put a fully implemented GUI like Apple on a UNIX box
Such an OS already exists -- it's called 'Mac OS X'. It is Darwin + Mac-ish/NeXT-ish GUI (or rather, Darwin is Mac OS X without the GUI components). I expected great things from it, but so far, I am not very impressed. My NetInfo database got corrupted a few days ago, and recovering it is a pain. vi does not work in single-user mode, and single-user mode terminal does not do with VT100 or XTerm emulation, so I cannot use Emacs in full-screen text mode. I am editing files with echo, cat, and sed!!!
I'm not surprised that China and many countries in the East do lots of pirating, consider the price of MS Office Professional and what someone earn in a year. When a piece of software cost as much as many months of salary it's really hard for a company to survive. (They should use free software instead of piracy tough...)
There is more to the Oriental piracy than just that. Countries in the Far East, especially China, have a very different history of social attitudes towards what we dub 'intellectual property' -- it (IP) simply did not exist. 'The highest form of flattery is immitation' was, until the recent West-imposed New World Order, the way of it. Because of this, people there usually do not see software 'piracy' as something morally bad.
Of course, the fact that an average computer user in India or China cannot afford the Western software prices, is a rather weighty factor...
Me, I wish all the 'software pirates' the best of luck. The current software distribution system is an abhorrent beast from Hel -- and it is a beast that tricked the majority of population into believing its crap (where are all the monster-slayers when we need 'em? or will Linux/FreeSoftware become one?). I frankly wish that they get hit harder, but i can hardly contribute to it, seeing as I don't use Windows except for games...
By this reasoning, a URL to an article which contains a URL to a defamatory article, is itself defamatory... Figuring out the far-flung consequences of such a moronic policy is left as an excercise to the reader.
This is a pefect example of legal lunacy -- cover your ass so thoroughly that you also cover your moth and suffocate. Reminds me of some older software licenses which, when taken literally, would not allow you to copy the software to your harddrive for installation purposes -- actually forbade you to install the software.
My faith in humans' intelligence is crumbling, piece by piece, every day.
XFree worked fine before (well, the font display sucked (yes, I know about standalone TT and PS fontservers)), but the design -- separate server binaries -- always bothered me as very inelegant. Finally, my aesthetic sensibilities will be satisfied, and we will all live happily ever after! (the fact that there will finally be native Voodoo3 support, won't hurt either).
while yes , as I expected the results showed off amds impersive cpu power when handling general applications. but still lagging in teh FPU scores:(
Well, the server is slashdotted... Anyway, I was under impression that AMD was supposed to, for the first time ever, beat the equivalent Intel offering in FPU performance -- with some super-duper optimized triple-pipelined FPU unit, with special optimization for single-precision FP arithmetic. Guess not...
(licks the finger and touches the kernel with it) Hshhhh! Piping hot! Not surprising, considering the speed it arrived at... At this rate, the kernels will soon start burning through the bottom of my hardrive!
Seriously , though: Could it be that the kernel folks are trying to fix some issues in time for the 3rd Mindcraft test?.. Is that why the upgrades are coming at such speed?
Even Microsoft has been wary about porting DirectX to NT....they'd like it to at least have a shred of a chance at being an enterprise solution. Even Microsoft isnt dumb enough to use DirectX for their desktop.
Hah! don't underestimate the power of stupidity. Win200 Professional (NT5) was presented in my university a week ago, and the presenter confirmed that NT5 will come with true DirectX (not simulation). When I asked him about stability, he had the balls to claim that NT is more stable than Linux... He ignored the question about the role of DirectX in the stability issue.
At my company, we'd really like to replace exchange and outlook with something unix and standards based. However, after searching for a couple of months, no good replacements are apparent.
Remember, outlook doesn't just do mail, but scheduling and contact managements (glorified address book).
Ummm... Why do you need it all integrated? I think the whole point of Unix way is that you can use different tools, and make them work together -- the 'one thing does all' is a very Windowish way (Emacs is different, it provides a framework for those 'separate things' to work together, it does not try to do everything by itself -- it's more of an OS than an editor)
Hear, hear! Logical (as opposed to visual) document design is the piece that so many people are missing! The difference between hand-coded HTML and visually-designed one is similar to the difference between LaTeX and word processors -- in both cases, the latter may come out looking pretty on the author's system, but no guarantees beyond that.
When I write a paper, I don't use word processor codes, so why when I want to make a website would I use HTML?
Well, if you are talking about short and simple papers, word-processors are OK -- and WYSIWIG editors are OK for short and simple pages. If you are writing something serious, you should be using a logical design language -- LaTeX -- rather than a word processor; similarly, you should be coding HTML rather than doing a visual layout.
Remember, HTML was designed for logical layout, not visual one. You are supposed to describe the logical structure of your document (or a group of documents), and let the browser determine the appearance. Yes, these days you can use style sheets -- but the problem with visual layout remains; with a logical layout language like HTML, what you see is rarely what they get. This is why you should be putting the document by defining its logical structure, not its appearance (this does apply to stylesheets, too -- they produce visual layout, but they have to be designed as a logical layout)
P.S. if you try submitting a PhD thesis written in Word in my CS department, you will be kicked so hard that you won't be able to hear yourself scream due to having broken the sound barrier.
I don't believe the person you responded to was saying that not a single professional web page designer codes complete pages by hand. He was just using common sense reasoning to say that he thinks it's unrealistic to expect all of the designers to know HTML and create and maintain sites with just a simple text editor.
Excuse me, this is exactly what is expected of DESIGNERS. People writing their own homepages can use whatever they want; anyone designing any serious page, MUST understand what goes on behind the scenes. Just as you would not trust a person who only knows how to use MS's GUI interface design tools, to write programs -- you would not trust the one who only knows how to drag'n'drop, to design serious sites.
Remember, you MUST KNOW WHAT HAPPENS BEHIND THE SCENES. This is exactly what is expected of any professional designer.
There were many glaring historical inaccuracies in the article -- that is indisputable.
There were also many technical inaccuracies, and this is indisputable as well.
So what? This article was not written for techies; considering its length, I think it packed as much useful info as possible in a form that is accessible to lay[wo]men.
The point is not in what ways it is wrong, but in what ways it is right -- and it is right in that it tells the general population about GNOME as one of the major alternatives in Linux user interface; it also tells them about what 'free' means in this context, and a bit about how bazaar development works. True, it could tell more and it could be more accurate -- but accuracy would entail both greater length and many details which a common non-techie would have trouble digesting in one sitting.
The glass is half-full, folks. I think this was a case of good PR, and a good article.
Just a quickie question from an ignoramus -- what do the ratings mean, and how do they relate to each other? is B1 better or worse than C2, or just different?
--
That DOES happens, but don't ask the liberal media
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
FBI statistics (even after possibly being fudged to support gun control by minimizing other forms of violence) report 1,523 mass-killings (defined as twelve or more dead) in 1998 where the sole weapons used were baseball bats and knives. 54% of these killings (a total of 822) were "drive-by" incidents
It's another little-publicized fact that government figures record no confirmed fatalities at all due to handguns in 1998, and only 23 due to long weapons (rifles, shotguns, "assault rifles", etc.)
Interesting numbers. Can you point me to a location where they can be verified, or at least a location which would reference the original FBI sources?
Nice article. One problem, though -- I cannot see all the PHBs doing a turn-around and changing the way they think about a market... especially the old, from-the-trenches PHB types. The author is making an excellent suggestion to them -- to approach Linux on its own terms, rather than as just another market -- but those people spent their entire lives approaching everything as just another market, and I don't think they can handle the radical change that viewing Linux as a process and a community requires.
Slashdot Mirror
which makes this satire mean, pure and simple. Tom seems convinced that RMS is a glory-seeker -- everything I read by and about RMS, indicates that he pushes GNU (as opposed to RMS) because he wants the issue of freedom to be prominent.
Yes, RMS is a political man: duh, humans are political animals! The point is not to escape politics and just quietly make good software -- you can't, because then someone who has NOT escaped politics, will swindle you; the point is to be political in the right direction.
The entire objectivist and libertarian (well, for SOME, more extreme, libertatians) apolitical schtick is much more of a hollow dream than communism ever was. What RMS is doing is The Right Thing, IMO, despite his abrasiveness -- he pushes a political issue that is critical to our (software geeks') survival as a culture. The fact that Tom tries to turn this into personal glory-seeking shows, I think, either misunderstanding of what RMS is talking about, or a personal agenda which Tom is not willing to [publicly] admit to.
Ultimately, it is pure and simple: What RMS is doing is not merely good, is it necessary. What Tom is doing (in this article at least) is partisan and mean.
--
While the article is rather interesting in and of itself, I think it points to a bigger issue: in computer industry in general, and in benchmarkig in particular, proper scientific tools and methods are often not used.
Statistics is your friend! If some psychologists used similar methodology for their investigation, they would be laughed at -- I won't even talk about hard sciences.
Yet in benchmarking, the perpetrators completely ignore representativeness of their samples -- this is all benchmarks are really supposed to be, controlled investigation of the performance of a representative sample of real-world computing activities. How can you investigate performance if you don't even try to account for various miscellaneous factors by using proper sample selection?..
What can I say?.. The entire thing disgusts me. I would rant more, but I will simply go and sob in the corner about lack of scientific methodology in my field of choice.
--
Well, this is not quite small enough for 'nanotech'. Should it be called 'millitech', then?..
--
Aaaah! pseudo-science and misinformation! Run away, run AWAAAYY!!!
BS. Darwin's Black Box is a rather badly-thought out piece. I was at the debate between its author (Behe, was it?) and out local Bio professor, here at UMass. basically, all his arguments come down to argument from personal incredulity -- 'well, I can't believe it, so it must not have happened'. The eye HAS evolved -- many times over. There are species living with the eye in what we could term mid-step of evolution. Darwin's famous quote about the eye -- so much loved by creationists -- is followed by something like 'but if it was shown how eye could evolve gradually, this objection would not stand'; this part creationists forget SOOO fast. Eye HAS been shown to be evolvable gradually, both by observation and by simulation, and so have many other of Behe's 'irreducibly complex' systems.
You, sir, are an ignoramus. 2nd law of TD speaks about closed systems -- Earth is NOT a closed system, we get constant energy input from the sun, this is why there is increasing complexity here, at the expense of Sun's deterioration.
Which 'scientific law' would that be? One of the 'I make up the laws as is convenient in the process of an argument' laws, by any chance?..
Lastly, it is quite the contrary -- anyone with some brains and a REAL scientific background (or even just some brains only, for pan's sake!) can see that the entire creationist thing is tripe, and that the theory of evolusion is pretty well established, and the fact of evolution is being observed right now -- it's happening in front of our eyes, for those who are willing to look.
--
I think there is a cruicial difference: Always before, the technology was playing catch-up with demand. We always needed MORE space, memory, speed! The technology has now overtaken popular demand (not the specialized computer needs, of course).
Let me tell you this: Since I got 11G drive a few months ago (in addition to my old 6G) -- rather cheaply, too! -- for the first time in my life, I have actually had free storage. LOTS of it. I have the content of a half-dozen CDs on my disks, a bunch of programs, some CD-games with full installation (you know, the kind which installd 500M straight onto the harddrive) -- and I still have space left. I am now trying to INVENT new uses for that space, whereas before, I was always trying to invent new ways to reduce my space usage.
My point? The existing computer paradigm has nearly exhausted itself. We will need to figure out something radically new to do with our computers, in order to actually use all the power we are getting.
--
Ultra-high speed backbone technologies... CPUs too fast for most common tasks... ADSL... Now super-duper-humongous harddrives...
I expect that within 2 years, we will have computers more powerful than we know what to do with -- most of our current programs simply do not use the available CPU resources already, and the same will happen with the storage and bandwidth. At that point, some totally new paragidm will spring up -- for nature abhors a vacuum. We will foigure out a Totally New Thing to do with our computers.
What will it be, that will be able to tax all of those resources? True VR? Totally wired environment, with the computers as the master controllers? We have those things already... Heck, I wish I knew what it will be! (I'd probably become very rich if I did). One thing I am fairly certain of -- we are at the edge of a paradigm shift in computing.
The New Thing (tm) is coming! The New Thing (tm) is coming!
--
You know, I am sometimes amazed by the sheer literal-mindedness and ignorance of the people out there, by their inability to grasp even the simple metaphors, or to comprehend even simple points about logic (present company excluded, of course ;)
My point was very simple: You can use the wrong methods, and STILL arrive at the right conclusion. There is nothing in faulty argument to say that the conclusion is incorrect -- the only thing you can infer from argument's invalidity, is that that particular argument does not support that particular conclusion.
The fact that the origional writer's arguments are bogus, does not mean that his conclusion is therefore false.
--
OK, class, today we will be studying division. Our first example is dividing 64 by 16.
64/16
We cross out 6 both on top and on the bottom, which leaves us with 4/1, which is the correct answer! And this, children, is how you do division...
--
This essay made many questionable assumptions and assertions; however, it made one excellent (as in, truly excellent point) about reversing the arrangement -- instead of offering a project w/ bounty and trying to find developers who are interested in it, offer developers' ideas and try to find sponsors for them. I think this model has the potential tpo combine the best of classic OSS development with the obvious benefits of the 'bounty model'.
Will it work? I certainly hope so. Has anyone tried something like this yet, the 'sponsor model' rather than the 'bounty model'?
--
Such an OS already exists -- it's called 'Mac OS X'. It is Darwin + Mac-ish/NeXT-ish GUI (or rather, Darwin is Mac OS X without the GUI components). I expected great things from it, but so far, I am not very impressed. My NetInfo database got corrupted a few days ago, and recovering it is a pain. vi does not work in single-user mode, and single-user mode terminal does not do with VT100 or XTerm emulation, so I cannot use Emacs in full-screen text mode. I am editing files with echo, cat, and sed!!!
(curses OS/X dirtily and stalks away)
--
There is more to the Oriental piracy than just that. Countries in the Far East, especially China, have a very different history of social attitudes towards what we dub 'intellectual property' -- it (IP) simply did not exist. 'The highest form of flattery is immitation' was, until the recent West-imposed New World Order, the way of it. Because of this, people there usually do not see software 'piracy' as something morally bad.
Of course, the fact that an average computer user in India or China cannot afford the Western software prices, is a rather weighty factor...
Me, I wish all the 'software pirates' the best of luck. The current software distribution system is an abhorrent beast from Hel -- and it is a beast that tricked the majority of population into believing its crap (where are all the monster-slayers when we need 'em? or will Linux/FreeSoftware become one?). I frankly wish that they get hit harder, but i can hardly contribute to it, seeing as I don't use Windows except for games...
--
By this reasoning, a URL to an article which contains a URL to a defamatory article, is itself defamatory... Figuring out the far-flung consequences of such a moronic policy is left as an excercise to the reader.
This is a pefect example of legal lunacy -- cover your ass so thoroughly that you also cover your moth and suffocate. Reminds me of some older software licenses which, when taken literally, would not allow you to copy the software to your harddrive for installation purposes -- actually forbade you to install the software.
My faith in humans' intelligence is crumbling, piece by piece, every day.
--
XFree worked fine before (well, the font display sucked (yes, I know about standalone TT and PS fontservers)), but the design -- separate server binaries -- always bothered me as very inelegant. Finally, my aesthetic sensibilities will be satisfied, and we will all live happily ever after! (the fact that there will finally be native Voodoo3 support, won't hurt either).
--
Well, the server is slashdotted... Anyway, I was under impression that AMD was supposed to, for the first time ever, beat the equivalent Intel offering in FPU performance -- with some super-duper optimized triple-pipelined FPU unit, with special optimization for single-precision FP arithmetic. Guess not...
--
(licks the finger and touches the kernel with it) Hshhhh! Piping hot! Not surprising, considering the speed it arrived at... At this rate, the kernels will soon start burning through the bottom of my hardrive!
Seriously , though: Could it be that the kernel folks are trying to fix some issues in time for the 3rd Mindcraft test?.. Is that why the upgrades are coming at such speed?
--
Hah! don't underestimate the power of stupidity. Win200 Professional (NT5) was presented in my university a week ago, and the presenter confirmed that NT5 will come with true DirectX (not simulation). When I asked him about stability, he had the balls to claim that NT is more stable than Linux... He ignored the question about the role of DirectX in the stability issue.
--
Ummm... Why do you need it all integrated? I think the whole point of Unix way is that you can use different tools, and make them work together -- the 'one thing does all' is a very Windowish way (Emacs is different, it provides a framework for those 'separate things' to work together, it does not try to do everything by itself -- it's more of an OS than an editor)
--
Hear, hear! Logical (as opposed to visual) document design is the piece that so many people are missing! The difference between hand-coded HTML and visually-designed one is similar to the difference between LaTeX and word processors -- in both cases, the latter may come out looking pretty on the author's system, but no guarantees beyond that.
--
Well, if you are talking about short and simple papers, word-processors are OK -- and WYSIWIG editors are OK for short and simple pages. If you are writing something serious, you should be using a logical design language -- LaTeX -- rather than a word processor; similarly, you should be coding HTML rather than doing a visual layout.
Remember, HTML was designed for logical layout, not visual one. You are supposed to describe the logical structure of your document (or a group of documents), and let the browser determine the appearance. Yes, these days you can use style sheets -- but the problem with visual layout remains; with a logical layout language like HTML, what you see is rarely what they get. This is why you should be putting the document by defining its logical structure, not its appearance (this does apply to stylesheets, too -- they produce visual layout, but they have to be designed as a logical layout)
P.S. if you try submitting a PhD thesis written in Word in my CS department, you will be kicked so hard that you won't be able to hear yourself scream due to having broken the sound barrier.
--
Hey, I wrote some stuff (well, modified it actually) using echo and sed... does that make me a demireal programmer?..
--
Excuse me, this is exactly what is expected of DESIGNERS. People writing their own homepages can use whatever they want; anyone designing any serious page, MUST understand what goes on behind the scenes. Just as you would not trust a person who only knows how to use MS's GUI interface design tools, to write programs -- you would not trust the one who only knows how to drag'n'drop, to design serious sites.
Remember, you MUST KNOW WHAT HAPPENS BEHIND THE SCENES. This is exactly what is expected of any professional designer.
--
There were also many technical inaccuracies, and this is indisputable as well.
So what? This article was not written for techies; considering its length, I think it packed as much useful info as possible in a form that is accessible to lay[wo]men.
The point is not in what ways it is wrong, but in what ways it is right -- and it is right in that it tells the general population about GNOME as one of the major alternatives in Linux user interface; it also tells them about what 'free' means in this context, and a bit about how bazaar development works. True, it could tell more and it could be more accurate -- but accuracy would entail both greater length and many details which a common non-techie would have trouble digesting in one sitting.
The glass is half-full, folks. I think this was a case of good PR, and a good article.
--
--
It's another little-publicized fact that government figures record no confirmed fatalities at all due to handguns in 1998, and only 23 due to long weapons (rifles, shotguns, "assault rifles", etc.)
Interesting numbers. Can you point me to a location where they can be verified, or at least a location which would reference the original FBI sources?
--
Nice article. One problem, though -- I cannot see all the PHBs doing a turn-around and changing the way they think about a market... especially the old, from-the-trenches PHB types. The author is making an excellent suggestion to them -- to approach Linux on its own terms, rather than as just another market -- but those people spent their entire lives approaching everything as just another market, and I don't think they can handle the radical change that viewing Linux as a process and a community requires.
In short -- I hope but remain doubtful. [sigh]
--