>...and ensure that all your car parts are produced by Ford.
There's an old quote from the early days of Ford, when they were the only car manufacturer: "You can have any color car you want, as long as it's black."
In a lot of ways, that quote aptly describes the information monoculture that Microsoft is trying to be. You can have any browser you want, as long as it's IE. You can have any operating system you want, as long as it's Windows.
Scary stuff. Makes me glad I use an alternative operating system. They can install Windows back on my machine when they can pry the keyboard from my dead hands.
I really don't want to wake up some morning in forty years to read about some A.I./robot who was an adopted orphan that was alternatingly verbally/physically abused and then ignored by it's foster parents, became psychologically unbalanced, spent its teenage years in a mental hospital, became an alcoholic and drug abuser with no immediate job prospects, and then went on a one-week bender which resulted in the A.I. taking a high-powered mining laser to the top of the Washington Monument and torching a good section of D.C.
Can anybody explain to me what the average user needs with such a large hard disk? I realize it's probably most beneficial to video editing and large databases. It seems that lately, though, the size of hard disks is vastly outpacing the application bloat revolution that has taken place recently.
Not to specifically target Microsoft, but Windows is perhaps the largest application that immediately jumps to mind that a consumer might run. In the *worst case* scenario, Windows and commonly bundled applications might take up 2G of space. Yet the average drive size today appears to be 10G to 12G.
It gets even more absurd when you consider alternative operating systems. I have BeOS installed with all the applications I need, and it takes up about 500M total. I have an 8.4G drive. I've installed Linux (Slack 3.6; 4.0's in the mail) in the not-too-distant past, and the installation indicated that even a complete full install would only hit ~370M.
216G is an awful lot of space, but I can't seriously imagine that most of the "commoners" need anywhere near that. Can anybody provide me with a legitimate example where Joe Blow is going to need even half that space? (Beyond archiving MP3s and pornography, that is.:)
Couldn't you make the argument that this is a design flaw?
Or that it was excusable up until the point where it was first discovered, and that Microsoft should have taken action. Because they didn't, they can be considered negligent and responsible for damages?
However, if you buy into the assumption that closed-source leaves me no choice, you're wrong. I always have the choice of not using that product anymore. If some large conglomerate decided to buy Be, Inc., completely redesign the UI along the lines of Windows 3.1, and then tries to charge $200, I have the option of no longer using BeOS.
However, I don't buy into the thought that simply because that _can_ happen means that it will, and that I might as well switch to Linux now because I'll have to switch later. It's a very speculative notion that can't be solidly argued. I've invested a fair amount of time, money, and energy in BeOS, and until it's being actively corrupted I don't see any reason to change.
From Microsoft's web site, the requirements for Intel NT:
- Pentium or faster processor 16 MB of memory (RAM); 32 MB recommended - 110 MB of available hard disk space - CD-ROM drive or access to a CD-ROM over a computer network - VGA or higher-resolution display adapter - Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device
If I have a table of items I've made put out in public, with a big sign on it that says, "Free stuff! Take as much as you like!" and someone walks by and takes one - are they stealing?
The GPL basically says, "Copy this as much as you like, it's free!" So how can you steal GPL software when it's being given away?
I believe it's called 'civil disobedience.' It isn't a law, per se; more of a philosophy.
There's also Ghandi's concept of 'non-violent resistance.'
As it oft-quoted, just because something is a law doesn't mean it's correct. Slavery was once supported by law, as well as preventing women from voting. Is software "piracy" equivalent to slavery or equal rights? No. On the other hand, laws aren't the be-all and end-all.
No, it's a different variation. It seems that a lot of people are willing to dismiss cold fusion out of hand simply because they believe too strongly in the current scientific theories. That's scientifically wrong as well.
If an experiment gives results that theory doesn't predict, you need to look at BOTH the theory and the experiment. The experiment may have been conducted wrong, but there's also the possibility that the theory is incorrect or incomplete. If all the results leaned one way - either every experiment got excess heat, or no experiment got excess heat - it would be easier to say whether the theories or the experiment need revising. The mixed results only lends some confusion to the process.
Nobody is saying that we should throw out our theories and start tossing random explanations in the air. On the other hand, it's far too arrogant to say that our theories are fixed in stone. After all, not too many centuries ago the Catholic Church held as inviolable the fact that Earth was the center of the universe.
Actually, the premise of "Chain Reaction" wasn't all that shabby, given the knowledge back when it was released ('96?).
The fusion experiments in that film were based on a concept called sonoluminescence. In a nutshell, it was found that when bubbles in a certain medium were exposed to certain types of sound waves, they would collapse and release visible light. One of the prevailing theories at the time is that the light was due to a fusion reaction, albeit on a very small scale.
I recall, a few months ago, reading that someone had verified experimentally that fusion does indeed take place in sonoluminescence.
I believe the circumvention that Microsoft used there was that IE "technology" (pardon me while I stifle the overpowering urge to laugh) was still used in the operating system, but simply that the Internet Explorer browser application that utilized that technology was simply not included.
I seem to recall an incident earlier in the trial in which a videotape - purported by Microsoft to be a genuine demonstration of something - turned out to be staged and spliced together out of several different tapes.
If Microsoft is going to submit false evidence to the court and then lie about it, I don't really see much hope that they're going to follow standard evidenciary channels (even granting that 'evidenciary' probably isn't a real word).
The key is _when_ the energy concentration gets powerful enough to prevent the wormhole from opening. In one reference frame, the ncecessary energy concentration arrives too late to affect the wormhole; in another reference frame, the energy concentration has the potential to collapse the forming wormhole before it takes.
Unfortunately, since wormholes are still theoretical structures, nobody is quite sure what will happen. The physics involved is still a bit too unformed to give a precise answer as to how much energy is needed, and when that energy needs to be in the formation of the wormhole.
It's been demonstrated - the article even mentions the demonstration.
It's called the Casimir effect, and is based on the idea of virtual particles. Spacetime isn't flat - it's teeming with zillions of virtual particles that pop in and out almost instantaneously. Their existence is so short that it doesn't really matter much. However, an Italian scientist named Casimir theorized that if you took two uncharged metal plates and put them close together, they would attract each other via the net force of all these virtual particles.
A few years later (IIRC, mid 1920s), when somebody actually _tried_ this, sure enough they detected a net attractive force. As science progressed, it was determined that this attractive force is based on negative energy. Negative energy is one of the driving forces behind wormholes. In order to make a stable wormhole, you need "exotic matter" - a form of matter that has an average negative energy density. Nobody's ever seen exotic matter, but no equation or physical process has been seen or discovered yet that would rule out its existence.
Negative energy/virtual particles are also the process by which black holes give off radiation (yes, THEY DO RADIATE). If a black hole gives off more matter than they consume, they will shrink and eventually explode.
1) You _can_ go faster than the speed of light, just not directly. You can't just turn the engines of a spaceship on "high," you have to skip over some of the space you're travelling through, and your _effective_ speed jumps past the speed of light. Both wormholes and "spacefolding" technologies - both of which are theoretically proven - would enable one to do this.
2) Yes, you can. In fact, we know how to do it today. The problem is, it takes an astronomically large amount of energy. It requires a wormhole in order to achieve it. You take one end of the wormhole and take it on a tour of the solar system at _relativistic_ speeds. You keep the other one stationary. Due to the time dilation, time passes for one a lot slower than it does for the other. Since one end of the wormhole has experienced less passage of time than the other, one end resides in the past, and one resides in the future. Then you can freely travel backwards and fowards through time via the wormhole.
There are other ways to travel backwards and forwards through time, but most are terribly implausible (e.g., infinitely long rotating cylinders spinning at relativistic speeds - I don't understand the full complexities of that particular process). And all have been discovered as parts of solutions to Einstein's equations, which have very little to do with quantum theory. So even assuming only relativity applies, you're still hosed.
Slackware tends to be on a different set of shelves: the book section. Many, many books tend to bundle Slackware as the Linux distribution (or one of them; I've seen books that bundle multiple distributions) on the CD in the back.
I've yet to see Debian *anywhere,* boxed or booked. The only way I got my hands on a copy was via a set of Linux Mall's cheap CDs.
Actually, I'm rather taken aback by the response, which has been almost entirely mediocre. On most of the BeOS posts on Slashdot, there's a steady flood of negative comments.
I'm sorry if you think I'm a troll and a zealot. I don't intend to be.
While I agree with your desire to point out the advantages of BeOS with comparison to Linux, I don't think either the tone or the specific comments of your post reflect very well on the BeOS community.
BeOS is neither better, nor worse, than Linux. "Under the hood" it is merely different. Linux has a leg up on BeOS in some areas, and vice versa.
Don't turn this into a flame war trying to support BeOS. Don't cop an attitude, don't try to prop up BeOS at Linux' expense. Simply state the facts. The facts are that Linux has a lot more commercial applications being ported to it than BeOS, but BeOS has a lot more of it's designated niche's applications being ported. As for general support, Linux is ahead of BeOS (but not by a huge margin).
As for some of your other comments (such as lack of developer support for Linux), you're not stating facts - you're shoveling FUD. Perhaps you should take the time to learn a bit more about the Linux community before you start charging in, both barrels blazing.
You're right - I probably shouldn't have included ESR in that. ESR has stated, though, that he doesn't want software that sucks, and I sort of followed a line-of-thought with the comments I assumed were coming (namely, "BeOS sucks/is poor quality/isn't Linux").
Slashdot Mirror
>...and ensure that all your car parts are produced by Ford.
There's an old quote from the early days of Ford, when they were the only car manufacturer: "You can have any color car you want, as long as it's black."
In a lot of ways, that quote aptly describes the information monoculture that Microsoft is trying to be. You can have any browser you want, as long as it's IE. You can have any operating system you want, as long as it's Windows.
Scary stuff. Makes me glad I use an alternative operating system. They can install Windows back on my machine when they can pry the keyboard from my dead hands.
The blades are also designed to break down feces from larger "chunks" so that they will stick easier to the sides of the container wall.
(This really is disgusting.)
Oh God, let's not.
I really don't want to wake up some morning in forty years to read about some A.I./robot who was an adopted orphan that was alternatingly verbally/physically abused and then ignored by it's foster parents, became psychologically unbalanced, spent its teenage years in a mental hospital, became an alcoholic and drug abuser with no immediate job prospects, and then went on a one-week bender which resulted in the A.I. taking a high-powered mining laser to the top of the Washington Monument and torching a good section of D.C.
Can anybody explain to me what the average user needs with such a large hard disk? I realize it's probably most beneficial to video editing and large databases. It seems that lately, though, the size of hard disks is vastly outpacing the application bloat revolution that has taken place recently.
:)
Not to specifically target Microsoft, but Windows is perhaps the largest application that immediately jumps to mind that a consumer might run. In the *worst case* scenario, Windows and commonly bundled applications might take up 2G of space. Yet the average drive size today appears to be 10G to 12G.
It gets even more absurd when you consider alternative operating systems. I have BeOS installed with all the applications I need, and it takes up about 500M total. I have an 8.4G drive. I've installed Linux (Slack 3.6; 4.0's in the mail) in the not-too-distant past, and the installation indicated that even a complete full install would only hit ~370M.
216G is an awful lot of space, but I can't seriously imagine that most of the "commoners" need anywhere near that. Can anybody provide me with a legitimate example where Joe Blow is going to need even half that space? (Beyond archiving MP3s and pornography, that is.
Couldn't you make the argument that this is a design flaw?
Or that it was excusable up until the point where it was first discovered, and that Microsoft should have taken action. Because they didn't, they can be considered negligent and responsible for damages?
(BTW, IANAL.)
Yes.
However, if you buy into the assumption that closed-source leaves me no choice, you're wrong. I always have the choice of not using that product anymore. If some large conglomerate decided to buy Be, Inc., completely redesign the UI along the lines of Windows 3.1, and then tries to charge $200, I have the option of no longer using BeOS.
However, I don't buy into the thought that simply because that _can_ happen means that it will, and that I might as well switch to Linux now because I'll have to switch later. It's a very speculative notion that can't be solidly argued. I've invested a fair amount of time, money, and energy in BeOS, and until it's being actively corrupted I don't see any reason to change.
The question is, what do you want to get done?
It's easy to make blanket statements like, "I can't figure out how to get anything accomplished" when you don't say what you are trying to do.
Do you want word processing? Playing MP3s? What?
Can anybody clarify the licensing/price for Beowulf? Is it GPL? Can I legally copy somebody else's Beowulf CD?
I'm just a touch confused. Red Hat's site seems to imply it's all under GPL, but I've yet to see any Cheapbytes-esque $1.95 CD...
Actually, Bill Gates donated $5 billion to his own charity, one that he founded.
Makes me even less inclined to leave my lip marks on his posterior.
From Microsoft's web site, the requirements for Intel NT:
- Pentium or faster processor 16 MB of memory (RAM); 32 MB recommended
- 110 MB of available hard disk space
- CD-ROM drive or access to a CD-ROM over a computer network
- VGA or higher-resolution display adapter
- Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device
Poor Borland.
They made great products in their day, and they deserved better than slow assimilation at the hands of Microsoft.
Explain this more, because I'm not following.
If I have a table of items I've made put out in public, with a big sign on it that says, "Free stuff! Take as much as you like!" and someone walks by and takes one - are they stealing?
The GPL basically says, "Copy this as much as you like, it's free!" So how can you steal GPL software when it's being given away?
I believe it's called 'civil disobedience.' It isn't a law, per se; more of a philosophy.
There's also Ghandi's concept of 'non-violent resistance.'
As it oft-quoted, just because something is a law doesn't mean it's correct. Slavery was once supported by law, as well as preventing women from voting. Is software "piracy" equivalent to slavery or equal rights? No. On the other hand, laws aren't the be-all and end-all.
No, it's a different variation. It seems that a lot of people are willing to dismiss cold fusion out of hand simply because they believe too strongly in the current scientific theories. That's scientifically wrong as well.
If an experiment gives results that theory doesn't predict, you need to look at BOTH the theory and the experiment. The experiment may have been conducted wrong, but there's also the possibility that the theory is incorrect or incomplete. If all the results leaned one way - either every experiment got excess heat, or no experiment got excess heat - it would be easier to say whether the theories or the experiment need revising. The mixed results only lends some confusion to the process.
Nobody is saying that we should throw out our theories and start tossing random explanations in the air. On the other hand, it's far too arrogant to say that our theories are fixed in stone. After all, not too many centuries ago the Catholic Church held as inviolable the fact that Earth was the center of the universe.
So much for that theory, eh?
Actually, the premise of "Chain Reaction" wasn't all that shabby, given the knowledge back when it was released ('96?).
The fusion experiments in that film were based on a concept called sonoluminescence. In a nutshell, it was found that when bubbles in a certain medium were exposed to certain types of sound waves, they would collapse and release visible light. One of the prevailing theories at the time is that the light was due to a fusion reaction, albeit on a very small scale.
I recall, a few months ago, reading that someone had verified experimentally that fusion does indeed take place in sonoluminescence.
I believe the circumvention that Microsoft used there was that IE "technology" (pardon me while I stifle the overpowering urge to laugh) was still used in the operating system, but simply that the Internet Explorer browser application that utilized that technology was simply not included.
Since when did process matter to Microsoft?
I seem to recall an incident earlier in the trial in which a videotape - purported by Microsoft to be a genuine demonstration of something - turned out to be staged and spliced together out of several different tapes.
If Microsoft is going to submit false evidence to the court and then lie about it, I don't really see much hope that they're going to follow standard evidenciary channels (even granting that 'evidenciary' probably isn't a real word).
It's not bullshit, but it's not gospel either.
The key is _when_ the energy concentration gets powerful enough to prevent the wormhole from opening. In one reference frame, the ncecessary energy concentration arrives too late to affect the wormhole; in another reference frame, the energy concentration has the potential to collapse the forming wormhole before it takes.
Unfortunately, since wormholes are still theoretical structures, nobody is quite sure what will happen. The physics involved is still a bit too unformed to give a precise answer as to how much energy is needed, and when that energy needs to be in the formation of the wormhole.
It's been demonstrated - the article even mentions the demonstration.
It's called the Casimir effect, and is based on the idea of virtual particles. Spacetime isn't flat - it's teeming with zillions of virtual particles that pop in and out almost instantaneously. Their existence is so short that it doesn't really matter much. However, an Italian scientist named Casimir theorized that if you took two uncharged metal plates and put them close together, they would attract each other via the net force of all these virtual particles.
A few years later (IIRC, mid 1920s), when somebody actually _tried_ this, sure enough they detected a net attractive force. As science progressed, it was determined that this attractive force is based on negative energy. Negative energy is one of the driving forces behind wormholes. In order to make a stable wormhole, you need "exotic matter" - a form of matter that has an average negative energy density. Nobody's ever seen exotic matter, but no equation or physical process has been seen or discovered yet that would rule out its existence.
Negative energy/virtual particles are also the process by which black holes give off radiation (yes, THEY DO RADIATE). If a black hole gives off more matter than they consume, they will shrink and eventually explode.
Actually, you're wrong on both counts.
1) You _can_ go faster than the speed of light, just not directly. You can't just turn the engines of a spaceship on "high," you have to skip over some of the space you're travelling through, and your _effective_ speed jumps past the speed of light. Both wormholes and "spacefolding" technologies - both of which are theoretically proven - would enable one to do this.
2) Yes, you can. In fact, we know how to do it today. The problem is, it takes an astronomically large amount of energy. It requires a wormhole in order to achieve it. You take one end of the wormhole and take it on a tour of the solar system at _relativistic_ speeds. You keep the other one stationary. Due to the time dilation, time passes for one a lot slower than it does for the other. Since one end of the wormhole has experienced less passage of time than the other, one end resides in the past, and one resides in the future. Then you can freely travel backwards and fowards through time via the wormhole.
There are other ways to travel backwards and forwards through time, but most are terribly implausible (e.g., infinitely long rotating cylinders spinning at relativistic speeds - I don't understand the full complexities of that particular process). And all have been discovered as parts of solutions to Einstein's equations, which have very little to do with quantum theory. So even assuming only relativity applies, you're still hosed.
Slackware tends to be on a different set of shelves: the book section. Many, many books tend to bundle Slackware as the Linux distribution (or one of them; I've seen books that bundle multiple distributions) on the CD in the back.
I've yet to see Debian *anywhere,* boxed or booked. The only way I got my hands on a copy was via a set of Linux Mall's cheap CDs.
Actually, I'm rather taken aback by the response, which has been almost entirely mediocre. On most of the BeOS posts on Slashdot, there's a steady flood of negative comments.
I'm sorry if you think I'm a troll and a zealot. I don't intend to be.
While I agree with your desire to point out the advantages of BeOS with comparison to Linux, I don't think either the tone or the specific comments of your post reflect very well on the BeOS community.
BeOS is neither better, nor worse, than Linux. "Under the hood" it is merely different. Linux has a leg up on BeOS in some areas, and vice versa.
Don't turn this into a flame war trying to support BeOS. Don't cop an attitude, don't try to prop up BeOS at Linux' expense. Simply state the facts. The facts are that Linux has a lot more commercial applications being ported to it than BeOS, but BeOS has a lot more of it's designated niche's applications being ported. As for general support, Linux is ahead of BeOS (but not by a huge margin).
As for some of your other comments (such as lack of developer support for Linux), you're not stating facts - you're shoveling FUD. Perhaps you should take the time to learn a bit more about the Linux community before you start charging in, both barrels blazing.
You're right - I probably shouldn't have included ESR in that. ESR has stated, though, that he doesn't want software that sucks, and I sort of followed a line-of-thought with the comments I assumed were coming (namely, "BeOS sucks/is poor quality/isn't Linux").
Eric, if you're reading this, I apologize.
>And why do I have a sneaking suspicion that Be is
>headed for the ash-heap, IPO or not?
I give up - why *do* you have that sneaking suspicion?