I dont fully expect KDE to deliver the entire product free to everyone
You should.:)
It's going to be completely (L)GPL, just like KDE. Development is taking place on KDE CVS (in its own branch), which is publically available for anyone to see and participate in.
However, note that it isn't a volunteer project; Germany contracted a company to deliver the product by the end of the year (I'm pretty sure there are some KDE guys employed there). This is a great thing; some KDE devs get paid to deliver a really useful project for any and all to use! Bravo, Germany!
Oh, and they aren't starting from scratch; they're starting from kdelibs, kmail and korganizer.
If you read the post on kde-core-devel, it's going to be a separate CVS branch (still on KDE CVS), but only temporarily and only because the project needs to be finished on a very short timescale. Basically, they don't want to make big changes to the HEAD branch so close to the release of KDE 3.1. Once kroupware(*) is done, they will port the changes back into HEAD.
Re:Is GPL best license for this purpose
on
Open Source TV
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think the "open source" part comes from the fact that he's releasing all of the unedited footage that was shot for each show. So anyone can cut their own version and redistribute it.
Not sure how useful that's going to be, but it's a neat idea.
I agree NerdTV might be useful for schools...but FYI, the parent poster's quote was actually referring to a DVD version of Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds", which is not this new Free webcast interview series, but a documentary on the history of Silicon Valley he did a few years ago.
Cringely mentioned it in the first part of his column this week (the "aimed at the educational market" bit was meant to justify its huge pricetag ($145)).
Kdevelop is direct competitor of [the] MS programming environment.
No, it isn't.
Most importantly, KDevelop is not a commercial product, so it has nothing to compete for. Sure, it's nice if lots of people use it, but ultimately it matters not at all how many "customers" KDevelop has. As long as there are interested developers, the project will thrive.
More obviously, KDevelop targets only unix apps; MSVB targets only windows apps. They're in completely different "markets".
1. Can you point to one positively-moderated comment here that's "cheered" the theft of the movie? Maybe I missed it, but the closest I saw was someone calling the studios morons for saying they were going after downloaders instead of trying to plug the leak. And that's not close at all.
2. Despite what you may have heard, the people who post on slashdot do not share a mind. They may therefore have a wide range of conflicting views on any number of topics, including copyright law. That is not hypocrisy.
OK, from these posts it's obvious that there's a lot of geek cred to be had by hating everything, but let me just say I enjoyed this story. It was legitimate sci-fi: it told a good story set in a recognizable world that explored the consequences of one "what-if" question. In this case, 'what if human physiology could be "hacked" with a computer?'. That's an interesting question.
I also don't get why people are disparaging it for the leetspeak and acronym-dropping ("CVS" et al.). That's the nomenclature for the world he's describing. It would have been more weird if he had decided *not* to use such terms. Plus, I loved all of the twisted slang of familiar terms: "Fourbucks muffin", "Lo-Cal", "Shallow Alto"...great!
Then again, what do I know, I liked Stephenson's books too.
No, I don't know what he's holding but the meteorite that hit that car weighed close to 30 pounds (12.5 kg).
Re:Not the first time . . .
on
Meteorite Hits Girl
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I find it kinda cool that nobody (*in recorded history*) has ever been killed by a meteorite.
I always thought that too, but while googling for a picture of the Peekskill Meteorite car, I stumbled on this page, which shows at least three separate incidents where a person was killed by a meteorite. None have happened recently, though.
It's possible this isn't a meteorite. It would have hurt (but probably not much more than having the same rock thrown at you); since the article didn't mention it, I assume she was undamaged by the impact. Perhaps it hit her after a bounce.
Anyway, the thing that caught me was that she said it was hot to the touch. Small meteorites tend to be cold by the time they hit the ground. They are mostly iron, so they conduct heat well, and cool off fast in the upper atmosphere.
And she said it looked "rusty". Meteorites are black; they can't oxidize in space. It will be interesting to see if there's a follow-up on this.
BTW, here is a picture of a car in NY that was hit by a 12.5-kg meteorite in 1995. Ouch!
Yes, I was assuming that the copyright of the kernel was currently held by Linus, and that it would revert to his estate if he died. However, in the COPYING file at kernel.org, Linus says that the linux kernel is "copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it", so I guess it isn't so clear-cut.
No, Stallman wants his vision to come true. Read "Free as in Freedom". His obsessive behavior is much more readily explained by his strict adherence to his principles, and a near-absolute unwillingness to compromise.
It must be "GNU/Linux", not because he wants to associate himself with the success of Linux, but because he wants to make sure that Linux remains firmly in the Free Software camp, and does not drift off into some less-Free OSS realm.
In the case of pharmaceuticals, they typically get the bulk of their R&D free from publically-funded university research. The government then gives a particular company a legal monopoly on bringing the fruits of the research to market, garnering huge and easy profits for the company.
Your reference to Microsoft is apt; they would like something similar: to be able to reap financial profits from the "R&D" work of the community...too bad they have the darn GPL standing in the way! I bet they're pretty jealous of the sweet deal the pharmies have going...
What happens if Linus Torvalds dies and his estate withdraws the license for Linux?
As I understand it, the worst that could happen would be a fork. The codebase at the moment before the license change would still exist, and would still be GPL'd. Guess which fork most people would continue to use and develop...
Re:Now change the name of KPP and KMAIL
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Uh, you already can get rid of the K-names. Just tell KDE to use the "program description" instead of the program name in the menus, and you'll see entries like "internet settings", "web browser", "email", etc.
Those darn KDE guys thought of everything! Quick, somebody come up with some other reason to hate them!!!
You might be a KDE basher if...
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 2
...App names which begin with "K" make you want to punch little puppies.
...You think the default KDE look is simultaneously "too much like Windows" and "too much like Mac Aqua".
...You see no irony in the statement: "Linux only needs one desktop; those KDE'ers are just a bunch of splitters, they should come back and work on GNOME".
...You believe that any discussion of Linux on the desktop is incomplete if the superiority of [Enlightenment/BlackBox/OSX/CLI/Altair] (choose one) goes unmentioned.
...You're still pissed that the KDE 1.x addressbook got replaced.
Well, that statement is true, but it's a rather sloppy way of putting it. How about: "For a closed system, the total amount of entropy must increase or stay the same".
When you consider the Earth as a thermodynamic system, it is not closed. It has a vast energy input from the Sun, and a waste energy output in the form of heat re-radiated into space. Thus, it is trivially easy to increase the amount of order locally on Earth. No, really, you can try it yourself! Empty your pocket change onto your desk. Now separate the dimes from the nickels and quarters. Voila! You have increased Order locally. Congratulations.
Again, this is no thermodynamic paradox; you had to exert energy to rearrange the coins; some of this energy was wasted as heat, such that the total entropy of the entire system increased. It's the same principle that allows crystals to grow spontaneously from liquid, and trees from acorns, and any other apparent local reversals of Entropy. All you need is energy. It's easy.
I'm sorry if that's too complicated; I don't know how to explain it in simpler terms. Just because something is complex, however, does not make it untrue.
Order cannot happen without disorder, beings can't just become more orderly beings by themself
That's not true! Why just the other day, I cleaned my apartment. Bingo, order from disorder.
Seriously, you have a pretty bad grasp of the 2nd theory of thermodynamics there. Entropy must increase only for a closed thermodynamic system. Earth is not such a system, because we have a constant influx of energy in the form of light and heat from the Sun. Perhaps you've heard that the Sun is the source of all energy used by life on Earth; it is this energy that allows the order of complex life to arise from chaos of the proverbial primordial ooze.
How about the fact that the oldest fossils are all microscopic organisms? The record is clear: for the first two billion years that there was life on Earth, life consisted only of single-celled organisms.
It was only 500 million years ago that the first vertebrate animals lived (fish), and 400 million years ago that we see the earliest record of life on land (millipedes).
Land-based, vertebrate life has existed only during the most recent 20% of the history of all life, so it just isn't possible that all species were created at the same time, "more or less as they are now".
The concept of a species is an artificial classification scheme imposed upon a continuous reality. Therefore saying when a "speciation" occurs is entirely a matter of opinion. That said, there are plenty of examples of so-called macroevolution in the fossil record (hell, the entire fossil record is one big macroevolutionary record!); you have only to open your eyes and see it.
Evolution is a fact. Things change.
The "theory of evolution of biological species by natural selection" is a scientific theory to explain the observed variation and "relatedness" of biological organisms, and their change through time as observed in the fossil record.
The "theory" of creationism is a load of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo used to prop up some people's faith in the Almighty in the face of evidence that contradicts the primary literary source of their belief.
Ergo, stating the belief that the theory of evolution and the theory of creationism are both scientific theories of equal merit demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of science and its rigid reliance on fact and observation. Q.E.D.
The entire concept of a "species" is the problem; the "loose grey zone" is the reality.
We classify organisms into species in order to make some sense of what we observe, but we should always keep in mind that the classification is artificially imposed, and somewhat arbitrary. The fossil record of any group of related organisms shows discrete snapshots of a continuous variation through time and geography (punctuated equilibrium does not refute this, it just says that the rate of evolution is not constant).
The species model describes evolutionary change as "creatures evolving from species A to species B to species C", with the implicit understanding that these are just arbitrary markers along the continuous evolutionary path, not coincidentally placed where there are well-preserved examples in the (incomplete) fossil record.
Unfortunately, this implicit understanding doesn't really get through to popular understanding of evolution; hence the many heated debates about speciation and how to tell when it occurs, when in fact speciation is not a real phenomenon at all, but a classification tool.
Yes, telescopes track the sky. They have to, because astronomers like to look at really faint things, so they have to expose for a long time.
If the telescope has an equatorial mount (like the 0.9 m WIYN telescope they used), then you don't get any field rotation while tracking. A horizontal mount (like almost all recently-built telescopes have) does give you field rotation, but the computer can simply counter-rotate the detector to correct for it.
Slashdot Mirror
hilarious! thanks :)
I dont fully expect KDE to deliver the entire product free to everyone
:)
You should.
It's going to be completely (L)GPL, just like KDE. Development is taking place on KDE CVS (in its own branch), which is publically available for anyone to see and participate in.
However, note that it isn't a volunteer project; Germany contracted a company to deliver the product by the end of the year (I'm pretty sure there are some KDE guys employed there). This is a great thing; some KDE devs get paid to deliver a really useful project for any and all to use! Bravo, Germany!
Oh, and they aren't starting from scratch; they're starting from kdelibs, kmail and korganizer.
Not to worry.
:) ]
If you read the post on kde-core-devel, it's going to be a separate CVS branch (still on KDE CVS), but only temporarily and only because the project needs to be finished on a very short timescale. Basically, they don't want to make big changes to the HEAD branch so close to the release of KDE 3.1. Once kroupware(*) is done, they will port the changes back into HEAD.
here is the relevant post to kde-core-devel.
[* is anyone suprised by the name?
I think the "open source" part comes from the fact that he's releasing all of the unedited footage that was shot for each show. So anyone can cut their own version and redistribute it.
Not sure how useful that's going to be, but it's a neat idea.
I agree NerdTV might be useful for schools...but FYI, the parent poster's quote was actually referring to a DVD version of Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds", which is not this new Free webcast interview series, but a documentary on the history of Silicon Valley he did a few years ago.
Cringely mentioned it in the first part of his column this week (the "aimed at the educational market" bit was meant to justify its huge pricetag ($145)).
Kdevelop is direct competitor of [the] MS programming environment.
No, it isn't.
Most importantly, KDevelop is not a commercial product, so it has nothing to compete for. Sure, it's nice if lots of people use it, but ultimately it matters not at all how many "customers" KDevelop has. As long as there are interested developers, the project will thrive.
More obviously, KDevelop targets only unix apps; MSVB targets only windows apps. They're in completely different "markets".
Two points:
1. Can you point to one positively-moderated comment here that's "cheered" the theft of the movie? Maybe I missed it, but the closest I saw was someone calling the studios morons for saying they were going after downloaders instead of trying to plug the leak. And that's not close at all.
2. Despite what you may have heard, the people who post on slashdot do not share a mind. They may therefore have a wide range of conflicting views on any number of topics, including copyright law. That is not hypocrisy.
OK, from these posts it's obvious that there's a lot of geek cred to be had by hating everything, but let me just say I enjoyed this story. It was legitimate sci-fi: it told a good story set in a recognizable world that explored the consequences of one "what-if" question. In this case, 'what if human physiology could be "hacked" with a computer?'. That's an interesting question.
I also don't get why people are disparaging it for the leetspeak and acronym-dropping ("CVS" et al.). That's the nomenclature for the world he's describing. It would have been more weird if he had decided *not* to use such terms. Plus, I loved all of the twisted slang of familiar terms: "Fourbucks muffin", "Lo-Cal", "Shallow Alto"...great!
Then again, what do I know, I liked Stephenson's books too.
Welcome back, LNLG! We've missed you; the agents of linguistic impropriety have been running loose in your absence! No time to lose...
No, I don't know what he's holding but the meteorite that hit that car weighed close to 30 pounds (12.5 kg).
I find it kinda cool that nobody (*in recorded history*) has ever been killed by a meteorite.
I always thought that too, but while googling for a picture of the Peekskill Meteorite car, I stumbled on this page, which shows at least three separate incidents where a person was killed by a meteorite. None have happened recently, though.
It's possible this isn't a meteorite. It would have hurt (but probably not much more than having the same rock thrown at you); since the article didn't mention it, I assume she was undamaged by the impact. Perhaps it hit her after a bounce.
Anyway, the thing that caught me was that she said it was hot to the touch. Small meteorites tend to be cold by the time they hit the ground. They are mostly iron, so they conduct heat well, and cool off fast in the upper atmosphere.
And she said it looked "rusty". Meteorites are black; they can't oxidize in space.
It will be interesting to see if there's a follow-up on this.
BTW, here is a picture of a car in NY that was hit by a 12.5-kg meteorite in 1995. Ouch!
Yes, I was assuming that the copyright of the kernel was currently held by Linus, and that it would revert to his estate if he died. However, in the COPYING file at kernel.org, Linus says that the linux kernel is "copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it", so I guess it isn't so clear-cut.
Stallman wants fame.
No, Stallman wants his vision to come true. Read "Free as in Freedom". His obsessive behavior is much more readily explained by his strict adherence to his principles, and a near-absolute unwillingness to compromise.
It must be "GNU/Linux", not because he wants to associate himself with the success of Linux, but because he wants to make sure that Linux remains firmly in the Free Software camp, and does not drift off into some less-Free OSS realm.
"There is no OS but GNU, and Linux is its kernel"
In the case of pharmaceuticals, they typically get the bulk of their R&D free from publically-funded university research. The government then gives a particular company a legal monopoly on bringing the fruits of the research to market, garnering huge and easy profits for the company.
Your reference to Microsoft is apt; they would like something similar: to be able to reap financial profits from the "R&D" work of the community...too bad they have the darn GPL standing in the way! I bet they're pretty jealous of the sweet deal the pharmies have going...
What happens if Linus Torvalds dies and his estate withdraws the license for Linux?
As I understand it, the worst that could happen would be a fork. The codebase at the moment before the license change would still exist, and would still be GPL'd. Guess which fork most people would continue to use and develop...
Uh, you already can get rid of the K-names. Just tell KDE to use the "program description" instead of the program name in the menus, and you'll see entries like "internet settings", "web browser", "email", etc.
Those darn KDE guys thought of everything! Quick, somebody come up with some other reason to hate them!!!
That's all I got. Feel free to add more.
"Order cannot come without disorder. Period."
Well, that statement is true, but it's a rather sloppy way of putting it. How about: "For a closed system, the total amount of entropy must increase or stay the same".
When you consider the Earth as a thermodynamic system, it is not closed. It has a vast energy input from the Sun, and a waste energy output in the form of heat re-radiated into space. Thus, it is trivially easy to increase the amount of order locally on Earth. No, really, you can try it yourself! Empty your pocket change onto your desk. Now separate the dimes from the nickels and quarters. Voila! You have increased Order locally. Congratulations.
Again, this is no thermodynamic paradox; you had to exert energy to rearrange the coins; some of this energy was wasted as heat, such that the total entropy of the entire system increased. It's the same principle that allows crystals to grow spontaneously from liquid, and trees from acorns, and any other apparent local reversals of Entropy. All you need is energy. It's easy.
I'm sorry if that's too complicated; I don't know how to explain it in simpler terms. Just because something is complex, however, does not make it untrue.
Order cannot happen without disorder, beings can't just become more orderly beings by themself
That's not true! Why just the other day, I cleaned my apartment. Bingo, order from disorder.
Seriously, you have a pretty bad grasp of the 2nd theory of thermodynamics there. Entropy must increase only for a closed thermodynamic system. Earth is not such a system, because we have a constant influx of energy in the form of light and heat from the Sun. Perhaps you've heard that the Sun is the source of all energy used by life on Earth; it is this energy that allows the order of complex life to arise from chaos of the proverbial primordial ooze.
How about the fact that the oldest fossils are all microscopic organisms? The record is clear: for the first two billion years that there was life on Earth, life consisted only of single-celled organisms.
It was only 500 million years ago that the first vertebrate animals lived (fish), and 400 million years ago that we see the earliest record of life on land (millipedes).
Land-based, vertebrate life has existed only during the most recent 20% of the history of all life, so it just isn't possible that all species were created at the same time, "more or less as they are now".
(source: Timeline of life on Earth)
Very well stated! I give it a virtual +1, Informative :)
The concept of a species is an artificial classification scheme imposed upon a continuous reality. Therefore saying when a "speciation" occurs is entirely a matter of opinion. That said, there are plenty of examples of so-called macroevolution in the fossil record (hell, the entire fossil record is one big macroevolutionary record!); you have only to open your eyes and see it.
Evolution is a fact. Things change.
The "theory of evolution of biological species by natural selection" is a scientific theory to explain the observed variation and "relatedness" of biological organisms, and their change through time as observed in the fossil record.
The "theory" of creationism is a load of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo used to prop up some people's faith in the Almighty in the face of evidence that contradicts the primary literary source of their belief.
Ergo, stating the belief that the theory of evolution and the theory of creationism are both scientific theories of equal merit demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of science and its rigid reliance on fact and observation. Q.E.D.
The entire concept of a "species" is the problem; the "loose grey zone" is the reality.
We classify organisms into species in order to make some sense of what we observe, but we should always keep in mind that the classification is artificially imposed, and somewhat arbitrary. The fossil record of any group of related organisms shows discrete snapshots of a continuous variation through time and geography (punctuated equilibrium does not refute this, it just says that the rate of evolution is not constant).
The species model describes evolutionary change as "creatures evolving from species A to species B to species C", with the implicit understanding that these are just arbitrary markers along the continuous evolutionary path, not coincidentally placed where there are well-preserved examples in the (incomplete) fossil record.
Unfortunately, this implicit understanding doesn't really get through to popular understanding of evolution; hence the many heated debates about speciation and how to tell when it occurs, when in fact speciation is not a real phenomenon at all, but a classification tool.
Yes, telescopes track the sky. They have to, because astronomers like to look at really faint things, so they have to expose for a long time.
If the telescope has an equatorial mount (like the 0.9 m WIYN telescope they used), then you don't get any field rotation while tracking. A horizontal mount (like almost all recently-built telescopes have) does give you field rotation, but the computer can simply counter-rotate the detector to correct for it.