That same Microsoft money can also buy support for their point of view in influential circles.
I don't doubt that Microsoft will fight this and attempt to drag it out as long as possible, but I'm not convinced that Microsoft will be able to buy its way into French politics, or many other countries. The US Federal Government is quite an unusual form of democracy when compared with the rest of the world, considering some of the things that seem to go on. Not every democracy is designed such that mega-corporations to fund both sides of a two party system and effectively buy their favourite policies. If it were so easy outside the US, I doubt Microsoft would have had so many problems with the European Union already.
it is my opinion that The Daily Show's viewers retain so much more information because it is entertaining.
Personally I think it's more likely that people who are capable of appreciating insightful journalism and retaining information simply can't stomach some of the horrendous news shows that make up the alternatives to The Daily Show. I'm not form the US and I haven't seen much of The Daily Show except short skits. In my experience, however, I've often found that people who watch a lot of satire enjoy it so much because it highlights things they already know. (A lot of earlier Simpsons and Futurama episodes are very similar, and even moreso if you listen to the DVD commentaries.)
It might be that you'd find an average viewer of TDS is much more likely to be able to pick rubbishy journalism from genuine, serious issues. Some of the people most instrumental in TDS have alreadyshown that they have a very dim view of the status quo in journalism, and it shouldn't be surprising that they'd make fun of it and try to do a better job in many ways, even though they're restricted by having to turn things into jokes. A difference with the satire is that people are allowed to laugh at it, and can enjoy it without having to feel disgusted.
Now perhaps Joe Random User might buy this stuff, but that won't put a dent in MS sales, other than perhaps the "Student Edition" of Office.
I don't think it's very relevant what businesses use as long as there's diversity. As far as I'm concerned, businesses can use whatever they like. What irks me is when they try to enforce their product choices on me.
The important thing here is that it introduces a lot more diversity in software, meaning that closed Microsoft-controlled formats are less likely to be considered a de-facto standard. If significant numbers of people at home aren't using Office products, it means that businesses can't as easily just send me a Word document, or require that I send a Word document to them, and blame me if I don't happen to have the software or appropriate operating system to read or produce it.
It's a shame in a way that Ability Office still claims to be compatible with Microsoft formats, meaning that it still provides space for an excuse for people to use Office formats. I guess they have to be compatible in today's world, although it's nice to see that the Word/Excel formats are only defaults as an option.
If it wasn't for IBM, Red Hat, Novell, HP, SUN and others, the OSS landscape would be much more barren. In the "Real World" it takes more than a philosophy to make something like OSS work. The other alternative is to have an extremely fragmented landscape of half done OSS projects out there where 1 in 10,000 efforts equate to anything useful. I personally would rather see all that talent organized. The Linux kernel is successful because it is organized. Many people can contribute, but there is a Benevolent Dictator at the top.
The open source landscape is what made it so possible for IBM, Red Hat, Novell, HP, SUN and others to get involved in the first place. Debian's strict rules of being a "free" distribution mean that anyone can fork it and use it for what they want, within the bounds of those stated ideals. If Debian lets the Firefox developers impose exceptions on those rules, the whole thing suddenly becomes more ugly and complicated to deal with. This might very well mean that Firefox can't be included in Debian, but at least Debian's being completely up-front and honest about what it's offering and under what terms it's being offered.
I appreciate your point of view here, but I just don't think it's realistic. It's like pointing out how many "useless" projects there are in OSS, which seems to happen frequently on slashdot, and then complaining that those people should instead be focusing their efforts on more important things (like improving firefox, or whatever). The problem with this is that it assumes that everyone's motivated by the same things, and they're not. I'm an open source developer, and not many people use my software. This doesn't mean that I'm going to drop everything I'm doing and go and help develop something that other people happen to think might be more useful for them -- if I couldn't work on what I wanted to, I'd much rather go hiking or something and actually enjoy myself.
Open source software developers are mostly a collection of random developers who want to do their own thing, like it or not. Sometimes companies are involved and drive it forward in whatever directions they want to, sometimes groups of people get together and push it in a direction they want. It's never going to be held together with one central goal, however, and personally I hope it never is. To do so would be to ignore one of the most important advantages of free software, which is to give people the ability to use, modify and redistribute software as they see fit. There will always be large numbers of fragmented and unfinished open source software out there, but it's not at all helpful to suggest that people shouldn't bother starting such projects. If anything, it'd make more sense to counter the arguments of people who point to open source and use their existence to argue that the lesser organisation makes it worse.
Imposing organisation on OSS is exactly the reason that distro's have emerged. Distros such as Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, SUSE, Slackware, and whatever else shouldn't be thought of as fragmentation -- they should be thought of as individual products, all of which have taken advantage of the underlying open source licenses.
If you'd like to form an organised open source community that does things in a certain way, there are plenty of other people who think the same way you do. There are even people who have created projects that probably have very similar intents to your own. The Debian maintainers want to create an unconditionally free operating system (by their own, specific definition) more than anything else, and there's no reason to think that this should always be compatible with whatever your specific aim happens to be. From what you've said it sounds like Debian isn't the distro for you, but complaining that they're being stupid by not bending the terms of their own project just so someone else's project can benefit seems quite absurd in itself.
The Firefox logo/trademark is important. Firefox has 10%+ of browser share now. That wasn't very easy to get. [.....] The people of Debian are being stupid. The Firefox logo is an important logo and should be kept. Debian protects their trademark(s), why shouldn't Mozilla?
Isn't that exactly what's happening here? Debian's acknowledging that the Firefox trademark is protected, and therefore preparing to change the name in Debian. I'm sure there are people involved in Debian who'd like to keep the Firefox name, but unless it can be done within the terms of Debian's main goals, it's not going to happen.
That said, why should Debian be bending over backwards and sacrificing how it does things so a single package (out of thousands) can keep up its perceived market-share, as you seem to imply in your post? People such as yourself might care about Firefox's market-share, but this has nothing to do wiht Debian. Besides, who cares if Debian people are being stupid? It's their right to govern their distribution as they see fit, and if this bothers people outside, such as Firefox users who don't want to see their perceived market share diminish, then it's their problem more than Debian's.
I know it's not just you, but your post is an example of what seems to be a huge misunderstanding everywhere that the open source "community" is some kind of big organisation with common goals. It's not -- it's a vast collection of people who share and use each other's source code through the application of open source licenses. What people use it for and who uses it is up to the people involved. Personally I like this, and I prefer it hugely over proprietary vendors arguing with and paying millions of dollars to each other to decide who can see what, what works where, and how broken something will be when it's released. Trying to imply that there's a massive open source organisation, though, and that everyone has the unified goal of having OSS take over servers and desktops and whatever else it takes to get noticed, is ridiculous.
It's Firefox that's clamping on the restrictions here, and rightly so for their own interests since Firefox wants to associate its name with a level of quality that it has control over. Fair enough, but if the Debian developers decide that Firefox's interests are incompatible with their main distribution goals, they're completely within their rights to do this. Any "loss in perceived market-share" is entirely because the Firefox team hasn't done everything necessary to cater to what its users require.
Debian really needs to get the stick out of their ass. It's a great server distro, but if they want any sort of desktop marketshare then they have to change. Ubuntu better tell Debian to shove it and include the logo and Firefox as Moz wants them too otherwise you're just going to confuse people. Not everyone wants to read Wiki's and forums to figure out that the browser they have is indeed Firefox.
Clearly your goals are not the same as Debian's goals. Debian's primary goal is to provide a free distribution, governed by the Debian Social Contract. It has a lot of benefits that have nothing to do with desktop use, or server use, and any benefits in those areas are good spinoffs but not the highest priorities. There's clearly support for this goal, and if there isn't enough then it'll fail and people will use other distros. Meanwhile, perhaps you should just not use Debian if you're not concerned about its primary goal. If you want to criticise, then maybe focus on a distribution whose goals you actually care about.
I think it'd be more correct to say it's an unfair and biased comparison than a pointless one. I know I'm being cynical, but the comparison is completely logical from a Symantec marketing perspective. (Well, that's what FUD is realistically.)
In particular, Firefox is a web browser that doesn't have a reputation of needing external software to protect it. If more people use Firefox, it also increases the motivation for website developers to develop compatible websites, and this means that less people overall are tied to MSIE and Windows, which is where Symantec makes nearly all of its money. By making people think twice before shifting to Firefox, Symantec raises the likelihood that people will stay with MSIE, and people who use MSIE are more likely to use Symantec's software to protect their PC's.
This is just another of Symantec's small contributions towards keeping as many people as possible on a single, unreliable platform that's more likely to be in need of third party security products.
That really destroyed my motivation. Why give away your time for free when others that are less motivated and less qualified are getting paid?
Obviously it varies for different people, but just because someone's being paid doesn't mean they're any less motivated. Ideally, you'd want to pick out the most motivated people and give them a salary so they can completely devote themselves (instead of 50% of their time), but it doesn't mean that there's no benefit from still getting help from others. I can think of several examples, but to mention a couple:
At our local astronomical observatory, some staff are paid whereas others are volunteers. It doesn't really put off people wanting to volunteer, though. There's a severe lack of funding for the facility, and everyone involved realises that while some paid staff are needed to keep the place going from day to day, it'll be better overall if volunteers also help out. It's also pretty obvious that when the observatory is hiring from time to time, the volunteers will the the first people they'll go to. It's much easier to hire from a people you know you can already work well with. I'm sure the management would love to pay all the volunteers, but if it did then there wouldn't be an observatory, and everyone knows that. The staff and management at the observatory put a lot of effort into returning the favours, though, among other things by working a lot with the local societies, offering use of facilities, and so on.
In New Zealand (where I live), the national government's Department of Conservation maintains approximately 1,000 back-country huts, which are scattered around all sorts of places and are a real help for people who want to walk to and see some of the remotest areas. The department flies them into all sorts of remote places for use by hunters and trampers (that's NZ's word for hiking), which makes a lot of the back-country a lot more accessible for people who are fit and able enough to get there. There's a token fee for staying the night at huts which helps to pay for some of the maintenance (not heavily enforced, and people are exempt when there are safety issues), but there's no way this could ever be done if it wasn't for the cooperation of all the tramping clubs, hunters, and pretty much all people who use them. Tramping club volunteers act as good citizens and help out, some even adopt particular huts and shelters in the back-country, and send out voluntary work parties to help keep the tracks maintained. In return, they get to use the services, and DOC makes a lot of concessions to the clubs in return. (eg. Substantial discounts on actually using the huts.)
In both of these cases, there's a clear combination of money being paid, and volunteers, and it's working great.
If your employer is like my employer, then chances are that ultra high quality code isn't as important as actually getting something out the door so you can be put to working on other projects. On the other hand, if your employer wanted high quality code as a priority (which tends to be wanted by many drivers of open-source), I suspect you'd be happy to oblige... if writing high quality code is one of the things that makes you happy, of course.
It's necessary for anyone in politics (ie. anyone appointed to positions, let alone politicians themselves) to align themselves with one of two parties in order to get anywhere significant. (The polarisation of US Federal Politics speaks for itself here.)
It's seen as some kind of redeeming feature of a person in a powerful position, if they've openly declared that they're aligned with whatever major party is not the one that's currently in power. (eg. Dr John Marburger is the director of the Whitehouse's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) "and a democrat".)
It's a shame that the party he's from is being made to somehow be an issue yet again. I'm sure it's one of the things he'd want to be noticed, but all that continuing to highlight this does is to reinforce the system as it is, which is one of the big reasons that US Federal politics is so messed up.
If you're talking about that bike track they built along side the North Western motorway you still have to dice with death every day to get there.
Yeah, I'd be first to agree that it's not perfect, but it's definitely better than it was even a decade ago. There's the whole thing if the more cyclists there are, the more people there are who have a some respect for other cyclists (even when they're driving). There are definitely more people taking up cycling, and I think the messages are getting out a bit more.
I'm in Wellington myself, and perhaps it's a bit better here than it is in Auckland. (It's probably more compact and somewhat easier to get around without a car, for starters.) Even then, however, there are some cycle lanes here that leave a bit to be desired. (eg. SH2 between central Wellington and Petone has quite a good cycle lane which is barricaded off to one side, until the final 400 metres when the barricade disappears for some reason and it re-joins the road in what's probably one of the more risky places to be on the side of the road near high-speed traffic.
On the other hand, there's actually recognition by local authorities that cyclists exist, even to the point where they promote it, and it's considered a viable alternative to driving by a lot of people. In the above case that I mentioned, I don't think it'll be too long before the problem gets fixed, simply because having spent so much effort on the cycle lane in the first place indicates that there's actually an initiative there for cyclists.
Until there are more people commuting in bikes rather than cars, I don't see the situation changing for the better.
I don't think it takes more people on bikes than in cars to change things -- there are plenty of places around the world where lots of consideration is given to people on bikes, both by the majority of drivers and by city planning authorities, and it's not because there are more people riding bikes than driving cars. It does help to have a little recognition and help from local governments, however.
This is (for the most part) true in New Zealand, where I live. There used to be a lot less bikes here. What it took to change was a realisation for a lot of people that cycling was a preferable way to commute, and then city planning authorities (who agreed) nudged it by re-designing many areas with cyclists in mind. Once that's in place, it's much easier for more people to take up cycling.
Of course, this is New Zealand. We have highly taxed petrol, reasonable public transport systems in the largest of the main centres, and maybe there's quite a different culture here compared with parts of the USA when it comes to things like walking and exercise. I haven't been there, so it's hard to tell.
Python's a great languages, and one of my favourites for a lot of the things I do at the moment. I think a lot of it has to do with the cool-ness factor, though, and being able to do something that seems comparable with software role models. (Whether that be commercial software, or otherwise.)
When I was first playing with computers, though, the "cool" factor that motivated me at the time was the ability to get away from scripting languages, because none of the commercial apps, or even downloaded shareware apps, that I used from day-to-day were written in scripts. I grew up playing with line-numbered BASIC programs on an Amstrad CPC, and later writing QBasic programs and batch files in DOS that did some quite tricky things, but none of this was really comparable with the sort of software that could be bought off the shelf.
When I got to secondary school and had access to the computer labs, it was fantastic, because the school had a Pascal compiler. (Turbo Pascal 6, I think, and later Turbo Pascal 7 which came with the wonders of syntax highlighting in the IDE.) Being able to actually write and compile code to executable programs that obscured the source code was pretty cool, as was writing little network chat programs that communicated through shared files (IPX network protocols were a bit beyond my reach at the time). I even found a BBS door game library (albeit closed source) and wrote a couple of simple BBS door games.
That's probably what convinced me to teach myself some assembly language, pascal, and eventually C (all of which the school had compilers for) before I went on to study the whole architecture side of things more formally in Computer Science at university. Ironically now that I've grown to use open source much more, obscuring the source code in an executable seems much less interesting.
Nowadays I'm not sure what would motivate people more -- my guess is imitation of things that are really graphical, or maybe things like fancy network communications, at least for people who grow up playing today's popular games. The easiest way to that is probably through things like level editors rather than line-based programming languages.
I mean really, you all talk about glowing green, getting two tounges etc.
GM food doesn't concern me too much if it's managed appropriately. As your comment implies, I've seen a lot of people who are concerned about things glowing green, but I really don't think this is an issue (unless we're really stupid).
What disturbs me are the predominantly US mega-corporations that hold the majority of rights to produce GM food, and appear to be quite happy to do whatever it takes to contaminate non-GM food, and lock any alternatives out of the market (such as this case). To the food world, they're what Microsoft is to the IT world -- except people everywhere require food to live, whereas only a small proportion of people require computers. In the back of my mind, it really does frighten me as to how all of this might turn out.
GM food certainly does have the potential to feed millions or perhaps billions of starving people, but how much of it is actually getting to those people? Compare this with the GM research that's instead being used for anti-competitive behaviour, such as by making seeds that won't reproduce after a single planting, and so on.
Paper is a crop. It grows on trees that are specially planted by paper companies on paper-company land.
Perhaps you're in a different situation, but if it becomes available reasonably cheaply, I could see this being useful in my workplace as part of the recycling initiative that's going on here. If land wasn't required for producing paper pulp and cotton, it might be used for something more useful.
Even if you're thinking about it in selfish economic terms, all it takes is for a piece of reusable paper to cost less than all the regular paper that might have been thrown away. If Xerox is researching it, it's presumably because they think they can eventually sell it.
The sign of true intelligence is often this statement, "I don't know but I can find out"
Yep, no argument here. I agree that there are definitely quite a few people out there who don't like to admit it publicly if they don't know what they're doing.
What gets me is how none of the "experts" can handle anything that isn't a PC. I wounder if the guy had been running Linux, BSD, Minix, SkyOS, an Amiga, or Atari ST if they would be just as lost.
I don't think this is a fair comment to make without actually knowing that they're having real problems with it. It's true that sometimes there aren't enough qualified people to fill certain postions given available funding, but so far there's no evidence of that here. Most police forensics experts I know of are pretty good at what they do, and they know when it's time to call in someone else if they can't handle it.
A C64 undoubtedly is different from what they'll normally handle today. This means they'll probably have to go out and buy some new equipment (exactly as you've suggested), they'll probaably need to wait some days for it to arrive if it's not on hand, and they might even need to hire a consultant who knows C64's really well, just to make sure they don't screw it up.
To me it seems that transferring the data will be the easy part. The difficult bit is likely to be analysing the legacy storage devices for forensic information. (Deleted file information, magnetic traces on the disk, and whatever else is useful.) Not to mention the differences in how C64's work from modern PC's -- regular applications on the latter tend to be much less space conscious, so data gets overwritten less often. Chances are there are modern tools for use on a modern 3.5" IDE HDD to analyse the surface for all the things that a regular head wouldn't pick up, but try doing the same thing with a 170 kilobyte 5.25" disk.
It shouldn't be a surprise that they're claiming it might "complicate their efforts". If you worked for the police as a computer forensics expert, I'm sure that this would complicate your efforts, too. It doesn't mean you'd mess it up, and it doesn't mean they will either.
I've been trying it for the last 20 minutes or so. It's entertaining for a while, but I've noticed that most of the labels I seem to get in common with my partner tend to be those of the lowest common denominator. About half the times that my partner and I reached an agreement, it was with labels such as "sky" when the sky was at least partly visible, "crowd" when there were more than two people, and maybe "black" if the image was too dark to see anything in detail. There were many cases that I could come up with a much more useful label (eg. "aurora", "intel processor", etc.), but those cases tended to involve more specialised knowledge that the other (random) person probably didn't have, and it was unlikely they'd ever come up with the same label.
I can't find much information on what Google plans to do with this data, or how they're going to apply it, besides "improving the image search". I'd be interested to know how this will work, because I'm not sure what could be gained by knowing that two people agreed on some very basic words. To me it seems as if it'd simply help to create about 50 to 100 major categories of images, which might be some kind of superficial help for a minority of searches where someone wants a broad range of images that very loosely match a label, but otherwise with not much useful detail at all.
Thanks, I can appreciate that. If I was a professional astronomer I like to hope I'd have the same attitude. That said, I've found it quite amusing how much of a controversy it seems to be stirring up. Some of the names on that petition are very well known -- it's not exactly the janitors at MIT or JPL who signed it.
Absolutely, I completely agree. If it's used in a context where there's doubt or ambiguity then it certainly should be defined as accurately as is necessary. But in general conversation, it really doesn't matter. 99% of the time people will understand each other, and if there's a mistake, it's not the end of the world.
It's not unknown to have standards that define what certain terms mean -- RFC and IEEE definitions are full of it, which is very useful for convenience because it saves people having to re-define things over and over again. But they're not binding -- they only reflect an agreement between enough people to warrant writing it down. They hold up because people choose to use them, and those people can happily cite the pre-written definition so people know exactly what they're talking about. (eg. "In this document, we use the definitions from RFCxxxx.") There are also RFC's and IEEE documents out there that everyone ignores, usually because they're impractical or just unnecessary.
The whole thing's a storm in a teacup. What it comes down to is that the definition is whatever people use the word to mean. It's easy to draw up a definition, but voting on it is fairly irrelevant, because it'll only actually work if people choose to use it.
Astronomers clearly can't come to a consensus about what a planet means. If the IAU wants to write its own standard, then fine. By trying to do this with a vote when there's clearly no consensus, however, all it really seems to be doing is risking the loss of reputation it generally has among astronomers for naming bodies in the Solar System. If anything, it's creating more confusion.
The whole argument seems quite ridiculous
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Pluto Making a Comeback
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Despite the headlines, astronomers are not arguing over whether Pluto's a planet. They're arguing over the right way to define "planet". Pluto's relevent only because lots of people are used to thinking of Pluto as a planet, and don't want a definition that leaves Pluto out.
My only relevant qualification for this argument is to be an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, but if anything it has meant I've been following it quite closely.
To be honest, the whole argument seems quite ridiculous to me. If the definition if a planet is so waffley that astronomers can't agree on it, then astronomers shouldn't be using the word for anything important in the first place. I'm a little surprised that the IAU saw the need to have a vote on this definition at all, and I'm even more surprised at the apparent outrage that's being expressed by professional astronomers whom I'd have thought might have had more interesting things to do with their time.
It's not as if we don't already have unambiguous ways to describe what's being referred to. The word "planet" is really just a convenience word that can be used as short-hand by people in informal communication. So what if we can count how many "planets" we have? Doing so is a convenient simplistic way to indicate about how many "big things" there are, but it doesn't even start to describe the real complexity of the Solar System.
I don't feel at all good about the precedent of firing people using email, but I'm reluctant to make an assumption based on the tone of a slashdot story. The article states:
Company officials had told employees in a series of meetings that layoff notices would be delivered electronically, spokeswoman Kay Jackson said. She said employees were invited to ask questions before Tuesday's notification on a company intranet site.
If this is true, it at least means that the company had given employees some warning that bad news was coming. In another, more complete article, it's stated that employees had a good chance to ask questions before the emails, and meet with management staff after the emails.
To be honest, it does sound a bit dehumanising with the way it's being reported, but put in a different context, it could also be that sending the actual notifications via email (after sufficient warning) was simply the best way to do it, for everyone, in that particular business.
Exactly what part of that comment was bashing RMS? Calling it a dumb, stupid troll is a bit ridiculous. The rest of your comment actually was insightful, but it's a shame to had to surround it with that crap.
Initially, schools were given the option to choose whether teachers were to be trained in Linux systems or Microsoft. The option has now narrowed down to migration.
I realise that schools have other priorities (eg. teaching reading, math, science, history, etc), and limited resources, not to mention that having computers in schools isn't always primarily to teach about computers. It's a shame, however, that children can't be trained using multiple platforms.
I feel I have a much better appreciation of computers, and feel more comfortable using them, because I appreciate the differences between things like Windows, Linux distros, Macs, Amigas, even DOS, and whatever else. (I'm sure many people here could run off a long list.) I know what I prefer to use for different tasks, and I know why I prefer it..
Restricting teaching to one OS and accustomising students to one way of doing things doesn't seem like preparing them to make their own choices at all.
They're not going to collide in the predictible future -- unless an unforseen force causes it. (Passing stars, or anything like that.) The easiest way to think of this is just to consider that you can quite easily hold two rings in an interlocking state, without the edges ever touching. The same is true for orbits. When a two dimensional ring is projected into three dimensional space, it's easy for them to cross-over without the edges actually meeting each other.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't doubt that Microsoft will fight this and attempt to drag it out as long as possible, but I'm not convinced that Microsoft will be able to buy its way into French politics, or many other countries. The US Federal Government is quite an unusual form of democracy when compared with the rest of the world, considering some of the things that seem to go on. Not every democracy is designed such that mega-corporations to fund both sides of a two party system and effectively buy their favourite policies. If it were so easy outside the US, I doubt Microsoft would have had so many problems with the European Union already.
Personally I think it's more likely that people who are capable of appreciating insightful journalism and retaining information simply can't stomach some of the horrendous news shows that make up the alternatives to The Daily Show. I'm not form the US and I haven't seen much of The Daily Show except short skits. In my experience, however, I've often found that people who watch a lot of satire enjoy it so much because it highlights things they already know. (A lot of earlier Simpsons and Futurama episodes are very similar, and even moreso if you listen to the DVD commentaries.)
It might be that you'd find an average viewer of TDS is much more likely to be able to pick rubbishy journalism from genuine, serious issues. Some of the people most instrumental in TDS have already shown that they have a very dim view of the status quo in journalism, and it shouldn't be surprising that they'd make fun of it and try to do a better job in many ways, even though they're restricted by having to turn things into jokes. A difference with the satire is that people are allowed to laugh at it, and can enjoy it without having to feel disgusted.
I don't think it's very relevant what businesses use as long as there's diversity. As far as I'm concerned, businesses can use whatever they like. What irks me is when they try to enforce their product choices on me.
The important thing here is that it introduces a lot more diversity in software, meaning that closed Microsoft-controlled formats are less likely to be considered a de-facto standard. If significant numbers of people at home aren't using Office products, it means that businesses can't as easily just send me a Word document, or require that I send a Word document to them, and blame me if I don't happen to have the software or appropriate operating system to read or produce it.
It's a shame in a way that Ability Office still claims to be compatible with Microsoft formats, meaning that it still provides space for an excuse for people to use Office formats. I guess they have to be compatible in today's world, although it's nice to see that the Word/Excel formats are only defaults as an option.
The open source landscape is what made it so possible for IBM, Red Hat, Novell, HP, SUN and others to get involved in the first place. Debian's strict rules of being a "free" distribution mean that anyone can fork it and use it for what they want, within the bounds of those stated ideals. If Debian lets the Firefox developers impose exceptions on those rules, the whole thing suddenly becomes more ugly and complicated to deal with. This might very well mean that Firefox can't be included in Debian, but at least Debian's being completely up-front and honest about what it's offering and under what terms it's being offered.
I appreciate your point of view here, but I just don't think it's realistic. It's like pointing out how many "useless" projects there are in OSS, which seems to happen frequently on slashdot, and then complaining that those people should instead be focusing their efforts on more important things (like improving firefox, or whatever). The problem with this is that it assumes that everyone's motivated by the same things, and they're not. I'm an open source developer, and not many people use my software. This doesn't mean that I'm going to drop everything I'm doing and go and help develop something that other people happen to think might be more useful for them -- if I couldn't work on what I wanted to, I'd much rather go hiking or something and actually enjoy myself.
Open source software developers are mostly a collection of random developers who want to do their own thing, like it or not. Sometimes companies are involved and drive it forward in whatever directions they want to, sometimes groups of people get together and push it in a direction they want. It's never going to be held together with one central goal, however, and personally I hope it never is. To do so would be to ignore one of the most important advantages of free software, which is to give people the ability to use, modify and redistribute software as they see fit. There will always be large numbers of fragmented and unfinished open source software out there, but it's not at all helpful to suggest that people shouldn't bother starting such projects. If anything, it'd make more sense to counter the arguments of people who point to open source and use their existence to argue that the lesser organisation makes it worse.
Imposing organisation on OSS is exactly the reason that distro's have emerged. Distros such as Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, SUSE, Slackware, and whatever else shouldn't be thought of as fragmentation -- they should be thought of as individual products, all of which have taken advantage of the underlying open source licenses.
If you'd like to form an organised open source community that does things in a certain way, there are plenty of other people who think the same way you do. There are even people who have created projects that probably have very similar intents to your own. The Debian maintainers want to create an unconditionally free operating system (by their own, specific definition) more than anything else, and there's no reason to think that this should always be compatible with whatever your specific aim happens to be. From what you've said it sounds like Debian isn't the distro for you, but complaining that they're being stupid by not bending the terms of their own project just so someone else's project can benefit seems quite absurd in itself.
Isn't that exactly what's happening here? Debian's acknowledging that the Firefox trademark is protected, and therefore preparing to change the name in Debian. I'm sure there are people involved in Debian who'd like to keep the Firefox name, but unless it can be done within the terms of Debian's main goals, it's not going to happen.
That said, why should Debian be bending over backwards and sacrificing how it does things so a single package (out of thousands) can keep up its perceived market-share, as you seem to imply in your post? People such as yourself might care about Firefox's market-share, but this has nothing to do wiht Debian. Besides, who cares if Debian people are being stupid? It's their right to govern their distribution as they see fit, and if this bothers people outside, such as Firefox users who don't want to see their perceived market share diminish, then it's their problem more than Debian's.
I know it's not just you, but your post is an example of what seems to be a huge misunderstanding everywhere that the open source "community" is some kind of big organisation with common goals. It's not -- it's a vast collection of people who share and use each other's source code through the application of open source licenses. What people use it for and who uses it is up to the people involved. Personally I like this, and I prefer it hugely over proprietary vendors arguing with and paying millions of dollars to each other to decide who can see what, what works where, and how broken something will be when it's released. Trying to imply that there's a massive open source organisation, though, and that everyone has the unified goal of having OSS take over servers and desktops and whatever else it takes to get noticed, is ridiculous.
It's Firefox that's clamping on the restrictions here, and rightly so for their own interests since Firefox wants to associate its name with a level of quality that it has control over. Fair enough, but if the Debian developers decide that Firefox's interests are incompatible with their main distribution goals, they're completely within their rights to do this. Any "loss in perceived market-share" is entirely because the Firefox team hasn't done everything necessary to cater to what its users require.
Clearly your goals are not the same as Debian's goals. Debian's primary goal is to provide a free distribution, governed by the Debian Social Contract. It has a lot of benefits that have nothing to do with desktop use, or server use, and any benefits in those areas are good spinoffs but not the highest priorities. There's clearly support for this goal, and if there isn't enough then it'll fail and people will use other distros. Meanwhile, perhaps you should just not use Debian if you're not concerned about its primary goal. If you want to criticise, then maybe focus on a distribution whose goals you actually care about.
I think it'd be more correct to say it's an unfair and biased comparison than a pointless one. I know I'm being cynical, but the comparison is completely logical from a Symantec marketing perspective. (Well, that's what FUD is realistically.)
In particular, Firefox is a web browser that doesn't have a reputation of needing external software to protect it. If more people use Firefox, it also increases the motivation for website developers to develop compatible websites, and this means that less people overall are tied to MSIE and Windows, which is where Symantec makes nearly all of its money. By making people think twice before shifting to Firefox, Symantec raises the likelihood that people will stay with MSIE, and people who use MSIE are more likely to use Symantec's software to protect their PC's.
This is just another of Symantec's small contributions towards keeping as many people as possible on a single, unreliable platform that's more likely to be in need of third party security products.
Obviously it varies for different people, but just because someone's being paid doesn't mean they're any less motivated. Ideally, you'd want to pick out the most motivated people and give them a salary so they can completely devote themselves (instead of 50% of their time), but it doesn't mean that there's no benefit from still getting help from others. I can think of several examples, but to mention a couple:
In both of these cases, there's a clear combination of money being paid, and volunteers, and it's working great.
If your employer is like my employer, then chances are that ultra high quality code isn't as important as actually getting something out the door so you can be put to working on other projects. On the other hand, if your employer wanted high quality code as a priority (which tends to be wanted by many drivers of open-source), I suspect you'd be happy to oblige... if writing high quality code is one of the things that makes you happy, of course.
I agree. It says something about the system when:
It's a shame that the party he's from is being made to somehow be an issue yet again. I'm sure it's one of the things he'd want to be noticed, but all that continuing to highlight this does is to reinforce the system as it is, which is one of the big reasons that US Federal politics is so messed up.
Yeah, I'd be first to agree that it's not perfect, but it's definitely better than it was even a decade ago. There's the whole thing if the more cyclists there are, the more people there are who have a some respect for other cyclists (even when they're driving). There are definitely more people taking up cycling, and I think the messages are getting out a bit more.
I'm in Wellington myself, and perhaps it's a bit better here than it is in Auckland. (It's probably more compact and somewhat easier to get around without a car, for starters.) Even then, however, there are some cycle lanes here that leave a bit to be desired. (eg. SH2 between central Wellington and Petone has quite a good cycle lane which is barricaded off to one side, until the final 400 metres when the barricade disappears for some reason and it re-joins the road in what's probably one of the more risky places to be on the side of the road near high-speed traffic.
On the other hand, there's actually recognition by local authorities that cyclists exist, even to the point where they promote it, and it's considered a viable alternative to driving by a lot of people. In the above case that I mentioned, I don't think it'll be too long before the problem gets fixed, simply because having spent so much effort on the cycle lane in the first place indicates that there's actually an initiative there for cyclists.
I don't think it takes more people on bikes than in cars to change things -- there are plenty of places around the world where lots of consideration is given to people on bikes, both by the majority of drivers and by city planning authorities, and it's not because there are more people riding bikes than driving cars. It does help to have a little recognition and help from local governments, however.
This is (for the most part) true in New Zealand, where I live. There used to be a lot less bikes here. What it took to change was a realisation for a lot of people that cycling was a preferable way to commute, and then city planning authorities (who agreed) nudged it by re-designing many areas with cyclists in mind. Once that's in place, it's much easier for more people to take up cycling.
Of course, this is New Zealand. We have highly taxed petrol, reasonable public transport systems in the largest of the main centres, and maybe there's quite a different culture here compared with parts of the USA when it comes to things like walking and exercise. I haven't been there, so it's hard to tell.
Python's a great languages, and one of my favourites for a lot of the things I do at the moment. I think a lot of it has to do with the cool-ness factor, though, and being able to do something that seems comparable with software role models. (Whether that be commercial software, or otherwise.)
When I was first playing with computers, though, the "cool" factor that motivated me at the time was the ability to get away from scripting languages, because none of the commercial apps, or even downloaded shareware apps, that I used from day-to-day were written in scripts. I grew up playing with line-numbered BASIC programs on an Amstrad CPC, and later writing QBasic programs and batch files in DOS that did some quite tricky things, but none of this was really comparable with the sort of software that could be bought off the shelf.
When I got to secondary school and had access to the computer labs, it was fantastic, because the school had a Pascal compiler. (Turbo Pascal 6, I think, and later Turbo Pascal 7 which came with the wonders of syntax highlighting in the IDE.) Being able to actually write and compile code to executable programs that obscured the source code was pretty cool, as was writing little network chat programs that communicated through shared files (IPX network protocols were a bit beyond my reach at the time). I even found a BBS door game library (albeit closed source) and wrote a couple of simple BBS door games.
That's probably what convinced me to teach myself some assembly language, pascal, and eventually C (all of which the school had compilers for) before I went on to study the whole architecture side of things more formally in Computer Science at university. Ironically now that I've grown to use open source much more, obscuring the source code in an executable seems much less interesting.
Nowadays I'm not sure what would motivate people more -- my guess is imitation of things that are really graphical, or maybe things like fancy network communications, at least for people who grow up playing today's popular games. The easiest way to that is probably through things like level editors rather than line-based programming languages.
GM food doesn't concern me too much if it's managed appropriately. As your comment implies, I've seen a lot of people who are concerned about things glowing green, but I really don't think this is an issue (unless we're really stupid).
What disturbs me are the predominantly US mega-corporations that hold the majority of rights to produce GM food, and appear to be quite happy to do whatever it takes to contaminate non-GM food, and lock any alternatives out of the market (such as this case). To the food world, they're what Microsoft is to the IT world -- except people everywhere require food to live, whereas only a small proportion of people require computers. In the back of my mind, it really does frighten me as to how all of this might turn out.
GM food certainly does have the potential to feed millions or perhaps billions of starving people, but how much of it is actually getting to those people? Compare this with the GM research that's instead being used for anti-competitive behaviour, such as by making seeds that won't reproduce after a single planting, and so on.
Perhaps you're in a different situation, but if it becomes available reasonably cheaply, I could see this being useful in my workplace as part of the recycling initiative that's going on here. If land wasn't required for producing paper pulp and cotton, it might be used for something more useful.
Even if you're thinking about it in selfish economic terms, all it takes is for a piece of reusable paper to cost less than all the regular paper that might have been thrown away. If Xerox is researching it, it's presumably because they think they can eventually sell it.
Yep, no argument here. I agree that there are definitely quite a few people out there who don't like to admit it publicly if they don't know what they're doing.
I don't think this is a fair comment to make without actually knowing that they're having real problems with it. It's true that sometimes there aren't enough qualified people to fill certain postions given available funding, but so far there's no evidence of that here. Most police forensics experts I know of are pretty good at what they do, and they know when it's time to call in someone else if they can't handle it.
A C64 undoubtedly is different from what they'll normally handle today. This means they'll probably have to go out and buy some new equipment (exactly as you've suggested), they'll probaably need to wait some days for it to arrive if it's not on hand, and they might even need to hire a consultant who knows C64's really well, just to make sure they don't screw it up.
To me it seems that transferring the data will be the easy part. The difficult bit is likely to be analysing the legacy storage devices for forensic information. (Deleted file information, magnetic traces on the disk, and whatever else is useful.) Not to mention the differences in how C64's work from modern PC's -- regular applications on the latter tend to be much less space conscious, so data gets overwritten less often. Chances are there are modern tools for use on a modern 3.5" IDE HDD to analyse the surface for all the things that a regular head wouldn't pick up, but try doing the same thing with a 170 kilobyte 5.25" disk.
It shouldn't be a surprise that they're claiming it might "complicate their efforts". If you worked for the police as a computer forensics expert, I'm sure that this would complicate your efforts, too. It doesn't mean you'd mess it up, and it doesn't mean they will either.
I've been trying it for the last 20 minutes or so. It's entertaining for a while, but I've noticed that most of the labels I seem to get in common with my partner tend to be those of the lowest common denominator. About half the times that my partner and I reached an agreement, it was with labels such as "sky" when the sky was at least partly visible, "crowd" when there were more than two people, and maybe "black" if the image was too dark to see anything in detail. There were many cases that I could come up with a much more useful label (eg. "aurora", "intel processor", etc.), but those cases tended to involve more specialised knowledge that the other (random) person probably didn't have, and it was unlikely they'd ever come up with the same label.
I can't find much information on what Google plans to do with this data, or how they're going to apply it, besides "improving the image search". I'd be interested to know how this will work, because I'm not sure what could be gained by knowing that two people agreed on some very basic words. To me it seems as if it'd simply help to create about 50 to 100 major categories of images, which might be some kind of superficial help for a minority of searches where someone wants a broad range of images that very loosely match a label, but otherwise with not much useful detail at all.
Thanks, I can appreciate that. If I was a professional astronomer I like to hope I'd have the same attitude. That said, I've found it quite amusing how much of a controversy it seems to be stirring up. Some of the names on that petition are very well known -- it's not exactly the janitors at MIT or JPL who signed it.
Absolutely, I completely agree. If it's used in a context where there's doubt or ambiguity then it certainly should be defined as accurately as is necessary. But in general conversation, it really doesn't matter. 99% of the time people will understand each other, and if there's a mistake, it's not the end of the world.
It's not unknown to have standards that define what certain terms mean -- RFC and IEEE definitions are full of it, which is very useful for convenience because it saves people having to re-define things over and over again. But they're not binding -- they only reflect an agreement between enough people to warrant writing it down. They hold up because people choose to use them, and those people can happily cite the pre-written definition so people know exactly what they're talking about. (eg. "In this document, we use the definitions from RFCxxxx.") There are also RFC's and IEEE documents out there that everyone ignores, usually because they're impractical or just unnecessary.
The whole thing's a storm in a teacup. What it comes down to is that the definition is whatever people use the word to mean. It's easy to draw up a definition, but voting on it is fairly irrelevant, because it'll only actually work if people choose to use it.
Astronomers clearly can't come to a consensus about what a planet means. If the IAU wants to write its own standard, then fine. By trying to do this with a vote when there's clearly no consensus, however, all it really seems to be doing is risking the loss of reputation it generally has among astronomers for naming bodies in the Solar System. If anything, it's creating more confusion.
My only relevant qualification for this argument is to be an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, but if anything it has meant I've been following it quite closely.
To be honest, the whole argument seems quite ridiculous to me. If the definition if a planet is so waffley that astronomers can't agree on it, then astronomers shouldn't be using the word for anything important in the first place. I'm a little surprised that the IAU saw the need to have a vote on this definition at all, and I'm even more surprised at the apparent outrage that's being expressed by professional astronomers whom I'd have thought might have had more interesting things to do with their time.
It's not as if we don't already have unambiguous ways to describe what's being referred to. The word "planet" is really just a convenience word that can be used as short-hand by people in informal communication. So what if we can count how many "planets" we have? Doing so is a convenient simplistic way to indicate about how many "big things" there are, but it doesn't even start to describe the real complexity of the Solar System.
I don't feel at all good about the precedent of firing people using email, but I'm reluctant to make an assumption based on the tone of a slashdot story. The article states:
If this is true, it at least means that the company had given employees some warning that bad news was coming. In another, more complete article, it's stated that employees had a good chance to ask questions before the emails, and meet with management staff after the emails.
To be honest, it does sound a bit dehumanising with the way it's being reported, but put in a different context, it could also be that sending the actual notifications via email (after sufficient warning) was simply the best way to do it, for everyone, in that particular business.
Exactly what part of that comment was bashing RMS? Calling it a dumb, stupid troll is a bit ridiculous. The rest of your comment actually was insightful, but it's a shame to had to surround it with that crap.
I realise that schools have other priorities (eg. teaching reading, math, science, history, etc), and limited resources, not to mention that having computers in schools isn't always primarily to teach about computers. It's a shame, however, that children can't be trained using multiple platforms.
I feel I have a much better appreciation of computers, and feel more comfortable using them, because I appreciate the differences between things like Windows, Linux distros, Macs, Amigas, even DOS, and whatever else. (I'm sure many people here could run off a long list.) I know what I prefer to use for different tasks, and I know why I prefer it..
Restricting teaching to one OS and accustomising students to one way of doing things doesn't seem like preparing them to make their own choices at all.
They're not going to collide in the predictible future -- unless an unforseen force causes it. (Passing stars, or anything like that.) The easiest way to think of this is just to consider that you can quite easily hold two rings in an interlocking state, without the edges ever touching. The same is true for orbits. When a two dimensional ring is projected into three dimensional space, it's easy for them to cross-over without the edges actually meeting each other.