Just thought I'd comment on your mention of Heinlein. He claimed that there were only a handful of stories in the world, all of which had been rewritten as science fiction before he began his career as a writer. All he and anyone else was doing was (parapharasing here) "..filing off the serial numbers and re-releasing it in a new cover.."
He also had a reputation for being extremely generous. Many authors credited him after his death with contributing ideas for their stories and never asking for credit.
A great man. I wonder what he'd make of all the IP fuss?
I know, I know; it's not considered appropriate to ask rhetorical questions on/.:)
Please, before buying into this view of what happened, THINK about the situation on the ground.
Yes, the convoy went astray. Stuff happens in wartime. Bad officers do exist. I do know that GPS gear wasn't available (broken maybe?) for that convoy. And have you ever driven through a country where you didn't know the language with no other guide than a compass and a map when you know you don't dare stop? At best, it's not easy.
Jessica was out of action almost immediately, yes. Knocked unconcious during the crash. Radio intercepts at the time showed that a female was giving the Iraqis grief, firing her weapon at any and all targets. She was apparently pretty effective for quite a while. The military intelligence people reported it this way.
No one knew at the time if it was Jessica or the black woman in her outfit whose name unfortunately escapes me. We now know that it was probably the black woman. Somehow, I'm not sure when, the general perception arose that it was Jessica who did all the firing. This was never confirmed or denied by the US military, although I think there was some wishful thinking on the part of some of the senior officers that she was the one who did the shooting. That may have leaked into statement that they made, but by and large I think it was the media jumping to the wrong conclusions on partial evidence.
Next, the attempted delivery by the doctors. Look at the timing! They tried to pull it off at night a day or so after the first successful suicide bombing attacks. The town was an active warzone. My guess is that the guys on the roadblock were very nervous and taking no chances. They shot at a vehicle that approached them, probably at speed. I can't say that I blame them.
Then there's the the actual attack on the hospital. Again, the town was an active warzone, with firefights all over the place. The insertion team had good intel from an Iraqi civilian lawyer about the location of Jessica, but had none on the attitude of the hospital staff. Also, that hospital had still been occupied by Iraqi Army units just a couple of days before. A lot of their equipment was still on the hospital grounds. As far as the US forces knew, they were still there.
Also, remember that the guys coming in are wearing full headgear and had been riding in the back of extremely noisy helicopters. They had just dropped in to what they regarded as a hostile LZ, which means they probably came in shooting. Even if they didn't, the noise from the ride alone was deafening.
Now, an Iraqi dressed as a civilian doctor comes up to them and tries to tell them where Jessica is. He's keyed up, which means his English probably isn't very good. The Special Forces team is keyed up, because they know battles are going on just a few blocks away. They don't know if the Iraqi is really a doctor, or possibly Iraqi Army or death squaq member trying to set them up. Not only that, they probably can't understand what him because of the factors that I pointed out.
OF COURSE they are going to treat the site as potentially hostile. OF COURSE they are going to rely on the intel that they had and treat the staff as potentially hostile. What were they supposed to do? Risk getting blown up by more booby traps? Risk walking into an ambush inside the building (terrain that anyone who has studied small unit tactics will tell you is the most dangerous to all concerned)?
Given the nature and extent of the intelligence and the overall military situation in the city at the time, the units on the ground acted correctly throughout.
As far as Jessica not remembering too much, when was the last time you were in a hospital after a bad car wreck? How much would YOU remember if you had a concussion, broken ribs, broken legs, and a broken arm?
IMO the media blew the whole Jessica Lynch story out of proportion. She was a private who happend to be the in the wrong place at the wrong time. But she was a private who was doing her job.
This is really a distro dependent issue. My experience is dated with RedHat and Suse, although I understand they have made remarkable progress in this arena. I think that my personal favorite, Mandrake, has things pretty well sewn up. Virtually any system setting that you need to tweak or view is available through Mandrake Control Center in a clean and easy to understand fashion. Need to restart a service? Add fonts? Set date and time? Review system logs? Add/remove/update software? Check your hardware configuration? etc.
All in all, I regard their toolset as a very well thought out and logical one. If you haven't tried it yet, give it a shot.
Oh, I don't know. I've always felt that taking the ethical track record of my vendors was only good common sense. If they have screwed their business partners and/or customers in the past, what would prevent them from doing the same to my company?
I haven't seen this letter from Sun. If I received a copy and I was still in a line position as opposed to staff, I would look long and hard at any new proposed purchase of Sun products.
The point that the grandparent post is making is that posting sales figures will help convince others to join, thereby expanding Mandrake's revenue stream, thereby making Mandrake a more viable company to invest in, thereby making it easier for Mandrake to add more staff for more tech support, dev, etc., thereby making Mandrake a better product for us all!:)
the front page of the opencontent.org website should say something like, "we're making things even better by joining Creative Commons. come join us".
Strange. I thought that's exactly what he was doing.
it's just that simple. what he wrote instead is depressing and inspires feelings of FUD. Spin is important, and not all spin is bad. Put your best foot forward, and don't air dirty laundry.
Wow. I didn't get this impression at all. Did you read the same thing I did? I thought it was a very positive statement.
This project has been open sourced (MIT style license) since the mid 90s. Versions are available for Linux, Mac OSX, Solaris, and Windows. There is an active mail list as well (link off the homepage). Still in active development.
I HIGHLY recommend this app. I have been told by people using closed source apps to do the same work that the canned reports that come with Lifelines beat their options all hollow.
If you don't like what's available, the scripting language make it easy to extend and adapt existing reports. Or write your own from scratch if you're a masochist.
The one thing that scares some people away is that data entry is done using a text editor, then verified by the database engine. This can be somewhat problematic on *nix type machines as it defaults to vi. Personally, I love vi but I wouldn't expect a newbie to pick it up and run with it. You might have to tweak the editor setting to something a little more userfriendly. Maybe pico or joe?
Sometimes talking to Linux zealots is like talking to an addict. Until you can make them admit that there is a problem, they're in denial. Until they're out of denial, they can't correct the problem.
Anyone who has tried the latest RedHat, Suse, Mandrake, or Lindows distros (other examples?) knows that the days when the only way to install software was to type stuff in are pretty much gone. Please check your facts.
I'll grant that Linux is NOT ready for the typical home user yet. But it's far more ready than it was even 6 months ago, and just keeps getting better.
Trust me on this: Corporate America has looked at Linux on the desktop.
Yes. And we are continuing to look at it.
Are they running it on the desktop?
Not yet. Although it is beginning to make inroads for tied down desktop apps like POS terminals, I don't expect to see widespread Linux adoption on corporate America's desktops for quite some time.
I do think it's inevitable, though. The economic worth is just too compelling. Either Linux, BSD, or some other FOSS OS will be on most desktops at some point. The cat is out of the bag, and you're not going to stuff it back in.:)
Perhaps they've noticed something you've missed, in your too-close myopic vision?
Actually, I think the real Linux penetration on the desktop will happen in Europe and Asia first. (witness the recent announcement of Munich's decision) Together, the two regions encompass a desktop market approximately 50% larger than the entire US market, not just corporate America.
Perhaps they've noticed something you might have missed as well?
I'm writing this late on Saturday, so I don't know if anyone else is still reading this thread. I've read through several of the comments and I'm puzzled by something. Just what are you defining as 'intellectual art'?
Really, I'm serious. I've read a lot of stuff from a wide variety of places and ages. I'm limited to English, as I just don't have my dad's ear for languages. He wrote his master's thesis on Don Quixote after reading it in the original 14th? 15th? century Spanish; is fluent in French and modern Spanish; picked up enough German, Korean, and Japanese to get by; and is currently learning Serbian as a hobby. Me? I took high school Spanish from him for 4 years and still have a hard time reading it.
I've tried not to let that limit my reading, though. I've read Don Quixote, most of Victor Hugo's published work, Ibsen, Wilde, Jules Verne, Dickens, most of Kipling, most of Poe, the Odyssey, H G Wells, H Rider Haggard, Shakespeare when I was ten (Try struggling through THAT with a basic American public education.:) ) and on and on.
By and large, the stuff that lasts is the stuff that tells a cracking good tale while teaching us something. Individual authors may favor the tale over the lesson or vice versa. However, the classics all do both or they wouldn't last. So, if a great tale teaches us something, or if a well written, deliberately deep story also happens to entertain us, how can you not define it as 'intellectual'?
I'm reminded of a comment by David Drake in an Afterword in a recent novel. He's a Vietnam vet, lawyer, and writer of military sci-fi for those who aren't familiar with him. He's probably best known for the Hammer's Slammers series. One of his trademarks is his conscious use of historical and mythological themes to drive his stories. He would talk about the fact in interviews, but he was always reluctant to do more than mention it in passing.
He said that he used to hate writing Afterwords that described the writing process of a novel or short story and refused to do so. His fans kept asking for it, his publisher kept asking him for it, but for years he wouldn't do it. He always felt that his work should stand on its own.
Finally, his fans wore him down and he started describing the themes that he used. Now, any fan halfway familiar with the themes of Norse mythology, for example, recognized his inspiration in _The_Northworld_Trilogy_. Still, it was gratifying to see him explain some of the more obscure references to history and art that gave him inspiration. It personally led me to study things that I had no idea had existed. Always a good thing, right?
The strange part, though, was the reaction from the critics. Suddenly, critics who would never be caught dead reading science fiction or fantasy were pointing at his work and talking about how ONE author in the whole wasteland that was sci fi actually was (gasp!) classicly trained.
Actually, anyone who reads much science fiction and fantasy knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Virtually all of the really good stuff in both genres comes from authors who have done their homework in meticulous detail. Their fans won't stand for less, as a more opinionated bunch probably doesn't exist. And yes, I include slashdotters.:)
The point of all that? Set aside the fact for a moment that Drake's work probably won't last 100 years. His work is very good, but I hesitate to call it 'great'. However, doesn't his conscious (and IMO successful) re-use of the themes from our past to re-tell a tale in a different setting require a certain engagement of the reader's faculties to really get the most out of it possible? Doesn't his work show at least some characteristics that would categorize it as 'intellectual'? Or are we limiting the definition of 'intellectual art' to a far more specific type of writing?
Actually, the best advice I ever heard was to ask a television or radio journalist how much time the sound bite had. Give an answer that fits in that sound bite, and not one syllable more.
If it's more of an open ended interview, be prepared to NOT respond to anything other than direct questions. Keep your answers short, direct, and above all, polite. If the reporter tries to rile you to get the sound bite that s/he wants, DO NOT respond. Just sit there with a smile.
Whatever you do, don't just answer "No comment". That's too easy to twist into an apparent admission of guilt by clever editing.
Nope, it's far more likely a reference to infantry. Any reader of military sci-fi would make the connection, as it has been used by various authors for decades. I think Joe Haldeman was the first to use it in this context back in the late 70s or early 80s.
From comments in this thread and elsewhere I gather it's also become popular slang within the US Army for ground troops. Since Joe was a Vietnam vet, maybe that's where he first heard it?
Evolution does not favor the good, the fair, or the just. The reason we have a complex legal system is precisely because the good, the fair, and the just are not fit to survive on their own and require, in the form of that legal system and the larger society, a high degree of coordination and cooperation to fend off the attacks of the unfair and unjust.
Actually, a case can be made that evolution does favor the good, fair, and the just. Examples abound in the animal kingdom of mutual cooperation between individuals of the same species. Enough examples of interspecies cooperation exist that the term "symbiosis" was coined to describe it.
When you look at the vast sweep of human history, you can also see that by and large the evolution of human society has been dominated by societies where the majority had a shared vision of what a fair society was. Communities and nations frequently fell to internal and/or external pressures when the majority lost faith that their leadership was no longer working for the best interests of the the society as a whole. The majority could lose this faith because either (a) the leadership really was screwing them over, or (b) the majority found a model that they regarded as better.
This is the fundamental principle that Jefferson relied upon when he wrote:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
You missed a key differentiator that is only now driving businesses and governments to consider FOSS software instead of Microsoft: Licensing. I don't know a single executive in my company who understands Microsoft's licensing (all IT guys because that's where I work) who is happy about it.
A year and a half ago IBM noted that 11% of all new mainframe sales were going to Linux installations.
IBM stated that they turned a profit on their billion dollar investment in Linux in the first year.
IBM has publicly committed to making Linux run on every hardware platform that they produce, and are most of the way to that goal already.
IBM has publicly committed to making all of their closed source apps run on Linux, and have published detailed roadmaps for much of it already. Several key pieces already run on Linux (Websphere over Apache, for one)
In the "eat your own dog food" category; IBM currently runs ~1300 Linux servers internally, and is actively working to upping that number. (From an IBM Linux road show that I saw recently)
Actually, no less an authority than Sun Tzu stated thousands of years ago that war was always damaging to an economy, prolonged wars even more so. This notion of a war being 'good' for an economy is a modern one, and one that has been shown to be fallacious at best.
No, he said he was doing something far riskier, something that can get people killed if there's a mistake; repairing avionics boxes for warplanes. You know, things like navigational systems, IFF (Identification Friend or Foe), targeting and tracking systems, etc.
I served in the US Navy for 6 years in a similar capacity. Maintaining modern weapons systems requires a great deal of natural ability. 30 years ago the minimum combined math and reading scores from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) for Electronic Technician (my rate as opposed to Avionic Tech) was 25 points HIGHER than that required to get into Annapolis.
Believe me, we dealt with fatigue related problems due to sleep deprivation on a daily basis. However, there is only so much room on a warship designed to be at sea for 6 to 9 months at a crack. A lot of it has to go to little things like storage for food, fuel, and ammo even when underway replenishment is a weekly drill. The reality is that there is no real choice; there are never enough hands to work a simple 9 to 5 job while at sea.
You minimize the problems as much as you can by tell-me-three-times systems both manual and automated, sticking to routine as much as possible, and instilling that peculiar kind of military discipline that relies far more on motivation from within to do the right thing than outsiders ever understand. Still, mistakes happen and people die.
Repairing electronic equipment is one of the more mentally demanding jobs in the service that you can find. Try doing it under the circumstances that I describe without killing someone before implying that "writing *code*" is somehow more of a challenge. Unless you're working on something like medical equipment, traffic systems, or something similar you just don't have the same high standard that this guy did for eight years.
Actually, OOo's document format is by far the most easily understood document format around. Try this in Windows:
Save as OOo. Rename as.ZIP. Open with WinZip. Extract.
What do you get? XML. It looks like pretty clean XML to this admittedly unprofessional eye.
Doing the same thing under Linux or *BSD is left as an exercise for the reader.:)
This is sort of a 'dirty little secret'. Sun does mention the document format someplace, because that's how I found out about it. I just can't remember whether it was on their Web site, in the help, or what.
IMO this native XML document format should be trumpeted from the roof instead of swept under the rug. I think Sun and the OO Org would be far better served by making it easy for people to understand the document formats and create conversion tools. Doing so should be trivial given the native format. Well, at least as compared to reverse engineering the deliberately obfuscated mess that is the standard MS doc format.
If you are an American, you may be familiar with the collected pamphlets that were initially published anonymously prior to the Revolutionary War. They are collectively known as "The Federalist Papers". If you haven't read them, I do recommend that you do. Fascinating discussion of what makes good government. Some of it is dated, but much is still worthwhile.
Because of that experience, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld the right to anonymous speech as a critically important component of public debate. Some of the ACs in this world do have something to say that is worth listening to. Evaluate their message the same way you do any other post, with the obvious factor that you can't evaluate them based on who they are. This is sometimes a good thing. Heck, if you have a prolific AC it's not too tough to see close resemblances in style from post to post.
While I understand your point that if there is no consequence to violating the GPL then people will violate it at will, I think that it would be best to save the "severe punishment" for those who decide to continue the violation AFTER being notified. It is a generally accepted fact of adult behavior (not the same as legal behavior) that people make mistakes, and that, if they correct their errors gracefully when notified, one forgives the original infraction. "Throwing the book" at someone will usually achieve further compliance at the expense of good will and "don't work with GPL systems" future behavior.
Which is exactly the approach that the FSF has successfully used dozens of times for GPL software whose copyright has been assigned to them.
Because that internal development typically gets deployed to a customer or business partner as part of a financial product offering. The software itself is not for sale, but it is required in order to make the financial product work.
I was in the Network group at the bank that I work for up until 8 months ago, so I can address this one. I think you'll find that any medium to large bank has a network topology and policies similar to what we've been running for the 7+ years that I've worked here. I'm defining medium sized as 250+ branches for the purposes of discussion. That's about a tenth our size.
Dedicated lease lines or frame relay links connect the branch offices back to the central offices. Modems on desktops are explicitly forbidden without special authorization. All modems are set to dial out only.
If we find a modem through war dialing that is not authorized, we will pull the network plug to that PC. I saw it done to a regional director once, and he was the one who got slapped when he raised a stink.
We don't run Exchange for mail, thank Ghu. Although lately our CIO has been spending far too much time out at Redmond. Bill wants all our business, not just the half he already has. Like he really has a shot to replace the mainframe.:)
Email attachments that look like executables are blocked, and the sender gets a polite automated note back explaining that we don't allow them into our network. Ran across this one not too long ago when a vendor tried to send me a self extracting zip file.
It's not a perfect setup, but we have managed to dodge most of the damage from the viral, worm, and trojan infections that have slammed the world. We realize it's an ongoing battle that requires constant vigilance. We don't assume that because we weren't hit today we won't be hit tomorrow.
Try ZoneAlarm instead of Kerio as your personal firewall. Great little product for catching unauthorized connection attempts.
I would also recommend NEVER allowing DCC to your PC. If, however, you do use it, for heaven's sake make sure you leave it disabled until you want a specific file from someone.
Slashdot Mirror
Just thought I'd comment on your mention of Heinlein. He claimed that there were only a handful of stories in the world, all of which had been rewritten as science fiction before he began his career as a writer. All he and anyone else was doing was (parapharasing here) "..filing off the serial numbers and re-releasing it in a new cover.."
/. :)
He also had a reputation for being extremely generous. Many authors credited him after his death with contributing ideas for their stories and never asking for credit.
A great man. I wonder what he'd make of all the IP fuss?
I know, I know; it's not considered appropriate to ask rhetorical questions on
Please, before buying into this view of what happened, THINK about the situation on the ground.
Yes, the convoy went astray. Stuff happens in wartime. Bad officers do exist. I do know that GPS gear wasn't available (broken maybe?) for that convoy. And have you ever driven through a country where you didn't know the language with no other guide than a compass and a map when you know you don't dare stop? At best, it's not easy.
Jessica was out of action almost immediately, yes. Knocked unconcious during the crash. Radio intercepts at the time showed that a female was giving the Iraqis grief, firing her weapon at any and all targets. She was apparently pretty effective for quite a while. The military intelligence people reported it this way.
No one knew at the time if it was Jessica or the black woman in her outfit whose name unfortunately escapes me. We now know that it was probably the black woman. Somehow, I'm not sure when, the general perception arose that it was Jessica who did all the firing. This was never confirmed or denied by the US military, although I think there was some wishful thinking on the part of some of the senior officers that she was the one who did the shooting. That may have leaked into statement that they made, but by and large I think it was the media jumping to the wrong conclusions on partial evidence.
Next, the attempted delivery by the doctors. Look at the timing! They tried to pull it off at night a day or so after the first successful suicide bombing attacks. The town was an active warzone. My guess is that the guys on the roadblock were very nervous and taking no chances. They shot at a vehicle that approached them, probably at speed. I can't say that I blame them.
Then there's the the actual attack on the hospital. Again, the town was an active warzone, with firefights all over the place. The insertion team had good intel from an Iraqi civilian lawyer about the location of Jessica, but had none on the attitude of the hospital staff. Also, that hospital had still been occupied by Iraqi Army units just a couple of days before. A lot of their equipment was still on the hospital grounds. As far as the US forces knew, they were still there.
Also, remember that the guys coming in are wearing full headgear and had been riding in the back of extremely noisy helicopters. They had just dropped in to what they regarded as a hostile LZ, which means they probably came in shooting. Even if they didn't, the noise from the ride alone was deafening.
Now, an Iraqi dressed as a civilian doctor comes up to them and tries to tell them where Jessica is. He's keyed up, which means his English probably isn't very good. The Special Forces team is keyed up, because they know battles are going on just a few blocks away. They don't know if the Iraqi is really a doctor, or possibly Iraqi Army or death squaq member trying to set them up. Not only that, they probably can't understand what him because of the factors that I pointed out.
OF COURSE they are going to treat the site as potentially hostile. OF COURSE they are going to rely on the intel that they had and treat the staff as potentially hostile. What were they supposed to do? Risk getting blown up by more booby traps? Risk walking into an ambush inside the building (terrain that anyone who has studied small unit tactics will tell you is the most dangerous to all concerned)?
Given the nature and extent of the intelligence and the overall military situation in the city at the time, the units on the ground acted correctly throughout.
As far as Jessica not remembering too much, when was the last time you were in a hospital after a bad car wreck? How much would YOU remember if you had a concussion, broken ribs, broken legs, and a broken arm?
IMO the media blew the whole Jessica Lynch story out of proportion. She was a private who happend to be the in the wrong place at the wrong time. But she was a private who was doing her job.
BTW, di
There I was on the Group W bench. Surrounded by father rapers and mother stabbers and they asked me, "What are you in for?"
and I said, "Litterin'."
And they all moved away. So I said "And disturbin' the peace" and they all moved back.
We were all havin' a fahn time on the Group W bench, playin' with the pencils....
This is really a distro dependent issue. My experience is dated with RedHat and Suse, although I understand they have made remarkable progress in this arena. I think that my personal favorite, Mandrake, has things pretty well sewn up. Virtually any system setting that you need to tweak or view is available through Mandrake Control Center in a clean and easy to understand fashion. Need to restart a service? Add fonts? Set date and time? Review system logs? Add/remove/update software? Check your hardware configuration? etc.
All in all, I regard their toolset as a very well thought out and logical one. If you haven't tried it yet, give it a shot.
Oh, I don't know. I've always felt that taking the ethical track record of my vendors was only good common sense. If they have screwed their business partners and/or customers in the past, what would prevent them from doing the same to my company?
I haven't seen this letter from Sun. If I received a copy and I was still in a line position as opposed to staff, I would look long and hard at any new proposed purchase of Sun products.
The point that the grandparent post is making is that posting sales figures will help convince others to join, thereby expanding Mandrake's revenue stream, thereby making Mandrake a more viable company to invest in, thereby making it easier for Mandrake to add more staff for more tech support, dev, etc., thereby making Mandrake a better product for us all! :)
Strange. I thought that's exactly what he was doing.
Wow. I didn't get this impression at all. Did you read the same thing I did? I thought it was a very positive statement.
Lifelines.
This project has been open sourced (MIT style license) since the mid 90s. Versions are available for Linux, Mac OSX, Solaris, and Windows. There is an active mail list as well (link off the homepage). Still in active development.
I HIGHLY recommend this app. I have been told by people using closed source apps to do the same work that the canned reports that come with Lifelines beat their options all hollow.
If you don't like what's available, the scripting language make it easy to extend and adapt existing reports. Or write your own from scratch if you're a masochist.
The one thing that scares some people away is that data entry is done using a text editor, then verified by the database engine. This can be somewhat problematic on *nix type machines as it defaults to vi. Personally, I love vi but I wouldn't expect a newbie to pick it up and run with it. You might have to tweak the editor setting to something a little more userfriendly. Maybe pico or joe?
Anyone who has tried the latest RedHat, Suse, Mandrake, or Lindows distros (other examples?) knows that the days when the only way to install software was to type stuff in are pretty much gone. Please check your facts.
I'll grant that Linux is NOT ready for the typical home user yet. But it's far more ready than it was even 6 months ago, and just keeps getting better.
Yes. And we are continuing to look at it.
Not yet. Although it is beginning to make inroads for tied down desktop apps like POS terminals, I don't expect to see widespread Linux adoption on corporate America's desktops for quite some time.
I do think it's inevitable, though. The economic worth is just too compelling. Either Linux, BSD, or some other FOSS OS will be on most desktops at some point. The cat is out of the bag, and you're not going to stuff it back in.
Actually, I think the real Linux penetration on the desktop will happen in Europe and Asia first. (witness the recent announcement of Munich's decision) Together, the two regions encompass a desktop market approximately 50% larger than the entire US market, not just corporate America.
Perhaps they've noticed something you might have missed as well?
I'm writing this late on Saturday, so I don't know if anyone else is still reading this thread. I've read through several of the comments and I'm puzzled by something. Just what are you defining as 'intellectual art'?
:) ) and on and on.
:)
Really, I'm serious. I've read a lot of stuff from a wide variety of places and ages. I'm limited to English, as I just don't have my dad's ear for languages. He wrote his master's thesis on Don Quixote after reading it in the original 14th? 15th? century Spanish; is fluent in French and modern Spanish; picked up enough German, Korean, and Japanese to get by; and is currently learning Serbian as a hobby. Me? I took high school Spanish from him for 4 years and still have a hard time reading it.
I've tried not to let that limit my reading, though. I've read Don Quixote, most of Victor Hugo's published work, Ibsen, Wilde, Jules Verne, Dickens, most of Kipling, most of Poe, the Odyssey, H G Wells, H Rider Haggard, Shakespeare when I was ten (Try struggling through THAT with a basic American public education.
By and large, the stuff that lasts is the stuff that tells a cracking good tale while teaching us something. Individual authors may favor the tale over the lesson or vice versa. However, the classics all do both or they wouldn't last. So, if a great tale teaches us something, or if a well written, deliberately deep story also happens to entertain us, how can you not define it as 'intellectual'?
I'm reminded of a comment by David Drake in an Afterword in a recent novel. He's a Vietnam vet, lawyer, and writer of military sci-fi for those who aren't familiar with him. He's probably best known for the Hammer's Slammers series. One of his trademarks is his conscious use of historical and mythological themes to drive his stories. He would talk about the fact in interviews, but he was always reluctant to do more than mention it in passing.
He said that he used to hate writing Afterwords that described the writing process of a novel or short story and refused to do so. His fans kept asking for it, his publisher kept asking him for it, but for years he wouldn't do it. He always felt that his work should stand on its own.
Finally, his fans wore him down and he started describing the themes that he used. Now, any fan halfway familiar with the themes of Norse mythology, for example, recognized his inspiration in _The_Northworld_Trilogy_. Still, it was gratifying to see him explain some of the more obscure references to history and art that gave him inspiration. It personally led me to study things that I had no idea had existed. Always a good thing, right?
The strange part, though, was the reaction from the critics. Suddenly, critics who would never be caught dead reading science fiction or fantasy were pointing at his work and talking about how ONE author in the whole wasteland that was sci fi actually was (gasp!) classicly trained.
Actually, anyone who reads much science fiction and fantasy knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Virtually all of the really good stuff in both genres comes from authors who have done their homework in meticulous detail. Their fans won't stand for less, as a more opinionated bunch probably doesn't exist. And yes, I include slashdotters.
The point of all that? Set aside the fact for a moment that Drake's work probably won't last 100 years. His work is very good, but I hesitate to call it 'great'. However, doesn't his conscious (and IMO successful) re-use of the themes from our past to re-tell a tale in a different setting require a certain engagement of the reader's faculties to really get the most out of it possible? Doesn't his work show at least some characteristics that would categorize it as 'intellectual'? Or are we limiting the definition of 'intellectual art' to a far more specific type of writing?
Actually, the best advice I ever heard was to ask a television or radio journalist how much time the sound bite had. Give an answer that fits in that sound bite, and not one syllable more.
If it's more of an open ended interview, be prepared to NOT respond to anything other than direct questions. Keep your answers short, direct, and above all, polite. If the reporter tries to rile you to get the sound bite that s/he wants, DO NOT respond. Just sit there with a smile.
Whatever you do, don't just answer "No comment". That's too easy to twist into an apparent admission of guilt by clever editing.
Nope, it's far more likely a reference to infantry. Any reader of military sci-fi would make the connection, as it has been used by various authors for decades. I think Joe Haldeman was the first to use it in this context back in the late 70s or early 80s.
From comments in this thread and elsewhere I gather it's also become popular slang within the US Army for ground troops. Since Joe was a Vietnam vet, maybe that's where he first heard it?
Actually, a case can be made that evolution does favor the good, fair, and the just. Examples abound in the animal kingdom of mutual cooperation between individuals of the same species. Enough examples of interspecies cooperation exist that the term "symbiosis" was coined to describe it.
When you look at the vast sweep of human history, you can also see that by and large the evolution of human society has been dominated by societies where the majority had a shared vision of what a fair society was. Communities and nations frequently fell to internal and/or external pressures when the majority lost faith that their leadership was no longer working for the best interests of the the society as a whole. The majority could lose this faith because either (a) the leadership really was screwing them over, or (b) the majority found a model that they regarded as better.
This is the fundamental principle that Jefferson relied upon when he wrote:
Smart man, that guy.
You missed a key differentiator that is only now driving businesses and governments to consider FOSS software instead of Microsoft: Licensing. I don't know a single executive in my company who understands Microsoft's licensing (all IT guys because that's where I work) who is happy about it.
A year and a half ago IBM noted that 11% of all new mainframe sales were going to Linux installations.
IBM stated that they turned a profit on their billion dollar investment in Linux in the first year.
IBM has publicly committed to making Linux run on every hardware platform that they produce, and are most of the way to that goal already.
IBM has publicly committed to making all of their closed source apps run on Linux, and have published detailed roadmaps for much of it already. Several key pieces already run on Linux (Websphere over Apache, for one)
In the "eat your own dog food" category; IBM currently runs ~1300 Linux servers internally, and is actively working to upping that number. (From an IBM Linux road show that I saw recently)
The times that I've seen this it's almost always been someone who renamed vim to vi, or just created a symlink between the two. :)
Actually, no less an authority than Sun Tzu stated thousands of years ago that war was always damaging to an economy, prolonged wars even more so. This notion of a war being 'good' for an economy is a modern one, and one that has been shown to be fallacious at best.
No, he said he was doing something far riskier, something that can get people killed if there's a mistake; repairing avionics boxes for warplanes. You know, things like navigational systems, IFF (Identification Friend or Foe), targeting and tracking systems, etc.
I served in the US Navy for 6 years in a similar capacity. Maintaining modern weapons systems requires a great deal of natural ability. 30 years ago the minimum combined math and reading scores from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) for Electronic Technician (my rate as opposed to Avionic Tech) was 25 points HIGHER than that required to get into Annapolis.
Believe me, we dealt with fatigue related problems due to sleep deprivation on a daily basis. However, there is only so much room on a warship designed to be at sea for 6 to 9 months at a crack. A lot of it has to go to little things like storage for food, fuel, and ammo even when underway replenishment is a weekly drill. The reality is that there is no real choice; there are never enough hands to work a simple 9 to 5 job while at sea.
You minimize the problems as much as you can by tell-me-three-times systems both manual and automated, sticking to routine as much as possible, and instilling that peculiar kind of military discipline that relies far more on motivation from within to do the right thing than outsiders ever understand. Still, mistakes happen and people die.
Repairing electronic equipment is one of the more mentally demanding jobs in the service that you can find. Try doing it under the circumstances that I describe without killing someone before implying that "writing *code*" is somehow more of a challenge. Unless you're working on something like medical equipment, traffic systems, or something similar you just don't have the same high standard that this guy did for eight years.
Actually, OOo's document format is by far the most easily understood document format around. Try this in Windows:
.ZIP. Open with WinZip. Extract.
:)
Save as OOo. Rename as
What do you get? XML. It looks like pretty clean XML to this admittedly unprofessional eye.
Doing the same thing under Linux or *BSD is left as an exercise for the reader.
This is sort of a 'dirty little secret'. Sun does mention the document format someplace, because that's how I found out about it. I just can't remember whether it was on their Web site, in the help, or what.
IMO this native XML document format should be trumpeted from the roof instead of swept under the rug. I think Sun and the OO Org would be far better served by making it easy for people to understand the document formats and create conversion tools. Doing so should be trivial given the native format. Well, at least as compared to reverse engineering the deliberately obfuscated mess that is the standard MS doc format.
Two big repeating LAN parties from the Twin Cities:
Minnesota Multi Mayhem
Hexapalooza (hosted by a guy whose nick is Hexis)
If you are an American, you may be familiar with the collected pamphlets that were initially published anonymously prior to the Revolutionary War. They are collectively known as "The Federalist Papers". If you haven't read them, I do recommend that you do. Fascinating discussion of what makes good government. Some of it is dated, but much is still worthwhile.
Because of that experience, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld the right to anonymous speech as a critically important component of public debate. Some of the ACs in this world do have something to say that is worth listening to. Evaluate their message the same way you do any other post, with the obvious factor that you can't evaluate them based on who they are. This is sometimes a good thing. Heck, if you have a prolific AC it's not too tough to see close resemblances in style from post to post.
Which is exactly the approach that the FSF has successfully used dozens of times for GPL software whose copyright has been assigned to them.
Because that internal development typically gets deployed to a customer or business partner as part of a financial product offering. The software itself is not for sale, but it is required in order to make the financial product work.
I was in the Network group at the bank that I work for up until 8 months ago, so I can address this one. I think you'll find that any medium to large bank has a network topology and policies similar to what we've been running for the 7+ years that I've worked here. I'm defining medium sized as 250+ branches for the purposes of discussion. That's about a tenth our size.
:)
Dedicated lease lines or frame relay links connect the branch offices back to the central offices. Modems on desktops are explicitly forbidden without special authorization. All modems are set to dial out only.
If we find a modem through war dialing that is not authorized, we will pull the network plug to that PC. I saw it done to a regional director once, and he was the one who got slapped when he raised a stink.
We don't run Exchange for mail, thank Ghu. Although lately our CIO has been spending far too much time out at Redmond. Bill wants all our business, not just the half he already has. Like he really has a shot to replace the mainframe.
Email attachments that look like executables are blocked, and the sender gets a polite automated note back explaining that we don't allow them into our network. Ran across this one not too long ago when a vendor tried to send me a self extracting zip file.
It's not a perfect setup, but we have managed to dodge most of the damage from the viral, worm, and trojan infections that have slammed the world. We realize it's an ongoing battle that requires constant vigilance. We don't assume that because we weren't hit today we won't be hit tomorrow.
Try ZoneAlarm instead of Kerio as your personal firewall. Great little product for catching unauthorized connection attempts.
I would also recommend NEVER allowing DCC to your PC. If, however, you do use it, for heaven's sake make sure you leave it disabled until you want a specific file from someone.