I was loosely following this news since 1992 when it first broke. While I remain sceptical, this is nevertheless Anti-G research that looks like real science (for instance Giovanni Modanese who offers a theoretical explanation for the presumed effect was a fellow of the very renowned German Max Planck institutes).
I hold a Masters in Physics and looking at his papers I can at least testify that they are not easy to dismiss (quite to the contrary to all the other Anti-G nonsense that's floating around on the web). It is also interesting to note that a Chinese theoretical physicist at the UofA predicted a gravitational effect of spinning superconducting disks prior to the (presumed) 1992 findings (unfortunately I've forgotten her name). She tried to reproduce the effect, but since I've never seen it mentioned again I assume she failed.
Anyway, I won't believe it until I've seen or preferably measured it myself;-)
Sorry, but have you ever left the US for more than two days? CA and NY are still very much the same country. To live through the uterly confusing experience of total culture shock I highly recommend living in a country with another language.
As a German it always amazes my how poorly many American think of their fellow citizens. The average education level may be lower in the US than in most European nations. Also due to the sheer site of the country many Americans lack first hand experience with immersion in other cultures, nevertheless I trust the common sense of the ordinary American men and women. Common sense implies that you do not vote on things that you do not feel well informed about.
Even in foreign affairs it quite often seems to me that polls show a much more sensible stance of the American public than what gets actually decided in Congress and Senate. Sometimes it seems to me both houses are captured by lunatics. I'd rather put my faith in the common American.
My claim of the original comment being ill informed was directed at this notion:
"Every single atom of Uranium in the Earth is going to decay - producing all the same radioactive wastes whether mankind is involved or not."
To me this suggests that the author believes that all nuclear radiation stems from natural Uranium. My point was that you can produce nuclear waste of the most exotic nature in many ways i.e. mankind acquired the ability produce radioactive waste in abundance. The rest of my comment just pointed out that high-flying plans were based on our ability to breed these artificial radioactive elements in nuclear reactors specifically designed for this task.
I am sorry that my original comment apparently did not make this line of reasoning very clear.
Ever heard of funny elements like Einsteinium and Fermium? Guess what these are elements that clever physicist colleagues of mine produced artificially.
They are very heavy (i.e. many more nucleus than Uranium and Plutonium) that is why they decay very quickly, and yes, they are totally artificial in the sense that you can not find these elements naturally on earth.
Nuclear waste of the most exotic nature can be produced by mankind. Actually, we are hunting for the "island of stability". This is a hypothetical mass number region where super-heavy elements just may be stable enough to last for some significant time. We are not there yet, but we are getting closer. The recent most heavy elements ever produced by mankind have actually found to become more stable again.
Guess what: Some designs of nuclear power plants can breed more fuel that they consume (by turning out more Plutonium than you put in). In France, Germany and Japan we used to dream that this will ultimately solve our energy crisis for ever and theoretically it could. In all three countries prototypes were build, in all three countries they are decommissioned. Actually, the one in Germany was completed and then never used once. The technical risk was deemed to be unmanageable (you need to control the flow of liquid magnesium as neutron moderator and core coolant).
You proved to be quite ill informed with your post. The moderation up to 3 just shows that many moderators seem to be pretty clueless as well.
Do you suggest that nuclear power production should be completely unregulated?
I for one thing would at least like to see that a producer of nuclear energy was required to have an insurance that can cover all claims after any accident that affects the public health (in any scenario).
What good does it if a cooperation that runs nuclear power plans is not able to cover all cost that a potential accident will cause? They either should be required to maintain a financial risk management themselves (i.e. by withholding large amounts of cash) or off-load the financial risk management to an insurance.
Funny thing is, to my knowledge no insurance company on earth will enter such a contract with nuclear power producers, because the risk/damage scenario is so costly that no company that runs nuclear power plants can afford the necessary instalment payments.
This implies that the risk posed by nuclear power plans goes unmanaged (from a financial standpoint). Thus it is handed back to the government(s) i.e. not regulating nuclear power generating companies or other highly invasive enterprises is subsidy by neglect.
Many things done here by humans are done by machines in my country e.g. trash cans in the village my parents live in have to be put on the street in a certain angle when the trash pick-up truck comes, because a robot arm is picking it up.
A friend of mine with a Ph.D. in computer science (he's from Poland originally) couldn't believe his eyes when we passed a construction crew here in NY state, because there were two guys who's only job was obviously to hold up a sign and serve as provisional traffic light. Even in socialistic Poland they had real provisional traffic lights doing this laughable job.
That is part of the reason why unemployment is higher in Europe, and without a welfare system it would result in social unrest.
What we see is a historic paradigm shift in the allocation of resources. A developer of free software is not motivated by money. My sole motivation is certainly not money (even though I am attending business school). The current monetary driven economic models can not capture this.
But don't despair a model called "attention economy" is underway (guess what, they won't teach you that at business school, but you can learn about it on the Web at http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/eco/6097/1. html)
In my country (Germany) and in most of Europe I see a society emerge that is primarily motivated by having fun. And by the way: Being creative, learning cool technology and discover scientific insights is big fun!
Re:Europeans, Canadians, and self loathing America
on
Catching a breath...
·
· Score: 1
What do you think about guns with a build in finger-print scanner in the trigger, so that only the rightfull owner can fire them? This kind of technology was discussed in a magazine I once read to solve the problem of policemen getten shot with their own weapon by criminals who - while opposing arrest - managed to get a hold of the policeman's gun.
This technology could at least solve the shooting accident problem in the US e.g. kids playing with Daddy's gun.
Re:Europeans, Canadians, and self loathing America
on
Catching a breath...
·
· Score: 1
> We oppose federal registration because it can > only be used as a tool for confiscation in the > future.
The distrust of many Americans in their own government always astounds me;-)
I am not saying that it may not deserve it...
Anyway, the matter seems to boil down to trust.
Americans who believe in federal gun control don't seem to trust that the guns in their fellow American hands are always handled responsibly.
You and presumably many NRA members in turn don't trust the federal administration.
So why letting any government organization handling this kind of data? It's just an idea, but why doesn't the NRA keep track of guns on a voluntary basis? The NRA could put the data in a thouroughly encrypted database at a secret location. Then if the FBI looks for a weapon used in a crime the NRA can check if such a weapon is reported as missing. This way the NRA could demonstrate its commitment to fight gun abuse and limite the FBI's obsession to control your personal data by sending a strong signal that responsible citicens can handle this themselves.
Just my 2 cents...
Re:Europeans, Canadians, and self loathing America
on
Catching a breath...
·
· Score: 1
So I am European. Do I want to take your guns away? Hell, no. If you want to collect guns that's cool, whatever works for you.
The people who worry and who I assume worry you, are your fellow Americans who don't trust you to handle your guns and think there should be something like gun control.
That's a bummer, because from what you wrote I am sure you are a very mature, stable and likable character.
What I don't understand is why the NRA is not lobbying for a "gun control" that gives the current gun owners control. Instead they appear of being permanently in the defensive.
In my country you can buy all sorts of guns for sport and hunting, and you can keep them at home with ammunition. As you were pointing out Europe's history is violent, so there are a lot of traditional sport shooting clubs. The guys in these clubs make sure no psychos are admitted and register the guns. So everybody's happy: The guys who want to have guns and the rest who know that somebody is accountable for keeping track of them.
Take a look outside to learn what may be wrong
on
Catching a breath...
·
· Score: 5
I am not a Sociologist nor Ethnologist i.e. I am not a scientist specifically trained to analyse an alien culture. But I am a scientist (Phycisist) from Germany and part of my motivation to come here is to understand the American culture.
The most scary thing I observe in the mainstream culture is a disdain for intelligence: "Dumb is good!" a slogan I saw in the TV movie "Brave new world" could be almost the banner for mainstream (white) America (may be a little bit different for the black American culture). I talked to a white American psychologist about it (a professor of mine at business school) and he told me he perceives a teen attitude that equates "being smart with being uncool". What a weird culture. In Europe being a university student means to be someone special, somebody with the potential to outstanding intelectual achievment, somebody who favors scientific truth over a big paycheck. Copmpare this to the frat boy as student role model.
I was a geek as kid. And I was an oddball but I had some respect from my peers, because I didn't suck up to the teachers, and I helped them out when I could. I don't know how many geeks had experiences like this in the US. This good geek school experience seems to me rather the rule than the exeption in my country. I hated school just because I wasn't free to do with my time what i wanted.
My fiancée is kind of an American geek girl who went through school by escaping into permanently reading SF. She hated Junior High and High School, and I think it did some severe damage to her. If we have children we don't want them to go through the American non-academic school system.
I try hard to figure out what is going on in this culture and why it is so different from Europe. Since I haven't gone through the US school system I don't know what it is from the inside but it seems to me to be a prime problem of the American society. I am aware that this is certainly no new insight, but it is concerning to see that nothing seems to be done about it. I remember that Bush senior put it on the agenda when he ran for presidency. I know that Steven Jobs, in an interview I once read, was delighted about the idea of organizing public schools privately, but I don't think he had the time to follow up on this.
In Europe it is good common political practice to compare your own national society with other Western countries in order to learn how to improve. That is something completely missing in the US (political) culture. Why invent yourself if you can copy good practices? The open source movement showed that this works for all sorts of matters. Nevertheless the US are just roasting in their own juice. The US society might figure out something the hard way, but it will produce a lot of unhappy American geeks along the way (and some dead students).
I spoke to a S.u.S.E. employee at CeBIT who claimed that RedHat did use a modified clib to run Oracle stable, and that they weren't able to get a patch or this modified C library from RedHat's ftp server. This is only first hand rumor, I am in no position to asses if RedHat really played intentionally dirty.
Oracle stated that it only supports RedHat, so that SAP felt it also should exclusively go with one distribution vendor (being RedHat). That is how the SAP investment in RedHat came to pass. No wonder the SuSE guys felt left out and were somewhat pissed. After all it was SuSE who pioneered the German market.
I plan to switch to Debian in the near future since they are the only distribution that it is really committed to the Linux standardization.
CERN the European counter-part to Fermi Lab was where HTML came into being. I am a physisist (besides being a MBA student - don't ask why) and I just think it's funny that HTML 3.5 was supposed to support mathematics, but then it was never accepted by the "corporate players". I want to put my physics stuff on the Web. For more than two years now. With XML (MathML) there seems to be a chance of doing this at some point in the near future, but it still is a long way from being build into the commercial browseres in a sensible way.
If you check out the history of some of the names of buildings and universities in the US (ever read an objective biography on Mr. Duke?), you will find that many of those people are not necessarily the best role models (please note: *sarcasm*).
I hope our offspring in a couple of hundred years will keep these names as nice practical jokes and have a good laugh.
Just when I thought the moderating system really worked to improve the quality of postings I have to reconsider when it comes to political discussion.
It seems to work fine when there is a consensus on the technical merits of a posting in other threats, but politics is always controversial. The politcal opinion of a moderator will affect his/her rating.
While one might argue that the article could have been shortened;-) it is good to see this question addressed on/.
I have the questionable pleasure of attending a business school (I hate golf). It is appalling to see how many faculty members have forgotten about this basic truth: that free market economy is based on trust and mutual respect. The finance dep. is actually worse than marketing. They come up with all sorts of elaborate schemes of control. As an intellectual once put it: Trust is reducing complexity. You can see it works the other way around too.
Unethical business behavior can come back to hunt those who practice it. I think the problems M$ is facing clearly show that.
In my last CIS class - fortunately taught by a real techy - the future M$ Win NT product manager had a hard time. First I was pointing out that Sweden and France is going to sue M$ on privacy and Y2K issues respectively. He reacted by stating that there is an effort underway in Washington, DC to put a cap on what a company can be held responsible to. That drew a hearty laugh from the crowd. Later in class discussion I was pointing out that SAP ported to Linux and that I saw a lot of penguins at the CeBit. He reacted with the M$ standard line: "You pay what you get for." and I answered: "Sorry, but I am not going to buy it."
You can imagine I had a very good time that class. Just wanted to share that with you.
I talked to a SuSE employee at the CeBit. They plan to go public soon.
For what it is worth he told me that SuSE is committed to LSB but he said he has his doubts when it comes to RH's commitment. I mentioned to him that relying on revenues from distros is not a healthy profit strategy and he agreed saying that this part of the revenue is already shrinking and the service part growing.
To drive the point home I told him that I might switch to Debian, because I want to comfortably update via ftp. He was meentioning that I could do that with SuSE, but once I tried it with a pre-SuSE 6.0 and killed my system. So I rather give Debian a shot now that I feel a little bit more comfortable in administring my own Linux (Note: I am using it for more than 3 years now).
So if anybody wants to invest in a public traded Linux distro company, check out when SuSE is doing their IPO. I assume they will have an IPO at the "Neuer Markt" stock exchange in Frankfurt. An electronic stock exchange designed comparable to NASDAQ.
The European stock exchanges are going to be consolidated into one electronic market soon, but already a competent bank should be able to get your stock traded in Euro at the "Neuer Markt" exchange.
Hey, you don't even have to send me money for this investment tip;-) Take it from a "suit" who works for free occasionally.
I think the reason that KDE is so Windoze like is exactly for the reasons you gave at the end of your posting. Businesses invested in the training of their employees. That is why you have to be able to tell them: Look you can make it look and feel like Windoze, you don't have to spend a penny on retraining your employees, you don't have spend anything for the licence.
Once Linux "ownes" the desktop people can figure out by themselfes that they can do way cooler things then runing a Windoze clone. For example KDE 1.1 has some Macish emulation features that you can switch on. Nothing earth-shattering yet, but it shows that the developers are not unaware of this Windoze trap.
The next wave of computing might look completly different anyway. Most wearable computers in academia run Linux. You certainly have different GUI paradigmes there. Who wants to carry a desktop around all day?:-)
Not a big innovation I admit, but it works fine for me, better then xclipboard.
I think the general thrust of KDE is to get a solid DE that can replace Windoze. No point in getting all innovative if you want to sell it to businesses. They invested in the training on Windoze, so you have to be able to tell them: Look you can make it look and feel like Windoze, you don't have to spend a penny on retraining your employees, you don't have spend anything for the licence. Once Linux "ownes" the desktop people can figure out by them selfes that they can do way cooler things then just running a Windoze clone.
Slashdot Mirror
... which can be found here:
;-)
http://www.gravity-society.org/
I was loosely following this news since 1992 when it first broke. While I remain sceptical, this is nevertheless Anti-G research that looks like real science (for instance Giovanni Modanese who offers a theoretical explanation for the presumed effect was a fellow of the very renowned German Max Planck institutes).
I hold a Masters in Physics and looking at his papers I can at least testify that they are not easy to dismiss (quite to the contrary to all the other Anti-G nonsense that's floating around on the web). It is also interesting to note that a Chinese theoretical physicist at the UofA predicted a gravitational effect of spinning superconducting disks prior to the (presumed) 1992 findings (unfortunately I've forgotten her name). She tried to reproduce the effect, but since I've never seen it mentioned again I assume she failed.
Anyway, I won't believe it until I've seen or preferably measured it myself
Sorry, but have you ever left the US for more than two days? CA and NY are still very much the same country. To live through the uterly confusing experience of total culture shock I highly recommend living in a country with another language.
As a German it always amazes my how poorly many American think of their fellow citizens. The average education level may be lower in the US than in most European nations. Also due to the sheer site of the country many Americans lack first hand experience with immersion in other cultures, nevertheless I trust the common sense of the ordinary American men and women. Common sense implies that you do not vote on things that you do not feel well informed about.
Even in foreign affairs it quite often seems to me that polls show a much more sensible stance of the American public than what gets actually decided in Congress and Senate. Sometimes it seems to me both houses are captured by lunatics. I'd rather put my faith in the common American.
My claim of the original comment being ill informed was directed at this notion:
"Every single atom of Uranium in the Earth is going to decay - producing all the same radioactive wastes whether mankind is involved or not."
To me this suggests that the author believes that all nuclear radiation stems from natural Uranium. My point was that you can produce nuclear waste of the most exotic nature in many ways i.e. mankind acquired the ability produce radioactive waste in abundance. The rest of my comment just pointed out that high-flying plans were based on our ability to breed these artificial radioactive elements in nuclear reactors specifically designed for this task.
I am sorry that my original comment apparently did not make this line of reasoning very clear.
Ever heard of funny elements like Einsteinium and Fermium? Guess what these are elements that clever physicist colleagues of mine produced artificially.
They are very heavy (i.e. many more nucleus than Uranium and Plutonium) that is why they decay very quickly, and yes, they are totally artificial in the sense that you can not find these elements naturally on earth.
Nuclear waste of the most exotic nature can be produced by mankind. Actually, we are hunting for the "island of stability". This is a hypothetical mass number region where super-heavy elements just may be stable enough to last for some significant time. We are not there yet, but we are getting closer. The recent most heavy elements ever produced by mankind have actually found to become more stable again.
Guess what: Some designs of nuclear power plants can breed more fuel that they consume (by turning out more Plutonium than you put in). In France, Germany and Japan we used to dream that this will ultimately solve our energy crisis for ever and theoretically it could. In all three countries prototypes were build, in all three countries they are decommissioned. Actually, the one in Germany was completed and then never used once. The technical risk was deemed to be unmanageable (you need to control the flow of liquid magnesium as neutron moderator and core coolant).
You proved to be quite ill informed with your post. The moderation up to 3 just shows that many moderators seem to be pretty clueless as well.
Do you suggest that nuclear power production should be completely unregulated?
I for one thing would at least like to see that a producer of nuclear energy was required to have an insurance that can cover all claims after any accident that affects the public health (in any scenario).
What good does it if a cooperation that runs nuclear power plans is not able to cover all cost that a potential accident will cause? They either should be required to maintain a financial risk management themselves (i.e. by withholding large amounts of cash) or off-load the financial risk management to an insurance.
Funny thing is, to my knowledge no insurance company on earth will enter such a contract with nuclear power producers, because the risk/damage scenario is so costly that no company that runs nuclear power plants can afford the necessary instalment payments.
This implies that the risk posed by nuclear power plans goes unmanaged (from a financial standpoint). Thus it is handed back to the government(s) i.e. not regulating nuclear power generating companies or other highly invasive enterprises is subsidy by neglect.
Well, actually whoever it was said "No though t worth ... etc."
Quoting is such a hard exercise *sigh*
I am certain Linus knows this, but it is something else to give a list of references at a discussion panel.
Do you know the quote: "No though worth thinking hasn't be thought before - including this one."
I am to lazy to find out who said this first, I think some old greek philosopher xxx B.C.
Their jobs are not going to exist until eternity.
Many things done here by humans are done by machines in my country e.g. trash cans in the village my parents live in have to be put on the street in a certain angle when the trash pick-up truck comes, because a robot arm is picking it up.
A friend of mine with a Ph.D. in computer science (he's from Poland originally) couldn't believe his eyes when we passed a construction crew here in NY state, because there were two guys who's only job was obviously to hold up a sign and serve as provisional traffic light. Even in socialistic Poland they had real provisional traffic lights doing this laughable job.
That is part of the reason why unemployment is higher in Europe, and without a welfare system it would result in social unrest.
What we see is a historic paradigm shift in the allocation of resources. A developer of free software is not motivated by money. My sole motivation is certainly not money (even though I am attending business school). The current monetary driven economic models can not capture this.
. html)
But don't despair a model called "attention economy" is underway (guess what, they won't teach you that at business school, but you can learn about it on the Web at http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/eco/6097/1
In my country (Germany) and in most of Europe I see a society emerge that is primarily motivated by having fun. And by the way: Being creative, learning cool technology and discover scientific insights is big fun!
What do you think about guns with a build in finger-print scanner in the trigger, so that only the rightfull owner can fire them? This kind of technology was discussed in a magazine I once read to solve the problem of policemen getten shot with their own weapon by criminals who - while opposing arrest - managed to get a hold of the policeman's gun.
This technology could at least solve the shooting accident problem in the US e.g. kids playing with Daddy's gun.
> We oppose federal registration because it can
;-)
...
...
> only be used as a tool for confiscation in the
> future.
The distrust of many Americans in their own government always astounds me
I am not saying that it may not deserve it
Anyway, the matter seems to boil down to trust.
Americans who believe in federal gun control don't seem to trust that the guns in their fellow American hands are always handled responsibly.
You and presumably many NRA members in turn don't trust the federal administration.
So why letting any government organization handling this kind of data? It's just an idea, but why doesn't the NRA keep track of guns on a voluntary basis? The NRA could put the data in a thouroughly encrypted database at a secret location. Then if the FBI looks for a weapon used in a crime the NRA can check if such a weapon is reported as missing. This way the NRA could demonstrate its commitment to fight gun abuse and limite the FBI's obsession to control your personal data by sending a strong signal that responsible citicens can handle this themselves.
Just my 2 cents
So I am European. Do I want to take your guns away? Hell, no. If you want to collect guns that's cool, whatever works for you.
The people who worry and who I assume worry you, are your fellow Americans who don't trust you to handle your guns and think there should be something like gun control.
That's a bummer, because from what you wrote I am sure you are a very mature, stable and likable character.
What I don't understand is why the NRA is not lobbying for a "gun control" that gives the current gun owners control. Instead they appear of being permanently in the defensive.
In my country you can buy all sorts of guns for sport and hunting, and you can keep them at home with ammunition. As you were pointing out Europe's history is violent, so there are a lot of traditional sport shooting clubs. The guys in these clubs make sure no psychos are admitted and register the guns. So everybody's happy: The guys who want to have guns and the rest who know that somebody is accountable for keeping track of them.
I am not a Sociologist nor Ethnologist i.e. I am not a scientist specifically trained to analyse an alien culture. But I am a scientist (Phycisist) from Germany and part of my motivation to come here is to understand the American culture.
The most scary thing I observe in the mainstream culture is a disdain for intelligence: "Dumb is good!" a slogan I saw in the TV movie "Brave new world" could be almost the banner for mainstream (white) America (may be a little bit different for the black American culture). I talked to a white American psychologist about it (a professor of mine at business school) and he told me he perceives a teen attitude that equates "being smart with being uncool". What a weird culture. In Europe being a university student means to be someone special, somebody with the potential to outstanding intelectual achievment, somebody who favors scientific truth over a big paycheck. Copmpare this to the frat boy as student role model.
I was a geek as kid. And I was an oddball but I had some respect from my peers, because I didn't suck up to the teachers, and I helped them out when I could. I don't know how many geeks had experiences like this in the US. This good geek school experience seems to me rather the rule than the exeption in my country. I hated school just because I wasn't free to do with my time what i wanted.
My fiancée is kind of an American geek girl who went through school by escaping into permanently reading SF. She hated Junior High and High School, and I think it did some severe damage to her. If we have children we don't want them to go through the American non-academic school system.
I try hard to figure out what is going on in this culture and why it is so different from Europe. Since I haven't gone through the US school system I don't know what it is from the inside but it seems to me to be a prime problem of the American society. I am aware that this is certainly no new insight, but it is concerning to see that nothing seems to be done about it. I remember that Bush senior put it on the agenda when he ran for presidency. I know that Steven Jobs, in an interview I once read, was delighted about the idea of organizing public schools privately, but I don't think he had the time to follow up on this.
In Europe it is good common political practice to compare your own national society with other Western countries in order to learn how to improve. That is something completely missing in the US (political) culture. Why invent yourself if you can copy good practices? The open source movement showed that this works for all sorts of matters. Nevertheless the US are just roasting in their own juice. The US society might figure out something the hard way, but it will produce a lot of unhappy American geeks along the way (and some dead students).
I spoke to a S.u.S.E. employee at CeBIT who claimed that RedHat did use a
modified clib to run Oracle stable, and that they weren't able to get a patch
or this modified C library from RedHat's ftp server. This is only first hand
rumor, I am in no position to asses if RedHat really played intentionally
dirty.
Oracle stated that it only supports RedHat, so that SAP felt it also should
exclusively go with one distribution vendor (being RedHat). That is how
the SAP investment in RedHat came to pass. No wonder the SuSE guys felt
left out and were somewhat pissed. After all it was SuSE who pioneered
the German market.
I plan to switch to Debian in the near future since they are the only
distribution that it is really committed to the Linux standardization.
CERN the European counter-part to Fermi Lab was where HTML came into being. I am a physisist (besides being a MBA student - don't ask why) and I just think it's funny that HTML 3.5 was supposed to support mathematics, but then it was never accepted by the "corporate players". I want to put my physics stuff on the Web. For more than two years now. With XML (MathML) there seems to be a chance of doing this at some point in the near future, but it still is a long way from being build into the commercial browseres in a sensible way.
If you check out the history of some of the names of buildings and universities in the US (ever read an objective biography on Mr. Duke?), you will find that many of those people are not necessarily the best role models (please note: *sarcasm*).
I hope our offspring in a couple of hundred years will keep these names as nice practical jokes and have a good laugh.
Just when I thought the moderating system really worked to improve the quality of postings I have to reconsider when it comes to political discussion.
It seems to work fine when there is a consensus on the technical merits of a posting in other threats, but politics is always controversial. The politcal opinion of a moderator will affect his/her rating.
Unfortunatelly I do not have the time to play "Ender's Game", because i am working on a FAQ about the Kosovo crisis. ;-)
I just want to give kudos to the conceivers of this moderating system.
/. character changed to the better in a snap. It is fascinating and amazing to wittness.
While one might argue that the article could have been shortened ;-) it is good to see this question addressed on /.
I have the questionable pleasure of attending a business school (I hate golf). It is appalling to see how many faculty members have forgotten about this basic truth: that free market economy is based on trust and mutual respect. The finance dep. is actually worse than marketing. They come up with all sorts of elaborate schemes of control. As an intellectual once put it: Trust is reducing complexity. You can see it works the other way around too.
Unethical business behavior can come back to hunt those who practice it. I think the problems M$ is facing clearly show that.
In my last CIS class - fortunately taught by a real techy - the future M$ Win NT product manager had a hard time. First I was pointing out that Sweden and France is going to sue M$ on privacy and Y2K issues respectively. He reacted by stating that there is an effort underway in Washington, DC to put a cap on what a company can be held responsible to. That drew a hearty laugh from the crowd. Later in class discussion I was pointing out that SAP ported to Linux and that I saw a lot of penguins at the CeBit. He reacted with the M$ standard line: "You pay what you get for." and I answered: "Sorry, but I am not going to buy it."
You can imagine I had a very good time that class. Just wanted to share that with you.
I talked to a SuSE employee at the CeBit. They plan to go public soon.
;-) Take it from a "suit" who works for free occasionally.
For what it is worth he told me that SuSE is committed to LSB but he said he has his doubts when it comes to RH's commitment. I mentioned to him that relying on revenues from distros is not a healthy profit strategy and he agreed saying that this part of the revenue is already shrinking and the service part growing.
To drive the point home I told him that I might switch to Debian, because I want to comfortably update via ftp. He was meentioning that I could do that with SuSE, but once I tried it with a pre-SuSE 6.0 and killed my system. So I rather give Debian a shot now that I feel a little bit more comfortable in administring my own Linux (Note: I am using it for more than 3 years now).
So if anybody wants to invest in a public traded Linux distro company, check out when SuSE is doing their IPO. I assume they will have an IPO at the "Neuer Markt" stock exchange in Frankfurt. An electronic stock exchange designed comparable to NASDAQ.
The European stock exchanges are going to be consolidated into one electronic market soon, but already a competent bank should be able to get your stock traded in Euro at the "Neuer Markt" exchange.
Hey, you don't even have to send me money for this investment tip
I will drop by on Wednesday.
:-)
By the way are you looking to hire some people?
As long as it is OpenSource. At least that was my understanding. Correct me when I am wrong.
I think the reason that KDE is so Windoze like is exactly for the reasons you gave at the end of your posting. Businesses invested in the training of their employees. That is why you have to be able to tell them: Look you can make it look and feel like Windoze, you don't have to spend a penny on retraining your employees, you don't have spend anything for the licence.
:-)
Once Linux "ownes" the desktop people can figure out by themselfes that they can do way cooler things then runing a Windoze clone. For example KDE 1.1 has some Macish emulation features that you can switch on. Nothing earth-shattering yet, but it shows that the developers are not unaware of this Windoze trap.
The next wave of computing might look completly different anyway. Most wearable computers in academia run Linux. You certainly have different GUI paradigmes there. Who wants to carry a desktop around all day?
I like knotes ;-)
Not a big innovation I admit, but it works fine for me, better then xclipboard.
I think the general thrust of KDE is to get a solid DE that can replace Windoze. No point in getting all innovative if you want to sell it to businesses. They invested in the training on Windoze, so you have to be able to tell them: Look you can make it look and feel like Windoze, you don't have to spend a penny on retraining your employees, you don't have spend anything for the licence. Once Linux "ownes" the desktop people can figure out by them selfes that they can do way cooler things then just running a Windoze clone.