"What the fuck happened to this (U.S.) country's pride?"
I can't see it myself. National pride. At one stage the US was spent something like 5% of its GDP for a decade to put whities on the moon, as Gil Scott-Heron put it. And for what?
It was impressive of course, but ultimately pointless.
The same is true with the shuttle when you get down to it. What has it provided you with? Again very little. Launching satellites and so forth is useful, but unmanned vehicles are 10 fold cheaper (at least!).
What pity that this money was not spent on researching a cure for malaria, or providing clean water for billions around the world. Or for supporting music and the arts which might have bought some real joy into the world. Instead you had a multi-billion dollar phallus for your pains.
The problem with most of the markup languages used in biology is that the are simple two letter at the begining of the line schemes. They tend to be very unexpressive as there are no relations between the tags (a line is one thing or another, and each line is independant of the last). The main problem with this unexpressivity is that it means "all the biology is in the comment field", or in other words unstructured free text. To extract this information out in a machine readable way, you get straight into natural (or as this is biology fairly unnatural) language parsing, and hit the same brick wall that AI has for the last 30 years.
I agree that the article linked to is half-assed, and badly researched. But the sad fact is that most of the database formats in existance also seem to be fairly half assed. I think that XML might help us to get around some of these problems.
"sorry but the idea seems to rank on the same idiocy level as XML "
If you can not see the value of structuring data into a format which is easily parsable, and whose semantics are formally defined in a standard format, then I fear that your own idiocy level is fairly high.
XML is potentially about a lot more than viewing web pages.
GEML incidentally is pretty much useless for viewing genome sequences. Whilst this is no doubt mainly the fault of the bloke who wrote the article for getting it totally wrong, GEML is not designed to represent genomic information, but gene expression data. Two very different things.
I would agree that bioxml servers as a much better licensing model for the community than GEML, its worth mentioning that at the current time they do not compete. GEML appears to be about gene expression, and bioxml has no DTD's addressing this.
As for nature, well I expect that there publishers are worried. Sooner or later paper journals are going to disappear. Perhaps they are diversifying, and have a stake in the company. This is not necessarily a problem. Even nature does not have the power to make a standard.
The problem is with standards is that you can not just declare them. They have to be built with community agreement. At the moment there are "standards" in biological information. Lots and lots of them. Yesterday for instance I was struggling with sequence file formats. I can think of at least 15 different formats, all slightly different.
The scope of GEML seems quite limited. Its about gene expression data, which is currently very sexy. Its also been licensed in a fairly restrictive manner. Not the way to go if you asked me.
"So what is it that you switched to that does not require you to learn about the internals to keep the damn thing running?"
I've used a couple of OS's since I left windows, namely IRIX and linux. Generally speaking once you have the system up and running you can just forget about it as it works (my desktop has an uptime of one or two months usually, and shut downs are usually not because of the OS).
On the odd occasion that I need to pick around in the internals I generally find that the documentation for unix systems is a lot better as well, so its a lot easier. And most of the internal picking around has been to get the OS to do something complex, rather than just getting it to run...
"And to all those people who moan on about "Windows Tax" on new machines, well duh! Build your own machine you idiots! If you're qualified enough to choose linux over windows and think yourself clever enough to be able to use it, then what's hard about plugging a few components
in a mboard and fitting it into a case?"
I don't particularly want to build my own machines thanks. It takes up a fair amount of time, requires a fair amount of knowledge that I don't have, and don't particular care to gain.
Believe it or not there are plenty of people out there who daily make use of computers, who know little about hardware. For that matter I don't know that much about operating systems either. One of the main reasons I switched from using windows was that I was being forced to learn far more about windows internals than I wanted just to keep the damn thing running.
"one can create objects in C by creating a structure, then passing that structure to every method that performs on that structure. a common use could be something like this. "
C, like most languages is Turing complete. You can do pretty much anything you want in it, and follow any programming paradigm. Its possible to write object orientated code in C, functional code in perl, and procedural code in lisp.
But why would you want to? Some languages do somethings better than others. You pick the language appropriate for the project. C, (or perl for that matter) are not good for writing OO code.
If you have to write in C for other reasons, thats different, but generally I can no reason to put yourself through the ringer in this way.
"if there are no people to view the ads, who are they advertising to? "
It doesn't matter. As long as the advertising executives can convince the advertisers that advertising is a good thing, then it does not matter at all what the public think.
Public beliefs might be a good way of convincing advertisers that the adverts are worth while, but this this is a long way from suggesting that consumers control the adverts.
"I think you may be remembering things wrong. Back when the web first started, yes, there was free content, but it wasn't updated regularly. If you updated things once a month your content was considered "fresh". "
I don't think that I was necessarily talking about web content. My favorite site was an ftp site, which archived a usenet group. There was plenty of traffic and updates were hourly.
"One more point; in the old days, bandwidth wasn't as expensive as it is today. "
Nonsense. Bandwidth is like most computer technology a lot cheaper than it was 5 or 10 years ago. Its just that we use a lot more it. My favorite site was entirely ascii driven. These days I have just downloaded the entire thing to my hard drive, because bandwidth, and disk space is now cheap enough.
"Europe does not consist of just Germany and France. True, they have some really severe Nazi censorship laws"
The Germans tend to be very sensitive about their past history, and want to go out of their way to show that it will not happen again. I think perhaps that they take things to far though. My own country (the UK) has a long history and dubious history, involve far more massacres, more degredation than I like to think about. The problem is that we never do think about it. The Nazi movement was horrific, but we need remember that we are all capable of it.
"In England especially if you say something about someone you pretty much will always have to back it up in a libel suit. So no such thing as Jay Leno show on British TV:-)"
Yeah you have been reading about Britain (not England) in the wrong places I think. We have had a few relatively high profile libel cases, but they are still not common. I suspect in time the law will be changed to cope with these legal excesses.
Don't know who Jay Leno is, but if it consists of saying unpleasant things about people of TV, then trust me. The British take vicious biting humour and satire to a high artform....
"Sure, we complain about being bothered by online ads, but what's the alternative? Paying for every piece of online content we access?"
I remember a time not so long ago (this sounds like the start of a fairy tale!), before the internet was considered by many to be the same as the web, and indeed before the network was the internet where I was, that we had free content and no advertising.
Its certainly true that the system was no where as near as mature as it is now, and there was no where nearly as much content as now. But you can't read all the content anyway, even then. You just found the best few sites that you wanted, and got the information that you wanted.
Of course many of the early sites that I used to use a lot have now been shut down by the threat of legal action. Notice not legal action itself just the threat of it. The internet is not what it was. In someways it has improved, but for me its golden period finished half a decade ago.
You have to be kidding right? The media is controlled by those who pay the piper, which is the advertisers and not the consumer.
At least I presume that you are using the word "consumer" to mean "the general public". If you meant "the consumer" as in "the consumer of advertisments", or "the advertiser" then of course we agree.
I would say teach him how to cook, play a musical instrument, and how to use a library, and other information resources.
The first will enable him to feed himself and others, and to enjoy the experience, rather than regarding it as something to be squashed into a busy life. The second will teach him to work with others and to listen. And the last will teach him how to learn, which is a skill much more important than a programming langauge.
I have to say I think that was an excellent article. People do get very tied into the language that they use most of the time. And this can really get in the way of understanding the issues behind other languages, and some of their strengths.
The authors linked article on type systems is actually a good example of this, and is well worth the read. Day to day I program in java. I remember the attitude of many C programmers to array bounds checking ("we don't need array bounds checking, because we just get things right"), and moaning about the annoying type errors that Java keeps bringing up. Silly. The compiler is trying to tell you that there is a problem, it is checking your code, so that you don't have to.
Of course Java's type system is relatively poor, and does not check much, but its still a little better than none. But I only know that its poor, because I am not blinkered against other languages, even if the chances of me ever getting a job coding with some of them (like ML for instance) are relatively small.
I guess in a nutshell what the article is advocating is education comment, rather than tribalism. Fine by me.
"That's right, you have to compile the.tex code after you type it in Emacs. "
You are missing the gains that you get from Compiling, namely that latex is doing a degree of validity checking for you. This takes time, but there again so does running a validating parser on HTML, which would give you the same effect. Also it is worth noting that latex compilation is also taking care of the page layout and rendering for you. With HTML this happens on the fly by the browser, which actually takes some time, although as you only read one small bit at a time this is not normally noticable.
As for constantly going back to emacs to compile,
you should find that emacs will do all of this for you, with at most a make file thrown in.
You are right about the syntax though. HTML is cleaner. None the less the fact that latex has a some degree of separation between layout and logical document structure makes for latex a better language.
I would hope in the future that something like docbook, can be advanced to the stage where it supports all of the features of latex. If it were done well it might help to overcome latex's main problem which is that its a bugger to customise. But docbook certainly is not there yet.
"So far, I have found most English engineers and scientists to be very arrogant. "
I think its a cultural difference rather than
arrogance to be honest. We have a deep sense of humour, but it tends to be based around sarcasm. Americans tend to think we are just being nasty to them as a result, although we do it amoungst ourselves as well.
And of course there are a couple of typical
American mannerisms that the British feel uniquely irritating, namely the tendancy to use peoples first name in every sentance, and to smile a lot.
What you need to do it go down the pub and spend a quite evening getting drunk, and you will see a different side come out.
Or were you in London? In which case your impressions are pretty much correct...
"but it seems to me that 'we' [...] went through [the]same thing as the industrial revolution bloomed."
Well this is true. It is worth remembering thought that in the UK (where the industrial revolution started) it caused a massive increase in poverty, increased starvation, and disease spread through the hovels that comprised the industrial towns like wildfire.
Worse still these towns were built up from the wreckage of communities which had 4 or 500 year histories, many of them with traditions of music, and literature. Much of which was just lost.
And the worst thing of all is why this happened. The industrial revolution hit first in the textiles industry, with the coming of the steam engine. It is often thought that this industrialisation was inevitable, but the irony is that for the first 30 years of the revolution steam and hand labour cost about the same. And for sometime after that the hand labour only cost more because of the massive tax burden (on food, on houses, on windows and so forth), that the factory owner did not pay for his steam engine. Why then was the move to the factory so rapid?
The depressing answer was that a few people, namely the factory owners, many of who were also the large land owners made a fortune out of it, and could not care less about the destitution of that they created amoung their workforce.
I wonder whether the situation is very different now? Sure there have been a few dot com billionaires. But having seen the conditions in some of the call centers that form the back drop of the online shopping, I think perhaps the same stuff is happening all over again.
"but in Britain, according to Merriam Webster, they spell it "advertize.""
No believe me they don't.
Actually the -ize ending was used extensively in English several hundred years ago, but is considered to be an archaic now. Still several hundred years ago spellings were much more fluid so perhaps this is not surprising.
Phil
Re:Stop trying to impede progress, UKian slime
on
The New Geography
·
· Score: 1
"America invented the net, America controls the net, and we're gonna control English next!"
The internet was invented in many different places. The idea that its a lineal descendant from DARPA's stuff does not really make sense. Its like saying that IBM invented the computer because most computers are PC's these days.
American English is already the de facto standard world language, so thats nothing new.
"Spell center right!"
Actually we use both spellings of centre. The verb is normally spelt "er".
"And refrigerate your beer!"
Yes but then we would not be able to taste it
anymore. I realise that this is considered to be a positively good thing when drinking US beer, but ours tastes great.
"It was probably his first direct encounter with somebody from outside of the USA. "
I think that you are right! It was funny actually,
because he was trying to make me look stupid, and in the end just made himself look daft. Actually he turned out to be a reasonably nice bloke, just rather young.
"hopelessly optimistic romanticized view"
One of the pleasing things about the internet in general, that despite all of the technology, and the vast amounts of cash to turn it into a shopping arcade (sorry should I say "mall") is that most people actually use it, well just to talk to one another. Perhaps there is hope for the world after all.
"I hope that you explained to that person that your spelling was correct"
I did. The origin of the spelling was actually quite relevant, as we were talking about politics at the time. Webster actually went around just before what was to turn into the revolutionary war (or the war of independance!) and made a dictionary with lots of deliberate mis-spellings. The logic was that if the spelling was different, the language was different, and the populace spoke a different language they should be a different independant country. A slightly mad but rather endearing argument I think.
"If I had a net connection in Namibia, I would be able to communicate with the same
people that I would have access to in the US. "
Well yes but thats a big if isn't.
"One of the good things about the
net is the way that cultures are blended together, and people share new ideas"
I have heard this idea expressed before. The net
never seemed to me to be that much of a melting pot. When I first got onto it a decade ago, it was overwhelmingly populated by academics, most of whom where computer scientists. Not a particularly mixed group therefore. Nowadays there are people from more walks of life, but overwhelmingly these are from the US. Again not a particularly mixed group. Okay so its better than doing some work, but on the whole its rather a boring cross section.
"The net is helping to blur some of the national boundaries that exist."
By and large it seems to me that its trying to stamp everything into an US perspective. I had someone recently write me a derisory message, telling me to learn how to spell, because "colour" does not have a 'u' in it. I mean really.
Telewest are a nightmare though. They screwed up out phone system more times than I care to remember, and then threaten to take us to court because they lost a check we gave them, even though we had a receipt.
I do any large scale downloading at work which
solves the problems really. But non metered dialup would be nice. I don't really care how fast it is because its its unmetered I can do night time transfers.
Phil
Which is why I said "X or GNU". I am aware that they are different. What I was attacking was the rather silly idea that Linus just went and coding an entire OS all on his own. He did not. The other idea that the previous poster gave was that linux was in competition with GNU. Again an incorrect comment. As RMS says "we started HURD before we had Linux. If we had had linux then we probably would not have started hurd".
I didn't say anything about the GNU/Linux naming scheme, so I am a little confused as to why you are attacking my viewpoint when you do not know it. Still as you are my view is that to argue that linux's correct name is GNU/Linux is silly and unlikely to happen. But I do agree with RMS that it would be sad if GNU's role in linux was forgotten, and worse if the importance of the freedom in linux was forgotten. I think that this will happen, but I happen to think that the issues of freedom that GNU has raised are somewhat more important than software enginneering...
Slashdot Mirror
I can't see it myself. National pride. At one stage the US was spent something like 5% of its GDP for a decade to put whities on the moon, as Gil Scott-Heron put it. And for what?
It was impressive of course, but ultimately pointless.
The same is true with the shuttle when you get down to it. What has it provided you with? Again very little. Launching satellites and so forth is useful, but unmanned vehicles are 10 fold cheaper (at least!).
What pity that this money was not spent on researching a cure for malaria, or providing clean water for billions around the world. Or for supporting music and the arts which might have bought some real joy into the world. Instead you had a multi-billion dollar phallus for your pains.
Phil
I agree that the article linked to is half-assed, and badly researched. But the sad fact is that most of the database formats in existance also seem to be fairly half assed. I think that XML might help us to get around some of these problems.
Phil
If you can not see the value of structuring data into a format which is easily parsable, and whose semantics are formally defined in a standard format, then I fear that your own idiocy level is fairly high.
XML is potentially about a lot more than viewing web pages.
GEML incidentally is pretty much useless for viewing genome sequences. Whilst this is no doubt mainly the fault of the bloke who wrote the article for getting it totally wrong, GEML is not designed to represent genomic information, but gene expression data. Two very different things.
Phil
Phil
I would agree that bioxml servers as a much better licensing model for the community than GEML, its worth mentioning that at the current time they do not compete. GEML appears to be about gene expression, and bioxml has no DTD's addressing this.
As for nature, well I expect that there publishers are worried. Sooner or later paper journals are going to disappear. Perhaps they are diversifying, and have a stake in the company. This is not necessarily a problem. Even nature does not have the power to make a standard.
Phil
The scope of GEML seems quite limited. Its about gene expression data, which is currently very sexy. Its also been licensed in a fairly restrictive manner. Not the way to go if you asked me.
Phil
I've used a couple of OS's since I left windows, namely IRIX and linux. Generally speaking once you have the system up and running you can just forget about it as it works (my desktop has an uptime of one or two months usually, and shut downs are usually not because of the OS).
On the odd occasion that I need to pick around in the internals I generally find that the documentation for unix systems is a lot better as well, so its a lot easier. And most of the internal picking around has been to get the OS to do something complex, rather than just getting it to run...
Phil
I don't particularly want to build my own machines thanks. It takes up a fair amount of time, requires a fair amount of knowledge that I don't have, and don't particular care to gain.
Believe it or not there are plenty of people out there who daily make use of computers, who know little about hardware. For that matter I don't know that much about operating systems either. One of the main reasons I switched from using windows was that I was being forced to learn far more about windows internals than I wanted just to keep the damn thing running.
Phil
C, like most languages is Turing complete. You can do pretty much anything you want in it, and follow any programming paradigm. Its possible to write object orientated code in C, functional code in perl, and procedural code in lisp.
But why would you want to? Some languages do somethings better than others. You pick the language appropriate for the project. C, (or perl for that matter) are not good for writing OO code. If you have to write in C for other reasons, thats different, but generally I can no reason to put yourself through the ringer in this way.
Phil
It doesn't matter. As long as the advertising executives can convince the advertisers that advertising is a good thing, then it does not matter at all what the public think.
Public beliefs might be a good way of convincing advertisers that the adverts are worth while, but this this is a long way from suggesting that consumers control the adverts.
Phil
I don't think that I was necessarily talking about web content. My favorite site was an ftp site, which archived a usenet group. There was plenty of traffic and updates were hourly.
"One more point; in the old days, bandwidth wasn't as expensive as it is today. "
Nonsense. Bandwidth is like most computer technology a lot cheaper than it was 5 or 10 years ago. Its just that we use a lot more it. My favorite site was entirely ascii driven. These days I have just downloaded the entire thing to my hard drive, because bandwidth, and disk space is now cheap enough.
Phil
The Germans tend to be very sensitive about their past history, and want to go out of their way to show that it will not happen again. I think perhaps that they take things to far though. My own country (the UK) has a long history and dubious history, involve far more massacres, more degredation than I like to think about. The problem is that we never do think about it. The Nazi movement was horrific, but we need remember that we are all capable of it.
"In England especially if you say something about someone you pretty much will always have to back it up in a libel suit. So no such thing as Jay Leno show on British TV :-)"
Yeah you have been reading about Britain (not England) in the wrong places I think. We have had a few relatively high profile libel cases, but they are still not common. I suspect in time the law will be changed to cope with these legal excesses.
Don't know who Jay Leno is, but if it consists of saying unpleasant things about people of TV, then trust me. The British take vicious biting humour and satire to a high artform....
Phil
I remember a time not so long ago (this sounds like the start of a fairy tale!), before the internet was considered by many to be the same as the web, and indeed before the network was the internet where I was, that we had free content and no advertising.
Its certainly true that the system was no where as near as mature as it is now, and there was no where nearly as much content as now. But you can't read all the content anyway, even then. You just found the best few sites that you wanted, and got the information that you wanted.
Of course many of the early sites that I used to use a lot have now been shut down by the threat of legal action. Notice not legal action itself just the threat of it. The internet is not what it was. In someways it has improved, but for me its golden period finished half a decade ago.
Phil
You have to be kidding right? The media is controlled by those who pay the piper, which is the advertisers and not the consumer.
At least I presume that you are using the word "consumer" to mean "the general public". If you meant "the consumer" as in "the consumer of advertisments", or "the advertiser" then of course we agree.
Phil
The first will enable him to feed himself and others, and to enjoy the experience, rather than regarding it as something to be squashed into a busy life. The second will teach him to work with others and to listen. And the last will teach him how to learn, which is a skill much more important than a programming langauge.
Phil
The authors linked article on type systems is actually a good example of this, and is well worth the read. Day to day I program in java. I remember the attitude of many C programmers to array bounds checking ("we don't need array bounds checking, because we just get things right"), and moaning about the annoying type errors that Java keeps bringing up. Silly. The compiler is trying to tell you that there is a problem, it is checking your code, so that you don't have to.
Of course Java's type system is relatively poor, and does not check much, but its still a little better than none. But I only know that its poor, because I am not blinkered against other languages, even if the chances of me ever getting a job coding with some of them (like ML for instance) are relatively small.
I guess in a nutshell what the article is advocating is education comment, rather than tribalism. Fine by me.
Phil
You are missing the gains that you get from Compiling, namely that latex is doing a degree of validity checking for you. This takes time, but there again so does running a validating parser on HTML, which would give you the same effect. Also it is worth noting that latex compilation is also taking care of the page layout and rendering for you. With HTML this happens on the fly by the browser, which actually takes some time, although as you only read one small bit at a time this is not normally noticable.
As for constantly going back to emacs to compile, you should find that emacs will do all of this for you, with at most a make file thrown in.
You are right about the syntax though. HTML is cleaner. None the less the fact that latex has a some degree of separation between layout and logical document structure makes for latex a better language.
I would hope in the future that something like docbook, can be advanced to the stage where it supports all of the features of latex. If it were done well it might help to overcome latex's main problem which is that its a bugger to customise. But docbook certainly is not there yet.
Phil
And of course there are a couple of typical American mannerisms that the British feel uniquely irritating, namely the tendancy to use peoples first name in every sentance, and to smile a lot.
What you need to do it go down the pub and spend a quite evening getting drunk, and you will see a different side come out.
Or were you in London? In which case your impressions are pretty much correct...
Phil
Well this is true. It is worth remembering thought that in the UK (where the industrial revolution started) it caused a massive increase in poverty, increased starvation, and disease spread through the hovels that comprised the industrial towns like wildfire.
Worse still these towns were built up from the wreckage of communities which had 4 or 500 year histories, many of them with traditions of music, and literature. Much of which was just lost.
And the worst thing of all is why this happened. The industrial revolution hit first in the textiles industry, with the coming of the steam engine. It is often thought that this industrialisation was inevitable, but the irony is that for the first 30 years of the revolution steam and hand labour cost about the same. And for sometime after that the hand labour only cost more because of the massive tax burden (on food, on houses, on windows and so forth), that the factory owner did not pay for his steam engine. Why then was the move to the factory so rapid?
The depressing answer was that a few people, namely the factory owners, many of who were also the large land owners made a fortune out of it, and could not care less about the destitution of that they created amoung their workforce.
I wonder whether the situation is very different now? Sure there have been a few dot com billionaires. But having seen the conditions in some of the call centers that form the back drop of the online shopping, I think perhaps the same stuff is happening all over again.
Phil
No believe me they don't.
Actually the -ize ending was used extensively in English several hundred years ago, but is considered to be an archaic now. Still several hundred years ago spellings were much more fluid so perhaps this is not surprising.
Phil
The internet was invented in many different places. The idea that its a lineal descendant from DARPA's stuff does not really make sense. Its like saying that IBM invented the computer because most computers are PC's these days.
American English is already the de facto standard world language, so thats nothing new.
"Spell center right!"
Actually we use both spellings of centre. The verb is normally spelt "er".
"And refrigerate your beer!"
Yes but then we would not be able to taste it anymore. I realise that this is considered to be a positively good thing when drinking US beer, but ours tastes great.
Phil
I think that you are right! It was funny actually, because he was trying to make me look stupid, and in the end just made himself look daft. Actually he turned out to be a reasonably nice bloke, just rather young.
"hopelessly optimistic romanticized view"
One of the pleasing things about the internet in general, that despite all of the technology, and the vast amounts of cash to turn it into a shopping arcade (sorry should I say "mall") is that most people actually use it, well just to talk to one another. Perhaps there is hope for the world after all.
"I hope that you explained to that person that your spelling was correct"
I did. The origin of the spelling was actually quite relevant, as we were talking about politics at the time. Webster actually went around just before what was to turn into the revolutionary war (or the war of independance!) and made a dictionary with lots of deliberate mis-spellings. The logic was that if the spelling was different, the language was different, and the populace spoke a different language they should be a different independant country. A slightly mad but rather endearing argument I think.
Phil
Well yes but thats a big if isn't.
"One of the good things about the net is the way that cultures are blended together, and people share new ideas"
I have heard this idea expressed before. The net never seemed to me to be that much of a melting pot. When I first got onto it a decade ago, it was overwhelmingly populated by academics, most of whom where computer scientists. Not a particularly mixed group therefore. Nowadays there are people from more walks of life, but overwhelmingly these are from the US. Again not a particularly mixed group. Okay so its better than doing some work, but on the whole its rather a boring cross section. "The net is helping to blur some of the national boundaries that exist." By and large it seems to me that its trying to stamp everything into an US perspective. I had someone recently write me a derisory message, telling me to learn how to spell, because "colour" does not have a 'u' in it. I mean really.
Phil
I do any large scale downloading at work which solves the problems really. But non metered dialup would be nice. I don't really care how fast it is because its its unmetered I can do night time transfers. Phil
Which is why I said "X or GNU". I am aware that they are different. What I was attacking was the rather silly idea that Linus just went and coding an entire OS all on his own. He did not. The other idea that the previous poster gave was that linux was in competition with GNU. Again an incorrect comment. As RMS says "we started HURD before we had Linux. If we had had linux then we probably would not have started hurd".
I didn't say anything about the GNU/Linux naming scheme, so I am a little confused as to why you are attacking my viewpoint when you do not know it. Still as you are my view is that to argue that linux's correct name is GNU/Linux is silly and unlikely to happen. But I do agree with RMS that it would be sad if GNU's role in linux was forgotten, and worse if the importance of the freedom in linux was forgotten. I think that this will happen, but I happen to think that the issues of freedom that GNU has raised are somewhat more important than software enginneering...
Phil