it is as you say, the "general public" would benefit greatly from a standard. But it's not the "general public" that assembles the distributions. Maybe the LSB is not so beneficial to those who spend time and effort on creating the distributions. After all, the more standardized the distros are, the fewer reasons there will be to choose one distro over another. And presumably the distributions are competing and this is a good thing. Competition entails differentiation, it's a necessary implication of it. The alternative would be a single distribution with many "resellers" who would only compete wrt services, but that's clearly not the landscape we have today. In short, it's not really in Red Hat or SuSE's interest to bring their distributions in line with each other, it just robs them of "unique selling points."
I think that if more people actually paid for commercial games, rather than copying and downloading them, free ones like this would be a lot more attractive. The fact that it's free would be an actual factor.
I think the author is making the mistake of assuming that things will stay the same. And you know, as long as things don't change, they will! He's giving a description of how things are (commonly perceived to be) now. He doesn't even try to describe some kind of dynamic for change. There is none. Things will be this way forever. Right. The future may be very hard to predict, but one thing is sure, it'll be different than today.That's especially true of operating systems and computer corporations.
"IBM and Red Hat can't be the only vendors who make their money selling support."
No of course not. There is SuSE etc., not to mention local firms who install and support OS solutions. But they're not software companies.
"Business models evolve, and companies that don't evolve with them may become as dead as the dinosaurs that perished in the flood."
De facto standards put pressure on corporations such as IBM whether the software in question is OS or not. But although many companies work with Linux today, the pressure to do so did not originally come from corporations.
"Who cares if innovation is from academia, hobbyists or Red Hat or Novell?"
Everyone? Don't you care whether you will have to pay for it or not? If you are on the producer end, don't you care whether you have to earn enough to pay your developers or not? I think that's a somewhat myopic question.
I was product manager for 2½ years at a software company, whose product was partly open-source based (it was our own OS webserver). I was in the business when Eric Raymond tried to convince s/w companies to "go open source." "It's much better, bugs get fixed, security holes shut much faster." And so on. But the truth is that open source is about free (gratis) software, and software companies are about selling software. There are one or two exceptions, those who can sell support and so on, but the whole _concept_ of having a software company is to charge people for the software you develop. This doesn't mean that I'm against open source, possibly I'm more against software companies.
The bottom line is that open source may one day cover all possible software need for every person, but it will come out of academia, non-profit organizations, and hobbyists. Software companies will not be the primary drive behind open source. I think Stallman has known this for a long time. And if you _do_ have, or plan to start, a software company, there is nothing wrong with keeping some parts of your code proprietary. Alternatively, just don't start a software company.
It's funny, I was reading the sleeve notes to Wendy Carlos's "Switched-On Bach" last night. The record, from 1968, seems like a joke, but it's nothing but and amazingly well-sounding for having been made in the 60's. Bob Moog was personally involved in this project, and many improvements to his synth were made to accommodate the artistic needs of classical music.
Server-initiated GUI changes is the real philosopher's stone of "weblications," and overwhelmingly the most important qualitative difference between web and desktop applications. It's the reason why a simple but realtime, multiplayer game is very hard to construct over the HTTP protocol, and without using Java sockets or some alternative communications technology. Everything else is simply smart caching (well, pretty much), as long as the server can't tell the client something. That, or the whole application is actually in the "Ajax engine," which means it's not a network app, but a just-in-time downloaded app.
My point is that actual use of units doesn't involve paper--and it doesn't involve unit conversion.
If it doesn't involve unit conversion, then your point about how much easier it is to cut a quart into cups is meaningless. No one unit is any better than any other, so the only way one of our systems can have an advantage over the other is in terms of unit conversion.
If it did, units better amenable to conversion would have been derived a lot earlier.
Decimal units had no advantages before there was agreement on a decimal, positional number system. The old units that were based on 12th, 16th, 24th, and 60th came about long before the Indian/Arabic system became standard in Europe. Yes, they are older, but that doesn't make them better any more than Roman numerals are better than Arab.
It's just another Enlightenment flim-flam.
Right. Like critical investigation, scientific method, human rights, and modern democracy!
I hate to be rude, but bullshit.
Your problem is not rudeness (I don't mind), it's that you're wrong. It's not "impossible" to eyeball a fifth, that's ridiculous. Why would it be? But more importantly, I know aproximately how much a deciliter is, just like you know aproximately how long an inch is, without having to take it out of a foot.
Okay, I should actually say something about your comments as well.
Decimals are much more easily converted on paper.
The point is that with units and number system of the same base, conversion is so trivial you don't need paper. You just move the decimal point or add trailing zeroes.
[T]he primary operation is actual measuring, and in the course of that measuring dividing and multiplying.
We are of course still talking about conversion between sub- and super-units (the discussion is moot of you have only one unit), and this operation is trivial with decimal units and non-trivial with non-decimal units. "Multiplying and dividing" is what decimal units in a decimal number system is all about.
It's simplicity itself to cut a quart into cups; it's a pain to divide a litre into a decilitre (in fact, I deny that it's possible by hand without a graduated measure).
Nonsense. You learn how big a deciliter is as easily as you learn the size of a cup. Taking a deciliter from a liter is no harder than taking 2.5 deciliters from a liter. But converting from any number of deciliters or centiliters or milliliters to liters is as easy as moving the decimal point. And, niftily, one milliliter of water at 4 degrees (Centigrade!) weighs exactly one gram.:-)
Regarding old British money: it actually made a reasonable amount of sense...
Yes, all these systems have some sort of history of justification. Still, I bet you wouldn't want to get your salary in a Monthly Wage unit today, and then have other monetary units, like the Monthly Rent unit and the Price Of Milk unit and Bus Ticket unit. Having units and number system coordinated is simply superior, and this I think is obvious to everyone in the contexts where this is the case.
Suffice it to say that it's an utter waste to have a positional number system if you don't have units of the same base. And sticking to quaint, random ratios has nothing to do with utility and everything to do with conservatism and an unwillingness to admit that "your way" is flawed.
Can we have a metric/imperial flame war? Pretty please?:-)
Metric units are the real units, in science, international standards, and so on. Obviously, decimal units make more sense than random ratios. Or would you like to substitute the olde British money system for your current decimal one? That is also why your "real" units are in fact formally defined in terms of decimal units.:-)
Lispers is not that large to produce tons of halfbaked code...
Ouch, sour grapes. There is actually some decent perl code out there. And if you have to access an old FoxPro database because there is actually some real business need with a time limit involved, you will cry happy tears at finding an old v. 0.01 procedure-oriented library to do it.
All this said, I am a big fan of Prolog, and liked what I saw of Scheme, and I certainly hope that those languages are used more and that the communities grow.
I hear you, and as I said below, as a CTO, it was my job to argue against the quick fixes.
However:
But we are allowed to make the same mistakes over and over again without taking the slightest hint from our academic friends...
The funny thing is, a not insignificant portion of the people in the industry are compuscience majors. They know all these things. After a few years you start to suspect that things don't happen the way they do because people are stupid or ignorant, but because the day-to-day priorities are the way they are.
Slashdot Mirror
it is as you say, the "general public" would benefit greatly from a standard. But it's not the "general public" that assembles the distributions. Maybe the LSB is not so beneficial to those who spend time and effort on creating the distributions. After all, the more standardized the distros are, the fewer reasons there will be to choose one distro over another. And presumably the distributions are competing and this is a good thing. Competition entails differentiation, it's a necessary implication of it. The alternative would be a single distribution with many "resellers" who would only compete wrt services, but that's clearly not the landscape we have today. In short, it's not really in Red Hat or SuSE's interest to bring their distributions in line with each other, it just robs them of "unique selling points."
I think that if more people actually paid for commercial games, rather than copying and downloading them, free ones like this would be a lot more attractive. The fact that it's free would be an actual factor.
I think the author is making the mistake of assuming that things will stay the same. And you know, as long as things don't change, they will! He's giving a description of how things are (commonly perceived to be) now. He doesn't even try to describe some kind of dynamic for change. There is none. Things will be this way forever. Right. The future may be very hard to predict, but one thing is sure, it'll be different than today.That's especially true of operating systems and computer corporations.
"IBM and Red Hat can't be the only vendors who make their money selling support."
No of course not. There is SuSE etc., not to mention local firms who install and support OS solutions. But they're not software companies.
"Business models evolve, and companies that don't evolve with them may become as dead as the dinosaurs that perished in the flood."
De facto standards put pressure on corporations such as IBM whether the software in question is OS or not. But although many companies work with Linux today, the pressure to do so did not originally come from corporations.
"Who cares if innovation is from academia, hobbyists or Red Hat or Novell?"
Everyone? Don't you care whether you will have to pay for it or not? If you are on the producer end, don't you care whether you have to earn enough to pay your developers or not? I think that's a somewhat myopic question.
I was product manager for 2½ years at a software company, whose product was partly open-source based (it was our own OS webserver). I was in the business when Eric Raymond tried to convince s/w companies to "go open source." "It's much better, bugs get fixed, security holes shut much faster." And so on. But the truth is that open source is about free (gratis) software, and software companies are about selling software. There are one or two exceptions, those who can sell support and so on, but the whole _concept_ of having a software company is to charge people for the software you develop. This doesn't mean that I'm against open source, possibly I'm more against software companies.
The bottom line is that open source may one day cover all possible software need for every person, but it will come out of academia, non-profit organizations, and hobbyists. Software companies will not be the primary drive behind open source. I think Stallman has known this for a long time. And if you _do_ have, or plan to start, a software company, there is nothing wrong with keeping some parts of your code proprietary. Alternatively, just don't start a software company.
Yes, but by that time she was already "Wendy." Carlos went through a sex change in the late 60's, but the album was released under her old name.
Don't forget sliced bread.
It's funny, I was reading the sleeve notes to Wendy Carlos's "Switched-On Bach" last night. The record, from 1968, seems like a joke, but it's nothing but and amazingly well-sounding for having been made in the 60's. Bob Moog was personally involved in this project, and many improvements to his synth were made to accommodate the artistic needs of classical music.
That's it.
It is very unlikely that they would (try to) register Ajax as a trademark...o ducts/CCPM3814.jpg
;-)
http://www.staples.com/images/products/catalog/pr
It is also a very famous Dutch football team.
Server-initiated GUI changes is the real philosopher's stone of "weblications," and overwhelmingly the most important qualitative difference between web and desktop applications. It's the reason why a simple but realtime, multiplayer game is very hard to construct over the HTTP protocol, and without using Java sockets or some alternative communications technology. Everything else is simply smart caching (well, pretty much), as long as the server can't tell the client something. That, or the whole application is actually in the "Ajax engine," which means it's not a network app, but a just-in-time downloaded app.
My point is that actual use of units doesn't involve paper--and it doesn't involve unit conversion.
If it doesn't involve unit conversion, then your point about how much easier it is to cut a quart into cups is meaningless. No one unit is any better than any other, so the only way one of our systems can have an advantage over the other is in terms of unit conversion.
If it did, units better amenable to conversion would have been derived a lot earlier.
Decimal units had no advantages before there was agreement on a decimal, positional number system. The old units that were based on 12th, 16th, 24th, and 60th came about long before the Indian/Arabic system became standard in Europe. Yes, they are older, but that doesn't make them better any more than Roman numerals are better than Arab.
It's just another Enlightenment flim-flam.
Right. Like critical investigation, scientific method, human rights, and modern democracy!
I hate to be rude, but bullshit.
Your problem is not rudeness (I don't mind), it's that you're wrong. It's not "impossible" to eyeball a fifth, that's ridiculous. Why would it be? But more importantly, I know aproximately how much a deciliter is, just like you know aproximately how long an inch is, without having to take it out of a foot.
Okay, I should actually say something about your comments as well.
:-)
Decimals are much more easily converted on paper.
The point is that with units and number system of the same base, conversion is so trivial you don't need paper. You just move the decimal point or add trailing zeroes.
[T]he primary operation is actual measuring, and in the course of that measuring dividing and multiplying.
We are of course still talking about conversion between sub- and super-units (the discussion is moot of you have only one unit), and this operation is trivial with decimal units and non-trivial with non-decimal units. "Multiplying and dividing" is what decimal units in a decimal number system is all about.
It's simplicity itself to cut a quart into cups; it's a pain to divide a litre into a decilitre (in fact, I deny that it's possible by hand without a graduated measure).
Nonsense. You learn how big a deciliter is as easily as you learn the size of a cup. Taking a deciliter from a liter is no harder than taking 2.5 deciliters from a liter. But converting from any number of deciliters or centiliters or milliliters to liters is as easy as moving the decimal point. And, niftily, one milliliter of water at 4 degrees (Centigrade!) weighs exactly one gram.
Regarding old British money: it actually made a reasonable amount of sense...
Yes, all these systems have some sort of history of justification. Still, I bet you wouldn't want to get your salary in a Monthly Wage unit today, and then have other monetary units, like the Monthly Rent unit and the Price Of Milk unit and Bus Ticket unit. Having units and number system coordinated is simply superior, and this I think is obvious to everyone in the contexts where this is the case.
"We still don't have the missing link that Darwin himself said you better find before you even start thinking about calling this theory fact."
h tml#morphological_intermediates_ex3
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.
You should love Tentime, my decimal calendar and time-keeping system. ;-)
http://kronocide.com/tentime/
Suffice it to say that it's an utter waste to have a positional number system if you don't have units of the same base. And sticking to quaint, random ratios has nothing to do with utility and everything to do with conservatism and an unwillingness to admit that "your way" is flawed.
Wow, soon they might find some melted water, and maybe even some evaporated vapor! ;-)
Can we have a metric/imperial flame war? Pretty please? :-)
:-)
Metric units are the real units, in science, international standards, and so on. Obviously, decimal units make more sense than random ratios. Or would you like to substitute the olde British money system for your current decimal one? That is also why your "real" units are in fact formally defined in terms of decimal units.
How this thread turns into Conspiracy Theory Galore. Why can't someone mention HIV without the woodwork squeeking?
Sorry, that's not a "paper" and there is no evidence, just random, lunatic assertions. (Did I just state the obvious?)
The Evidence That HIV Causes AIDS (National Institute of Health):
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/evidhiv.htm/
Moreover, it has basically zero news value (since there are plenty of such programs), and I don't understand what it's doing here unless it's a troll.
There is no claim that this is the "first official game development education." Several times it says the exact oposite:
UAT is one of the few programs that offers bachelor's degrees in game design.
Electronic Gaming Monthly recognized UAT as one of the "top five game-degree programs in the world" in the January 2003 issue.
The CNN article claims that this is the first professor's chair in computer game design, which it might very well be.
It's better to read the article before you post it on Slashdot, or people may think you're a troll.
Lispers is not that large to
produce tons of halfbaked code...
Ouch, sour grapes. There is actually some decent perl code out there. And if you have to access an old FoxPro database because there is actually some real business need with a time limit involved, you will cry happy tears at finding an old v. 0.01 procedure-oriented library to do it.
All this said, I am a big fan of Prolog, and liked what I saw of Scheme, and I certainly hope that those languages are used more and that the communities grow.
I hear you, and as I said below, as a CTO, it was my job to argue against the quick fixes.
However:
But we are allowed to make the same mistakes over and over again without taking the slightest hint from our academic friends...
The funny thing is, a not insignificant portion of the people in the industry are compuscience majors. They know all these things. After a few years you start to suspect that things don't happen the way they do because people are stupid or ignorant, but because the day-to-day priorities are the way they are.
The day you win an Alan Turing award is the day that I'll pay any attention to you.
:-)
:-)
Or perhaps right now is that day.
You are a sad little fart who is dropping his pants and wagging is small little penis in order to make fun of adults.
And you are obviously not one of those adults.
Go and masterbate on some IRC channel and leave Slashdot to people who actually have some functioning brain cells.
It's "masturbate."
Have a nice day!