Sorry, I made the assumption that beta products didn't count because if they did then there might be even better web browsers that we don't know about because they're in the early stages. If Mozilla is as fast as IE, as stable as IE, and more standards compliant than IE, then the only thing that will keep people from switching is laziness.
This is different, VoteAuction isn't asking you to send them a blank ballot, they're simply going to make a suggestion of who you vote for and then will send money to anyone who can demonstrate that they have voted for them. They're not buying a vote, just offering a reward.
Analogies:
eBay: A guys about to enter the voting station so I walk up and tell him I'll give him a dollar if he votes for BushGore.
VoteAuction: I stand outside the voting station with a sign that says "if you're voting for BushGore, I'll give you $1".
The trick is, in order to make this look better, VoteAuction has to offer the same reward to voters who weren't previously registered with them.
IE currently does the best job of standards compliance, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. Any rational IE developer must wish that the W3C didn't exist so that Microsoft could create new standards without interference. Instead, Microsoft or someone else comes up with something new, and the final recommendation can be changed from the beta. This is a pain for both Microsoft developers because they have to go back and change their work, and for other developers because people might be making work that doesn't appear broken during testing (but is broken on more compliant browsers).
Think of Mozilla as the reference drivers like video cards have: you can use it if you want it exactly the way the W3C intended. If standards-compliance was the market dominance, people wouldn't commit to beta standards until they had been subjected to peer review.
If you're a web developer, you don't have to worry about testing on different browsers. If it works in Mozilla, then its not your problem if it doesn't work somewhere else.
I know I was confused before I read the FAQ -- which we can count on the mainstream press not to do.:)
"Dual-licensing" implies that it's under two licenses at the same time, which isn't really what's happening. I believe the MPL was the GPL with additions, so what the heads of the devel team are doing is asking each developer if its okay for them to remove those additions and go to pure GPL. If any of them say no (which would be very bizarre), then some of Mozilla's components would be under the GPL and some under the MPL.
So calling it "dual-licensing" is being pessimistic at this phase. Mozilla is currently in transition and we can worry about what to call it later if it doesn't all make it through the transition.
Although it's facisnating to consider an alternative history of the computer where development took place in another language, there is a much less theoretical question we could be asking: Is English, as the standard language for programmers, holding us back? Is there another natural language which would be better for describing our concepts or which would be easily speakable yet more understandable to our machines? As for the later, Constructed Logical Languages would be a massive boon to speech input and machine translation.
Could someone point us to some research on the usefulness of certain languages for certain tasks? Obviously the less letters the smaller keyboards, but is French really better for poetry or Latin for science?
As a current undergraduate student looking towards an academic career, I know a list of unsolved problems in CS (perhaps not including Math and AI?) would be a great help in focusing my course selection.
Or even better, why not establish an online database of unsolved questions in every discipline? Each question could include some links to background information, a list of researchers who were known to be working on them, perhaps a method for companies and individuals to offer financial incentives (much like Paul Erdos used to).
As an aside, if anyone has any links or suggestion for topic selection, I'd greatly appreciate it.
I think the Open Content license would be more appropriate for everything outside CS thesi. But a better question is why you would want to. The academic community has no desire for collaboration on a single paper, instead they cite other works within existing copywrite law. Rather than making your thesis Open Content, it would be a much more beneficial act to ensure that it's available on-line (for free) so that everyone could read it to enhance their own work.
This is the best explanation of "information wants to be free" that I have ever seen. I think that comparing information to physical laws yields a lot of insight. Perhaps you could flesh this out into a/. Feature?
This summer I'm working in Victoria, BC (Canada) rather than Toronto or Ottawa. I go to school in Ontario so they'd both be much more convient, but it was impossible to find companies without being in the cities themselves. And the positions I did find, weren't flexible with their interview times and didn't give me enough information about the position to warrant the day-long excursion.
I'm a Computer Science student just looking to pay the rent every summer. I get good grades and have extensive work and hobby experience. I have to go across the country to get a job that only marginally challenges me. And they wonder why there's a brain drain...
Well I have to admit, I've never done much job hunting in Ottawa, so I could be wrong. At the start of the summer, I spent a lot of time on the Net hunting around for programming, especially Linux-oriented, jobs in both Ontario and BC. How about you give me your e-mail and I'll give you a chance to prove me wrong next year?:)
Note the name of the company you quote: Ventures West. They're from Vancouver and, as I heard it told by Indigo's CEO Heather Reisman, they decided to expand East because there was no competition. She said they were looking for a partnership and then realised there was no one to partner with.
Besides, every media outlet in Canada is polarised as either pro-Ontario or anti-Ontario so they're not to be trusted.
In order to be applicable to much more of the/. crowd, it should be pointed out that other forms of meditation will likely have a similar effect. That is assuming, of course, that it's the asking for inspiration that helps rather than the reply.:)
Why not Vancouver instead? Sure Ottawa's got all the older Canadian software companies, but there's no venture capital to speak of. Besides, Vancouver's weather is a lot nicer this time of year to those of us not flying up from Austin.
Conferences should never be in the same place twice.
But it also allows parents who don't approve of their children playing these games to do something about it. Now parents who are distrustful or even paranoid (which they have every right to be), don't have to worry about leaving the kid alone in the arcade.
Most of the posters on both this and the SoF article are missing the point: these actions are empowering the parents to control what their children have access to. Just because we don't agree with what a parents' judgement does not mean we should remove their ability to control their children. If you're an adult, then these laws don't effect you, and if you're a child then blame your parents.
The fact remains, many American parents wouldn't want their children exposed to excessive sex and many Canadian parents wouldn't want their children exposed to excessive violence. Who are you to say that we shouldn't help them as long as it doesn't restrict what adults have access to? Is it just me, or do very few of the/. crowd understand the concept of Good Parenting (TM)?
In fact, it was named after one of the captains who charted its cost and was described as a "British Columbus". (I think it was either Cook, Vancouver, or Quadra; but I'm too lazy to look it up.:)
No one complains when a violent movie is given a high rating, why should they for a video game? The last time I remember complaints was over South Park, which was given a lower rating in Canada than it was in the US.
Should the report have not mentioned that animals were killed? Would it have been better to omit that due to the fact that the government condones using flame throwers on dogs? They were just trying to be complete, give them a break.
The rating simply gives the parent the ability to restrict the presence of the game in their household. Do you really think a 17-year-old can't go out and rent a movie that's rated G without his parents knowing? They can rent it for their children if they want, but the store must have confirmation that the parent has knowledge of the purchase.
Rated 'R' (which isn't used in Canada anymore, the equivilent is '18A') is one thing, but did you ever try to buy hard core porn? SOF is being rated 'NC-17' or 'X[XX]'.
Wouldn't it be great if people with real university degrees (as opposed to education degrees) and work experience could volunteer their time to teach a highschool class? For that matter, wouldn't it be great if teachers right out of university could get positions which allowed them to use their grasp of leading edge technology?
Unfortunately (at least in Canada), schools hire based on senority, rather than competence. And if you don't have a teaching certificate, your senority is automatically -1. Teachers unions have been getting in the way of education for years -- Ontario is just the most painful example.
And I reply in same to you, sir! I may have commited a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, but under the circumstances I think it's a valid assumption rather than deserving of an "RTFM" suggestion.
There's no need to have a hard drive to have your OS of choice: just create your own live CD. As soon as a few people have NICs, I'm sure we'll see pages with instructions to do just that. In the meanwhile, check out Live CDs on Dmoz.
May I first take a moment to apologise for many of the other posters. I have no idea why they don't wait for an interview with the current director for all their Debian questions.
Anyway, I was hoping you could contrast Linux NOW with Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Beowulf clusters. I assume your commercial effort will be focused on the enterprise, but how do you think Linux NOW will scale for hobbiest or academic pursuits? (I ask because I was excited about Plan 9 until I realised how hard it would be to convince my flat mates to switch OSes.:)
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Sorry, I made the assumption that beta products didn't count because if they did then there might be even better web browsers that we don't know about because they're in the early stages. If Mozilla is as fast as IE, as stable as IE, and more standards compliant than IE, then the only thing that will keep people from switching is laziness.
This is different, VoteAuction isn't asking you to send them a blank ballot, they're simply going to make a suggestion of who you vote for and then will send money to anyone who can demonstrate that they have voted for them. They're not buying a vote, just offering a reward.
Analogies:
The trick is, in order to make this look better, VoteAuction has to offer the same reward to voters who weren't previously registered with them.
IE currently does the best job of standards compliance, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. Any rational IE developer must wish that the W3C didn't exist so that Microsoft could create new standards without interference. Instead, Microsoft or someone else comes up with something new, and the final recommendation can be changed from the beta. This is a pain for both Microsoft developers because they have to go back and change their work, and for other developers because people might be making work that doesn't appear broken during testing (but is broken on more compliant browsers).
Think of Mozilla as the reference drivers like video cards have: you can use it if you want it exactly the way the W3C intended. If standards-compliance was the market dominance, people wouldn't commit to beta standards until they had been subjected to peer review.
If you're a web developer, you don't have to worry about testing on different browsers. If it works in Mozilla, then its not your problem if it doesn't work somewhere else.
If you believe that (which I don't), then you could see this as the final step in the transition from Netscape:
Using the GPL means that even if the Mozilla project itself died, parts of the code would live on in things like Galeon.
I know I was confused before I read the FAQ -- which we can count on the mainstream press not to do. :)
"Dual-licensing" implies that it's under two licenses at the same time, which isn't really what's happening. I believe the MPL was the GPL with additions, so what the heads of the devel team are doing is asking each developer if its okay for them to remove those additions and go to pure GPL. If any of them say no (which would be very bizarre), then some of Mozilla's components would be under the GPL and some under the MPL.
So calling it "dual-licensing" is being pessimistic at this phase. Mozilla is currently in transition and we can worry about what to call it later if it doesn't all make it through the transition.
Although it's facisnating to consider an alternative history of the computer where development took place in another language, there is a much less theoretical question we could be asking: Is English, as the standard language for programmers, holding us back? Is there another natural language which would be better for describing our concepts or which would be easily speakable yet more understandable to our machines? As for the later, Constructed Logical Languages would be a massive boon to speech input and machine translation.
Could someone point us to some research on the usefulness of certain languages for certain tasks? Obviously the less letters the smaller keyboards, but is French really better for poetry or Latin for science?
What about Computer Science?
As a current undergraduate student looking towards an academic career, I know a list of unsolved problems in CS (perhaps not including Math and AI?) would be a great help in focusing my course selection.
Or even better, why not establish an online database of unsolved questions in every discipline? Each question could include some links to background information, a list of researchers who were known to be working on them, perhaps a method for companies and individuals to offer financial incentives (much like Paul Erdos used to).
As an aside, if anyone has any links or suggestion for topic selection, I'd greatly appreciate it.
I think the Open Content license would be more appropriate for everything outside CS thesi. But a better question is why you would want to. The academic community has no desire for collaboration on a single paper, instead they cite other works within existing copywrite law. Rather than making your thesis Open Content, it would be a much more beneficial act to ensure that it's available on-line (for free) so that everyone could read it to enhance their own work.
This is the best explanation of "information wants to be free" that I have ever seen. I think that comparing information to physical laws yields a lot of insight. Perhaps you could flesh this out into a /. Feature?
I second the request for methods!
This summer I'm working in Victoria, BC (Canada) rather than Toronto or Ottawa. I go to school in Ontario so they'd both be much more convient, but it was impossible to find companies without being in the cities themselves. And the positions I did find, weren't flexible with their interview times and didn't give me enough information about the position to warrant the day-long excursion.
I'm a Computer Science student just looking to pay the rent every summer. I get good grades and have extensive work and hobby experience. I have to go across the country to get a job that only marginally challenges me. And they wonder why there's a brain drain...
Well I have to admit, I've never done much job hunting in Ottawa, so I could be wrong. At the start of the summer, I spent a lot of time on the Net hunting around for programming, especially Linux-oriented, jobs in both Ontario and BC. How about you give me your e-mail and I'll give you a chance to prove me wrong next year? :)
Note the name of the company you quote: Ventures West. They're from Vancouver and, as I heard it told by Indigo's CEO Heather Reisman, they decided to expand East because there was no competition. She said they were looking for a partnership and then realised there was no one to partner with.
Besides, every media outlet in Canada is polarised as either pro-Ontario or anti-Ontario so they're not to be trusted.
Dmoz's Programming Games category is a good place to start.
In order to be applicable to much more of the /. crowd, it should be pointed out that other forms of meditation will likely have a similar effect. That is assuming, of course, that it's the asking for inspiration that helps rather than the reply. :)
Why not Vancouver instead? Sure Ottawa's got all the older Canadian software companies, but there's no venture capital to speak of. Besides, Vancouver's weather is a lot nicer this time of year to those of us not flying up from Austin.
Conferences should never be in the same place twice.
But it also allows parents who don't approve of their children playing these games to do something about it. Now parents who are distrustful or even paranoid (which they have every right to be), don't have to worry about leaving the kid alone in the arcade.
Most of the posters on both this and the SoF article are missing the point: these actions are empowering the parents to control what their children have access to. Just because we don't agree with what a parents' judgement does not mean we should remove their ability to control their children. If you're an adult, then these laws don't effect you, and if you're a child then blame your parents.
The fact remains, many American parents wouldn't want their children exposed to excessive sex and many Canadian parents wouldn't want their children exposed to excessive violence. Who are you to say that we shouldn't help them as long as it doesn't restrict what adults have access to? Is it just me, or do very few of the /. crowd understand the concept of Good Parenting (TM)?
In fact, it was named after one of the captains who charted its cost and was described as a "British Columbus". (I think it was either Cook, Vancouver, or Quadra; but I'm too lazy to look it up. :)
No one complains when a violent movie is given a high rating, why should they for a video game? The last time I remember complaints was over South Park, which was given a lower rating in Canada than it was in the US.
Should the report have not mentioned that animals were killed? Would it have been better to omit that due to the fact that the government condones using flame throwers on dogs? They were just trying to be complete, give them a break.
The rating simply gives the parent the ability to restrict the presence of the game in their household. Do you really think a 17-year-old can't go out and rent a movie that's rated G without his parents knowing? They can rent it for their children if they want, but the store must have confirmation that the parent has knowledge of the purchase.
Rated 'R' (which isn't used in Canada anymore, the equivilent is '18A') is one thing, but did you ever try to buy hard core porn? SOF is being rated 'NC-17' or 'X[XX]'.
Wouldn't it be great if people with real university degrees (as opposed to education degrees) and work experience could volunteer their time to teach a highschool class? For that matter, wouldn't it be great if teachers right out of university could get positions which allowed them to use their grasp of leading edge technology?
Unfortunately (at least in Canada), schools hire based on senority, rather than competence. And if you don't have a teaching certificate, your senority is automatically -1. Teachers unions have been getting in the way of education for years -- Ontario is just the most painful example.
And I reply in same to you, sir! I may have commited a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, but under the circumstances I think it's a valid assumption rather than deserving of an "RTFM" suggestion.
There's no need to have a hard drive to have your OS of choice: just create your own live CD. As soon as a few people have NICs, I'm sure we'll see pages with instructions to do just that. In the meanwhile, check out Live CDs on Dmoz.
May I first take a moment to apologise for many of the other posters. I have no idea why they don't wait for an interview with the current director for all their Debian questions.
Anyway, I was hoping you could contrast Linux NOW with Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Beowulf clusters. I assume your commercial effort will be focused on the enterprise, but how do you think Linux NOW will scale for hobbiest or academic pursuits? (I ask because I was excited about Plan 9 until I realised how hard it would be to convince my flat mates to switch OSes. :)
But this is exactly what he's doing with Linux NOW: adding a feature from Plan 9!