There's also a difference between observations and theories. For instance, gravity is pretty much "settled". However, it's an observation. We always see that objects are attracted to other massive objects; every time we throw something in the air, it falls to the ground. At this point, it'd be stupid to say that gravity doesn't exist.
However, whyare objects with mass attracted to other objects with mass? That isn't very well understood. We have a theory that describes the relationship (the universal gravitation theory), in a simple equation that tells you the gravitational force given two objects' masses and distance apart. But why is it so? According to Einstein's theories, it's because the spacetime continuum is warped by mass like a rubber sheet, and gravity is just a side-effect of this. According to Quantum Mechanics, particles called gravitons are responsible somehow.
So we can debate all day about what exactly causes gravity, but the existence of gravity itself is really undeniable at this point.
Similarly, with evolution, the age of the earth, etc., the theories might be somewhat debatable (but not nearly as much as gravitational theories), the evidence that led to those theories' creation is pretty undeniable at this point, namely fossils and other geological evidence. Claiming the earth is 6500 years old when there's enormous evidence contradicting that claim is just stupid.
This isn't a very good analogy, unless you're going to constrain it to Free/open-source software.
In proprietary software, there's new versions every now and then, which both remove useful features and add new feature of questionable value, not because people found flaws or bugs, or because people really needed some new features, but rather because the company behind the software wanted to make more money by selling customers something they already had, and the people writing the software needed to justify their jobs. So we get crap like Windows 8/Metro. We get newer software which has new bugs which weren't present in the older versions, which run slower, which do less, which are uglier and have worse user interfaces.
It's not confined to proprietary software either. Just look at Gnome3. People were perfectly happy with Gnome2, but they had to toss that out and create something totally new and different (and incompatible) just because they wanted to, maybe because they had nothing better to do with their time, maybe because they wanted to justify their existence.
Your statements work for lower-level open-source projects like the Linux kernel, the Linux init systems (some people didn't think sysvinit had the features they needed, so they created upstart; some other people thought that was buggy and not architected right, so they created systemd, etc.). But for user-facing things, there's frequently completely different (and not so utilitarian) dynamics at work.
But, speaking frankly, if I were satisfied with the Windows way of things, I would remain a Windows user instead.
Well you can't just remain a Windows XP user unless you want to be hacked, and all the new computers have Windows 8 with Metro, so just "remaining a Windows user" is becoming less and less viable.
use KDE (what is almost the same to go back to Windows)
Except that it's not that hard to configure KDE to be a lot like Gnome2. Or, you could switch to MATE or Cinnamon. MacOS isn't anything like Gnome2.
Apples and oranges. Linux distros are made up of software from many different sources. The people who make the kernel are not the same people who make KDE or GNOME or XCFE or the display system (X or Wayland in the near future), or even the init system (sysvinit, upstart, systemd). These different groups do work together to varying extents however.
The thing about the different software in a Linux distro, however, is that it's all freely-available. It doesn't cost me extra to switch from GNOME to KDE because I think GNOME sucks. It doesn't cost me extra to add the "Lancelot" menu in KDE because I don't like the regular version. They're all easily available with "sudo apt-get install [software]". Even better, I can pick a distro that's closer to my ideal instead of adding software to a distro that wasn't really intended to have that software (for instance, pick Kubuntu or Linux Mint KDE edition or OpenSUSE if you want KDE, rather than picking Ubuntu and adding it manually). There's lots of different distros, and different versions of distros.
With "third party software" in Windows, not only is it a pain to obtain something to address some shortcoming in regular Windows (I have to go to some website, download it separately, then go through some separate install program, reboot the system, etc.), I have to pay extra for the privilege. And then what if the third-party software is crap? It's not like I can try it out for a while before buying. With Linux software, I apt-get install it, run it for a while, and if I don't like it, I just apt-get remove it and try something else.
It's the equivalent of saying X model of car is absolutely horrible because you don't like the layout of the dash.
Why the hell would I buy a car if the dashboard is butt-ugly? The dashboard is the one part of the car that I look at the most. I see it whenever I'm in the driver's seat (or front passenger's seat for that matter). For someone who actually uses the car, the dashboard aesthetics are arguably much more important than the exterior design of the car. You only see the outside of the car when you're walking towards it in the parking lot. Moreover, the dashboard layout is critical to my operation of the car. If it's poorly laid out, that'll affect my usage of the car greatly, and if it isn't laid out well, this can be annoying and even dangerous in heavy traffic.
So yes, if a car has a terrible dash layout, then that model of car IS absolutely horrible, and I'm not going to buy it.
The cathedral model has won? I'll admit I haven't actually read the book, but I understand the basic premise, but if you're pointing to the Apple and Google app stores as proof of "winning", I think you're overly simplifying things. The existence of Android itself (with its Linux kernel) is proof the bazaar is also winning, not to mention the fact that most servers are running LAMP stacks, and that Linux itself (Android or otherwise) is found in all kinds of places now. Don't forget the success of the Firefox browser. Open-source has proven itself, and has "won". It just hasn't completely pushed out the cathedral. If anything, both sides have "won", they just own different territories. And the amount of "territory" they own is much greater than it was in the past: the market is much bigger.
That's not what I see at the local Dunkin Donuts (multiple locations). Most customers come in there, buy a cup, maybe some donuts, and leave as fast as they can.
It would take me a lot more than 5 minutes to drive out of my way to a Starbucks, find a place to park (good luck with that around here during the morning commute) and then sit in line for a cup of coffee. Maybe you happen to have one of these places directly on your commute, but not everyone does.
That's possible, but sounds implausible. Barcodes can't store that much information, and you'd need a really long barcode to store a long enough number for all the coffee pods they might expect to make. Maybe though.
It'd be funny if they did this, and someone hacked a Keurig machine to report back to Keurig that lots and lots of codes were used, when in fact they weren't, so that many random users would find many K-cups unusable.
There's no way they can put a chip in a coffee pod. It's just too expensive. Chips make sense for printer cartridges, where the cartridge costs $30-90, so a $0.10-0.15 chip doesn't make much difference in the parts cost. For a $0.50-0.65 coffee pod, it doesn't make any sense at all.
The only way I see this working is if they try to patent the cup design somehow, to prevent people from making knock-off cups/pods that fit into the unit. I have no idea how they think this will work legally though; past attempts at such things have never worked, which is why there's all kinds of third-party auto parts out there that are virtually identical to the OEM parts.
Don't forget the cost of your time. Traveling to DD or SB and standing in line for a cup of expensive coffee takes a lot of time (depending on how far you are from the nearest location). If you have your own machine at home, you can have a cup of coffee ready for you in the morning, taking no time at all (I assume the Keurig machines can be programmed to automatically brew a cup at a specified time; make sure you put a cup in place the night before though).
So if you have a private car and live in the Bay Area, should you also be required to carry whatever urban riff-raff want a ride to wherever you're going?
I haven't seen many workplaces where it's possible to respect the privacy of others, because they insist on building open-plan work areas, or cubicles with extremely low walls so everyone can see everything you're doing, whether you're taking a quick break to look at Slashdot or you're picking your nose.
Yes, it is a little maddening not having anyone to talk to all day, but it's even more maddening working in a bullpen or open-plan work area (aka the Panopticon) and having zero privacy. I'll take the telecommute, thanks. At least then I don't have to waste so much time (and risk my life) in traffic every day.
If Google built their facility right in SanFran, it'd drive up the cost of housing there even more, and all these people would still be bitching about gentrification.
That makes sense; the storm drain system is only designed to handle so much water flow.
Fining people for collecting rainwater in their houses makes no sense: the water is going to run onto the ground and be absorbed by the ground anyway. By collecting it and using it for your house's water systems (showers, toilets, etc.), all you're doing is adding a short delay to that process, before it goes into your septic system (assuming a rural house here; city-dwellers don't typically try to collect rainwater), and into the ground. You're also saving a lot of energy, because you only need to pump the water from your cistern (near ground level) to your plumbing outlets, rather than pumping well water up hundreds of feet, and you're leaving the water table alone. Some limits on cistern size might be warranted, but banning rainwater collection altogether is nonsensical and anti-environmental.
There's a big difference between collecting rainwater on your roof and damming a stream or river. There's no valid reason to restrict the former, there's lots of good reasons to restrict the latter.
Sounds great for villages in developing countries, but it doesn't look like it would scale very well.
Um, isn't that the whole idea here? I don't think anyone's thinking of using tree branch slices for commercial-quality water filtration in Western countries. No one's going to start selling tree branch slice filters for Samsung and GE refrigerators and Pur faucet adapters. The whole idea here is to come up with ultra-cheap, low-tech, but effective methods of improving quality of life and health and sanitation in very poor developing countries.
And that's quite sad, since almost nothing good ever comes out of that group. The only thing I can think of offhand is that panoramic multi-photo stitching process.
The death of serious research (like IBM's copper-on-silicon process in the late 90s) and the move to vacuous bullshit cloud services is just a symptom of the death throes of American industry, and before too long, the American economy.
Like many large companies, the only good way to work at such a place is as a contractor, and only for a short duration so you can make extra money until you find a better permanent job.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also a difference between observations and theories. For instance, gravity is pretty much "settled". However, it's an observation. We always see that objects are attracted to other massive objects; every time we throw something in the air, it falls to the ground. At this point, it'd be stupid to say that gravity doesn't exist.
However, whyare objects with mass attracted to other objects with mass? That isn't very well understood. We have a theory that describes the relationship (the universal gravitation theory), in a simple equation that tells you the gravitational force given two objects' masses and distance apart. But why is it so? According to Einstein's theories, it's because the spacetime continuum is warped by mass like a rubber sheet, and gravity is just a side-effect of this. According to Quantum Mechanics, particles called gravitons are responsible somehow.
So we can debate all day about what exactly causes gravity, but the existence of gravity itself is really undeniable at this point.
Similarly, with evolution, the age of the earth, etc., the theories might be somewhat debatable (but not nearly as much as gravitational theories), the evidence that led to those theories' creation is pretty undeniable at this point, namely fossils and other geological evidence. Claiming the earth is 6500 years old when there's enormous evidence contradicting that claim is just stupid.
This isn't a very good analogy, unless you're going to constrain it to Free/open-source software.
In proprietary software, there's new versions every now and then, which both remove useful features and add new feature of questionable value, not because people found flaws or bugs, or because people really needed some new features, but rather because the company behind the software wanted to make more money by selling customers something they already had, and the people writing the software needed to justify their jobs. So we get crap like Windows 8/Metro. We get newer software which has new bugs which weren't present in the older versions, which run slower, which do less, which are uglier and have worse user interfaces.
It's not confined to proprietary software either. Just look at Gnome3. People were perfectly happy with Gnome2, but they had to toss that out and create something totally new and different (and incompatible) just because they wanted to, maybe because they had nothing better to do with their time, maybe because they wanted to justify their existence.
Your statements work for lower-level open-source projects like the Linux kernel, the Linux init systems (some people didn't think sysvinit had the features they needed, so they created upstart; some other people thought that was buggy and not architected right, so they created systemd, etc.). But for user-facing things, there's frequently completely different (and not so utilitarian) dynamics at work.
But, speaking frankly, if I were satisfied with the Windows way of things, I would remain a Windows user instead.
Well you can't just remain a Windows XP user unless you want to be hacked, and all the new computers have Windows 8 with Metro, so just "remaining a Windows user" is becoming less and less viable.
use KDE (what is almost the same to go back to Windows)
Except that it's not that hard to configure KDE to be a lot like Gnome2. Or, you could switch to MATE or Cinnamon. MacOS isn't anything like Gnome2.
Apples and oranges. Linux distros are made up of software from many different sources. The people who make the kernel are not the same people who make KDE or GNOME or XCFE or the display system (X or Wayland in the near future), or even the init system (sysvinit, upstart, systemd). These different groups do work together to varying extents however.
The thing about the different software in a Linux distro, however, is that it's all freely-available. It doesn't cost me extra to switch from GNOME to KDE because I think GNOME sucks. It doesn't cost me extra to add the "Lancelot" menu in KDE because I don't like the regular version. They're all easily available with "sudo apt-get install [software]". Even better, I can pick a distro that's closer to my ideal instead of adding software to a distro that wasn't really intended to have that software (for instance, pick Kubuntu or Linux Mint KDE edition or OpenSUSE if you want KDE, rather than picking Ubuntu and adding it manually). There's lots of different distros, and different versions of distros.
With "third party software" in Windows, not only is it a pain to obtain something to address some shortcoming in regular Windows (I have to go to some website, download it separately, then go through some separate install program, reboot the system, etc.), I have to pay extra for the privilege. And then what if the third-party software is crap? It's not like I can try it out for a while before buying. With Linux software, I apt-get install it, run it for a while, and if I don't like it, I just apt-get remove it and try something else.
It's the equivalent of saying X model of car is absolutely horrible because you don't like the layout of the dash.
Why the hell would I buy a car if the dashboard is butt-ugly? The dashboard is the one part of the car that I look at the most. I see it whenever I'm in the driver's seat (or front passenger's seat for that matter). For someone who actually uses the car, the dashboard aesthetics are arguably much more important than the exterior design of the car. You only see the outside of the car when you're walking towards it in the parking lot. Moreover, the dashboard layout is critical to my operation of the car. If it's poorly laid out, that'll affect my usage of the car greatly, and if it isn't laid out well, this can be annoying and even dangerous in heavy traffic.
So yes, if a car has a terrible dash layout, then that model of car IS absolutely horrible, and I'm not going to buy it.
KDE still works just fine, and is an easy transition for Windows users.
Have you tried running them in WINE? A lot of old Windows software works quite well in it.
Why wouldn't it be? It has contributions from lots of different people and companies, and it's all freely-available.
The liberal ones probably put out more too.
The cathedral model has won? I'll admit I haven't actually read the book, but I understand the basic premise, but if you're pointing to the Apple and Google app stores as proof of "winning", I think you're overly simplifying things. The existence of Android itself (with its Linux kernel) is proof the bazaar is also winning, not to mention the fact that most servers are running LAMP stacks, and that Linux itself (Android or otherwise) is found in all kinds of places now. Don't forget the success of the Firefox browser. Open-source has proven itself, and has "won". It just hasn't completely pushed out the cathedral. If anything, both sides have "won", they just own different territories. And the amount of "territory" they own is much greater than it was in the past: the market is much bigger.
That's not what I see at the local Dunkin Donuts (multiple locations). Most customers come in there, buy a cup, maybe some donuts, and leave as fast as they can.
It would take me a lot more than 5 minutes to drive out of my way to a Starbucks, find a place to park (good luck with that around here during the morning commute) and then sit in line for a cup of coffee. Maybe you happen to have one of these places directly on your commute, but not everyone does.
That's possible, but sounds implausible. Barcodes can't store that much information, and you'd need a really long barcode to store a long enough number for all the coffee pods they might expect to make. Maybe though.
It'd be funny if they did this, and someone hacked a Keurig machine to report back to Keurig that lots and lots of codes were used, when in fact they weren't, so that many random users would find many K-cups unusable.
Slackware users? Where on earth did you get that idea? Slashdot is mostly full of Windows and Mac users.
There's no way they can put a chip in a coffee pod. It's just too expensive. Chips make sense for printer cartridges, where the cartridge costs $30-90, so a $0.10-0.15 chip doesn't make much difference in the parts cost. For a $0.50-0.65 coffee pod, it doesn't make any sense at all.
The only way I see this working is if they try to patent the cup design somehow, to prevent people from making knock-off cups/pods that fit into the unit. I have no idea how they think this will work legally though; past attempts at such things have never worked, which is why there's all kinds of third-party auto parts out there that are virtually identical to the OEM parts.
Don't forget the cost of your time. Traveling to DD or SB and standing in line for a cup of expensive coffee takes a lot of time (depending on how far you are from the nearest location). If you have your own machine at home, you can have a cup of coffee ready for you in the morning, taking no time at all (I assume the Keurig machines can be programmed to automatically brew a cup at a specified time; make sure you put a cup in place the night before though).
So if you have a private car and live in the Bay Area, should you also be required to carry whatever urban riff-raff want a ride to wherever you're going?
He's making pro-gun people look like morons who can't write decent English.
I haven't seen many workplaces where it's possible to respect the privacy of others, because they insist on building open-plan work areas, or cubicles with extremely low walls so everyone can see everything you're doing, whether you're taking a quick break to look at Slashdot or you're picking your nose.
Yes, it is a little maddening not having anyone to talk to all day, but it's even more maddening working in a bullpen or open-plan work area (aka the Panopticon) and having zero privacy. I'll take the telecommute, thanks. At least then I don't have to waste so much time (and risk my life) in traffic every day.
If Google built their facility right in SanFran, it'd drive up the cost of housing there even more, and all these people would still be bitching about gentrification.
That makes sense; the storm drain system is only designed to handle so much water flow.
Fining people for collecting rainwater in their houses makes no sense: the water is going to run onto the ground and be absorbed by the ground anyway. By collecting it and using it for your house's water systems (showers, toilets, etc.), all you're doing is adding a short delay to that process, before it goes into your septic system (assuming a rural house here; city-dwellers don't typically try to collect rainwater), and into the ground. You're also saving a lot of energy, because you only need to pump the water from your cistern (near ground level) to your plumbing outlets, rather than pumping well water up hundreds of feet, and you're leaving the water table alone. Some limits on cistern size might be warranted, but banning rainwater collection altogether is nonsensical and anti-environmental.
There's a big difference between collecting rainwater on your roof and damming a stream or river. There's no valid reason to restrict the former, there's lots of good reasons to restrict the latter.
Sounds great for villages in developing countries, but it doesn't look like it would scale very well.
Um, isn't that the whole idea here? I don't think anyone's thinking of using tree branch slices for commercial-quality water filtration in Western countries. No one's going to start selling tree branch slice filters for Samsung and GE refrigerators and Pur faucet adapters. The whole idea here is to come up with ultra-cheap, low-tech, but effective methods of improving quality of life and health and sanitation in very poor developing countries.
And that's quite sad, since almost nothing good ever comes out of that group. The only thing I can think of offhand is that panoramic multi-photo stitching process.
The death of serious research (like IBM's copper-on-silicon process in the late 90s) and the move to vacuous bullshit cloud services is just a symptom of the death throes of American industry, and before too long, the American economy.
Like many large companies, the only good way to work at such a place is as a contractor, and only for a short duration so you can make extra money until you find a better permanent job.