Geezus, why does everything have to be related to open-source software? We're not dealing with software here, folks, no matter how many analogies you want to make.
Guess what, the human genome is better than GPL'd. It's completely free. If you alter it, you have a copy of the new code right in the genes. We did majority of the work on decoding the genome in the last 2 years. Decoding is practically trivial now, and the finished product carries with it the code that made it.
Everything is not software, and not everything should live by the rules of software. I personally would love to stop hearing talk about licenses with respect to the human genome and start hearing talk about the responsible use of the code. My greatest fear isn't that someone will modify the genome to create a superhuman and then not tell anyone what they did. My greatest fear is simply that the genome will be modified at all.
The crux of this is that do we really want linux to be mainstream? I don't really think that people are working to make linux mainstream - sure, the installers are getting better. Sure, we have gnome, kde, berlin - but these are still made for and by developers and the hard-core, just those that want it to look prettier. People are working to make linux better, and that's what makes it great.
This is the exact same type of elitism that the author rails against. "Linux is by programmers and for programmers!" What a load of crap!. If you don't think that companies and individuals aren't trying to make Linux mainstream, open your eyes a bit wider. There's this hugely popular company. Maybe you've heard of it, Redhat? It sells Linux. It's not selling Linux to programmers, but to end users, on the aisles of Best Buy and Office Depot. There are other companies, too, pushing this OS into the hands of the typical consumer, not the hands of the programmer. You know what the images look like on the back of these boxes? They look like Windows. Why would a programmer buy a product that looks like Windows? Companies are actively basing their entire profit plan on bringing Linux to the masses, not to programmers, but to Grandma and Uncle Bob. Groups are actively doing the same. Check out HelixCode sometime. Their goal is not the make the friendliest interface for programmers and developers. It's the bring the simplicity of the Mac GUI philosophy to Linux. And guess what, Linux, the OS, sucks for doing things like that.
You've basically just completely backed up the author's main points. Open source isn't meant for the consumer. OSS advocates tend to be elitists. And yet, the OS movement still tries to tell everyone, not just programmers, that it's the best model. It just isn't true. Stallman and Raymond and Linus and whoever else is pushing Linux on to store aisles needs to turn around and ask themselves, "If I don't want Linux to be mainstream, why am I doing this?" It's ideological, and ideological battles are pointless and in the end, alienate people.
Closed-source software is good for the some things, and the author's stand (which I agree with), is that it's good for consumer-driven markets.. of which Open Source software is not a part.
I recently was in the market for a new cheapie ethernet card. I'm not talking about anything fancy here, just a little 10Mb card that I could stick in my Linux box for use with a new ISDN adapter. I went to Best Buy and bought a NetGear FA311. The side of the box said 'Supported operating systems' and listed underneath that 'Linux'.
Inside, I was surprised to find on the driver diskette actual drivers, both in compiled module and source code forms. So I followed their instructions for installing the module with my 2.2.16 kernel. The module wouldn't load. No doubt it had been compiled for something else. So I followed the instructions for compiling in their module directly into my kernel. They didn't do that. They were completely wrong. So I messed around with the kernel and driver source to get the card into the configuration routine and successfully compiled it in. On bootup, the system crashed. So I contacted NetGear technical support. I received the Old Faithful of tech responses, "We don't support Linux, but we have a text file that will help you." I followed their text file to the letter (basically, compile in support for the DEC Tulip driver) and still no go. I then replied back to the NetGear guy, "Thanks but no thanks, I'm taking my business elsewhere." I then took the card back to Best Buy where I received a full refund for a 'broken' card. With my refund, I went to CompUSA (so shoot me) and bought an even cheaper SMC card (less than half the price, and the first one cost $24) that worked like a charm.
So what do you do when a company says they support Linux and then you find out they don't? Take your business elsewhere. Even in my story I spent too much time fiddling with that NetGear, all because I didn't feel like driving back out to Best Buy. From reading newsgroup posts after the fact, I discovered that NetGear's even worse than I suspected. Apparently, their 'drivers' are actually the same thing as the standard DEC Tulip drivers rebranded, without proper crediting, and they did something that prevents the driver/card combo from working on a majority of systems, something they refuse to acknowledge.
So what do you do if a company 'supports' Linux and really doesn't? Take your piece of hardware back and say it's defective. For all intents and purposes it is. For part of your payment, you're getting support and if you're not getting support, you have a defective product. Let market forces sort out the rest.
Because that's what Linux advocates trump up. Ever since Linux became 'popular', advocates have been pitting it against the big bad evil Microsoft. Nevermind that until recently, Solaris was just as closed-source and dealt in the same underhanded tricks as Microsoft. Nevermind that they're two completely different types of operating systems aimed at two entirely different classes of people.
Basically, Linux people want Linux to be able to do everything that Windows can. They want it to be a robust server operating system. They want it to be an easy-to-use client operating system. They want it to run everything. They want to be the monopoly (but a monopoly of choice, not of force). Nevermind that Windows 2000 isn't trumped as the OS for everyone and Windows 98 isn't used in high-end server systems (and yet, advocates want Linux to do all of these tasks, and rule the hand-held market as well). And so, we get tests like this, Win2K vs. Linux, when really, what we should be getting is Win2K vs. Solaris (which I'm quite confident would blow Win2K out of the water).
Does Linux really want to compete at the levels of AIX and Solaris?
No, they want to compete with Windows. Windows is the enemy. Sound the alarms, and when Windows does something better than Linux, something is seriously wrong with the world (or so they would have you believe). Perhaps what would be a better suite of tests for Linux is one which isn't a comparison test at all, but rather one which looks for deficiencies so that people can start fixing them and quit debating about whether or not a comparison is valid.
One of NASA's major criticisms is that the American taxpayers basically pay to do a lot of very interesting but socially useless things when the money could better be spent on helping social programs like welfare and Medicare (whether or not you agree is beyond this argument; the fact that it is a criticism is fairly well known). With ISRO this is even/more/ so. If you think you've seen poverty in the Western world, wait til you see poverty in India, and then realize that there's a lot more of it. India is overpopulated, under-industrialized, in a state of almost constant conflict in Kashmir with Pakistan, and reeling from a set of natural disasters. ISRO would be better off, like the article says, commercializing and, like what the article doesn't say, solicity foreign investment and support for their mission. Unfortunately, their main reason for doing this isn't scientific (which, honestly, a proposal to orbit the moon for several years could actually be quite beneficial to understanding how the moon changes over time), but rather, for Indian pride, just like the nuclear weapons detonations two years ago and just like nearly every other major public undertaking.
A long time ago, the world learned that moon missions were like drinking after a bad day: they hid the problems, but they didn't fix them. We turned away from nuclear proliferation, wasteful manned missions, and 'just for the sake of doing it' public spending and instead focused on understanding and making our own world better. Maybe India needs to get over it's inferiority complex and utilize the vast social and economic resources it has squandered thus far, and think about doing things with the rest of the world that will benefit its people, not its image.
A correctly configured IE client differentiates based on file extension. So it ignores the MIME type in the response header, correctly displaying the PNG. Netscape on the otherhand looks at the response header, and thus cannot display the PNG if IIS is incorrectly configured.
This is crap. All web clients should look at MIME type first and then file extension (if any). This allows perl scripts to dynamically generate GIFs and the like without having to change their file extension. Believe me, the biggest headache is having to program web pages for browsers that don't recognize MIME types correctly.
All the articles I'm reading on this are comparing this feat to that of landing a man on the moon in terms of its importance. Well, that's all a matter of relative importance. I'm not old enough to have experienced it, but I'm hold enough to understand what landing a man on the moon meant. Hearing the stories of entire families gathered around a television during the landing and "one small step for man" speech put the perceived importance into perspective. People to this day remember where they were when Armstrong set foot on the moon. It's doubtful that people walking around the streets today will remember what they were doing when the Human Genome Project announced they had mapped the entire genome. It's really not that important.
But history has a way of vindicating the worthy. We look back on the moon landing today and ask, "What did it get us?" We constantly bicker over the importance of the space program. We still don't have mining operations or hotels on the Moon and we while we may have several new products (Velcro, TV dinners, yay!), the benefit to the majority of humanity from the Apollo project has been minimal at best. Jump forward 30 years from today and imagine even a small piece of the world that researchers are promising us. It benefits far more people and has the potential to impact everyone, not just rich industrial service-oriented nations (I won't name names, but I do live there).
So can you compare the moon landing and the genome project? No. The moon landing was about a people meeting a challenge and doing something strictly for the sake of doing it. The Genome project, on the other hand, is about understanding who we are and working towards a 'better' humanity. In that regards, these news services should really be comparing it to the Manhattan Project, although, hopefully, it will turn out a lot less violent.
Shotgun Stories From the Real World
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Quickiefest 2000
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· Score: 4
Ahh, things are always more obvious than they appear. Just the other day, my coworkers and I were talking about the 'mysterious' web site which had the rules of Shotgun. Now we have our guide.
See, for the people in my office, calling Shotgun is a ritual. Most often, it is called in the form of 'Shotgun! I rule!" (similar to the oldie-but-goodie prayer, "God bless this food, amen, eat!" Shotgun is a battle of wits, not just of skill, for many of us are getting older and doing more and more things, and it is sometimes difficult to remember to call Shotgun when leaving the building for a quick lunch trip. Some of us are better than others. I just returned to this company after being away for school. The hunters had separated themselves from the gatherers, but now I've disturbed the mix (nothing trains you for Shotgun quite like college).
Some rules are missing, though. Listed below are a few of the rules that we throw into the mix.
The False Shotgun This is similar to a false start. The person calls Shotgun without realizing that the group isn't driving anywhere. Punishment can be anything from a slight razzing to a full-blown beating.
Everyone Must Be Together While not everyone must hear, everyone must be in a group together. That means that while some people are coming up from the bottom floor and the others are coming down from the top floor, you can't call Shotgun.
Best Two Out Of Three If Shotgun must be decided using Rock/Scissors/Paper, you must win two out of three. It's too easy to get lucky in RSP (despite what some coworkers might think of their RSP skills).
Victory Dance While not quite a rule of Shotgun, it has become custom to celebrate shortly the victory of Shotgun. This is most often done by throwing both arms in the air while shouting, "I rule!" but can also be represented by finger pointing, cries of "Old man too slow!" or running and jumping.
Anyway, Shotgun is definitely one of the great amateur sports on the planet (and for those with the strictest of definitions of sport, yes, you can get killed playing Shotgun, especially if you throw in the 'everyone must be outside' rule).
No one else seems to have thrown this out, so I figure I may as well. Does it seem odd to anyone else that at a time when the Mars program is coming under attack from all sides for ineptitude and wasting taxpayers' dollars, NASA releases this startling evidence?
And, in case you didn't read the article, they're not finding rivers, lakes, or even pools. They're talking about some seepage, either from the floor of very deep canyons or the sides of cliffs in said deep canyons. Not be over cynical, but NASA has a hard time locating a probe correctly on the surface of Mars. Is it really accurate to say that they can detect tiny amounts of seepage? I have a feeling that these findings are quite ambiguous and one possibility is that they're seepage, but it's neither the only nor the most likely of possibilities. Couple that with the extreme thinness of the Martian atmosphere (which prevents liquid water from existing at the average elevation) and the fact that the atmosphere is not that much thicker in the canyons and you have the makings for an incredible disappointment the likes of which haven't been seen since Viking.
But leave it Slashdot to blow it out of proportion. Perhaps we should wait until NASA actually makes the statement until we make plans for wakeboarding on a foreign planet, no?
It scares me to know (not think) that eventually this is going to be applied to humanity. Of all the apocalyptical scenarios envisioned by science fiction writers, the genetically-bred humans vs. natural humans forwarded in media such as Star Wars and Gattica seems the most real and most likely. While aliens or meteors may come out of the sky, there's a certain lack of denial that eventually human beings are going to genetically alter themselves in more than trivial ways, and given human nature, it's not a stretch to imagine a way peeking its head out of such a development.
The only hope I draw is from Mother Nature herself. Everyone talks about this being a step in evolution, but what if there's a reason we haven't evolved there yet? I like stories like Ender's Shadows that posit what corrective measures nature may have preinstalled. Card's certainly not alone in his view, either. What isn't as interesting as a genetic super-mouse is the development of a genetic super-mouse. Is it normal in every way except for intelligence, or will other genes be affected by this one being turned on, genes that may lead to super strength or self-destruction.
Our view of gene structure is simplified. We turn a gene on and consider it a success. Nature, however, does not live in a vacuum. Everything is balanced tenuously in nature, and turning on one gene may disrupt that balance completely. So when, not if, we make these leaps, the study shouldn't be about the object being modified, but about the way that nature reacts to those modifications, for that will be where the real benefits are found.
I'll agree that the primary use of the Internet is to 'disseminate information', but I disagree that it's primary use is to 'route around censorship'. That's a use invented by the more freedom minded of the Internet culture. People didn't get together when they were building the Internet and say, "Hey, man, let's design this thing so that we can never be censored!" In fact, given that the Internet grew out of the old DARPAnet projects, I'd say the goal was anything but routing around censorship. In fact, I think the the reason it's so easy to track people down on the Internet (and the reason that China's having such an easy time cracking down on Internet dissidents) is because the military wanted to make sure that it could manage and track its own information.
So yes, the Internet's use is to move around information, but I would never say that the goal of the Internet is to route around censorship. That's just one of the many things you can do when you move information, and it's one that's particularly attractive to Western-minded people.
You've probably heard it many many times. The Internet is just a tool. I've heard people talk about how the Internet revolutionized commerce, how it revolutionized our understanding of information.
The Internet doesn't do jack. The Internet is a tool. Hammers are tools, too. A hammer can be used to pound a nail into a wall. A hammer can also be used, ironically, to pull a nail out of a wall. A hammer can be used to kill someone. A hammer can be used to save someone.
China's just using the Internet as a tool. Everything's a political tool in China. What's really ironic is that financial transactions will probably be safer with Chinese financial institutions because they're actually putting in place an Internet infrastructure that they can police. Rather than security being site-centric like it is in Western countries, security is being country-centric in China, meaning that while you may have less anonymity, so do the bad guys.
But again, it's just a tool. China's not abusing the Internet. They're just defining the way in which they're going to use their tool, and it just happens to be different from the Western ideology.
Seriously? I can go on the 'Net and find instructions on how to build a high-yield thermonuclear device. The news reports every day about stockpiles of weapons-grade material. Most nuclear countries have their missiles targeted on our silos already. It's not as if nuclear weapons are this big secret that can't be let out of the bag. The real barrier to nuclear weaponry is getting the material. I'd feel more threatened if nuclear material was actually stolen, but it's information.
What's that I hear on Slashdot? Information wants to be free? I'd be willing to bet that someone's head is going to roll because information escaped that's already out there anyway.
All the comments about how it looks like Macintosh or Windows, how it's not innovative (I agree, BTW, it looks like the bastard child of Windows 95 and MacOS), it's just ugly. Recently in Time or Newsweek, there was an article about the increasing awareness of design in the American consciousness (sue me, I'm American). When I look at the Eazel screenshots, I see something very kludgy, very awkward, like icons are the wrong size, the wrong proportion. Line weights are too thick or too thin. Colors are too garish. Buttons are too small or too big or have too much blank space (why do the close buttons have to be even smaller when they're surrounded by so much space?). The one thing I like about GNOME (and don't get me wrong, I think both GNOME and KDE feel "heavy") is the professional elegance of it's imagery. Icons feel well designed (I think tigert designed quite a few of them; they appear to be his style). Default buttons feel about the right size and proportion (proportion is ever more important than size). Here, the Eazel developers have started to throw all that out in an effort to look just different enough that people can call it 'different'.
I don't know what's causing it. The early screenshots looked promising, but these just don't fulfill expectations. They look almost like they're being underdesigned, and given the real lack of innovations these screenshots are displaying, it's really going to take a user interface that enlivens the Linux desktop to sell this thing. Yes, I know you can customize it, but frankly, I don't want to download something ugly to make it look beautiful. I want the best with minimal effort.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, though, and I have a critical eye. Do other people feel the same way? That this is kludgy? Or does this have the potential to be the new aesthetic?
What's the likelihood that this thing can be adapted for human use? I mean, Stevie Wonder is supposedly going to try getting his vision back through some artificial means. What about people with no smell? That's not a joke, BTW. My stepsister really doesn't have a sense of smell. Her mother won't let her live alone because she can't smell things like gas leaks or burning food in the oven.
Speaking of which, possible uses for this include alarm systems that trigger when certain odors (like the odor added to gas) are detected or warning lights in car when odors like burning oil are detected. I bet a real market for something like this can be had in alarms and triggers based on smell.
Does anyone care to translate these algorithms to something us lesser geeks might know? I recognize the quicksort, Fourier, and Fortran algorithms, but the rest are rather over my head.
It'd be interesting to see how these relate to the algorithms that computer jockeys see as king (obviously, the list is biased towards science and numbers). Are any of these algorithms related to things like compression algorithms (MP3, Zip, LZW, etc.), encryption algorithms (DES, RSA, Blowfish, etc.) or search algorithms (like the one Google uses, for instance)?
What would a computer geek's top ten algorithms list look like? Would they be scientifically/technologically important or more socially important (like MP3, RSA, or Google)?
Re-read your message. Arcade games suffer the same problems. I've crashed Hydro Thunder more times than I've caused a pinball machine to break. Arcade games have joysticks and buttons that break, stick and malfunction. I have yet to see an arcade game without moveable parts, and each year, the machines get more and more complicated. It used to be that a skiing game put you behind a joystick with maybe a jump button. Now, you actually climb into an apparatus that takes your movements and translates them to a character. If this isn't both mechanically and developmentally expensive, I don't know what is.
When I go to game arcades and pinball machines are present, they are almost always filled. Most of the time it's an older generation, though. The same holds true for such classics as air hockey and ski ball. Kids aren't playing them. The real reason such machines are dying is because a younger generation raised on virtual reality, super-realistic graphics, and ever faster-paced games doesn't have the interest in something that requires both an understanding of truly real-world physics and an imagination of what exactly a Black Hole of Doom really is. It's not because of game companies are losing money on mechanically inferior pinball machines.
It's an automatic thing that runs on my Windows 2K box. It's called the Windows Critical Update Notification, and yeah, it came up. It basically says, "Hey, there's a critical update available. Click here to go get it. Click here to close"
You have to install it (it's not like it's a default thing) and all it does is periodically poll their site for updates. When you want to go get one, it just opens IE and takes you to their page.
How many companies can you identify by their logo alone (omit word logos, like 'Microsoft' and 'IBM'). How many "open-source" software companies can you identify by their logo alone? How many "open-source" web sites? How many games?
The 'no logo' idea is a noble one, but one which will ultimately fail. It's not just marketing, but recognition. Man has been doing it for as long as we've been painting animals on our shields so that other armies will know who we are. Self-identification is one of the key pieces of human nature and what we now call 'logos' are simply another manifestation of our nature.
I was reading the story on C|Net News and all of the sudden, the Windows Critical Update notice came up on my desktop. It's kind of freaky if you ask me.
And one which, I hope, leads to an interesting discussion. If the GPL states that you must make available source code for the binary products, do you necessarily have to be the source of that source code? Could Microsoft just like to the GNU web site and say, "Here's your source code!" I realize in this case the EULA states that it can be found on a particular site, but could someone simply link from there to GNU web site or, as the MS employee did, just tell people to go there?
I don't know. To me this seems a little unfair. You can take someone else's code and sell it and not actually do any work yourself, but on the other hand, isn't that what it's all about?
I remember when I was kid playing the old game SimEarth on my Mac (not the Mac SE or the Mac Classic, but the Mac.. The Mac). Despite the game being very primitive and only in black and white, they had a couple of scenarios that were really interesting. One was to take Mars and make it livable and the other was to take Venus and make it livable. The easiest way to do both was to put in these devices that converted the carbon dioxide to oxygen (the hard way was to crash ice comets into the planet, both cooling it off and releasing oxygen.. don't ask me).
I wouldn't say it's so worrisome. Making other planets livable for humans is going to become a fact of life if we ever decide to permanently leave this world. Mars is another system, but it's a dead system, and adapting it for human needs is not going to make species extinct or ruin our understanding of Martian phenomena (and even if it were alive, we'd have plenty of time to find out.. these sorts of transformations don't happen overnight).
But that's beyond the logistical nightmares of actually getting such a thing to work. Look at how long its taken our planet to register the effects of 150 years of industrial revolution, and the environmental change is a blip, an abnormality barely noticeable on the geological scale that scientists are still debating whether or not we are the cause. You can rest assured that by the time human beings are ready to purposefully alter the state of another planet's environment, they'll have the necessary expertise (and computer/robotics/cybernetic systems) to do it much more exactingly than you or I can imagine.
By the way, in the SimEarth game, the irony of it all is that once you terraform the planet (Mars was easier, Venus was much more difficult), sentient life can rise, become industrialized, and then ruin your environmental masterpiece. Maybe that should be the bigger fear, not what havoc we wreck when we purposefully change the environment, but what terrors we cause when we neglect it.
I think both GNOME and KDE have taken the beneficial parts of Microsoft's GUI and left out the parts that are either extraneous or just plain bloated. I can see why Slashdot has a bias towards GNOME as the screenshots released are pretty slick looking, although I will note that the last time a KDE article was posted, everyone bitched about how Slashdot had a KDE bias.
See how silly moderator rules are? I just mentioned all of the items you spoke about in a very respectful way that actually may have added a little to the discussion.
And frankly, I'd like to see more mention about KDE when talking about GNOME, not less. The fact that these two are out there and somewhat competing against each other gives us a) choice and b) better features as they continually learn from each other and play off each other. The progress in both GNOME and KDE this year has been amazing and it's probably a direct result of each group's desire to make a better interface than their counterparts.
I mean, its not like this would go unnoticed with the vigilant/. community on the prowl.
And what exactly are the extents to which the vigilant/. community's influence reaches? Slashdot's been misquoted in a couple of tech news stories and maybe one major publication. Most people who use eBay, I'd bet, don't read Slashdot.
To MS, this isn't negative. They are 'defending' their copyright and property rights (although I think it's on rather shaky ground, their reasoning I mean). They have to do this sort of thing as part of maintaining their copyright. Microsoft would look a lot worse if they finally did manage to get a pirate into court and the pirate said, "But look, there was a lot of warezing going on right there on eBay and you did nothing."
First off, Microsoft does not need good PR or bad PR. Everyone knows who they are. They have a de facto monopoly on Windows systems. Moving away from Windows is probably hardest the move to make in the computer industry, and big companies who buy the majority of Microsoft products are not going to look at this auction as anything more than what a business needs to do, so they're not going to lose any customers there. The people this pisses off are the Slashdot crowd, who most likely aren't buying Microsoft anyway, again no lost sales there. As for the DOJ case, Microsoft telling eBay that it's piracy is happening and they need to stop it is not anything like bundling and the other issues involved with the DOJ case. Klein is not going to point at eBay and say to the judge, "Look at what Microsoft just did, Jackson! That should show they're a monopoly!" Jackson would laugh at him.
The real target here should be eBay, which has clearly violated its own stated policies. The issue here is not the fault of MS; it's that of eBay.
To summarize, it's part of business, Slashdot is not powerful enough to change the entire world's viewpoint on Microsoft, focus on eBay.
First off, the acceptance of bad patents is not in itself a reason to get rid of patents altogether. People, the Patent Office is run by human beings under an incredible workload. They are bound to make mistakes, and they are bound to let things sort themselves out in the courts rather than focus in detail on everything. Yes, some things like software patents and even business model patents probably should be removed, but the overarching concept of the patent is not a bad one, especially if you truly do have a novel invention that you intend to market.
With that said, the most rational response I can think of is to notify your Congressperson that their web site is in violation of a patent. According to this patent, almost everything on the Web is. Let your Congressperson know this, and then let them know that this is absurd and more important, why this is absurd. Use this as a natural starting point for showing other examples of 'bad' patents that apply to obvious ideas (note ideas, not mechanisms) and then ask them respectfully to look into the matter so that both you and they don't have to change your web site.
Trust me, you accuse a Congressperson of breaking the law and the first thing they're going to do (even before they start lying) is figure out a way to legally remove the illegality.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if only they'd GPL it.
Geezus, why does everything have to be related to open-source software? We're not dealing with software here, folks, no matter how many analogies you want to make.
Guess what, the human genome is better than GPL'd. It's completely free. If you alter it, you have a copy of the new code right in the genes. We did majority of the work on decoding the genome in the last 2 years. Decoding is practically trivial now, and the finished product carries with it the code that made it.
Everything is not software, and not everything should live by the rules of software. I personally would love to stop hearing talk about licenses with respect to the human genome and start hearing talk about the responsible use of the code. My greatest fear isn't that someone will modify the genome to create a superhuman and then not tell anyone what they did. My greatest fear is simply that the genome will be modified at all.
There's a fine line between advocacy and zealotry
The crux of this is that do we really want linux to be mainstream? I don't really think that people are working to make linux mainstream - sure, the installers are getting better. Sure, we have gnome, kde, berlin - but these are still made for and by developers and the hard-core, just those that want it to look prettier. People are working to make linux better, and that's what makes it great.
.. of which Open Source software is not a part.
This is the exact same type of elitism that the author rails against. "Linux is by programmers and for programmers!" What a load of crap!. If you don't think that companies and individuals aren't trying to make Linux mainstream, open your eyes a bit wider. There's this hugely popular company. Maybe you've heard of it, Redhat? It sells Linux. It's not selling Linux to programmers, but to end users, on the aisles of Best Buy and Office Depot. There are other companies, too, pushing this OS into the hands of the typical consumer, not the hands of the programmer. You know what the images look like on the back of these boxes? They look like Windows. Why would a programmer buy a product that looks like Windows? Companies are actively basing their entire profit plan on bringing Linux to the masses, not to programmers, but to Grandma and Uncle Bob. Groups are actively doing the same. Check out HelixCode sometime. Their goal is not the make the friendliest interface for programmers and developers. It's the bring the simplicity of the Mac GUI philosophy to Linux. And guess what, Linux, the OS, sucks for doing things like that.
You've basically just completely backed up the author's main points. Open source isn't meant for the consumer. OSS advocates tend to be elitists. And yet, the OS movement still tries to tell everyone, not just programmers, that it's the best model. It just isn't true. Stallman and Raymond and Linus and whoever else is pushing Linux on to store aisles needs to turn around and ask themselves, "If I don't want Linux to be mainstream, why am I doing this?" It's ideological, and ideological battles are pointless and in the end, alienate people.
Closed-source software is good for the some things, and the author's stand (which I agree with), is that it's good for consumer-driven markets
I recently was in the market for a new cheapie ethernet card. I'm not talking about anything fancy here, just a little 10Mb card that I could stick in my Linux box for use with a new ISDN adapter. I went to Best Buy and bought a NetGear FA311. The side of the box said 'Supported operating systems' and listed underneath that 'Linux'.
Inside, I was surprised to find on the driver diskette actual drivers, both in compiled module and source code forms. So I followed their instructions for installing the module with my 2.2.16 kernel. The module wouldn't load. No doubt it had been compiled for something else. So I followed the instructions for compiling in their module directly into my kernel. They didn't do that. They were completely wrong. So I messed around with the kernel and driver source to get the card into the configuration routine and successfully compiled it in. On bootup, the system crashed. So I contacted NetGear technical support. I received the Old Faithful of tech responses, "We don't support Linux, but we have a text file that will help you." I followed their text file to the letter (basically, compile in support for the DEC Tulip driver) and still no go. I then replied back to the NetGear guy, "Thanks but no thanks, I'm taking my business elsewhere." I then took the card back to Best Buy where I received a full refund for a 'broken' card. With my refund, I went to CompUSA (so shoot me) and bought an even cheaper SMC card (less than half the price, and the first one cost $24) that worked like a charm.
So what do you do when a company says they support Linux and then you find out they don't? Take your business elsewhere. Even in my story I spent too much time fiddling with that NetGear, all because I didn't feel like driving back out to Best Buy. From reading newsgroup posts after the fact, I discovered that NetGear's even worse than I suspected. Apparently, their 'drivers' are actually the same thing as the standard DEC Tulip drivers rebranded, without proper crediting, and they did something that prevents the driver/card combo from working on a majority of systems, something they refuse to acknowledge.
So what do you do if a company 'supports' Linux and really doesn't? Take your piece of hardware back and say it's defective. For all intents and purposes it is. For part of your payment, you're getting support and if you're not getting support, you have a defective product. Let market forces sort out the rest.
Why is it always Linux vs. Windows?
Because that's what Linux advocates trump up. Ever since Linux became 'popular', advocates have been pitting it against the big bad evil Microsoft. Nevermind that until recently, Solaris was just as closed-source and dealt in the same underhanded tricks as Microsoft. Nevermind that they're two completely different types of operating systems aimed at two entirely different classes of people.
Basically, Linux people want Linux to be able to do everything that Windows can. They want it to be a robust server operating system. They want it to be an easy-to-use client operating system. They want it to run everything. They want to be the monopoly (but a monopoly of choice, not of force). Nevermind that Windows 2000 isn't trumped as the OS for everyone and Windows 98 isn't used in high-end server systems (and yet, advocates want Linux to do all of these tasks, and rule the hand-held market as well). And so, we get tests like this, Win2K vs. Linux, when really, what we should be getting is Win2K vs. Solaris (which I'm quite confident would blow Win2K out of the water).
Does Linux really want to compete at the levels of AIX and Solaris?
No, they want to compete with Windows. Windows is the enemy. Sound the alarms, and when Windows does something better than Linux, something is seriously wrong with the world (or so they would have you believe). Perhaps what would be a better suite of tests for Linux is one which isn't a comparison test at all, but rather one which looks for deficiencies so that people can start fixing them and quit debating about whether or not a comparison is valid.
One of NASA's major criticisms is that the American taxpayers basically pay to do a lot of very interesting but socially useless things when the money could better be spent on helping social programs like welfare and Medicare (whether or not you agree is beyond this argument; the fact that it is a criticism is fairly well known). With ISRO this is even /more/ so. If you think you've seen poverty in the Western world, wait til you see poverty in India, and then realize that there's a lot more of it. India is overpopulated, under-industrialized, in a state of almost constant conflict in Kashmir with Pakistan, and reeling from a set of natural disasters. ISRO would be better off, like the article says, commercializing and, like what the article doesn't say, solicity foreign investment and support for their mission. Unfortunately, their main reason for doing this isn't scientific (which, honestly, a proposal to orbit the moon for several years could actually be quite beneficial to understanding how the moon changes over time), but rather, for Indian pride, just like the nuclear weapons detonations two years ago and just like nearly every other major public undertaking.
A long time ago, the world learned that moon missions were like drinking after a bad day: they hid the problems, but they didn't fix them. We turned away from nuclear proliferation, wasteful manned missions, and 'just for the sake of doing it' public spending and instead focused on understanding and making our own world better. Maybe India needs to get over it's inferiority complex and utilize the vast social and economic resources it has squandered thus far, and think about doing things with the rest of the world that will benefit its people, not its image.
A correctly configured IE client differentiates based on file extension. So it ignores the MIME type in the response header, correctly displaying the PNG. Netscape on the otherhand looks at the response header, and thus cannot display the PNG if IIS is incorrectly configured.
This is crap. All web clients should look at MIME type first and then file extension (if any). This allows perl scripts to dynamically generate GIFs and the like without having to change their file extension. Believe me, the biggest headache is having to program web pages for browsers that don't recognize MIME types correctly.
All the articles I'm reading on this are comparing this feat to that of landing a man on the moon in terms of its importance. Well, that's all a matter of relative importance. I'm not old enough to have experienced it, but I'm hold enough to understand what landing a man on the moon meant. Hearing the stories of entire families gathered around a television during the landing and "one small step for man" speech put the perceived importance into perspective. People to this day remember where they were when Armstrong set foot on the moon. It's doubtful that people walking around the streets today will remember what they were doing when the Human Genome Project announced they had mapped the entire genome. It's really not that important.
But history has a way of vindicating the worthy. We look back on the moon landing today and ask, "What did it get us?" We constantly bicker over the importance of the space program. We still don't have mining operations or hotels on the Moon and we while we may have several new products (Velcro, TV dinners, yay!), the benefit to the majority of humanity from the Apollo project has been minimal at best. Jump forward 30 years from today and imagine even a small piece of the world that researchers are promising us. It benefits far more people and has the potential to impact everyone, not just rich industrial service-oriented nations (I won't name names, but I do live there).
So can you compare the moon landing and the genome project? No. The moon landing was about a people meeting a challenge and doing something strictly for the sake of doing it. The Genome project, on the other hand, is about understanding who we are and working towards a 'better' humanity. In that regards, these news services should really be comparing it to the Manhattan Project, although, hopefully, it will turn out a lot less violent.
Ahh, things are always more obvious than they appear. Just the other day, my coworkers and I were talking about the 'mysterious' web site which had the rules of Shotgun. Now we have our guide.
See, for the people in my office, calling Shotgun is a ritual. Most often, it is called in the form of 'Shotgun! I rule!" (similar to the oldie-but-goodie prayer, "God bless this food, amen, eat!" Shotgun is a battle of wits, not just of skill, for many of us are getting older and doing more and more things, and it is sometimes difficult to remember to call Shotgun when leaving the building for a quick lunch trip. Some of us are better than others. I just returned to this company after being away for school. The hunters had separated themselves from the gatherers, but now I've disturbed the mix (nothing trains you for Shotgun quite like college).
Some rules are missing, though. Listed below are a few of the rules that we throw into the mix.
The False Shotgun
This is similar to a false start. The person calls Shotgun without realizing that the group isn't driving anywhere. Punishment can be anything from a slight razzing to a full-blown beating.
Everyone Must Be Together
While not everyone must hear, everyone must be in a group together. That means that while some people are coming up from the bottom floor and the others are coming down from the top floor, you can't call Shotgun.
Best Two Out Of Three
If Shotgun must be decided using Rock/Scissors/Paper, you must win two out of three. It's too easy to get lucky in RSP (despite what some coworkers might think of their RSP skills).
Victory Dance
While not quite a rule of Shotgun, it has become custom to celebrate shortly the victory of Shotgun. This is most often done by throwing both arms in the air while shouting, "I rule!" but can also be represented by finger pointing, cries of "Old man too slow!" or running and jumping.
Anyway, Shotgun is definitely one of the great amateur sports on the planet (and for those with the strictest of definitions of sport, yes, you can get killed playing Shotgun, especially if you throw in the 'everyone must be outside' rule).
No one else seems to have thrown this out, so I figure I may as well. Does it seem odd to anyone else that at a time when the Mars program is coming under attack from all sides for ineptitude and wasting taxpayers' dollars, NASA releases this startling evidence?
And, in case you didn't read the article, they're not finding rivers, lakes, or even pools. They're talking about some seepage, either from the floor of very deep canyons or the sides of cliffs in said deep canyons. Not be over cynical, but NASA has a hard time locating a probe correctly on the surface of Mars. Is it really accurate to say that they can detect tiny amounts of seepage? I have a feeling that these findings are quite ambiguous and one possibility is that they're seepage, but it's neither the only nor the most likely of possibilities. Couple that with the extreme thinness of the Martian atmosphere (which prevents liquid water from existing at the average elevation) and the fact that the atmosphere is not that much thicker in the canyons and you have the makings for an incredible disappointment the likes of which haven't been seen since Viking.
But leave it Slashdot to blow it out of proportion. Perhaps we should wait until NASA actually makes the statement until we make plans for wakeboarding on a foreign planet, no?
It scares me to know (not think) that eventually this is going to be applied to humanity. Of all the apocalyptical scenarios envisioned by science fiction writers, the genetically-bred humans vs. natural humans forwarded in media such as Star Wars and Gattica seems the most real and most likely. While aliens or meteors may come out of the sky, there's a certain lack of denial that eventually human beings are going to genetically alter themselves in more than trivial ways, and given human nature, it's not a stretch to imagine a way peeking its head out of such a development.
The only hope I draw is from Mother Nature herself. Everyone talks about this being a step in evolution, but what if there's a reason we haven't evolved there yet? I like stories like Ender's Shadows that posit what corrective measures nature may have preinstalled. Card's certainly not alone in his view, either. What isn't as interesting as a genetic super-mouse is the development of a genetic super-mouse. Is it normal in every way except for intelligence, or will other genes be affected by this one being turned on, genes that may lead to super strength or self-destruction.
Our view of gene structure is simplified. We turn a gene on and consider it a success. Nature, however, does not live in a vacuum. Everything is balanced tenuously in nature, and turning on one gene may disrupt that balance completely. So when, not if, we make these leaps, the study shouldn't be about the object being modified, but about the way that nature reacts to those modifications, for that will be where the real benefits are found.
I'll agree that the primary use of the Internet is to 'disseminate information', but I disagree that it's primary use is to 'route around censorship'. That's a use invented by the more freedom minded of the Internet culture. People didn't get together when they were building the Internet and say, "Hey, man, let's design this thing so that we can never be censored!" In fact, given that the Internet grew out of the old DARPAnet projects, I'd say the goal was anything but routing around censorship. In fact, I think the the reason it's so easy to track people down on the Internet (and the reason that China's having such an easy time cracking down on Internet dissidents) is because the military wanted to make sure that it could manage and track its own information.
So yes, the Internet's use is to move around information, but I would never say that the goal of the Internet is to route around censorship. That's just one of the many things you can do when you move information, and it's one that's particularly attractive to Western-minded people.
You've probably heard it many many times. The Internet is just a tool. I've heard people talk about how the Internet revolutionized commerce, how it revolutionized our understanding of information.
The Internet doesn't do jack. The Internet is a tool. Hammers are tools, too. A hammer can be used to pound a nail into a wall. A hammer can also be used, ironically, to pull a nail out of a wall. A hammer can be used to kill someone. A hammer can be used to save someone.
China's just using the Internet as a tool. Everything's a political tool in China. What's really ironic is that financial transactions will probably be safer with Chinese financial institutions because they're actually putting in place an Internet infrastructure that they can police. Rather than security being site-centric like it is in Western countries, security is being country-centric in China, meaning that while you may have less anonymity, so do the bad guys.
But again, it's just a tool. China's not abusing the Internet. They're just defining the way in which they're going to use their tool, and it just happens to be different from the Western ideology.
Seriously? I can go on the 'Net and find instructions on how to build a high-yield thermonuclear device. The news reports every day about stockpiles of weapons-grade material. Most nuclear countries have their missiles targeted on our silos already. It's not as if nuclear weapons are this big secret that can't be let out of the bag. The real barrier to nuclear weaponry is getting the material. I'd feel more threatened if nuclear material was actually stolen, but it's information.
What's that I hear on Slashdot? Information wants to be free? I'd be willing to bet that someone's head is going to roll because information escaped that's already out there anyway.
It's ugly.
All the comments about how it looks like Macintosh or Windows, how it's not innovative (I agree, BTW, it looks like the bastard child of Windows 95 and MacOS), it's just ugly. Recently in Time or Newsweek, there was an article about the increasing awareness of design in the American consciousness (sue me, I'm American). When I look at the Eazel screenshots, I see something very kludgy, very awkward, like icons are the wrong size, the wrong proportion. Line weights are too thick or too thin. Colors are too garish. Buttons are too small or too big or have too much blank space (why do the close buttons have to be even smaller when they're surrounded by so much space?). The one thing I like about GNOME (and don't get me wrong, I think both GNOME and KDE feel "heavy") is the professional elegance of it's imagery. Icons feel well designed (I think tigert designed quite a few of them; they appear to be his style). Default buttons feel about the right size and proportion (proportion is ever more important than size). Here, the Eazel developers have started to throw all that out in an effort to look just different enough that people can call it 'different'.
I don't know what's causing it. The early screenshots looked promising, but these just don't fulfill expectations. They look almost like they're being underdesigned, and given the real lack of innovations these screenshots are displaying, it's really going to take a user interface that enlivens the Linux desktop to sell this thing. Yes, I know you can customize it, but frankly, I don't want to download something ugly to make it look beautiful. I want the best with minimal effort.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, though, and I have a critical eye. Do other people feel the same way? That this is kludgy? Or does this have the potential to be the new aesthetic?
What's the likelihood that this thing can be adapted for human use? I mean, Stevie Wonder is supposedly going to try getting his vision back through some artificial means. What about people with no smell? That's not a joke, BTW. My stepsister really doesn't have a sense of smell. Her mother won't let her live alone because she can't smell things like gas leaks or burning food in the oven.
Speaking of which, possible uses for this include alarm systems that trigger when certain odors (like the odor added to gas) are detected or warning lights in car when odors like burning oil are detected. I bet a real market for something like this can be had in alarms and triggers based on smell.
Does anyone care to translate these algorithms to something us lesser geeks might know? I recognize the quicksort, Fourier, and Fortran algorithms, but the rest are rather over my head.
It'd be interesting to see how these relate to the algorithms that computer jockeys see as king (obviously, the list is biased towards science and numbers). Are any of these algorithms related to things like compression algorithms (MP3, Zip, LZW, etc.), encryption algorithms (DES, RSA, Blowfish, etc.) or search algorithms (like the one Google uses, for instance)?
What would a computer geek's top ten algorithms list look like? Would they be scientifically/technologically important or more socially important (like MP3, RSA, or Google)?
Bah!
Re-read your message. Arcade games suffer the same problems. I've crashed Hydro Thunder more times than I've caused a pinball machine to break. Arcade games have joysticks and buttons that break, stick and malfunction. I have yet to see an arcade game without moveable parts, and each year, the machines get more and more complicated. It used to be that a skiing game put you behind a joystick with maybe a jump button. Now, you actually climb into an apparatus that takes your movements and translates them to a character. If this isn't both mechanically and developmentally expensive, I don't know what is.
When I go to game arcades and pinball machines are present, they are almost always filled. Most of the time it's an older generation, though. The same holds true for such classics as air hockey and ski ball. Kids aren't playing them. The real reason such machines are dying is because a younger generation raised on virtual reality, super-realistic graphics, and ever faster-paced games doesn't have the interest in something that requires both an understanding of truly real-world physics and an imagination of what exactly a Black Hole of Doom really is. It's not because of game companies are losing money on mechanically inferior pinball machines.
It's an automatic thing that runs on my Windows 2K box. It's called the Windows Critical Update Notification, and yeah, it came up. It basically says, "Hey, there's a critical update available. Click here to go get it. Click here to close"
You have to install it (it's not like it's a default thing) and all it does is periodically poll their site for updates. When you want to go get one, it just opens IE and takes you to their page.
How many companies can you identify by their logo alone (omit word logos, like 'Microsoft' and 'IBM'). How many "open-source" software companies can you identify by their logo alone? How many "open-source" web sites? How many games?
The 'no logo' idea is a noble one, but one which will ultimately fail. It's not just marketing, but recognition. Man has been doing it for as long as we've been painting animals on our shields so that other armies will know who we are. Self-identification is one of the key pieces of human nature and what we now call 'logos' are simply another manifestation of our nature.
I was reading the story on C|Net News and all of the sudden, the Windows Critical Update notice came up on my desktop. It's kind of freaky if you ask me.
And one which, I hope, leads to an interesting discussion. If the GPL states that you must make available source code for the binary products, do you necessarily have to be the source of that source code? Could Microsoft just like to the GNU web site and say, "Here's your source code!" I realize in this case the EULA states that it can be found on a particular site, but could someone simply link from there to GNU web site or, as the MS employee did, just tell people to go there?
I don't know. To me this seems a little unfair. You can take someone else's code and sell it and not actually do any work yourself, but on the other hand, isn't that what it's all about?
I remember when I was kid playing the old game SimEarth on my Mac (not the Mac SE or the Mac Classic, but the Mac .. The Mac). Despite the game being very primitive and only in black and white, they had a couple of scenarios that were really interesting. One was to take Mars and make it livable and the other was to take Venus and make it livable. The easiest way to do both was to put in these devices that converted the carbon dioxide to oxygen (the hard way was to crash ice comets into the planet, both cooling it off and releasing oxygen .. don't ask me).
.. these sorts of transformations don't happen overnight).
I wouldn't say it's so worrisome. Making other planets livable for humans is going to become a fact of life if we ever decide to permanently leave this world. Mars is another system, but it's a dead system, and adapting it for human needs is not going to make species extinct or ruin our understanding of Martian phenomena (and even if it were alive, we'd have plenty of time to find out
But that's beyond the logistical nightmares of actually getting such a thing to work. Look at how long its taken our planet to register the effects of 150 years of industrial revolution, and the environmental change is a blip, an abnormality barely noticeable on the geological scale that scientists are still debating whether or not we are the cause. You can rest assured that by the time human beings are ready to purposefully alter the state of another planet's environment, they'll have the necessary expertise (and computer/robotics/cybernetic systems) to do it much more exactingly than you or I can imagine.
By the way, in the SimEarth game, the irony of it all is that once you terraform the planet (Mars was easier, Venus was much more difficult), sentient life can rise, become industrialized, and then ruin your environmental masterpiece. Maybe that should be the bigger fear, not what havoc we wreck when we purposefully change the environment, but what terrors we cause when we neglect it.
I think both GNOME and KDE have taken the beneficial parts of Microsoft's GUI and left out the parts that are either extraneous or just plain bloated. I can see why Slashdot has a bias towards GNOME as the screenshots released are pretty slick looking, although I will note that the last time a KDE article was posted, everyone bitched about how Slashdot had a KDE bias.
See how silly moderator rules are? I just mentioned all of the items you spoke about in a very respectful way that actually may have added a little to the discussion.
And frankly, I'd like to see more mention about KDE when talking about GNOME, not less. The fact that these two are out there and somewhat competing against each other gives us a) choice and b) better features as they continually learn from each other and play off each other. The progress in both GNOME and KDE this year has been amazing and it's probably a direct result of each group's desire to make a better interface than their counterparts.
I mean, its not like this would go unnoticed with the vigilant /. community on the prowl.
/. community's influence reaches? Slashdot's been misquoted in a couple of tech news stories and maybe one major publication. Most people who use eBay, I'd bet, don't read Slashdot.
And what exactly are the extents to which the vigilant
To MS, this isn't negative. They are 'defending' their copyright and property rights (although I think it's on rather shaky ground, their reasoning I mean). They have to do this sort of thing as part of maintaining their copyright. Microsoft would look a lot worse if they finally did manage to get a pirate into court and the pirate said, "But look, there was a lot of warezing going on right there on eBay and you did nothing."
First off, Microsoft does not need good PR or bad PR. Everyone knows who they are. They have a de facto monopoly on Windows systems. Moving away from Windows is probably hardest the move to make in the computer industry, and big companies who buy the majority of Microsoft products are not going to look at this auction as anything more than what a business needs to do, so they're not going to lose any customers there. The people this pisses off are the Slashdot crowd, who most likely aren't buying Microsoft anyway, again no lost sales there. As for the DOJ case, Microsoft telling eBay that it's piracy is happening and they need to stop it is not anything like bundling and the other issues involved with the DOJ case. Klein is not going to point at eBay and say to the judge, "Look at what Microsoft just did, Jackson! That should show they're a monopoly!" Jackson would laugh at him.
The real target here should be eBay, which has clearly violated its own stated policies. The issue here is not the fault of MS; it's that of eBay.
To summarize, it's part of business, Slashdot is not powerful enough to change the entire world's viewpoint on Microsoft, focus on eBay.
First off, the acceptance of bad patents is not in itself a reason to get rid of patents altogether. People, the Patent Office is run by human beings under an incredible workload. They are bound to make mistakes, and they are bound to let things sort themselves out in the courts rather than focus in detail on everything. Yes, some things like software patents and even business model patents probably should be removed, but the overarching concept of the patent is not a bad one, especially if you truly do have a novel invention that you intend to market.
With that said, the most rational response I can think of is to notify your Congressperson that their web site is in violation of a patent. According to this patent, almost everything on the Web is. Let your Congressperson know this, and then let them know that this is absurd and more important, why this is absurd. Use this as a natural starting point for showing other examples of 'bad' patents that apply to obvious ideas (note ideas, not mechanisms) and then ask them respectfully to look into the matter so that both you and they don't have to change your web site.
Trust me, you accuse a Congressperson of breaking the law and the first thing they're going to do (even before they start lying) is figure out a way to legally remove the illegality.