Second, America's large-scale deployment lasted from 1965-1973. So the 56,000 casualties were spread out over eight years. While I'm glad that we're only losing around 600 troops a year rather than 7000, "It's not as bad as Vietnam, so it must be okay" doesn't strike me as a healthy perspective.
Wow. Twenty seconds ripped from your life, possibly as frequently as once or twice a day. I feel your pain.
OO.o actually comes up faster on my P433 than my Duron 1200, so don't pity users of "older machines" quite yet. It's all about how quickly the computer reads it off the hard drive. The only difference is, Windows keeps most of Office in RAM, whether you want it or not.
OO.o has a quicklauncher for Windows, and on Linux you can just keep an instance running on another desktop. If you care to look, there are solutions to your "problem." Unless your problem is that you're a whiner who likes to demonstrate how valuable his time is by complaining about some program's startup time.
1) The "bias" comes from the submitter. While Timothy's response is tautological when taken literally, it implies that (despite the submitter's confusion on the issue) the GPL doesn't automatically forbid commercial use.
2) It's not like the Unwashed Slashdottian Hordes hunted down the manufacturer and mounted him on a pike outside the castle wall. Collectively, they surfed the site, discovered that the source was included, and said, "okay, we're cool."
3) Given the relative frequency of commercial misappropriation of GPL'ed software, the question of "does this use comply with the GPL?" is one that needed asking.
4) How a "slahsdot is teh BIAS" post gets modded up as insightful is beyond me. It's like pointing out that the editors are carbon-based lifeforms. We know they have their biases, and we likes it that ways.
5) I like making numbered lists.
The only thing that I would criticize is that Timothy could have investigated the licensing issues before posting the story. But with all the folks here desperate to get modded up for a bit of legwork, it's not a huge deal.
Listen, when a company is put on trial for abuse of a monopoly, the lawyers spend their time reading things like the Sherman Antitrust Act, and case law surrounding the AT&T breakup. I can't imagine a competent lawyer coming in and trying to get an antitrust suit throw out on the grounds of, "Your Honor, Websters dictionary defines a monopoly as exclusive control over... nah, I'm just messing with you." See, even hypothetical lawyer-boy over there can't bring himself to do it.
Here. Educate yourself. Also check out the section on "tying," which is relevant to the media player debate, just as it was relevant to the browser wars.
Depending on how you define "ready," Linux is ready for the desktop. But even if a company like Dell had the political will to pull off an end-user transition to Linux, and had a superior distro (perfect hardware detection, a friendly interface for most consumer-level tasks, and transparent security updates) it would still get eaten alive as its marketshare dwindled.
People demand Windows. It's what they're used to; it's what runs their games, applications, and consumer devices; they don't want to bother learning something new. None of these things have anything to do with the inherent superiority of one OS over another, but they all present a huge advantage for Microsoft and a barrier to competitors.
Stop bitching about how Microsoft should be allowed to do whatever they want, and the market should be the final judge. We have a good hundred fifty years of evidence that monopolies are both self-perpetuating and bad for the consumer.
It's a good read, especially for someone like you, who feels like he's just punching the clock every day, doing work that doesn't provide much interest.
You conveniently forget to mention, IE had one additional advantage: It came pre-installed on every single computer!
You can keep your "real facts" and your Google-fu insults. None of the things you mentioned are relevant to the antitrust lawsuit; even if IE might have deserved to win solely on merit (it's not nearly as open-and-shut as you imply), it was this abuse of their monopoly position that turned the browser wars into a bloodbath.
And since you appear to consider yourself an expert in these matters, I would point out that the 6.0 release was a complete rewrite of the Netscape codebase, and is related to the 4.x series in name only.
You're mixing up your timeframes here. Sure you can buy OS-free computers right now (if you look really, really hard). But back when Microsoft was fighting the browser war, it was virtually impossible to get a Windows-free computer from any computer distributor.
By the time Netscape 6 was released, the Browser wars had been over for years.
"You mean a distibutor tried to leverage it's market power to make sure the retailers were only installing it's product, umm that is a damn good idea, it's called sales and marketing, we do it in the damn ceramics industry, so I'd expect every other industry to do it too. Tires, oil, transmissions, electronics, car audio. No one bitches about that shit."
No, it's called market tying, and yes, it is illegal. Especially for a monopoly. If you want to sell computers to a wide range of customers, you have to be able to provide Microsoft Windows. If, in order to provide Windows you must sign an agreement to include Internet Explorer (and you further have to refuse to provide alternatives), then that is an illegal abuse of a monopoly by Microsoft.
Prior to the antitrust ruling, this is precisely what they did.
"But media player works well, and comes with the OS, why would i want to go to something else
Why indeed? You've just demonstrated the power of a monopoly to perpetuate itself.
That day, two men touched down on the Moon, pointed their camera back towards the Earth, and a billion people all over the world sat awestruck at how very small and fragile we all are.
Damn it, this has never been about return on investment, or about finding spinoff technologies to make us rich. It's about curiosity, about a deep, compelling drive to explore the unknown, to drive it back, and to stand in wonder at what we find there.
If you want to turn the greatest of all human adventures into a simple TCO analysis, by all means go ahead. If you want to bitch about the government using your money to do it, go ahead. I'm sure I could find a few programs that you support that I would want to see eliminated.
In every case, he admits that his figures are for projects spanning decades, so the trillion dollars is more reasonable than it first appears. Imagine combining everything a person expects to pay for cable over the next thirty years into one nice round number. Then add in the money that was lost because it wasn't sitting in an account earning interest. Yet many people gladly pay for cable.
Anyways, the statistics are less important than his overall argument: That unmanned space exploration is more valuable. That may be, depending on what our goals are. If it's just for scientific exploration, then it most likely is. On the other hand, if we decide that a manned presence on the Moon and Mars carries its own inherent value, then it's a whole other debate.
Sorry, $30 billion a year. I should have known something was fishy there. Does anyone have a good idea of how that compares with other government spending (military, welfare, interest on the debt, etc.)?
Read the last part: the estimate was a total over 34 years, meaning the bill would be about $3B a year. Not too pricey given the full scope of the federal budget.
Beyond that, the original $500B proposal was probably over-estimated, because everyone in NASA (along with private contractors) tried to get their pet projects added to the mix. So you end up with things like nuclear-powered ships that aren't strictly necessary.
Obligatory Slashdot-Mars-story link: The Case for Mars, by Robert Zubrin.
Jayson Blair? The reporter who got sacked for making up news? The one that gave the NYT a credibility problem that it still hasn't fully overcome? If anything, he would be a data point in favor of the idea that the media has some interest in reporting the news in a factual manner.
Who released this study? How substantiative was it? Did it get any peer review? Maybe, just maybe, the study didn't get much play because there are more important things than acting as a megaphone for some right-wing think tank with bad science. I can't pass judgment on a study I haven't seen, but you haven't provided compelling evidence that it deserved to get attention.
It may also be that the major news outlets are giving us the news we're interested: The war in Iraq, not global warming. Global warming hasn't been in the headlines much since the furor over the Kyoto Treaty died down. Finally, whether you side with the pro-war or the anti-war side, it's pointless to call all the Iraqi guerillas attacking an invading army on their home soil "terrorists." They have their own political agenda, and they are using force to move it forward, just like we are.
Let's reserve the term "terrorists" for those who target non-combatants.
Finally, you can't think of the number of terrorists as a zero sum game. We can't say, "Okay, there are 100,000 terrorists inside Iraq, so if we kill 60,000 terrorists, we've reduced the threat by sixty percent." More terrorists are created and eliminated by political maneuvers than the U.S. could ever hope to take out with bullets and missile strikes.
Just look at the recent killing of Shiek Ahmed Yassin--a Hamas leader--by Israel. Did he coordinate suicide bombings? Probably. Did he deserve to die? Probably. Can Israel scratch one terrorist off the scorecard? Nope. The public reaction to the killing will probably increase the number and willpower of the Palestinian militants.
I would gripe at you for not reading the article, but the server is only barely responsive.
Quick summary: The trillion dollar figure was based on the $500 billion number that the George Bush Sr. presidency came up with during its own initiative. That number was rounded up to $800 billion to adjust for inflation, and then rounded up yet again to produce a nice, round $1 trillion.
Finally, the master stroke: While the original estimate was for 34 years of operations on both the moon and Mars, the reporter claimed $1 trillion to be the cost of a single Mars landing.
Once it hit the news, everyone else copied it, and the public perception grew that this would be a fiscally irresponsible program.
1) Routing is the only area of the Internet where OSS doesn't dominate. The big three (web, mail, DNS) are handled primarily by Open Source. If you took those away, you could spend a whole day merrily pinging other computers, but that's about it.
Except you couldn't. Unless Cisco and Sun both wrote their own TCP/IP stacks.
2) The Internet doesn't care what it carries, but people tend to care what they put on the Internet. Specifically, no company whose primary income comes from boxing up software and selling it for money is going to put its source out there for the world to see. Well, maybe Microsoft, but that was accidental.
2 and 3 are basically the same thing (at least, I don't see the distinction). But whatever you may think of Andreesen, he wasn't just saying "Um, er, this Linux thing will be big because... er, it's on... THE INTERNET!" His point (and you may not consider it a strong one, but it's insulting to pretend it's nothing but handwaving) is that OSS can benefit from widespread, volunteer collaboration in a way that no proprietary counterpart can. The Internet provides the medium for collaboration, but proprietary companies can't take advantage of it in the same way.
4) Granted, it's hard to back this as a blanket statement. But if you ignore the average Sourceforge projects and concentrate only on open and proprietary products where security is given due consideration, I think OSS compares quite favorably.
5) I think he was simply stating a fact, not nudging Linux zealots into demanding an invasion of Iran, Syria, North Korea, and France.
Skipping, skipping, skipping....
10) You've missed the point here. The point is, a huge fraction of software isn't written with the intention of boxing up and selling thousands of copies. The software is written with one goal: To make the company run more efficiently. Now, if you grant some of the arguments ESR makes in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," OSS should have an advantage in this market because multiple companies can split the costs of development, lowering overall development costs while improving quality.
As you say, in your own inimitably charming style, 11 and 12 were a bit too obvious. I think Andreesen was aiming to produce a useful set of soundbytes. That's actually a very important talent, but judging by some of the misinterpretations and requests for clarifications, it's a skill he hasn't mastered.
1) From the TCP/IP stack onwards and upwards to the really critical applications (web, mail, DNS), GPL and BSD software dominate the Net. The only real counterexample I can think of is the software on the big Cisco routers. I think the first statement is a sound one.
2) It's not meaningless. I don't personally remember the bad old days when Linux distros were mailed between developers on stacks of fifty or sixty floppy disks. But those dark times did exist.
The Internet allowed for collaboration on an unprecedented, massively multiplayer level. This is something that proprietary developers haven't been able to take full advantage of, because their model requires a certain level of secrecy. They can release beta software and ask for feedback, but they can't say, "Here's the code. Tell me if you see anything wrong with it."
I don't believe #2 and #3 are saying anything different. #4 may be true, but it's difficult to make a convincing case either way.
5) It's not just about the developers. It's about the acceptance of Linux by users. The fact is, only about 5% of potential computer users live inside the U.S. Therefore, for 95% of people, any money paid for Microsoft products is money leaving the country. The higher the level of anti-American sentiment, the more people will clamor for an alternative. There's also the fact that a foreign government cannot check the Windows disks they receive for backdoors.
In America, no it won't resonate. But we're not the center of the world, and those who be against us dwarf the number that be for us. So I think Bush should be playing nicer, but that's a flame for another time.
There are plenty of reasons why countries outside the U.S. might consider Open Source, and yes, a couple of them are mostly about dislike for the U.S. itself:
"We don't want to send America one cent that we don't have to." "The NSA might be pushing code into Windows that can be used to compromise our security." "Support your local developers." "If Microsoft doesn't support our language, we're screwed. If Linux doesn't, we can fix that." "Maybe they saved our asses in World War II, but they're still acting like a bunch of pricks. Screw 'em."
Interesting. You jump all over everyone for speculating about why InformationWeek would be blocking links from LinuxToday. Then in the very next sentence, you make the unsubstantiated assertion that IW must have tried to contact LT before setting up the block, and make a bunch of uninformed speculations about why the e-mail didn't get through.
Here's what we do know:
1: Links from LT to stories on IW result in a message about unauthorized content distribution.
2: Many online publishers consider deep linking a form of copyright violation.
3: #1 is precisely what one would expect to happen when a publisher from #2 decides to act upon that belief.
4: Referrer blocks don't just set themselves up.
The people at LT are still investigating why it happened, and they haven't ruled out an error. But from the evidence gathered so far, it doesn't look like an error; it looks like a shortsighted attempt by the publisher to control how its content is distributed.
I did read a book a short while back, that was sort of a diary of a young teacher's stint in an inner city grade school. It was a brutal experience for her, and she transferred to a boring middle-class district at the end of the year. Cynicism is a natural response to apparently insoluble problems.
I'm not sure how welfare fits into the mix. I've gotten the impression that the standard right-wing mantra is that if we end welfare, all those welfare recipients will automatically go out and get jobs. The standard left-wing response is that nobody would rather be on welfare than be employed. There's a grain of truth to both, and neither applies in all situations. I don't know if welfare is killing peoples' dreams, or keeping them alive, or both. But I don't like the idea of just yanking it out from under people without replacing it with something better.
Personally, I think any solution would have to start by fixing inner city school systems, then expanding adult education. Of course, this proposal is about as useful as Monty Python's "How to Become a Doctor" skit.
So you have one neighbor who claims that the poor people she meets have no higher aspirations in life than to get themselves a fat, cushy welfare check. Therefore, it is time to write them all off; every dollar spent trying to feed, clothe, and educate the poor may as well be flushed down the toilet.
Okay, I'm certainly exaggerating your actual position. I apologize for that. But it doesn't sound like you have sufficient evidence to make such general pronouncements.
I don't mind the fact that Mr. Allen pumped a few million into SETI. I think a positive result is a bit of a longshot, but it's nevertheless valuable scientific research. It's the fact that one person can have that kind of money to throw at nifty little side projects. Sure, a precisely equal distribution of wealth retards a lot of the motivation needed to keep the economy running. On the other hand, I don't see how someone like Bill Gates or Paul Allen would say, "Screw it, I'm just going on welfare" if they were legally barred from attaining more than two billion in aggregate wealth (just to pick a number out of thin air). Capitalism doesn't need to provide infinite incentive in order for the incentive to be effective.
I know that Mr. Allen didn't just donate the money on a lark. He's a savvy businessman, and probably did a good deal of research into the project and its chances of success. But in the end, it was his money, and if he'd wanted to donate it towards buying gourmet doggie treats for every dog in the world, nobody but Mrs. Allen could stop him. I'm having trouble with the idea that one person should be able to amass that kind of power.
Personally, I think it would be possible to feed, clothe, and educate every person in the world. Not in fifty years, when nanotech takes off. Not in twenty years when robotic labor becomes more efficient than most human labor. Right now. You could even throw in medical care, environmental protection, and a whole load of scientific research.
The catch is, there is a lot we would have to give up; a lot of lifestyle changes that we would have to make. We're not willing to make them. We won't even entertain the idea of giving up our cars, or our suburbs, or changing our diets. So let's just console ourselves by saying it was never really possible in the first place.
Seriously, it would probably work the other way, as the aliens moved their high-polluting, unskilled manufacturing processes here to Earth. They'd buy our labor for a few hundred thousand a year (pennies on the dollar when compared to the cost of labor back on Xaphodbrox). We'd all be rushing out to buy Xaphian language tapes, learning to chat about their politics and sports (an odd cross between polo and mud wrestling), staffing their call centers and reading scripts we only barely understood, and buying up their nifty technology while local industries perished.
Meanwhile, back on the Motherworld, the people would be consoling themselves, saying that humans were great for cheap labor, but thank god they aren't capable of real creativity. Then a hundred years down the road, we'd lob a bunch of nukes at their planet, each lovingly engraved with, "Is THIS creative enough for ya?"
I have to disagree. I would guess that if you did a quick, uncoached survey asking people something like "How long should an author have exclusive right to publish a book before anyone can start using his work without paying royalties?" more than half of Americans would say, "Forever." Not because that is really best for society, but because they don't really understand the issues. To most people, there is no distinction between "Intellectual Property" and real property. You built it, you own it.
I'm starting to believe that true representative democracy doesn't work all that well. It's difficult to stay deeply informed about all the important issues that one could be called upon to decide, and many people don't even try. Yes, I am referring specifically to Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
I think it would be interesting if, instead of voting on bills directly, the job of the legislature was to elect a group of relevant experts (selected from outside the legislature itself) to write the bill, vote on it, and send it directly to the president. Sure, it's an ugly system, but the people voting on how the country is to be governed usually cast their votes based on a soundbite-deep understanding. This strikes me as a huge problem, and one which demands to be fixed.
Ninety-five percent of people don't have the time or interest to do anything but the most insufficient product research. In order for consumer decisions to make a big dent, we would have to lower the barrier to researching the origins of products by labelling their content the way the FDA forces food manufacturers to label nutritional information.
I think the government should be involved, and that no other entity has any chance at fixing things. I'm all in favor of total free trade with nations which abide by a reasonable set of environmental and labor laws, but I don't think it's reasonable to ask us to "compete fairly" against nations which don't.
There is a difference between Mexican auto factories and India IT "factories". For the auto factories, the primary investment needed to keep it running comes in the form of the plant itself. For the IT shops, there's not much "infrastructure" to support; all the real value is locked up in the heads of the programmers themselves.
When a factory worker quits, he can't take the conveyor belt with him and strike out on his own. But give the programmer a low-end computer with a pirated toolkit, and he can produce again.
I think most companies are seeing the outsourcing thing from your perspective: that outsourcing IT is like outsourcing any other form of manufacturing. The company gets lower production costs, and the profits flow straight back into their coffers. But I'm of the opinion that U.S. tech companies are unwittingly training their future replacements.
Slashdot Mirror
A few points.
First, we're up to 591 now.
Second, America's large-scale deployment lasted from 1965-1973. So the 56,000 casualties were spread out over eight years. While I'm glad that we're only losing around 600 troops a year rather than 7000, "It's not as bad as Vietnam, so it must be okay" doesn't strike me as a healthy perspective.
Wow. Twenty seconds ripped from your life, possibly as frequently as once or twice a day. I feel your pain.
OO.o actually comes up faster on my P433 than my Duron 1200, so don't pity users of "older machines" quite yet. It's all about how quickly the computer reads it off the hard drive. The only difference is, Windows keeps most of Office in RAM, whether you want it or not.
OO.o has a quicklauncher for Windows, and on Linux you can just keep an instance running on another desktop. If you care to look, there are solutions to your "problem." Unless your problem is that you're a whiner who likes to demonstrate how valuable his time is by complaining about some program's startup time.
1) The "bias" comes from the submitter. While Timothy's response is tautological when taken literally, it implies that (despite the submitter's confusion on the issue) the GPL doesn't automatically forbid commercial use.
2) It's not like the Unwashed Slashdottian Hordes hunted down the manufacturer and mounted him on a pike outside the castle wall. Collectively, they surfed the site, discovered that the source was included, and said, "okay, we're cool."
3) Given the relative frequency of commercial misappropriation of GPL'ed software, the question of "does this use comply with the GPL?" is one that needed asking.
4) How a "slahsdot is teh BIAS" post gets modded up as insightful is beyond me. It's like pointing out that the editors are carbon-based lifeforms. We know they have their biases, and we likes it that ways.
5) I like making numbered lists.
The only thing that I would criticize is that Timothy could have investigated the licensing issues before posting the story. But with all the folks here desperate to get modded up for a bit of legwork, it's not a huge deal.
Listen, when a company is put on trial for abuse of a monopoly, the lawyers spend their time reading things like the Sherman Antitrust Act, and case law surrounding the AT&T breakup. I can't imagine a competent lawyer coming in and trying to get an antitrust suit throw out on the grounds of, "Your Honor, Websters dictionary defines a monopoly as exclusive control over... nah, I'm just messing with you." See, even hypothetical lawyer-boy over there can't bring himself to do it.
Here. Educate yourself. Also check out the section on "tying," which is relevant to the media player debate, just as it was relevant to the browser wars.
Depending on how you define "ready," Linux is ready for the desktop. But even if a company like Dell had the political will to pull off an end-user transition to Linux, and had a superior distro (perfect hardware detection, a friendly interface for most consumer-level tasks, and transparent security updates) it would still get eaten alive as its marketshare dwindled.
People demand Windows. It's what they're used to; it's what runs their games, applications, and consumer devices; they don't want to bother learning something new. None of these things have anything to do with the inherent superiority of one OS over another, but they all present a huge advantage for Microsoft and a barrier to competitors.
Stop bitching about how Microsoft should be allowed to do whatever they want, and the market should be the final judge. We have a good hundred fifty years of evidence that monopolies are both self-perpetuating and bad for the consumer.
What Should I Do With My Life?
It's a good read, especially for someone like you, who feels like he's just punching the clock every day, doing work that doesn't provide much interest.
You conveniently forget to mention, IE had one additional advantage: It came pre-installed on every single computer!
You can keep your "real facts" and your Google-fu insults. None of the things you mentioned are relevant to the antitrust lawsuit; even if IE might have deserved to win solely on merit (it's not nearly as open-and-shut as you imply), it was this abuse of their monopoly position that turned the browser wars into a bloodbath.
And since you appear to consider yourself an expert in these matters, I would point out that the 6.0 release was a complete rewrite of the Netscape codebase, and is related to the 4.x series in name only.
By the time Netscape 6 was released, the Browser wars had been over for years.
No, it's called market tying, and yes, it is illegal. Especially for a monopoly. If you want to sell computers to a wide range of customers, you have to be able to provide Microsoft Windows. If, in order to provide Windows you must sign an agreement to include Internet Explorer (and you further have to refuse to provide alternatives), then that is an illegal abuse of a monopoly by Microsoft.
Prior to the antitrust ruling, this is precisely what they did.
Why indeed? You've just demonstrated the power of a monopoly to perpetuate itself.
July 20, 1969.
That day, two men touched down on the Moon, pointed their camera back towards the Earth, and a billion people all over the world sat awestruck at how very small and fragile we all are.
Damn it, this has never been about return on investment, or about finding spinoff technologies to make us rich. It's about curiosity, about a deep, compelling drive to explore the unknown, to drive it back, and to stand in wonder at what we find there.
If you want to turn the greatest of all human adventures into a simple TCO analysis, by all means go ahead. If you want to bitch about the government using your money to do it, go ahead. I'm sure I could find a few programs that you support that I would want to see eliminated.
In every case, he admits that his figures are for projects spanning decades, so the trillion dollars is more reasonable than it first appears. Imagine combining everything a person expects to pay for cable over the next thirty years into one nice round number. Then add in the money that was lost because it wasn't sitting in an account earning interest. Yet many people gladly pay for cable.
Anyways, the statistics are less important than his overall argument: That unmanned space exploration is more valuable. That may be, depending on what our goals are. If it's just for scientific exploration, then it most likely is. On the other hand, if we decide that a manned presence on the Moon and Mars carries its own inherent value, then it's a whole other debate.
Sorry, $30 billion a year. I should have known something was fishy there. Does anyone have a good idea of how that compares with other government spending (military, welfare, interest on the debt, etc.)?
Read the last part: the estimate was a total over 34 years, meaning the bill would be about $3B a year. Not too pricey given the full scope of the federal budget.
Beyond that, the original $500B proposal was probably over-estimated, because everyone in NASA (along with private contractors) tried to get their pet projects added to the mix. So you end up with things like nuclear-powered ships that aren't strictly necessary.
Obligatory Slashdot-Mars-story link: The Case for Mars, by Robert Zubrin.
A none-too-complimentary view of "Bias" can be found at http://www.fair.org/articles/bias-op-ed.html.
Jayson Blair? The reporter who got sacked for making up news? The one that gave the NYT a credibility problem that it still hasn't fully overcome? If anything, he would be a data point in favor of the idea that the media has some interest in reporting the news in a factual manner.
Who released this study? How substantiative was it? Did it get any peer review? Maybe, just maybe, the study didn't get much play because there are more important things than acting as a megaphone for some right-wing think tank with bad science. I can't pass judgment on a study I haven't seen, but you haven't provided compelling evidence that it deserved to get attention.
It may also be that the major news outlets are giving us the news we're interested: The war in Iraq, not global warming. Global warming hasn't been in the headlines much since the furor over the Kyoto Treaty died down. Finally, whether you side with the pro-war or the anti-war side, it's pointless to call all the Iraqi guerillas attacking an invading army on their home soil "terrorists." They have their own political agenda, and they are using force to move it forward, just like we are.
Let's reserve the term "terrorists" for those who target non-combatants.
Finally, you can't think of the number of terrorists as a zero sum game. We can't say, "Okay, there are 100,000 terrorists inside Iraq, so if we kill 60,000 terrorists, we've reduced the threat by sixty percent." More terrorists are created and eliminated by political maneuvers than the U.S. could ever hope to take out with bullets and missile strikes.
Just look at the recent killing of Shiek Ahmed Yassin--a Hamas leader--by Israel. Did he coordinate suicide bombings? Probably. Did he deserve to die? Probably. Can Israel scratch one terrorist off the scorecard? Nope. The public reaction to the killing will probably increase the number and willpower of the Palestinian militants.
I would gripe at you for not reading the article, but the server is only barely responsive.
Quick summary: The trillion dollar figure was based on the $500 billion number that the George Bush Sr. presidency came up with during its own initiative. That number was rounded up to $800 billion to adjust for inflation, and then rounded up yet again to produce a nice, round $1 trillion.
Finally, the master stroke: While the original estimate was for 34 years of operations on both the moon and Mars, the reporter claimed $1 trillion to be the cost of a single Mars landing.
Once it hit the news, everyone else copied it, and the public perception grew that this would be a fiscally irresponsible program.
1) Routing is the only area of the Internet where OSS doesn't dominate. The big three (web, mail, DNS) are handled primarily by Open Source. If you took those away, you could spend a whole day merrily pinging other computers, but that's about it.
Except you couldn't. Unless Cisco and Sun both wrote their own TCP/IP stacks.
2) The Internet doesn't care what it carries, but people tend to care what they put on the Internet. Specifically, no company whose primary income comes from boxing up software and selling it for money is going to put its source out there for the world to see. Well, maybe Microsoft, but that was accidental.
2 and 3 are basically the same thing (at least, I don't see the distinction). But whatever you may think of Andreesen, he wasn't just saying "Um, er, this Linux thing will be big because... er, it's on... THE INTERNET!" His point (and you may not consider it a strong one, but it's insulting to pretend it's nothing but handwaving) is that OSS can benefit from widespread, volunteer collaboration in a way that no proprietary counterpart can. The Internet provides the medium for collaboration, but proprietary companies can't take advantage of it in the same way.
4) Granted, it's hard to back this as a blanket statement. But if you ignore the average Sourceforge projects and concentrate only on open and proprietary products where security is given due consideration, I think OSS compares quite favorably.
5) I think he was simply stating a fact, not nudging Linux zealots into demanding an invasion of Iran, Syria, North Korea, and France.
Skipping, skipping, skipping....
10) You've missed the point here. The point is, a huge fraction of software isn't written with the intention of boxing up and selling thousands of copies. The software is written with one goal: To make the company run more efficiently. Now, if you grant some of the arguments ESR makes in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," OSS should have an advantage in this market because multiple companies can split the costs of development, lowering overall development costs while improving quality.
As you say, in your own inimitably charming style, 11 and 12 were a bit too obvious. I think Andreesen was aiming to produce a useful set of soundbytes. That's actually a very important talent, but judging by some of the misinterpretations and requests for clarifications, it's a skill he hasn't mastered.
1) From the TCP/IP stack onwards and upwards to the really critical applications (web, mail, DNS), GPL and BSD software dominate the Net. The only real counterexample I can think of is the software on the big Cisco routers. I think the first statement is a sound one.
2) It's not meaningless. I don't personally remember the bad old days when Linux distros were mailed between developers on stacks of fifty or sixty floppy disks. But those dark times did exist.
The Internet allowed for collaboration on an unprecedented, massively multiplayer level. This is something that proprietary developers haven't been able to take full advantage of, because their model requires a certain level of secrecy. They can release beta software and ask for feedback, but they can't say, "Here's the code. Tell me if you see anything wrong with it."
I don't believe #2 and #3 are saying anything different. #4 may be true, but it's difficult to make a convincing case either way.
5) It's not just about the developers. It's about the acceptance of Linux by users. The fact is, only about 5% of potential computer users live inside the U.S. Therefore, for 95% of people, any money paid for Microsoft products is money leaving the country. The higher the level of anti-American sentiment, the more people will clamor for an alternative. There's also the fact that a foreign government cannot check the Windows disks they receive for backdoors.
In America, no it won't resonate. But we're not the center of the world, and those who be against us dwarf the number that be for us. So I think Bush should be playing nicer, but that's a flame for another time.
There are plenty of reasons why countries outside the U.S. might consider Open Source, and yes, a couple of them are mostly about dislike for the U.S. itself:
"We don't want to send America one cent that we don't have to."
"The NSA might be pushing code into Windows that can be used to compromise our security."
"Support your local developers."
"If Microsoft doesn't support our language, we're screwed. If Linux doesn't, we can fix that."
"Maybe they saved our asses in World War II, but they're still acting like a bunch of pricks. Screw 'em."
Wow. Mine weighed in at #60. This is why I didn't go into graphical design. :)
Interesting. You jump all over everyone for speculating about why InformationWeek would be blocking links from LinuxToday. Then in the very next sentence, you make the unsubstantiated assertion that IW must have tried to contact LT before setting up the block, and make a bunch of uninformed speculations about why the e-mail didn't get through.
Here's what we do know:
1: Links from LT to stories on IW result in a message about unauthorized content distribution.
2: Many online publishers consider deep linking a form of copyright violation.
3: #1 is precisely what one would expect to happen when a publisher from #2 decides to act upon that belief.
4: Referrer blocks don't just set themselves up.
The people at LT are still investigating why it happened, and they haven't ruled out an error. But from the evidence gathered so far, it doesn't look like an error; it looks like a shortsighted attempt by the publisher to control how its content is distributed.
I did read a book a short while back, that was sort of a diary of a young teacher's stint in an inner city grade school. It was a brutal experience for her, and she transferred to a boring middle-class district at the end of the year. Cynicism is a natural response to apparently insoluble problems.
I'm not sure how welfare fits into the mix. I've gotten the impression that the standard right-wing mantra is that if we end welfare, all those welfare recipients will automatically go out and get jobs. The standard left-wing response is that nobody would rather be on welfare than be employed. There's a grain of truth to both, and neither applies in all situations. I don't know if welfare is killing peoples' dreams, or keeping them alive, or both. But I don't like the idea of just yanking it out from under people without replacing it with something better.
Personally, I think any solution would have to start by fixing inner city school systems, then expanding adult education. Of course, this proposal is about as useful as Monty Python's "How to Become a Doctor" skit.
So you have one neighbor who claims that the poor people she meets have no higher aspirations in life than to get themselves a fat, cushy welfare check. Therefore, it is time to write them all off; every dollar spent trying to feed, clothe, and educate the poor may as well be flushed down the toilet.
Okay, I'm certainly exaggerating your actual position. I apologize for that. But it doesn't sound like you have sufficient evidence to make such general pronouncements.
I don't mind the fact that Mr. Allen pumped a few million into SETI. I think a positive result is a bit of a longshot, but it's nevertheless valuable scientific research. It's the fact that one person can have that kind of money to throw at nifty little side projects. Sure, a precisely equal distribution of wealth retards a lot of the motivation needed to keep the economy running. On the other hand, I don't see how someone like Bill Gates or Paul Allen would say, "Screw it, I'm just going on welfare" if they were legally barred from attaining more than two billion in aggregate wealth (just to pick a number out of thin air). Capitalism doesn't need to provide infinite incentive in order for the incentive to be effective.
I know that Mr. Allen didn't just donate the money on a lark. He's a savvy businessman, and probably did a good deal of research into the project and its chances of success. But in the end, it was his money, and if he'd wanted to donate it towards buying gourmet doggie treats for every dog in the world, nobody but Mrs. Allen could stop him. I'm having trouble with the idea that one person should be able to amass that kind of power.
Personally, I think it would be possible to feed, clothe, and educate every person in the world. Not in fifty years, when nanotech takes off. Not in twenty years when robotic labor becomes more efficient than most human labor. Right now. You could even throw in medical care, environmental protection, and a whole load of scientific research.
The catch is, there is a lot we would have to give up; a lot of lifestyle changes that we would have to make. We're not willing to make them. We won't even entertain the idea of giving up our cars, or our suburbs, or changing our diets. So let's just console ourselves by saying it was never really possible in the first place.
Seriously, it would probably work the other way, as the aliens moved their high-polluting, unskilled manufacturing processes here to Earth. They'd buy our labor for a few hundred thousand a year (pennies on the dollar when compared to the cost of labor back on Xaphodbrox). We'd all be rushing out to buy Xaphian language tapes, learning to chat about their politics and sports (an odd cross between polo and mud wrestling), staffing their call centers and reading scripts we only barely understood, and buying up their nifty technology while local industries perished.
Meanwhile, back on the Motherworld, the people would be consoling themselves, saying that humans were great for cheap labor, but thank god they aren't capable of real creativity. Then a hundred years down the road, we'd lob a bunch of nukes at their planet, each lovingly engraved with, "Is THIS creative enough for ya?"
T'will be interesting times, indeed.
I have to disagree. I would guess that if you did a quick, uncoached survey asking people something like "How long should an author have exclusive right to publish a book before anyone can start using his work without paying royalties?" more than half of Americans would say, "Forever." Not because that is really best for society, but because they don't really understand the issues. To most people, there is no distinction between "Intellectual Property" and real property. You built it, you own it.
I'm starting to believe that true representative democracy doesn't work all that well. It's difficult to stay deeply informed about all the important issues that one could be called upon to decide, and many people don't even try. Yes, I am referring specifically to Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
I think it would be interesting if, instead of voting on bills directly, the job of the legislature was to elect a group of relevant experts (selected from outside the legislature itself) to write the bill, vote on it, and send it directly to the president. Sure, it's an ugly system, but the people voting on how the country is to be governed usually cast their votes based on a soundbite-deep understanding. This strikes me as a huge problem, and one which demands to be fixed.
Ninety-five percent of people don't have the time or interest to do anything but the most insufficient product research. In order for consumer decisions to make a big dent, we would have to lower the barrier to researching the origins of products by labelling their content the way the FDA forces food manufacturers to label nutritional information.
I think the government should be involved, and that no other entity has any chance at fixing things. I'm all in favor of total free trade with nations which abide by a reasonable set of environmental and labor laws, but I don't think it's reasonable to ask us to "compete fairly" against nations which don't.
Umm, frat parties usually involve girls. The college life of the CS major is nothing like a frat party.
There is a difference between Mexican auto factories and India IT "factories". For the auto factories, the primary investment needed to keep it running comes in the form of the plant itself. For the IT shops, there's not much "infrastructure" to support; all the real value is locked up in the heads of the programmers themselves.
When a factory worker quits, he can't take the conveyor belt with him and strike out on his own. But give the programmer a low-end computer with a pirated toolkit, and he can produce again.
I think most companies are seeing the outsourcing thing from your perspective: that outsourcing IT is like outsourcing any other form of manufacturing. The company gets lower production costs, and the profits flow straight back into their coffers. But I'm of the opinion that U.S. tech companies are unwittingly training their future replacements.