Re:Proud to be a Heretic!
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What You Can't Say
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· Score: 4, Interesting
As one of the most groupthunk people I know, I have to disagree with you on a couple of points.
Copyright isn't evil. Copyright is an important guarantor of a creator's rights. The whole Linux thing wouldn't be possible without copyright protection. A few/.ers will disagree with that, but I think that nails down the beliefs of the majority.
Nevertheless, the current copyright system is too heavily biased towards creators, at the expense of the public and the public domain, and the situation is only getting worse with the recent copyright extension and the DMCA.
It appears obvious to me that the SCO lawsuit is utterly without merit. Obviously, everyone else here thinks so as well (probably even you). Now, there are a few reasons that such a consensus would emerge. The proponents of the SCO suit are being silenced, moderated to oblivion, or otherwise rendered incapable of presenting their side of the argument. Another is that nobody is interested in defending SCO on this forum, where Linux zealotry renders us all incapable of seeing the truth. Finally, SCO supporters may simply not have any reasonable arguments in their defense.
I've also seen a small minority of posts that coherently criticize Linux as a desktop platform, and I don't have to browse at -1 to find them. So while there is a herd mentality here on/., and that's often a bad thing, I don't see that any of the things you've pointed out rise to the level of "unsayable", even within the confines of Slashdot.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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What You Can't Say
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· Score: 4, Insightful
1) Never heard of that, and it sounds really implausible on the surface. Have a link?
2) I know a lot of people who are openly outspoken against the war on drugs, including myself. But genocide has a very specific meaning: The eradication of a selected group of people. Who is this group of people the war on drugs is intended to wipe out, and how is it being accomplished?
3) If Rush Limbaugh is saying it, and 20 million Americans are nodding their heads in unison, it's not really unsayable, is it?
Unpopular opinions aren't the same as heresies. Dig deeper. You have to have others.
If loss of your data means your life is ruined, or that your business will go under, or that thousands of hours of effort is wiped away, then I agree: This device is a terrible, terrible backup solution. You do not want to risk your data by having it all at the same location.
But if this is the case, you had better be willing--even eager--to fork over more than a few hundred bucks for your backup solution.
Why does it "not make sense" to have a simple, easy-to-use [assuming the review is accurate] local backup solution for a home user? 90% of home users are still on dial-up, so Internet-based backups are prohibitive. Most home users wouldn't know what to do with a hard drive slot if they included one. A DVD burner would up the price too much, and you'd probably rather have it on your main system anyways.
This device is targeted towards a certain group of people, and it sounds like it does an adequate job in that role. If a user's data is so critical, they need to be aware that they need off-site capabilities. Most home users simply don't.
You say you've had "a main system" destroyed by flood. Of course an off-site backup would have saved you, but unless it was a really severe flood, a mirror upstairs would have saved you just as well.
You then go on to say you've had countless hard drive failures. Which is exactly what I was thinking when I said "I thought so." 99% of data loss would be averted by having an on-site backup.
Nor does "having one half of a raid pair fail" mean data loss. If these are the only personal anecdotes you can come up with to back up your position, then you've failed. Even if this product can't do an off-site backup solution, it's still a reasonable solution for a home user, because it protects them from common causes of data loss.
Finally, because you've been gratuitously insulting: I'm a 26 y/o CS major, and I've probably played about ten hours of video games in the last year. Looking at your posting history, this is probably 1/10 the time you've spent whining about how crappy Slashdot is.
Question: How often have you had hard drives fail? Now, how often have you had computers destroyed by fire or flood?
I thought so.
Quit whining. Not every story which features a commercial product constitutes an "advertisement." Do you complain when/. puts up graphics card benchmarks? Or when they cover another point release of Red Hat?
Home backup solutions are interesting. Unless you can show that/. or OSDN was paid to run this story, or that Extremetech was paid to review it, then just shut up and move on to a different story.
I just finished reading it last week. You would think that a ten to twelve year old book would seem crusty and outdated, but it's by far the most relevant book I've read in the last couple of years.
Actually, there were a few points where it seemed like he really should have thrown in some discussion of Java, and I slapped myself when I remembered that it predates the language.
"Best practices" isn't too bad a concept, though it tends to get abused a lot. "Best of breed" is the phrase that really makes my knuckles itch.
You would have to get permission to include any third party software. Permission to download isn't the same as permission to redistribute. Since they're free downloads anyways, it would be hard for the software creators to show that they were seriously harmed by your redistribution, but it's still copyright infringement.
On the other hand, if you created a script to FTP the latest version from their own websites, and then set them up, it might pass the legal sniff test.
Yes, indeed, computers are cheaper than MS Office. I'm typing this on a 433 Celeron-based machine which I will probably be selling in the next few days for less than $100. It runs OpenOffice 1.1 just fine.
As you say, there are lots of people out there with all sorts of software loaded on their machines. But much of it is illegal, so there are hidden costs. People lose respect for copyright laws. The laws themselves become more draconian, in order to crack down on widespread piracy. New players like OO.o are shut out of the market because there is an entire segment of the population where "free as in beer" confers no competitive advantage.
In short, widespread piracy distorts copyright law and locks out competition. Despite the problems with copyright law, we do need it. If a "free as in legal" product can be had that has 90% of the functionality of MS Office, then it is irresponsible to use "closing the digital divide" as an excuse for encouraging piracy.
Especially if half of the remaining 10% is Clippy.
Unless Bill Gates has a really, really big mattress that it's all stuffed under.:)
Actually, I remember a/. article about the software they designed to manage their investments. I'm too lazy to look it up, but I do know that all that money is being re-invested (aside from the 5% that goes straight into Bill's Evil Moon Base).
A similar thing happens when regular people put money into a bank. The bank doesn't put the money into a small box with your name on it. It lends it out to others as loans, and a portion of the profit is used to pay you interest. So the bank never has enough money on hand to cover a massive withdrawl, which is where FDIC insurance comes in.
Britannica pretends to be the final word on any subject. When you open The Encyclopedia Britannica, your nose is seduced by the aroma of heavy parchment, while the touch of a rich leather binding whispers, "Trust me. Trusssst me." In a bleating, sheeplike manner, you set aside any skepticism you may have for written communication. This is The Encyclopedia Britannica, and the gilded edging of each page reminds you that its words are True.
Wikipedia makes no pretense of authoritativeness. The simple fact that every page on the site has a "Edit this page" button should be encouragement for the reader to think critically about the information being presented.
Wikipedia forces me to read it as I should read everything. Even if Britannica is less error-riddled, I greatly prefer Wikipedia.
I've been a big fan of Wikipedia for a while now, and I'm thoroughly impressed with the quality that comes about when a bunch of random, self-selected people want to share what they know.
I'm as amused about the "Microsoft, age 25, found dead at its Redmond Campus" story that touched off this debate. Microsoft's death has been predicted at least four times a year since I started reading/. back in 1999.
But it's one thing for a company to turn on a dime and embrace "the Internet"; Open source is a whole 'nuther animal. I don't believe the Internet feat shows near the flexibility it would take in order for them to embrace something like open source, which is almost precisely antithetical to their historical business practices.
I see Microsoft continuing to play the game according to the old rules, and living or dying according to their success with the old stratagems. I do believe they have a lot of wiggle room without fundamentally parting with the proprietary code/proprietary file format/single-company-does-everything solution. But I would wager that you will not see Microsoft open up a single product until their desktop share drops below 50%.
None of the evidence you've pointed to is direct or conclusive. Some of it is just plain wrong.
* That we exist. For motion to exist there must be a prime mover.
First and foremost, it is unreasonable to take everyday experience and try to impose the conclusions derived from that limited experience on the universe as a whole.
For example, common sense tells us that time flows at a constant rate, and things happen in a specific, unambiguous order. But the Theory of Special Relativity wreaks havoc with day-to-day experience.
You claim that all effects must have a cause, thus implying a chain of causality leading back to a single source. That's the same sort of appeal to common sense that informs the general belief that we should be able to measure both the position and the velocity of something to an arbitrary level of precision at the same time.
This "evidence" isn't an appeal to a well-understood fact about the universe; it's an appeal to an assumption that many people make about the universe.
* The sophistication of life and nature.
To paraphrase and summarize Richard Dawkins: The incredible complexity of life is something that requires an explanation. Evolution via natural selection is that explanation.
If you want to believe that God directed evolution, you may have faith in that idea. But it's a far cry from actual evidence for the proposition. If you want to believe that evolution never happened, then you are simply wrong, and I'm too lazy to educate you on the matter.
* Beauty and ugliness.
Both are simple human perceptions. Actually, they're very complex. But you must first explain how certain things tickle our senses to produce these perceptions, and only then can that explanation be used as evidence for a given worldview.
The mere existence of beauty and ugliness are brute facts requiring an explanation. You must show not only that your theory of a God-driven universe fully explains these perceptions, but also that your theory produces testable conclusions about them.
* Serendipidous events that often determine our situation in life.
You can collect a vast, vast library of anecdotes, but the plural of anecdote is not "data." People notice when unusual things happen, especially when those unusual events can be made to conform to their worldview. Until you can find a clever way to factor out this selectivity, all this talk of serendipity is worthless as evidence.
Faith requires that we assume a particular belief without the benefit of detailed, verified proof often because the subject is too complex, or simply does not lend itself to the scientific method.
The body of knowledge that constitutes our scientific understanding of the world is far too large to fit in any one brain, but science hasn't thrown up its hands and said, "You have to have faith." "Too complex" is just a cop-out.
With respect to environmentalism, in particular global warming believers, in many respects, it is more of a faith than a science. You see to truly be scientific, it requires that an assertion be proven through controled experimentation. And I'm not aware of a planet size lab that would give science the ability to even begin to perform what would be true scientific work.
Okay, this is wrong on a couple of levels. Scientific assertions are never "proven" per se. They simply survive numerous experiments to try and disprove them. The "truth" of a given assertion is never 100%, even if an experiment has been successfully run millions of times.
This leads to my second point: some experiments are very cheap to replicate, while others are very expensive. It would be prohibitively expensive to create a precise replica of Earth, tweak a few variab
Why is that, precisely? What makes "faith" such a special way of knowing things that common reason no longer applies to it?
The answer is, nothing. "Faith" is simply belief in a proposition which is not commensurate with the evidence. It makes no sense to have faith in a proposition when there is ample evidence that the proposition is true.
When someone says, "I believe X," and their response to a request for evidence is "I have faith," they've merely restated the original point: They believe X.
I have to agree with the grandparent post here: If people were more inclined towards reason and the scientific method, they would not believe things only insofar as the evidence justifies such belief. Since most religious people will admit that there is no direct evidence for God, belief in God would decline drastically.
I've seen cons that I would definitely fall for. For example, last year the manager of a respected local title company started pocketing the money of people who were using the company in order to arrange financing on real estate. Made several million in a few days, then fled, leaving the customers in the very uncomfortable state of totally broke.
I feel sorry for those people. I don't feel sorry for this guy. The difference is, no amount of due diligence would have warned the real estate buyers that the title company was going to turn on them. In this guy's case, even a small amount of investigation would have saved him. He failed to do it because he simply wanted it to be true.
I hope they catch the scammer, and that the guy sees some of his retirement again. But he deserves to learn a hard lesson, and the fact that he doesn't appear to be learning doesn't tweak my sympathy any.
Linux already does OpenGL very well, and OpenGL is very competitive with Direct3D.
DirectX isn't merely 3D graphics. It's everything you need to create a game, including sound, joystick and keyboard inputs, network play, etc. SDL is an attempt to group the same sort of functionality into a single, easy-on-developers library. My impressions are that it's really good, but still an imperfect substitute for DirectX.
But even if SDL and OpenGL were superior, the Linux world would still be locked out of DirectX games. Microsoft has made it seductively easy to publish games based on their proprietary platform, and very few game developers are going to trade it in for the cross-platform goodness of SDL.
Actually, the Emacs thing wouldn't be too difficult, so long as you defined the.el files as something outside the codebase. I think it would mostly be a matter of writing your own Lisp interpreter. A lot of other stuff would just fall into place.
I think they're just looking for ways to woo those who use Linux for pragmatic, rather than ideological reasons. Winning back the trust of those who truly believe in "free as in speech" would require the sort of mindset change that I don't believe Microsoft is capable of at the moment.
Sure, IBM got back into most of our good graces after decades of misbehavior, but only after spending a good deal of time in the corner, thinking about what it had done.
15. List the top one or two possible improvements that you would like to see made to Windows.
The surveyor might want to put a little note at the top of this survey, pointing out that Javascript must be enabled for the form to work properly.
From a technical standpoint, I would advise Microsoft to continue working towards greater reliability and security.
But even if Windows leapfrogged far ahead of Linux in both those areas, I wouldn't switch. As I answered earlier in the survey, I don't trust Microsoft. I don't trust their business practices. I don't trust them to be open and honest about what is going on inside my computer. I don't trust them to do anything other than find ways to derive the maximum revenue from me personally.
It's nothing personal. Give Sun or IBM the same sort of complete control over 95% of the desktops out there, and the situation wouldn't be significantly altered. The thing is, Microsoft is forced to reconcile two orthogonal goals: Doing what is best for the users of Microsoft products, and doing what is best for their own bottom line.
They don't know me, and they don't know what is best for me or any other individual. With Linux, I can choose exactly what my computer does, to the extent that my own computer skills will allow. Under the Microsoft paradigm, I can't tinker. I can't experiment. I might be able to study the source under their Shared-Source license if I meet certain requirements, but I can't make improvements. Hell, the rumor mill says that even suggesting improvements can be an ordeal [I can't say I have firsthand experience].
I trust Linux and Open Source because I don't have to worry about other agendas. This isn't because everyone involved is agenda free, but because the process is transparent and no one agenda can dominate.
The big fixes cannot be made to Windows; they must be performed on Microsoft itself. They must stop trying to take over every market, eliminate every competitor, and control the direction of an entire industry. If they open their file formats, become more responsive to reports of security threats, and begin supporting open standards, they'll find they have a huge role in the future of computing.
More likely, I believe they'll stick with the same strategy that put them on top: Crush the competition, embrace/extend/extinguish any good ideas that come along, and do whatever it takes to "maximize shareholder value." If that's the case, I'll continue supporting Linux with my time and dollars, and watch as the world rejects their demand for total control.
16. List the top one or two improvements that you would like to see made to Linux.
More vendor support for hardware. Open source drivers often have to be written blindly because the manufacturer doesn't care to support it.
More application and game support. Especially game support. For example, Microsoft has Windows/DirectX, which is certainly a powerful game development platform. Unfortunately, we're never going to see DirectX ported to Linux, and so long as game developers target only that framework, I think Linux will have to be content with a few crappy ports long after the original.
Linux isn't without its problems. However, the biggest ones that I've mentioned aren't a problem with Linux per se, but with how others choose not to support it.
Look at it from a business perspective. You want to create an application. Under Gnome/GTK, the choice is as follows: a) Make it GPL. b) Keep it proprietary. Under KDE/Qt, the choice is: a) Make it GPL. b) Pay a (pretty reasonable) license fee to Trolltech to make it proprietary.
Now if--as some have argued--Qt is really superior to GTK, then some larger companies would probably rather have the second choice. But for many GPL-skittish companies, ESR seems to figure that the licensing costs will be a deal-breaker, and impede adoption of Linux overall.
You claim that this reasoning implies that the distro should be BSD-based. I have absolutely no idea where you're coming from there. He's not trying to "discourage the use of GPL'ed code," merely keep potential users from being pushed into it.
As I understand it, KDE is able to run Gnome apps by calling the GTK libraries, while Gnome can call Qt libraries. So even if they don't install the KDE desktop, it might be possible for UserLinux to include enough libraries to get the apps working.
Also, in a business environment, Joe User shouldn't be installing his own software anyways. So I would hardly call this a "showstopper."
Evidence: You're surprised that Slashdot would draw its readers into a Gnome/KDE flame war.
Conclusion: You, sir, must be new here.
BTW, there's absolutely nothing wrong with ripping off the Debian project. Knoppix did it. SuSE did it. I think both Lycoris and Lindows did. As for ESR (Eric S. Raymond), he's been hailed as the great mainstreamer of Open Source, and derided as a glory hound and a libertarian gun-nut. It's up to you and Google to decide, but for better or for worse, he's something of a mainstay in the Linux world. So yes, you do have to know who he is.
That's a good idea! Note to Indian coder types: Start saving all the money you can so you can start your own company. Trust me, within five years your job will be outsourced to Haiti or Madagascar, because our multimillionaire CEOs have decided that paying you $4000/year USD is too large a burden on their wealthy shareholders.
Also, invest in your parent company. That way, when they drive up stock prices by announcing your outsourcing, you can cash in.*
Seriously, take advantage of this while you can. If these corporate types have so little loyalty to their own people, imagine how loyal they are to you.
[I wish there was a +1, Drunken, incoherent rant]
* Actually, this is bad advice. It's generally a bad idea to invest exclusively in the company that cuts you a paycheck. If things go bad, you take a double whammy because you're not only out of a job, your investments are in the toilet as well.
Slashdot Mirror
As one of the most groupthunk people I know, I have to disagree with you on a couple of points.
/.ers will disagree with that, but I think that nails down the beliefs of the majority.
/., and that's often a bad thing, I don't see that any of the things you've pointed out rise to the level of "unsayable", even within the confines of Slashdot.
Copyright isn't evil. Copyright is an important guarantor of a creator's rights. The whole Linux thing wouldn't be possible without copyright protection. A few
Nevertheless, the current copyright system is too heavily biased towards creators, at the expense of the public and the public domain, and the situation is only getting worse with the recent copyright extension and the DMCA.
It appears obvious to me that the SCO lawsuit is utterly without merit. Obviously, everyone else here thinks so as well (probably even you). Now, there are a few reasons that such a consensus would emerge. The proponents of the SCO suit are being silenced, moderated to oblivion, or otherwise rendered incapable of presenting their side of the argument. Another is that nobody is interested in defending SCO on this forum, where Linux zealotry renders us all incapable of seeing the truth. Finally, SCO supporters may simply not have any reasonable arguments in their defense.
I've also seen a small minority of posts that coherently criticize Linux as a desktop platform, and I don't have to browse at -1 to find them. So while there is a herd mentality here on
1) Never heard of that, and it sounds really implausible on the surface. Have a link?
2) I know a lot of people who are openly outspoken against the war on drugs, including myself. But genocide has a very specific meaning: The eradication of a selected group of people. Who is this group of people the war on drugs is intended to wipe out, and how is it being accomplished?
3) If Rush Limbaugh is saying it, and 20 million Americans are nodding their heads in unison, it's not really unsayable, is it?
Unpopular opinions aren't the same as heresies. Dig deeper. You have to have others.
If loss of your data means your life is ruined, or that your business will go under, or that thousands of hours of effort is wiped away, then I agree: This device is a terrible, terrible backup solution. You do not want to risk your data by having it all at the same location.
But if this is the case, you had better be willing--even eager--to fork over more than a few hundred bucks for your backup solution.
Why does it "not make sense" to have a simple, easy-to-use [assuming the review is accurate] local backup solution for a home user? 90% of home users are still on dial-up, so Internet-based backups are prohibitive. Most home users wouldn't know what to do with a hard drive slot if they included one. A DVD burner would up the price too much, and you'd probably rather have it on your main system anyways.
This device is targeted towards a certain group of people, and it sounds like it does an adequate job in that role. If a user's data is so critical, they need to be aware that they need off-site capabilities. Most home users simply don't.
You say you've had "a main system" destroyed by flood. Of course an off-site backup would have saved you, but unless it was a really severe flood, a mirror upstairs would have saved you just as well.
You then go on to say you've had countless hard drive failures. Which is exactly what I was thinking when I said "I thought so." 99% of data loss would be averted by having an on-site backup.
Nor does "having one half of a raid pair fail" mean data loss. If these are the only personal anecdotes you can come up with to back up your position, then you've failed. Even if this product can't do an off-site backup solution, it's still a reasonable solution for a home user, because it protects them from common causes of data loss.
Finally, because you've been gratuitously insulting: I'm a 26 y/o CS major, and I've probably played about ten hours of video games in the last year. Looking at your posting history, this is probably 1/10 the time you've spent whining about how crappy Slashdot is.
Question: How often have you had hard drives fail? Now, how often have you had computers destroyed by fire or flood?
/. puts up graphics card benchmarks? Or when they cover another point release of Red Hat?
/. or OSDN was paid to run this story, or that Extremetech was paid to review it, then just shut up and move on to a different story.
I thought so.
Quit whining. Not every story which features a commercial product constitutes an "advertisement." Do you complain when
Home backup solutions are interesting. Unless you can show that
Two words: Malpractice insurance.
This would drive the costs of coding way, way up, and presumably speed the movement of jobs towards India.
I just finished reading it last week. You would think that a ten to twelve year old book would seem crusty and outdated, but it's by far the most relevant book I've read in the last couple of years.
Actually, there were a few points where it seemed like he really should have thrown in some discussion of Java, and I slapped myself when I remembered that it predates the language.
"Best practices" isn't too bad a concept, though it tends to get abused a lot. "Best of breed" is the phrase that really makes my knuckles itch.
You would have to get permission to include any third party software. Permission to download isn't the same as permission to redistribute. Since they're free downloads anyways, it would be hard for the software creators to show that they were seriously harmed by your redistribution, but it's still copyright infringement.
On the other hand, if you created a script to FTP the latest version from their own websites, and then set them up, it might pass the legal sniff test.
It's a joke, man. Lighten up.
Yes, indeed, computers are cheaper than MS Office. I'm typing this on a 433 Celeron-based machine which I will probably be selling in the next few days for less than $100. It runs OpenOffice 1.1 just fine.
As you say, there are lots of people out there with all sorts of software loaded on their machines. But much of it is illegal, so there are hidden costs. People lose respect for copyright laws. The laws themselves become more draconian, in order to crack down on widespread piracy. New players like OO.o are shut out of the market because there is an entire segment of the population where "free as in beer" confers no competitive advantage.
In short, widespread piracy distorts copyright law and locks out competition. Despite the problems with copyright law, we do need it. If a "free as in legal" product can be had that has 90% of the functionality of MS Office, then it is irresponsible to use "closing the digital divide" as an excuse for encouraging piracy.
Especially if half of the remaining 10% is Clippy.
Unless Bill Gates has a really, really big mattress that it's all stuffed under. :)
/. article about the software they designed to manage their investments. I'm too lazy to look it up, but I do know that all that money is being re-invested (aside from the 5% that goes straight into Bill's Evil Moon Base).
Actually, I remember a
A similar thing happens when regular people put money into a bank. The bank doesn't put the money into a small box with your name on it. It lends it out to others as loans, and a portion of the profit is used to pay you interest. So the bank never has enough money on hand to cover a massive withdrawl, which is where FDIC insurance comes in.
Britannica pretends to be the final word on any subject. When you open The Encyclopedia Britannica, your nose is seduced by the aroma of heavy parchment, while the touch of a rich leather binding whispers, "Trust me. Trusssst me." In a bleating, sheeplike manner, you set aside any skepticism you may have for written communication. This is The Encyclopedia Britannica, and the gilded edging of each page reminds you that its words are True.
Wikipedia makes no pretense of authoritativeness. The simple fact that every page on the site has a "Edit this page" button should be encouragement for the reader to think critically about the information being presented.
Wikipedia forces me to read it as I should read everything. Even if Britannica is less error-riddled, I greatly prefer Wikipedia.
I've been a big fan of Wikipedia for a while now, and I'm thoroughly impressed with the quality that comes about when a bunch of random, self-selected people want to share what they know.
I'm as amused about the "Microsoft, age 25, found dead at its Redmond Campus" story that touched off this debate. Microsoft's death has been predicted at least four times a year since I started reading /. back in 1999.
But it's one thing for a company to turn on a dime and embrace "the Internet"; Open source is a whole 'nuther animal. I don't believe the Internet feat shows near the flexibility it would take in order for them to embrace something like open source, which is almost precisely antithetical to their historical business practices.
I see Microsoft continuing to play the game according to the old rules, and living or dying according to their success with the old stratagems. I do believe they have a lot of wiggle room without fundamentally parting with the proprietary code/proprietary file format/single-company-does-everything solution. But I would wager that you will not see Microsoft open up a single product until their desktop share drops below 50%.
First and foremost, it is unreasonable to take everyday experience and try to impose the conclusions derived from that limited experience on the universe as a whole.
For example, common sense tells us that time flows at a constant rate, and things happen in a specific, unambiguous order. But the Theory of Special Relativity wreaks havoc with day-to-day experience.
You claim that all effects must have a cause, thus implying a chain of causality leading back to a single source. That's the same sort of appeal to common sense that informs the general belief that we should be able to measure both the position and the velocity of something to an arbitrary level of precision at the same time.
This "evidence" isn't an appeal to a well-understood fact about the universe; it's an appeal to an assumption that many people make about the universe.
To paraphrase and summarize Richard Dawkins: The incredible complexity of life is something that requires an explanation. Evolution via natural selection is that explanation.
If you want to believe that God directed evolution, you may have faith in that idea. But it's a far cry from actual evidence for the proposition. If you want to believe that evolution never happened, then you are simply wrong, and I'm too lazy to educate you on the matter.
Both are simple human perceptions. Actually, they're very complex. But you must first explain how certain things tickle our senses to produce these perceptions, and only then can that explanation be used as evidence for a given worldview.
The mere existence of beauty and ugliness are brute facts requiring an explanation. You must show not only that your theory of a God-driven universe fully explains these perceptions, but also that your theory produces testable conclusions about them.
You can collect a vast, vast library of anecdotes, but the plural of anecdote is not "data." People notice when unusual things happen, especially when those unusual events can be made to conform to their worldview. Until you can find a clever way to factor out this selectivity, all this talk of serendipity is worthless as evidence.
The body of knowledge that constitutes our scientific understanding of the world is far too large to fit in any one brain, but science hasn't thrown up its hands and said, "You have to have faith." "Too complex" is just a cop-out.
Okay, this is wrong on a couple of levels. Scientific assertions are never "proven" per se. They simply survive numerous experiments to try and disprove them. The "truth" of a given assertion is never 100%, even if an experiment has been successfully run millions of times.
This leads to my second point: some experiments are very cheap to replicate, while others are very expensive. It would be prohibitively expensive to create a precise replica of Earth, tweak a few variab
Why is that, precisely? What makes "faith" such a special way of knowing things that common reason no longer applies to it?
The answer is, nothing. "Faith" is simply belief in a proposition which is not commensurate with the evidence. It makes no sense to have faith in a proposition when there is ample evidence that the proposition is true.
When someone says, "I believe X," and their response to a request for evidence is "I have faith," they've merely restated the original point: They believe X.
I have to agree with the grandparent post here: If people were more inclined towards reason and the scientific method, they would not believe things only insofar as the evidence justifies such belief. Since most religious people will admit that there is no direct evidence for God, belief in God would decline drastically.
Too smart? Maybe not. Too paranoid? Definitely.
I've seen cons that I would definitely fall for. For example, last year the manager of a respected local title company started pocketing the money of people who were using the company in order to arrange financing on real estate. Made several million in a few days, then fled, leaving the customers in the very uncomfortable state of totally broke.
I feel sorry for those people. I don't feel sorry for this guy. The difference is, no amount of due diligence would have warned the real estate buyers that the title company was going to turn on them. In this guy's case, even a small amount of investigation would have saved him. He failed to do it because he simply wanted it to be true.
I hope they catch the scammer, and that the guy sees some of his retirement again. But he deserves to learn a hard lesson, and the fact that he doesn't appear to be learning doesn't tweak my sympathy any.
Linux already does OpenGL very well, and OpenGL is very competitive with Direct3D.
DirectX isn't merely 3D graphics. It's everything you need to create a game, including sound, joystick and keyboard inputs, network play, etc. SDL is an attempt to group the same sort of functionality into a single, easy-on-developers library. My impressions are that it's really good, but still an imperfect substitute for DirectX.
But even if SDL and OpenGL were superior, the Linux world would still be locked out of DirectX games. Microsoft has made it seductively easy to publish games based on their proprietary platform, and very few game developers are going to trade it in for the cross-platform goodness of SDL.
Actually, the Emacs thing wouldn't be too difficult, so long as you defined the .el files as something outside the codebase. I think it would mostly be a matter of writing your own Lisp interpreter. A lot of other stuff would just fall into place.
In a way, Emacs is beautifully designed.
I think they're just looking for ways to woo those who use Linux for pragmatic, rather than ideological reasons. Winning back the trust of those who truly believe in "free as in speech" would require the sort of mindset change that I don't believe Microsoft is capable of at the moment.
Sure, IBM got back into most of our good graces after decades of misbehavior, but only after spending a good deal of time in the corner, thinking about what it had done.
15. List the top one or two possible improvements that you would like to see made to Windows.
The surveyor might want to put a little note at the top of this survey, pointing out that Javascript must be enabled for the form to work properly.
From a technical standpoint, I would advise Microsoft to continue working towards greater reliability and security.
But even if Windows leapfrogged far ahead of Linux in both those areas, I wouldn't switch. As I answered earlier in the survey, I don't trust Microsoft. I don't trust their business practices. I don't trust them to be open and honest about what is going on inside my computer. I don't trust them to do anything other than find ways to derive the maximum revenue from me personally.
It's nothing personal. Give Sun or IBM the same sort of complete control over 95% of the desktops out there, and the situation wouldn't be significantly altered. The thing is, Microsoft is forced to reconcile two orthogonal goals: Doing what is best for the users of Microsoft products, and doing what is best for their own bottom line.
They don't know me, and they don't know what is best for me or any other individual. With Linux, I can choose exactly what my computer does, to the extent that my own computer skills will allow. Under the Microsoft paradigm, I can't tinker. I can't experiment. I might be able to study the source under their Shared-Source license if I meet certain requirements, but I can't make improvements. Hell, the rumor mill says that even suggesting improvements can be an ordeal [I can't say I have firsthand experience].
I trust Linux and Open Source because I don't have to worry about other agendas. This isn't because everyone involved is agenda free, but because the process is transparent and no one agenda can dominate.
The big fixes cannot be made to Windows; they must be performed on Microsoft itself. They must stop trying to take over every market, eliminate every competitor, and control the direction of an entire industry. If they open their file formats, become more responsive to reports of security threats, and begin supporting open standards, they'll find they have a huge role in the future of computing.
More likely, I believe they'll stick with the same strategy that put them on top: Crush the competition, embrace/extend/extinguish any good ideas that come along, and do whatever it takes to "maximize shareholder value." If that's the case, I'll continue supporting Linux with my time and dollars, and watch as the world rejects their demand for total control.
16. List the top one or two improvements that you would like to see made to Linux.
More vendor support for hardware. Open source drivers often have to be written blindly because the manufacturer doesn't care to support it.
More application and game support. Especially game support. For example, Microsoft has Windows/DirectX, which is certainly a powerful game development platform. Unfortunately, we're never going to see DirectX ported to Linux, and so long as game developers target only that framework, I think Linux will have to be content with a few crappy ports long after the original.
Linux isn't without its problems. However, the biggest ones that I've mentioned aren't a problem with Linux per se, but with how others choose not to support it.
Look at it from a business perspective. You want to create an application. Under Gnome/GTK, the choice is as follows: a) Make it GPL. b) Keep it proprietary. Under KDE/Qt, the choice is: a) Make it GPL. b) Pay a (pretty reasonable) license fee to Trolltech to make it proprietary.
Now if--as some have argued--Qt is really superior to GTK, then some larger companies would probably rather have the second choice. But for many GPL-skittish companies, ESR seems to figure that the licensing costs will be a deal-breaker, and impede adoption of Linux overall.
You claim that this reasoning implies that the distro should be BSD-based. I have absolutely no idea where you're coming from there. He's not trying to "discourage the use of GPL'ed code," merely keep potential users from being pushed into it.
As I understand it, KDE is able to run Gnome apps by calling the GTK libraries, while Gnome can call Qt libraries. So even if they don't install the KDE desktop, it might be possible for UserLinux to include enough libraries to get the apps working.
Also, in a business environment, Joe User shouldn't be installing his own software anyways. So I would hardly call this a "showstopper."
Evidence: You don't know who ESR is.
Evidence: You're surprised that Slashdot would draw its readers into a Gnome/KDE flame war.
Conclusion: You, sir, must be new here.
BTW, there's absolutely nothing wrong with ripping off the Debian project. Knoppix did it. SuSE did it. I think both Lycoris and Lindows did. As for ESR (Eric S. Raymond), he's been hailed as the great mainstreamer of Open Source, and derided as a glory hound and a libertarian gun-nut. It's up to you and Google to decide, but for better or for worse, he's something of a mainstay in the Linux world. So yes, you do have to know who he is.
That's a good idea! Note to Indian coder types: Start saving all the money you can so you can start your own company. Trust me, within five years your job will be outsourced to Haiti or Madagascar, because our multimillionaire CEOs have decided that paying you $4000/year USD is too large a burden on their wealthy shareholders.
Also, invest in your parent company. That way, when they drive up stock prices by announcing your outsourcing, you can cash in.*
Seriously, take advantage of this while you can. If these corporate types have so little loyalty to their own people, imagine how loyal they are to you.
[I wish there was a +1, Drunken, incoherent rant]
* Actually, this is bad advice. It's generally a bad idea to invest exclusively in the company that cuts you a paycheck. If things go bad, you take a double whammy because you're not only out of a job, your investments are in the toilet as well.
Congratulations. I've never seen a (-1, Interesting) before. /me goes to RTFA.