Mundie has been making a big deal of this over at http://www.siliconvalley.com/roundtable/
He is pretending that the (US) government, hence the US people, is funding research that includes writing code. These researchers are GPL'ing the code (he claims) and thereby taking away all its value (to Microsoft) and are thereby stealing it from the American people (big business).
This is pure FUD and has nothing to do with the GPL. When such research produces code, somebody owns it. If the researcher or his institution owns it, they can do what they like. If the gov't owns it, then it is illegal for the researcher to release it under the GPL. The question is who owns the code. Probably the institution does, and Mundie doesn't like that, but that has nothing to do with the GPL.
It is all anti-linux FUD. The "Round Table Discussion" (see above url) consists of the microsoft mouthpiece (Mundie), one careful, thoughtful OSS advocate (Bruce Perens), and bunch of nattering half-wits. (Feel free to mod this up, Bruce:-)
it's very difficult to push strategic choices down the throats of users, especially when cost is involved.
But you forget that there are lots of different purchasers of PCs and the cost/benefits are not the same for all of them.
I am typing this on a Dell computer, not because it was cheap or because I like Dell, but because my employer likes to buy computers from Dell. Being a well-established business with a reputation for good support is worth a lot of money.
If IBM is marketing a PPC-based linux PC, $1k either way won't make a difference compared to the reputation and connections of IBM when a business is looking to buy PCs.
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky...
plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please "research"
Seriously, one criterion used in assessing professors for tenure is whether they have written books. Almost all the undergraduate textbooks for a given topic are essentially identical, without a single unique idea. Why? Because when someone needs to write such a text he just regurgitates what he's already seen in other books. This is why the few original works, like the Feynman lectures on physics, are so valuable.
Evidence for this exists. In particular, Stephen Jay Gould (in an essay printed in Natural History magazine and reprinted in one of his books) noticed that certain examples of evolution were used over and over again, repeating the same errors. What really caught his eye was that eohippus was described as being "this size of a fox terrier" in every modern book that mentions it. He had a grad student look back in textbooks through this century and found that at first the eohippus was described as the size of a cat or a small dog or a fox. At some point the fox terrier description appeared and within a decade or so that was the only description given. Are students held to a higher standard than their professors?
BTW, I did a google search on "eohippus terrier" and the first hit was in French, "Ce petit ancêtre du cheval moderne...la taille d'un fox-terrier".
Metro-Goldwyn-Moskva buys movie rights for six million rubles, changing title to "The Eternal Triangle", with Ingrid Bergman playing part of hypotenuse
One year's class had 500 students, according to the article. Even if he spent 50 hours grading essays, Bllomfield would still only be spending 6 minutes per paper. How long would I spend working on a paper that the prof was going to look at for 3 or 4 minutes?
"Our goal is to offer the ability to search the entire 5-year archive by the end of next month"
That's not very good. Searches used to only take a minute or so.
On topic: I have found the information on bugs/oddities in the usenet archives to be absolutely necessary in getting programs set up and working over the years, especially at a site where there is no usenet access through the firewall (moronic policy).
DNA testing or keeping a DNA library does not mean making a complete genome sequence. There are particular traits that are looked for, which differ from test to test. The percentage of people with a given set of DNA characteristics is very small, but the number of people with given characteristics is large.
This means that if an eyewitness claims to have seen you at the location of a crime and your DNA matches a sample recovered there, it is overwhelmingly probable that you were there.
Now we get to the part regarding privacy. If a DNA sample taken from a crime scene is checked against a comprehensive database, there will almost certainly be many, many matches. As we have seen recently, once a prosecutor has decided someone is guilty, he doesn't let anything (like the truth) stand in his way. (For example, the case of Wen Ho Lee) So your DNA randomly matches a sample from a crime scene; the reality is that it will be your responsibility to get lawyers, go to court, etc. to prove your innocence. Let us hope you are not a member of certain ethnic groups when this happens.
It is worth emphasizing this, even though I see it mentioned once above.
Some versions of glibc have a threads problem causing The Lizard to hang while starting up. I had problems with glibc-2.1.3-17. Upgrade to glibc-2.1.3-21 and the problem goes away.
I used the aphrodite chrome when the modern was too ugly to look at. I think people don't realize how versatile moz is.
ObComplaint: It doesn't play well on 8-bit graphics. How do we do settings that were in.Xdefaults for Netscape? Like Netscape*maxImageColors
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't "NEXT step" trademarked? Steve Jobs may make /. delete you post.
You are right, of course. It is like naming the product kImJustAWannabe. Maybe they should call it kGimp? :-)
He is pretending that the (US) government, hence the US people, is funding research that includes writing code. These researchers are GPL'ing the code (he claims) and thereby taking away all its value (to Microsoft) and are thereby stealing it from the American people (big business).
This is pure FUD and has nothing to do with the GPL. When such research produces code, somebody owns it. If the researcher or his institution owns it, they can do what they like. If the gov't owns it, then it is illegal for the researcher to release it under the GPL. The question is who owns the code. Probably the institution does, and Mundie doesn't like that, but that has nothing to do with the GPL.
It is all anti-linux FUD. The "Round Table Discussion" (see above url) consists of the microsoft mouthpiece (Mundie), one careful, thoughtful OSS advocate (Bruce Perens), and bunch of nattering half-wits. (Feel free to mod this up, Bruce :-)
But you forget that there are lots of different purchasers of PCs and the cost/benefits are not the same for all of them.
I am typing this on a Dell computer, not because it was cheap or because I like Dell, but because my employer likes to buy computers from Dell. Being a well-established business with a reputation for good support is worth a lot of money.
If IBM is marketing a PPC-based linux PC, $1k either way won't make a difference compared to the reputation and connections of IBM when a business is looking to buy PCs.
plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please "research"
Seriously, one criterion used in assessing professors for tenure is whether they have written books. Almost all the undergraduate textbooks for a given topic are essentially identical, without a single unique idea. Why? Because when someone needs to write such a text he just regurgitates what he's already seen in other books. This is why the few original works, like the Feynman lectures on physics, are so valuable.
Evidence for this exists. In particular, Stephen Jay Gould (in an essay printed in Natural History magazine and reprinted in one of his books) noticed that certain examples of evolution were used over and over again, repeating the same errors. What really caught his eye was that eohippus was described as being "this size of a fox terrier" in every modern book that mentions it. He had a grad student look back in textbooks through this century and found that at first the eohippus was described as the size of a cat or a small dog or a fox. At some point the fox terrier description appeared and within a decade or so that was the only description given. Are students held to a higher standard than their professors?
BTW, I did a google search on "eohippus terrier" and the first hit was in French, "Ce petit ancêtre du cheval moderne...la taille d'un fox-terrier".
Metro-Goldwyn-Moskva buys movie rights for six million rubles, changing title to "The Eternal Triangle", with Ingrid Bergman playing part of hypotenuse
One year's class had 500 students, according to the article. Even if he spent 50 hours grading essays, Bllomfield would still only be spending 6 minutes per paper. How long would I spend working on a paper that the prof was going to look at for 3 or 4 minutes?
That's not very good. Searches used to only take a minute or so.
On topic: I have found the information on bugs/oddities in the usenet archives to be absolutely necessary in getting programs set up and working over the years, especially at a site where there is no usenet access through the firewall (moronic policy).
The first lady should be elected separately from the president.
Almost certainly Barbara Bush would have been re-elected as first lady in 1994. Think she could have kept Bill Clinton in line?
CC
This means that if an eyewitness claims to have seen you at the location of a crime and your DNA matches a sample recovered there, it is overwhelmingly probable that you were there.
Now we get to the part regarding privacy. If a DNA sample taken from a crime scene is checked against a comprehensive database, there will almost certainly be many, many matches. As we have seen recently, once a prosecutor has decided someone is guilty, he doesn't let anything (like the truth) stand in his way. (For example, the case of Wen Ho Lee) So your DNA randomly matches a sample from a crime scene; the reality is that it will be your responsibility to get lawyers, go to court, etc. to prove your innocence. Let us hope you are not a member of certain ethnic groups when this happens.
A national DNA registry would be bad.
CC
Some versions of glibc have a threads problem causing The Lizard to hang while starting up. I had problems with glibc-2.1.3-17. Upgrade to glibc-2.1.3-21 and the problem goes away.
I used the aphrodite chrome when the modern was too ugly to look at. I think people don't realize how versatile moz is.
ObComplaint: It doesn't play well on 8-bit graphics. How do we do settings that were in .Xdefaults for Netscape? Like Netscape*maxImageColors
CC