Every time I witness a debate between BSD and Linux fans, I reminded of the Star Trek episode where the Cheronians were a race of people who were black on one side and white on the other. One group claimed the other was inferior because they were black on the left side instead of the right.
"Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
I think it's proof that nothing significant is in the works. Just a bunch of companies trying bluff their way into a better stock price.
A real "killer" product would not be revealed until it was ready to be released. Why would they tip off their competitors?
I think your answer illustrates that what is now considered embedded and real-time, would not fit the traditional definitions.
Having incorrect timing or being unable to get enough memory is a product defect, not just an opportunity to display an error message.
Most of these systems don't use anything as sophisticated as a thread (many don't even use an OS) but when they do, most of the threads will be running 100% of the time. This doesn't leave much room for trading memory back and forth, so there's little value in allocating memory dynamically.
Many real-time systems can't use dynamic memory allocation because of its non-deterministic execution time. So I guess the GNU coding standards aren't suitable in those situations?
The point is that there are no absolute rules in SW.
Of course, lock-in is also possible with open-source software. Just because the source code is available, doesn't mean that users have the knowledge, desire, or money to make their own modifications if the leaders of the open source project take it in a direction they don't like.
So, the question for MS is what percentage of those additional servers were operated by potential IIS customers as opposed to individuals or organizations that simply wouldn't operate a site if the server wasn't free?
It's bit like the complaints from the record companies about how much money they lost to illegal downloading: the downloaders couldn't possibly afford to pay for all the music they download, so the actual losses are a lot smaller.
Interesting article, but it seems the GPL terms fail the license vs. contract test.
Fishing in someones else's pond and giving them 1/2 the fish you catch doesn't sound much different then saying you can distribute someone else's code and you give the community all of your source code linked to it.
I agree, we didn't go to war for WMDs. That was just the excuse.
We went to war because Bush realized he could get away with it in a post-9/11 environment. I hope he enjoyed using up his free pass, he isn't going to get another one.
So I guess a complete solution only included an Office Suite in the last few years.
It was only about 5 years ago when McNealy was saying he didn't understand why anyone would want to use a word processor. He was bragging about handing out white boards and markers to all his workers. That was back in his "Java Man" days.
Yes, too many of Sun's customers were running Windows on their Sun Workstations, so it's about time the Sun challenged them by installing Linux.
Seriously, StarOffice is really the only product that Sun has produced that competes directly with MS on the desktop.
The fact that they are still selling a non-Intel platform running a non-Windows-compatible OS just proves they're using the same failed strategy they been using for a decade to stop MS on the desktop.
The $100/employee offer sounds like the same sort of scam they had with the Java/Network computer. They never tell you the total cost including all the hardware you need to buy to make it work.
How does one willingly accept $25,250,000 without a trial, when one could potentially receive many times more. The lack of a viable case is suggested under such circumstances.
"The GPL is a license that grants you rights that you wouldn't otherwise have. If it "breaks-down", you're left with no rights."
Your thinking too much like a programmer. A court could find that the GPL is legal, illegal, or partially legal. That last option means that copyright infringement isn't a sure thing, even if the GPL doesn't survive intact.
"Even worse than arguing with management and not getting the time necessary to write a proper spec is getting the time to write the spec and then going to the programming team, asking for an estimate, and discovering that your senior programmers (10+ years experience) are unable to gauge how long it will take them to get the programming done. "
So essentially you believe the abstract claims of a book author more than you trust your own people. The complaints about programmers have been going on for years. Is it really likely that we are mostly incompetent or that our education is fatally flawed and all we need is a few simple rules to straighten us out?
Or is it more likely that we are no better or worse than any other workers and we perform fairly well under real-world conditions?
In my view, wishful thinking is human nature and the nature of management makes it more susceptible to that siren call then other roles. The fact is that managers probably have little power to move a deadline regardless of the accuracy of their people's time estimates.
Perhaps the time has come to drop the politically-correct scheduling phase, and just admit that we all know the due date and that has nothing to do with the amount of work required to get the job done.
"IBM's finally opened the patent portfolio. Boies must have known this was coming; he worked on the IBM anti-trust case for years. I wonder if he already has plans for dealing with this."
Perhaps he's considering lobbying the Justice Dept. to reopen the investigation of IBM. IBM may have a problem if they appear to be selective in their patent enforcement efforts. It would also be interesting to know what percentage of US software patents are held by IBM.
Not to be too picky, but by the time Corel owned WordPerfect (they were the third owner), the game was already over. It was essentially lost by owner #1, WordPerfect Corp.
Ironically, Corel made a ton of money from Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1 with their Corel-draw product. If they didn't already have an excellent grasp of the Windows API, I doubt that they would have been able to produce this product. The reason it was successful and WordPerfect was not was because Corel-draw fully embraced Windows and wasn't a half-hearted port like WordPerfect for Windows.
WordPerfect programmers weren't stupid. The problem was the management of WordPerfect corporation had a philosophy about word processing that went against GUIs. It took them a long time to even consider a menu system in their DOS version. They never wanted to do a Windows version and the quality of their first attempt showed it.
If it were all MS's fault, how come all the Apple Users aren't using a version of WordPerfect today?
I don't think IBM will do anything extreme. The memory of how close they came to being declared an illegal monopoly, still haunts them. Also consider that there's no shareholder value in a "bitch-slap" of SCO.
"In many ways a meta-analysis (evaluation of existing analyses) is actually more reliable than a single well designed study. No matter how well it is designed, any single study will have weaknesses -- they have a small number of subjects, the truths/lies are limited to a single domain, the time and location of the study has some unexpected influence on the results, etc."
Well that makes sense if each of the original studies is well designed, but if some of those studies are flawed then it's quite likely that the meta-analysis will be flawed as well. A better approach might be to evaluate each of the prior studies, determining their weaknesses and then design an experiment that avoids them.
"Again, the polygraph is a decent tool to determine if someone reacts unusually to some stimulus. Any assumptions beyond that may be unfounded."
Well, it's only advertised value is for detecting lies, so that's the only valid standard it should be evaluated on. If law enforcement wants to drop it because it's just a tool to "determine if someone reacts unusually to some stimulus" then other criteria could be applied.
My brief look at the report you cite suggests that the researchers didn't do any experiments on their own but rather relied on a number of older experiments performed by a variety of organizations (correct me if I'm wrong).
Here's my first crack at how such an experiment should be handled:
Subjects should be representative of the population at large.
The questions should be chosen such that the truthful answer is "yes" about 1/2 the time across the subject population.
The technician hooking up the subject, the questioner and the one retrieving the data are different people who never meet for the life of the study.
Those trying to "read" the result should have no information on the questions or any information about the subject the data comes from. Again, they are isolated from other team members. Multiple individuals perform the analysis.
The coorelation between the questions and analysis is performed by another group who are also isolated from the others.
I'm sure this isn't a complete list, but you get the idea. If they followed rules like these and got a mean accuracy > 90% I would be impressed. I think anything short of that would keep it in the novelty category.
"The real question is whether or not this increase in bloodflow is 100% always indicative of lying and nothing BUT lying."
Well, unless one believes God is responsible the answer to that question is very likely to be no. What is the survival value of such a feature and how did it evolve?
I have to say I'm a bit sketical of the neural recognition argument as well. Exactly how close can two images be to be considered different by the brain? Obviously most visual information from a crime scene has nothing to do with the crime.
It's very similar to the problems encountered with supervised learning in neural nets. You never know exactly what the net "thinks" is significant.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I witness a debate between BSD and Linux fans, I reminded of the Star Trek episode where the Cheronians were a race of people who were black on one side and white on the other. One group claimed the other was inferior because they were black on the left side instead of the right.
You keep using the prefix Mono. I do not think it means what you think it means.
If they spent 5 minutes browsing Slashdot they would realilze there is no Monoculture (unless it's Unix)
"Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
I think it's proof that nothing significant is in the works. Just a bunch of companies trying bluff their way into a better stock price.
A real "killer" product would not be revealed until it was ready to be released. Why would they tip off their competitors?
I think your answer illustrates that what is now considered embedded and real-time, would not fit the traditional definitions.
Having incorrect timing or being unable to get enough memory is a product defect, not just an opportunity to display an error message.
Most of these systems don't use anything as sophisticated as a thread (many don't even use an OS) but when they do, most of the threads will be running 100% of the time. This doesn't leave much room for trading memory back and forth, so there's little value in allocating memory dynamically.
Many real-time systems can't use dynamic memory allocation because of its non-deterministic execution time. So I guess the GNU coding standards aren't suitable in those situations?
The point is that there are no absolute rules in SW.
Of course, lock-in is also possible with open-source software. Just because the source code is available, doesn't mean that users have the knowledge, desire, or money to make their own modifications if the leaders of the open source project take it in a direction they don't like.
So, the question for MS is what percentage of those additional servers were operated by potential IIS customers as opposed to individuals or organizations that simply wouldn't operate a site if the server wasn't free?
It's bit like the complaints from the record companies about how much money they lost to illegal downloading: the downloaders couldn't possibly afford to pay for all the music they download, so the actual losses are a lot smaller.
Interesting article, but it seems the GPL terms fail the license vs. contract test.
Fishing in someones else's pond and giving them 1/2 the fish you catch doesn't sound much different then saying you can distribute someone else's code and you give the community all of your source code linked to it.
I agree, we didn't go to war for WMDs. That was just the excuse.
We went to war because Bush realized he could get away with it in a post-9/11 environment. I hope he enjoyed using up his free pass, he isn't going to get another one.
So I guess a complete solution only included an Office Suite in the last few years.
It was only about 5 years ago when McNealy was saying he didn't understand why anyone would want to use a word processor. He was bragging about handing out white boards and markers to all his workers. That was back in his "Java Man" days.
Yes, too many of Sun's customers were running Windows on their Sun Workstations, so it's about time the Sun challenged them by installing Linux.
Seriously, StarOffice is really the only product that Sun has produced that competes directly with MS on the desktop.
The fact that they are still selling a non-Intel platform running a non-Windows-compatible OS just proves they're using the same failed strategy they been using for a decade to stop MS on the desktop.
The $100/employee offer sounds like the same sort of scam they had with the Java/Network computer. They never tell you the total cost including all the hardware you need to buy to make it work.
Stop saying that!
How does one willingly accept $25,250,000 without a trial, when one could potentially receive many times more. The lack of a viable case is suggested under such circumstances.
"The GPL is a license that grants you rights that you wouldn't otherwise have. If it "breaks-down", you're left with no rights."
Your thinking too much like a programmer. A court could find that the GPL is legal, illegal, or partially legal. That last option means that copyright infringement isn't a sure thing, even if the GPL doesn't survive intact.
OK. So did your new knowledge result in accurate time estimates from your experienced programming staff?
"Even worse than arguing with management and not getting the time necessary to write a proper spec is getting the time to write the spec and then going to the programming team, asking for an estimate, and discovering that your senior programmers (10+ years experience) are unable to gauge how long it will take them to get the programming done. "
So essentially you believe the abstract claims of a book author more than you trust your own people. The complaints about programmers have been going on for years. Is it really likely that we are mostly incompetent or that our education is fatally flawed and all we need is a few simple rules to straighten us out?
Or is it more likely that we are no better or worse than any other workers and we perform fairly well under real-world conditions?
In my view, wishful thinking is human nature and the nature of management makes it more susceptible to that siren call then other roles. The fact is that managers probably have little power to move a deadline regardless of the accuracy of their people's time estimates.
Perhaps the time has come to drop the politically-correct scheduling phase, and just admit that we all know the due date and that has nothing to do with the amount of work required to get the job done.
Honesty is the ultimate discipline.
"IBM's finally opened the patent portfolio. Boies must have known this was coming; he worked on the IBM anti-trust case for years. I wonder if he already has plans for dealing with this."
Perhaps he's considering lobbying the Justice Dept. to reopen the investigation of IBM. IBM may have a problem if they appear to be selective in their patent enforcement efforts. It would also be interesting to know what percentage of US software patents are held by IBM.
Not to be too picky, but by the time Corel owned WordPerfect (they were the third owner), the game was already over. It was essentially lost by owner #1, WordPerfect Corp.
Ironically, Corel made a ton of money from Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1 with their Corel-draw product. If they didn't already have an excellent grasp of the Windows API, I doubt that they would have been able to produce this product. The reason it was successful and WordPerfect was not was because Corel-draw fully embraced Windows and wasn't a half-hearted port like WordPerfect for Windows.
WordPerfect programmers weren't stupid. The problem was the management of WordPerfect corporation had a philosophy about word processing that went against GUIs. It took them a long time to even consider a menu system in their DOS version. They never wanted to do a Windows version and the quality of their first attempt showed it.
If it were all MS's fault, how come all the Apple Users aren't using a version of WordPerfect today?
I don't think IBM will do anything extreme. The memory of how close they came to being declared an illegal monopoly, still haunts them. Also consider that there's no shareholder value in a "bitch-slap" of SCO.
Where else can you start a conversation on advances in surgery and end up arguing over the definition of winter?
"In many ways a meta-analysis (evaluation of existing analyses) is actually more reliable than a single well designed study. No matter how well it is designed, any single study will have weaknesses -- they have a small number of subjects, the truths/lies are limited to a single domain, the time and location of the study has some unexpected influence on the results, etc."
Well that makes sense if each of the original studies is well designed, but if some of those studies are flawed then it's quite likely that the meta-analysis will be flawed as well. A better approach might be to evaluate each of the prior studies, determining their weaknesses and then design an experiment that avoids them.
"Again, the polygraph is a decent tool to determine if someone reacts unusually to some stimulus. Any assumptions beyond that may be unfounded."
Well, it's only advertised value is for detecting lies, so that's the only valid standard it should be evaluated on. If law enforcement wants to drop it because it's just a tool to "determine if someone reacts unusually to some stimulus" then other criteria could be applied.
My brief look at the report you cite suggests that the researchers didn't do any experiments on their own but rather relied on a number of older experiments performed by a variety of organizations (correct me if I'm wrong).
Here's my first crack at how such an experiment should be handled:
Subjects should be representative of the population at large.
The questions should be chosen such that the truthful answer is "yes" about 1/2 the time across the subject population.
The technician hooking up the subject, the questioner and the one retrieving the data are different people who never meet for the life of the study.
Those trying to "read" the result should have no information on the questions or any information about the subject the data comes from. Again, they are isolated from other team members. Multiple individuals perform the analysis.
The coorelation between the questions and analysis is performed by another group who are also isolated from the others.
I'm sure this isn't a complete list, but you get the idea. If they followed rules like these and got a mean accuracy > 90% I would be impressed. I think anything short of that would keep it in the novelty category.
"The real question is whether or not this increase in bloodflow is 100% always indicative of lying and nothing BUT lying."
Well, unless one believes God is responsible the answer to that question is very likely to be no. What is the survival value of such a feature and how did it evolve?
I have to say I'm a bit sketical of the neural recognition argument as well. Exactly how close can two images be to be considered different by the brain? Obviously most visual information from a crime scene has nothing to do with the crime.
It's very similar to the problems encountered with supervised learning in neural nets. You never know exactly what the net "thinks" is significant.
Make that "BP" instead of "PB".