What is to stop the OS folks from sharing their secret API's with the APPS company?
The shareholders. If there were a breakup in this case, there would presumably be some sort of restrictions on owning percentages of stock in each new company. If the Windosoft people gave the Offisoft people some secret APIs, the only benefit would be to those people who owned both Windosoft and Offisoft.
First of all, I think that there should be some effort required to vote. As much as I sometimes worry about "the other side" winning a given vote, it scares me even more that some apathetic dork might just randomly pick a choice on a ballot he doesn't really care about and hasn't even made a pretense of informing himself about. If "the other side" actually has more supporters, fine, I'll grump off into the corner and hope to do better in the next election. But if someone wins based on convincing enough lazy people to vote for something they don't know a thing about, well, that's just downright frightening.
But even more frightening is the notion of duress at the polls. At a physical poll, they do not permit multiple people to be in the same polling booth. Period. What this means is, that no matter how much someone pays you and no matter what sort of extortion they hold over your head, they can't buy your vote because they can't know for sure how you voted. There is this danger with absentee balloting, but as long as that is only granted in "special cases", it isn't as much of a worry. With internet voting? The mind reels at the sort of thing that could happen. Hey you, wanna make $500? Come into this shop and click these buttons. Easy! Hey you, peon, you're not getting a raise this year unless you come in here and vote for my candidate. Hey honey, come into the family room, you do agree with me on who to vote for, right?
I have several problems with this, at least as reported. Here are a few...
At the top of the article, it says, "researchers note that it is the elderly and those with bad memories who appear to have the most to gain from eating such foods." But when they cite the methodology, it turns out that only elderly people were tested! Who knows whether this would have a better or worse effect on those younger than 60?
Mr. Kaplan is quoted as saying that "eating potatoes or rice or pasta is really no different than having sugar." Which, if I recall my high school biology at all, is not quite true---if you just 'had sugar', it is in its simple form, and can give you the well-known 'sugar rush', but potatoes et al. have complex carbohydrates which take a bit longer to be broken down by your digestive system. This is why athletes often go for lots of starchy foods the night before a big meet.
Farther down, they state that the gains (of 37% and 32%) are as compared to the postplacebo results. There should have been at least one day in the study where the methodology was the same except no food or drink was given, to determine the psychological effect of the placebo.
Even the placebo is of dubious value; if they used e.g. water, then the test subject would be able to tell (and know that it was the placebo), while if it were anything else, there might be something else in it to explain the difference in memory. Ideally the control-placebo would have been something like mashed potatoes but without glucose (or whatever), but they could have faked it if they had a whole variety of different foods with little or no glucose to compare against. (No matter what, though, you'll have the problem of the subjects recognising the food!)
Basically, as far as I can tell, this study is a crock and this guy shouldn't get his doctorate.:P
Much as I like Linux I haven't found any email program that can meet my needs as well as MS Outlook.
I really can't argue against that statement, because only you can say what your needs are. It appears that your needs involve using a mouse; as such, it seems unlikely that text-based MUAs like mutt aren't going to serve them. But I do feel the need to point up some mutt features...
I have over 400MB of email in Outlook. It's organized in a multi-level tree of mail folders that are displayed on screen. I have icons in the Outlook bar that take me to frequently used folders with a single click.
In mutt, you can specify a list of mailboxes, and when changing between them it only takes a few keypresses.
Clicking on a column heading in the message list sorts by that column.
You can resort the message lists (both primary and secondary sort criteria) with two keypresses.
When I open a message it opens in a new window which I can leave open while I read other email. I do this all the time when I'm not ready to deal with a message right away. Fair enough, mutt can't open new windows since it's limited to the terminal it started in. As a matter of personal curiosity, though, why are you opening them if you're not going to do anything with them? If you just want to make sure to come back to them, there are relevant mutt commands, such as marking a message important, or re-marking it as new.
With Outlook I can cntrl-click on many different messages and drag them to a folder.
In mutt, one would 't'ag all the relevant messages, and then ';s'ave them to a folder.
Certainly I could spend my time reading documentation... and figure out work arounds for most of the things Outlook does "out of the box", but I just don't have the time.
It's absolutely reasonable to stick with an interface because that's what you're used to, but you should at least say that's what you're doing. Most of the features you tout, mutt does have "out of the box", although you don't already know how to do them. But then, did you already know how to run Outlook before you started using it?
A PROFESSIONAL index will include controlling the list of keywords so you will know how to find something. There is no way this can be done on the web.
What? Whatever for? I always found it the hugest pain to have to look through the big index (library of congress? I forget who put it out) to find exactly how I needed to phrase my query in order to find it in a book. And who here hasn't gone through the pain of looking through the Yellow Pages (or local equivalent) trying to find one item, and having to reword it three times before you find it? It's like trying to find a word in a foreign language, and you have a dictionary that goes from the foreign lang to English but not back again.
The greatest thing about the net is that hyperlinking and such is easy. There's no reason we have to wear the straitjacket of a predefined subject list. Not here.
"This technology is so poorly understood, they could actually hurt themselves by doing it." This is a good cautionary note, but again doesn't mean outright avoidance. If it does indeed turn out that GE actually weakens people (ie, causes degenerative damage, shortens lifespans, etc) then they took a risk that failed, so be it.
The problem is, the damage might not be realised until it's too late. I'm thinking specifically of people breeding out "bad" traits, like left-handedness, or homosexuality, or any number of other things that quite a lot of people consider either value-neutral or good. "But wait," you say, "there are *some* things that we can all agree are bad." Can we? And if we do, does that mean we're right? It's been shown for several diseases and syndromes that they actually help in some cases; sickle-cell anemia, prominent in a number of African-derived populations, helps combat malaria, and Tay-Sachs, found in Ashkenazi Jewish populations, combats against---iirc---tuberculosis. Granted, we now have (to some extent) other ways of dealing with these diseases in modern times, but that's not to say that there isn't something out there that *isn't* preventable by modern medicine, that *is* combatted by some "obviously bad" trait (!) that we would tend to breed out with GE.
Diversity of the genome is a *good* thing. GEing our children will do nothing to make the genome more diverse, and everything to make it conform to some "ideal" that might not be.
Basically with the old money system (base 12) you could divide a bill for a meal between multiple numbers of people easily. with Metric Base 10 your are all left fighting over who ordered the extra rolls.:)
This is a very real concern, and one of the reasons I prefer the US system; it makes explicit the notion that for everyday use people do not have the same measurement needs as for scientific use; and in fact that the two conflict. For everyday measurements, humans tend much more to think in terms of reference measurements and small multiples and divisors thereof. Like a half, a third, a fourth. When we need to think about big numbers of a unit, we convert into a mix of units anyway; there's good reason that nobody goes around saying that they're 74 inches tall---they'd say they're 6 foot 2, from which we mentally think ''two inches over six feet''. This may come as a slight surprise, but for someone who knows metric natively, if they're told someone is 179 centimeters tall, they don't think ''hmm, that's about... one, two... 179 cm. Ok.'' Rather, they think more along the lines of ''ok that's about 4 cm over 175 cm'', or ''1 cm below 180'' or whatever their own mental landmark is.
The other big advantage lies not so much in the system itself as in how it's used. This is the ''better accuracy'' of the US system that you occasionally hear about; a misnomer, because metric could be used this way, it just isn't. That is, it's easier to specify my precision more precisely (got that?) if I say 3/8 or 15/32; with metric you've just got the millimetre. One could say two lines were 18 and 3/4 centimetres apart, which would implicitly mean "187.5 +- 1.25 mm"---yuck---but nobody does. They'll just say "187 mm" or "188 mm", nevermind that the lines themselves are each a millimeter wide; for scientists, it's fine to specify tolerances, but it's way cumbersome for everyday use.
Overall, I have no fundamental objections to using the metric system units. They would swoop in and fill the various niches that the US system does; for small lengths there's the centimetre instead of the inch, for bigger lengths there's the metre instead of the foot and the yard. For really big lengths there's the kilometre instead of the mile. Major temperature swings will be fives of Celsius instead of tens of Fahrenheit. The litre will replace the cup, the pint, the quart, and the gallon. People would adapt to these new reference measurements easily. What I think is silly is the faux-precision most people seem to adopt when using metric... when I'm cooking, I dump a cup of water into the mix, and I'd be perfectly happy to dump a quarter-litre in; but it's ludicrous to talk about dumping "250 millilitres" (or even better, "237 millilitres") in, as if it would affect the recipe if I dumped in 249 or 252---as if I could or would even bother to measure it that precisely. It is this madness that I hope (futilely, I suppose) to avoid when and if the US ever converts to metric.
Even if it is a hoax, there are a few interesting points. Let me play devil's advocate for a moment, and assume it's not. There's some silly, funny stuff (e.g. the hex mode chmod:), but I know quite a few people who would consider the following to be fairly legitimate, useful services:
a bookmark list of Christian sites
Christian holidays built into cal(1)
proxy server with subscription to URL list service
hierarchical user structure (i.e. "parent" account can access "child" account) (this in particular is a feature that many parents would require in a realistic multi-user OS in the home!)
I mean, after all, why not bundle these things together? Is there any such service already existing for Linux? I'm sure there is for WinX if not for the Mac. While I personally wouldn't be using it, I'd be thrilled if something vaguely along these lines marketed itself as a service to the more (small o) orthodox Christians who might be considering Linux. I mean, like it or not, Christians of strong faith make up a huge percentage of the US population; we have the largest number of Sunday-church-attenders per capita in the world.
So basically, I guess I'm just saying, don't automatically assume it's a hoax. Is it so stunning that a geek could be Christian? I mean, really. And the same people who would find the above services useful are perfectly capable of being amused by chmod's extra functionality, or the occasional amusing extra link to kill---I remember in my early UNIX-using days getting the biggest kick out of setting up funny symlinks. Christians can have a sense of humour, too.:)
Oh, and as for the CSPL: why not? They won't be relicensing old code, just new code; and they would just be taking advantage of the same viral properties as the GPL folks are (though to different ends).
Final note: nothing in the entire feature list indicated that there would be any features disabled. The extra features of the distribution could be used or not used according to the wishes of the owner. They wouldn't even remove hardly anything---just a couple games, which of course could be re-downloaded if desired. A hoax this may well be, but it is neither obvious nor provable from the information they've given on the website.
She was definitely a great writer, and a strong voice that stood up for equality and tolerance decades before such sentiments became mainstream. She's left us the legacy of her books, though, for which we can be thankful. And...
As I think about it, she made a very geeky move a few years back. She declared that in the event of her death, she would will the Darkover series to Mercedes Lackey (another great author, and one who got her start in MZB's short story anthologies). I never thought about the connection until just now, but in many ways her Darkover series was a distant relative of the OSS movement: anyone was and is free to write any stories they want, of course; but the especially good ones she would collect and publish in anthologies along with some of her own short stories and of course the novels. These short stories are as much a part of the Darkover series as anything MZB herself wrote, and many of them were written by authors known in the field (e.g. Diane Duane), some by authors that later became known in the field (e.g. Mercedes Lackey). And now that she can no longer oversee the series, she has passed the baton to someone who could.
A visionary in more ways than one, it seems. She will be missed...
Why would Apple not want the pictures on the site? (In case you haven't checked, all the pictures on AppleInsider have been replaced by gifs which read "This image has been removed at Apple Legal's Demand".:P) Seems silly to me---I mean, it's good publicity, no?
The idea of the Windows registry is actually a pretty good one. It just went horribly wrong in storing the configurations for everything in one file. If anything happens to that file, you're SOL. (Have later Windows versions fixed this to any degree?) But it got a few things right: it's a centralised location to store your configuration info, and it can be edited by hand if necessary (though because of the aforementioned corruption problem, this is not recommended for the faint of heart!).
Applying this idea to linux would be fairly easy. Just have a directory ~/.config that contained lots of files in XML format for configuring the systems. By having a separate config file for each program (and perhaps several for some of them!), you mostly avert the corruption problem. There is still the issue of a namespace---if you and I both make a program that wants a "foorc.xml" file, who wins? But there we could take a page from Sun's java convention: until we write a package that gets "blessed" (presumably by an RFC?), we store our configs in a reverse-domain hierarchy. Thus config files for packages I wrote would be in $HOME/.config/edu/brown/cs/dpb/, or something similar. If people want more convenient access, they (or even I) could install a symlink directly into ~/.config---if that got clobbered with another symlink, data wouldn't be lost.
All in all, having a "Registry" would be a very good idea. Don't let the bad micros~1 implementation scare you off from a fundamentally good idea.
IMHO it's not the fact that Corel's distro is beta that lets them do this; it is the manner in which it is (not) distributed. That is, if they were completely non-selective as to whom they gave the "beta" to, then yes, this act would violate the letter and spirit of the GPL, no question, even if they called it "beta" and said they weren't "releasing" it.
But if they are highly selective about who will get access; and those people are actually in some meaningful sense Corel employees (or rather, contractors); and the statement and intent are clearly there to perform a full, open release after some finite amount of time; then I think that they are certainly following the spirit of the GPL, and a strong case could be made that they are following the letter as well.
It could be done the other way around too of course. Why not have english-students in non-english speaking countries translate the docs, or have them review the translation that were done in an english-speaking country.
This is key. As someone who is currently learning French, I would be happy to donate some time towards translating some sort of documentation (any sort) into French. But I don't have any confidence in my ability to write good, colloquial French. On the other hand, I do trust in the ability of a native French-speaker who knows only a bit of English to write good, colloquial French.
What we need is some sort of pairing between native speakers of both the source and destination language, each able to speak the other to some degree. Each one can work on the translation; the native speaker of the source language can explain nasty idioms in the existing docs, while the native speaker of the destination language can skim over and smooth out the rough edges in the docs translated by the other person. Great translations without having to find the somewhat rarer perfectly bilingual person. The best of both worlds, n'est-ce pas?
The link given was bogus (I think J05H was trying to make it pop up in a new window and/. mangled the link tag). The correct link is here (in France), with a French version pour les francophones, and a US mirror for those of us on this side of the pond.
Which means it's even a bigger security hole than it would be otherwise. Or am I just way off here?
No, you're absolutely right. But, there are a few solutions. First, they could do something involving the serial number on the CD it came on; then, the "now you're ready to be root" section of the manual can say how to use it. Or, you could cast root as something other than an ordinary account, e.g. with a prompt sequence like: "What do you want your username to be? And its password? Now, make up a super-secret emergency password, different from the first one, and type it here:..." There are a lot of ways you could get a root password unique to the machine such that the "dumb user" doesn't really know what to do with it until they are no longer just a dumb user.
I just had a conversation with my Dad last week about how pointless the Rio was---I mean, you only get a bit more music than you can fit on a CD, and you have to download a new set of music onto the Rio whenever you want to change it. "Why not," I said, "have a player that could play MP3s off of CD?" Et voilà! For my car, this is perfect, so I don't have to deal with packing the ten or so CDs I want to listen to (which I'll have to listen to twice on a 1000-mile trip), I can just pack one MP3-CD per day!
For that matter, I may hold off a bit on getting a new stereo. I had gotten tired of my old one, which could only handle one CD, and had planned on getting a 5-CD changer; but if this Pine player is in the portable market, it's not long before an equivalent thing makes it into the stereo market... it's like having a 10-CD changer, only cheaper, and you can randomise the playlist without listening to the player whirr and click as it changes the CD between each song.:)
1) Troll Tech makes QT/Windows free 2) New Killer Linux/QT App X is ported to windows 3) Everyone buys Windows to run Killer App X 4) More cash rolls in to Microsoft
There is a gaping flaw in your reasoning here. It lies in your third step, ``Everyone buys Windows to run Killer App X''. Setting aside for a moment the fact that the vast majority of computer users already have (access to) Windows, this statement still is not a logical deduction from the preceding two events. That is, if people learn about App X, and App X runs on Linux/QT and Windows/QT, there is no system-internal reason to choose Windows over Linux. So, a priori, one might expect half these people to go with Linux, and half with Windows.
Now let's return to reality. Most people have access to Windows these days. Many have access to Linux. When they hear about App X, they'll just get it for their system and install it. But if they use Windows, and they like App X, then that's one more thing they know will run on Linux, if they ever decide to switch. The more such things there are, the easier switching will become in their mind. And that's a Good Thing, because it promotes a true marketplace for OSes, rather than the current situation where your choice of OS is by necessity influenced by what you want to run on it.... Ideally, we could each choose an OS on its merits, knowing that we could run all the applications we'd want on it. And that should be the goal of the OSS movement, not a promotion of Linux. Linux can rise to the top on its own merits. We don't need to force people to use an OS just to get the cool apps---that's a Micros~1 tactic.
I wonder if this means the FBI might be in the market for some 'puter Savvy folks like us? And would accepting a job like that be selling out? Is it ethical to assist in the prevention of certain 'crimes' if you don't believe they are crimes?
Given the current situation, even if you disagree with the laws it might not be a bad idea to join the FBI in enforcing them. Right now, people get stuck in limbo for years waiting to get their hardware back. If the computer forensics team at the FBI were increased, then the innocent people would get their stuff back a lot sooner, and the guilty (who would be convicted anyway) would be pretty much unaffected (they might go to prison a little sooner, but at least they'd know what was happening).
Of course, if you do in fact disagree with the laws, then it might likewise be a good idea to do something like this, in order to "speak from experience" that people in X situation are unlikely to (cause|have caused) Y problem.
Not that I'm trying to convince anyone to go work for the FBI or anything, but I wanted to point up ways in which doing so shouldn't be considered "selling out"---almost the reverse, in fact.
Yarbrough said that it is not a valid use of limited government resources to spend time copying the hard drives of a suspect's computer just to be able to return it to them. "We don't give the gun back to a bad guy, and we don't give the computer back to a bad guy," he said.
This sentiment really irritates me, because this law-enforcement official seems to be forgetting something very important: the owner of the computer is INNOCENT of the crime he's accused of. At least, until proven guilty. Which means that the above quote is pretty much directly advocating theft (not to mention the technical differences between a gun and a computer...).
For example, any British Black I've ever seen speaks perfect English, in the US, we have this silly notion that the natural language for blacks is something called "Ebonics". Ebonics is an English subset.
You've been misled. Ebonics is not a subset of English, it is a dialect in its own right. It is just as expressive as NSAE (Network Standard American English), RP (British standard), Cockney, Ozark, Canuck, or any other English dialect. It got some rather unfortunate publicity when Oakland schools intended to acknowledge it as such; they weren't intending to teach in it (at least, not generally), they hoped that by recognising it as a dialect they could more effectively teach the students NSAE. The theory is, students are more receptive to ``in this classroom, I want you to speak formal English'' than to ``you're wrong''. From all I can tell, that's exactly correct.
I've seen the same thing as you wrt British black people, but I assume that's due to me mostly seeing foreigners who are educated enough to either get on TV or travel to the US for school or a conference; I don't interact with the poor British black people, but I interact with poor American black people on a semiregular basis. I should note that most of the well-educated American black people I know speak perfectly good NSAE.
An employer would be as likely to hire an ebonics-speaking black for a good job as he or she would be likely to hire a street-slang speaking white kid who uses the word "sh-t" every third word.
I feel the need to clarify: it's not the ability to speak ebonics that would disqualify them, but an inability to speak a more standard dialect. The well-educated American blacks I mentioned above do speak perfectly good NSAE, but they can drop into the thickest of Ebonic dialects when they're around friends and family. This isn't all that different from the second-generation immigrants who speak English natively with the public but drop into a foreign language when speaking with their parents---and there's nothing wrong with that.
You enumerated a few, the ones I've heard most about; but these and many, many (, many, many) more are listed on J.R. Stockton's ``Critical Dates'' site... all sorts of critical dates, mostly relating to rollover dates of various sorts, and mostly clustering around this era (of course). He appears to have updated it just this week, too.
I can certainly see your point, but respectfully disagree. With one expensive do-everything computer, then when my dad is sitting there browsing the web, my mom can't check her email, and my sister can't type in her research paper, and I can't play Quake III. If, instead of buying that (say) $2000 computer, we had bought two web terminals for (say) $400 each, a word processor for $700, and a networked game console for $500, then we'd each be able to do our own thing.
Of course, the flip side is that then if two of us needed to type a research paper, we'd be out of luck. But my point is that for a given household, there is probably some combination of general-purpose computers and network appliances that is cheaper and that serves the household better than just one or two general-purpose computers. For one family, it might be two game consoles for the kids, a word processor for the older kid, a recipe database for the kitchen, and a webTV. For another, it might be a computer for the hacker and a simple email terminal. I really see the future of computing as a migration from few multi-purpose computers to many, cheap, single-purpose appliances, each filling their own little niche in the household.
Palm is trying to keep their stuff proprietary, just like Microsoft does....
Whoa there. ``Keeping [code] proprietary'' is not the same as ``rejecting standards''. Just because 3Com doesn't want daVinci to dupe their code, doesn't mean that 3Com is actively opposing clones that do similar things with similar interfaces. The claim 3Com is making is that ``portions of the copyrighted Palm OS operating system software were copied verbatim in the daVinci products, in violation of the United States copyright laws'' (from the press release), and that's just not cool (assuming it's true, which of course is yet to be proven). Don't try to co-opt this into a big-bad-monopoly argument....
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What is to stop the OS folks from sharing their secret API's with the APPS company?
The shareholders. If there were a breakup in this case, there would presumably be some sort of restrictions on owning percentages of stock in each new company. If the Windosoft people gave the Offisoft people some secret APIs, the only benefit would be to those people who owned both Windosoft and Offisoft.
First of all, I think that there should be some effort required to vote. As much as I sometimes worry about "the other side" winning a given vote, it scares me even more that some apathetic dork might just randomly pick a choice on a ballot he doesn't really care about and hasn't even made a pretense of informing himself about. If "the other side" actually has more supporters, fine, I'll grump off into the corner and hope to do better in the next election. But if someone wins based on convincing enough lazy people to vote for something they don't know a thing about, well, that's just downright frightening.
But even more frightening is the notion of duress at the polls. At a physical poll, they do not permit multiple people to be in the same polling booth. Period. What this means is, that no matter how much someone pays you and no matter what sort of extortion they hold over your head, they can't buy your vote because they can't know for sure how you voted. There is this danger with absentee balloting, but as long as that is only granted in "special cases", it isn't as much of a worry. With internet voting? The mind reels at the sort of thing that could happen. Hey you, wanna make $500? Come into this shop and click these buttons. Easy! Hey you, peon, you're not getting a raise this year unless you come in here and vote for my candidate. Hey honey, come into the family room, you do agree with me on who to vote for, right?
Terrifying.
I have several problems with this, at least as reported. Here are a few...
Basically, as far as I can tell, this study is a crock and this guy shouldn't get his doctorate. :P
Much as I like Linux I haven't found any email program that can meet my needs as well as MS Outlook.
I really can't argue against that statement, because only you can say what your needs are. It appears that your needs involve using a mouse; as such, it seems unlikely that text-based MUAs like mutt aren't going to serve them. But I do feel the need to point up some mutt features...
I have over 400MB of email in Outlook. It's organized in a multi-level tree of mail folders that are displayed on screen. I have icons in the Outlook bar that take me to frequently used folders with a single click.
In mutt, you can specify a list of mailboxes, and when changing between them it only takes a few keypresses.
Clicking on a column heading in the message list sorts by that column.
You can resort the message lists (both primary and secondary sort criteria) with two keypresses.
When I open a message it opens in a new window which I can leave open while I read other email. I do this all the time when I'm not ready to deal with a message right away. Fair enough, mutt can't open new windows since it's limited to the terminal it started in. As a matter of personal curiosity, though, why are you opening them if you're not going to do anything with them? If you just want to make sure to come back to them, there are relevant mutt commands, such as marking a message important, or re-marking it as new.
With Outlook I can cntrl-click on many different messages and drag them to a folder.
In mutt, one would 't'ag all the relevant messages, and then ';s'ave them to a folder.
Certainly I could spend my time reading documentation ... and figure out work arounds for most of the things Outlook does "out of the box", but I just don't have the time.
It's absolutely reasonable to stick with an interface because that's what you're used to, but you should at least say that's what you're doing. Most of the features you tout, mutt does have "out of the box", although you don't already know how to do them. But then, did you already know how to run Outlook before you started using it?
A PROFESSIONAL index will include controlling the list of keywords so you will know how to find something. There is no way this can be done on the web.
What? Whatever for? I always found it the hugest pain to have to look through the big index (library of congress? I forget who put it out) to find exactly how I needed to phrase my query in order to find it in a book. And who here hasn't gone through the pain of looking through the Yellow Pages (or local equivalent) trying to find one item, and having to reword it three times before you find it? It's like trying to find a word in a foreign language, and you have a dictionary that goes from the foreign lang to English but not back again.
The greatest thing about the net is that hyperlinking and such is easy. There's no reason we have to wear the straitjacket of a predefined subject list. Not here.
"This technology is so poorly understood, they could actually hurt themselves by doing it." This is a good cautionary note, but again doesn't mean outright avoidance. If it does indeed turn out that GE actually weakens people (ie, causes degenerative damage, shortens lifespans, etc) then they took a risk that failed, so be it.
The problem is, the damage might not be realised until it's too late. I'm thinking specifically of people breeding out "bad" traits, like left-handedness, or homosexuality, or any number of other things that quite a lot of people consider either value-neutral or good. "But wait," you say, "there are *some* things that we can all agree are bad." Can we? And if we do, does that mean we're right? It's been shown for several diseases and syndromes that they actually help in some cases; sickle-cell anemia, prominent in a number of African-derived populations, helps combat malaria, and Tay-Sachs, found in Ashkenazi Jewish populations, combats against---iirc---tuberculosis. Granted, we now have (to some extent) other ways of dealing with these diseases in modern times, but that's not to say that there isn't something out there that *isn't* preventable by modern medicine, that *is* combatted by some "obviously bad" trait (!) that we would tend to breed out with GE.
Diversity of the genome is a *good* thing. GEing our children will do nothing to make the genome more diverse, and everything to make it conform to some "ideal" that might not be.
Basically with the old money system (base 12) you could divide a bill for a meal between multiple numbers of people easily. with Metric Base 10 your are all left fighting over who ordered the extra rolls. :)
This is a very real concern, and one of the reasons I prefer the US system; it makes explicit the notion that for everyday use people do not have the same measurement needs as for scientific use; and in fact that the two conflict. For everyday measurements, humans tend much more to think in terms of reference measurements and small multiples and divisors thereof. Like a half, a third, a fourth. When we need to think about big numbers of a unit, we convert into a mix of units anyway; there's good reason that nobody goes around saying that they're 74 inches tall---they'd say they're 6 foot 2, from which we mentally think ''two inches over six feet''. This may come as a slight surprise, but for someone who knows metric natively, if they're told someone is 179 centimeters tall, they don't think ''hmm, that's about... one, two... 179 cm. Ok.'' Rather, they think more along the lines of ''ok that's about 4 cm over 175 cm'', or ''1 cm below 180'' or whatever their own mental landmark is.
The other big advantage lies not so much in the system itself as in how it's used. This is the ''better accuracy'' of the US system that you occasionally hear about; a misnomer, because metric could be used this way, it just isn't. That is, it's easier to specify my precision more precisely (got that?) if I say 3/8 or 15/32; with metric you've just got the millimetre. One could say two lines were 18 and 3/4 centimetres apart, which would implicitly mean "187.5 +- 1.25 mm"---yuck---but nobody does. They'll just say "187 mm" or "188 mm", nevermind that the lines themselves are each a millimeter wide; for scientists, it's fine to specify tolerances, but it's way cumbersome for everyday use.
Overall, I have no fundamental objections to using the metric system units. They would swoop in and fill the various niches that the US system does; for small lengths there's the centimetre instead of the inch, for bigger lengths there's the metre instead of the foot and the yard. For really big lengths there's the kilometre instead of the mile. Major temperature swings will be fives of Celsius instead of tens of Fahrenheit. The litre will replace the cup, the pint, the quart, and the gallon. People would adapt to these new reference measurements easily. What I think is silly is the faux-precision most people seem to adopt when using metric... when I'm cooking, I dump a cup of water into the mix, and I'd be perfectly happy to dump a quarter-litre in; but it's ludicrous to talk about dumping "250 millilitres" (or even better, "237 millilitres") in, as if it would affect the recipe if I dumped in 249 or 252---as if I could or would even bother to measure it that precisely. It is this madness that I hope (futilely, I suppose) to avoid when and if the US ever converts to metric.
I mean, after all, why not bundle these things together? Is there any such service already existing for Linux? I'm sure there is for WinX if not for the Mac. While I personally wouldn't be using it, I'd be thrilled if something vaguely along these lines marketed itself as a service to the more (small o) orthodox Christians who might be considering Linux. I mean, like it or not, Christians of strong faith make up a huge percentage of the US population; we have the largest number of Sunday-church-attenders per capita in the world.
So basically, I guess I'm just saying, don't automatically assume it's a hoax. Is it so stunning that a geek could be Christian? I mean, really. And the same people who would find the above services useful are perfectly capable of being amused by chmod's extra functionality, or the occasional amusing extra link to kill---I remember in my early UNIX-using days getting the biggest kick out of setting up funny symlinks. Christians can have a sense of humour, too. :)
Oh, and as for the CSPL: why not? They won't be relicensing old code, just new code; and they would just be taking advantage of the same viral properties as the GPL folks are (though to different ends).
Final note: nothing in the entire feature list indicated that there would be any features disabled. The extra features of the distribution could be used or not used according to the wishes of the owner. They wouldn't even remove hardly anything---just a couple games, which of course could be re-downloaded if desired. A hoax this may well be, but it is neither obvious nor provable from the information they've given on the website.
As I think about it, she made a very geeky move a few years back. She declared that in the event of her death, she would will the Darkover series to Mercedes Lackey (another great author, and one who got her start in MZB's short story anthologies). I never thought about the connection until just now, but in many ways her Darkover series was a distant relative of the OSS movement: anyone was and is free to write any stories they want, of course; but the especially good ones she would collect and publish in anthologies along with some of her own short stories and of course the novels. These short stories are as much a part of the Darkover series as anything MZB herself wrote, and many of them were written by authors known in the field (e.g. Diane Duane), some by authors that later became known in the field (e.g. Mercedes Lackey). And now that she can no longer oversee the series, she has passed the baton to someone who could.
A visionary in more ways than one, it seems. She will be missed...
Why would Apple not want the pictures on the site? (In case you haven't checked, all the pictures on AppleInsider have been replaced by gifs which read "This image has been removed at Apple Legal's Demand". :P) Seems silly to me---I mean, it's good publicity, no?
The idea of the Windows registry is actually a pretty good one. It just went horribly wrong in storing the configurations for everything in one file. If anything happens to that file, you're SOL. (Have later Windows versions fixed this to any degree?) But it got a few things right: it's a centralised location to store your configuration info, and it can be edited by hand if necessary (though because of the aforementioned corruption problem, this is not recommended for the faint of heart!).
Applying this idea to linux would be fairly easy. Just have a directory ~/.config that contained lots of files in XML format for configuring the systems. By having a separate config file for each program (and perhaps several for some of them!), you mostly avert the corruption problem. There is still the issue of a namespace---if you and I both make a program that wants a "foorc.xml" file, who wins? But there we could take a page from Sun's java convention: until we write a package that gets "blessed" (presumably by an RFC?), we store our configs in a reverse-domain hierarchy. Thus config files for packages I wrote would be in $HOME/.config/edu/brown/cs/dpb/, or something similar. If people want more convenient access, they (or even I) could install a symlink directly into ~/.config---if that got clobbered with another symlink, data wouldn't be lost.
All in all, having a "Registry" would be a very good idea. Don't let the bad micros~1 implementation scare you off from a fundamentally good idea.
IMHO it's not the fact that Corel's distro is beta that lets them do this; it is the manner in which it is (not) distributed. That is, if they were completely non-selective as to whom they gave the "beta" to, then yes, this act would violate the letter and spirit of the GPL, no question, even if they called it "beta" and said they weren't "releasing" it.
But if they are highly selective about who will get access; and those people are actually in some meaningful sense Corel employees (or rather, contractors); and the statement and intent are clearly there to perform a full, open release after some finite amount of time; then I think that they are certainly following the spirit of the GPL, and a strong case could be made that they are following the letter as well.
It could be done the other way around too of course. Why not have english-students in non-english speaking countries translate the docs, or have them review the translation that were done in an english-speaking country.
This is key. As someone who is currently learning French, I would be happy to donate some time towards translating some sort of documentation (any sort) into French. But I don't have any confidence in my ability to write good, colloquial French. On the other hand, I do trust in the ability of a native French-speaker who knows only a bit of English to write good, colloquial French.
What we need is some sort of pairing between native speakers of both the source and destination language, each able to speak the other to some degree. Each one can work on the translation; the native speaker of the source language can explain nasty idioms in the existing docs, while the native speaker of the destination language can skim over and smooth out the rough edges in the docs translated by the other person. Great translations without having to find the somewhat rarer perfectly bilingual person. The best of both worlds, n'est-ce pas?
The link given was bogus (I think J05H was trying to make it pop up in a new window and /. mangled the link tag). The correct link is here (in France), with a French version pour les francophones, and a US mirror for those of us on this side of the pond.
No, you're absolutely right. But, there are a few solutions. First, they could do something involving the serial number on the CD it came on; then, the "now you're ready to be root" section of the manual can say how to use it. Or, you could cast root as something other than an ordinary account, e.g. with a prompt sequence like: "What do you want your username to be? And its password? Now, make up a super-secret emergency password, different from the first one, and type it here: ..." There are a lot of ways you could get a root password unique to the machine such that the "dumb user" doesn't really know what to do with it until they are no longer just a dumb user.
I just had a conversation with my Dad last week about how pointless the Rio was---I mean, you only get a bit more music than you can fit on a CD, and you have to download a new set of music onto the Rio whenever you want to change it. "Why not," I said, "have a player that could play MP3s off of CD?" Et voilà! For my car, this is perfect, so I don't have to deal with packing the ten or so CDs I want to listen to (which I'll have to listen to twice on a 1000-mile trip), I can just pack one MP3-CD per day!
For that matter, I may hold off a bit on getting a new stereo. I had gotten tired of my old one, which could only handle one CD, and had planned on getting a 5-CD changer; but if this Pine player is in the portable market, it's not long before an equivalent thing makes it into the stereo market... it's like having a 10-CD changer, only cheaper, and you can randomise the playlist without listening to the player whirr and click as it changes the CD between each song. :)
They could spin the CD at 1x long enough to fill a large buffer...
Not as described. They said it'd have ten seconds of anti-shock storage, which seems to indicate that it's not storing any more of the song.
1) Troll Tech makes QT/Windows free
2) New Killer Linux/QT App X is ported to windows
3) Everyone buys Windows to run Killer App X
4) More cash rolls in to Microsoft
There is a gaping flaw in your reasoning here. It lies in your third step, ``Everyone buys Windows to run Killer App X''. Setting aside for a moment the fact that the vast majority of computer users already have (access to) Windows, this statement still is not a logical deduction from the preceding two events. That is, if people learn about App X, and App X runs on Linux/QT and Windows/QT, there is no system-internal reason to choose Windows over Linux. So, a priori, one might expect half these people to go with Linux, and half with Windows.
Now let's return to reality. Most people have access to Windows these days. Many have access to Linux. When they hear about App X, they'll just get it for their system and install it. But if they use Windows, and they like App X, then that's one more thing they know will run on Linux, if they ever decide to switch. The more such things there are, the easier switching will become in their mind. And that's a Good Thing, because it promotes a true marketplace for OSes, rather than the current situation where your choice of OS is by necessity influenced by what you want to run on it.... Ideally, we could each choose an OS on its merits, knowing that we could run all the applications we'd want on it. And that should be the goal of the OSS movement, not a promotion of Linux. Linux can rise to the top on its own merits. We don't need to force people to use an OS just to get the cool apps---that's a Micros~1 tactic.
I wonder if this means the FBI might be in the market for some 'puter Savvy folks like us? And would accepting a job like that be selling out? Is it ethical to assist in the prevention of certain 'crimes' if you don't believe they are crimes?
Given the current situation, even if you disagree with the laws it might not be a bad idea to join the FBI in enforcing them. Right now, people get stuck in limbo for years waiting to get their hardware back. If the computer forensics team at the FBI were increased, then the innocent people would get their stuff back a lot sooner, and the guilty (who would be convicted anyway) would be pretty much unaffected (they might go to prison a little sooner, but at least they'd know what was happening).
Of course, if you do in fact disagree with the laws, then it might likewise be a good idea to do something like this, in order to "speak from experience" that people in X situation are unlikely to (cause|have caused) Y problem.
Not that I'm trying to convince anyone to go work for the FBI or anything, but I wanted to point up ways in which doing so shouldn't be considered "selling out"---almost the reverse, in fact.
Yarbrough said that it is not a valid use of limited government resources to spend time copying the hard drives of a suspect's computer just to be able to return it to them. "We don't give the gun back to a bad guy, and we don't give the computer back to a bad guy," he said.
This sentiment really irritates me, because this law-enforcement official seems to be forgetting something very important: the owner of the computer is INNOCENT of the crime he's accused of. At least, until proven guilty. Which means that the above quote is pretty much directly advocating theft (not to mention the technical differences between a gun and a computer...).
For example, any British Black I've ever seen speaks perfect English, in the US, we have this silly notion that the natural language for blacks is something called "Ebonics". Ebonics is an English subset.
You've been misled. Ebonics is not a subset of English, it is a dialect in its own right. It is just as expressive as NSAE (Network Standard American English), RP (British standard), Cockney, Ozark, Canuck, or any other English dialect. It got some rather unfortunate publicity when Oakland schools intended to acknowledge it as such; they weren't intending to teach in it (at least, not generally), they hoped that by recognising it as a dialect they could more effectively teach the students NSAE. The theory is, students are more receptive to ``in this classroom, I want you to speak formal English'' than to ``you're wrong''. From all I can tell, that's exactly correct.
I've seen the same thing as you wrt British black people, but I assume that's due to me mostly seeing foreigners who are educated enough to either get on TV or travel to the US for school or a conference; I don't interact with the poor British black people, but I interact with poor American black people on a semiregular basis. I should note that most of the well-educated American black people I know speak perfectly good NSAE.
An employer would be as likely to hire an ebonics-speaking black for a good job as he or she would be likely to hire a street-slang speaking white kid who uses the word "sh-t" every third word.
I feel the need to clarify: it's not the ability to speak ebonics that would disqualify them, but an inability to speak a more standard dialect. The well-educated American blacks I mentioned above do speak perfectly good NSAE, but they can drop into the thickest of Ebonic dialects when they're around friends and family. This isn't all that different from the second-generation immigrants who speak English natively with the public but drop into a foreign language when speaking with their parents---and there's nothing wrong with that.
You enumerated a few, the ones I've heard most about; but these and many, many (, many, many) more are listed on J.R. Stockton's ``Critical Dates'' site... all sorts of critical dates, mostly relating to rollover dates of various sorts, and mostly clustering around this era (of course). He appears to have updated it just this week, too.
I can certainly see your point, but respectfully disagree. With one expensive do-everything computer, then when my dad is sitting there browsing the web, my mom can't check her email, and my sister can't type in her research paper, and I can't play Quake III. If, instead of buying that (say) $2000 computer, we had bought two web terminals for (say) $400 each, a word processor for $700, and a networked game console for $500, then we'd each be able to do our own thing.
Of course, the flip side is that then if two of us needed to type a research paper, we'd be out of luck. But my point is that for a given household, there is probably some combination of general-purpose computers and network appliances that is cheaper and that serves the household better than just one or two general-purpose computers. For one family, it might be two game consoles for the kids, a word processor for the older kid, a recipe database for the kitchen, and a webTV. For another, it might be a computer for the hacker and a simple email terminal. I really see the future of computing as a migration from few multi-purpose computers to many, cheap, single-purpose appliances, each filling their own little niche in the household.
Not directly related to the article, but to Y2K in general: the GPS ``week 0'' rollover is this upcoming weekend (story).
Palm is trying to keep their stuff proprietary, just like Microsoft does....
Whoa there. ``Keeping [code] proprietary'' is not the same as ``rejecting standards''. Just because 3Com doesn't want daVinci to dupe their code, doesn't mean that 3Com is actively opposing clones that do similar things with similar interfaces. The claim 3Com is making is that ``portions of the copyrighted Palm OS operating system software were copied verbatim in the daVinci products, in violation of the United States copyright laws'' (from the press release), and that's just not cool (assuming it's true, which of course is yet to be proven). Don't try to co-opt this into a big-bad-monopoly argument....