As nice as that is, it isn't where the "the earth is only 6000 years old" comes from. The 6000 figure comes from very careful calculations (repeated by many theological scholars back when religion was the highest form of scholarship) given the very very explicit (and unbelievably tedious) family tree ("x begat y") given in the bible, linking from Adam all the way down. Based on the lfeispans (which were supposedly longer back then) it was determined that the world was created in 4004 BC or something like that.
The argument you'll get with those that support creationism is "When do you stop believing in the bible? At what point in that family tree is it suddenly false?", which s a reasonable argument. My answer, of course, is "I never start believing."
My mother is a high school science teacher in New Zealand. There are no issues about evlution there, it isn't even really a separate topic, it's just deeply integrated into the entire biology syllabus. I've looked through some of the textbooks she uses to teach biology, and they don't deal with evolution in anything like what you're describing. They teach it as a useful tool for understadning phylogeny, and for makign predictions about classes and species. One section had a proposed descent tree for Kaka, Kea, and Kakapo (3 different New Zealand parrots) and was asking students to (1) see if it made sense in terms of very basic genetics and evolutionary theory (2) try and predict things about the various birds (basic) genetic differences assuming the descent tree.
I don't know what the hell you teach in the US, but in New Zealand evolution simply comes up in taxonmy, philogeny, genetics and inheritance, and wherever else it makes sense in biology, very naturally.
And just as there are wonderful craftsmen who can create a masterpiece of a beautiful chair from wood, there are factories turning out cheap Ikea furniture by the ton...Software is much the same. A true craftsmen of the art will produce code that is so tight, so functional and so spare that it is nothing short of beautiful. When was the last time you made something beautiful?
I'm not sure I actually fully follow this line of reasoning. You see Ikea hires designers, and some of them are very very good designers. Sure the aesthetic is spare, but if you like that you will probably appreciate the designs. Part of the requirements of the design is that it be possible to construct as a kitset. The bonus is that you can then get replacement partseasily and cheaply because everything is a nice replaceable component. Ikea does have some advantages.
The main point here though is that it doesn't matter quite so much if an average craftsman or brilliant craftsman builds your chair, what matters is who designed the chair. If you design the chair well, then that design includes very specific instructions on how to build the chair. Given that sort of specified design a master craftsman and me with the right tools are not going to make an appreciably different looking chair. And I suck at carpentery. If software engineers can write good design specifications code poets aren't going to matter.
And then there's another level where your analogy falls down. As a user of a chair I often have to look at the chair, thus the aesthetics of the chair do indeed matter to me. As a user of software I have to, well, look at and use software... I will only very rarely (and hopefuly never be required to) look at the code itself. I care if the interface has been designed well. I care that the visual presentation of the application itself is aesthetically pleasing. I will likely never notice nor care if some code poet has constructed a beautiful and elegant system.
The most I could possibly care about in terms of code aesthetic is good structure, readability, documentation (including comments) and general maintainability. These are things that can be engineered, it just takes work. If you want to pretend that good maintainable design happens by artful felicitation and manipulation of programming instructions... well, to be honest I suspect that's going to be less maintainable, not more so.
You may still want to play with margin widths, font sizes and so on to tweak it to your taste. All of that can be found in even the most basic introduction to LaTeX, but I'd reccomend The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX which you can skim to the appropriate sections in.
Personally I'm not overly concerned about having the latest KDE on the day of release on my research cluster. I am concerned about stability, administration tools and a good array of scientific and engineering software available out of the box.
If you want to surf the bleeding edge then SuSE is probably not for you. Personally I see that as a benefit, not a problem.
Technical binary compatibility is an irrelevance if Mr.Average User can't get his application to install.
Quite true.
Maybe it is possible to convert an RPM to a DEB and install it with Apt-get or one of its front-ends but again that's further than most users want to go just to get a pre-compiled app running.
If you want to install an application that isn't provided by your distribution then you really want to be using an autopackage. Binary compatability becomes clear - a single autopackage can install and run on most major distributions (providing you've got the same architecture of course). If the people providing you the software haven't packaged it as an autopackage... perhaps you should be asking them to do so. Autopackage is new, but it's great for packaging up your software project - no more "RPM for Redhat, RPM for SuSE, RPM for Mandrake, DEB for Debian..." just make one autopackage binary for the lot.
But Suse is still good for person across the street that just sends e-mail and reads online news, and wants something relatively easy to use, but without the hassle of spyware.
SuSE is also still good for throwing on opteron servers and clusters. SuSE was the first major distro with x86-64 support, so they were the early leader in that market, and they've stayed pretty strong. The enterprise edition for x86-64 is a very nicely put together package, and great for research clusters. Just because it isn't hard or obscure doesn't mean it isn't good.
Jedidiah.
Re:OT: where'd all the 4/5 comments go?
on
Xbox 360 for $300
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· Score: 1
It's actually possible to weed out a lot of the crap. Here's how I do it:
Set the high karma posting bonux to +1 Set the New User modifier to 95% and -1
That means (unless you have a particularly low uid) even logged in users post at 0 unless they have high enough karma.
Then start befriending people that make good intelligent insightful comments. Put the friend modifier at +2, the friend of a friend at +1 and be prepared to add and drop friends from what the friends of friends have to say.
Browse at +3
After a little while you'll find that you're mostly reading fairly decent comments. A large number of good intelligent comments never get modded up - people come to the discussion late and mods are fickle. Bring these toward the top with the friend modifiers and your reading experienc can improve immeasurably.
Where you fill up the other parts (left, center, right, header and footer) with whatever else you may want to add. That's off the top of my head so may have a mistake or two (I actually tested the documentclass from my previous comment) but the fancyhdr documentation should sort that out for you (Google is your friend) if I have missed something.
In fact, I'll go ne better - it's pretty easy to knock these things up once you've done a couple, so here's my quick and dirty version of what you described:
You will most likely want to play with the lengths and other settings a bit, but that should at least give you a good template to work from. Oh, and watch for spaces and crap that slashdot has inserted... Given that as a document class a newsletter then just becomes:
\documentclass{newsletter} \title{Title you want to use} \issue{Isse No. 42} \date{If you want to use something other than compilation date} \begin{document} Start writing your newsletter. \end{document}
And all the rest should happily take care of itself.
I have to agree with the other poster, LaTeX is by far going to be the easiest and most efficient way to do this. The quickest way to get it done is to just extend an existing document class and make your own. It's actually easier than it may sound - you can probably mostly just inherit from the article class and do a renewcommand on maketitle (copy and paste out of article.cls then edit it to suit your needs) Grab the multicol package to do your three columns.
As far as JavaDoc goes I like to expand on it with JML. Essentially it's just a matter of adding comments outlining "this is what I intend the function to do" which is always useful to the reader - the bonus is that the comments are also parseable, and allow for extra static checking beyond just type checking.
Documentation that helps reduce bugs - what more could you ask for?
(Note that this doesn't eliminate the need for good explanatory comments, it just allows you to get some extra mileage out of some of the comments that you ought to be making anyway)
So unless they could secure a number of OEM deals with the Dells and HPs of the world, they'd be bankrupt within the year.
HP was selling HP iPods there for a while (stopped recently - it was dumb idea), but obviously Apple is willing to license other vendors to sell stuff... so while you might not see OS X whitebox edition, you might see HP featuring MacOS X. There may be a few laptop vendors like Toshiba interested as well. I have a feeling Dell is too cosy in their arrangements to do any such thing.
The point is that Apple doesn't have to release OS X into the wold for us to see OS X on non-Apple hardware: they just have to hammer out license deals with other vendors. Presumably any such deal would involve said vendor being responsible for support. I doubt HP or Toshiba could significantly undercut Apple on hardware, especially if Apple has control over the license agreement on how the vendor gets to use OS X.
I'm not sure this is really likely, but it is definitely possible. It would be interesting to kno who Apple is having talks with...
Perhaps it would be appropriate for someone to point out that Sony and Microsoft's gaming divisions have both reported net losses this quarter. Nintendo still profited, just not as much as it expected, and they remain more profitable overall than any other gaming division. Of course, you'll never see that in any gaming publication. It's all about how Nintendo is constantly doomed. Yeah right.
Both Sony and Microsoft have other divisions that make enough money that they can afford to run their gaming divisions at a loss for quite some time. Sure the losses the Xbox was incurring early on were painful, but as long as they are in the vague neighbourhood of breaking even they will be quite comfortable.
Given that Microsoft and Sony have both shown intentions of being highly aggressive in the console market, and they have the cash to do do so, I think Nintendo may well be in trouble. Nintendo simply cannot afford to run their gaming division at a loss for long at all - their gaming division is pretty much all they have. Microsoft and Sony can afford to run their gaming divisions at "barely break even" to "running a small loss" pretty much indefinitely. If doing so means they can eliminate a competitor from the market, it would be foolish to imagine they will not try to do so: neither MS or Sony are well known for their coporate benevolence.
The scripting language as he demonstrated seemed waaay too verbose and awkward. Text pipes can be limiting in some situations, but treating everything as an object is overkill.
You see the thing is, if you want to throw things around as objects instead of just text pipes, and you're willing to suffer a slightly more verbose syntax than a simple shell - well that's what python is for. No problems throwing around objects there, and it offers an interactive shell if you want it.
Installers are the recommended procedure on Windows. Apple provides developers with the Installer software. Debian provides DEBs, Red Hat provides RPMs, Gentoo provides emerge, and GoboLinux provides InstallPackage.
These are what is provided for the base system install, not extra packages. Microsoft Windows does not ship with explicit Installshield or WISE support, they provide MSI packages. Apple doesn't ship with explicit Installshield support, they provide... well they provide a mix of installers and App folders. Yet people seem to have no difficulty in using installers packaged with Installshield or WISE, and developers seem to have no issues with packaging their software that way.
I think you are making a barrier where one does not exist. Regardless of what distribtions do, if Autopackage provides a simple easy way for developers to package their applications, and a simple easy way for users to install them, it will get used and become widespread. Sure it would be nice if Fedora and SuSE and Debian all shipped with Autopackage already installed, but from the users perspective when trying to install an autopackage there is practically no discernable difference in the installation procedure whether the distro has it Autopackage preinstalled or not.
That wasn't what I was referring to. I was referring to having the autopackage software pre-installed, and encouraging users to use this technique. Without distro support, Autopackage will always remain a fringe product.
There is no need for Autopackage to be preinstalled - any autopackage can bootstrap itself and install Autopackage for you as the first step. Regardless of what distros do autopackages will still be a click and install. Autopackage will only be a fringe product if all the commercial developers don't bother to use it, and has nothing to do with distros.
If a company or developer packages an application for the Mac using their own convoluted handrolled installer you would blame the developer, not Apple. If a company or developer packaged an application for Windows using their own convoluted handrolled installer instead of Installshield you would blame the developer, not Microsoft. If a company or developer packages an application for Linux and ignores Autopackage in favour of their own convoluted installer all of a sudden it is the fault of Linux and the distros.
I agree. Autopackage is an awesome advancement in Linux. Unfortunately, not even one distro has embraced it!:-(
They don't need to embrace it! A distro packaing itself with autopakages would be foolish - the autopackage developers themselves will tell you this. Autopackage will work happily with any distro, be it rpm, dpkg, tgz or source based (presuming things are in somewhat predictable locations).
It is the commercial developers that need to use Autopackage, not the distros. It matter not a jot what the distros use, all the commercial developers have to do is build an autopackage for their software, and potentially some extra autopackages for any potential dependencies they think might be unmet on some systems - not that hard to do as long as you plan ahead and write your linux version with autopackaging in mind. If they do that, then that autopackage is a simple click install on almost any distro.
Packaging commercial software for linux is easy providing you plan ahead enough to allow yourself to build autopackages. Yes, that means current commercial packages possibly have some rewriting to do, but it is unlikely to be that much, and the benefits are clear. Linux is not lacking a means for packaging commercial software for it, it is lacking sufficient publiity of what is a fairly recently developed means for packaging commercial software for it. In another year or two people will not be talking about this problem in the same way, and soon enough it won't get mentioned at all.
Currently, if a movie house is using a closed-source toolset, and there is a feature missing or a non-trivial bug causing issues with their workflow, they have to spend a *ton* of money to get the Vendor to 'fix' it for them.
To be fair, I don't think Pixar would have to scream very loud to get critical issues with OS X fixed exceptionally quickly. Then again, they are in an awfully priviledged position on that one. In general you are quite correct.
The notion of private property has proven to be a useful social construct for eliminating "tragedy of the commons"-style misuse of resources, and for providing a framework that minimizes fighting over control of resources
Certainly, I would hardly claim that property as a social construct is not without value. I am merely arguing that the objectivist view, that property is the sole value upon which all else must be based and measured, is poorly justified. I am merely suggesting that there may be more to life and liberty than property, unless you severely curtail your definitions of life and liberty (which is the usual objectivist method of justification).
The question is, what kind of "liberty" leads to a sustainable society that we'd all like to live in?
And the answer seems to be some mixture of private and communal property, mediated via some level of democratic arbitration. At least, that's what the majority of legitimately democratic nations in the world seem to have voted for. That is, in effect people have banded together into groups (nations) and agreed to some (often relatively limited) amount of shared communal property. Such groups are, admittedly, opt-out rather than opt-in: your parents usually default to opting you in as a child, but the majority of legitimately democratic nations do allow you to opt-out (renounce citizenship and leave). Those that don't (like, for example, Cuba), and those that are not legitimately democratic (like, for example, Zimbabwe) are of course cause for concern.
Thankfully presumably neither of us are citizens of such countries.
Yes it is self-serving and egocentric most of the time, but if you want a society that values liberty over the illusion of safety then those are principles that must be adopted.
I think the issue a lot of people have is the interesting part where liberty is equated to private property, and no other forms of liberty are considered. It's a matter of baseline expectations, and founding things on the (very poorly defended) Lockean concept of property (mixing labour with a resource makes the resource "mine").
If you begin from a different baseline perspective than objectivist concepts of property, say for example from the current social democracy, then a person is deprived liberty by the objectivist system - where once I could walk through public parks, or go to public museums, libraries and art galleries, I am now banned from doing such things (as everything must be owned) and the coercive force of the state will be used to enforce that.
There really isn't especially more of less liberty in either system, and the objectivist version ignores positive liberty to focus exclusively on negative liberty - that is, it worries only about liberties that may be deprived, and ignores liberties that may be granted. A man with little property has very little freedom in an objectivist world.
In the end objectivist philosophy is very poorly ground, and the consequentialist arguments ("but the results will be far better/more efficient"), while being justified when compared to state socialism and communism, don't hold up as well when talking about a limited amount of intervention. There is little prove that the government is always wrong, always less efficient, and always less productive. Handing everything to the government certaonly doesn't work, but that doesn't mean there aren't things a government can do effectively - and a pick and choose where it is sensible seems better than a poorly founded, and poorly empirically justified ideology.
The politicians are the source of of much of the hype, and will contribute to and encourage the rest. US politicians on both sides now live and die by the amount of moral outrage they can stir.
"We can't let Terry Schiavo be murdered!" "We must keep our children safe from these sick perverted video games!"
The whole point, as far as I can tell, is to keep everyone in a state of hysteria, and make sure that you pick one side or the other (because the other side is surely the way or complete moral degenracy and the downfall of civilization) so you won't notice that really, for the most part, both parties do exactly the same thing: enrih themselves and their wealthy contributors.
Seriously - for all the bluster and noise about these "hugely important" moral issues over the last 10 years, how much has actually been done by the politicians in power? I mean, if they really do care that much, surely it wouldn't be that hard to get some legislation through? How come the DMCA went through easily, and broadcast flags, copyright extensions, etc. keep recurring, but apparently these horribly important moral issues manage to simply keep getting batted back and forth with no real tangible action taken?
The politicians live on the hype. If they didn't you migt actually notice what they're actually doing (as opposed to what they are saying).
I always liked the way that conversation goes at parties. If there's a follow-up question, it's always "What kind?" and occasionally incredulous. One learns to say "algebra" and change the subject.
I've had more than one conversation run along lines like this:
Person: So what do you do? Me: I'm a mathematician. Person: Oh, you're a teacher. What level do you teach? Me: No, I don't teach at all - Person: But I thought you said you did math? Me: Yeah, I do. I'm a research mathematician for a software company. Person: How do you research math?
At which point it's time to grab the conversation by the scruff of the neck and quickly steer it in another direction because anything more isn't going to be productive.
The exposure to abstract mathematics doesn't reach significance--much less unification--with a BS in math ed.
I agree, and this is an issue. We spend a lot of time teaching people how to do math problems, without actually teaching them any mathematics. In a way it's akin to teaching people about creative writing by nothing but drilling them for years in spelling and formal grammar - yes it's important if you want to be able to do the subject properly, but it fails to really impart the essence of the subject.
That horrible question, when will I ever use this?, becomes a sort of grim reality.
That's an interesting problem, and the answer really is "all the time". We really ought to be teaching philosophy, including some formal logic, and stretching our math ciriculum sideways to meet it. One of the greatest skills that mathematics can impart, even at a very early level (late elementary school) if taught appropriately, is how to think about, deal with, and analyse abstract concepts. It's exercising the mental muscles for logical analysis and critical thinking. If we actually taught mathematics and philosophy from an early age I think we'd be much better off.
I don't think bad teachers are to blame. Boring, maybe, but not resentful.
I think they are, in that they have an attitude that math is both hard, and not of much real practical importance. Whether or not they tell kids that explicitly, it is very much an attitude that kids pick up and learn to imitate.
What window manager doesn't support "stay on top" hinting? Even Windows does, though you may have to get an extension to do it - I recall being able to do it a long time ago with Win2k, but I haven't used Windows in years so I can't recall what extra software I needed. Windowblinds maybe.
Anyway, the end result is that "stay on top" should not be a problem with GIMP. Complain about the "intuitiveness" of the interface all you like, but palettes is not one of GIMP's problems.
Is Nokia likely to move off Symbian? Very unlikely from the sound of it. Then again Nokia has been interested in Linux, and given their work on, for instance, gtk-webcore perhaps we can see why: Symbian might be great for telephony, but much of the movement with cell-phones today is toward convergence devices that feature web browsers, MP3 players, vast amounts of PDA functions, cameras, etc. For such devices the greater flexiblity and more friendly development offered Linux might be considered valuable.
Which is to say, Symbian is probably here to stay, but Linux may become Nokias OS of choice for its more complex devices. There's plenty of room for both in what is a diverging market.
Slashdot Mirror
As nice as that is, it isn't where the "the earth is only 6000 years old" comes from. The 6000 figure comes from very careful calculations (repeated by many theological scholars back when religion was the highest form of scholarship) given the very very explicit (and unbelievably tedious) family tree ("x begat y") given in the bible, linking from Adam all the way down. Based on the lfeispans (which were supposedly longer back then) it was determined that the world was created in 4004 BC or something like that.
The argument you'll get with those that support creationism is "When do you stop believing in the bible? At what point in that family tree is it suddenly false?", which s a reasonable argument. My answer, of course, is "I never start believing."
Jedidiah.
My mother is a high school science teacher in New Zealand. There are no issues about evlution there, it isn't even really a separate topic, it's just deeply integrated into the entire biology syllabus. I've looked through some of the textbooks she uses to teach biology, and they don't deal with evolution in anything like what you're describing. They teach it as a useful tool for understadning phylogeny, and for makign predictions about classes and species. One section had a proposed descent tree for Kaka, Kea, and Kakapo (3 different New Zealand parrots) and was asking students to (1) see if it made sense in terms of very basic genetics and evolutionary theory (2) try and predict things about the various birds (basic) genetic differences assuming the descent tree.
I don't know what the hell you teach in the US, but in New Zealand evolution simply comes up in taxonmy, philogeny, genetics and inheritance, and wherever else it makes sense in biology, very naturally.
Jedidiah.
And just as there are wonderful craftsmen who can create a masterpiece of a beautiful chair from wood, there are factories turning out cheap Ikea furniture by the ton...Software is much the same. A true craftsmen of the art will produce code that is so tight, so functional and so spare that it is nothing short of beautiful. When was the last time you made something beautiful?
I'm not sure I actually fully follow this line of reasoning. You see Ikea hires designers, and some of them are very very good designers. Sure the aesthetic is spare, but if you like that you will probably appreciate the designs. Part of the requirements of the design is that it be possible to construct as a kitset. The bonus is that you can then get replacement partseasily and cheaply because everything is a nice replaceable component. Ikea does have some advantages.
The main point here though is that it doesn't matter quite so much if an average craftsman or brilliant craftsman builds your chair, what matters is who designed the chair. If you design the chair well, then that design includes very specific instructions on how to build the chair. Given that sort of specified design a master craftsman and me with the right tools are not going to make an appreciably different looking chair. And I suck at carpentery. If software engineers can write good design specifications code poets aren't going to matter.
And then there's another level where your analogy falls down. As a user of a chair I often have to look at the chair, thus the aesthetics of the chair do indeed matter to me. As a user of software I have to, well, look at and use software... I will only very rarely (and hopefuly never be required to) look at the code itself. I care if the interface has been designed well. I care that the visual presentation of the application itself is aesthetically pleasing. I will likely never notice nor care if some code poet has constructed a beautiful and elegant system.
The most I could possibly care about in terms of code aesthetic is good structure, readability, documentation (including comments) and general maintainability. These are things that can be engineered, it just takes work. If you want to pretend that good maintainable design happens by artful felicitation and manipulation of programming instructions... well, to be honest I suspect that's going to be less maintainable, not more so.
Jedidiah.
HTH.
Jedidiah.
Personally I'm not overly concerned about having the latest KDE on the day of release on my research cluster. I am concerned about stability, administration tools and a good array of scientific and engineering software available out of the box.
If you want to surf the bleeding edge then SuSE is probably not for you. Personally I see that as a benefit, not a problem.
Jedidiah.
Technical binary compatibility is an irrelevance if Mr.Average User can't get his application to install.
Quite true.
Maybe it is possible to convert an RPM to a DEB and install it with Apt-get or one of its front-ends but again that's further than most users want to go just to get a pre-compiled app running.
If you want to install an application that isn't provided by your distribution then you really want to be using an autopackage. Binary compatability becomes clear - a single autopackage can install and run on most major distributions (providing you've got the same architecture of course). If the people providing you the software haven't packaged it as an autopackage... perhaps you should be asking them to do so. Autopackage is new, but it's great for packaging up your software project - no more "RPM for Redhat, RPM for SuSE, RPM for Mandrake, DEB for Debian..." just make one autopackage binary for the lot.
Jedidiah.
But Suse is still good for person across the street that just sends e-mail and reads online news, and wants something relatively easy to use, but without the hassle of spyware.
SuSE is also still good for throwing on opteron servers and clusters. SuSE was the first major distro with x86-64 support, so they were the early leader in that market, and they've stayed pretty strong. The enterprise edition for x86-64 is a very nicely put together package, and great for research clusters. Just because it isn't hard or obscure doesn't mean it isn't good.
Jedidiah.
It's actually possible to weed out a lot of the crap. Here's how I do it:
Set the high karma posting bonux to +1
Set the New User modifier to 95% and -1
That means (unless you have a particularly low uid) even logged in users post at 0 unless they have high enough karma.
Then start befriending people that make good intelligent insightful comments. Put the friend modifier at +2, the friend of a friend at +1 and be prepared to add and drop friends from what the friends of friends have to say.
Browse at +3
After a little while you'll find that you're mostly reading fairly decent comments. A large number of good intelligent comments never get modded up - people come to the discussion late and mods are fickle. Bring these toward the top with the friend modifiers and your reading experienc can improve immeasurably.
Jedidiah.
\RequirePackage{fancyhdr}
\RequirePackage{lastpage}
In at the top with the other requires, and then somewhere in amongst it all define the neaders and footers along the lines of:Where you fill up the other parts (left, center, right, header and footer) with whatever else you may want to add. That's off the top of my head so may have a mistake or two (I actually tested the documentclass from my previous comment) but the fancyhdr documentation should sort that out for you (Google is your friend) if I have missed something.
Jedidiah.
Jedidiah.
I have to agree with the other poster, LaTeX is by far going to be the easiest and most efficient way to do this. The quickest way to get it done is to just extend an existing document class and make your own. It's actually easier than it may sound - you can probably mostly just inherit from the article class and do a renewcommand on maketitle (copy and paste out of article.cls then edit it to suit your needs) Grab the multicol package to do your three columns.
Jedidiah.
As far as JavaDoc goes I like to expand on it with JML. Essentially it's just a matter of adding comments outlining "this is what I intend the function to do" which is always useful to the reader - the bonus is that the comments are also parseable, and allow for extra static checking beyond just type checking.
Documentation that helps reduce bugs - what more could you ask for?
(Note that this doesn't eliminate the need for good explanatory comments, it just allows you to get some extra mileage out of some of the comments that you ought to be making anyway)
Jedidiah.
So unless they could secure a number of OEM deals with the Dells and HPs of the world, they'd be bankrupt within the year.
HP was selling HP iPods there for a while (stopped recently - it was dumb idea), but obviously Apple is willing to license other vendors to sell stuff... so while you might not see OS X whitebox edition, you might see HP featuring MacOS X. There may be a few laptop vendors like Toshiba interested as well. I have a feeling Dell is too cosy in their arrangements to do any such thing.
The point is that Apple doesn't have to release OS X into the wold for us to see OS X on non-Apple hardware: they just have to hammer out license deals with other vendors. Presumably any such deal would involve said vendor being responsible for support. I doubt HP or Toshiba could significantly undercut Apple on hardware, especially if Apple has control over the license agreement on how the vendor gets to use OS X.
I'm not sure this is really likely, but it is definitely possible. It would be interesting to kno who Apple is having talks with...
Jedidiah.
Perhaps it would be appropriate for someone to point out that Sony and Microsoft's gaming divisions have both reported net losses this quarter. Nintendo still profited, just not as much as it expected, and they remain more profitable overall than any other gaming division. Of course, you'll never see that in any gaming publication. It's all about how Nintendo is constantly doomed. Yeah right.
Both Sony and Microsoft have other divisions that make enough money that they can afford to run their gaming divisions at a loss for quite some time. Sure the losses the Xbox was incurring early on were painful, but as long as they are in the vague neighbourhood of breaking even they will be quite comfortable.
Given that Microsoft and Sony have both shown intentions of being highly aggressive in the console market, and they have the cash to do do so, I think Nintendo may well be in trouble. Nintendo simply cannot afford to run their gaming division at a loss for long at all - their gaming division is pretty much all they have. Microsoft and Sony can afford to run their gaming divisions at "barely break even" to "running a small loss" pretty much indefinitely. If doing so means they can eliminate a competitor from the market, it would be foolish to imagine they will not try to do so: neither MS or Sony are well known for their coporate benevolence.
Jedidiah.
The scripting language as he demonstrated seemed waaay too verbose and awkward. Text pipes can be limiting in some situations, but treating everything as an object is overkill.
You see the thing is, if you want to throw things around as objects instead of just text pipes, and you're willing to suffer a slightly more verbose syntax than a simple shell - well that's what python is for. No problems throwing around objects there, and it offers an interactive shell if you want it.
Jedidiah.
Installers are the recommended procedure on Windows. Apple provides developers with the Installer software. Debian provides DEBs, Red Hat provides RPMs, Gentoo provides emerge, and GoboLinux provides InstallPackage.
These are what is provided for the base system install, not extra packages. Microsoft Windows does not ship with explicit Installshield or WISE support, they provide MSI packages. Apple doesn't ship with explicit Installshield support, they provide... well they provide a mix of installers and App folders. Yet people seem to have no difficulty in using installers packaged with Installshield or WISE, and developers seem to have no issues with packaging their software that way.
I think you are making a barrier where one does not exist. Regardless of what distribtions do, if Autopackage provides a simple easy way for developers to package their applications, and a simple easy way for users to install them, it will get used and become widespread. Sure it would be nice if Fedora and SuSE and Debian all shipped with Autopackage already installed, but from the users perspective when trying to install an autopackage there is practically no discernable difference in the installation procedure whether the distro has it Autopackage preinstalled or not.
I fail to see the problem.
Jedidiah.
That wasn't what I was referring to. I was referring to having the autopackage software pre-installed, and encouraging users to use this technique. Without distro support, Autopackage will always remain a fringe product.
There is no need for Autopackage to be preinstalled - any autopackage can bootstrap itself and install Autopackage for you as the first step. Regardless of what distros do autopackages will still be a click and install. Autopackage will only be a fringe product if all the commercial developers don't bother to use it, and has nothing to do with distros.
If a company or developer packages an application for the Mac using their own convoluted handrolled installer you would blame the developer, not Apple. If a company or developer packaged an application for Windows using their own convoluted handrolled installer instead of Installshield you would blame the developer, not Microsoft. If a company or developer packages an application for Linux and ignores Autopackage in favour of their own convoluted installer all of a sudden it is the fault of Linux and the distros.
Jedidiah.
I agree. Autopackage is an awesome advancement in Linux. Unfortunately, not even one distro has embraced it! :-(
They don't need to embrace it! A distro packaing itself with autopakages would be foolish - the autopackage developers themselves will tell you this. Autopackage will work happily with any distro, be it rpm, dpkg, tgz or source based (presuming things are in somewhat predictable locations).
It is the commercial developers that need to use Autopackage, not the distros. It matter not a jot what the distros use, all the commercial developers have to do is build an autopackage for their software, and potentially some extra autopackages for any potential dependencies they think might be unmet on some systems - not that hard to do as long as you plan ahead and write your linux version with autopackaging in mind. If they do that, then that autopackage is a simple click install on almost any distro.
Packaging commercial software for linux is easy providing you plan ahead enough to allow yourself to build autopackages. Yes, that means current commercial packages possibly have some rewriting to do, but it is unlikely to be that much, and the benefits are clear. Linux is not lacking a means for packaging commercial software for it, it is lacking sufficient publiity of what is a fairly recently developed means for packaging commercial software for it. In another year or two people will not be talking about this problem in the same way, and soon enough it won't get mentioned at all.
Jedidiah.
Currently, if a movie house is using a closed-source toolset, and there is a feature missing or a non-trivial bug causing issues with their workflow, they have to spend a *ton* of money to get the Vendor to 'fix' it for them.
To be fair, I don't think Pixar would have to scream very loud to get critical issues with OS X fixed exceptionally quickly. Then again, they are in an awfully priviledged position on that one. In general you are quite correct.
Jedidiah.
The notion of private property has proven to be a useful social construct for eliminating "tragedy of the commons"-style misuse of resources, and for providing a framework that minimizes fighting over control of resources
Certainly, I would hardly claim that property as a social construct is not without value. I am merely arguing that the objectivist view, that property is the sole value upon which all else must be based and measured, is poorly justified. I am merely suggesting that there may be more to life and liberty than property, unless you severely curtail your definitions of life and liberty (which is the usual objectivist method of justification).
The question is, what kind of "liberty" leads to a sustainable society that we'd all like to live in?
And the answer seems to be some mixture of private and communal property, mediated via some level of democratic arbitration. At least, that's what the majority of legitimately democratic nations in the world seem to have voted for. That is, in effect people have banded together into groups (nations) and agreed to some (often relatively limited) amount of shared communal property. Such groups are, admittedly, opt-out rather than opt-in: your parents usually default to opting you in as a child, but the majority of legitimately democratic nations do allow you to opt-out (renounce citizenship and leave). Those that don't (like, for example, Cuba), and those that are not legitimately democratic (like, for example, Zimbabwe) are of course cause for concern.
Thankfully presumably neither of us are citizens of such countries.
Jedidiah.
Yes it is self-serving and egocentric most of the time, but if you want a society that values liberty over the illusion of safety then those are principles that must be adopted.
I think the issue a lot of people have is the interesting part where liberty is equated to private property, and no other forms of liberty are considered. It's a matter of baseline expectations, and founding things on the (very poorly defended) Lockean concept of property (mixing labour with a resource makes the resource "mine").
If you begin from a different baseline perspective than objectivist concepts of property, say for example from the current social democracy, then a person is deprived liberty by the objectivist system - where once I could walk through public parks, or go to public museums, libraries and art galleries, I am now banned from doing such things (as everything must be owned) and the coercive force of the state will be used to enforce that.
There really isn't especially more of less liberty in either system, and the objectivist version ignores positive liberty to focus exclusively on negative liberty - that is, it worries only about liberties that may be deprived, and ignores liberties that may be granted. A man with little property has very little freedom in an objectivist world.
In the end objectivist philosophy is very poorly ground, and the consequentialist arguments ("but the results will be far better/more efficient"), while being justified when compared to state socialism and communism, don't hold up as well when talking about a limited amount of intervention. There is little prove that the government is always wrong, always less efficient, and always less productive. Handing everything to the government certaonly doesn't work, but that doesn't mean there aren't things a government can do effectively - and a pick and choose where it is sensible seems better than a poorly founded, and poorly empirically justified ideology.
Jedidiah.
The politicians are the source of of much of the hype, and will contribute to and encourage the rest. US politicians on both sides now live and die by the amount of moral outrage they can stir.
"We can't let Terry Schiavo be murdered!"
"We must keep our children safe from these sick perverted video games!"
The whole point, as far as I can tell, is to keep everyone in a state of hysteria, and make sure that you pick one side or the other (because the other side is surely the way or complete moral degenracy and the downfall of civilization) so you won't notice that really, for the most part, both parties do exactly the same thing: enrih themselves and their wealthy contributors.
Seriously - for all the bluster and noise about these "hugely important" moral issues over the last 10 years, how much has actually been done by the politicians in power? I mean, if they really do care that much, surely it wouldn't be that hard to get some legislation through? How come the DMCA went through easily, and broadcast flags, copyright extensions, etc. keep recurring, but apparently these horribly important moral issues manage to simply keep getting batted back and forth with no real tangible action taken?
The politicians live on the hype. If they didn't you migt actually notice what they're actually doing (as opposed to what they are saying).
Jedidiah.
I always liked the way that conversation goes at parties. If there's a follow-up question, it's always "What kind?" and occasionally incredulous. One learns to say "algebra" and change the subject.
I've had more than one conversation run along lines like this:
Person: So what do you do?
Me: I'm a mathematician.
Person: Oh, you're a teacher. What level do you teach?
Me: No, I don't teach at all -
Person: But I thought you said you did math?
Me: Yeah, I do. I'm a research mathematician for a software company.
Person: How do you research math?
At which point it's time to grab the conversation by the scruff of the neck and quickly steer it in another direction because anything more isn't going to be productive.
The exposure to abstract mathematics doesn't reach significance--much less unification--with a BS in math ed.
I agree, and this is an issue. We spend a lot of time teaching people how to do math problems, without actually teaching them any mathematics. In a way it's akin to teaching people about creative writing by nothing but drilling them for years in spelling and formal grammar - yes it's important if you want to be able to do the subject properly, but it fails to really impart the essence of the subject.
That horrible question, when will I ever use this?, becomes a sort of grim reality.
That's an interesting problem, and the answer really is "all the time". We really ought to be teaching philosophy, including some formal logic, and stretching our math ciriculum sideways to meet it. One of the greatest skills that mathematics can impart, even at a very early level (late elementary school) if taught appropriately, is how to think about, deal with, and analyse abstract concepts. It's exercising the mental muscles for logical analysis and critical thinking. If we actually taught mathematics and philosophy from an early age I think we'd be much better off.
I don't think bad teachers are to blame. Boring, maybe, but not resentful.
I think they are, in that they have an attitude that math is both hard, and not of much real practical importance. Whether or not they tell kids that explicitly, it is very much an attitude that kids pick up and learn to imitate.
Jedidiah.
What window manager doesn't support "stay on top" hinting? Even Windows does, though you may have to get an extension to do it - I recall being able to do it a long time ago with Win2k, but I haven't used Windows in years so I can't recall what extra software I needed. Windowblinds maybe.
Anyway, the end result is that "stay on top" should not be a problem with GIMP. Complain about the "intuitiveness" of the interface all you like, but palettes is not one of GIMP's problems.
Jedidiah.
Is Nokia likely to move off Symbian? Very unlikely from the sound of it. Then again Nokia has been interested in Linux, and given their work on, for instance, gtk-webcore perhaps we can see why: Symbian might be great for telephony, but much of the movement with cell-phones today is toward convergence devices that feature web browsers, MP3 players, vast amounts of PDA functions, cameras, etc. For such devices the greater flexiblity and more friendly development offered Linux might be considered valuable.
Which is to say, Symbian is probably here to stay, but Linux may become Nokias OS of choice for its more complex devices. There's plenty of room for both in what is a diverging market.
Jedidiah.