Okay, I've been using Mozilla for over a year -- and as my primary browser for quite a number of months...
But I really hoped that Netscape 6 would have waited until they had a freakin' drop down for the address edit box... I *hate* not being able to pick and choose from other URL's I've been to recently!
Maybe Boston geeks know how hard it is to find parking down that way, and would rather keep it small!
Actually, I'm usually the last to know about these things, in this case a friend of a friend has something to do with organizing it, so I found out that way.
The "community" here in Boston, frankly sucks. Its pretty common that interesting tech-oriented social events are found out about by people after the fact. The Globe's new site (www.digitalmass.com) is probably the best resource here for this kind of thing going on, but I'm not even sure I saw this on there.
This is exciting in a geek kind of way. I'm not used to living somewhere with stuff actually going on.
And to be honest, I'm kind of glad this wasn't posted two weeks ago on Slashdot -- there were limited tickets for the party Friday night and I might not have gotten any!;)
This ought to be even more interesting than IBM's Bar Code thing a few weeks ago that Michael De Icaza spoke at. Hmmmm... free food, free beer and legos. Doesn't get much better than that!
The most interesting thing I saw in the IGN article wasn't the info on the Playstation2 -- thats been done to death. In the article they had on PS2 accessories though, they listed the PocketStation -- which looks suspiciously like a handheld Playstation!
Perhaps what is needed is another (yikes, did I just say that?) open source license. One with a specific clause restricting use of the software by companies that choose to hold software patents.
Amazon hosts using Stronghold/Apache. I bet they use gobs of other free software, and they give back to the community by filing for software patents?
If people really want to make a statement about their beliefs that software patents are bad, add a clause to your open source software specifically removing the rights for any corporation or individual holding software patents from use of your software without express written permission.
"Technology pundit Bob Metcalfe walks in the valley of death, Open Sourcerers to his left and Microsofties to his right. He needs all the encouragement he can get at metcalfe@infoworld.com. "
I said this last time an article of his ramblings showed up on here, and its worth saying again. Just because he "invented" some technologies thirty years ago that made him marginally relavent in the industry back then doesn't mean he's at all relavent now. He's walking through a valley of his own ego, reality to his left and the world as he believes it is on his right.
Excuse me? Although I have little desire to get into an argument with a coward on here, but I'm speaking from cold hard experience, and several months of fairly heavy benchmarking and evaluation of a half dozen platforms for servlet and EJB-based applications on a number of servlet engines and application servers on the various platforms.
Blaming Java for Linux's inability to handle large numbers of threads stinks of Linux evangelism at it worst. How long have you, Mr or Mrs Anonymous Coward being using Linux? Eight years like I have? How many commercial rollouts of services using it have you done? Dozens like I have?
The fact is, regardless of your opinion on the Java threading model and the way most Java applications are written, that Linux is not a good match currently for running enterprise class Java applications. And it most certainly is because native threads (being one-to-one mapped to processes) are too heavy-weight. Tweaking the scheduler helps, but most certainly doesn't fix the problem.
If you've ever written enterprise applications in Java, you'd know that the choice as how to use threading isn't always in the control of the application writer. Its tied to the application server and the web server, or servlet environment.
The one point you were correct about was the need in Linux for a more robust kernel threading model that isn't process-bound as it currently is. Until that time, no matter how good IBM's JVM is (and it IS that good), the vast majority of enterprise applications are going to run notably faster under NT. Shipping IBM's JVM with RedHat under the guise of making it an "enterprise" platform, however, is asking for more pseudo-Mindcraft tests to run and show how much faster Java applications are on NT than Linux.
RedHat would be better spending some of its millions hiring kernel hackers to find a solution to the threading issues, THEN Linux could really compete in the enterprise application marketplace.
This is a good thing. The IBM JVM is far and away the fastest on Linux. But it still (unfortunately) sucks compared to the IBM JVM on NT. That's not IBM's fault, but rather the threading issues dealing with the Linux kernel.
Bundling it is good, but its definately not "enterprise" ready. On identical hardware (ie dual boot) its at least 40% slower than NT at moderate load using the JRun servlet environment and Apache 1.3.9. I hate it when I end up having to host an application on NT instead of Linux -- its rare -- but the area of Java is definately a weak point.
The work IBM's been doing to optimize the scheduler looks promising though, but it can't replace the benefit of having ligher-weight threading in the kernel.
A small warning for those thinking about moving down the XML/XSL route who haven't done any testing on it:
Its slow. VERY slow.
Most XSL implementations have significant performance and scalability issues as compared to more common custom technology for producing dynamic web pages.
There's no argument that its a better technology, but I've known several commercial web sites that have spent considerable resources developing XML/XSL implementations and having to roll back the technology when they discovered they needed four or five times the number of servers to be able to use it.
Anyone know of any top-tier sites that are actually using the technology?
I've been using Mozilla as one of my primary browsers for several months now. The only real problem is that lots of sites don't work correctly with it, especially where Javascript is concerned. Sometimes is buggy code (sites that check for a 4.0 Netscape browser specifically) and sometimes it seems to be issues related to backwards compatibility with older versions of Netscape.
Unfortunately I hate to say the Windows version is a LOT more stable than the Linux version. I'm hoping thats not the case in the future. I'd hate Mozilla / Communicator 5.0 to be as crash prone as every other version Netscape's ever released for Unix.
At least now if Netscape can't get it right, at least someone else can fix it!
The first and foremost thing to remember when being offered options is they should not ever be offered in place of a market-level salary. Small start ups are notorious for that, particularly when they're hiring people right out of school who don't know better.
I know lots of people who were talked down as much as 25% in their salary for options in a company that went under after a year or two. Those options are worth nothing (of course), and those people get burned for the salary they lost.
Options should be a perk.
Also another good point thats already been said in here several times is to make sure EVERYTHING is in writing. With the sudden boom in the Internet over the last few years, there's a lot of serious sleezeballs out there.
While we're divulging trade secrets, the coke recipe isn't too complicated. The only secret part are the flavors added to it (the "vegetable extracts" as they term it in Europe)...
And those are simple -- they're kola nut extract and coca extract. That's why all the other colas taste like Pepsi, not Coke. Coke is the only company allowed to use the coca plant extract. From my understanding, they purchase it from some company in New Jersey which has an exclusive arrangement with the US Government to import something on the order of 500 tons of coca leaves which are chemically processed to destroy the cocaine. The extract is sold to Coke in some exclusive arrangement.
So there you go, now we all know how to decrypt DVD's and make Coke.
Of course, when you say you can use coke's formula if you figure it out, that's not the case because no one else can import the coca leaves, or you rot in jail for the rest of your life.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who believes that the top-level stories on here should have moderation on them too.
I mean, really! This search engine hardly works at all, only the search part is free (and that's the no-brainer part of any search engine), it certainly doesn't index 800 million pages (I rarely got any results on any queries) and yet they still appear on here like some news item.
Did they pay slashdot? Are they a major stockholder now? What's the deal? Or was once again a story posted that wasn't checked first.
Give me seven million dollars, I'll double check my stories...
Mozilla stopped using gtk widgets AFAIK like six months ago, I believe everything is rendering locally, so all the platforms look the same. No more having things lay out wierd on Unix because the widgets are different than on Windows or MacOS.
No one has ever said the speed of light is constant. You've read a few articles apartently and drawn the wrong conclusions.
It was stated that the speed of light in a vacuum is an absolute barrier for mass less than light to be accellerated to with the addition of energy.
Reletivity doesn't say anywhere that things can't go faster than light or that light has a constant speed.
Lenses work because light moves slower in glass than in air. You get twinkles in the stars because light travels at different speeds in different densities of air. And its trivial to accellerate something faster than the speed of light in some mediums. I think its called Chernekov radiation, when an energetic particle travels faster than light in the medium its passing through. Its the blue glow you get from a nuclear reactor -- neutrons moving faster than the photons. You can picture it like a sonic boom, although physically thats not really whats happening. But the neutrons moving faster than the photons is the cause of it.
Special reletivity says there are no absolute points of reference, but that's the one part of special reletivity that doesn't sync well with quantum mechanics, and it seems to be is blatently wrong.
I'm not a physicist, so I don't understand the exact mechanics behind making it work, but if you're at an arbitrary point in space, you could take measurements of the cosmic background radiation (which defines the extents of the universe, and as such provides a point of reference that inherantly defines the universe) in various directions. An arbitrary time later you take the same measurements again. Figuring the universe cools at the same rate in each direction , differences between the various measurements taken can ABSOLUTELY determine one's motion and position relative to the universe, this Einstein's concept of no absolute points of reference only works in theory -- when comparing simple systems with only two objects -- and that theory doesn't match reality.
Actually even if the universe cools at different rates in different directions, you could still calculate it as long as the rate of cooling in a given direction remains constant, or at least calulatable. Its sort of like how Microsoft's IntelliEye mice track their motion by comparing snapshots of their background reference points.
This one popped into my head a few minutes ago, just a thought experiment on why the universe would have to be flat.
If you accept the multiple-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then every possible state of the universe exists (flat, closed, open, following every possible occurance throughout time).
Assuming that we need a stable version of the universe where things occur in ways that match the observations of classical physics (special relativity, general relativity, thermodynamics, etc), then we suddenly have a defined number of states the universe must exist in where random quantum occurances don't violate thise rules to a significant enough extent to keep the physical processes we need to live from occurring. (Blending the Copenhagen and multi-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, I'm suggesting that the requirements for our conciousness to exist and thus be able to ponder the question forces the full range of possible universes represented by the wave function of the universe in general to collapse into discrete universes in which we're able to exist, one of which involves every instant we perceive passing through).
If it turned out that the physical results of the radiation pressure I mentioned in my other post are inherantly needed for the proper functioning of our brain in being concious as we are, than those requirements as parameters to our conciousness cause the wave function of the universe to collapse not into discrete universes (ala the multi-worlds hypothesis) where the universe could be open or closed, but in fact our existance would force the universe we're concious of to drop into a stable state where its flat.
Reversing that, basically I'm saying that if it turned out that the universe as we know it can't exist in a form that can support our form of conciousness without the specific form of radiation pressure we measure, and that pressure requires a flat universe because of the results of quantum electrodynamics, then our existance is either proof of the universe being flat, or the cause of the universe being flat, depending on how you want to look at it.
Ugh, that just hurt my brain. Gotta love quantum physics.
Almost without exception, all physics developed pre-quantum dynamics are only true in certain specialized circumstances, in average, on bodies over a certain mass.
That explanation (and in fast the physics typically taught in school) leaves out 99% of what we really know, and are basically just plain wrong.
The only science (IMGO) taught worse in school than evolutionary theory is physics. THey still try to teach people that, for a big example, the angle that light reflects off a mirror is same as the angle it hits a mirror at (ie, if a light source is 30 degrees above the mirror, its reflected light is reflected at 30 degrees) -- which is blatently wrong, has been proven wrong countless times, and is still taught to students.
I'm by no means an expert on this, but I thought quantum mechanics required the universe to be flat.
I'm pre-coffee this morning, but I thought one of the effects of QED was a quantum explanation of radiation pressure involving sending a wave of some variety (again, pre coffee, I think it was an electromagnetic wave? maybe not... because I'm not sure that makes sense) when an electron gains energy, both forward in time, as well as backwards in time that propogate throughout the universe. At some point they impact another electron (or other particle), which inturn reemit the same sort of radiation half of which propogates back towards the original electron (half in terms of time, not direction). The vast majority of the radiation ends up cancelling each other out, but a small amount ends up "reflecting" back to the original electron and providing that resistance? If the universe was open, there wouldn't be enough advanced waves returning to balance things out (unless our understanding of the origins were incorrect, because you can't be open in one direction in time and closed in the other and still have things balance out), and if the universe was closed, there would be too many advanced waves returning and we wouldn't get the results we get.
If I recall correctly, it was some work that Richard Feynmann did early on in his life that involved that.
Okay, point by point (not like anyone will see this, since its old anyway...)
1) Its not jealousy. Its opportunities being offered in a non-equitable way. Its not that I didn't get any stock, its the fact that people who have contributed less did. That's inequitable.
2) Its actually four people with that stock, not 20. But that's neither here nor there.
3) The collective owners of RedHat, for one.
4) I most certainly didn't fuck up. If I had an issue with it, I would have never contributed to it. My point is the inequitable distribution of the opportunity to people under the guise of "compensation" when it was really a luck-of-the-draw among people who's names got pulled out of some database query. If they said a few thousand people would randomly get choosen, I wouldn't have had an issue with it. That's not what they said though.
Slashdot Mirror
I think its still being shown at some wierd middle-of-the-night time on the SciFi channel.
I remember watching an espisode maybe two or three months ago. It might've just been a BG marathon though...
Okay, I've been using Mozilla for over a year -- and as my primary browser for quite a number of months...
But I really hoped that Netscape 6 would have waited until they had a freakin' drop down for the address edit box... I *hate* not being able to pick and choose from other URL's I've been to recently!
Maybe Boston geeks know how hard it is to find parking down that way, and would rather keep it small!
Actually, I'm usually the last to know about these things, in this case a friend of a friend has something to do with organizing it, so I found out that way.
The "community" here in Boston, frankly sucks. Its pretty common that interesting tech-oriented social events are found out about by people after the fact. The Globe's new site (www.digitalmass.com) is probably the best resource here for this kind of thing going on, but I'm not even sure I saw this on there.
This is exciting in a geek kind of way. I'm not used to living somewhere with stuff actually going on.
;)
And to be honest, I'm kind of glad this wasn't posted two weeks ago on Slashdot -- there were limited tickets for the party Friday night and I might not have gotten any!
This ought to be even more interesting than IBM's Bar Code thing a few weeks ago that Michael De Icaza spoke at. Hmmmm... free food, free beer and legos. Doesn't get much better than that!
Boston geeks have known about it for weeks. :)
The most interesting thing I saw in the IGN article wasn't the info on the Playstation2 -- thats been done to death. In the article they had on PS2 accessories though, they listed the PocketStation -- which looks suspiciously like a handheld Playstation!
Has anyone heard anything about this?
Perhaps what is needed is another (yikes, did I just say that?) open source license. One with a specific clause restricting use of the software by companies that choose to hold software patents.
Amazon hosts using Stronghold/Apache. I bet they use gobs of other free software, and they give back to the community by filing for software patents?
If people really want to make a statement about their beliefs that software patents are bad, add a clause to your open source software specifically removing the rights for any corporation or individual holding software patents from use of your software without express written permission.
"Technology pundit Bob Metcalfe walks in the valley of death, Open Sourcerers to his left and Microsofties to his right. He needs all the encouragement he can get at metcalfe@infoworld.com. "
I said this last time an article of his ramblings showed up on here, and its worth saying again. Just because he "invented" some technologies thirty years ago that made him marginally relavent in the industry back then doesn't mean he's at all relavent now. He's walking through a valley of his own ego, reality to his left and the world as he believes it is on his right.
Excuse me? Although I have little desire to get into an argument with a coward on here, but I'm speaking from cold hard experience, and several months of fairly heavy benchmarking and evaluation of a half dozen platforms for servlet and EJB-based applications on a number of servlet engines and application servers on the various platforms.
Blaming Java for Linux's inability to handle large numbers of threads stinks of Linux evangelism at it worst. How long have you, Mr or Mrs Anonymous Coward being using Linux? Eight years like I have? How many commercial rollouts of services using it have you done? Dozens like I have?
The fact is, regardless of your opinion on the Java threading model and the way most Java applications are written, that Linux is not a good match currently for running enterprise class Java applications. And it most certainly is because native threads (being one-to-one mapped to processes) are too heavy-weight. Tweaking the scheduler helps, but most certainly doesn't fix the problem.
If you've ever written enterprise applications in Java, you'd know that the choice as how to use threading isn't always in the control of the application writer. Its tied to the application server and the web server, or servlet environment.
The one point you were correct about was the need in Linux for a more robust kernel threading model that isn't process-bound as it currently is. Until that time, no matter how good IBM's JVM is (and it IS that good), the vast majority of enterprise applications are going to run notably faster under NT. Shipping IBM's JVM with RedHat under the guise of making it an "enterprise" platform, however, is asking for more pseudo-Mindcraft tests to run and show how much faster Java applications are on NT than Linux.
RedHat would be better spending some of its millions hiring kernel hackers to find a solution to the threading issues, THEN Linux could really compete in the enterprise application marketplace.
This is a good thing. The IBM JVM is far and away the fastest on Linux. But it still (unfortunately) sucks compared to the IBM JVM on NT. That's not IBM's fault, but rather the threading issues dealing with the Linux kernel.
Bundling it is good, but its definately not "enterprise" ready. On identical hardware (ie dual boot) its at least 40% slower than NT at moderate load using the JRun servlet environment and Apache 1.3.9. I hate it when I end up having to host an application on NT instead of Linux -- its rare -- but the area of Java is definately a weak point.
The work IBM's been doing to optimize the scheduler looks promising though, but it can't replace the benefit of having ligher-weight threading in the kernel.
A small warning for those thinking about moving down the XML/XSL route who haven't done any testing on it:
Its slow. VERY slow.
Most XSL implementations have significant performance and scalability issues as compared to more common custom technology for producing dynamic web pages.
There's no argument that its a better technology, but I've known several commercial web sites that have spent considerable resources developing XML/XSL implementations and having to roll back the technology when they discovered they needed four or five times the number of servers to be able to use it.
Anyone know of any top-tier sites that are actually using the technology?
I've been using Mozilla as one of my primary browsers for several months now. The only real problem is that lots of sites don't work correctly with it, especially where Javascript is concerned. Sometimes is buggy code (sites that check for a 4.0 Netscape browser specifically) and sometimes it seems to be issues related to backwards compatibility with older versions of Netscape.
Unfortunately I hate to say the Windows version is a LOT more stable than the Linux version. I'm hoping thats not the case in the future. I'd hate Mozilla / Communicator 5.0 to be as crash prone as every other version Netscape's ever released for Unix.
At least now if Netscape can't get it right, at least someone else can fix it!
So?
How many people worldwide in a given year die from Influenza?
In 1996, 3.6 percent of all the deaths in the US were of either Influenza or Pneumonia brought on by Influenza.
That's greater than the number of deaths by AIDS, homicide and suicide put together according to the CDC.
Five deaths? What a horror!
The first and foremost thing to remember when being offered options is they should not ever be offered in place of a market-level salary. Small start ups are notorious for that, particularly when they're hiring people right out of school who don't know better.
I know lots of people who were talked down as much as 25% in their salary for options in a company that went under after a year or two. Those options are worth nothing (of course), and those people get burned for the salary they lost.
Options should be a perk.
Also another good point thats already been said in here several times is to make sure EVERYTHING is in writing. With the sudden boom in the Internet over the last few years, there's a lot of serious sleezeballs out there.
Actually, I didn't even know about it. I just thought the whole coca leaves thing was interesting... and a very non-widely-known fact.
So now we're even closer to the recipe... Pretty soon even the soft drink companies will quake at the mention of Slashdot!
While we're divulging trade secrets, the coke recipe isn't too complicated. The only secret part are the flavors added to it (the "vegetable extracts" as they term it in Europe)...
And those are simple -- they're kola nut extract and coca extract. That's why all the other colas taste like Pepsi, not Coke. Coke is the only company allowed to use the coca plant extract. From my understanding, they purchase it from some company in New Jersey which has an exclusive arrangement with the US Government to import something on the order of 500 tons of coca leaves which are chemically processed to destroy the cocaine. The extract is sold to Coke in some exclusive arrangement.
So there you go, now we all know how to decrypt DVD's and make Coke.
Of course, when you say you can use coke's formula if you figure it out, that's not the case because no one else can import the coca leaves, or you rot in jail for the rest of your life.
My parents bought me a Robotics Discovery Set which was quickly exchanged for a linux-compatible RIS.
I went to finally sit down and play with it last night and realized I'd forgotten to buy batteries.
*sigh*
I'm sure I'm not the only one who believes that the top-level stories on here should have moderation on them too.
I mean, really! This search engine hardly works at all, only the search part is free (and that's the no-brainer part of any search engine), it certainly doesn't index 800 million pages (I rarely got any results on any queries) and yet they still appear on here like some news item.
Did they pay slashdot? Are they a major stockholder now? What's the deal? Or was once again a story posted that wasn't checked first.
Give me seven million dollars, I'll double check my stories...
Mozilla stopped using gtk widgets AFAIK like six months ago, I believe everything is rendering locally, so all the platforms look the same. No more having things lay out wierd on Unix because the widgets are different than on Windows or MacOS.
No one has ever said the speed of light is constant. You've read a few articles apartently and drawn the wrong conclusions.
It was stated that the speed of light in a vacuum is an absolute barrier for mass less than light to be accellerated to with the addition of energy.
Reletivity doesn't say anywhere that things can't go faster than light or that light has a constant speed.
Lenses work because light moves slower in glass than in air. You get twinkles in the stars because light travels at different speeds in different densities of air. And its trivial to accellerate something faster than the speed of light in some mediums. I think its called Chernekov radiation, when an energetic particle travels faster than light in the medium its passing through. Its the blue glow you get from a nuclear reactor -- neutrons moving faster than the photons. You can picture it like a sonic boom, although physically thats not really whats happening. But the neutrons moving faster than the photons is the cause of it.
This isn't entirely true.
Special reletivity says there are no absolute points of reference, but that's the one part of special reletivity that doesn't sync well with quantum mechanics, and it seems to be is blatently wrong.
I'm not a physicist, so I don't understand the exact mechanics behind making it work, but if you're at an arbitrary point in space, you could take measurements of the cosmic background radiation (which defines the extents of the universe, and as such provides a point of reference that inherantly defines the universe) in various directions. An arbitrary time later you take the same measurements again. Figuring the universe cools at the same rate in each direction , differences between the various measurements taken can ABSOLUTELY determine one's motion and position relative to the universe, this Einstein's concept of no absolute points of reference only works in theory -- when comparing simple systems with only two objects -- and that theory doesn't match reality.
Actually even if the universe cools at different rates in different directions, you could still calculate it as long as the rate of cooling in a given direction remains constant, or at least calulatable. Its sort of like how Microsoft's IntelliEye mice track their motion by comparing snapshots of their background reference points.
This one popped into my head a few minutes ago, just a thought experiment on why the universe would have to be flat.
If you accept the multiple-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then every possible state of the universe exists (flat, closed, open, following every possible occurance throughout time).
Assuming that we need a stable version of the universe where things occur in ways that match the observations of classical physics (special relativity, general relativity, thermodynamics, etc), then we suddenly have a defined number of states the universe must exist in where random quantum occurances don't violate thise rules to a significant enough extent to keep the physical processes we need to live from occurring. (Blending the Copenhagen and multi-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, I'm suggesting that the requirements for our conciousness to exist and thus be able to ponder the question forces the full range of possible universes represented by the wave function of the universe in general to collapse into discrete universes in which we're able to exist, one of which involves every instant we perceive passing through).
If it turned out that the physical results of the radiation pressure I mentioned in my other post are inherantly needed for the proper functioning of our brain in being concious as we are, than those requirements as parameters to our conciousness cause the wave function of the universe to collapse not into discrete universes (ala the multi-worlds hypothesis) where the universe could be open or closed, but in fact our existance would force the universe we're concious of to drop into a stable state where its flat.
Reversing that, basically I'm saying that if it turned out that the universe as we know it can't exist in a form that can support our form of conciousness without the specific form of radiation pressure we measure, and that pressure requires a flat universe because of the results of quantum electrodynamics, then our existance is either proof of the universe being flat, or the cause of the universe being flat, depending on how you want to look at it.
Ugh, that just hurt my brain. Gotta love quantum physics.
Almost without exception, all physics developed pre-quantum dynamics are only true in certain specialized circumstances, in average, on bodies over a certain mass.
That explanation (and in fast the physics typically taught in school) leaves out 99% of what we really know, and are basically just plain wrong.
The only science (IMGO) taught worse in school than evolutionary theory is physics. THey still try to teach people that, for a big example, the angle that light reflects off a mirror is same as the angle it hits a mirror at (ie, if a light source is 30 degrees above the mirror, its reflected light is reflected at 30 degrees) -- which is blatently wrong, has been proven wrong countless times, and is still taught to students.
I'm by no means an expert on this, but I thought quantum mechanics required the universe to be flat.
I'm pre-coffee this morning, but I thought one of the effects of QED was a quantum explanation of radiation pressure involving sending a wave of some variety (again, pre coffee, I think it was an electromagnetic wave? maybe not... because I'm not sure that makes sense) when an electron gains energy, both forward in time, as well as backwards in time that propogate throughout the universe. At some point they impact another electron (or other particle), which inturn reemit the same sort of radiation half of which propogates back towards the original electron (half in terms of time, not direction). The vast majority of the radiation ends up cancelling each other out, but a small amount ends up "reflecting" back to the original electron and providing that resistance? If the universe was open, there wouldn't be enough advanced waves returning to balance things out (unless our understanding of the origins were incorrect, because you can't be open in one direction in time and closed in the other and still have things balance out), and if the universe was closed, there would be too many advanced waves returning and we wouldn't get the results we get.
If I recall correctly, it was some work that Richard Feynmann did early on in his life that involved that.
Okay, point by point (not like anyone will see this, since its old anyway...)
1) Its not jealousy. Its opportunities being offered in a non-equitable way. Its not that I didn't get any stock, its the fact that people who have contributed less did. That's inequitable.
2) Its actually four people with that stock, not 20. But that's neither here nor there.
3) The collective owners of RedHat, for one.
4) I most certainly didn't fuck up. If I had an issue with it, I would have never contributed to it. My point is the inequitable distribution of the opportunity to people under the guise of "compensation" when it was really a luck-of-the-draw among people who's names got pulled out of some database query. If they said a few thousand people would randomly get choosen, I wouldn't have had an issue with it. That's not what they said though.