If you accept that the human mind functions as a Turing machine, then the idea of downloading your conciousness to a computer and letting it run there is plausible. But the human mind has seems to have non algorithmic capabilities that seem not to be consistent with the turing model. If you want to read a truly enlighting essay on this subject, check out The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. He contends that we do not yet understand the physics of the mind. His reasoning makes fascinating reading.
If you wish to sell binary only versions of your software why even get involved with GPL or LGPL? It seems to me that you are more interested in working around them than in keeping your code free. One of the other losing "Open Source" licenses would suit your duplicious purposes better. You are a software hoarder who does not belong in the free software community.
Is it that surprising that anyone with the near guarantee of anonymity that the net provides behaves in a hostile manner? I think not. Our lives are spent occuping our place in societies many heirarchies, as emplyees, as citizens, in social settings. Not so on the net. Anyone and communicate uninhibited, exaggerated, and safe from retribution. Social norms and courtesies are unnecessary and discarded. I, a long time gadfly on slashdot, prefer sarcasm to threats. So beware Jon Katz! If you dangle flaimbait in front of a readership known to be trigger happy to begin with don't be surprised if you get exaggerated responses.
The auction of these rare specimens to the highest bidder is disgusting. TRex specimens are incredibly rare and are of profound scientific interest. The skeleton should be held in trust by the US government, preserved for scientic inquiry by paleotologists, and then displayed for the public.
How can you say you you hate bad science reporting when that is all/. seems to post these days? Like most programmers with some technical training but no scientific training you are inclined waste your team refuting already refuted ideas instead of actually particpating in real scientific debate. When was the last time you pointed us to an interesting Science or Nature article. I read/. because I want to get the latest hacking news. You should stick to that.
Color caee has focused on selling cheezey knockoffs of iMacs. A lot of companies including Compac are doing the same thing. If is further proof the the PC industry is entirely lacking in imagination. Apple's future success is assured in the presence of these sheep.
Steven Hawking is a towering figure of this century. It was good to hear some of the words of the man himself. I found his rejection of the idea of "being a perfect soul in an imperfect body" to be very humble.
Has anyone thought of cleaning them off with a solvent and letting them go? I suppose that isn't an option because of the tree huggers involved. Better to whine about oil companies I guess.
Seems to me if you like lignux and are trolling for trash on PC simpleton's flagship trade rag you will eventually find reason to be outraged./. posts get worse all the time.
Both true. BSD is great software but it failed to attract a fanatical developer base like lignux because of the aristocratic development model they employ. Lignux inspires orders of magnitude more contributers. This certainly has its negative side -- lignux does not have a reputation for being a scupulously clean design.
Have you ever heard of double precision floating point numbers and long integers in C? I can't help it if your are not careful handling numeric types. C often makes bad decisions for you if you let it.
I am primarily a C/C++ programmer with all of the biases that come therewith. I also use Perl quite a bit because it is useful, even if the syntax is abomitable. If I had my way we would all be using LISP. I started out using VAX Fortran and Fortran 77 in scientific applications. As I gained increasing familiarity with it I began to seek alternatives.
Glag to see Katz comments about Linus Torvalds. They will surely sit well on this bulletin board. But his use of the term open source is annoying and hypocritical. I mean the term was only invented to make free software more palatable to the corporate entities which he denounces in his article. I use the term free software and I hope you will too.
Oh God. Here we go again. The mantra of the Fortran programmer is efficiency. Cobol programmers make the same claims. Ofcourse people stopped listening to both groups 10 years ago. The notion that C is inefficient has been so thoroughly refuted in the past 10 years that it is not worth debating. Together Fortran and Cobol programmers the lowest rungs of computing, and rightly so. I still think that this story is a yawn.
At last, a substantive piece about RMS. I'd thought/. had turned into an etabloid dedicated to mockery of everything non-Lignux, including RMS. Glad to see I am wrong. RMS is the Jesus of software!
His main point seems to be that PC keyboards suck and Unix (Sun) style keyboards are great. So why is this piece so long? I take exception to his criticism of Emacs keyboard sequences. Emacs is the most magical program of all time. What else would you expect from a Perl simpleton?
Re:Funny how the system fails to work both ways
on
ESR talks in Dublin
·
· Score: 1
I agree. As much as I despise NT, M$ keeps getting bigger and stronger. The Unix camp has been whistling this tune for 10 years. I hope LiGNUx continues to make gains, but I don't see M$ folding up shop anytime soon.
No. Atlanta is just hot. The real action is in Tulsa, the networking capitol of the US, home to WorldCom and Williams Communications. The cost of living here is extremely low and salaries are quite competative.
The excitement surrounding this year's announcement is huge. Although many of the candidates are worthy I think Alan Cox really stands out. The guy is a one man wrecking crew when it comes to kernel hacking.
As originally conceived, the browser (Mosaic) was a nice efficient way to browse nicely formated text. Today browser is an absolute garbage can of features. Consider:
HTML with M$ and Netscape extensions
CSS/Javascript style sheets
Sun and M$ Java
OS dependent pluggins
The W3 Consortium has completely lost control of defining what a browser is to Microsoft. Netscape is all but dead. I used to think that RMS's idea of developing a free full featured browser (E-scape) was a waste of time. I was wrong. The free software community needs to develop a good browser. It is more important than the desktop initiatives.
It does no good for free software and GNU/Linux advocates like the folks at slashdot to steer their readers to baseless accusations. This makes slashdot just as bad as the Microsoft disinformation machine they abhor.
Slashdot Mirror
If you accept that the human mind functions as a Turing machine, then the idea of downloading your conciousness to a computer and letting it run there is plausible. But the human mind has seems to have non algorithmic capabilities that seem not to be consistent with the turing model. If you want to read a truly enlighting essay on this subject, check out The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. He contends that we do not yet understand the physics of the mind. His reasoning makes fascinating reading.
For this and lots of other info from the Space Telescope Institute check out http://www.stsci.edu. It is an outstanding web site.
If you wish to sell binary only versions of your software why even get involved with GPL or LGPL? It seems to me that you are more interested in working around them than in keeping your code free. One of the other losing "Open Source" licenses would suit your duplicious purposes better. You are a software hoarder who does not belong in the free software community.
Is it that surprising that anyone with the near guarantee of anonymity that the net provides behaves in a hostile manner? I think not. Our lives are spent occuping our place in societies many heirarchies, as emplyees, as citizens, in social settings. Not so on the net. Anyone and communicate uninhibited, exaggerated, and safe from retribution. Social norms and courtesies are unnecessary and discarded. I, a long time gadfly on slashdot, prefer sarcasm to threats. So beware Jon Katz! If you dangle flaimbait in front of a readership known to be trigger happy to begin with don't be surprised if you get exaggerated responses.
The auction of these rare specimens to the highest bidder is disgusting. TRex specimens are incredibly rare and are of profound scientific interest. The skeleton should be held in trust by the US government, preserved for scientic inquiry by paleotologists, and then displayed for the public.
Nice interview guys. It is always fun for me to read the words of brilliant people discussing what they know best.
As for Michael Cowpland, isn't he in jail yet for insider trading?
How can you say you you hate bad science reporting when that is all /. seems to post these days? Like most programmers with some technical training but no scientific training you are inclined waste your team refuting already refuted ideas instead of actually particpating in real scientific debate. When was the last time you pointed us to an interesting Science or Nature article. I read /. because I want to get the latest hacking news. You should stick to that.
Color caee has focused on selling cheezey knockoffs of iMacs. A lot of companies including Compac are doing the same thing. If is further proof the the PC industry is entirely lacking in imagination. Apple's future success is assured in the presence of these sheep.
Steven Hawking is a towering figure of this century. It was good to hear some of the words of the man himself. I found his rejection of the idea of "being a perfect soul in an imperfect body" to be very humble.
Has anyone thought of cleaning them off with a solvent and letting them go? I suppose that isn't an option because of the tree huggers involved. Better to whine about oil companies I guess.
Seems to me if you like lignux and are trolling for trash on PC simpleton's flagship trade rag you will eventually find reason to be outraged. /. posts get worse all the time.
Both true. BSD is great software but it failed to attract a fanatical developer base like lignux because of the aristocratic development model they employ. Lignux inspires orders of magnitude more contributers. This certainly has its negative side -- lignux does not have a reputation for being a scupulously clean design.
Have you ever heard of double precision floating point numbers and long integers in C? I can't help it if your are not careful handling numeric types. C often makes bad decisions for you if you let it.
I am primarily a C/C++ programmer with all of the biases that come therewith. I also use Perl quite a bit because it is useful, even if the syntax is abomitable. If I had my way we would all be using LISP. I started out using VAX Fortran and Fortran 77 in scientific applications. As I gained increasing familiarity with it I began to seek alternatives.
Glag to see Katz comments about Linus Torvalds. They will surely sit well on this bulletin board. But his use of the term open source is annoying and hypocritical. I mean the term was only invented to make free software more palatable to the corporate entities which he denounces in his article. I use the term free software and I hope you will too.
Oh God. Here we go again. The mantra of the Fortran programmer is efficiency. Cobol programmers make the same claims. Ofcourse people stopped listening to both groups 10 years ago. The notion that C is inefficient has been so thoroughly refuted in the past 10 years that it is not worth debating. Together Fortran and Cobol programmers the lowest rungs of computing, and rightly so. I still think that this story is a yawn.
A. Fortran is a lousy language that you should not use.
B. If you use Fortran, use g77 and support free software!
Slow day guys?
At last, a substantive piece about RMS. I'd thought /. had turned into an etabloid dedicated to mockery of everything non-Lignux, including RMS. Glad to see I am wrong. RMS is the Jesus of software!
His main point seems to be that PC keyboards suck and Unix (Sun) style keyboards are great. So why is this piece so long? I take exception to his criticism of Emacs keyboard sequences. Emacs is the most magical program of all time. What else would you expect from a Perl simpleton?
I agree. As much as I despise NT, M$ keeps getting bigger and stronger. The Unix camp has been whistling this tune for 10 years. I hope LiGNUx continues to make gains, but I don't see M$ folding up shop anytime soon.
No. Atlanta is just hot. The real action is in Tulsa, the networking capitol of the US, home to WorldCom and Williams Communications. The cost of living here is extremely low and salaries are quite competative.
The excitement surrounding this year's announcement is huge. Although many of the candidates are worthy I think Alan Cox really stands out. The guy is a one man wrecking crew when it comes to kernel hacking.
The W3 Consortium has completely lost control of defining what a browser is to Microsoft. Netscape is all but dead. I used to think that RMS's idea of developing a free full featured browser (E-scape) was a waste of time. I was wrong. The free software community needs to develop a good browser. It is more important than the desktop initiatives.
I think that uwm is still the window manager of choice.
It does no good for free software and GNU/Linux advocates like the folks at slashdot to steer their readers to baseless accusations. This makes slashdot just as bad as the Microsoft disinformation machine they abhor.