As for the Russians, they can produce good airframes and decent powerplants, but they lack sophistication in the high-end electronics/software/sensors that pretty much make or break a combat aircraft today.
What worries most analysts is not so much the capability of Russia to produce an F-35 killer but rather what will happen if China/Russia/India combine to produce a joint stealth fighter project. The resulting machine could conceivably be better than the F-35 and capable of making up it's shortcomings vs. the F-22 by being cheaper to make and easyer to mass manufacture. The idea being that if you can't beat the F-22 technologically use the 'T-34 effect' to swamp forces using the F-22. Now Russia perhaps does not have the economic muscle to mass manufacture a stealth design in a big way but India and especially China do.
The only comparable jet to the F-35 is the Eurofighter platform, though the capability mix is different.
Purely in terms of electronics the Eurofighter is probably better than the F-35. The Trance 3 aircraft with all the frills including thrust-vectoring will be even better than the current Typhoons which lack a large portion of the Eurofighters potential feature set. Another thing is that he Eurofighter can supercruise which the F-35 AFAIK can't. The F-35 does have stealth and it is frequently clamied the Typhoon has none, which, according to one US source is due to an European ability to understand but inablitiy to implement Stealth technology. The first part is a half truth, the Typhoon has low observability features, which will probably lower its radar signature considerably but of course never quite as low as those of the F-22 especially. Also keep in mind that the F-35's stealth is compromized by an inability to carry weapons internally unlike the F-22. As for the European inabilty to produce Stealth designs, I find that claim to be funny. I would evaluate the Typhoon as being better the F-35 but not as good as the F-22.
XML stands for Xtremely Media-hyped Language and PHP stands for Perl-Hater's Platform. They are both very overused and should be ignored from this point on. Oh crap. I guess I get a free downmod for going against Slashdot culture. Oh well.
Dude, calm down! Hating Perl is not something developers do out of malice. It's a bit more like the obvious conclusion a child draws about fire after getting burned for the first time. Of course there are also some people, like you for example, who enjoy pain....
1) SWORD is remote controlled it is not autonomous like I always thought a true robot in the Asimovian sense had to be. 2) Since we are now including remotely operated vehicles in the definition of a true robot, SWORD is not that different from a Paveway bomb or a Hellfire missile except SWORD doesn't self destruct when it destroys the target.
This begs the question wasn't Asimov's first law broken decades ago, perhaps even by the V1 which was strictly speaking a remote operated vehicle?
Personally I won't begin to worry about Asimovs laws as long as Humans are on the other end. apons.
t stings to get banned... but realy any MMO is a waste of time, WoW being one of the worst in my opinion.
He should channel all his energy into some more worthwhile waste of time like us sensible Nerds, something like..... ummm.... building a PC case made completely out of fans, or an iPod with a 300gb disk or if he is really masocistic he could try installing Oracle Application Suite on a minimalist Slackware system. One of the aspects of Nerdity is spending so much time indoors doing nerdy things that you begin to suffer from lack of exposure to sunlight and and Warcraft in all its incarnations made the list of nerdy things a long time ago. That being said, techically, you are right WoW is a waste of time.
This article has me wondering about something. Why aren't we encrypting things by default? Why isn't encryption being built into the protocol when it's designed? It always seems that it gets tacked on afterwards, if at all, and we're worse off in the long run for it. Take VNC for example. If you want that encrypted you're told to send it over SSH. Wouldn't it be great if VNC traffic was encryped by design right from the start? The same applies to any other traffic (VoIP, IM, whatever). What happens is that many people don't encrypt because of the difficultly or they don't know any better. Unencrypted traffic is sent putting them at risk.
There are lots of reasons why encryption isn't being widely used. For one thing there is the normal tinfoil hat reason, ie. that the people in charge don't want it becausy they wouldn't be able to stick their nose where it don't belong so they try to prevent such technology from being widely used. Alot has also to do with cost and computing overhead. Encrypting can be an expensive thing to do in terms of computing power and especially so if everything form all the network communications protocols to storage media content is bening encrypted. Doning encryption with special hardware is one solution but that adds cost and also the problem of the hardware algorithms becoming obsolete like WEP for example. Just try to get ahold of, say a 100mb photoshop file. Now copy it into the user home directory of a regular user on an OS.X machine, then do the same for antoher user using 'File Vault'. You will quickly discover that the latter operation takes alot longer since those 100mb's of Photoshop file are being encrypted. You should notice similar problems when comparing normal unencrypted file transfers over a network with transfers over a high strength encrypted link. VPN for example works noticably slower using port forwarding over an SSH tunnel.
Who would ever wear such a thing? It looks ridiculous. Completely style-free. The girls would laugh at you.
Everybody here is a nerd, girls are already laughing at us so why should we care what kind of a fashion statement that thing makes? Now take your beer and go back to the sports forum....
For the FOSS Means Business event, it was suggested that we get Microsoft to take part and make a big controversial event (since Perens and Stallman would be the other keynoters).
We decided against......
I'm rather disappointed, If you could have gotten Steve Ballmer to attend on behalf of MS as well as Richard Stallman I would have be willing to pay for the privilege of watching the event. I'm convinced a debate between those two would end in a world class chairthrowing duel.......
When both the Netherlands and Belgium just gave up the front grew too long and far for France to effectively resist an invasion so they surrendered to save their people from harm.
I am getting rather tired of this whole roll-over and surrendermyth. The Netherlands and Belgium didn't roll over and surrender they fought back and fought hard. They simply got overrun by a combination of massive airborne assaults, innovative commando operations and armored warfare on a scale and using tactics they were in no way prepared for. In addition, since their governments and military leaders had seriously neglected equipping their airforces in partickular with up-to-date weapons they also lost control of their airspace within a matter of days. What happened in France and the Low countries in 1940 was the result of a massive tactical, technological and organizatorial military reforms since Napoleon. To add insult to injury those reforms in Germany were in many ways the direct result of the de mitlitarization of the country dictated by the treaty of Versailles since it brought a whole generation of young military thinkers into positions/ranks they would not have had a chance to get in other armies. Making fun of the Belgians, Netherlanders, French, and yes even the British (Contrary to popular beleif they got their ass kicked as well in 1940) is pretty unfair. I am willing to lay odds to the fact that if there had been US troop in France in 1940 they would have gotten spanked by the Germans as well.
While this may get shot down (NPI) as all a bit of movie inspired silliness, it's people who attempt these very ambitious projects and designs that change the world. Hey - commercial spaceflight is a reality today so why not?
It isn't just the people who attempt ambitios projects who change the worls. Keep in mind that Frank Whittle was laughed at when he offered his Jet engine to the British MOD, the Brits only began to allocate real resources to jet engie research when their photo intelligence analysts found prints showing working jet fighter prototypes on the tarmac on research facities in Germany. It has been debated to what extent Whittle influenced his German counterpart Hans von Ohain but the point is still that sometimes the person who spots the potential of an ambitious project/idea (in this case Heinkel, Junkers and BMW), picks it up and develops it further is just as important as the original inventor. Many ambitios ideas lay unused for decades or even centuries before their potential was reckognized.
The crusades did nothing to the islamic civilization, it was minor compared to other things. The crusades are highly exaggerated nowadays in their impact, back then they were even considered so minor that a german/roman emperor could lease the holy land for a lifetime (and having a clash with the pope over this back then)
While I mostly agree with you that partickular part of your comment is a bit inaccurate. It is often forgotten that there were more 'crusades' or rather 'holy wars' against the Muslims than just in the holy land. While the west lost the campaigns in Palestine the influx of religiously motivated warriors into Christian Spanish armies were essential to the recovery of Spain from Islamic rulers. It has also been argued that the Moslem/Christian wars in Spain actually damaged the crusader states by drawing off Crusader armies. It has also been argued by historians that the Crusades contributed to a radicalization of Islam. Also keep in mind that neiter Emperor Frederick II or the Sultan al-Malik were exactly your typical run-of-the-mill illiterate medieval rulers so their agreement over the holy land must be considered fairly unique and it certainly pissed off a whole horde of zealots. In contemporary terms it would be comparable to an Israeli prime ministar giving the Palestinians back control over their half of Jerusalem and various other sacrfed places they are entitled to by UN decrees. The reaction among Christian fundamentalists in the USA and elsewhere as well as Orthodox Jews should be interesting to say the least.
When you can't figure out why you have no friends, you hole yourself up in the basement for 3 years and come out with an equation that explains your shell of a social life.;D
You have misunderstood this completely. It is not an effort to explain the shell that is a Nerd's social life, this is already a well understood phenomenon. This research is part of an ongoing effort to find a sientifically sound solution to the tricky problem of enabling a Nerd to find a girlfriend. If you can't understand human females and their social behavior instinctively, analyze them mathematically until you do. Of course it might take a few more decades before we have quantum computers powerful enough to handle this daunting analytical task but until then basic mathematical research like this is vital.
I think you're forgetting about this little thing called World War II;-)
No not really, and I did say it's a 'simple' scheme:-) Plus, WWII happened to a large extent because of the treaty of Versailles whose terms were beyond our control. Foch wasn't joking when he called it a '20 year armistice'.
...the extreme expression of that are the almost ridiculous levels of Nazi record keeping. I've often wondered if this is a cultural trait, or if it's something genetic in the brain. Given that I have pretty close to zero German cultural influence, I tend to by sympathetic toward a genetic possibility.
Being that I am a German and have had alot of German cultural influence as a consequence of being a German (you know: 'knackwurst, bier und sauerkraut') I can tell you that this has nothing to do with genetics!! It is a cultural thing, an ancient German custom. Whenever we Germans feel that we might be about to do somenting galactically stupid we like to document the full extent of our idiocy for future reference. Think of it as a simple scheme, aimed at preventing us from making the same mistake twice, don't read to much into it...
They don't have much choice...Microsoft had essentially destryed "direct" market by driving browsers price to zero. And they need _some_ ways to fund their development.
Yup and it isn't as if there is anything morally wrong about OOS projects making money as long as it doesn't violate GPL and the profits go toward funding the project? Personally I don't mind, there are plenty of examples of non-profit organizations that have revenue streams so why get upset over the Mozilla project joining that group as long as the money doesnt' corrupt them?
I teach astronomy, and I just tried to go to Cassini's website for some information for a presentation I'm giving next week. When I found the Cassini website down with some strange error, I clicked over to/. to check the news until their site comes back up. Lo and behold, the first story on/. is about Cassini. Did you all purposely do this?
Isn't it common knowledge that/. is really a diabolically clever sceme hatched by a group af evil hackers with the intention of harnessing the insatiable curiosity of thousands of unsuspecting nerds to contuct DOS attacks on websites the proprietors of/. don't like?
>And once you've lost a user's confidence, it's hard to get it back. Just ask Microsoft And yet, they still seem to be doing OK.
Do you mean in terms of security or money? If you are talking about security, given the attitudes toward MS on this forum, I'm surprised you weren't moded up to '+5 Funny' for that comment. Personally I wouldn't exactly call Windows Security 'OK' (as in security provided by Microsoft, out of the box, after patching and with native tools only no third party software), perhaps in a couple of years, if Vista lives up to the security hype that surrounds it then maybe..... I still have occasion to use Win2k3 at work. It has become alot more stable than Windows 2k Server used to be but in terms of Security it still has away to go. I can't speak for the Microsoft Desktop OS'es I stopped using them back in 1997.
That evolution doesn't give a toss about your concept of strength or of fitness, and guess what... poor people have more children than rich people do...
That's not really the point. The point is that we are now at a level of scientific knowledge where we can begin to influence evolution at a genetic level. That means will soon be able, if we want to, to conduct eugenics at a molecular level thus pre-programming the genome of a child rather than achieving canges by slow and clumsy selective breeding like the Nazis and other eugenics enthusiasts of the 1930s had in mind. In the forseeable future we will be able to modify genes to make our children smarter, stronger, better looking etc... If you are rich you will be more easily able to afford this kind of treatment than if you are poor. Some poor people will not be able to afford it at all, which might lead to them becoming 'indentured' (in the historical sense) to a corporation who sponsors the gene modifications of their children. Some scientists have advanced the hypothesis that such developments may lead to two genetically distinct... I hesitate to use the word 'species', lets call them 'groups' of humans emerging resulting in a 'genetc upperclass' and a 'genetic underclass' of untouchables. As genetic modifications become more extreme these groups might even become unable to cross breed. This sounds like science fiction but there is no reason why it could not happen althoug perhaps what actually happens will not be quite so extreme as what I described. Even so, think about it, how would you feel if you lived to discover that your great grandchild in 50 years time will have the words 'Encoded by Microsoft Genetics' genetically etched into the skin behind it's left ear?
We all know that "journalists" do this all the time.
A cliche from an old movie:
- The difference between a Journalist and a Reporter is that a journalist writes a story, a reporter simply reports what he sees.
noun, An archaic instrument for writing or drawing, consisting of a thin stick of graphite or a similar substance enclosed in a long thin piece of wood or fixed in a metal or plastic case.
Instead of inane, immature competitions such as this one, I'd rather have a nice manual (RTNM -- Read The Nice Manual) on how to improve/lock down an OS X machine.
This has been done already, TNM can be found here. Two caveats:
1) The manual is for OS.X Panther although it should be mostly just as valid for OS.X Tiger. 2) The publisher has a dubious reputation with the tinfoil-hat crowd.
I found it to be interesting to read and it should be fairly easy for moderately computer-literate users to understand.
I think Larry's pushing an agenda here. Linux and Apache were both tremendously successful long before the big corporations got involved. They got involved _because_ the Open Source products were successful.
If MySql hadn't established a market niche that's now threatening Oracle, would Larry have looked at buying it? How did he make it successful?
Let's keep things in perspective here, MySql is a nice product but in terms of features, stability etc. it is a toy compared to Oracle Database. People rant on endlessly about speed but when it comes to the feature set, stability and reliability it leaves MySql standing which is not surprising since they occupy totally different market segments MySql is low end while Oracle Database is a high end product. The reason why Oracle looked at acquirirng it probably has more to do with them needing a good low end solution than them being threatened by it.
What about standard staples of Java development such as Ant, JUnit, even things like Struts? Sure, most corporations use them. But they're successful because they're written well, they add great value, they're available, and they were all of those things without IBM or Oracle or Microsoft buying them, promoting them, offering to support them, etc.
I think Larry's wrong. Surprisingly often people do just sit at home and write world-class software, and sometimes that does become successful. Open Source definitely doesn't need corporate sponsorship; the two can go together very nicely.
OSS pojects all on their own can produce quality software and they are not reliant on corporations but OSS pojects can and indeed have also benefitted immensly from corporate involvement. Another thing is that OSS projects have more than once formed the jumping-off point for sucessful commercial ventures which is good since it can provide small startup companies with a jumping-off point, or shortcut, into markets dominated by a few corporate giants. Oracle (not exactly a small company but a good example) for example uses Apache in it's Oracle Application Server but improved it significantly by replacing some modules and replacing others. Whether Larry is right depends on what context he was speaking in. Does OSS software need corporate sponsorship to suceed in general? NO I dont think so. Does OSS software need corporate sponsorship or repackaging/improvement to succeed in the enterprise where high availability and world class support are a must? YES, because when your revenue generating systems are suffering kernel panicks or some other difficult to solve problems you want to get an expert engineer on-site and fix the problem post haste and not spend a week rifling through Internet forums and HowTo docs.
I thought that was president Bush junior? You see if Bush the elder was the Alpha release that would make brother Jeb the Stable production release when he gains the White House...
Slashdot Mirror
And that is to fool you into thinking you live in a democracy. :)
IIRC:
Two things only the people anxiously desire: bread and the Circus games." -- Decimus Iunius Iuvenali (Satiric roma poet)
If he were here today I bet old Decimus would say:
Two things only the people anxiously desire: broadband and the Computer games."
I wonder what he would have to say about US politics?
As for the Russians, they can produce good airframes and decent powerplants, but they lack sophistication in the high-end electronics/software/sensors that pretty much make or break a combat aircraft today.
What worries most analysts is not so much the capability of Russia to produce an F-35 killer but rather what will happen if China/Russia/India combine to produce a joint stealth fighter project. The resulting machine could conceivably be better than the F-35 and capable of making up it's shortcomings vs. the F-22 by being cheaper to make and easyer to mass manufacture. The idea being that if you can't beat the F-22 technologically use the 'T-34 effect' to swamp forces using the F-22. Now Russia perhaps does not have the economic muscle to mass manufacture a stealth design in a big way but India and especially China do.
The only comparable jet to the F-35 is the Eurofighter platform, though the capability mix is different.
Purely in terms of electronics the Eurofighter is probably better than the F-35. The Trance 3 aircraft with all the frills including thrust-vectoring will be even better than the current Typhoons which lack a large portion of the Eurofighters potential feature set. Another thing is that he Eurofighter can supercruise which the F-35 AFAIK can't. The F-35 does have stealth and it is frequently clamied the Typhoon has none, which, according to one US source is due to an European ability to understand but inablitiy to implement Stealth technology. The first part is a half truth, the Typhoon has low observability features, which will probably lower its radar signature considerably but of course never quite as low as those of the F-22 especially. Also keep in mind that the F-35's stealth is compromized by an inability to carry weapons internally unlike the F-22. As for the European inabilty to produce Stealth designs, I find that claim to be funny. I would evaluate the Typhoon as being better the F-35 but not as good as the F-22.
XML stands for Xtremely Media-hyped Language and PHP stands for Perl-Hater's Platform. They are both very overused and should be ignored from this point on. Oh crap. I guess I get a free downmod for going against Slashdot culture. Oh well.
Dude, calm down! Hating Perl is not something developers do out of malice. It's a bit more like the obvious conclusion a child draws about fire after getting burned for the first time. Of course there are also some people, like you for example, who enjoy pain....
This begs the question wasn't Asimov's first law broken decades ago, perhaps even by the V1 which was strictly speaking a remote operated vehicle
Actually it wasn't a ROW it was preprogrammed, which makes it what? a very primitive implementation of an autonomous robot?
First: two observations:
1) SWORD is remote controlled it is not autonomous like I always thought a true robot in the Asimovian sense had to be.
2) Since we are now including remotely operated vehicles in the definition of a true robot, SWORD is not that different from a Paveway bomb or a Hellfire missile except SWORD doesn't self destruct when it destroys the target.
This begs the question wasn't Asimov's first law broken decades ago, perhaps even by the V1 which was strictly speaking a remote operated vehicle?
Personally I won't begin to worry about Asimovs laws as long as Humans are on the other end. apons.
t stings to get banned... but realy any MMO is a waste of time, WoW being one of the worst in my opinion.
He should channel all his energy into some more worthwhile waste of time like us sensible Nerds, something like..... ummm.... building a PC case made completely out of fans, or an iPod with a 300gb disk or if he is really masocistic he could try installing Oracle Application Suite on a minimalist Slackware system. One of the aspects of Nerdity is spending so much time indoors doing nerdy things that you begin to suffer from lack of exposure to sunlight and and Warcraft in all its incarnations made the list of nerdy things a long time ago. That being said, techically, you are right WoW is a waste of time.
This article has me wondering about something. Why aren't we encrypting things by default? Why isn't encryption being built into the protocol when it's designed? It always seems that it gets tacked on afterwards, if at all, and we're worse off in the long run for it. Take VNC for example. If you want that encrypted you're told to send it over SSH. Wouldn't it be great if VNC traffic was encryped by design right from the start? The same applies to any other traffic (VoIP, IM, whatever). What happens is that many people don't encrypt because of the difficultly or they don't know any better. Unencrypted traffic is sent putting them at risk.
There are lots of reasons why encryption isn't being widely used. For one thing there is the normal tinfoil hat reason, ie. that the people in charge don't want it becausy they wouldn't be able to stick their nose where it don't belong so they try to prevent such technology from being widely used. Alot has also to do with cost and computing overhead. Encrypting can be an expensive thing to do in terms of computing power and especially so if everything form all the network communications protocols to storage media content is bening encrypted. Doning encryption with special hardware is one solution but that adds cost and also the problem of the hardware algorithms becoming obsolete like WEP for example. Just try to get ahold of, say a 100mb photoshop file. Now copy it into the user home directory of a regular user on an OS.X machine, then do the same for antoher user using 'File Vault'. You will quickly discover that the latter operation takes alot longer since those 100mb's of Photoshop file are being encrypted. You should notice similar problems when comparing normal unencrypted file transfers over a network with transfers over a high strength encrypted link. VPN for example works noticably slower using port forwarding over an SSH tunnel.
Who would ever wear such a thing? It looks ridiculous. Completely style-free. The girls would laugh at you.
Everybody here is a nerd, girls are already laughing at us so why should we care what kind of a fashion statement that thing makes? Now take your beer and go back to the sports forum....
For the FOSS Means Business event, it was suggested that we get Microsoft to take part and make a big controversial event (since Perens and Stallman would be the other keynoters).
......
We decided against
I'm rather disappointed, If you could have gotten Steve Ballmer to attend on behalf of MS as well as Richard Stallman I would have be willing to pay for the privilege of watching the event. I'm convinced a debate between those two would end in a world class chairthrowing duel.......
When both the Netherlands and Belgium just gave up the front grew too long and far for France to effectively resist an invasion so they surrendered to save their people from harm.
I am getting rather tired of this whole roll-over and surrendermyth. The Netherlands and Belgium didn't roll over and surrender they fought back and fought hard. They simply got overrun by a combination of massive airborne assaults, innovative commando operations and armored warfare on a scale and using tactics they were in no way prepared for. In addition, since their governments and military leaders had seriously neglected equipping their airforces in partickular with up-to-date weapons they also lost control of their airspace within a matter of days. What happened in France and the Low countries in 1940 was the result of a massive tactical, technological and organizatorial military reforms since Napoleon. To add insult to injury those reforms in Germany were in many ways the direct result of the de mitlitarization of the country dictated by the treaty of Versailles since it brought a whole generation of young military thinkers into positions/ranks they would not have had a chance to get in other armies. Making fun of the Belgians, Netherlanders, French, and yes even the British (Contrary to popular beleif they got their ass kicked as well in 1940) is pretty unfair. I am willing to lay odds to the fact that if there had been US troop in France in 1940 they would have gotten spanked by the Germans as well.
While this may get shot down (NPI) as all a bit of movie inspired silliness, it's people who attempt these very ambitious projects and designs that change the world. Hey - commercial spaceflight is a reality today so why not?
It isn't just the people who attempt ambitios projects who change the worls. Keep in mind that Frank Whittle was laughed at when he offered his Jet engine to the British MOD, the Brits only began to allocate real resources to jet engie research when their photo intelligence analysts found prints showing working jet fighter prototypes on the tarmac on research facities in Germany. It has been debated to what extent Whittle influenced his German counterpart Hans von Ohain but the point is still that sometimes the person who spots the potential of an ambitious project/idea (in this case Heinkel, Junkers and BMW), picks it up and develops it further is just as important as the original inventor. Many ambitios ideas lay unused for decades or even centuries before their potential was reckognized.
The crusades did nothing to the islamic civilization, it was minor compared to other things. The crusades are highly exaggerated nowadays in their impact, back then they were even considered so minor that a german/roman emperor could lease the holy land for a lifetime (and having a clash with the pope over this back then)
While I mostly agree with you that partickular part of your comment is a bit inaccurate. It is often forgotten that there were more 'crusades' or rather 'holy wars' against the Muslims than just in the holy land. While the west lost the campaigns in Palestine the influx of religiously motivated warriors into Christian Spanish armies were essential to the recovery of Spain from Islamic rulers. It has also been argued that the Moslem/Christian wars in Spain actually damaged the crusader states by drawing off Crusader armies. It has also been argued by historians that the Crusades contributed to a radicalization of Islam. Also keep in mind that neiter Emperor Frederick II or the Sultan al-Malik were exactly your typical run-of-the-mill illiterate medieval rulers so their agreement over the holy land must be considered fairly unique and it certainly pissed off a whole horde of zealots. In contemporary terms it would be comparable to an Israeli prime ministar giving the Palestinians back control over their half of Jerusalem and various other sacrfed places they are entitled to by UN decrees. The reaction among Christian fundamentalists in the USA and elsewhere as well as Orthodox Jews should be interesting to say the least.
When you can't figure out why you have no friends, you hole yourself up in the basement for 3 years and come out with an equation that explains your shell of a social life. ;D
You have misunderstood this completely. It is not an effort to explain the shell that is a Nerd's social life, this is already a well understood phenomenon. This research is part of an ongoing effort to find a sientifically sound solution to the tricky problem of enabling a Nerd to find a girlfriend. If you can't understand human females and their social behavior instinctively, analyze them mathematically until you do. Of course it might take a few more decades before we have quantum computers powerful enough to handle this daunting analytical task but until then basic mathematical research like this is vital.
I think you're forgetting about this little thing called World War II ;-)
:-) Plus, WWII happened to a large extent because of the treaty of Versailles whose terms were beyond our control. Foch wasn't joking when he called it a '20 year armistice'.
No not really, and I did say it's a 'simple' scheme
...the extreme expression of that are the almost ridiculous levels of Nazi record keeping. I've often wondered if this is a cultural trait, or if it's something genetic in the brain. Given that I have pretty close to zero German cultural influence, I tend to by sympathetic toward a genetic possibility.
Being that I am a German and have had alot of German cultural influence as a consequence of being a German (you know: 'knackwurst, bier und sauerkraut') I can tell you that this has nothing to do with genetics!! It is a cultural thing, an ancient German custom. Whenever we Germans feel that we might be about to do somenting galactically stupid we like to document the full extent of our idiocy for future reference. Think of it as a simple scheme, aimed at preventing us from making the same mistake twice, don't read to much into it...
They don't have much choice...Microsoft had essentially destryed "direct" market by driving browsers price to zero. And they need _some_ ways to fund their development.
Yup and it isn't as if there is anything morally wrong about OOS projects making money as long as it doesn't violate GPL and the profits go toward funding the project? Personally I don't mind, there are plenty of examples of non-profit organizations that have revenue streams so why get upset over the Mozilla project joining that group as long as the money doesnt' corrupt them?
Probably if you gave them $90 million for a silly little study they would be happy to.
Only $90 million? With a Federal agency involved that sort of chump change will hardly cover the ashtrays and the plastic coffee cups.
I teach astronomy, and I just tried to go to Cassini's website for some information for a presentation I'm giving next week. When I found the Cassini website down with some strange error, I clicked over to /. to check the news until their site comes back up. Lo and behold, the first story on /. is about Cassini.
/. is really a diabolically clever sceme hatched by a group af evil hackers with the intention of harnessing the insatiable curiosity of thousands of unsuspecting nerds to contuct DOS attacks on websites the proprietors of /. don't like?
Did you all purposely do this?
Isn't it common knowledge that
>And once you've lost a user's confidence, it's hard to get it back. Just ask Microsoft
And yet, they still seem to be doing OK.
Do you mean in terms of security or money? If you are talking about security, given the attitudes toward MS on this forum, I'm surprised you weren't moded up to '+5 Funny' for that comment. Personally I wouldn't exactly call Windows Security 'OK' (as in security provided by Microsoft, out of the box, after patching and with native tools only no third party software), perhaps in a couple of years, if Vista lives up to the security hype that surrounds it then maybe..... I still have occasion to use Win2k3 at work. It has become alot more stable than Windows 2k Server used to be but in terms of Security it still has away to go. I can't speak for the Microsoft Desktop OS'es I stopped using them back in 1997.
That evolution doesn't give a toss about your concept of strength or of fitness, and guess what... poor people have more children than rich people do...
That's not really the point. The point is that we are now at a level of scientific knowledge where we can begin to influence evolution at a genetic level. That means will soon be able, if we want to, to conduct eugenics at a molecular level thus pre-programming the genome of a child rather than achieving canges by slow and clumsy selective breeding like the Nazis and other eugenics enthusiasts of the 1930s had in mind. In the forseeable future we will be able to modify genes to make our children smarter, stronger, better looking etc... If you are rich you will be more easily able to afford this kind of treatment than if you are poor. Some poor people will not be able to afford it at all, which might lead to them becoming 'indentured' (in the historical sense) to a corporation who sponsors the gene modifications of their children. Some scientists have advanced the hypothesis that such developments may lead to two genetically distinct... I hesitate to use the word 'species', lets call them 'groups' of humans emerging resulting in a 'genetc upperclass' and a 'genetic underclass' of untouchables. As genetic modifications become more extreme these groups might even become unable to cross breed. This sounds like science fiction but there is no reason why it could not happen althoug perhaps what actually happens will not be quite so extreme as what I described. Even so, think about it, how would you feel if you lived to discover that your great grandchild in 50 years time will have the words 'Encoded by Microsoft Genetics' genetically etched into the skin behind it's left ear?
We all know that "journalists" do this all the time.
A cliche from an old movie:
- The difference between a Journalist and a Reporter is that a journalist writes a story, a reporter simply reports what he sees.
"...pencil."
noun,
An archaic instrument for writing or drawing, consisting of a thin stick of graphite or a similar substance enclosed in a long thin piece of wood or fixed in a metal or plastic case.
Instead of inane, immature competitions such as this one, I'd rather have a nice manual (RTNM -- Read The Nice Manual) on how to improve/lock down an OS X machine.
This has been done already, TNM can be found here. Two caveats:
1) The manual is for OS.X Panther although it should be mostly just as valid for OS.X Tiger.
2) The publisher has a dubious reputation with the tinfoil-hat crowd.
I found it to be interesting to read and it should be fairly easy for moderately computer-literate users to understand.
I think Larry's pushing an agenda here. Linux and Apache were both tremendously successful long before the big corporations got involved. They got involved _because_ the Open Source products were successful.
If MySql hadn't established a market niche that's now threatening Oracle, would Larry have looked at buying it? How did he make it successful?
Let's keep things in perspective here, MySql is a nice product but in terms of features, stability etc. it is a toy compared to Oracle Database. People rant on endlessly about speed but when it comes to the feature set, stability and reliability it leaves MySql standing which is not surprising since they occupy totally different market segments MySql is low end while Oracle Database is a high end product. The reason why Oracle looked at acquirirng it probably has more to do with them needing a good low end solution than them being threatened by it.
What about standard staples of Java development such as Ant, JUnit, even things like Struts? Sure, most corporations use them. But they're successful because they're written well, they add great value, they're available, and they were all of those things without IBM or Oracle or Microsoft buying them, promoting them, offering to support them, etc.
I think Larry's wrong. Surprisingly often people do just sit at home and write world-class software, and sometimes that does become successful. Open Source definitely doesn't need corporate sponsorship; the two can go together very nicely.
OSS pojects all on their own can produce quality software and they are not reliant on corporations but OSS pojects can and indeed have also benefitted immensly from corporate involvement. Another thing is that OSS projects have more than once formed the jumping-off point for sucessful commercial ventures which is good since it can provide small startup companies with a jumping-off point, or shortcut, into markets dominated by a few corporate giants. Oracle (not exactly a small company but a good example) for example uses Apache in it's Oracle Application Server but improved it significantly by replacing some modules and replacing others. Whether Larry is right depends on what context he was speaking in. Does OSS software need corporate sponsorship to suceed in general? NO I dont think so. Does OSS software need corporate sponsorship or repackaging/improvement to succeed in the enterprise where high availability and world class support are a must? YES, because when your revenue generating systems are suffering kernel panicks or some other difficult to solve problems you want to get an expert engineer on-site and fix the problem post haste and not spend a week rifling through Internet forums and HowTo docs.
Think of it as the beta release.
I thought that was president Bush junior? You see if Bush the elder was the Alpha release that would make brother Jeb the Stable production release when he gains the White House...