While MacOS was at a disadvantage being one of the only ones to use it, wouldn't it have been an excellent advantage for ALL filesystems to be forked?
Well, one problem immediately springs to mind: The translation between different metadata formats. It's already a pain in the butt when using transferring files of not-so-popular types to the Mac.
The second gripe I have with the Mac is that it's so friggin' hard to edit the metadata. AFAIK you can't even do it on OS 9 without software. Now assuming the user is too stupid to change this manually is good. But not providing the ability at all, even for people who know what they're doing is just stupid.
(Windows first hides the extensions, then if you try to change them, it warns you first. That feels about right for me. - Not that extensions isn't a klugde.)
Apart from that, I agree.. anything is better than file extensions.
Open source won't use Java until Java is open source. Most OSS developers are wary of traps like that. (Which caused reluctance to using Qt, which sparked the Gnome project. Now Qt is free, of course.)
I predict that, when these projects reach sufficient maturity (AWT/Swing support being the achilles heel in all the above), we will see widespread adoption of Java in the OSS community.
What Sun does will have little impact on the OSS community unless they get serious about open source and put Java under a tolerable license.
(If someone's curious about what is bad about the Sun license, see Dalibor Topic's post here, containing a point-by-point comparison to the Open-source definition.)
I think the #1 factor in this is that many families have both parents working, so nobody is home to raise the children. [..] Divorce is happening because people who were raised poorly are getting married.
You may think that.. but it doesn't check out with reality. Not, at least if you take crime and drug use as a measure of how well kids are being brought up.
Sweden has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, and far more working parents (about 80%). It also has far lower rates of violent crime and drug use.
The same goes for much of Europe. And the kids there listen to the same music and watch the same violent films as in the US. These simple answers to tough questions don't cut it.
That being said, the parents do have a responsibility, but so do public schools. Society can't expect every parent to be a good one, our schools must be able to act as a 'safety net' for those kids who need them. And good daycare for working parents as well.
I think it is intriguing that there is a correlation between "elegant mathematics" and visual elegance/beauty. Makes you think about some of the "big questions", doesn't it?
Uh, not really. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you know.
It's seems to me quite natural that mathematical and artistical beauty are related - both are judged by what humans find beautiful. And as boring as it may sound, Symmetry for instance, is something which is appreciated as 'beautiful', and thus humans appreciate symmetry wherever we find it, be it in a mathematical function or the columns of a greek temple.
It also raises the (unanswered) question of why geeks (ostensibly intelligent and scientifically-minded people) continue to believe some ideas (for example, 'garbage collection is slow') despite strong evidence to the contrary that has been available for many years.
The same attitude prevails today, albeit the programming languages are different.
Personally, I've been around long enough to have heard "C is slow, you should be writing that in assembly language". And now the mantra is "Java is slow, you should use C/C++".
That is the first category of machismo anyway: speed-freaks who are quick to recommend C, yet seem surprized when their favorite program turns out to have a buffer-overflow exploit.
The second category appears to be the CS-geek-machismo which is more academic.. These are the guys who are talking about how it all should be Lisp, no matter what. And Java sucks because of its typing, etc. Practical use of the language seems to be of less concern than the design of the language itself for these guys.
Then there are those who believe in using the right tool for the right job. Sadly, you don't hear as much from these guys, probably because macho-geeks are loud and obnoxious by definition.
Anyway, I used to teach a beginners' course in programming, and often got the question on what the 'best' programming language was. I usually answered by asking: "What's the best tool, a screwdriver or a hammer?"
Which is a mighty big 'if'.. Those books were copyrighted, even if ownership is now unclear. Given how the economic situation is in Russia at the moment, they are very unlikely to give anything away.
(Recently, a fight broke out over the rights to the classic Soviet childrens-show Cheburashka, which recently had become big in Japan (!))
Also, the best of these textbooks were republished in the west, such as Landau-Lifshitz "Course of Theoretical Physics", which is still in print.
(Not that Landau-Lifshitz is that good either.. Let's just say that translating it didn't do much.:-) )
I'd wager most doctors and MRI operators have a fairly good understanding of how an MRI works. True, they couldn't invent such a machine, but understanding what's going on isn't all that challenging
They have an abstract understanding, sure. They do not have a detailed understanding. That requires graduate-level physics. (Time evolution of nuclear spin couplings)
But this was my point as well, they don't need to have a detailed understanding.
Also my point wasn't that most scientific instruments will be simplified to the degree that everyone can use them, why should they? Most people don't want to do research! But most instrumetns are simplified enough to be used outside the particular field that developed them.
(and thank god, or the only people using lasers would be molecular physicists..)
Biotech is hard. It isn't something you just pick up and do. Making it open source wouldn't make it any more accessible to non-biologists. Similarly, whether a program is open-source or not has virtually no bearing on how your 'average' user uses said program.
True. However, if we just skip the open-source bit: In science, software is a tool. In general, tools tend to get easier and easier to use.
Galileo had to build his own telescope, today, you can just go buy one and start using it immediately and actually find out stuff. No knowledge of optics required.
Doctors use MRI machines all the time. How many of them can explain how they work? Not many.
Basically, every scientific method starts with the method-developer and develops into a state where the user is not necessarily in the same field as the developer. It's becomes a black-box, giving the results the user wants, but without the user needing to know exactly how the thing works.
Interesting that the only time a proof of concept is ever challanged is when money is involved.
Bull. There are thousands of mathematical researchers. Most don't have hefty salaries, and most aren't working on money-prize problems.
Mathematicians are never in it for the money.
Wonder what he'll do with the money?
Seems like he wants to restore the old family castle:
The ruin of the chateau de Bourcia overlooks a fertile valley surrounded by wooded hills. The site is ideal for a mathematical research institute. The restoration of the ch^ateau for that purpose would be an appropriate use of the million dollars offered for a proof of the Riemann hypothesis.
I must say that at he seems a bit full of himself, or at least, getting a bit ahead of himself. Given how many have tried and failed witht his problem.
The statician Hermann Chernoff was first to developed the idea of using faces to display multi-variable data.
Actually, if someone just wants a simple metaphor, faces probably are the best choice, given that our brains are hard-wired to do face recognition especially well.
I call bullshit on that one. You're comparing apples and oranges.
Fertilizer causes eutrophication, which is not 'pollution' per se, but is better defined as an overabundance of nutrients causing detrimental environmental effects. (such as oxygen depletion in waters-->dead fish)
Now, pesticides are a different matter. But even then, you can't compare these things with pollution caused by fossil fules, because they contribute to global warming, acid rain and ground-level ozone. Which are completely different forms of pollution.
Anyway. Fertilizers aren't a problem in themselves, but rather the leakage of fertilizer into surrounding biotopes. There are ways to adress that problem through runoff-control, organic farming methods, etc.
No. It was a $50 million dollar cash investment for new SCO stock. That means $50 million cash for SCO, and $50 million worth of SCO's stock. (AKA 'Reichsmarks', 'Confederate dollars', )
Then it turned out that noone else felt that $50 million dollars of this SCO-money was actually worth $50 million. So they wanted their money back.
They got $13 million. And some stock. The stock doesn't cost SCO anything.
So SCO gets 50-13 = $37 million out of the deal. Not bad. But, they have totally screwed their reptutation with any potential investors.
Now given that SCO:
Is not going to win any of their lawsuits
Their Unix business is losing money big time, and they have nothing to attract new business with, being generally dispised.
They have no way of getting more funding from investors.
They're sinking. Big time. However, Microsoft may very well pitch in to keep them afloat through the lawsuits.
Wheps, misinformation. Sorry. The link, that was the Florida dept of energy, not the US. Still, the Per capita number is representative, since the US average is apparently 461.12 gallons/person.
1) There are better crops than soy for oil. 2) You get more miles to the gallon on ANY diesel than on ordinary gas. 3) Your figures on gasoline consumption are way off. You missed something. Department of Energy says the total US consumption is of fuel gasoline including gasohol was 7.98 billion gallons in 2001.
4) Why should the USA be self-sufficient in fuel production? It certainly isn't today. (And don't say fuel reserves, because you can store diesel too, you know.)
The quote in the article is that open source folks 'are often libertarian..', not are. There's a difference there.
Not that I think that is a fair description either, but given that it is a pretty accurate description of guys like ESR, it's not hard to see how such an opinion could be formed.
Slashdot Mirror
Googling gave nothing: Do you have a source for that quote?
Although I truely despise Ashcroft, I cannot believe he is so monumentally stupid to say something like that.
Or did you intend to paraphrase?
While MacOS was at a disadvantage being one of the only ones to use it, wouldn't it have been an excellent advantage for ALL filesystems to be forked?
Well, one problem immediately springs to mind: The translation between different metadata formats. It's already a pain in the butt when using transferring files of not-so-popular types to the Mac.
The second gripe I have with the Mac is that it's so friggin' hard to edit the metadata. AFAIK you can't even do it on OS 9 without software. Now assuming the user is too stupid to change this manually is good. But not providing the ability at all, even for people who know what they're doing is just stupid.
(Windows first hides the extensions, then if you try to change them, it warns you first. That feels about right for me. - Not that extensions isn't a klugde.)
Apart from that, I agree.. anything is better than file extensions.
Apples and oranges, dude..
Don't for a second assume that criminal law and civil law work the same way.
And apart from that, a criminal can very well be released pending appeal too, it's at the judge's discretion.
Bail is something else, that is pending trial, e.g. while you are still innocent, and it's there to guarantee you show up at the trial.
Open source won't use Java until Java is open source. Most OSS developers are wary of traps like that.
(Which caused reluctance to using Qt, which sparked the Gnome project. Now Qt is free, of course.)
Java is certainly going open source. Not Sun's java, but there are plenty of open-source VM:s, and compilers, and a full implementation of the class library in the works.
I predict that, when these projects reach sufficient maturity (AWT/Swing support being the achilles heel in all the above), we will see widespread adoption of Java in the OSS community.
What Sun does will have little impact on the OSS community unless they get serious about open source and put Java under a tolerable license.
(If someone's curious about what is bad about the Sun license, see Dalibor Topic's post here, containing a point-by-point comparison to the Open-source definition.)
I think the #1 factor in this is that many families have both parents working, so nobody is home to raise the children. [..] Divorce is happening because people who were raised poorly are getting married.
You may think that.. but it doesn't check out with reality.
Not, at least if you take crime and drug use as a measure of how well kids are being brought up.
Sweden has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, and far more working parents (about 80%).
It also has far lower rates of violent crime and drug use.
The same goes for much of Europe. And the kids there listen to the same music and watch the same violent films as in the US. These simple answers to tough questions don't cut it.
That being said, the parents do have a responsibility, but so do public schools. Society can't expect every parent to be a good one, our schools must be able to act as a 'safety net' for those kids who need them.
And good daycare for working parents as well.
What examples? Did you actually read the book, or just quote it off some web page?
I haven't seen the full context - but that quote is in itself completly bogus.
What he's saying is "If beauty is biological, it is strange that physics is beautiful, since physics isn't biology.".
Which is just weird, because he is equating the subject of study with the study itself.
I think it is intriguing that there is a correlation between "elegant mathematics" and visual elegance/beauty. Makes you think about some of the "big questions", doesn't it?
Uh, not really. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you know.
It's seems to me quite natural that mathematical and artistical beauty are related - both are judged by what humans find beautiful. And as boring as it may sound, Symmetry for instance, is something which is appreciated as 'beautiful', and thus humans appreciate symmetry wherever we find it, be it in a mathematical function or the columns of a greek temple.
This said, if Linux ever got to the point that it was as much of a competitor to MS as Pepsi is to Coke, I'd be damn happy.
Could that happen, though? I mean, who would buy coke if you could get Pepsi for free?
It also raises the (unanswered) question of why geeks (ostensibly intelligent and scientifically-minded people) continue to believe some ideas (for example, 'garbage collection is slow') despite strong evidence to the contrary that has been available for many years.
It's not an unanswered question, it was answered quite long ago, in satirical form:
Real programmers don't use Pascal.
The same attitude prevails today, albeit the programming languages are different.
Personally, I've been around long enough to have heard "C is slow, you should be writing that in assembly language". And now the mantra is "Java is slow, you should use C/C++".
That is the first category of machismo anyway: speed-freaks who are quick to recommend C, yet seem surprized when their favorite program turns out to have a buffer-overflow exploit.
The second category appears to be the CS-geek-machismo which is more academic.. These are the guys who are talking about how it all should be Lisp, no matter what. And Java sucks because of its typing, etc. Practical use of the language seems to be of less concern than the design of the language itself for these guys.
Then there are those who believe in using the right tool for the right job. Sadly, you don't hear as much from these guys, probably because macho-geeks are loud and obnoxious by definition.
Anyway, I used to teach a beginners' course in programming, and often got the question on what the 'best' programming language was. I usually answered by asking: "What's the best tool, a screwdriver or a hammer?"
.. if they could be liberated.
:-) )
Which is a mighty big 'if'.. Those books were copyrighted, even if ownership is now unclear. Given how the economic situation is in Russia at the moment, they are very unlikely to give anything away.
(Recently, a fight broke out over the rights to the classic Soviet childrens-show Cheburashka, which recently had become big in Japan (!))
Also, the best of these textbooks were republished in the west, such as Landau-Lifshitz "Course of Theoretical Physics", which is still in print.
(Not that Landau-Lifshitz is that good either.. Let's just say that translating it didn't do much.
I'd wager most doctors and MRI operators have a fairly good understanding of how an MRI works. True, they couldn't invent such a machine, but understanding what's going on isn't all that challenging
They have an abstract understanding, sure. They do not have a detailed understanding. That requires graduate-level physics. (Time evolution of nuclear spin couplings)
But this was my point as well, they don't need to have a detailed understanding.
Also my point wasn't that most scientific instruments will be simplified to the degree that everyone can use them, why should they? Most people don't want to do research! But most instrumetns are simplified enough to be used outside the particular field that developed them.
(and thank god, or the only people using lasers would be molecular physicists..)
Biotech is hard. It isn't something you just pick up and do. Making it open source wouldn't make it any more accessible to non-biologists. Similarly, whether a program is open-source or not has virtually no bearing on how your 'average' user uses said program.
True. However, if we just skip the open-source bit:
In science, software is a tool. In general, tools tend to get easier and easier to use.
Galileo had to build his own telescope, today, you can just go buy one and start using it immediately and actually find out stuff. No knowledge of optics required.
Doctors use MRI machines all the time. How many of them can explain how they work? Not many.
Basically, every scientific method starts with the method-developer and develops into a state where the user is not necessarily in the same field as the developer. It's becomes a black-box, giving the results the user wants, but without the user needing to know exactly how the thing works.
Just some examples of how bio very much is open already..
In biotech software, there's lots of open source. BioJava, BLAST.. etc.
As for what they're talking about, e.g. databases.. Most data already IS open. The human genome, protein structures and sequences.
Sorry to burst the bubble, but some usenetting shows:
The same guy claimed to have solved the same problem at least 4 years ago.
The guy has a reputation for sometimes getting it wrong.
(Probably because he has published flawed proofs of other well-known problems.)
He could be right, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Bull. There are thousands of mathematical researchers. Most don't have hefty salaries, and most aren't working on money-prize problems.
Mathematicians are never in it for the money.
Wonder what he'll do with the money?
Seems like he wants to restore the old family castle:
I must say that at he seems a bit full of himself, or at least, getting a bit ahead of himself. Given how many have tried and failed witht his problem.
Cool idea, but let's hand out some credit:
The statician Hermann Chernoff was first to developed the idea of using faces to display multi-variable data.
Actually, if someone just wants a simple metaphor, faces probably are the best choice, given that our brains are hard-wired to do face recognition especially well.
The reasoning for why the new license sucks has absolutely nothing to do with the GPL, despite the uninformed ramblings of the Slashdot crowd.
Richard Stallman interprets the license as GPL-incompatible. Is he also uninformed? I wouldn't say so.
How many other companies put "Ph.D. a plus" in their want ads?"
How about: Every company which does any kind of research?
Seriously. In areas like biochem, getting a job (or at least, a good one) without a PhD is near-impossible.
I call bullshit on that one. You're comparing apples and oranges.
Fertilizer causes eutrophication, which is not 'pollution' per se, but is better defined as an overabundance of nutrients causing detrimental environmental effects.
(such as oxygen depletion in waters-->dead fish)
Now, pesticides are a different matter. But even then, you can't compare these things with pollution caused by fossil fules, because they contribute to global warming, acid rain and ground-level ozone. Which are completely different forms of pollution.
Anyway. Fertilizers aren't a problem in themselves, but rather the leakage of fertilizer into surrounding biotopes. There are ways to adress that problem through runoff-control, organic farming methods, etc.
And analysts still recommend it as a "strong buy".
Actually they don't. Only Deutsche Bank feels that way. And the analyst who formed that opinion, Brian Skiba, doesn't work there anymore. Interesting.
That means $50 million cash for SCO, and $50 million worth of SCO's stock.
(AKA 'Reichsmarks', 'Confederate dollars', )
Then it turned out that noone else felt that $50 million dollars of this SCO-money was actually worth $50 million. So they wanted their money back.
They got $13 million. And some stock. The stock doesn't cost SCO anything.
So SCO gets 50-13 = $37 million out of the deal. Not bad. But, they have totally screwed their reptutation with any potential investors.
Now given that SCO:
Is not going to win any of their lawsuits
Their Unix business is losing money big time, and they have nothing to attract new business with, being generally dispised.
They have no way of getting more funding from investors.
They're sinking. Big time. However, Microsoft may very well pitch in to keep them afloat through the lawsuits.
Wheps, misinformation. Sorry. The link, that was the Florida dept of energy, not the US. Still, the Per capita number is representative, since the US average is apparently 461.12 gallons/person.
That's still half of your number there.
1) There are better crops than soy for oil.
2) You get more miles to the gallon on ANY diesel than on ordinary gas.
3) Your figures on gasoline consumption are way off. You missed something. Department of Energy says the total US consumption is of fuel gasoline including gasohol was 7.98 billion gallons in 2001.
4) Why should the USA be self-sufficient in fuel production? It certainly isn't today.
(And don't say fuel reserves, because you can store diesel too, you know.)
those web sites didn't work. The urls have been Slashdotted already.
.gov top domain!
Yup. And they're
Given the PATRIOT act, does this mean we're all terrorists now?
I'll get the "Free Taco!" campaign started right now, just in case. We can only hope the general public will misunderstand.
(I'm hungry, so?)
The quote in the article is that open source folks 'are often libertarian..', not are. There's a difference there.
Not that I think that is a fair description either, but given that it is a pretty accurate description of guys like ESR, it's not hard to see how such an opinion could be formed.