I think an even bigger problem is that it's not necessarily the _results_ that are a problem, but the question.
The "question" is a part of the methodology.
For example, a lot of the Microsoft studies compare Microsoft and Linux/J2EE. What an idiotic comparison!!!!
Thing is that it isn't obviously an idiotic comparison to someone who dosn't know the subject. Unlike, for example, comparing wine (or pizza) made from either grapes or tomatoes...
And even if it is truly independent, people will argue about the methodology.
This is part of what is known as the "scientific method". In some cases knowing the methdology is even more important than knowing the results or conclusion. Where the aim is really marketing rather than actual research the conclusion will be pushed, typically without mention of the methodology (sometimes without any results.) To the point where some are simply glorified (and expensive) anecdotes.
Benchmarks, independent or not, are useful as a hazy indicator at best, a waste of electrons at worst.
It is difficult to design a benchmark which accuratly reflects the "real world" for a complex machine. When it comes to software there is the additional complication of software which is optimised to benchmarks.
Only to someone massively jealous and ashamed of his own inferiority is a charitable organization having donated over $7 billion of grants and with $25 billion in assets pandering "table scraps." Actually by my count the BGF is by far the largest philanthropic organization ever.
There is a story about a poor person who gives a small amount of money to charity and thus has to go without being far more philanthropic than many rich people who donate lots of money at no cost to themselves. That story being thousands of years old.
Some of these stores will be ringing up the wrong price, be informed at the register that the database is wrong, and only fix it on your order.
Quite possibly the staff in the store have no ability to correct the problem. Even overriding the price on a single transaction tends to need a supervisor's key.
If what you say is true then why don't more people send bills for bogus things to corporations.
Bogus billing is a fairly common and well known scam. Typically along the lines of invoicing for something never ordered. It still goes on because there are still companies who don't reconcile invoices to orders.
How about if SCO loses? Do they have to refund everyone who was coerced into buying licenses?
If you paid SCO and they lost you'd need to sue them to try and get your money back. Good luck, since you'd probably be just another unsecured creditor of a bankrupt company.
It's ridiculous that no one has tried to prevent them from talking out their asses yet. It makes sense to me, am I missing something?
The concept of "freedom of speach". SCO can say whatever they like, but no-one is obliged to listen to them or believe what they say. Similarly anyone else has the freedom to comment on, critique and debunk whatever SCO might be saying.
Of course, changing the law would be a good route,
Assuming the problem is (entirely) within the law, as opposed to how it is operated.
but before you do that you'd probably need to follow the advice of Dick from Shakespeare's King Henry VI: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." because while the legal profession remains in its current form, it will do everything possible to work against timely processing of expensive cases, even if the judges support it (are judges paid per case or per hour?)
How many judges are not lawyers? Maybe lawyers should also be ineligable to play any part in the executive and legislative arms of government.
The problem is the legal bit. If our system was less beaurocratic (consider what just happened when the SCO failed to come forward with any real backup to their claims in court) we really could sue them for extortion.
As well as commercial software piracy. Since they are continuing to distribute GPL software, whilist claiming that the GPL does not apply to them. Dosn't the law, as it now stands, make this a criminal rather than civil activity.
From the article it looks like they're trying to understand how a plant knows how many total pores to have open for breathing, given that each pore only has local information - there's no global sensor telling the pores what to do.
The point is that there dosn't need to be any kind of global control system or "knowlage". Any more than there needs to be for birds to form flocks or fish to school.
Who cares who's selling what? The TRUE geek makes his own from a brick of silver.
The typical properties you want for a thermal paste are good heat conductivity and poor electrical conductivity. Since silver is the best conducting element it is not really something which makes sense to use in the first place.
Drug laws were birthed and fostered by racism, and they're perpetuated by ignorance and a stubborn "For your own good" attitude.
The gangsters involved in black market drug supply probably want them kept illegal. Since the business models don't work too well with legal commodities. Pharmaceutical companies probably wouldn't want currently illegal drugs to become legal, since they wouldn't be able to get patents on them...
If the U.S. govt would ask a University Comp-Sci department (any University) to initiate an open-source secure electronic voting system, this problem would solve itself very rapidly.
No doubt the US government would get upset were the answer something along the lines of using a system which could be easily counted by hand or machine, without involving lots of computer hardware and software. Especially if "not invented here" syndrome was involved.
Why do these things continue to go out to bid instead of being handled in academia where they should be?
It's a political dicision. The claim is that putting things to "the market" (the criteria being such that only a very few businesses could even put up a bid in the first place) is "more efficent". Whereas in actual practice it could just as easily be "corporate welfare".
Forgive me for asking but why is the Pentagon involved in the conduct of Elections? Isn't there some more neutral organization ? It is like asking the Republican-leaning ("I am committed to delivering...") Diebold to be in charge of conducting elections.
In many places elections are run by a neutral "civil service". (With care being taken to ensure that any civil servant is not seen to be in a position of conflicting interests.) AFAIK no such entity even exists in the US.
If it was the State Department (Colin Powell) it would make sense but the Pentagon (Donald Rumsfeld) ? There is no democracy in the Defense Services and None at the Pentagon - what makes them so confident that they know what democracy needs.
Since both Powell and Rumsfeld are part of the current US government it's hard to see how either could play a part in any current elections without interest conflicts.
Just because two computers can talk to each other directly doesn't mean they are "wide open on the wild west Internet". but you were speaking from a business standpoint. I'm speaking from a technical aspect as well as a community aspect. the control of who gets to publish information on the internet is restricted by things like NAT which doesn't allow direct connections,
NAT can easily be an issue with business systems. Since companies merge and "partner". It's quite possible for there to be situations where two (or more) previously unconnected networks need to be connected, but there several machines on the same IP addresss...
Its a fuggin executable. With everyone running as admin, the thing is just going to open and infect everything. There is no way anyone is going to pick the program to open executables with every time they need to be run.
There are a couple of issues here. If a user application needs to be run as "admin" in order to work then it is broken. There is no good reason why executables should be directly runnable from an attachment in an email program (or for that matter directly from a web browser). For the vast majority of end users there's no good reason why executables should even be runnable via a file browser...
Granted, the 'bug' is in the user. However Firebird/Thunderbird (for Windows) will not let you run executables directly from the client. They make you save to disk and run it your own damn self.
Whilst at the same time not disabling the ability to click on data files or attachments and open them in the relevent application. IIRC Microsoft does not allow you to be this selective.
And since I know everyone is already readying their "Ah ha! Windows sucks!" posts, remember that running unknown code is NOT a good idea on ANY operating system. The virus doesn't exploit any massive windows bug.
Except being able to run executable attachments trivially.
If everyone used Linux instead of Windows, then the virus writers would write viruses for linux instead!
Even if this were the case Linux is considerably less "virus friendly" than Windows. Having the concept of execute permission and a heterogeneous binary mix makes the virus writer's task a considerably harder one. Remember even in areas such as webservers where Windows is in the minority it is still the platform with the most malware.
Believe it or not, Roald Dahl, the slightly scary looking and GREAT writer of childrens novels was awarded the international aerial photography award during the Second World War
I knew an old man who in his youth was a photographer in Army, and flew some missions over Europe taking aerial photographs. That was as dangerous as any other job on the plane.
It could easily be a lot more dangerous. Since the planes used were likely to be fighters which had all the guns removed. To make room for cameras and increase the top speed. If they encountered an enemy fighter the only option was to run...
Linux levels the playing field in grand new ways, even for the embedded folks, even for the snooty ones.
The last thing companies who are doing fairly well out of proprietary software want is a level playing field. Especially if it means they have to work hard to gain and retain ("lock ins" are rather more difficult with OSS) customers.
The people who wrote it will have the best understanding of how the system works.
With proprietary software these are likely to be the only people on the planet who know how it actually works.
If they happen to be sitting next to you, it is easy to get support.
Except in the case of very small companies the software writer is unlikely to be answering the "support" line. If the writer has left the company or was a contractor in the first place don't expect customers to be told:)
You and I might be able to figure stuff out on our own, but Joe CEO wants everything he uses to be backed 24/7/365 by the company making it. And you know what? Hes right.
If Joe CEO want's this kind of support for anything then they had better be prepared to pay for it. As for this support comming from the company who made the widget this isn't usually a condition with anything else so why should it be with software. Anyway when it comes to proprietary software all you know is who supplied it to you. Did they actually write it? Did they buy it from someone else? Did they buy it from somewhere else and hack it about? Only with OSS do you have any way to find out who actually wrote the software.
I believe the core reason for Cisco migrating to Linux-based appliances is support; when customers see a WINDOWS 2000 splash screen, they think of it as a Windows box. They tinker. I would wager I get at least one support issue a week because customers "play".
It's not that hard to change the spash screen on Windows. The issue is more likely to be that Windows is a "Personal Computer" operating system. Where such tinkering is often not only possible but encouraged...
OpenOffice.org will certainly open and save in MS Office formats. However, once you get OpenOffice.org on all of those government desktops how long do you think it is going to be before Israeli government workers are simply emailing around OpenOffice.org formats?
Especially given that the OpenOffice.org formats result in smaller files. Combined with the issues of MS Word documents possibly having data you don't want third parties to see.
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I think an even bigger problem is that it's not necessarily the _results_ that are a problem, but the question.
The "question" is a part of the methodology.
For example, a lot of the Microsoft studies compare Microsoft and Linux/J2EE. What an idiotic comparison!!!!
Thing is that it isn't obviously an idiotic comparison to someone who dosn't know the subject. Unlike, for example, comparing wine (or pizza) made from either grapes or tomatoes...
And even if it is truly independent, people will argue about the methodology.
This is part of what is known as the "scientific method". In some cases knowing the methdology is even more important than knowing the results or conclusion. Where the aim is really marketing rather than actual research the conclusion will be pushed, typically without mention of the methodology (sometimes without any results.) To the point where some are simply glorified (and expensive) anecdotes.
Benchmarks, independent or not, are useful as a hazy indicator at best, a waste of electrons at worst.
It is difficult to design a benchmark which accuratly reflects the "real world" for a complex machine. When it comes to software there is the additional complication of software which is optimised to benchmarks.
Only to someone massively jealous and ashamed of his own inferiority is a charitable organization having donated over $7 billion of grants and with $25 billion in assets pandering "table scraps." Actually by my count the BGF is by far the largest philanthropic organization ever.
There is a story about a poor person who gives a small amount of money to charity and thus has to go without being far more philanthropic than many rich people who donate lots of money at no cost to themselves. That story being thousands of years old.
Some of these stores will be ringing up the wrong price, be informed at the register that the database is wrong, and only fix it on your order.
Quite possibly the staff in the store have no ability to correct the problem. Even overriding the price on a single transaction tends to need a supervisor's key.
If what you say is true then why don't more people send bills for bogus things to corporations.
Bogus billing is a fairly common and well known scam. Typically along the lines of invoicing for something never ordered. It still goes on because there are still companies who don't reconcile invoices to orders.
How about if SCO loses? Do they have to refund everyone who was coerced into buying licenses?
If you paid SCO and they lost you'd need to sue them to try and get your money back. Good luck, since you'd probably be just another unsecured creditor of a bankrupt company.
It's ridiculous that no one has tried to prevent them from talking out their asses yet. It makes sense to me, am I missing something?
The concept of "freedom of speach". SCO can say whatever they like, but no-one is obliged to listen to them or believe what they say. Similarly anyone else has the freedom to comment on, critique and debunk whatever SCO might be saying.
Of course, changing the law would be a good route,
Assuming the problem is (entirely) within the law, as opposed to how it is operated.
but before you do that you'd probably need to follow the advice of Dick from Shakespeare's King Henry VI: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." because while the legal profession remains in its current form, it will do everything possible to work against timely processing of expensive cases, even if the judges support it (are judges paid per case or per hour?)
How many judges are not lawyers? Maybe lawyers should also be ineligable to play any part in the executive and legislative arms of government.
The problem is the legal bit. If our system was less beaurocratic (consider what just happened when the SCO failed to come forward with any real backup to their claims in court) we really could sue them for extortion.
As well as commercial software piracy. Since they are continuing to distribute GPL software, whilist claiming that the GPL does not apply to them. Dosn't the law, as it now stands, make this a criminal rather than civil activity.
From the article it looks like they're trying to understand how a plant knows how many total pores to have open for breathing, given that each pore only has local information - there's no global sensor telling the pores what to do.
The point is that there dosn't need to be any kind of global control system or "knowlage". Any more than there needs to be for birds to form flocks or fish to school.
Who cares who's selling what? The TRUE geek makes his own from a brick of silver.
The typical properties you want for a thermal paste are good heat conductivity and poor electrical conductivity. Since silver is the best conducting element it is not really something which makes sense to use in the first place.
Drug laws were birthed and fostered by racism, and they're perpetuated by ignorance and a stubborn "For your own good" attitude.
The gangsters involved in black market drug supply probably want them kept illegal. Since the business models don't work too well with legal commodities.
Pharmaceutical companies probably wouldn't want currently illegal drugs to become legal, since they wouldn't be able to get patents on them...
If the U.S. govt would ask a University Comp-Sci department (any University) to initiate an open-source secure electronic voting system, this problem would solve itself very rapidly.
No doubt the US government would get upset were the answer something along the lines of using a system which could be easily counted by hand or machine, without involving lots of computer hardware and software. Especially if "not invented here" syndrome was involved.
Why do these things continue to go out to bid instead of being handled in academia where they should be?
It's a political dicision. The claim is that putting things to "the market" (the criteria being such that only a very few businesses could even put up a bid in the first place) is "more efficent". Whereas in actual practice it could just as easily be "corporate welfare".
Forgive me for asking but why is the Pentagon involved in the conduct of Elections? Isn't there some more neutral organization ? It is like asking the Republican-leaning ("I am committed to delivering ...") Diebold to be in charge of conducting elections.
In many places elections are run by a neutral "civil service". (With care being taken to ensure that any civil servant is not seen to be in a position of conflicting interests.) AFAIK no such entity even exists in the US.
If it was the State Department (Colin Powell) it would make sense but the Pentagon (Donald Rumsfeld) ? There is no democracy in the Defense Services and None at the Pentagon - what makes them so confident that they know what democracy needs.
Since both Powell and Rumsfeld are part of the current US government it's hard to see how either could play a part in any current elections without interest conflicts.
Just because two computers can talk to each other directly doesn't mean they are "wide open on the wild west Internet". but you were speaking from a business standpoint. I'm speaking from a technical aspect as well as a community aspect. the control of who gets to publish information on the internet is restricted by things like NAT which doesn't allow direct connections,
NAT can easily be an issue with business systems. Since companies merge and "partner". It's quite possible for there to be situations where two (or more) previously unconnected networks need to be connected, but there several machines on the same IP addresss...
Why? you can easily write a userspace smtp client for linux, which is what this virus is. add it to .bash_rc or similar and away you go,
How do you propose getting it to execute in the first place? Where is it going to get its addresses from?
Its a fuggin executable. With everyone running as admin, the thing is just going to open and infect everything. There is no way anyone is going to pick the program to open executables with every time they need to be run.
There are a couple of issues here.
If a user application needs to be run as "admin" in order to work then it is broken.
There is no good reason why executables should be directly runnable from an attachment in an email program (or for that matter directly from a web browser). For the vast majority of end users there's no good reason why executables should even be runnable via a file browser...
Granted, the 'bug' is in the user. However Firebird/Thunderbird (for Windows) will not let you run executables directly from the client. They make you save to disk and run it your own damn self.
Whilst at the same time not disabling the ability to click on data files or attachments and open them in the relevent application. IIRC Microsoft does not allow you to be this selective.
And since I know everyone is already readying their "Ah ha! Windows sucks!" posts, remember that running unknown code is NOT a good idea on ANY operating system. The virus doesn't exploit any massive windows bug.
Except being able to run executable attachments trivially.
If everyone used Linux instead of Windows, then the virus writers would write viruses for linux instead!
Even if this were the case Linux is considerably less "virus friendly" than Windows. Having the concept of execute permission and a heterogeneous binary mix makes the virus writer's task a considerably harder one.
Remember even in areas such as webservers where Windows is in the minority it is still the platform with the most malware.
Believe it or not, Roald Dahl, the slightly scary looking and GREAT writer of childrens novels was awarded the international aerial photography award during the Second World War
Not all of his writing was aimed at children.
I knew an old man who in his youth was a photographer in Army, and flew some missions over Europe taking aerial photographs. That was as dangerous as any other job on the plane.
It could easily be a lot more dangerous. Since the planes used were likely to be fighters which had all the guns removed. To make room for cameras and increase the top speed. If they encountered an enemy fighter the only option was to run...
Linux levels the playing field in grand new ways, even for the embedded folks, even for the snooty ones.
The last thing companies who are doing fairly well out of proprietary software want is a level playing field. Especially if it means they have to work hard to gain and retain ("lock ins" are rather more difficult with OSS) customers.
The people who wrote it will have the best understanding of how the system works.
:)
With proprietary software these are likely to be the only people on the planet who know how it actually works.
If they happen to be sitting next to you, it is easy to get support.
Except in the case of very small companies the software writer is unlikely to be answering the "support" line. If the writer has left the company or was a contractor in the first place don't expect customers to be told
You and I might be able to figure stuff out on our own, but Joe CEO wants everything he uses to be backed 24/7/365 by the company making it. And you know what? Hes right.
If Joe CEO want's this kind of support for anything then they had better be prepared to pay for it. As for this support comming from the company who made the widget this isn't usually a condition with anything else so why should it be with software. Anyway when it comes to proprietary software all you know is who supplied it to you. Did they actually write it? Did they buy it from someone else? Did they buy it from somewhere else and hack it about? Only with OSS do you have any way to find out who actually wrote the software.
I believe the core reason for Cisco migrating to Linux-based appliances is support; when customers see a WINDOWS 2000 splash screen, they think of it as a Windows box. They tinker. I would wager I get at least one support issue a week because customers "play".
It's not that hard to change the spash screen on Windows. The issue is more likely to be that Windows is a "Personal Computer" operating system. Where such tinkering is often not only possible but encouraged...
OpenOffice.org will certainly open and save in MS Office formats. However, once you get OpenOffice.org on all of those government desktops how long do you think it is going to be before Israeli government workers are simply emailing around OpenOffice.org formats?
Especially given that the OpenOffice.org formats result in smaller files. Combined with the issues of MS Word documents possibly having data you don't want third parties to see.