Presumably theodp is one of those people who always waits for someone else to refill the copy machine -- 20 kg of paper isn't exactly "burying the Patent Office", particularly when a reexamination on a key patent for your business is at stake.
This is the same guy who submits these anti-Amazon stories every other week, right? At least this time the links seem vaguely related to his grievance, although I have no idea what that Flickr picture is supposed to show.
"Documented" in this story means that the company's developers have documented what the hell is going into their codebases (with respect to licenses, keeping things updated, and so forth). It has nothing to do with either user documentation or source code comments in the original open source project.
That said, the "70%, up from 30%" numbers are absurd. There is no way that the failure rate to document use of open source code more than doubled in 2007.
In my experience, being a capital-S "Skeptic" about one's pet dislikes (people have trotted out religion and global warming already, but not a single complaint about Microsoft yet!?!) isn't nearly as well-correlated with objectivity and critical thinking about anything else as the "Skeptics" would like to think.
Also, in what way has Paul Allen failed? Seems to me he's doing rather well for himself.
His various dot-com and VC projects have mostly cost him money (IIRC), his sports teams have mostly sucked, his 413 foot yacht has fallen to number 8 on the World's Largest Yacht list and Jimi Hendrix was, in hindsight, wildly overrated. Without the billions in his pocket to begin with, you wouldn't say he's doing that well.
On the plus side, he's nowhere near as appalling as the seven guys with bigger yachts than his.
In TFA, Frank Wolf implies that the Chinese government is involved, but the the article presents no evidence that that's the case.
Harassing a human rights critic is the kind of thing a nationalistic script kiddie moron would do; the Chinese intelligence agencies have much higher-value targets to pursue.
If you CAN eat horrific things, and the locals are messing with you to make you look foolish-suggest a better place to eat, and take them somewhere where they turn green. Evil...but funny.
Even if they suggest it, half the time they're afraid to eat it themselves and you can turn the tables on them. If they were really nonchalant about eating it, it probably wouldn't have occurred to them to snicker at you. (Just like you wouldn't think twice about ordering potato skins for Japanese...)
The other curious thing is that the story claims (quoting the IFAW guy, I guess) that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits are required for legal sales in the US and then goes on to to state that there are no such permits! It's surprising enough that the "expert" doesn't have even a basic understanding of the law, but you'd think the writer would at least go back and correct an earlier paragraph!
Reading the story, it doesn't seem like there's a single demonstrated case of illegal ivory sale on EBay, just a lot of numbers being thrown around about ivory sales overall.
GMail just served me up an ad for the book by a founder of theglobe.com. For the youngsters, previous dot-com IPO hysteria had centered on companies like Netscape, which had products, if not necessarily a reasonable business plan. theglobe.com, a useless website that no one could explain exactly what it did, was worth $600 million at the end of its first day, breaking the first-day runup record previously held by the Broadcast.com IPO that left Mark Cuban as a permanent pain in the ass of our society. Henceforth, any idiot with a domain name and a copy of PageMill thought he should be a billionaire.
I'm familiar with both (not sure why you're linking to the Wikipedia pages instead of the projects themselves) and use SuperKaramba on a work account that doesn't have WindowMaker. But neither of them, nor conky, which someone else mentioned, strikes me as a fundamentally different way to display information on the screen. I'd say both fall into "things like gkrellm".
Huge waste of space and now that I'm in Linux there are much better options.
Those being what? The only Linux options I know of are things like KDE and GNOME toolbar applets, things like gkrellm and (my favorite) WindowMaker dockapps. Those aren't any different from "blocks" and "tickers" on other platforms.
I had the same mentality until I lived in Los Angeles. The people you see being stalked by paparazzi are the tiny tip of the iceberg -- there are tens of thousands of people making careers in the entertainment industry whom you've never heard of. When you flip channels through 30 different shows before deciding that "nothing is on", that's the work of 30 directors, 90 producers and hundreds of actors and crew who are earning a good living but whom you don't consider "successful".
To argue against myself on your behalf though, having someone from a larger corporation, can be benificial aswell, because they may have been fired, or quit because the larger corporation wasn't listening to them, or was doing something in a way that went against their ideology, thereby possibly preventing said smaller company from becomming similar to the larger one.
Like the AC said, I think you're wildly exaggerating how ideological workplaces are, particularly from the point of view of a server monkey.
Just FYI, one of the technicians working in this experiment used to work in a nuclear submarine, I presume taking care of the cooling of a reactor. I don't know what kind of reactors they use in the Navy, but Dr. Lathrop told me that this guy knows how to handle liquid sodium.
The only US sub with such a reactor was the Seawolf in the 1950s. If the tech is Russian -- Alfa's have lead-cooled reactors, not sodium-cooled, IIRC.
Sodium becomes liquid at stovetop temperatures and conducts electricity well, but it's flammable. A sodium fire can't just be put out with water. Water can actually make things worse -- Lathrop's team has disabled the sprinkler system.
My first thought upon reading the summary here was "Man, I really hope they disabled the sprinkler system...
Beyond the fact that, as J.Y. Kelly explains, protein folding is an insanely complex problem, the assertion was variously that Folding@Home results would directly lead to solutions for "Africa's hunger" and "some better meds", both of which are rather wild extrapolations from what the project actually produces.
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This is the same guy who submits these anti-Amazon stories every other week, right? At least this time the links seem vaguely related to his grievance, although I have no idea what that Flickr picture is supposed to show.
That said, the "70%, up from 30%" numbers are absurd. There is no way that the failure rate to document use of open source code more than doubled in 2007.
In my experience, being a capital-S "Skeptic" about one's pet dislikes (people have trotted out religion and global warming already, but not a single complaint about Microsoft yet!?!) isn't nearly as well-correlated with objectivity and critical thinking about anything else as the "Skeptics" would like to think.
No, I meant Jimi himself. Talented, creative guy, turned in probably the best performance at Woodstock, but still...
His various dot-com and VC projects have mostly cost him money (IIRC), his sports teams have mostly sucked, his 413 foot yacht has fallen to number 8 on the World's Largest Yacht list and Jimi Hendrix was, in hindsight, wildly overrated. Without the billions in his pocket to begin with, you wouldn't say he's doing that well.
On the plus side, he's nowhere near as appalling as the seven guys with bigger yachts than his.
Harassing a human rights critic is the kind of thing a nationalistic script kiddie moron would do; the Chinese intelligence agencies have much higher-value targets to pursue.
C'mon, how many people are really going to stop buying from Amazon because their website was down for a few hours on June 6, 2008?
I think her point was that there's one gigantic binary, not an enormous number of tiny ones.
If you have a point, I'm completely missing what it is...
Even if they suggest it, half the time they're afraid to eat it themselves and you can turn the tables on them. If they were really nonchalant about eating it, it probably wouldn't have occurred to them to snicker at you. (Just like you wouldn't think twice about ordering potato skins for Japanese...)
I'm just relieved to hear that Web 4.0 is more than 10 years away...
Well, if you RTFA, the Fish and Wildlife Service guy states that permits are not required, in contrast to what both IFAW and EBay are saying.
The other curious thing is that the story claims (quoting the IFAW guy, I guess) that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits are required for legal sales in the US and then goes on to to state that there are no such permits! It's surprising enough that the "expert" doesn't have even a basic understanding of the law, but you'd think the writer would at least go back and correct an earlier paragraph!
Reading the story, it doesn't seem like there's a single demonstrated case of illegal ivory sale on EBay, just a lot of numbers being thrown around about ivory sales overall.
There's no reason to think that. Complaining is far easier than doing.
Anyway, the founder wrote a book.
I'm familiar with both (not sure why you're linking to the Wikipedia pages instead of the projects themselves) and use SuperKaramba on a work account that doesn't have WindowMaker. But neither of them, nor conky, which someone else mentioned, strikes me as a fundamentally different way to display information on the screen. I'd say both fall into "things like gkrellm".
Those being what? The only Linux options I know of are things like KDE and GNOME toolbar applets, things like gkrellm and (my favorite) WindowMaker dockapps. Those aren't any different from "blocks" and "tickers" on other platforms.
I have minimal interest in this subject, but even I know his damn name is spelled "Barack", not "Barrack".
I had the same mentality until I lived in Los Angeles. The people you see being stalked by paparazzi are the tiny tip of the iceberg -- there are tens of thousands of people making careers in the entertainment industry whom you've never heard of. When you flip channels through 30 different shows before deciding that "nothing is on", that's the work of 30 directors, 90 producers and hundreds of actors and crew who are earning a good living but whom you don't consider "successful".
Like the AC said, I think you're wildly exaggerating how ideological workplaces are, particularly from the point of view of a server monkey.
The only US sub with such a reactor was the Seawolf in the 1950s. If the tech is Russian -- Alfa's have lead-cooled reactors, not sodium-cooled, IIRC.
My first thought upon reading the summary here was "Man, I really hope they disabled the sprinkler system...
Beyond the fact that, as J.Y. Kelly explains, protein folding is an insanely complex problem, the assertion was variously that Folding@Home results would directly lead to solutions for "Africa's hunger" and "some better meds", both of which are rather wild extrapolations from what the project actually produces.
Again, getting to that from Folding@Home results is at least as speculative as climate modeling.