The need for external connections to a power supply was only one impediment to the development of an artificial heart. The other important one was that, for some reason, plastic tends to promote the formation of blood clots, so before long the patient would die of a stroke.
Interesting results! Looks like heavily optimizing one's compiler pays huge dividends in terms of processing power.
There's an important question though. The article used the MS compilers exclusively, with the best results coming from the Intel plug-ins - since these are apparently the industry standards. However, I'm at a university, and everybody I know is using gcc. We would be very interested in the kind of performance that is displayed here. Does gcc keep rigorously up to date with the most modern CPU technology, or does it lag (and if so, how much)? How long until these optimizations will appear in a release of gcc?
which is why Windows XP will come bundled with a browser, media player, fire-wall, email client,
and ISP.
How evil of them.
This got me to thinking: Whenever I install RedHat I click the "everything" box, because I have the disk space and I'm lazy. This past time (7.1) I got:
not one, not two, but at least three browsers (netscape, konqueror, and mozilla);
a cornucopia of media players (xmms, mpg123,... I'm sure there's a video player in there somewhere);
two firewall systems (ipchains and iptables); and
a cornucopia of email clients (pine, elm, mail, netscape mail, mozilla mail,...)
And let's not forget:
a compiler suite and complete development tools (gcc);
an office suite (koffice);
graphics manipulation programs (ee and gimp);
editors coming out the ying-yang (vi, pico, emacs, xedit, kedit,...)
A number of cheezy little time-wasting games that put Minesweeper and Solitaire to shame; and
scores more that I'm sure I will never use before I install RH7.2.
It seems the only objection to bundling is that it's done by MS.
Re:Microsoft is just trying to minimize the damage
on
Microsoft and the GPL
·
· Score: 1
When you're the US government you can demand that MS release its source code for analysis as part of a contract (and they do). From what I hear from my military buddies, though, it takes a hell of a long time to analyze it, as you might imagine. Personally, if I were the government I'd be happier with open source, since its analysis is relatively commonplace, and security implications are well-known. You don't want any little surprises when state secrets are on the line.
So why can't you guys do that with Linux and Microsoft?
Because the GNU people are ideologues. They believe they have right on their side, and everyone else is wrong. Hence rhetoric from RMS to the effect that asking people to pay for software is unethical. There is no live-and-let-live when you think you're fighting a holy war.
Personally I agree with you, the GPL has its time and place, and everyone should get over themselves.
It's 1977, Bill Gates is fresh from dropping out of Harvard, and IBM is the big bad company, throwing around its corporate weight to discourage new entrants (like Amdahl) with competing technology. Within a decade the PC revolution and antitrust suits have brought IBM to its knees, from which they recover through innovation and (reasonably) fair corporate practices.
It's 2001, the Internet is an emerging technology, Microsoft is trying to take control while chasing off antitrust suits and a bad corporate image. Suppose the.NET initiative falls on its face (or suppose, like the PC, it is too successful and slips out of their grasp), and Linux starts to pick up some serious steam.
It's not farfetched to imagine, in 2024, that MS will be a good corporate citizen, having learned lessons about innovation and co-operation the hard way. It's also not hard to see that Linux and the GNU effort can have a role in such a positive transformation, by presenting an immovable obstacle to MS.
Freedom of speech is simply a ploy by companies to excuse their behavior.
So I guess we should ban it then?
You suggest that an individual has rights to free speech, but as soon as two people become organized, the government can regulate what they have to say?
And what of media companies then - where do their rights of free speech end?
I hasten to point out that the government is basically a large corporation; that would give the government a legal monopoly on organized speech.
Sorry, no sale.
What would keep us from/.ing a senator's
video-voicemail box at home?
That's called harrassment, or mischief in some jurusdictions.
Similar systems are already in use in the Canadian military - the application that I've heard of is a training system for naval boarding parties that enforce UN embargoes. I've got a buddy who has gone through the system; basically you stand in one spot with an electronic "gun" while various scenarios are displayed on a projection screen in front of you. The scenarios are all live action; like in the article, the scenario anticipates two or three possible outcomes and displays the results based on what you do (hold your fire? shoot at the wrong target? miss? etc.). The intention seems to be to illustrate the consequences of deadly force in a hostile but ambiguous situation, where your life is threatened but it's deliberately misleading which of the characters in the scenario represents the actual danger.
Though the headline implies a study of corporately-biased research (leading to a conclusion of bias), the article is merely speculative, rehashing arguments about
academic freedom in a corporately sponsored research environment. These arguments are certainly not news.
I have heard stories of professors forcing their students to release coursework under GPL
(possibly apocryphal, but it has the ring of truth). In particular, in order to receive credit, the students were required to use a header file provided by the professor, which was covered by GPL. As a derivative work, all the resulting coursework inherited GPL.
So the question is again: who owns the work, and who decides what can be done with it? It's difficult to imagine that forcing someone to use GPL could have nefarious purposes, but imagine that some bright student could develop a novel algorithm, but deliberately holds it back because it might have commercial application? This could be particularly problematic in graduate EE/CS programs. The focal point of the licencing decision process should rest with the student.
How can you have a proprietary add-on to a GPL program? It's not possible; you would have to release the add-on under GPL unless it was a provably unrelated product.
Remember the kerfuffle about a proprietary program linking to a GPL.so library? According to RMS, the proprietary program inherits GPL through linking.
How about IT oursourcers? Currently they produce nothing except support.
Currently, IT outsourcers can make money off someone else's software. You suggest that they should write their own software (for which they pay the authors, but gain no additional revenue) and provide support for it - hence lowering their margins. Not the best business model.
It's nice to think that business can be based solely on trust (as in point #3 above), and it's not hard to see that a company that has other interests (like hardware, internet assets, etc.) could release its software under GPL without expecting compensation.
However, it costs money to produce software, if only to feed the authors, and GPL explicitly denies the software itself as a source of revenue. Has any pure software company ever made money by releasing all its software under GPL? (and selling support?)
There's a lot of group-think and unwillingness to consider ideas that aren't fashionable in a particular
discipline.
It disturbs me when people speak of "science" as though it were completely monolithic. There's quite a bit of variation from biology to physics to psychology.
Firstly, this is true of any discipline, not just science. Secondly, it depends on the specific field within science. I can't speak for others, but I'm a researcher in a "hard science", where theory is rigorously attached to mathematics. When surprising results are presented, there has historically been disbelief and resistance at first, but it's pretty hard to be prejudiced against a proof.
Do you have any insight about trends that can be gleaned from these surveys - that is, regardless of what number one uses for the percentage of users that adopt Linux, is it static, taking off, steadily increasing, or what?
Slashdot Mirror
text editor for lazy people who dont learn vi
vi: text editor for people who like to hit themselves over the head with a hammer, because it feels good when you stopThe need for external connections to a power supply was only one impediment to the development of an artificial heart. The other important one was that, for some reason, plastic tends to promote the formation of blood clots, so before long the patient would die of a stroke.
... is a $100k penalty really suitable?
Given their current stock price of $0.38, $100,000 is probably in the same order of magnitude as the market valuation of the company.Artificial Insemination?
Homer:[laughs] I don't know. You gotta be pretty lame to make it with a robot.
[Marge whispers in his ear] I knew that.
Interesting results! Looks like heavily optimizing one's compiler pays huge dividends in terms of processing power.
There's an important question though. The article used the MS compilers exclusively, with the best results coming from the Intel plug-ins - since these are apparently the industry standards. However, I'm at a university, and everybody I know is using gcc. We would be very interested in the kind of performance that is displayed here. Does gcc keep rigorously up to date with the most modern CPU technology, or does it lag (and if so, how much)? How long until these optimizations will appear in a release of gcc?
which is why Windows XP will come bundled with a browser, media player, fire-wall, email client, and ISP.
How evil of them.
This got me to thinking: Whenever I install RedHat I click the "everything" box, because I have the disk space and I'm lazy. This past time (7.1) I got:
And let's not forget:
It seems the only objection to bundling is that it's done by MS.
When you're the US government you can demand that MS release its source code for analysis as part of a contract (and they do). From what I hear from my military buddies, though, it takes a hell of a long time to analyze it, as you might imagine. Personally, if I were the government I'd be happier with open source, since its analysis is relatively commonplace, and security implications are well-known. You don't want any little surprises when state secrets are on the line.
So why can't you guys do that with Linux and Microsoft?
Because the GNU people are ideologues. They believe they have right on their side, and everyone else is wrong. Hence rhetoric from RMS to the effect that asking people to pay for software is unethical. There is no live-and-let-live when you think you're fighting a holy war.
Personally I agree with you, the GPL has its time and place, and everyone should get over themselves.
It's 1977, Bill Gates is fresh from dropping out of Harvard, and IBM is the big bad company, throwing around its corporate weight to discourage new entrants (like Amdahl) with competing technology. Within a decade the PC revolution and antitrust suits have brought IBM to its knees, from which they recover through innovation and (reasonably) fair corporate practices.
It's 2001, the Internet is an emerging technology, Microsoft is trying to take control while chasing off antitrust suits and a bad corporate image. Suppose the .NET initiative falls on its face (or suppose, like the PC, it is too successful and slips out of their grasp), and Linux starts to pick up some serious steam.
It's not farfetched to imagine, in 2024, that MS will be a good corporate citizen, having learned lessons about innovation and co-operation the hard way. It's also not hard to see that Linux and the GNU effort can have a role in such a positive transformation, by presenting an immovable obstacle to MS.
"That hotel's a dump and your monopoly's pathetic." -- Skinner/Tanzarian
Stimulus: Hey, Mathworld is down! CRC Press is claiming ownership over the internet version of the work!
Response: Greedy corporate bastards! Think they can take away our free content!
Stimulus: Hey, the Supreme Court ruled that freelance authors have rights over the internet versions of their works!
Response: Greedy author bastards! Think they can take away our free content!
Sigh.
Is this yet another sign that Sun is weakening?
Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the Sun. I will do the next best thing -- read their source code!
Freedom of speech is simply a ploy by companies to excuse their behavior.
So I guess we should ban it then?
You suggest that an individual has rights to free speech, but as soon as two people become organized, the government can regulate what they have to say? And what of media companies then - where do their rights of free speech end? I hasten to point out that the government is basically a large corporation; that would give the government a legal monopoly on organized speech.
Sorry, no sale.
What would keep us from /.ing a senator's
video-voicemail box at home?
That's called harrassment, or mischief in some jurusdictions.
IANAL, etc.
Similar systems are already in use in the Canadian military - the application that I've heard of is a training system for naval boarding parties that enforce UN embargoes. I've got a buddy who has gone through the system; basically you stand in one spot with an electronic "gun" while various scenarios are displayed on a projection screen in front of you. The scenarios are all live action; like in the article, the scenario anticipates two or three possible outcomes and displays the results based on what you do (hold your fire? shoot at the wrong target? miss? etc.). The intention seems to be to illustrate the consequences of deadly force in a hostile but ambiguous situation, where your life is threatened but it's deliberately misleading which of the characters in the scenario represents the actual danger.
Though the headline implies a study of corporately-biased research (leading to a conclusion of bias), the article is merely speculative, rehashing arguments about academic freedom in a corporately sponsored research environment. These arguments are certainly not news.
change the Company Name?
... to "Black Hat"? Imagine someone at a computer security firm telling the boss that he/she wants to become a "Black Hat" user.
I have heard stories of professors forcing their students to release coursework under GPL (possibly apocryphal, but it has the ring of truth). In particular, in order to receive credit, the students were required to use a header file provided by the professor, which was covered by GPL. As a derivative work, all the resulting coursework inherited GPL.
So the question is again: who owns the work, and who decides what can be done with it? It's difficult to imagine that forcing someone to use GPL could have nefarious purposes, but imagine that some bright student could develop a novel algorithm, but deliberately holds it back because it might have commercial application? This could be particularly problematic in graduate EE/CS programs. The focal point of the licencing decision process should rest with the student.
They had some proprietary add-ons ...
How can you have a proprietary add-on to a GPL program? It's not possible; you would have to release the add-on under GPL unless it was a provably unrelated product.
Remember the kerfuffle about a proprietary program linking to a GPL .so library? According to RMS, the proprietary program inherits GPL through linking.
This is precisely why business is afraid of GPL.
How about IT oursourcers? Currently they produce nothing except support.
Currently, IT outsourcers can make money off someone else's software. You suggest that they should write their own software (for which they pay the authors, but gain no additional revenue) and provide support for it - hence lowering their margins. Not the best business model.
It's nice to think that business can be based solely on trust (as in point #3 above), and it's not hard to see that a company that has other interests (like hardware, internet assets, etc.) could release its software under GPL without expecting compensation.
However, it costs money to produce software, if only to feed the authors, and GPL explicitly denies the software itself as a source of revenue. Has any pure software company ever made money by releasing all its software under GPL? (and selling support?)
There's a lot of group-think and unwillingness to consider ideas that aren't fashionable in a particular discipline.
It disturbs me when people speak of "science" as though it were completely monolithic. There's quite a bit of variation from biology to physics to psychology.
Firstly, this is true of any discipline, not just science. Secondly, it depends on the specific field within science. I can't speak for others, but I'm a researcher in a "hard science", where theory is rigorously attached to mathematics. When surprising results are presented, there has historically been disbelief and resistance at first, but it's pretty hard to be prejudiced against a proof.
Er. I mean, Schrodinger.
It's too hot today.
Curiosity placed the cat in a superimposed alive/dead state. (With apologies to Heisenberg)
Do you have any insight about trends that can be gleaned from these surveys - that is, regardless of what number one uses for the percentage of users that adopt Linux, is it static, taking off, steadily increasing, or what?
... that the PC was by design (even if by accident of design) more amenable to hacking. I accept the criticism of my original comment.