I'm not an Ubuntu developer, but I do go to the Ubuntu development conferences. I assure you that free software is a huge deal. The non-free-drivers-by-default was discussed and debated for a long time - it was not an easy decision. It was considered that it had to be done, because of no choice. If Firefox was closed source, it would most definitely not be included, since there are alternatives. If for some reason all the other web browser disappeared somehow, there were no alternatives at all, then I suppose firefox would be included. But it would have to be only when there are no other choices.
If you see that anywhere, then file it as a bug. Seriously - the GPL is not an EULA. If the user does not agree, that does not affect their right at all to use the software.
Indeed, it's like seeing that the light is switching on and off and from that concluding that it is a person doing the switching. I'd want to see the electrical schematics to be sure that it is indeed wired to the light switch correctly.
> wouldn't the energy of a particle vary with it's velocity,
Yes. It's kinetic energy increases. And so it's (relativistic) mass increase.
> and its position in a charged field if the particle had a charge?
Yes, the potential energy increases/decreases, with the energy being converted from/to kinetic energy. The overall mass/energy of the system remains constant if there's no external force.
What exactly would you rather they did? Have a second person double check the amounts on the check? It seems very easy for that person to make the same mistake as well
mcelrath, Is there a route to get into CERN for computer scientists? I have both a physics degree and a computer science degree and an optics engineering PhD and quite a bit of computer experience. I'd love to work on programming computer systems for physics simulations, but I can't afford to do a second PhD in theoretical physics to go the academic route. Any ideas if it's possible to get into CERN via another route?
> We hear disposable grocery bags are evil so we should use other bags which take hundreds of times the resources to make but don't last 100 times longer.
Isn't that exactly the point? Plastic bags last for thousands of years but are used for an average of only 20 minutes. The spend 99.999% of their lifetime at a dump
To port Doom3 to Linux took one developer. Just a single guy in the whole of id worked on the Linux port. (He hung around on freenode IRC and talked about it which is why I know this for sure)
Of course the inner circle of developers care about users. We code, for free, to develop software with the ultimate aim for it to be used! To say that we don't care about users is just plain daft.
> If they did care about users they would have set up usability studies by now under their own initiative, but they haven't.
Except we did. http://www.openusability.org/ and KDE has its own internal usability group with approx 10 people, 1 or 2 of which are professionally trained. They are swamped with requests, and as I've said - there is _far_ more demand than supply.
To give an example, the start menu replacement in KDE4 was done with a large amount of usability testing, funded by Novell/Suse. You can download the videos of the user testing if you want to.
> And as they are more focused towards the needs of contributors/developers, even if someone were to devise and carry out KDE usability studies, it's debatable if they would want to overhaul KDE according to these findings.
KDE is continually overhauled to try to fix problems. I personally work on the task manager and have drastically overhauled it from KDE3 to KDE4 based on (rather short) talks with a usability expert. The start menu was completely replaced, the run menu was completely replaced, and so on.
As I've said - seriously, just email pretty much any project group in KDE saying that you wish to do a serious usability analysis, and they will be very happy indeed.
> Contributors and developers like to tweak their UI settings and like things complicated and KDE serves them well in this regard. On the other hand users just want it to work;
'Users' are a very wide range of people. To suggest that all users want no customization is just plain silly. I personally believe that there is no problem with having as much customization, as long as that customization does not get in the way or confuse ordinary users. There's no point removing an option if an ordinary user would never come across it, for example. It is always good to provide sensible defaults that make it work well for ordinary users.
> one metre away it'd be 3x10^14 g. That's gonna hurt.
Just to point out... acceleration itself doesn't hurt. What hurts is if your feet are accelerated faster/slower than your head. If you fall into a small or normal blackhole, the difference in force between your head and feet is very large and would tear you apart.
However if you fell into a supermassive black hole (say, the size of a few million suns), the difference in force as you cross the event horizon would be near zero and wouldn't be noticable.
Knowing the mass of the higgs is important because it tells us which of our theories is on the right track. For example, a very large higgs would rule out huge branches of string theory, almost killing it. Not finding it at all would rule super symmetry would destroy the standard model, with nothing left to stand it in place.
The 'worst' case is that we find the higgs exactly where we expect it to be, confirming what we pretty much knew already, without adding any new real information.
I installed broadband with O2 and I did seem to need to run the windows setup tool the first time. I think it initialises the wireless broadband router that they send. Without doing the windows setup I couldn't get the broadband router to give me an IP address from linux.
It _might_ have just been coincidental timing though - it takes a while for them to connect you.
Troy is 100% correct. What part are you saying is wrong? KDE doesn't benefit directly from having more users. This is a fact. A company benefits directly from having more customers because that in turn directly gives them more income.
For KDE the benefits are much more subtle. More users does end up with more users becoming developers. Also more users puts more pressure on hardware companies etc.
It sounds to me that you are hearing something that you admit is true, but don't want to admit to being true.
You are really not getting the point of Troy's post.
He is attacking people who are abusive and are outright rude with their demands.
I bet if you sent a polite email to even Troy saying that you want to conduct a usability study for whatever software he works on, he'll be more than happy. If you send Troy a rude email telling him his software sucks, he'll probably tell you to go jump.
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Windows isn't made up of thousands of separate programs. The can present a single EULA at installation.
I'm not an Ubuntu developer, but I do go to the Ubuntu development conferences. I assure you that free software is a huge deal. The non-free-drivers-by-default was discussed and debated for a long time - it was not an easy decision. It was considered that it had to be done, because of no choice.
If Firefox was closed source, it would most definitely not be included, since there are alternatives. If for some reason all the other web browser disappeared somehow, there were no alternatives at all, then I suppose firefox would be included. But it would have to be only when there are no other choices.
Linux is also trademarked. Does that mean we should add a EULA that you have to agree to everytime you boot a new kernel?
I know of no EULA that gives rights at all. Maybe you are getting confused with a distribution license (such as the GPL).
So should the other 10,000 packages that are installed also display an EULA because of no warranty?
If you see that anywhere, then file it as a bug. Seriously - the GPL is not an EULA. If the user does not agree, that does not affect their right at all to use the software.
Go vote on the bug report then:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=439604
Don't you see the practical point here too? Do you really want every app and every package in Ubuntu displaying an EULA and having you agree to it?
Indeed, it's like seeing that the light is switching on and off and from that concluding that it is a person doing the switching. I'd want to see the electrical schematics to be sure that it is indeed wired to the light switch correctly.
> wouldn't the energy of a particle vary with it's velocity,
Yes. It's kinetic energy increases. And so it's (relativistic) mass increase.
> and its position in a charged field if the particle had a charge?
Yes, the potential energy increases/decreases, with the energy being converted from/to kinetic energy. The overall mass/energy of the system remains constant if there's no external force.
A well-hidden secret is to go to the simple 'translation'
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle
His joke references the fact that Excel was found to miscalcute certain calculations:
http://www.appscout.com/2007/09/excel_cant_multiply.php
And MS's response:
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx
Looking at his last few posts, there has been someone posting anonymously insulting him. Maybe that's why we haven't heard from him for a while?
What's huge for you may be a tiny amount to someone else.
I like your idea, and I don'tthink it's impossible to implement, but I don't think it would be trivial either.
What exactly would you rather they did? Have a second person double check the amounts on the check? It seems very easy for that person to make the same mistake as well
mcelrath, Is there a route to get into CERN for computer scientists? I have both a physics degree and a computer science degree and an optics engineering PhD and quite a bit of computer experience. I'd love to work on programming computer systems for physics simulations, but I can't afford to do a second PhD in theoretical physics to go the academic route.
Any ideas if it's possible to get into CERN via another route?
> We hear disposable grocery bags are evil so we should use other bags which take hundreds of times the resources to make but don't last 100 times longer.
Isn't that exactly the point? Plastic bags last for thousands of years but are used for an average of only 20 minutes. The spend 99.999% of their lifetime at a dump
There is Gnash (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/) but it still has a way to go
To port Doom3 to Linux took one developer. Just a single guy in the whole of id worked on the Linux port. (He hung around on freenode IRC and talked about it which is why I know this for sure)
Okay one more time back to you.
Of course the inner circle of developers care about users. We code, for free, to develop software with the ultimate aim for it to be used! To say that we don't care about users is just plain daft.
> If they did care about users they would have set up usability studies by now under their own initiative, but they haven't.
Except we did. http://www.openusability.org/ and KDE has its own internal usability group with approx 10 people, 1 or 2 of which are professionally trained. They are swamped with requests, and as I've said - there is _far_ more demand than supply.
To give an example, the start menu replacement in KDE4 was done with a large amount of usability testing, funded by Novell/Suse. You can download the videos of the user testing if you want to.
> And as they are more focused towards the needs of contributors/developers, even if someone were to devise and carry out KDE usability studies, it's debatable if they would want to overhaul KDE according to these findings.
KDE is continually overhauled to try to fix problems. I personally work on the task manager and have drastically overhauled it from KDE3 to KDE4 based on (rather short) talks with a usability expert. The start menu was completely replaced, the run menu was completely replaced, and so on.
As I've said - seriously, just email pretty much any project group in KDE saying that you wish to do a serious usability analysis, and they will be very happy indeed.
> Contributors and developers like to tweak their UI settings and like things complicated and KDE serves them well in this regard. On the other hand users just want it to work;
'Users' are a very wide range of people. To suggest that all users want no customization is just plain silly. I personally believe that there is no problem with having as much customization, as long as that customization does not get in the way or confuse ordinary users. There's no point removing an option if an ordinary user would never come across it, for example.
It is always good to provide sensible defaults that make it work well for ordinary users.
> one metre away it'd be 3x10^14 g. That's gonna hurt.
Just to point out... acceleration itself doesn't hurt. What hurts is if your feet are accelerated faster/slower than your head. If you fall into a small or normal blackhole, the difference in force between your head and feet is very large and would tear you apart.
However if you fell into a supermassive black hole (say, the size of a few million suns), the difference in force as you cross the event horizon would be near zero and wouldn't be noticable.
Knowing the mass of the higgs is important because it tells us which of our theories is on the right track. For example, a very large higgs would rule out huge branches of string theory, almost killing it. Not finding it at all would rule super symmetry would destroy the standard model, with nothing left to stand it in place.
The 'worst' case is that we find the higgs exactly where we expect it to be, confirming what we pretty much knew already, without adding any new real information.
Good point. Maybe you could have it look like he is still logged in?
I installed broadband with O2 and I did seem to need to run the windows setup tool the first time. I think it initialises the wireless broadband router that they send. Without doing the windows setup I couldn't get the broadband router to give me an IP address from linux.
It _might_ have just been coincidental timing though - it takes a while for them to connect you.
Okay what specifically are you disagreeing with?
Troy is 100% correct. What part are you saying is wrong? KDE doesn't benefit directly from having more users. This is a fact. A company benefits directly from having more customers because that in turn directly gives them more income.
For KDE the benefits are much more subtle. More users does end up with more users becoming developers. Also more users puts more pressure on hardware companies etc.
It sounds to me that you are hearing something that you admit is true, but don't want to admit to being true.
You are really not getting the point of Troy's post.
He is attacking people who are abusive and are outright rude with their demands.
I bet if you sent a polite email to even Troy saying that you want to conduct a usability study for whatever software he works on, he'll be more than happy.
If you send Troy a rude email telling him his software sucks, he'll probably tell you to go jump.