Hmmn. I think singling out women's contributions, although on the face seeming nice, actually reinforces the perception of "women != technological" by making a big fuss when, gasp, a woman actually got past the math-is-hard stereotype and did something smart!!!
I think Hedy Lamarr's contribution to technology was not (because of/in spite of/related to) her having XX chromosomes instead of XY. Instead, it was good instance of lateral thinking, getting an idea that kicks the struts out from under the core assumptions that so-called "experts" unthinkingly make when thinking about a problem.
If there's to be a proposition for a Hedy Lamarr award, why not make it for the person of any gender who's had the best out-of-left-field idea that made the most impact?
Ultra-rare? It's a check. From Microsoft. A company that size writes a lot of checks, probably hundreds or thousands a week. To various people, companies, institutions, and employees for various amounts and reasons. A check from Microsoft is anything but 'ultra-rare.' I'd be interested to know the check number. Probably in the six-digits somewhere.
The only thing that makes this particular check worth more than its face value or in any way 'collectible' is the story behind it, the 'well-documented history' that you point out. Which in this case is the media hype. Which was my point.
Au contraire -- without the media attention, do you really think he'd have received anything at all? At best, the $35 he spent? The reason this can be auctioned off on ebay AT ALL is because it's somewhat notorious, it's a 'relic' in a sense.
Without public awareness of this incident, it would be a $35 transaction; it's the hype around it that makes MS's check for $500 worth many times that.
In this age of insanely record-breaking IPO's, this story seems to me a perfect object lesson of how excessive press can artificially inflate the general perception of a thing's value by two orders of magnitude or more in a very short time -- from $35, to $500, to $2500+, in just a couple of weeks.
Not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but it is certainly an interesting thing to watch....
>mkLinux doesn't even use the kernel, but is still called Linux.
Au contraire, mkLinux uses the bulk of the Linux kernel, drivers, memory management, and so forth. All that stuff has just been ported on top of Mach, which is MUCH smaller and less full-featured, but provides a nice abstraction layer and other services. Essentially, the Linux kernel runs on top of the Mach microkernel, but Mach doesn't 'replace' the Linux kernel in really any way.
>We have our best perl coders here slaving over the Slash release. Patrick, Rob, and Pater...
Ever stop to think there might be folks out there that could help who are better than your three best perl coders?
>The Slash code really is hardcoded in many ways and they are trying to unhardcode it for you now.
And we're somehow not able to figure this out ourselves? Or at least lend a hand finding bugs, hardcoded assumptions, off-by-one errors, etc?
Y'all need to stop trying to make a release that 'looks good,' and take a little time to re-read CatB. "Release early, release often." Not "when it looks pretty," not "when we think we have most of the bugs fixed," not "after we've added this one new feature."
Because what that's going to get you is an immaculately-debugged Slash that is going to have to be rewritten anyway since you didn't expose the code to enough eyes to find the bad practices and assumptions that no doubt live in there. You'll have cleaned up a bunch of code that will get thrown away anyway. cf Mozilla....
Do it now -- 'tar cvfz slash-0.50.tar.gz slash/' and put it out there, warts and all, money where your mouth is. I double dare you -- you might end up surprised at how much faster the code (and therefore your revenue generating site) gets better. Ah, and that takes us right back to the original topic, donnit?
The protein isn't named after the devil -- they share a common root. The name "Lucifer" and the word "luciferase" both come from the Latin root lux/lucis, light, and ferre, to carry.
According to the story, Lucifer was called LightBringer before he rebelled and fell, as he was the angel on the right hand of God, God's A-Number-One Angel.
And, of course, the protein is named luciferin for the same reason -- it 'carries' or 'bears' light. (No, not because the protein sat at the right hand of God....)
So, nothing sinister here, the protein was not named by Satanists, the gun is not a tool of the devil. Just a coincidence from the fact that science and the church both use Latin a lot.
Hmmn. I'm not that familiar with SuSE's OS, but isn't it a violation of the various Free/Open Source licenses for them to grant exclusivity in distribution? I understand wanting control of the channel and all that, but don't they have to allow for redistribution of all of the free parts of their OS? And therefore they cannot say 'you have exclusive rights,' since that... well, EXCLUDES redistribution?
The actual story, the trademark thing, that'll work itself out correctly. I'm more interested in this exclusivity subplot, and whether SuSE is willfully breaking license, or if this is a misunderstanding on someone's part (like mine, for instance), or what....
It's not so surprising that the Solaris and NT versions are going to be opened up, too -- it's likely that all of the versions have a common codebase with a thin layer of platform-specific code on top.
If they use a truly open license and just released 'the Linux version,' it would open the door for third parties to fork the code to create their OWN free/open Solaris and Win32 (and Irix and Hurd and MacOS and BeOS) versions of it, competing with the Inprise 'non-open' versions on other platforms.
Of course, if their license isn't correctly open/free, this is academic, but since they ARE apparently releasing their multi-platform code, it might be reasonable inferred that they plan to use a properly free license and don't want to compete with that.
>You have three candidates, A, B and C: Now if I vote for candidate C, my vote ultimately goes to >candidate A or B?
No, that's not what he was saying at all.
He was talking about, hypothetically, the Democratic candidate being Gore, and the Green candidate being Gore. Both parties actually floating the same person as their candidate. So your ballot would have:
[ ] Democratic -- Al Gore [ ] Republican -- Jim Billbock [ ] Green -- Al Gore [ ] Silly -- Zimfram Wubble-Wubble
...and a vote for Green-Gore or a vote for Demo-Gore would be a vote for Gore, but would also be a message to the candidate about the relative popularity of the ideals of the parties supporting him.
Sun's SCSL can be simplified to what you describe -- hack on our code so you improve our product for us, and no, you can't use the code for anything outside of our product. That's the reason it's caused such an uproar, and is not considered properly 'free' or 'Open Source(tm)' by most folks.
Epic is releasing this code under the Artistic License, meaning you can take this code away and do just about whatever you like with it, separate from Epic's commercial product. Sure, Epic will benefit from contributions to this source tree, but anyone else can also use this source for just about anything they want, including games that compete with Unreal Tournament. This is the Right Thing(tm) for Epic to have done.
Your objections make it sound as though you wouldn't be happy unless Epic _couldn't_ make money off of others' contributions, and that just doesn't make sense.
An excellent reply. If I hadn't already posted and had moderator points, I'd spend at least one on this.
I do want to counter a little bit, again, because I can, mostly, but also because I'm a little bit on about the more epistological implications of my questions -- how, exactly, do we choose to value one idea over another? Obviously we DO, but where does this valuability reside in an idea? How do we select?
>if the reason you want to test a theory is that it's Really Really Appealing To Laypeople, odds >are it's bunk that can't stand on its own merits
Yes. Agreed. But the larger question is whether science 'playing the odds' is a good idea. Odds are it's bunk, but popularity shouldn't throw ideas out a priori. That's just science being stodgy. IMHO. Are we then valuing ideas based on their conformity to our current idea of statistics?
>Most great scientific discoveries didn't start with "I know the Answer to Life, The Universe, And >Everything, and You Don't!", but with a guy looking at an experimental or mathematical result >and saying "huh? that's funny..."
Oh, totally. That moment of enlightenment is such a deeply-rooted concept that we still use the work that the inventors of rationality, the Greeks, gave it -- eureka, I have found it. The danger is in assuming that only 'trained professionals' in science can have those moments; that a cocky lay person can't change the universe with a single profound insight. But, again, somehow the out-of-left-field idea has to be VALUED, has to be deemed 'worthy,' and that acceptance/rejection process is woefully misunderstood, to my eyes.
>...it was worthy of investigation. Why? Because physicists at the time already had reason to >believe that classical mechanics wasn't quite what it was cracked up to be.
And physicists today have all SORTS of weird little anomalies that are pointing to cracks in the tidy bundle of quantum foo we're so used to. Dark matter, for instance. Again, I don't know if Mills is onto something or if he's just a crackpot, but it's sometimes disturbing to see the scientific community (and more predictably, the lay-science community like the Average Sophomoric Slashdotter) instantly rejecting new ideas just because they don't fit. Often it seems to me that Organized Science is actually doing the exact opposite of its stated goal of seeking truth at all costs. Value patterns based on accumulated experience, yes, but that is very roughly synonymous to 'stagnation.'
>"They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Columbus. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
That's wonderful. Yes. An excellent reality check. I'm just tilting at windmills, trying to make the point that just because it's laughable doesn't _automatically_ mean it's the clown.
>Which of those two "investments in science" offers the greater chance of a positive (scientific) return? >Which of those experiments is more likely to teach us something about the way the world works?
I'm not sure I like this line of thought -- boiled down to its core, it says "the safer and more known the results will be, the better an investment in science is." Unfortunately, applying the reduce-to-absurdity filter to that, you get "the best investment in science is the one where the results are pre-known," which is no science at all.
Science is like any other investment -- you balance your risk with your potential returns. Fringe science is defintionally high-risk, but that's always where the largest expansions of knowledge come from when they pan out.
>Unlike philosophy or politics, in science, not all ideas are created equal, and not all theories are worthy of inquiry.
I've seen you say this a couple times in the comments to this story, and while I don't actually disagree, I'd be curious to know where you think a theory's 'betterness' springs from?
Specifically, since the object of scientific method is to discover 'truth,' and since 'truth' has historically been a process of slow refining of knowledge punctuated by complete sea changes in our understanding of the world, the act of pre-judging theories by whether they fit our current thoughts and expectations locks us into those thoughts and expectations, keeps us from investigating potential sea change ideas when they arrive.
Which is not to say that every theory is worthy of investigation -- as you say, some are and some aren't. But how do we pick? What about some ideas makes them 'worthy?' Where does the 'worth' live? With an infinity of possible ways to explain the universe out there, how do we select which to take time to look at? Can we truly stand up and say that science leads to 'objective truth' when we don't even take the time to TEST some ideas because they're pre-filtered by our biases?
What makes a better idea 'better?' "Because it proves to be valid and repeatable" isn't a good answer, because I'm asking about how we choose which ones to validate and repeat, my questions come _before_ truth-tests. Where do we get our idea of what makes a 'good idea?'
Lessee... Win3.x would pop up a warning flag if you tried to run it over DR-DOS or the like...
Win95, at install time, would detect HPFS partitions, and (incorrectly) allege that having OS/2 on your machine could make Windows malfunction.
And now official help documentation regarding Win2000, claiming that somehow the very presence of a Linux partition on your system is somehow 'incompatible' and must be removed.
Astounding how the largest software company in the world manages to be somehow ignorant of how to work with anyone else's software.
Then again, maybe not so astounding....
--
Re:Thats great but what about other OS's?
on
Quake 1 GPL'ed
·
· Score: 2
>Two: I think Westlake has to Open-Source their stuff now, including all six Quakes they did >(software, 3Dfx, RAVE, QWsoftware, QW3Dfx, QWRAVE). They were based off the original Quake >source, after all, and probably still contain chunks of it (particularly the QuakeC engine and >the file-translation routines).
That code was licensed from id separately. The fact that code from the same source tree (or even identical code) was later released under GPL does not affect that licensing agreement; even the GPL is not so viral as to affect licenses already in place when a GPL release is made.
The only Quake I code that will be bound by the GPL (barring other third-party code later being thus released) is additions and modifications made to THIS particular blob of code and all of its subsequent spinoffs and later versions. The GPLed tree starts here.
Although it would be The Decent Thing(tm) for Westlake to mirror the gesture, they are under no license-bound obligation to do so.
>Where are we, 1995? >Enter the first ur-distro. Probably only three or four floppy disks given to a neighbor.
Heh. I submit my late 1994 Yggdrasil CD to the court as exhibit one. And that was just the one I chose, of the 3-4 CD-based semi-commercial distros available at that point.
By '95, Slackware was already on top of the second wave of distros, Red Hat was working on RH2.0, and Yggdrasil and its ilk were slipping into history.
Going more and more off-topic, here, but just wanted to clear up some history.
No chance. 1280x1024 can be displayed successfully on a standard 25-dot-pitch 17" monitor.
Throw 1280 pixels across a 30-foot (10 meter) screen, well, that's 128 pixels per meter, or something just under 1 pixel per cm. About 8 times a 10mm dot pitch, in the best of circumstances.
And many large theater screens are much much larger than 30 feet -- I'm just thinking in terms of monster many-small-screen cineplexes in the above example.
1280x1024 is about 10mm dot pitch over what area? I mean, if you project 1280x1024 over a screen the size of North America, that's about a TWO MILE dot pitch.
I understand that I'm abusing the concept of 'dot pitch' a bit to make my example, but saying that a resolution necessarily equals a dot pitch is just incorrect.
"Integrity" is such a nice word, innit? It gives you the warm fuzzy feeling that there's somehow something pure and holy there that's being kept sacrasanct, out of the dirty hands of the teeming masses. Sun Microsystems, noble defenders of the "integrity" of Java2, stalwart bastions of truth and light against the unwashed heathens that would taint their singular manifest vision.
Merriam-Webster defines integrity as, among other things, "an unimpaired condition : soundness." So, Sun is protecting Java2 from the "impairment" of the standards process. Standards are somehow "unsound." Sun is saying that Java2 becoming a standard will somehow innately taint, corrupt, or poison the platform.
Merriam-Webster also defines integrity as "firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : incorruptibility." Aha. So Sun keeping Java outside of the standards process is an issue of morals? "It's a moral decision, Doc, and I'll stand by it." Sun-as-priesthood, handing down proclamations on morailty to the ignorant masses who are too immoral and corrupt to See The Java Vision(tm) themselves.
Finally, M-W defines integrity as "the quality or state of being complete or undivided : completeness." Here's the cruz of the matter: control. The One True Java, Sun's Java. The Java Above Which There Is No Other. I-AM-Brand Java. Thou Shalt Not Worship Other Java's Besides Sun's. Sun fears the fork, more than anything.
None of these observations is earth-shattering news, but it's interesting (to me, at least), to look at how Sun has doctored and spun this story with the use of that single word, "integrity."
>He did not forget, he simply did not need to. That's the point. If you spend your day at home, >with no other persons to meet, you don't have to do the usual hoopla.
I dunno, the article alleged he was so offended by his own stink that he bought $14 deodorant. Seems like a quick shower would have been cheaper and easier. But then he wouldn't have been able to write 1/3 of his "tech" article about body odor. Seems like a badly disguised plot device to me -- play on the stereotype of geek-as-unwashed-social-misfit.
So talk to the MAPS people about the offending domains -- subscribing to the RBL is no guarantee of spam freedom -- the RBL has to be maintainted constantly by volunteers and people in the community.
If the RBL isn't decreasing your spam, it's at least partly because you're not doing your part to help MAPS.
On the days I'm late to work and take a cab, it's a 20 minute ride, and being able to pick up my mail ahead of time and know what's happening in the office would be a GODSEND.
And yes, this is in San Francisco, and no, I've never been in a Yahoo cab yet. Although the author is right, you can see them from about a half mile away....
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmn. I think singling out women's contributions, although on the face seeming nice, actually reinforces the perception of "women != technological" by making a big fuss when, gasp, a woman actually got past the math-is-hard stereotype and did something smart!!!
I think Hedy Lamarr's contribution to technology was not (because of/in spite of/related to) her having XX chromosomes instead of XY. Instead, it was good instance of lateral thinking, getting an idea that kicks the struts out from under the core assumptions that so-called "experts" unthinkingly make when thinking about a problem.
If there's to be a proposition for a Hedy Lamarr award, why not make it for the person of any gender who's had the best out-of-left-field idea that made the most impact?
--
>Too many of us on /. tend to assume that the beautiful people are lusers.
And the best part is, it mostly seems the feeling is mutual... (*grin)
--
Ultra-rare? It's a check. From Microsoft. A company that size writes a lot of checks, probably hundreds or thousands a week. To various people, companies, institutions, and employees for various amounts and reasons. A check from Microsoft is anything but 'ultra-rare.' I'd be interested to know the check number. Probably in the six-digits somewhere.
The only thing that makes this particular check worth more than its face value or in any way 'collectible' is the story behind it, the 'well-documented history' that you point out. Which in this case is the media hype. Which was my point.
--
Au contraire -- without the media attention, do you really think he'd have received anything at all? At best, the $35 he spent? The reason this can be auctioned off on ebay AT ALL is because it's somewhat notorious, it's a 'relic' in a sense.
Without public awareness of this incident, it would be a $35 transaction; it's the hype around it that makes MS's check for $500 worth many times that.
--
In this age of insanely record-breaking IPO's, this story seems to me a perfect object lesson of how excessive press can artificially inflate the general perception of a thing's value by two orders of magnitude or more in a very short time -- from $35, to $500, to $2500+, in just a couple of weeks.
Not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but it is certainly an interesting thing to watch....
--
>mkLinux doesn't even use the kernel, but is still called Linux.
Au contraire, mkLinux uses the bulk of the Linux kernel, drivers, memory management, and so forth. All that stuff has just been ported on top of Mach, which is MUCH smaller and less full-featured, but provides a nice abstraction layer and other services. Essentially, the Linux kernel runs on top of the Mach microkernel, but Mach doesn't 'replace' the Linux kernel in really any way.
Just FYI.
--
>We have our best perl coders here slaving over the Slash release. Patrick, Rob, and Pater...
Ever stop to think there might be folks out there that could help who are better than your three best perl coders?
>The Slash code really is hardcoded in many ways and they are trying to unhardcode it for you now.
And we're somehow not able to figure this out ourselves? Or at least lend a hand finding bugs, hardcoded assumptions, off-by-one errors, etc?
Y'all need to stop trying to make a release that 'looks good,' and take a little time to re-read CatB. "Release early, release often." Not "when it looks pretty," not "when we think we have most of the bugs fixed," not "after we've added this one new feature."
Because what that's going to get you is an immaculately-debugged Slash that is going to have to be rewritten anyway since you didn't expose the code to enough eyes to find the bad practices and assumptions that no doubt live in there. You'll have cleaned up a bunch of code that will get thrown away anyway. cf Mozilla....
Do it now -- 'tar cvfz slash-0.50.tar.gz slash/' and put it out there, warts and all, money where your mouth is. I double dare you -- you might end up surprised at how much faster the code (and therefore your revenue generating site) gets better. Ah, and that takes us right back to the original topic, donnit?
--
The protein isn't named after the devil -- they share a common root. The name "Lucifer" and the word "luciferase" both come from the Latin root lux/lucis, light, and ferre, to carry.
According to the story, Lucifer was called LightBringer before he rebelled and fell, as he was the angel on the right hand of God, God's A-Number-One Angel.
And, of course, the protein is named luciferin for the same reason -- it 'carries' or 'bears' light. (No, not because the protein sat at the right hand of God....)
So, nothing sinister here, the protein was not named by Satanists, the gun is not a tool of the devil. Just a coincidence from the fact that science and the church both use Latin a lot.
--
Hmmn. I'm not that familiar with SuSE's OS, but isn't it a violation of the various Free/Open Source licenses for them to grant exclusivity in distribution? I understand wanting control of the channel and all that, but don't they have to allow for redistribution of all of the free parts of their OS? And therefore they cannot say 'you have exclusive rights,' since that... well, EXCLUDES redistribution?
The actual story, the trademark thing, that'll work itself out correctly. I'm more interested in this exclusivity subplot, and whether SuSE is willfully breaking license, or if this is a misunderstanding on someone's part (like mine, for instance), or what....
--
It's not so surprising that the Solaris and NT versions are going to be opened up, too -- it's likely that all of the versions have a common codebase with a thin layer of platform-specific code on top.
If they use a truly open license and just released 'the Linux version,' it would open the door for third parties to fork the code to create their OWN free/open Solaris and Win32 (and Irix and Hurd and MacOS and BeOS) versions of it, competing with the Inprise 'non-open' versions on other platforms.
Of course, if their license isn't correctly open/free, this is academic, but since they ARE apparently releasing their multi-platform code, it might be reasonable inferred that they plan to use a properly free license and don't want to compete with that.
We'll see.
--
>You have three candidates, A, B and C: Now if I vote for candidate C, my vote ultimately goes to
>candidate A or B?
No, that's not what he was saying at all.
He was talking about, hypothetically, the Democratic candidate being Gore, and the Green candidate being Gore. Both parties actually floating the same person as their candidate. So your ballot would have:
[ ] Democratic -- Al Gore
[ ] Republican -- Jim Billbock
[ ] Green -- Al Gore
[ ] Silly -- Zimfram Wubble-Wubble
...and a vote for Green-Gore or a vote for Demo-Gore would be a vote for Gore, but would also be a message to the candidate about the relative popularity of the ideals of the parties supporting him.
--
The comparison with Sun is profoundly unfair.
Sun's SCSL can be simplified to what you describe -- hack on our code so you improve our product for us, and no, you can't use the code for anything outside of our product. That's the reason it's caused such an uproar, and is not considered properly 'free' or 'Open Source(tm)' by most folks.
Epic is releasing this code under the Artistic License, meaning you can take this code away and do just about whatever you like with it, separate from Epic's commercial product. Sure, Epic will benefit from contributions to this source tree, but anyone else can also use this source for just about anything they want, including games that compete with Unreal Tournament. This is the Right Thing(tm) for Epic to have done.
Your objections make it sound as though you wouldn't be happy unless Epic _couldn't_ make money off of others' contributions, and that just doesn't make sense.
--
An excellent reply. If I hadn't already posted and had moderator points, I'd spend at least one on this.
I do want to counter a little bit, again, because I can, mostly, but also because I'm a little bit on about the more epistological implications of my questions -- how, exactly, do we choose to value one idea over another? Obviously we DO, but where does this valuability reside in an idea? How do we select?
>if the reason you want to test a theory is that it's Really Really Appealing To Laypeople, odds
>are it's bunk that can't stand on its own merits
Yes. Agreed. But the larger question is whether science 'playing the odds' is a good idea. Odds are it's bunk, but popularity shouldn't throw ideas out a priori. That's just science being stodgy. IMHO. Are we then valuing ideas based on their conformity to our current idea of statistics?
>Most great scientific discoveries didn't start with "I know the Answer to Life, The Universe, And
>Everything, and You Don't!", but with a guy looking at an experimental or mathematical result
>and saying "huh? that's funny..."
Oh, totally. That moment of enlightenment is such a deeply-rooted concept that we still use the work that the inventors of rationality, the Greeks, gave it -- eureka, I have found it. The danger is in assuming that only 'trained professionals' in science can have those moments; that a cocky lay person can't change the universe with a single profound insight. But, again, somehow the out-of-left-field idea has to be VALUED, has to be deemed 'worthy,' and that acceptance/rejection process is woefully misunderstood, to my eyes.
>...it was worthy of investigation. Why? Because physicists at the time already had reason to
>believe that classical mechanics wasn't quite what it was cracked up to be.
And physicists today have all SORTS of weird little anomalies that are pointing to cracks in the tidy bundle of quantum foo we're so used to. Dark matter, for instance. Again, I don't know if Mills is onto something or if he's just a crackpot, but it's sometimes disturbing to see the scientific community (and more predictably, the lay-science community like the Average Sophomoric Slashdotter) instantly rejecting new ideas just because they don't fit. Often it seems to me that Organized Science is actually doing the exact opposite of its stated goal of seeking truth at all costs. Value patterns based on accumulated experience, yes, but that is very roughly synonymous to 'stagnation.'
>"They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Columbus. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
That's wonderful. Yes. An excellent reality check. I'm just tilting at windmills, trying to make the point that just because it's laughable doesn't _automatically_ mean it's the clown.
Good discussion. Nice to meet you.
--
>Which of those two "investments in science" offers the greater chance of a positive (scientific) return?
>Which of those experiments is more likely to teach us something about the way the world works?
I'm not sure I like this line of thought -- boiled down to its core, it says "the safer and more known the results will be, the better an investment in science is." Unfortunately, applying the reduce-to-absurdity filter to that, you get "the best investment in science is the one where the results are pre-known," which is no science at all.
Science is like any other investment -- you balance your risk with your potential returns. Fringe science is defintionally high-risk, but that's always where the largest expansions of knowledge come from when they pan out.
>Unlike philosophy or politics, in science, not all ideas are created equal, and not all theories are worthy of inquiry.
I've seen you say this a couple times in the comments to this story, and while I don't actually disagree, I'd be curious to know where you think a theory's 'betterness' springs from?
Specifically, since the object of scientific method is to discover 'truth,' and since 'truth' has historically been a process of slow refining of knowledge punctuated by complete sea changes in our understanding of the world, the act of pre-judging theories by whether they fit our current thoughts and expectations locks us into those thoughts and expectations, keeps us from investigating potential sea change ideas when they arrive.
Which is not to say that every theory is worthy of investigation -- as you say, some are and some aren't. But how do we pick? What about some ideas makes them 'worthy?' Where does the 'worth' live? With an infinity of possible ways to explain the universe out there, how do we select which to take time to look at? Can we truly stand up and say that science leads to 'objective truth' when we don't even take the time to TEST some ideas because they're pre-filtered by our biases?
What makes a better idea 'better?' "Because it proves to be valid and repeatable" isn't a good answer, because I'm asking about how we choose which ones to validate and repeat, my questions come _before_ truth-tests. Where do we get our idea of what makes a 'good idea?'
--
Lessee... Win3.x would pop up a warning flag if you tried to run it over DR-DOS or the like...
Win95, at install time, would detect HPFS partitions, and (incorrectly) allege that having OS/2 on your machine could make Windows malfunction.
And now official help documentation regarding Win2000, claiming that somehow the very presence of a Linux partition on your system is somehow 'incompatible' and must be removed.
Astounding how the largest software company in the world manages to be somehow ignorant of how to work with anyone else's software.
Then again, maybe not so astounding....
--
>Two: I think Westlake has to Open-Source their stuff now, including all six Quakes they did
>(software, 3Dfx, RAVE, QWsoftware, QW3Dfx, QWRAVE). They were based off the original Quake
>source, after all, and probably still contain chunks of it (particularly the QuakeC engine and
>the file-translation routines).
That code was licensed from id separately. The fact that code from the same source tree (or even identical code) was later released under GPL does not affect that licensing agreement; even the GPL is not so viral as to affect licenses already in place when a GPL release is made.
The only Quake I code that will be bound by the GPL (barring other third-party code later being thus released) is additions and modifications made to THIS particular blob of code and all of its subsequent spinoffs and later versions. The GPLed tree starts here.
Although it would be The Decent Thing(tm) for Westlake to mirror the gesture, they are under no license-bound obligation to do so.
--
>Where are we, 1995?
>Enter the first ur-distro. Probably only three or four floppy disks given to a neighbor.
Heh. I submit my late 1994 Yggdrasil CD to the court as exhibit one. And that was just the one I chose, of the 3-4 CD-based semi-commercial distros available at that point.
By '95, Slackware was already on top of the second wave of distros, Red Hat was working on RH2.0, and Yggdrasil and its ilk were slipping into history.
Going more and more off-topic, here, but just wanted to clear up some history.
--
No chance. 1280x1024 can be displayed successfully on a standard 25-dot-pitch 17" monitor.
Throw 1280 pixels across a 30-foot (10 meter) screen, well, that's 128 pixels per meter, or something just under 1 pixel per cm. About 8 times a 10mm dot pitch, in the best of circumstances.
And many large theater screens are much much larger than 30 feet -- I'm just thinking in terms of monster many-small-screen cineplexes in the above example.
--
1280x1024 is about 10mm dot pitch over what area? I mean, if you project 1280x1024 over a screen the size of North America, that's about a TWO MILE dot pitch.
I understand that I'm abusing the concept of 'dot pitch' a bit to make my example, but saying that a resolution necessarily equals a dot pitch is just incorrect.
--
I can't get the image out of my head: two would-be Zero-G lovers, rotating in space to get 'aligned' correctly like the docking scene in _2001_.
--
"Integrity" is such a nice word, innit? It gives you the warm fuzzy feeling that there's somehow something pure and holy there that's being kept sacrasanct, out of the dirty hands of the teeming masses. Sun Microsystems, noble defenders of the "integrity" of Java2, stalwart bastions of truth and light against the unwashed heathens that would taint their singular manifest vision.
Merriam-Webster defines integrity as, among other things, "an unimpaired condition : soundness." So, Sun is protecting Java2 from the "impairment" of the standards process. Standards are somehow "unsound." Sun is saying that Java2 becoming a standard will somehow innately taint, corrupt, or poison the platform.
Merriam-Webster also defines integrity as "firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : incorruptibility." Aha. So Sun keeping Java outside of the standards process is an issue of morals? "It's a moral decision, Doc, and I'll stand by it." Sun-as-priesthood, handing down proclamations on morailty to the ignorant masses who are too immoral and corrupt to See The Java Vision(tm) themselves.
Finally, M-W defines integrity as "the quality or state of being complete or undivided : completeness." Here's the cruz of the matter: control. The One True Java, Sun's Java. The Java Above Which There Is No Other. I-AM-Brand Java. Thou Shalt Not Worship Other Java's Besides Sun's. Sun fears the fork, more than anything.
None of these observations is earth-shattering news, but it's interesting (to me, at least), to look at how Sun has doctored and spun this story with the use of that single word, "integrity."
--
>He did not forget, he simply did not need to. That's the point. If you spend your day at home,
>with no other persons to meet, you don't have to do the usual hoopla.
I dunno, the article alleged he was so offended by his own stink that he bought $14 deodorant. Seems like a quick shower would have been cheaper and easier. But then he wouldn't have been able to write 1/3 of his "tech" article about body odor. Seems like a badly disguised plot device to me -- play on the stereotype of geek-as-unwashed-social-misfit.
--
So talk to the MAPS people about the offending domains -- subscribing to the RBL is no guarantee of spam freedom -- the RBL has to be maintainted constantly by volunteers and people in the community.
If the RBL isn't decreasing your spam, it's at least partly because you're not doing your part to help MAPS.
--
On the days I'm late to work and take a cab, it's a 20 minute ride, and being able to pick up my mail ahead of time and know what's happening in the office would be a GODSEND.
And yes, this is in San Francisco, and no, I've never been in a Yahoo cab yet. Although the author is right, you can see them from about a half mile away....
--
>The Worst Sequel Ever was: Highlander II: The Quickening.
Yes. That's because the franchise forgot to take its own advice: "There can be only one."
--