"Meanwhile, history teaches that the next great advance in scientific thought will probably be made by the scientist who approaches everything that science "knows" with suspicion, including the theory of evolution."
Yes. And likewise, "history teaches that the next great advance in religious thought will probably be made by the theologian who approaches everything that religion "knows" with suspicion, including the bible."
"You seem to be making the assumption that everyone in urban areas are intelligent." There is a difference between intelligence, which seems to a large degree to be an inheritable trait, and culture, which seems to be more so learned. Assuming the IQ distribution is fairly even (for the sake of argument (google "brain drain"), since psychobiology *isn't* relevant to the discussion at hand) there are major differences in culture. One such difference is whether having an "open mind" is a good thing or a bad thing. In cultures where an open mind is viewed as an invitation to Satan, you can't have a rational discussion because rationality isn't an acceptable mode. This isn't IQ, this is learned behavior. An ignorant and stupid person with an open mind can learn. A genius who already knows because "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it" can't learn.
"If someone sends me a math formula to review then I would logically edit in the formula for correction or to add review notes to it. In ODF you would have to split the math formal in seprate math piecies for each edit/revision or review note added to the formula or effectivly anything done to the math formula." Yes, that does seem the sane approach. Mixing in your revision information all willy-nilly (making a toss salad of the tags) would corrupt the mathML. Now suppose I want to pipe that mathML to Mathematica, say. I want to be able to eliminate your extraneous corruption as simply as possible to actually evaluate the integral represented by the mathML. I don't want "tossed-salad" tags, I want a simple separation based on functional category.
Again, we look at this differently. I think the focus should be on developing a standards compliant format, yes. It should be modular in design, in that it should be assembled from other open standards. It should *not* under any circumstances give any consideration whatsoever to supporting older formats *within* its format, as that leads to recursive insanity. Rather, there should exist as necessary *external* applications which translate from one format to another. Any support *within* a proposed standard for such interoperability with historical documents (which is, I understand, MS's approach) surely seems ass-backwards. Where do you stop? Do you want one format that is the union of every document format ever created?
Indeed, and the very next sentence is: "But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software." This is followed with an explanation of why access (which Public Domain fosters) is a necessary but insufficient condition.
"The moderation of my original post is interesting too. I don't think there's anything particularly provocative about it, yet it's attracting "troll" mods. Strange."
Agreed, and interesting to the point that it deserves its own topic thread. It seems to me to be similar to the anti-mono perspective (not the one based on fear of legal land mines, but rather the one based on market mind share). When I was a Physics grad student, I was interested in Computational Science and so took grad applied math classes that met my elective requirements. My dept chair commented, "Well, but once you've made it into the Light (i.e, Physics), we'd be doing you a disservice if we didn't discourage you from slipping back into Darkness (i.e., anything other than the Physics way). It is a mime-war?
Except that it is RMS's views that I'm quoting and trying to make clear. So it is an oxymoron to suggest that the dichotomy is that most people split and view it as either A or B, and so I'll hardly find any takers for A. Perhaps what you meant to suggest was that my presentation of the FSF philosophy was mistaken. If so, lets talk. I'm willing to learn. But please don't suggest I'm not a FSF/GNU kinda guy:-)
Yes, I certainly am aware of, and indeed certainly don't intend to disrespect, those of you who are more interested in a free exchange of ideas and what I might term "the freedom to experiment". Add structured peer review and you are moving towards scientific methodology.
In the same spirit of honest, open discourse, I'd like to suggest that "convoluted ideology" is harsh and unfair. The "freedom" to drive *faster* is often enhanced by restricting traffic to moving in one direction. The apparent paradox you want to present is based on not specifying what element of freedom is being enhanced / optimized in what part of the system by imposing restrictions.
Agreed that Cringley isn't authoritative, but I am willing to admit I occasionally make it over and do enjoy the creative, imaginative, flights of fancy. If thinking is allowed (encouraged even), then a forum for interesting dreams is not to far behind.
In terms of "WTF good would 1995's Win32 be as Microsoft actively tries to abandon it for.NET/WinFX", I'd like to suggest that while the.net framework seems interesting (and well liked by people that I've seen who actually used it) it currently seems that even these people are not interested in moving from WinXP to Vista. MSDNAA free copies of Vista Business lead to a lot of Vista downloads and installations last year. I'm unaware of even one of those installatins that lasted more than a month..net in the free to MSDNAA members downloaded VS2005 on WinXP seems to be the way.net is used at least around this (admittedly academic) neck of the woods.
Thank you. Its somewhat rare on slashdot for someone to concede the point. And my point was just that rather than his "making shit up" there were and still are people talking about this.
Now in terms of whether Apple should, or would, or even could... I never went there. As a user I find VMWare sufficent to run WinXP under Ubuntu on a linux box, or Ubuntu in VMWare on my WinXP laptop. However, since you bring it up: Running win32 natively (with wine, say, or if Apple did a "wine on steroids") does have uses, though, which are exactly the uses that have me running WinXP in VMWare on Ubuntu. Since I have MSDNAA licenses to MS products VMWare already "just works", though. But I can at least imagine that it could be more seamless. That would be nice.
You state, "we should only bash them for the things they've actually screwed up" and yet they screwed up by illegally leveraging their monopoly power against Sun in violation of contracts, no less, and getting caught. Or did you mean only bash them for technical mistakes and not managerial/legal mistakes? Shouldn't we just bash them for mistakes?
Remember Steve Jobs' first days back at Apple in 1997 as Interim-CEO-for-Life? Trying to save the company, Steve got Bill Gates to invest $150 million in Apple and promise to keep Mac Office going for a few more years in exchange for a five-year patent cross-licensing agreement? The idea in everyone's mind, of course, was that Microsoft would grab lots of Apple technology, which they probably did, and it quite specifically ended an Apple patent infringement suit against Microsoft. But I'm told that the exchange wasn't totally one-way, that Apple, in turn, got some legal right to the Windows API.
That agreement ran for five years, from August, 1997 to August 2002. Even though it has since expired, the rights it conferred at the time still lie with the respective companies. Whatever Microsoft grabbed from Apple they can still use, they just aren't able to grab anything developed since August 2002. Same for Apple using Microsoft technology like that in Office X. But Windows XP shipped October 25, 2001: 10 months before the agreement expired.
No one said it was easy. But then again, there were "usability" options alleged to have been part of the settlement when Apple sued...
Oh, and also,
Results 1 - 10 of about 404,000 for Win32 compatibility layer in OS X. (0.12 seconds)
The very first hit suggests
OSNews has an interesting post referencing some discoveries that Wine developers have made about OSX 10.5. Apple may be working on its own, new, OS-native Win32 compatibility layer, and keeping it quiet for now.
So it might be not be easy, but the fact that there was found what appears to be a windows binary loader in leopard lends at least some credence to the theory. Since this theory is not unique to the poster, he isn't "obviously making shit up".
Agreed that Public Domain is not incompatible with Open Source. In fact, it isn't incompatible, in terms of absorbing the code into a project, with the GPL. However, in terms of Free Software, Free doesn't mean "a free exchange of ideas and code that let you do what ever you wanted with it", but rather a limit on distribution rights for the purpose of ensuring that user rights always remain free. And it seems to work:-)
I can't say that Public Domain is the worst way to release, but it is less than adequate for the purposes of Free Software. However, it would allow code to be quickly absorbed into projects and extended and released under the GPL. At that point, it would remain useful and also be safe (i.e., status: to remain free).
I couldn't load the video either, so I googled for the title. It still wouldn't open up, so I used my back-button to get back to the search page and used the "Watch video here" link from the google search page. That worked!
No, GPL does not. The URL you link to is building a strawman for the purpose of selling a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
You can't sell Drupal, or any modification you made to Drupal. You can charge money for having to make these changes but you can't make these changes available under a commercial license. Why not? Because Drupal's license, the General Public License 2 (GPL 2), mandates that all modifications also be distributed under the GPL.
GPL v2 FAQ
Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?
Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)
The right to sell is just that: "Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. "
I suppose then that now there is nothing to stop developers from implementing a fork of qmail that will use libc (and indeed, to absorb into libc anything worthy from qmail). So the race is on! Will gqmail or kqmail be the first to distribute said fork?
While I can understand limiting access to, say, thermonuclear weapons, the link which "reinforced your opinion" was indeed intended to reinforce your post. I was being supportive.
I believe the offer was shipped with the unit. Since the source code wasn't shipped with the executable, that is why the offer was required. Making the source available is as they have done now is one way to make good on the offer, and thus is indeed why the source is available online now.:-)
Perhaps an answer would be to wrap the mathML with tags that indicate revision history information, or that indicate a footnote. This would preserve mathML, while allowing for functionality that is outside the scope of mathematical markup. The idea of placing such information inside of the mathematical markup seems less than well thought out to me. If you are suggesting that a footnote be placed on a variable in an equation, how would you indicate it is a footnote and not the raising of the variable by a power? If you mean that an equation should be footnoted, why not wrap that equation with footnote tags? Then the fact that it is a footnote would be obvious. My real concern remains misaddressed, which is that respect for de-jure standards are ignored while monopoly power leverages the introduction of what is likely to be a new set of conflicting and unnecessary (except for the purpose of maintaining said monopoly power) de-facto standards. This is not elegant. This doesn't promote or prosper the arts or sciences. This is perhaps effective marketing for the purpose of generating wealth for stockholders, but it is bad Computer Science.
Slashdot Mirror
Setterfield has been debunked, see here and here and elsewhere :-)
"Meanwhile, history teaches that the next great advance in scientific thought will probably be made by the scientist who approaches everything that science "knows" with suspicion, including the theory of evolution."
Yes. And likewise, "history teaches that the next great advance in religious thought will probably be made by the theologian who approaches everything that religion "knows" with suspicion, including the bible."
"You seem to be making the assumption that everyone in urban areas are intelligent." There is a difference between intelligence, which seems to a large degree to be an inheritable trait, and culture, which seems to be more so learned. Assuming the IQ distribution is fairly even (for the sake of argument (google "brain drain"), since psychobiology *isn't* relevant to the discussion at hand) there are major differences in culture. One such difference is whether having an "open mind" is a good thing or a bad thing. In cultures where an open mind is viewed as an invitation to Satan, you can't have a rational discussion because rationality isn't an acceptable mode. This isn't IQ, this is learned behavior. An ignorant and stupid person with an open mind can learn. A genius who already knows because "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it" can't learn.
"If someone sends me a math formula to review then I would logically edit in the formula for correction or to add review notes to it. In ODF you would have to split the math formal in seprate math piecies for each edit/revision or review note added to the formula or effectivly anything done to the math formula." Yes, that does seem the sane approach. Mixing in your revision information all willy-nilly (making a toss salad of the tags) would corrupt the mathML. Now suppose I want to pipe that mathML to Mathematica, say. I want to be able to eliminate your extraneous corruption as simply as possible to actually evaluate the integral represented by the mathML. I don't want "tossed-salad" tags, I want a simple separation based on functional category.
Again, we look at this differently. I think the focus should be on developing a standards compliant format, yes. It should be modular in design, in that it should be assembled from other open standards. It should *not* under any circumstances give any consideration whatsoever to supporting older formats *within* its format, as that leads to recursive insanity. Rather, there should exist as necessary *external* applications which translate from one format to another. Any support *within* a proposed standard for such interoperability with historical documents (which is, I understand, MS's approach) surely seems ass-backwards. Where do you stop? Do you want one format that is the union of every document format ever created?
Indeed, and the very next sentence is: "But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software." This is followed with an explanation of why access (which Public Domain fosters) is a necessary but insufficient condition.
"The moderation of my original post is interesting too. I don't think there's anything particularly provocative about it, yet it's attracting "troll" mods. Strange."
Agreed, and interesting to the point that it deserves its own topic thread. It seems to me to be similar to the anti-mono perspective (not the one based on fear of legal land mines, but rather the one based on market mind share). When I was a Physics grad student, I was interested in Computational Science and so took grad applied math classes that met my elective requirements. My dept chair commented, "Well, but once you've made it into the Light (i.e, Physics), we'd be doing you a disservice if we didn't discourage you from slipping back into Darkness (i.e., anything other than the Physics way). It is a mime-war?
Except that it is RMS's views that I'm quoting and trying to make clear. So it is an oxymoron to suggest that the dichotomy is that most people split and view it as either A or B, and so I'll hardly find any takers for A. Perhaps what you meant to suggest was that my presentation of the FSF philosophy was mistaken. If so, lets talk. I'm willing to learn. But please don't suggest I'm not a FSF/GNU kinda guy :-)
Yes, I certainly am aware of, and indeed certainly don't intend to disrespect, those of you who are more interested in a free exchange of ideas and what I might term "the freedom to experiment". Add structured peer review and you are moving towards scientific methodology.
In the same spirit of honest, open discourse, I'd like to suggest that "convoluted ideology" is harsh and unfair. The "freedom" to drive *faster* is often enhanced by restricting traffic to moving in one direction. The apparent paradox you want to present is based on not specifying what element of freedom is being enhanced / optimized in what part of the system by imposing restrictions.
Agreed that Cringley isn't authoritative, but I am willing to admit I occasionally make it over and do enjoy the creative, imaginative, flights of fancy. If thinking is allowed (encouraged even), then a forum for interesting dreams is not to far behind.
.NET/WinFX", I'd like to suggest that while the .net framework seems interesting (and well liked by people that I've seen who actually used it) it currently seems that even these people are not interested in moving from WinXP to Vista. MSDNAA free copies of Vista Business lead to a lot of Vista downloads and installations last year. I'm unaware of even one of those installatins that lasted more than a month. .net in the free to MSDNAA members downloaded VS2005 on WinXP seems to be the way .net is used at least around this (admittedly academic) neck of the woods.
In terms of "WTF good would 1995's Win32 be as Microsoft actively tries to abandon it for
Thank you. Its somewhat rare on slashdot for someone to concede the point. And my point was just that rather than his "making shit up" there were and still are people talking about this.
Now in terms of whether Apple should, or would, or even could... I never went there. As a user I find VMWare sufficent to run WinXP under Ubuntu on a linux box, or Ubuntu in VMWare on my WinXP laptop. However, since you bring it up: Running win32 natively (with wine, say, or if Apple did a "wine on steroids") does have uses, though, which are exactly the uses that have me running WinXP in VMWare on Ubuntu. Since I have MSDNAA licenses to MS products VMWare already "just works", though. But I can at least imagine that it could be more seamless. That would be nice.
You state, "we should only bash them for the things they've actually screwed up" and yet they screwed up by illegally leveraging their monopoly power against Sun in violation of contracts, no less, and getting caught. Or did you mean only bash them for technical mistakes and not managerial/legal mistakes? Shouldn't we just bash them for mistakes?
Oh, and also,
Results 1 - 10 of about 404,000 for Win32 compatibility layer in OS X. (0.12 seconds)
The very first hit suggests So it might be not be easy, but the fact that there was found what appears to be a windows binary loader in leopard lends at least some credence to the theory. Since this theory is not unique to the poster, he isn't "obviously making shit up".
Thanks! Wish I had mod points...
Agreed that Public Domain is not incompatible with Open Source. In fact, it isn't incompatible, in terms of absorbing the code into a project, with the GPL. However, in terms of Free Software, Free doesn't mean "a free exchange of ideas and code that let you do what ever you wanted with it", but rather a limit on distribution rights for the purpose of ensuring that user rights always remain free. And it seems to work :-)
I can't say that Public Domain is the worst way to release, but it is less than adequate for the purposes of Free Software. However, it would allow code to be quickly absorbed into projects and extended and released under the GPL. At that point, it would remain useful and also be safe (i.e., status: to remain free).
I couldn't load the video either, so I googled for the title. It still wouldn't open up, so I used my back-button to get back to the search page and used the "Watch video here" link from the google search page. That worked!
I suppose then that now there is nothing to stop developers from implementing a fork of qmail that will use libc (and indeed, to absorb into libc anything worthy from qmail). So the race is on! Will gqmail or kqmail be the first to distribute said fork?
While I can understand limiting access to, say, thermonuclear weapons, the link which "reinforced your opinion" was indeed intended to reinforce your post. I was being supportive.
I believe the offer was shipped with the unit. Since the source code wasn't shipped with the executable, that is why the offer was required. Making the source available is as they have done now is one way to make good on the offer, and thus is indeed why the source is available online now. :-)
Perhaps an answer would be to wrap the mathML with tags that indicate revision history information, or that indicate a footnote. This would preserve mathML, while allowing for functionality that is outside the scope of mathematical markup. The idea of placing such information inside of the mathematical markup seems less than well thought out to me. If you are suggesting that a footnote be placed on a variable in an equation, how would you indicate it is a footnote and not the raising of the variable by a power? If you mean that an equation should be footnoted, why not wrap that equation with footnote tags? Then the fact that it is a footnote would be obvious. My real concern remains misaddressed, which is that respect for de-jure standards are ignored while monopoly power leverages the introduction of what is likely to be a new set of conflicting and unnecessary (except for the purpose of maintaining said monopoly power) de-facto standards. This is not elegant. This doesn't promote or prosper the arts or sciences. This is perhaps effective marketing for the purpose of generating wealth for stockholders, but it is bad Computer Science.
Here is Obama's tech stance
"Corps are a logical extension of biology..." is a beautiful analogy, by the way. Approaching poetic, even.
"Unlike biological organisms, a corporation can grow to any size..." sounds a little bit like cancer, though.