You may call rebooting after patches FUD, but it happens to me about 65% of the time I download any sort of update from WindowsUpdate. As a result, I postpone running WindowsUpdate, or at least applying the updates after they've been downloaded, until I'm ready to reboot.
Your final assesment is much clearer than the site's section on "Industry and the Environment", which left me feeling that I'd been had (and I got a masters in oceanography, so I know a thing or two about the global carbon cycle). Perhaps you could send them this summary.
The essence of your argument is that this technology move elements of the carbon budget from one place on the spreadsheet to another. That is, it probably reduces the amount of carbon sequestered in biomass decay, but simultaneously reduces the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere as various industries move from taking fossil fuels out of the ground to these new synthetic oils. So without a particular demonstration that the refined oil that comes out of their "crude" is puts less carbon into the atmosphere, I'd say it has approximately zero effect on the total carbon added to the atmosphere. Worse than that, without some reform in either energy infrastructure or energy consumption, people will not forgo fossil fuel oil for this oil, they'll use both.
At present, only limitations on refining capacity will hold the US back from greatly increasing its consumption of fossil-fuel based energies. And there's the rapidly approaching question: WWCD (What Will China Do?) As a scientist, I'm not totally convinced that the carbon emissions - global warming link is as strong as everyone says it is, given that we still don't really know whether the ocean's total carbon uptake is positive or negative, and we really don't know what has prompted dramatic climate change in the past. But I do know that pushing a big lever to the floor on a machine you don't know how to drive is a very unwise proposition, so common sense dictates that we really ought to be reforming our carbon emissions before we drive the machine into the support beams of the building we're building.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is great technology - the benefits of not dumping organic slurry into streams or heavy metal waste into oceans or crude sludge into open pits are tremendous. I just think they're making a mistake to get into the carbon cycle debate when it's far from clear that they will contribute to any reductions in carbon emissions.
Why are people so afraid to implement a real GUI installation/uninstallation routine? What we have now are silly hacks instead of real installers that configure programs, register them with the GUI, etc.
a) If you're questioning the design philosophy of Linux that the entire system can be equally well accessed via console as GUI, you're not likely to find much support, even among those who recognize the problems you mention. It's a fundamentally good idea to provide a simple, robust (i.e. text-based) method for configuration.
b) The other piece that you're alluding to is the thorny problem of package management, with or without a GUI. Here I think you're putting several problems together as one. I agree that the situation with binaries installation is a total clusterfsck, but I think it's not just a question of the One System to Bring Them Together, nor the lack of a well-thought-out GUI for the systems that exist, it's incompatibility due to specific design choices by Linux programmers. In open-source no individual programmer or project is tasked with looking out for the consistency of a broad swath of binaries, and the binaries themselves are often homebrewed, so people tend use whatever library suits their present design needs and setup, without worrying how that will translate across distros and versions.
You could, and people are proposing to, create a library management layer that provides necessary libraries for many things. But it's just a matter of time before someone takes a shortcut around such a layer because it suits their fancy.
Contrast that with Microsoft's relentless insistence on backwards compatibility, which has incoporated all this clusterfscking into the Win32 API instead. Six of one...
One thing I don't understand is why system paths like/usr/sbin seem to be compiled into programs, instead of $SYSTEMROOT as in Windows... Anyone know how to answer that?
Not only that, but one of the reasons that the US government is considered among the most and responsive and transparent by the IMF (including setting best practice standards many areas) is because we pay what it takes for good people.
By contrast, in many other countries government jobs pay much less than their counterparts in the private sector, and with that low pay comes corruption, mismanagement and general incompetence.
That's not to say that the US federal government is uniformly the best at delivering services, or that it couldn't be better, merely that it's a lot better than the outsources give it credit for.
Does caffeine cause dangerous heart irregularity?:
Yes, even in persons who are "otherwise healthy." In patients with coronary artery heart disease, with or without angina (chest pains), and/or hypertension (high blood pressure), drinking coffee or cola drinks, or drinking or eating chocolates, can precipitate a heart irregularity called PVCs (Premature Ventricular Contractions) or even palpitation (rapid heart pounding).
Now before folks call me alarmist, this is not true of everybody. I happen to be someone with a very high sensitivity to caffeine, and one of my brothers has this too, though interestingly neither of my parents do. I discovered how sensitive I was to caffeine after it put me in the cardiac wing of a hospital for a day and a half with an atrial fibrillation, even though I am fit and don't smoke.
That experience has left me thinking that people are awfully blasee about using what can be a very strong stimulant for people with certain biochemistry. So let me add that to all the other excellent advice about getting used to drinking water.
One other thought:
If you don't have hypertension, you might try snacking on sunflower seeds periodically. The salt gives you a wicked urge to drink water, and the seeds take enough work to crack that you don't really go through that many calories.
that was a foruitous side effect of what was otherwise seven years of wasted research and funding.
Well-done research is never "wasted", because you always learn something. It may not be what you wanted to know, and it may not be immediately applicable, but it adds to people's knowledge, which makes it useful.
Full disclosure: IANAP, I'm a 29-year-old mulling over this stuff.
Let me leave you with this: If you feel your kids are equipped to make the right decisions on their own, then you're doing your job as a parent. The converse of that is that if you feel the need to install logging software because you can't trust your children not to spend all their time looking at porn then somewhere along the line you really fucked up as a parent.
I agree that a key task as a parent is helping your children develop judgement. But there is no formula for it. Some kids are easy to raise: they want to learn, they want to please you, they want to share the sandbox with other kids. Other kids are hard to raise - they can just get it in their heads that they must do a lot of drugs, be mean to their siblings, ignore school, and engage in whatever other self-defeating behaviors you can name.
My brothers and I were relatively "easy" raises - we basically liked our parents and each other, and enjoyed most of the things they set out as useful for us to do. My mom's boyfriend Bob has a son, who just came back home after a lot of time drinking too much, dropping out of school, etc. He came to dinner the other night with us, full of remorse and self-deprecation. It's hard not to think that his time to get through that stuff was just longer than Bob's other son, or my brothers and I.
I believe that that great majority of people can eventually make it through these kind of self-defeating behaviors; I'm still in the middle as to when and how some of them might be necessary parts of the learning process. A "good" parent will provide as much guidance as s?he can, and that can take a lot of different forms. For some parents and some kids, strictness is the ticket. For other parents and kids, a long leash is just right. The books, articles, seminars that are out there can give you good tools to do this (of particular importance in my mind is showing that you love someone in easy times and tough times), but ultimately, I think you just give parenting your all and hope for the best without knowing in advance how it will turn out.
There's no good reason your mailserver or each machine in your SQL Server farm needs a GUI.
This is point that OSS seems to have really missed. People like the GUI in SQL Server. It's only now that they are trying to stack em into racks that they're thinking perhaps they want to strip that stuff out. The GUI makes it easy to get started and do simple things.
Here's an even more striking example of that: I have built Microsoft Access applications for years, and a few VB ones on the side. I'm not a Microsoft love, in fact, I also do some PHP programming against MySQL, and I much prefer PHP as a language. Why, you ask, do I screw around with Access? Because I can make a functioning GUI database app in a few days, not weeks. And it's report functionality is quite powerful. Yes, Access has some real shortcomings, Microsoft's s/true technical documentation/marketing nonsense/ approach is infuriating, and don't even get me started on the licensing hoops MS puts you through.
But every time I've looked around for RAD tools for Linux or MySQL, that I can deploy and run easily, I come up sorely short. If someone can put me onto a good, easy-to-deploy OSS RAD package either web, or that runs on Windows, I'll retract this post and flagellate myself. And no, a half-finished version of something with no reporting does not count. Until then, I have to believe that this is a boat that OSS has really missed.
Isn't this just slocate with more metadata?
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CNet on WinFS
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· Score: 1
I don't get it. How is WinFS any different from indexing files and storing the metadata in a database, a la slocate but with more metadata?
As I see it, if an app that doesn't know about WinFS, say a legacy app (or open up its data storage to WinFS) goes to store data in WinFS, it will ignore most of the metadata layer, and store its data as binary, whether that's as a BLOB in a DB or a file pointed to by a fs tree seems immaterial. This says to me that the main problem is that apps don't TELL each other how to share data (i.e., open data formats), and I don't see how WinFS addresses this. Am I missing something here?
I really don't see how the XML fits in either - if we want an XML filetype, why not just make an XML filetype, and then index afterwards?
I am writing to express my disappointment that Daniel Lyons' vitriolic, disinformational broadside against the General Public License (GPL) was published as an article, when it is in fact an uninformed editorial.
The author's thorough misunderstanding of the Free Software Foundation's efforts to enforce the terms of a license would be part of the normal ebb and flow of chatter on the Web - if they didn't appear in a respectable business publication. Mr. Lyons attempts to portray the efforts of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to enforce the General Public License for Linux first as conspiratorial, and then inexplicably, as communistic. In fact, the FSF is doing what all effective organizations do - defending its legal rights to the products that fall under its purview, and making use of the most basic principle of intellectual property law to do so. The principle is this: if I come up with something new, I own it and control its disposition; if I take the work of someone else and use it, I have to follow the terms they set. Simple. Which leaves a simple choice for someone wishing to extend Linux: use it under the authors' terms or find something else. Would Mr. Lyons, or any Forbes writer object if Motorola took Nokia's chip and used it, unlicensed, in a cellphone? I hope so.
So Mr. Lyons is not in fact, objecting to (much less reporting on) FSF's enforcing a license, he is objecting the license's ends of promoting a creative commons, or perhaps to the FSF's rhetoric. While he is welcome to his opinon (though it seems to me a very narrow view of the many ways one can run a successful company), I would ask him to take another look at the issues he's writing about. More importantly, I would ask Forbes' editorial staff to refrain from publishing as articles unsubstantiated attacks on a project whose rhetoric they may or may not love, but which produces products of demonstrated value to the business world.
Does anyone worry that we may actually reach a monoculture situation with Apache?
I have worked with both Apache and IIS, and I _agree_ with almost all the arguments claiming that Apache is more robust and easier to work with than IIS, but monoculture is clearly a problem.
Apache is good software, but no programmer or software is perfect - if Apache controls 90% of the market, and one serious flaw is found in it, then you have the kind of virus an patch problems that Windows faces now.
This is all fine and good, but the machines that "decoded" the human genome were performing a simple task really and did not require much in the way of alternative paths or any complex programming. For simple tasks or projects, yes VB is pretty handy. For other tasks, or requirements that may need a bit more complex programming, VB will not cut it.
I'd be really interested to see what fraction of programming projects are or ought to be simple ones. It has always seemed to me that many, many organizations need (and are ready to pay for) something much more than they need an elegantly designed system. This does provoke growing pains as the load on the system grows, but then again, the org probably has systemic changes prompting the increased load. I wonder if it's possible to compare the number of man-hours on relatively simple projects with those on complex projects requiring more complex tools.
That said, I do think it's rather inflammatory of Greenspun to claim that everyone is stupid for using a language he found hard to learn. As others have pointed out, he just seemed to have a rather shallow knowledge of the subject. Just because someone has an opinion doesn't mean they know anything - I and plenty of other/bots can certainly attest to that.:]
And I should also add that people here seem to think that Microsoft has some massive calculating scheme, like your three points. I'm sure those points have been on many powerpoint slides in many meetings, but I'd be awfully suprised if the strategy was that refined. Most of the time what they do is try and see. They are clear unafraid to try various forms of hardball, so try and see sometimes means, try locking out other clients, and see whether people stay on our system.
Your are also correct on the client point, though I don't think it's the ones you're thinking of - they really don't give a rip about Gaim or Trillian. I wouldn't be surprised if this has something to do with a really big enterprise wanting to mix MSN Messenger with someone else's solution, and Microsoft objecting, probably in conjunction with some nasty security flaws someone unearthed.
Spot on. You gotta work with what people have got, not what you wish they had.
This is perhaps the best review Ive ever read of a real install of Linux in Microsoft work environment (which is a huge number of places). Thorough, and insightful, and amazing propaganda-free. The point of the article was in fact that Linux is very close to being the biggest bargain of the new century - imagine getting for free what costs several hundred dollars otherwise (not to mention the TAO - Total Aggravation of Ownership of MS CALs).
The cut-and-paste problem is a tremendous nuisance, of the oh-for-Chrissakes type. In the year 2003 AD, you should just be able to copy and paste text. In fact, even the separation of the selection buffer from the cut-and-paste buffer is still imperfect in most Linux WMs. That fact that its very rarely mentioned as a shortcoming of Linux, which highlights how few times people have actually done the experiment ZDNet did.
Linux may yet take the desktop, but only after a good open-source usability model emerges.
What distro will everyone have some experience with when your customization guru leaves and you have to hire someone to keep the wheels duct-taped onto the car?
Excellent observation. As KDE has gotten snappier, I've noticed that it does this less frequently than Windows. Things take a noticeably longer to load, but once they are loaded they are generally more responsive to user input. I think this ends up being a big usability issue - because for those less familiar with the what the button is supposed to do, its meaning is made unclear when it doesn't respond. I.e., am I _supposed_ to click 5 times to make something happen?
Your scenario - which, by the way, I go through on a regular basis with XP (Home and Pro) - makes me think of a question about the GUI. You mention clicking the start button a million times. Shouldn't explorer (or MFC) be catching some of these extra clicks, too, and avoiding sending them to the graphics subsystem to force 10^4 repaints? Or could this perhaps be done at the level of the graphics toolkit, where certain widgets could be marked to catch only n events until a response is given?
Ironically, the actual difference in the U.S. between Republicans and Democrats when they get into office is frightfully small.
Well, this boils down to realizations both parties made in the 90s: The Republicans who had been yapping since Reagan took office about killing this or that program or department, realized that even when voters claim to like "small government" killing programs will make you really unpopular. Remember the talk about killing the department of Education? The Democrats, aside from losing sight of their goals, realized that even though people want more government when it comes to their cherished sectors and projects, the taxes required to do so will make you really unpopular. Remember the Clintons' attempt at universal health care?
What the U.S. needs is campaign finance reform, and reform of how bills are created and passed. No more massive pork-barrel laden bills, with random riders that have nothing to do with the bill in question. One bill, one law.
Certainly an interesting idea. But a) you'd have to have a definition of "one law" that's legally specific enough to be enforceable but flexible enough to avoid hogtying the legislature, and b) this would require congress to pass a constitutional amendment limiting its powers. Fattius chancius, especially if the Supreme Court, whom the Constitution has ASKED to limit the powers of congress wet its pants and ran away.
And get making laws back into the hands of people who give a darn, not ones who are doing it because some donor or PAC says it, or some stupid "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" deals.
I see your point, but I'd be careful with your terms. A PAC is a group formed to acheive some political goal. If I understand what you're saying, you mean that PACs push through actions that you don't think are connected to the welfare of "ordinary" citizens, but represent some self-interested "special interest" writing manna for itself into the law. Of course the whole trick of the lobbying game is to come up with a case for why your action is in the common good: e.g., "Deregulating broadband is good for the consumer because it will promote greater rollout." How do you determine who speaks for "ordinary citizens"?
Campaign finance reform is definitely one measure that may be useful (although it may end up making things worse as people learn to work around it). We shall see. And I can't help thinking that some reforms guaranteeing balanced access by lobbyists to key political figures would be useful - like anyone who can raise a certain number of signatures must be granted a half-hour meeting with a congressman, or schemes like that. Regrettably I don't know how Capitol Hill works well enough to flesh out any details.
Re:Painful? Yes. Helps long term? I don't see it.
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Giant Sucking Noise
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Your onto some excellent points here. Yes, it is patronize to tell people that they should value cultural purity (as defined by some starry-eyed outsider) over a better house and a car. The schizophrenia you mention cuts through a lot of the work of international development in general.
On the other hand, this makes me leery:
While there are many problems in globalism, the fact is that thinking globally is the most humanistic and charitable thing to do. The fact is that those programmers in India are not somehow less deserving than the programmers in your town or even the next town over.
Less developed countries still lack the legal framework to help their citizens avoid devastating exploitation - in labor, in environment, in transparent courts, for example (not that American institutions are in such great shape right now...). So yes, there are many potential benefits to well-managed globalism. The problem is that much of the free trade corner is heavily populated with people who want the benefits of free movement of capital, but without kicking down for corresponding assitance (in developing institutions), or making sacrifices on our side like opening markets. This limits the spread of true globalism, and doesn't help address the unacceptable levels of poverty in the world.
Not trying to presume your position on any of these things, just felt they should be elaborated on.
The lossiness from an analog rip is not so bad that people won't put up with it, especially if the RIAAAAAHHAAHH's solution is to jack up prices. It's true that the sound off a CD is more dynamic than audio tape, and while this helped the adoption of CD's, I'd wager that regaining control of discrete tracks, the elimination of tape hiss and all the myriad ways that tapes lose sound had a lot more do with it. You can do all but the dynamic sound with an analog rip (and perhaps some post-rip cleanup).
No, now that people feel they can get music for free, mp3 sharing ain't going nowhere. It might well headed towards where porn is - people won't want to talk about doing it, but lot of them will anyway.
Well, as someone who's spent a fair amount of time on the KDE usability list, I should take some umbrage at this, but I have to admit it's mostly true.
The reasons for this are largely consistent with what Shawn had to say about KDE: it is rather passive. I think this is a consequence of being extremely open - it's very easy to get involved with KDE, at almost any level because people will listen to you, but they will not stop and wait for you, but just keep going about their business of building stuff for KDE.
And to be fair, you have to give some credit to how difficult a truly open-source usability effort like this is. Usability is mostly about polish: consistency, intuitiveness, ease of learning for behavior, so it's best done by sitting down and going through the whole shebang at once, which is anathema to OSS and especially KDE's development process. The usability folks are now working to collect the usability reviews people have done into a database so developers can refer to them. With luck and some effort to get developers to interact more with the usability project, we can get more broadly involved.
The problem is people don't want to be organized, so they look to technology to help them be lazy.
Well, I'm certainly lazy about organizing my stuff. I don't care about having things organized on paper, I care about understanding things in my head. I would love to have a computer keep track of things that I needed to know, as long as it learned to follow what I'm thinking. Obviously we're a long way from that, but this here is a small but very useful evolutionary step. No doubt people will want to continue to categorize and hierarchical represent things, drawing on the strengths of HFS. But they will also learn to use search and metadata based filesystems to organize things in other ways. And once they get a chance to do this, we can use what we learn to take more steps towards being lazy. And then slovenly victory will be ours!
Plus try explaining 'metadata' to someone. At least now you can use the file cabinet, drawers, folders, papers example to explain the layout to someone.
Ah, yes all those millions of Google users who don't really understand metadata sure are having a hard time searching for things...
The alternative, of course, is to write something that acts nothing like the standard desktop, while being just as functional but more intuitive. It's not impossible, but would require an almost preternaturally deep understanding of what is and isn't intuitive, the ability to put that vision into code, and the ability to win enough converts to get the ideas into common usage.
Very well put. It's sort of like someone saying "be more inspired!" Could we really understand how physics works at the speed of light before Einstein put together a deep set of insights that were much clearer? No - that's what made him inspired, and likewise FDR, and likewise Pablo Neruda. And frankly, the small steps folks take in place being Einstein or Neruda are quite worthy, and it's not particularly nice to spend a bunch of time nattering "you're no Einstein, you know".
The preceding paragraph, to me, reads "you may as well give up."
It just frustrates me - if Dvorak has good, concrete ideas for what the community _should_ do, and how we _should_ do them, would he please help put them into effect. Not only do you have any number of toolkits in OSS, complete with the source and a license which encourages screwing around with the source, but they're all _FREE_. So if he's not going to get to work, a more respectful tone might be in order.
While I do believe that authors do skimp on what they've read and what they just pretend to have read, I'm not sure that using typos in references is the best way to determine the degree to which this occurs.
The key problem they identify is a actually quite a deep one. One way to look at this problem is that people are almost always as interested in being right as getting it right. Scientists are hardly alone here, in fact they at least have the good grace learn how to admit they're wrong. In this context, citations are an attempt to say, "see, they say I'm right too". This is made worse by the fact that original papers are often much harder to read than subsequent papers, as the later ones are published more with the aim of making the idea comprehensible and the first one is for getting the new idea out there as quickly as possible. But all this adds up to spin on the original idea, and soon the original premise has collected a whole bunch of new meaning. Science would do well be to more diligent in saying, "yeah, but what's his angle", rather than thinking that the "facts" will ultimately be outed.
All that said, the parent is again spot on: their work is just not publication ready. It's a good proof of concept for a proposal to do the real work of finding out how an citation propagates, but by itself it's full of holes (as many have pointed out in a more articulate way than I can). I do think that the real work will involve a critical interpretation of the culture of science, which will be a hard sell. Recall what happened the last time some uppity sociologists _dared_ to fsck with the absolute objectivity of the physics community...
And to those posters who like to say science is mannned by noble, knowledge-seeking, self-sacrificing philosophers-ascetics, DROP IT NOW. That kind of self-aggrandizement masquerading as piousness drives me nuts and is what makes people think scientists are pompous. In the US at least, science is a gravy train (remember the military industrial complex you all work for?) which shelters many otherwise quite resourceful people from having figure out what to do with their lives and how to do it. Nice work if you can get it, but let's be honest about it, please.
There's something a lot simpler keeping Linux off the desktop: inertia.
Companies very quickly reach a saturation stage in computing where the number of things they could do dwarfs their resources to do them and dilutes their mission. Microsoft offers them a clear path. Buy this now, but that later. It may seems counterintuitive to pay the MS tax and deal with the intense aggravation of CALs, but recall, most companies have money, and they're happy to pay it to not have to pay someone every 20 minutes to research what to do next.
This especially applies to the desktop. Consider that most office drones' salaries are above $20/hr when you include support costs, and $100 a year comes out to 5 hours of work. It's pretty hard to get the time-to-conversion down to 5 hours or less per employee, so naturally businesses are hesitant to commit to that big a change of direction. Not to mention that IT departments seem to rapidly converge into a heady mic of territoriality, and fending off the additions of all sorts of extra projects.
I certainly hope that Mandrake does well - I think they make a nice alternative for filling in those not well served by MS' pricing and license model: schools, small business, developing countries etc. I'd expect enough incremental progress in the needed desktop apps that in two years desktop Linux will be a reasonable alternative for small businesses with less need for polished interoperability features. Microsoft will probably remain a considerable force (noone else in the world has the experience of building a software house that big), which could turn out to be positive once their iron grip is broken. If you look at the slow march, things look good for a positive software environment. Now if only the BSDs and Linux would cooperate more, the spectrum of Unix would offer even better choice.
You have a good point - in moderation. It is not reasonable for people to expect all their employment goals to be handed to them by a legal framework. It does take some pushing and stretching yourself outside your envelope. And certainly the law ought include ample provision for the work and effort put in by the founder(s) of a company to be rewarded. But this goes too far:
Nobody is "exploiting" you.
That really depends on who you are. For the programmer/engineer types that haunt/., I generally agree. We've got way too much going for us to justify the kind of self-pitying nerdling view that passes for muster here. On the other hand, most people in this world start with so few resources that they are subject to a lot of exploitation. Factory workers (god forbid you toil in a high-production, low-cost place like China or Singapore), retail, data-entry, office support drones, and an endlessly long list of other jobs involve skills that are perceived as basically interchangeable, and most everyone knows this.
And the fact that someone with brains, brawn and balls started a company ought not to give her the right to exploit people, nor does it grant her the right to a mighty river of money just cause she did some good work at the outset, nor should it excuse her from the duty we have to other human beings to give them a little help in this life. Upper management's sense of entitlement is just as honed as the worker bees, and just as bogus.
An IT workers coop - not quite a union, but with some of the same goals - that helped take some of the rough edges off of life as an IT worker could be a great thing, to keep things in balance in the workplace.
Slashdot Mirror
You may call rebooting after patches FUD, but it happens to me about 65% of the time I download any sort of update from WindowsUpdate. As a result, I postpone running WindowsUpdate, or at least applying the updates after they've been downloaded, until I'm ready to reboot.
Evidently YMMV.
Your final assesment is much clearer than the site's section on "Industry and the Environment", which left me feeling that I'd been had (and I got a masters in oceanography, so I know a thing or two about the global carbon cycle). Perhaps you could send them this summary.
The essence of your argument is that this technology move elements of the carbon budget from one place on the spreadsheet to another. That is, it probably reduces the amount of carbon sequestered in biomass decay, but simultaneously reduces the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere as various industries move from taking fossil fuels out of the ground to these new synthetic oils. So without a particular demonstration that the refined oil that comes out of their "crude" is puts less carbon into the atmosphere, I'd say it has approximately zero effect on the total carbon added to the atmosphere. Worse than that, without some reform in either energy infrastructure or energy consumption, people will not forgo fossil fuel oil for this oil, they'll use both.
At present, only limitations on refining capacity will hold the US back from greatly increasing its consumption of fossil-fuel based energies. And there's the rapidly approaching question: WWCD (What Will China Do?) As a scientist, I'm not totally convinced that the carbon emissions - global warming link is as strong as everyone says it is, given that we still don't really know whether the ocean's total carbon uptake is positive or negative, and we really don't know what has prompted dramatic climate change in the past. But I do know that pushing a big lever to the floor on a machine you don't know how to drive is a very unwise proposition, so common sense dictates that we really ought to be reforming our carbon emissions before we drive the machine into the support beams of the building we're building.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is great technology - the benefits of not dumping organic slurry into streams or heavy metal waste into oceans or crude sludge into open pits are tremendous. I just think they're making a mistake to get into the carbon cycle debate when it's far from clear that they will contribute to any reductions in carbon emissions.
a) If you're questioning the design philosophy of Linux that the entire system can be equally well accessed via console as GUI, you're not likely to find much support, even among those who recognize the problems you mention. It's a fundamentally good idea to provide a simple, robust (i.e. text-based) method for configuration.
b) The other piece that you're alluding to is the thorny problem of package management, with or without a GUI. Here I think you're putting several problems together as one. I agree that the situation with binaries installation is a total clusterfsck, but I think it's not just a question of the One System to Bring Them Together, nor the lack of a well-thought-out GUI for the systems that exist, it's incompatibility due to specific design choices by Linux programmers. In open-source no individual programmer or project is tasked with looking out for the consistency of a broad swath of binaries, and the binaries themselves are often homebrewed, so people tend use whatever library suits their present design needs and setup, without worrying how that will translate across distros and versions.
You could, and people are proposing to, create a library management layer that provides necessary libraries for many things. But it's just a matter of time before someone takes a shortcut around such a layer because it suits their fancy.
Contrast that with Microsoft's relentless insistence on backwards compatibility, which has incoporated all this clusterfscking into the Win32 API instead. Six of one...
One thing I don't understand is why system paths like
Kudos on an excellent example.
Not only that, but one of the reasons that the US government is considered among the most and responsive and transparent by the IMF (including setting best practice standards many areas) is because we pay what it takes for good people.
By contrast, in many other countries government jobs pay much less than their counterparts in the private sector, and with that low pay comes corruption, mismanagement and general incompetence.
That's not to say that the US federal government is uniformly the best at delivering services, or that it couldn't be better, merely that it's a lot better than the outsources give it credit for.
From http://www.cdc-cdh.edu/hospital/cardio/art44.html
Now before folks call me alarmist, this is not true of everybody. I happen to be someone with a very high sensitivity to caffeine, and one of my brothers has this too, though interestingly neither of my parents do. I discovered how sensitive I was to caffeine after it put me in the cardiac wing of a hospital for a day and a half with an atrial fibrillation, even though I am fit and don't smoke.
That experience has left me thinking that people are awfully blasee about using what can be a very strong stimulant for people with certain biochemistry. So let me add that to all the other excellent advice about getting used to drinking water.
One other thought:
If you don't have hypertension, you might try snacking on sunflower seeds periodically. The salt gives you a wicked urge to drink water, and the seeds take enough work to crack that you don't really go through that many calories.
Well-done research is never "wasted", because you always learn something. It may not be what you wanted to know, and it may not be immediately applicable, but it adds to people's knowledge, which makes it useful.
I agree that a key task as a parent is helping your children develop judgement. But there is no formula for it. Some kids are easy to raise: they want to learn, they want to please you, they want to share the sandbox with other kids. Other kids are hard to raise - they can just get it in their heads that they must do a lot of drugs, be mean to their siblings, ignore school, and engage in whatever other self-defeating behaviors you can name.
My brothers and I were relatively "easy" raises - we basically liked our parents and each other, and enjoyed most of the things they set out as useful for us to do. My mom's boyfriend Bob has a son, who just came back home after a lot of time drinking too much, dropping out of school, etc. He came to dinner the other night with us, full of remorse and self-deprecation. It's hard not to think that his time to get through that stuff was just longer than Bob's other son, or my brothers and I.
I believe that that great majority of people can eventually make it through these kind of self-defeating behaviors; I'm still in the middle as to when and how some of them might be necessary parts of the learning process. A "good" parent will provide as much guidance as s?he can, and that can take a lot of different forms. For some parents and some kids, strictness is the ticket. For other parents and kids, a long leash is just right. The books, articles, seminars that are out there can give you good tools to do this (of particular importance in my mind is showing that you love someone in easy times and tough times), but ultimately, I think you just give parenting your all and hope for the best without knowing in advance how it will turn out.
This is point that OSS seems to have really missed. People like the GUI in SQL Server. It's only now that they are trying to stack em into racks that they're thinking perhaps they want to strip that stuff out. The GUI makes it easy to get started and do simple things.
Here's an even more striking example of that:
I have built Microsoft Access applications for years, and a few VB ones on the side. I'm not a Microsoft love, in fact, I also do some PHP programming against MySQL, and I much prefer PHP as a language. Why, you ask, do I screw around with Access? Because I can make a functioning GUI database app in a few days, not weeks. And it's report functionality is quite powerful. Yes, Access has some real shortcomings, Microsoft's s/true technical documentation/marketing nonsense/ approach is infuriating, and don't even get me started on the licensing hoops MS puts you through.
But every time I've looked around for RAD tools for Linux or MySQL, that I can deploy and run easily, I come up sorely short. If someone can put me onto a good, easy-to-deploy OSS RAD package either web, or that runs on Windows, I'll retract this post and flagellate myself. And no, a half-finished version of something with no reporting does not count. Until then, I have to believe that this is a boat that OSS has really missed.
I don't get it. How is WinFS any different from indexing files and storing the metadata in a database, a la slocate but with more metadata?
As I see it, if an app that doesn't know about WinFS, say a legacy app (or open up its data storage to WinFS) goes to store data in WinFS, it will ignore most of the metadata layer, and store its data as binary, whether that's as a BLOB in a DB or a file pointed to by a fs tree seems immaterial. This says to me that the main problem is that apps don't TELL each other how to share data (i.e., open data formats), and I don't see how WinFS addresses this. Am I missing something here?
I really don't see how the XML fits in either - if we want an XML filetype, why not just make an XML filetype, and then index afterwards?
To the Editors of Forbes:
I am writing to express my disappointment that Daniel Lyons' vitriolic, disinformational broadside against the General Public License (GPL) was published as an article, when it is in fact an uninformed editorial.
The author's thorough misunderstanding of the Free Software Foundation's efforts to enforce the terms of a license would be part of the normal ebb and flow of chatter on the Web - if they didn't appear in a respectable business publication. Mr. Lyons attempts to portray the efforts of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to enforce the General Public License for Linux first as conspiratorial, and then inexplicably, as communistic. In fact, the FSF is doing what all effective organizations do - defending its legal rights to the products that fall under its purview, and making use of the most basic principle of intellectual property law to do so. The principle is this: if I come up with something new, I own it and control its disposition; if I take the work of someone else and use it, I have to follow the terms they set. Simple. Which leaves a simple choice for someone wishing to extend Linux: use it under the authors' terms or find something else. Would Mr. Lyons, or any Forbes writer object if Motorola took Nokia's chip and used it, unlicensed, in a cellphone? I hope so.
So Mr. Lyons is not in fact, objecting to (much less reporting on) FSF's enforcing a license, he is objecting the license's ends of promoting a creative commons, or perhaps to the FSF's rhetoric. While he is welcome to his opinon (though it seems to me a very narrow view of the many ways one can run a successful company), I would ask him to take another look at the issues he's writing about. More importantly, I would ask Forbes' editorial staff to refrain from publishing as articles unsubstantiated attacks on a project whose rhetoric they may or may not love, but which produces products of demonstrated value to the business world.
Sincerely,
Eric Ellsworth
Software Developer
Washington, DC
Does anyone worry that we may actually reach a monoculture situation with Apache?
I have worked with both Apache and IIS, and I _agree_ with almost all the arguments claiming that Apache is more robust and easier to work with than IIS, but monoculture is clearly a problem.
Apache is good software, but no programmer or software is perfect - if Apache controls 90% of the market, and one serious flaw is found in it, then you have the kind of virus an patch problems that Windows faces now.
How do we avoid the same fate as Windows?
I'd be really interested to see what fraction of programming projects are or ought to be simple ones. It has always seemed to me that many, many organizations need (and are ready to pay for) something much more than they need an elegantly designed system. This does provoke growing pains as the load on the system grows, but then again, the org probably has systemic changes prompting the increased load. I wonder if it's possible to compare the number of man-hours on relatively simple projects with those on complex projects requiring more complex tools.
That said, I do think it's rather inflammatory of Greenspun to claim that everyone is stupid for using a language he found hard to learn. As others have pointed out, he just seemed to have a rather shallow knowledge of the subject. Just because someone has an opinion doesn't mean they know anything - I and plenty of other
Well said,
And I should also add that people here seem to think that Microsoft has some massive calculating scheme, like your three points. I'm sure those points have been on many powerpoint slides in many meetings, but I'd be awfully suprised if the strategy was that refined. Most of the time what they do is try and see. They are clear unafraid to try various forms of hardball, so try and see sometimes means, try locking out other clients, and see whether people stay on our system.
Your are also correct on the client point, though I don't think it's the ones you're thinking of - they really don't give a rip about Gaim or Trillian. I wouldn't be surprised if this has something to do with a really big enterprise wanting to mix MSN Messenger with someone else's solution, and Microsoft objecting, probably in conjunction with some nasty security flaws someone unearthed.
Spot on. You gotta work with what people have got, not what you wish they had.
This is perhaps the best review Ive ever read of a real install of Linux in Microsoft work environment (which is a huge number of places). Thorough, and insightful, and amazing propaganda-free. The point of the article was in fact that Linux is very close to being the biggest bargain of the new century - imagine getting for free what costs several hundred dollars otherwise (not to mention the TAO - Total Aggravation of Ownership of MS CALs).
The cut-and-paste problem is a tremendous nuisance, of the oh-for-Chrissakes type. In the year 2003 AD, you should just be able to copy and paste text. In fact, even the separation of the selection buffer from the cut-and-paste buffer is still imperfect in most Linux WMs. That fact that its very rarely mentioned as a shortcoming of Linux, which highlights how few times people have actually done the experiment ZDNet did.
Linux may yet take the desktop, but only after a good open-source usability model emerges.
Just to follow up on this:
What distro will everyone have some experience with when your customization guru leaves and you have to hire someone to keep the wheels duct-taped onto the car?
Excellent observation. As KDE has gotten snappier, I've noticed that it does this less frequently than Windows. Things take a noticeably longer to load, but once they are loaded they are generally more responsive to user input. I think this ends up being a big usability issue - because for those less familiar with the what the button is supposed to do, its meaning is made unclear when it doesn't respond. I.e., am I _supposed_ to click 5 times to make something happen?
Your scenario - which, by the way, I go through on a regular basis with XP (Home and Pro) - makes me think of a question about the GUI. You mention clicking the start button a million times. Shouldn't explorer (or MFC) be catching some of these extra clicks, too, and avoiding sending them to the graphics subsystem to force 10^4 repaints? Or could this perhaps be done at the level of the graphics toolkit, where certain widgets could be marked to catch only n events until a response is given?
Well, this boils down to realizations both parties made in the 90s:
The Republicans who had been yapping since Reagan took office about killing this or that program or department, realized that even when voters claim to like "small government" killing programs will make you really unpopular. Remember the talk about killing the department of Education?
The Democrats, aside from losing sight of their goals, realized that even though people want more government when it comes to their cherished sectors and projects, the taxes required to do so will make you really unpopular. Remember the Clintons' attempt at universal health care?
Certainly an interesting idea. But a) you'd have to have a definition of "one law" that's legally specific enough to be enforceable but flexible enough to avoid hogtying the legislature, and b) this would require congress to pass a constitutional amendment limiting its powers. Fattius chancius, especially if the Supreme Court, whom the Constitution has ASKED to limit the powers of congress wet its pants and ran away.
I see your point, but I'd be careful with your terms. A PAC is a group formed to acheive some political goal. If I understand what you're saying, you mean that PACs push through actions that you don't think are connected to the welfare of "ordinary" citizens, but represent some self-interested "special interest" writing manna for itself into the law. Of course the whole trick of the lobbying game is to come up with a case for why your action is in the common good: e.g., "Deregulating broadband is good for the consumer because it will promote greater rollout." How do you determine who speaks for "ordinary citizens"?
Campaign finance reform is definitely one measure that may be useful (although it may end up making things worse as people learn to work around it). We shall see. And I can't help thinking that some reforms guaranteeing balanced access by lobbyists to key political figures would be useful - like anyone who can raise a certain number of signatures must be granted a half-hour meeting with a congressman, or schemes like that. Regrettably I don't know how Capitol Hill works well enough to flesh out any details.
On the other hand, this makes me leery:
Less developed countries still lack the legal framework to help their citizens avoid devastating exploitation - in labor, in environment, in transparent courts, for example (not that American institutions are in such great shape right now...). So yes, there are many potential benefits to well-managed globalism. The problem is that much of the free trade corner is heavily populated with people who want the benefits of free movement of capital, but without kicking down for corresponding assitance (in developing institutions), or making sacrifices on our side like opening markets. This limits the spread of true globalism, and doesn't help address the unacceptable levels of poverty in the world.
Not trying to presume your position on any of these things, just felt they should be elaborated on.
Let's put it another way then:
The lossiness from an analog rip is not so bad that people won't put up with it, especially if the RIAAAAAHHAAHH's solution is to jack up prices. It's true that the sound off a CD is more dynamic than audio tape, and while this helped the adoption of CD's, I'd wager that regaining control of discrete tracks, the elimination of tape hiss and all the myriad ways that tapes lose sound had a lot more do with it. You can do all but the dynamic sound with an analog rip (and perhaps some post-rip cleanup).
No, now that people feel they can get music for free, mp3 sharing ain't going nowhere. It might well headed towards where porn is - people won't want to talk about doing it, but lot of them will anyway.
Well, as someone who's spent a fair amount of time on the KDE usability list, I should take some umbrage at this, but I have to admit it's mostly true.
The reasons for this are largely consistent with what Shawn had to say about KDE: it is rather passive. I think this is a consequence of being extremely open - it's very easy to get involved with KDE, at almost any level because people will listen to you, but they will not stop and wait for you, but just keep going about their business of building stuff for KDE.
And to be fair, you have to give some credit to how difficult a truly open-source usability effort like this is. Usability is mostly about polish: consistency, intuitiveness, ease of learning for behavior, so it's best done by sitting down and going through the whole shebang at once, which is anathema to OSS and especially KDE's development process. The usability folks are now working to collect the usability reviews people have done into a database so developers can refer to them. With luck and some effort to get developers to interact more with the usability project, we can get more broadly involved.
If you want better usability in KDE, help us!
Well, I'm certainly lazy about organizing my stuff. I don't care about having things organized on paper, I care about understanding things in my head. I would love to have a computer keep track of things that I needed to know, as long as it learned to follow what I'm thinking. Obviously we're a long way from that, but this here is a small but very useful evolutionary step. No doubt people will want to continue to categorize and hierarchical represent things, drawing on the strengths of HFS. But they will also learn to use search and metadata based filesystems to organize things in other ways. And once they get a chance to do this, we can use what we learn to take more steps towards being lazy. And then slovenly victory will be ours!
Ah, yes all those millions of Google users who don't really understand metadata sure are having a hard time searching for things...
Very well put. It's sort of like someone saying
"be more inspired!"
Could we really understand how physics works at the speed of light before Einstein put together a deep set of insights that were much clearer? No - that's what made him inspired, and likewise FDR, and likewise Pablo Neruda. And frankly, the small steps folks take in place being Einstein or Neruda are quite worthy, and it's not particularly nice to spend a bunch of time nattering "you're no Einstein, you know".
It just frustrates me - if Dvorak has good, concrete ideas for what the community _should_ do, and how we _should_ do them, would he please help put them into effect. Not only do you have any number of toolkits in OSS, complete with the source and a license which encourages screwing around with the source, but they're all _FREE_. So if he's not going to get to work, a more respectful tone might be in order.
The key problem they identify is a actually quite a deep one. One way to look at this problem is that people are almost always as interested in being right as getting it right. Scientists are hardly alone here, in fact they at least have the good grace learn how to admit they're wrong. In this context, citations are an attempt to say, "see, they say I'm right too". This is made worse by the fact that original papers are often much harder to read than subsequent papers, as the later ones are published more with the aim of making the idea comprehensible and the first one is for getting the new idea out there as quickly as possible. But all this adds up to spin on the original idea, and soon the original premise has collected a whole bunch of new meaning. Science would do well be to more diligent in saying, "yeah, but what's his angle", rather than thinking that the "facts" will ultimately be outed.
All that said, the parent is again spot on: their work is just not publication ready. It's a good proof of concept for a proposal to do the real work of finding out how an citation propagates, but by itself it's full of holes (as many have pointed out in a more articulate way than I can). I do think that the real work will involve a critical interpretation of the culture of science, which will be a hard sell. Recall what happened the last time some uppity sociologists _dared_ to fsck with the absolute objectivity of the physics community...
And to those posters who like to say science is mannned by noble, knowledge-seeking, self-sacrificing philosophers-ascetics, DROP IT NOW. That kind of self-aggrandizement masquerading as piousness drives me nuts and is what makes people think scientists are pompous. In the US at least, science is a gravy train (remember the military industrial complex you all work for?) which shelters many otherwise quite resourceful people from having figure out what to do with their lives and how to do it. Nice work if you can get it, but let's be honest about it, please.
There's something a lot simpler keeping Linux off the desktop: inertia.
Companies very quickly reach a saturation stage in computing where the number of things they could do dwarfs their resources to do them and dilutes their mission. Microsoft offers them a clear path. Buy this now, but that later. It may seems counterintuitive to pay the MS tax and deal with the intense aggravation of CALs, but recall, most companies have money, and they're happy to pay it to not have to pay someone every 20 minutes to research what to do next.
This especially applies to the desktop. Consider that most office drones' salaries are above $20/hr when you include support costs, and $100 a year comes out to 5 hours of work. It's pretty hard to get the time-to-conversion down to 5 hours or less per employee, so naturally businesses are hesitant to commit to that big a change of direction. Not to mention that IT departments seem to rapidly converge into a heady mic of territoriality, and fending off the additions of all sorts of extra projects.
I certainly hope that Mandrake does well - I think they make a nice alternative for filling in those not well served by MS' pricing and license model: schools, small business, developing countries etc. I'd expect enough incremental progress in the needed desktop apps that in two years desktop Linux will be a reasonable alternative for small businesses with less need for polished interoperability features. Microsoft will probably remain a considerable force (noone else in the world has the experience of building a software house that big), which could turn out to be positive once their iron grip is broken. If you look at the slow march, things look good for a positive software environment. Now if only the BSDs and Linux would cooperate more, the spectrum of Unix would offer even better choice.
You have a good point - in moderation. It is not reasonable for people to expect all their employment goals to be handed to them by a legal framework. It does take some pushing and stretching yourself outside your envelope. And certainly the law ought include ample provision for the work and effort put in by the founder(s) of a company to be rewarded. But this goes too far:
That really depends on who you are. For the programmer/engineer types that haunt
On the other hand, most people in this world start with so few resources that they are subject to a lot of exploitation. Factory workers (god forbid you toil in a high-production, low-cost place like China or Singapore), retail, data-entry, office support drones, and an endlessly long list of other jobs involve skills that are perceived as basically interchangeable, and most everyone knows this.
And the fact that someone with brains, brawn and balls started a company ought not to give her the right to exploit people, nor does it grant her the right to a mighty river of money just cause she did some good work at the outset, nor should it excuse her from the duty we have to other human beings to give them a little help in this life. Upper management's sense of entitlement is just as honed as the worker bees, and just as bogus.
An IT workers coop - not quite a union, but with some of the same goals - that helped take some of the rough edges off of life as an IT worker could be a great thing, to keep things in balance in the workplace.