Personally, I'm seeing coalescing trends like this also in Canada - in Ottawa, they are predicting that the city could double in size due to high tech growth.
Yes, I'd imagine that a Tim Hortons based Edonut.com could really take off in Ottawa. The truly frightening thing is I just checked that URL, and it is owned by a squatter firm. Somebody is taking my idea seriously!
to defend legality. It is well known in Canada that the Bronfman family worked with organized crime in the States to bring alcohol into the US during Prohibition, and that many of the Bronfman owned hotels were really fronts for prostitution. Granted, these actions are several generations removed from the current leadership of Seagram, but his money is still tainted. Perhaps the granchildren of the Napster founders could act equally as outraged over illegal acts.
True, much of the purely theoretical work does occur in an academic setting, most universities can't hold a candle to the resources present in a commercial biotech company to produce actual product.
Frankly, there isn't a whole lot of actual product being produced. Just like the Internet craze, biotech company owners generally just make money on the stock market rather than running a profitable business.
Believe me, if you had the choice between going to work for a high paying biotech company or staying at the university as a grad student for meager wages, where would you end up?
Hey, I've had that choice and made my decision concerning that already. Perhaps you would have chosen differently.
The simple fact is that most truly important research happens in academia and not industry. Look at Nobel prize winners -- only a handful of them are industrial scientists. And when industry does attempt to do important research, more often than not they are competing with similar research going on in academia -- they difference being, of course, that industrial research aims at keeping the knowledge proprietory while academic research doesn't. Sure, not allowing genes to be patented would result in fewer biotech companies -- but why would that be a bad thing?
I dunno about the Turner Diaries
on
Fahrenheit 451
·
· Score: 2
In the limit of ab absurdum, given the choice between reading the Turner Diaries and F451, I would probably read F451. Would you prefer that everyone read F451 over the Turner Diaries? (Most people would)
Considering that I, and most people, haven't read the Turner Diaries, I'm not sure if this is a meaningful question. All I know is that the media has made it sound as if the TD were some sort of mind control device which can turn normal people into fanatic anti-government terrorists. It might be interesting to see what the fuss is all about, but it probably isn't interesting enough to risk being profiled as a potential terrorist by the governments of the western world by purchasing it.
If so, the article should have been written way before March 2000. Why do adherents to the "Church of RMS" dig for such snide remarks? Is it because they have no actual arguments behind their dogmatic hate for people making a living?
Who's displaying dogmatic hatred? I'm merely trying to understand the rationale behind his rather odd article. Meyer is the only one displaying hatred. BTW: While Meyer may run a small company selling compilers on the side, he has a real job is in academia, (two of them in fact!), and so hardly needs to support himself through the sale of software. That's what really is amusing about his slam against academics with steady salaries releasing free software.
Io is a moon of Jupiter. Io was also the name of one of Zeus/Jupiter's girlfriends in mythology, so the name makes sense, sort of. It was also the setting of an early 80's mediocre SF movie with Sean Connery. Outland, I think the name was.
And so, I think we finally get to the real point of the article. Meyer is upset because a group was inspired by RMS to write a free compiler which is competing with his own. I had little knowledge of Meyer before this outbust, and I can't say his underhanded attack inspires me to purchase his book or compiler.
The author hiself villifies taxpayer-supported free software, but shouldn't something that's paid for by the public be freely available to the public?
You'd think so, but that doesn't seem to be the way things are. Basically, universities have two policies -- either the University owns the software (the policy of the University of California, I believe), or the authors own it (as in the case of the University of Waterloo). In either case, the owners can freely release the software to the public, but there is no obligation to do so.
I believe in the principles of the FSF and have put my software under the GPL because I believe that this is the right thing to do and is congruent with my desire to help build a better world. I am aware that not everybody feels this way -- many people I know feel that they owe the world nothing and openly declare that they simply want to maximize their income. Fine. I have a right to consider such people shallow and short-sighted, and they have the right to consider me a dewey-eyed idealist.
Clerk: But where is the most comfortable seat in your house? Woman: The expensive office chair in front of my computer. Clerk: Isn't a sofa more comfortable? Woman: Since when have sofas been designed by engineers with a background in ergonomics?
Well, at least my 17-inch monitor is larger than my TV set, but then I've never been a TV person -- I've considered simply getting rid of my television altogether. Besides, the only reason people need big televisions is that the refresh rate of TVs is so terrible that sitting too close to one gives headaches. With a good monitor, I can sit for an entire day a foot and a half away from my monitor with no problems. So, why wouldn't I want to watch a movie on such a high-quality screen?
...Sun's pre-X windowing environment. Although pretty hard to find in its original form, Xview is pretty much a straight port on top of X11 -- even the API calls are very Sunview-ish
Considering that both the Napster server and clients have GPL clones, it is hard to see how the RIAA can really have any real effect on MP3 trading through their actions against Napster. Too late, RIAA -- the cat is already out of the bag.
"For Dummies" is a stupid series of books with a stupid title, IMO, but obviously successful for IDG. You can't tell me that people that made up a site or whatever entired "blah blah for Dummies" weren't inspired to do so by IDG's books.
Sure I can. When I was an undergrad in the late '80s (before IDG) we used to refer to the courses given by department X for non-majors as X for dummies. (Statistics for Dummies, Physics for Dummies, etc.) You can't tell me that IDG wasn't inspired to call their books "for dummies" by exactly this usage.
I thought the whole reason why products have names like Coca-Cola or Kleenex is that by creating a nonsense word, the word isn't one in common use and so can only refer to the product in question. But "for dummies" hardly originated in 1991. In fact, if the phrase hadn't already been entrenched it would make no sense for IDG to use it in their titles. It's a pity that nobody has dared IDG to sue them.
Don't these people ever match movies? You create some sort of icky technological horrors like robotic snakes and deploy them in an isolated location like a space station or martian colony and they will certainly go berserk, killing all but the most charismatic male and his love interest. These two characters of course defeat the evil technology just in time to catch the last spaceship back to earth.
I'm quite familar with both systems and frankly, there is no real reason to prefer one over the other. Metric fans like to point out the ease of metric unit conversion, but first of all, unit conversion is rarely a significant percentage of the real work involved in any calculation, and secondly, people in metric countries seem to love to create new unit names which defeat the whole metric principle. For example, why have liters? Why have metric tons? Both these units can be expressed in terms of basic units, but people don't do this in practice.
The objection to metric seems to arise soley from a portion of the group of people raised from childhood primarily on imperial or without metric altogether.
Likewise, the objection to imperial units seems to arise soley from a portion of the group of people raised from childhood primarily on metric units or without imperial units altogether...
Yes, in theory/. isn't a Linux site. But really, what would a non-Linux/BSD user find of interest here? Perhaps the science stories, but that's about it. So why do you read/.? I'm not attacking you -- I'm just genuinely curious.
The problem is, as RMS says, there are no scientific reasons to believe Open Source is a better business model. After all, Microsoft is far more profitable than Red Hat. Lacking such reasons, the only real reason to support Open Source is if it is congruent with one's own personal philosophy. I happen to support it myself, but I admit my feelings are merely ethical in nature. I suspect you and ESR are really idealists at heart but, like Bogart's Rick in Casablanca feel that you have justify your feelings economically
Well, I recently (two weeks ago) attended a lecture by Jonathan Schaeffer, the main author of Chinook, (the "Deep Blue" of checkers) and he claimed that checkers is of yet unsolved, and I'd think he'd know.
Heck, people haven't even solved checkers yet, despite a popular misconception to the contrary that an early 60's program played "perfect checkers" (it didn't, it was merely the first checkers program that was any good at all) Click here for a discussion of the practical problems involved in solving the chess or checkers search tree.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'm seeing coalescing trends like this also in Canada - in Ottawa, they are predicting that the city could double in size due to high tech growth.
Yes, I'd imagine that a Tim Hortons based Edonut.com could really take off in Ottawa. The truly frightening thing is I just checked that URL, and it is owned by a squatter firm. Somebody is taking my idea seriously!
to defend legality. It is well known in Canada that the Bronfman family worked with organized crime in the States to bring alcohol into the US during Prohibition, and that many of the Bronfman owned hotels were really fronts for prostitution. Granted, these actions are several generations removed from the current leadership of Seagram, but his money is still tainted. Perhaps the granchildren of the Napster founders could act equally as outraged over illegal acts.
True, much of the purely theoretical work does occur in an academic setting, most universities can't hold a candle to the resources present in a commercial biotech company to produce actual product.
Frankly, there isn't a whole lot of actual product being produced. Just like the Internet craze, biotech company owners generally just make money on the stock market rather than running a profitable business.
Believe me, if you had the choice between going to work for a high paying biotech company or staying at the university as a grad student for meager wages, where would you end up?
Hey, I've had that choice and made my decision concerning that already. Perhaps you would have chosen differently.
The simple fact is that most truly important research happens in academia and not industry. Look at Nobel prize winners -- only a handful of them are industrial scientists. And when industry does attempt to do important research, more often than not they are competing with similar research going on in academia -- they difference being, of course, that industrial research aims at keeping the knowledge proprietory while academic research doesn't. Sure, not allowing genes to be patented would result in fewer biotech companies -- but why would that be a bad thing?
In the limit of ab absurdum, given the choice between reading the Turner Diaries and F451, I would probably read F451. Would you prefer that everyone read F451 over the Turner Diaries? (Most people would)
Considering that I, and most people, haven't read the Turner Diaries, I'm not sure if this is a meaningful question. All I know is that the media has made it sound as if the TD were some sort of mind control device which can turn normal people into fanatic anti-government terrorists. It might be interesting to see what the fuss is all about, but it probably isn't interesting enough to risk being profiled as a potential terrorist by the governments of the western world by purchasing it.
If so, the article should have been written way before March 2000. Why do adherents to the "Church of RMS" dig for such snide remarks?
Is it because they have no actual arguments behind their dogmatic hate for people making a living?
Who's displaying dogmatic hatred? I'm merely trying to understand the rationale behind his rather odd article. Meyer is the only one displaying hatred. BTW: While Meyer may run a small company selling compilers on the side, he has a real job is in academia, (two of them in fact!), and so hardly needs to support himself through the sale of software. That's what really is amusing about his slam against academics with steady salaries releasing free software.
Io is a moon of Jupiter. Io was also the name of one of Zeus/Jupiter's girlfriends in mythology, so the name makes sense, sort of. It was also the setting of an early 80's mediocre SF movie with Sean Connery. Outland, I think the name was.
And so, I think we finally get to the real point of the article. Meyer is upset because a group was inspired by RMS to write a free compiler which is competing with his own. I had little knowledge of Meyer before this outbust, and I can't say his underhanded attack inspires me to purchase his book or compiler.
The author hiself villifies taxpayer-supported free software, but shouldn't something that's paid for by the public be freely available to the public?
You'd think so, but that doesn't seem to be the way things are. Basically, universities have two policies -- either the University owns the software (the policy of the University of California, I believe), or the authors own it (as in the case of the University of Waterloo). In either case, the owners can freely release the software to the public, but there is no obligation to do so.
That moral values are subjective? Well, Duh!
I believe in the principles of the FSF and have put my software under the GPL because I believe that this is the right thing to do and is congruent with my desire to help build a better world. I am aware that not everybody feels this way -- many people I know feel that they owe the world nothing and openly declare that they simply want to maximize their income. Fine. I have a right to consider such people shallow and short-sighted, and they have the right to consider me a dewey-eyed idealist.
Clerk: But where is the most comfortable seat in your house?
Woman: The expensive office chair in front of my computer.
Clerk: Isn't a sofa more comfortable?
Woman: Since when have sofas been designed by engineers with a background in ergonomics?
Well, at least my 17-inch monitor is larger than my TV set, but then I've never been a TV person -- I've considered simply getting rid of my television altogether. Besides, the only reason people need big televisions is that the refresh rate of TVs is so terrible that sitting too close to one gives headaches. With a good monitor, I can sit for an entire day a foot and a half away from my monitor with no problems. So, why wouldn't I want to watch a movie on such a high-quality screen?
...Sun's pre-X windowing environment. Although pretty hard to find in its original form, Xview is pretty much a straight port on top of X11 -- even the API calls are very Sunview-ish
Yes! When I saw this review I thought immediately of my 1993 Hugo CD-ROM. It is really too bad that they never made versions of it for other years.
Just print out a picture every fraction of a second, and you can have a nice flip-book of your favorite show!
Considering that both the Napster server and clients have GPL clones, it is hard to see how the RIAA can really have any real effect on MP3 trading through their actions against Napster. Too late, RIAA -- the cat is already out of the bag.
"For Dummies" is a stupid series of books with a stupid title, IMO, but obviously successful for IDG. You can't tell me that people that made up a site or whatever entired "blah blah for Dummies" weren't inspired to do so by IDG's books.
Sure I can. When I was an undergrad in the late '80s (before IDG) we used to refer to the courses given by department X for non-majors as X for dummies. (Statistics for Dummies, Physics for Dummies, etc.) You can't tell me that IDG wasn't inspired to call their books "for dummies" by exactly this usage.
I thought the whole reason why products have names like Coca-Cola or Kleenex is that by creating a nonsense word, the word isn't one in common use and so can only refer to the product in question. But "for dummies" hardly originated in 1991. In fact, if the phrase hadn't already been entrenched it would make no sense for IDG to use it in their titles. It's a pity that nobody has dared IDG to sue them.
Don't these people ever match movies? You create some sort of icky technological horrors like robotic snakes and deploy them in an isolated location like a space station or martian colony and they will certainly go berserk, killing all but the most charismatic male and his love interest. These two characters of course defeat the evil technology just in time to catch the last spaceship back to earth.
I'm quite familar with both systems and frankly, there is no real reason to prefer one over the other. Metric fans like to point out the ease of metric unit conversion, but first of all, unit conversion is rarely a significant percentage of the real work involved in any calculation, and secondly, people in metric countries seem to love to create new unit names which defeat the whole metric principle. For example, why have liters? Why have metric tons? Both these units can be expressed in terms of basic units, but people don't do this in practice.
The objection to metric seems to arise soley from a portion of the group of people raised from childhood primarily on imperial or without metric altogether.
Likewise, the objection to imperial units seems to arise soley from a portion of the group of people raised from childhood primarily on metric units or without imperial units altogether...
Yes, in theory /. isn't a Linux site. But really, what would a non-Linux/BSD user find of interest here? Perhaps the science stories, but that's about it. So why do you read /.? I'm not attacking you -- I'm just genuinely curious.
The problem is, as RMS says, there are no scientific reasons to believe Open Source is a better business model. After all, Microsoft is far more profitable than Red Hat. Lacking such reasons, the only real reason to support Open Source is if it is congruent with one's own personal philosophy. I happen to support it myself, but I admit my feelings are merely ethical in nature. I suspect you and ESR are really idealists at heart but, like Bogart's Rick in Casablanca feel that you have justify your feelings economically
Well, I recently (two weeks ago) attended a lecture by Jonathan Schaeffer, the main author of Chinook, (the "Deep Blue" of checkers) and he claimed that checkers is of yet unsolved, and I'd think he'd know.
Heck, people haven't even solved checkers yet, despite a popular misconception to the contrary that an early 60's program played "perfect checkers" (it didn't, it was merely the first checkers program that was any good at all)
Click here for a discussion of the practical problems involved in solving the chess or checkers search tree.