I agree with your criticism of the idea, but from what I've seen in the past couple of decades, the fact that it is an abysmally stupid idea with no pros and many cons makes me think it will catch on like wildfire.
Right? Why? Does not the people with the money have a right to decide what to fund?
They certainly have a right to decide, though whether they like it or not their own (non-scientific) decisions decrease the scientific value of whatever they end up funding.
Maybe we should go back to the Gallileien or Newtonian model of funding science: either be well-off, or find a truly disinterested (and uninterested) patron.
Do you have a remedy that ensures that loafers and sponges do not flourish? That is the problem with the more eutopian ideas that don't involve direct reward.
Why is that such a "problem"? Technology has greatly decreased the number of man-hours required to feed and house and clothe the human population. If that means some people get to loaf and sponge, that's a good thing. I'd rather just work with other people who are interested in doing things, and not have to put up with the Wally's of the world.
We don't *need* to accomplish about 90% of what we accomplish. And frankly if anything there aren't enough sponges and loafers in the world today.
This is stupid because nobody makes money for content directly off consumer in any broadcast medium. Why does the sudden addition of the Internet change this in people's minds? I pay $0 directly to the networks for their broadcast content. I pay $0 directly to the cable companies for their cable content (though the cable provider does filter some of my money back to the stations -- it's still not me paying the station; if it was, I could order just the channels I want). The only time a content provider gets money directly from me is Pay Per View, which seems limited to good boxing matches and pr0n.
The same idiocy of assuming the Net must play by different rules goes into advertising decisions too: execs get 0 click-through from TV ads, but they freak out when they don't get X% click through from Net ads that they are paying significantly less for. Consider yourself lucky for being able to shove your brand into my face for 15 seconds and then move on, dude.
I remember back before '94 when the DC, Guam, VI, and PR delegates could vote in the committee of the whole, which is to say, in Congress, and have the votes count. Then they added the rule you mentioned. Then Gingrich still wasn't satisfied and said if the vote was "close enough that Members might be confused as to the outcome", they could not vote. I think currently they just can't vote period.
Hey, you'll get no argument from me that our agro-industrial complex is messed up. We farm the wrong crops the wrong way. We create extremely dangerous monocultures and wipe out indigenous crops and economies -- not to mention the fact that we release untested artificial and modified genes into the wild and into our bodies.
I buy organic. That's a luxury I can afford because I'm in the top-middle tier of the top-tier country in the world. But that seems backwards to me because several studies have shown it's greatly more efficient (from a calories-in vs. calories-out standpoint) to farm organic crops than to run an industrial farm. The difference is that organic crops do not have as long a shelf life or as predictable a crop return, so they make for bad business. If the peak notion is right, though, we may not have much of a choice other than doing smaller-scale, local farms for food production. Which, incidentally, is why I belong to a CSA -- even though I live in a city, I have to take some responsibility for my food production too.
It may well be a much different world in a few decades from an agriculture perspective: for the most part only fruits and vegetables that are in season locally, free range ruminants and fowl, and food preservation by canning, drying, smoking, etc. rather than preservatives, pasteurization and other energy-intensive means. Or, famine and huge population drop off. Either way.
It just means extracting and refining oil are better seen economically as energy conversions.
Not currently; we receive more calories from oil than we put in to get them (right now).
The amount of energy that goes into ANY electric power plant is greater than the amount of power it produces.
And this is possible precisely because we get more energy from fossil fuels than we expend extracting them. Once that stops being the case, we won't be able to convert fossil fuels into electricity since we won't be able to extract the fossil fuels in the first place.
Ultimately, every energy source we have gets its energy from the Sun. Fossil fuels are stored bioenergy, which is stored solar energy. But once we no longer get a positive EROI from fossil fuels, all our energy will ultimately have to come from so-called renewables that do a much faster sun-to-electricity conversion, like biodiesel (which takes 1 growing season), or wind and solar which are more or less instantaneous.
The problems will start if we end up needing more energy for our activities than the Sun provides at a given time, since we're rapidly using up our exploitable energy stores. I'm curious to see what will happen -- and don't forget that a lot of solar energy has to go to making things like food and oxygen to keep us alive.
Want other window manager nice-ities? Nearly anything you want for X is also available in Windows, for free, via 3rd party programs. All it takes is some Google searches.
I do know that, and I've tried some of them, but I just want my computer to work; I don't want to spend time downloading 3rd party applications and tweaking their configurations to get what I get straight out of the box from any Linux distribution. Maybe for elite power users who are used to messing with Windows configurations and registry keys that's an option, but not for Joe Sixpack.
Microsoft might not be legally responsible for anything, but they still make a good scapegoat.
Huh? I can use Microsoft as a scapegoat, but I can't use RedHat or the Debian team or Linus or Theo as a scapegoat? Or for that matter, Sun, IBM, or Novell? Why not?
If that is what exempts people and businesses for F/OSS usage, then F/OSS is will be relegated to the arrogant hobbyist and Bill G, Ellison,
What is "that" referring to in your sentence? I pointed out that the output of a GPL'd program is not a derivative work. So, yes, that is what allows you to create a proprietary application with GCC, for example. How that makes Bill Gates richer in your mind is beyond me.
BTW, packages DO NOT ALWAY WORK
No, but the packages for tested, stable software you should be using in an enterprise do.
Seriously. What is all this crap? I'm still thrown by the word "enterprise"; it seems to mean either "company with more than one building" or "company whose officers are stupid enough to pay too much for software and consultants".
And what's up with "partners"? Why does everybody want "partners" these days? Why not pay companies to provide you goods and services (or, God forbid, hire people to do that internally) and get paid for providing other companies and people goods and services?
ne is that when I'm installing F/OSS software, almost always, there's bunch of dependencies that I don't know about when I first install it. Yes, yes, there's the 'README' that has some of the dependencies. But it almost never mentions the dependencies of the dependencies.
Do you live in a strange world without package management? apt? yum? portage? ports? I know software on Windows has horrible issues with library versioning and sharing, but that's no excuse to drag that same problem into a real operating system.
A lot of F/OSS projects are started and never quite finished or they're not suported any longer - so, it'll be up to the users/consumers to maintain it.
A lot of proprietary projects are started and never quite finished or they're not supported any longer. In this case the users/customers don't even have the option of paying someone else to maintain it. It's just gone. My last company had about 3500 POP users on an old POP server called Post.Office. It hasn't been supported since 2000. When the company that made it went under and support disappeared, they couldn't even find somebody who could migrate the user base to another server. If the POP server had been open source, they could have sunk in a few grand to get a contractor to do the migration and recouped the cost pretty quickly.
The GNU license. If I ask, let's say, if I compile some proprietary code with gcc, does that mean my code is now under GNU? I'll get basically two different answers: yes or no
Ummm... no you don't. Are you trolling or just stupid? The GPL is quite clear that the output of a program is not a derivative work and so need not be distributed under the terms of the GPL.
At the very least, there's going to legal costs associated with settling that. If I end up going with this start up, I will have to get legal advice
Check out the MS Office EULA some time. The license forbids you from using Office to create materials critical of Microsoft (no, I'm not kidding). Did your lawyer check that out? Why not? If you can skip on that legal question, why would you hire a lawyer to find out what's explicitly said in the GPL, that the output of a program is not a derivative work?
No they're not. They may think they are, but they're wrong. If a Microsoft application fails and destroys millions of dollars of data for you, and you sue Microsoft, you will at most be able to get back the price you paid for the application. Microsoft does not warrant or guarantee their software; no commodity software maker does.
That's better-stated than my comment below. I have a window manager to let me manage windows. I don't need an application to bring its own window manager with it. I mean, I can scream "give me mechanism not policy" until my face turns red but until application designers "get it", I'm going to be stuck having to deal with the fact that Windows has a crappy window manager which forces application developers to bring their own window management capabilities.
Seriously, is there anybody who has spent some time on X11 with a decent window manager who thinks that the Windows window manager is more useable? I'd be really interested to hear some ideas. I've tried OS X's desktop too, it's better than Windows and can almost fake virtual desktops with Expose (and you can set up virtual desktops with a third party utility anyways). But honestly I find Windows' desktop almost unusable after several years of using X11. MDIs can make up for some of those deficiencies in Windows, but on a decent window manager they are close to intolerable.
I'm sure this is a religious issue, but I've not actually seen the arguments against MDIs.
Oh, that's simple: MDI programs cover up real estate needlessly. If I'm editing a couple of photos in an SDI program like the GIMP, I want the screen area for those photos and whatever tool windows I'm using and nothing else taken up by my graphics manipulation program. Why? Several reasons:
If I'm editing graphics, I'm usually doing it by according to some list of changes someone gave me, which might be in an email or a text file of some sort. If my graphics program is an SDI, I can simply position the viewer for that change list somewhere that's not covered by the image or the tool window. If it's an MDI, I have to resize the whole application, which is a pain in the first place, and I suddenly have to fit all of the app's windows into a single rectangle. If an MDI main window could be reshaped into an arbitrary polygon, it would be at least a little more usable to me.
I'm on Windowmaker, a NeXT-ish environment, which means I tend to navigate by a windowlist I can make pop up with a center-click when my cursor is on a desktop. This means I want free spaces of desktop scattered about around all my windows. That takes manually resizing and placing MDI applications; SDI applications just do it.
Similarly, when I use a windowlist to navigate, I like to be able to jump to a given document open by a given application. If I'm using an MDI, I have to first jump to the application and then activate the appropriate window. This is counterintuitive to me, and a waste of time and motion.
Also similarly (Joel on Software even mentioned this one), if I click on a window I want that to raise it. On that click. I don't want it to raise the "magic window" that contains all the windows owned by that application; I have a docked icon to do that. if an application has two documents open, and it does not have focus, and I click on the document that is behind the other one, I want the document I clicked on to be raised, not having both documents come up with the one I clicked behind the one that was in front of it.
So, to summarize, an SDI let's me position documents anywhere, not just in a resizeable rectangle. An SDI lets me leave blank desktop around my windows. An SDI lets me navigate to arbitrary open documents in multiple ways. When an MDI can do that, I'd like them more.
If I had to generalize, I would say that SDIs are better for people with "generalist" jobs like mine that involve frequent context switches. MDIs might be better for specialists who can open a single application and work in it most of the day.
Yes, yes, I know; its not economic to refine it. Only when the price is under $30/barrel. What are we at now? $55? $60?
Eh... money isn't the only issue. You also have a basic problem of thermodynamics. It takes X calories to extract and refine gasoline that will release Y calories when burned. As extraction gets harder, X grows. Once X == Y, an oil field becomes an energy sink, not an energy source, even if there are centuries worth of oil left in it.
I'm much more interested in how you came up with a food crisis. North and South America already produce way more food than is necessary
For that matter, Africa also produces more food than its population could consume but has large swathes of famine. Why? Because the hunger problem is now about how much food there is, but where it is and who has it. It's a question of (mis)distribution, not production.
So, if we suddenly couldn't afford to gas up our trucks, all the food being made in Kansas and Iowa couldn't get to Baltimore and Chicago anymore. And, after about two days of that, the Superdome during Katrina would look like a playground scuffle.
But we're talking about a desktop environment here: an application suite whose purpose is to give me an interface with the computer and system software that is easy to use and attractive.
That, incidentally, is why I use windowmaker. It is stable, looks good, and throws in GNUStep as a bonus.
Ah yes, that old highschool mathematical dilemma; is dividing zero by zero infinite or zero?
*shrug* I don't know if it's a dilemma. Theoretically, X/0 is specifically undefined, so it is neither zero nor infinite (except in the sense that "infinite" encompasses "undefined"). Practically, X / 0 for nonzero X behaves in many ways like aleph-nought (or "infinity" in the casual sense), while 0 / 0 is the entire subject of the differential calculus (and in many cases can be expressed as a limit of the quotient of the two quantities that are approaching zero).
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your criticism of the idea, but from what I've seen in the past couple of decades, the fact that it is an abysmally stupid idea with no pros and many cons makes me think it will catch on like wildfire.
They certainly have a right to decide, though whether they like it or not their own (non-scientific) decisions decrease the scientific value of whatever they end up funding.
Maybe we should go back to the Gallileien or Newtonian model of funding science: either be well-off, or find a truly disinterested (and uninterested) patron.
Why is that such a "problem"? Technology has greatly decreased the number of man-hours required to feed and house and clothe the human population. If that means some people get to loaf and sponge, that's a good thing. I'd rather just work with other people who are interested in doing things, and not have to put up with the Wally's of the world.
We don't *need* to accomplish about 90% of what we accomplish. And frankly if anything there aren't enough sponges and loafers in the world today.
This is stupid because nobody makes money for content directly off consumer in any broadcast medium. Why does the sudden addition of the Internet change this in people's minds? I pay $0 directly to the networks for their broadcast content. I pay $0 directly to the cable companies for their cable content (though the cable provider does filter some of my money back to the stations -- it's still not me paying the station; if it was, I could order just the channels I want). The only time a content provider gets money directly from me is Pay Per View, which seems limited to good boxing matches and pr0n.
The same idiocy of assuming the Net must play by different rules goes into advertising decisions too: execs get 0 click-through from TV ads, but they freak out when they don't get X% click through from Net ads that they are paying significantly less for. Consider yourself lucky for being able to shove your brand into my face for 15 seconds and then move on, dude.
I remember back before '94 when the DC, Guam, VI, and PR delegates could vote in the committee of the whole, which is to say, in Congress, and have the votes count. Then they added the rule you mentioned. Then Gingrich still wasn't satisfied and said if the vote was "close enough that Members might be confused as to the outcome", they could not vote. I think currently they just can't vote period.
Well, we have Norton, she just can't vote... Feel like throwing some tea in the Potomac this weekend?
Maryland comptroller wants cute intern tail
Hey, you'll get no argument from me that our agro-industrial complex is messed up. We farm the wrong crops the wrong way. We create extremely dangerous monocultures and wipe out indigenous crops and economies -- not to mention the fact that we release untested artificial and modified genes into the wild and into our bodies.
I buy organic. That's a luxury I can afford because I'm in the top-middle tier of the top-tier country in the world. But that seems backwards to me because several studies have shown it's greatly more efficient (from a calories-in vs. calories-out standpoint) to farm organic crops than to run an industrial farm. The difference is that organic crops do not have as long a shelf life or as predictable a crop return, so they make for bad business. If the peak notion is right, though, we may not have much of a choice other than doing smaller-scale, local farms for food production. Which, incidentally, is why I belong to a CSA -- even though I live in a city, I have to take some responsibility for my food production too.
It may well be a much different world in a few decades from an agriculture perspective: for the most part only fruits and vegetables that are in season locally, free range ruminants and fowl, and food preservation by canning, drying, smoking, etc. rather than preservatives, pasteurization and other energy-intensive means. Or, famine and huge population drop off. Either way.
Not currently; we receive more calories from oil than we put in to get them (right now).
And this is possible precisely because we get more energy from fossil fuels than we expend extracting them. Once that stops being the case, we won't be able to convert fossil fuels into electricity since we won't be able to extract the fossil fuels in the first place.
Ultimately, every energy source we have gets its energy from the Sun. Fossil fuels are stored bioenergy, which is stored solar energy. But once we no longer get a positive EROI from fossil fuels, all our energy will ultimately have to come from so-called renewables that do a much faster sun-to-electricity conversion, like biodiesel (which takes 1 growing season), or wind and solar which are more or less instantaneous.
The problems will start if we end up needing more energy for our activities than the Sun provides at a given time, since we're rapidly using up our exploitable energy stores. I'm curious to see what will happen -- and don't forget that a lot of solar energy has to go to making things like food and oxygen to keep us alive.
I do know that, and I've tried some of them, but I just want my computer to work; I don't want to spend time downloading 3rd party applications and tweaking their configurations to get what I get straight out of the box from any Linux distribution. Maybe for elite power users who are used to messing with Windows configurations and registry keys that's an option, but not for Joe Sixpack.
And what is a "Sales Engineer"?
Huh? I can use Microsoft as a scapegoat, but I can't use RedHat or the Debian team or Linus or Theo as a scapegoat? Or for that matter, Sun, IBM, or Novell? Why not?
What is "that" referring to in your sentence? I pointed out that the output of a GPL'd program is not a derivative work. So, yes, that is what allows you to create a proprietary application with GCC, for example. How that makes Bill Gates richer in your mind is beyond me.
No, but the packages for tested, stable software you should be using in an enterprise do.
Seriously. What is all this crap? I'm still thrown by the word "enterprise"; it seems to mean either "company with more than one building" or "company whose officers are stupid enough to pay too much for software and consultants".
And what's up with "partners"? Why does everybody want "partners" these days? Why not pay companies to provide you goods and services (or, God forbid, hire people to do that internally) and get paid for providing other companies and people goods and services?
What exactly distinguishes an "enterprise" from a "business"?
Do you live in a strange world without package management? apt? yum? portage? ports? I know software on Windows has horrible issues with library versioning and sharing, but that's no excuse to drag that same problem into a real operating system.
A lot of proprietary projects are started and never quite finished or they're not supported any longer. In this case the users/customers don't even have the option of paying someone else to maintain it. It's just gone. My last company had about 3500 POP users on an old POP server called Post.Office. It hasn't been supported since 2000. When the company that made it went under and support disappeared, they couldn't even find somebody who could migrate the user base to another server. If the POP server had been open source, they could have sunk in a few grand to get a contractor to do the migration and recouped the cost pretty quickly.
Ummm... no you don't. Are you trolling or just stupid? The GPL is quite clear that the output of a program is not a derivative work and so need not be distributed under the terms of the GPL.
Check out the MS Office EULA some time. The license forbids you from using Office to create materials critical of Microsoft (no, I'm not kidding). Did your lawyer check that out? Why not? If you can skip on that legal question, why would you hire a lawyer to find out what's explicitly said in the GPL, that the output of a program is not a derivative work?
No they're not. They may think they are, but they're wrong. If a Microsoft application fails and destroys millions of dollars of data for you, and you sue Microsoft, you will at most be able to get back the price you paid for the application. Microsoft does not warrant or guarantee their software; no commodity software maker does.
That's better-stated than my comment below. I have a window manager to let me manage windows. I don't need an application to bring its own window manager with it. I mean, I can scream "give me mechanism not policy" until my face turns red but until application designers "get it", I'm going to be stuck having to deal with the fact that Windows has a crappy window manager which forces application developers to bring their own window management capabilities.
Seriously, is there anybody who has spent some time on X11 with a decent window manager who thinks that the Windows window manager is more useable? I'd be really interested to hear some ideas. I've tried OS X's desktop too, it's better than Windows and can almost fake virtual desktops with Expose (and you can set up virtual desktops with a third party utility anyways). But honestly I find Windows' desktop almost unusable after several years of using X11. MDIs can make up for some of those deficiencies in Windows, but on a decent window manager they are close to intolerable.
Oh, that's simple: MDI programs cover up real estate needlessly. If I'm editing a couple of photos in an SDI program like the GIMP, I want the screen area for those photos and whatever tool windows I'm using and nothing else taken up by my graphics manipulation program. Why? Several reasons:
So, to summarize, an SDI let's me position documents anywhere, not just in a resizeable rectangle. An SDI lets me leave blank desktop around my windows. An SDI lets me navigate to arbitrary open documents in multiple ways. When an MDI can do that, I'd like them more.
If I had to generalize, I would say that SDIs are better for people with "generalist" jobs like mine that involve frequent context switches. MDIs might be better for specialists who can open a single application and work in it most of the day.
Eh... money isn't the only issue. You also have a basic problem of thermodynamics. It takes X calories to extract and refine gasoline that will release Y calories when burned. As extraction gets harder, X grows. Once X == Y, an oil field becomes an energy sink, not an energy source, even if there are centuries worth of oil left in it.
For that matter, Africa also produces more food than its population could consume but has large swathes of famine. Why? Because the hunger problem is now about how much food there is, but where it is and who has it. It's a question of (mis)distribution, not production.
So, if we suddenly couldn't afford to gas up our trucks, all the food being made in Kansas and Iowa couldn't get to Baltimore and Chicago anymore. And, after about two days of that, the Superdome during Katrina would look like a playground scuffle.
But we're talking about a desktop environment here: an application suite whose purpose is to give me an interface with the computer and system software that is easy to use and attractive.
That, incidentally, is why I use windowmaker. It is stable, looks good, and throws in GNUStep as a bonus.
*shrug* I don't know if it's a dilemma. Theoretically, X/0 is specifically undefined, so it is neither zero nor infinite (except in the sense that "infinite" encompasses "undefined"). Practically, X / 0 for nonzero X behaves in many ways like aleph-nought (or "infinity" in the casual sense), while 0 / 0 is the entire subject of the differential calculus (and in many cases can be expressed as a limit of the quotient of the two quantities that are approaching zero).
Maybe not, but I bet outguess can, along with a million other stego tools.
Error: division by zero signalled