"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.
"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
These words were spoken by Martin Luther King Jr in August of 1963. His dream has been largely ignored and misunderstood.
When a company hires a black man in preference to a more qualified white man because they must meet their diversity quota, they are being forced to judge men based on the color of their skin, and not the content of their character.
When a judge varies the harshness of a sentence according to the race of the person murdered, he becomes a minister of arbitrariness, not justice. He effectively places the worth of one race above the worth of another race.
What was that? I heard someone further up complain that such inequality exists already; that in the courts, murdered cops are already valued more than murdered cab drivers; that we are "looking for equality in a system where none exists." It therefore makes sense to this person that we legislate more of this nonsense in the name of fairness.
Sir, Martin Luther King Jr looked for equality in a system where none existed. I do too.
So-called "Hate crime" legislation would not be merely meaningless. It would be unjustice.
If I wrote a book, and marked it as "universal free distribution", could someone make a copy it, then copyright their copy, and possibly sue me for infringment?
To me, "universal free distribution" would seem like as loose a GPL as you can get. Basically, you are setting absolutely no limits on it's distribution.
Actually, it's so loose it can't even be likened to the GPL. It's in the public domain, which means anyone can do any kind of derivitave work from it and copyright the results if they care to.
This is a good article, but Linux is not ready for use as a desktop OS.
This is not flamebait! I would not think twice before choosing Linux as a server, but until the UI design improves I do not think it is viable for desktop usage. Please read the whole post.
Speed: X/Linux is slower on my machine for everything I do than Windows. I though Windows was a bit slow, now it seems downright perky! I can't even have start a second application (by which I mean even dinky KDE games) without having my hard disk grind forever. Often my screen powers down before the second program finishes loading. And I'm running 32mb ram, 166mhz cpu, 1024x768 16bpp, and KDE with no themes or wallpaper whatsoever. Why can't Linux GUIs be as fast as Windows? Sure, the thing is stable, but it is hard to get anything done.
Graphical Interface Design: Linux installation plunked about 87 applications into my KDE menus. Most of these are fluff. Nothing in the GUI tells me how to configure my sound card. (Yes, I did find sndconfig eventually.) Keep the console tools, but give me a graphical alternative and put it somewhere where it's visible.
Financial software. CAD. Lotus Notes client. Decent activeX counterpart to aid software design. Decent Browser. None of these are here yet; I'm not saying they're not under construction, but these are reasons why Linux does not yet make sense for the desktop. My company would not even think of switching to Linux until it had a CAD that included LISP routines, xrefs, multiple line weights, etc. And that kind of CAD looks like its a long way away.
Software installation: just try upgrading the GNOME that came with your distribution. You have to download thirty-umpteen packages. Will it work with your distribution? Who knows!
I am greatly encouraged by the progress I keep hearing about (especially Mozilla), and I think Linux is the coolest thing since the saltine cracker, but it has a ways to go. Linux for the home desktop is at the point now where Linux for the server was five years ago. My advice is, give it a couple of years to get financial software, CAD, a good browser, Notes client, CORBA counterpart to ActiveX (for real), and UI standards, and then give it a shot.
This is funny. I work as a programmer at a large architecture/engineering/construction firm in Minneapolis. We use Windows at work, but a couple of us have been experimenting with Linux at home. Just yesterday someone pointed me to http://www.linuxcad.com, a complete replacement for AutoCAD with support for just about everything. It costs $99 a license, which is phenomenal pricing compared with AutoDesk. Free software people may buck at the price, but at a company like mine, this would be *very* reasonable. They also have a very tempting corporate licensing program going on.
I haven't actually tried the software, but if the package actually meets all the claims, it is definitely worth checking out. One thing I'm not sure of is whether it supports AutoCAD's LISP extensibility features. Our company has done a lot of customization for AutoCAD using LISP, and I don't think I could realistically recommend it to our folks if it meant we had to rewrite all our menus and LISP routines.
I was referring not to Sun's 'open source' software, but to proprietary, closed source software solutions that are based on Sun's SCSL'ed code. By my original statement I meant that corporate IT will begin to see the dangers of such closed source solutions and pass them by in favor of open source products, which may be free or not (although free is better in my opinion).
Bill Joy makes his point that the SCSL protects 'innovation' by allowing you to make modifications/enhancements and distribute them closed source (as long as you pay the royalty fee and pass the compatibility test). I think allowing completely closed source enhancements is a backward step, however. If nothing else, your paying customers should be allowed to use the source code for their own support purposes, a la classic UNIX style.
The exchange of ideas in that article is rather muddy because of the misperception that GPL can and should cater to the classic corporation as well as the volunteer hacker.
The GPL suits me just fine because I do programming for fun (as well as at work), and I have no notions of profiting financially from my code. If someone builds on my product and sells it for $50 a pop, that is fine with me as long as they comply with the license.
However, there are companies out there dipping their toes in the water that most of us volunteers are already swimming in. Companies who (suprise!) do not believe in a business model like Red Hat's; they do not want someone to be able to come along and sell their $80 box under a different name for the cost of the CD. Using this new license they can enhance an SCSL'ed product and sell it w/o source and actually make a buck. This license is not aimed at individuals, it is for corporations and commercial use.
That does not mean that the SCSL approach is not fundamentally flawed; I believe it probably is. (even the name using foghorn words like 'community' puts me off) It still gives Sun the last word on enhancements and fixes, and it also looks like you still have to pay royalties for commercial use. If Linux's success thus far is any indication, true open source will gradually win out over any closed source solutiuon in the corporate IT world as it has already for individual hackers.
Also remember, just because a company is using SCSL does not mean that their output must be proprietary; they may release the source of their product (under SCSL of course) or they may not.
It is not a question of the Linux crowd 'rejecting' SCSL; it is a matter of both parties using the license best suited to them.
You make an excellent point. It is high time these people started getting more informed counsel.
A better way, if they must have something, might be to take into consideration the revenues of a site that runs an endorsement, especially advertising revenues. The true value of an endorsement is bound up with who is doing the endorsing and how big their audience is, not how much the equipment cost (what if they used the same rule for radio advertisements!?!). There is a direct relationship between the size of a site's audience and their [advertising] revenues. Thus, the value of the "donation" should be assesed by how much the site would charge a third party for an endorsement of similiar size/content.
If an endorsement is placed on Joe Hackestoop's Personal Home Page, it can and should be ignored by the government, regardless of what hardware he is running. However, if amazon.com or E*Trade placed endorsements for candidates on their sites, I should think those endorsements would be very valuable to their candidates and should be accounted for. The problem is not that the FEC wants to get a handle on this somehow, but the way they are doing it.
The flip side of this is that most commercial sites would never run endorsements on their pages for fear of alienating customers.
(Disclaimer: I like linux. I am trying to get it to work on my home box. This is not flame-bait, just devil's advocate material.)
Just lurking in all the stories about linux vs NT security challenges, and it seems like most slashdotters are incredibly one-sided in their views, driven more by a sense of rebellion than anything else.
When somebody challenges people to break into their linux box, somebody eventually does, and all kinds of excuses are offered.
When somebody challenges people to break into their NT box, the linux sneetches with stars upon thars scoff, "Us? Condescend to help Microsoft by breaking into their pitiful OS? The very idea!"
If linux is so secure and Windows anything is not:
Why do you refuse to prove your point by actually cracking an NT box in one of these challenges? On a related note, I have heard as an excuse for Linux in response to the ZDnet trial, "A system is only as good as its administrator." This seems true, but if you really believed it, (A) you would know that you would not be helping MS by cracking NT, you would be helping only the particular person administrating that box, and (B) you would be proving your as-yet undemonstrated point that NT is at least as insecure as Linux.
Why do I read, in every mailing list and newsgroup, posts from Linux people saying "HELP! Someone cracked my box! What do I DO??" These would seem to back up my first point.
Why is network security so complicated in Linux as compared to Windows? My windows computer is connected 24x7 via aDSL, all I have to do is disable file/print sharing; one check box. If I enable sharing, I just have to use common sense and set a password. If you wanted Linux to be more secure, you could try making it easier batten down the hatches.
If linux advocates want any credibility, they will have to stop giving knee-jerk, "heads-I-win tails-you-lose" excuses and begin to demonstrate their claims.
I'm no computer newbie, but I am what you'd call a Linux newbie. I bought a Mandrake 6 GPL cd a week ago, and after running the installer 117 times on a computer with all supported hardware and oodles of disk space, I must say that it is the stupidest installer I've seen yet. All my hardware is detected, fine, but for crying out loud why does it deceive you into thinking you'll be running X Windows and then dump you at the command prompt? I have no problem using a command line, but figuring out how to fix things the installer should have done right in the first place is a pain and a crying shame.
The point of all this is...I can only hope now that other distros will get the hint on useability. If other users' experiences with even a supposedly user-friendly install program like Mandrake are anything like mine, then Linux is not ready for prime time any more than "Three's Company".
The solution here is not to allow people to copyright databases. The solution is for people compiling data to make their product copyrightable by adding expert information or research to their product; this would also give those who use it more information. Sure you can go out and hunt the data down and do the research yourself, but why not get the data prepackaged with hints, expert advice, etc.?
On a related note, I fail to see how scientest writing "the world's largest book on snake poison antedotes" would be unable to copyright it unless the merely listed the various poisons with their antedotes in a two-column table. Any real book containing research, opinions and experiences by the author is copyrightable, whether or not it also contains data that is publicly available.
Joel Dueck
Re:That's like copywriting the format of a text fi
on
Who Owns The Database?
·
· Score: 1
The issue is not the database format itself that is the issue, it is the data, regardless of what format it is stored in. You should read the article.
All "who was first" semantics aside, it then appears that nostalgia is the overriding factor here. OS/2 does not seem to have any technical advantage or meaningful future.
I mentioned closed-source only to point out that particular, clear advantage of Linux over OS/2. I would also imagine that OS/2's TCO is also higher than Linux' because of licensing costs, as well as the fact that at least as much user training is req'd.
OS/2 was the first 32bit, multi-tasking, OS out there
Bother. I am a Windows developer who has just seen the light, and I just forked over $12 for a mail-order CD set of Mandrake 6.0. I hope upgrading's not too big of a deal - but probably couldn't be harder than making room for it in the first place. I was pretty convinced of Mandrake's superiority when I first started looking around, though.
I may be missing something obvious here, but why for crying out loud can't people use PGP (or even the new GPG)? They are available free worldwide without any export restrictions (see PGPi.com and gnupg.org) and are many times stronger than standard 128-bit stuff. Yes, I know a commercial license is required for PGP, but the mere fact that there is no export hassle should make it a no-brainer.
I think that the Internet will transform politics. In what way exactly is hard to say, but the 'net allows people to communicate and interact in a broad basis that has never before been available. This interaction leads to new ideas and less known ideas surfacing.
That's the way it works in theory, but in fact the Internet will not transform politics, but rather become a mere extension of the political arena for both citizens and politicians.
On the citizen side, the Internet would be chiefly a tool for discussion and debate. This will not bring about a revolution in politics if existing examples of net-based discussion count for anything. People tend to use the Internet more to broadcast their own opinions and experience rather than for any serious exchange of ideas.
The fact is that most people who are old enough to vote and actually do so have already decided what their basic political philosophy is and their minds will not be changed by discussion or debate. Have you ever known a person to, in the midst of a storm of rhetoric, suddenly see what you're saying and agree with you? Very few (none that I know of) have switched parties (political or otherwise) as a result of open-ended discussion.
On the politician's side, the Internet becomes merely another media for advertising, like television and radio. Granted, the Internet does allow them to communicate more actual information than a thirty second commercial, but again, nobody's mind is going to be changed even by hard, undecorated facts they see on the site of a politician they dislike. Also, any information published on a politician's site is likely to be presented with such a partisan slant that everyone will be taking it with a grain of salt.
That leaves independent analysis and the media, which will not cause any more ripples in the pond through the Internet than they do already. There is nothing magic about pixels that makes a news report or a study appear any more objective and credible than it does on your local newspaper.
Remember, the underlying principle here is that people will interpret information in a way that fits a political model they have already accepted. This is true on the Internet as much as it is anywhere else.
Think about it: why won't newspapers run ads for these movies? Why won't theatres show them? Because of public stigma. A newspaper would suffer huge backlash if it started running NC-17 ads. Theatres would likely be boycotted to a certain extent. This stigma against NC-17 ratings is not, and never was, the government's problem. It happened because many people in this country have some morality left. Most people not only don't want these kinds of products, but they also react against them, the same way Nike has been ostracized for its unfair labor practices, the same way a McDonald's would be shunned for selling Joe Camel toys. Is a movie theatre any less a family place than McDonald's? How about the Internet, then?
Many object to government trying to "legislate morality." Well, let's face it, laws are supposed to legislate morality! That's why we have laws! Things like don't steal, don't rape, don't kill; all of our laws legislate morality, the only question is whose.
There is nothing threatening about a rating system. Let's face it, all you're trying to protect if you're against it is your right to get pornography and gut-spattering violence off the Internet. A lot of guys are enslaved to their related addictions and get panicky when the rest of the world gets near their so-called constitutional rights.
Let ratings go on ahead. It won't hurt anyone except perverts and violence lovers.
A computer program would not store todays date as 9999, but as 090999, with two digits for month and day. There may be variations on this, but in almost no case would the computer look at today's date and see the value 9,999, and of course flat-ASCII should have no problems at all.
I think this one is a dud; I don't know how it slipped past the "experts".
I am not a biological expert, but I am a programmer, and one things annoys me about evolution simulations on a computer. They don't Mean Anything. Scientists/programmers have preconcieved notions about how the process works, and when they write a program to simulate the process, they build their possibly wrong concepts into the program's framework. "What? Nothing's evolving? Must be a logic error - better change the program a little."
By the time they get the results they expected, their "experiment" is, to a certain extent, meaningless, and I will explain why.
The very reason for doing an experiment, I thought, is to test your hypothesis in a real-world environment, or one that accurately represents the real world. In a physical experiment, you are running on a code base that is real and infinitely complex: the universe. In a computer simulation, you must start from scratch. If they were able to accurately simulate everything down to the atomic level, they could perhaps approach gettning something like a meaningful conclusion from their "experiments."
As it is, the scientist/programmer makes a million assumptions in order to run, not an experiment on actual organic matter, but basically a high-level simulation of a list of rules. The list of rules is essentially his hypothesis about evolution. If his rules don't work as expected when run on the computer, he changes them until they do. When they do run, his simulation has not proved anything, only given him an idea of how evolution might work in a ridiculously oversimplified universe.
All free-information ideals aside, a charity providing this service would be entirely within its rights to restrict access to certain content in order to protect itself from litigation, and to assure [potential] donors that their money will be put to good and edifying use. The main question is how. As others on this board have pointed out, none of these client-side filters are any good.
At home we use CharacterLink, which is an ISP that white-list filters content on the server, meaning initially all sites are verboten and only those which are checked out are allowed. 80% of the stuff I visit is already available, and when a site hasn't been reviewed, the server returns a page with a Submit button that allows you to add the site to the review queue. They usually get OK'd within six hours to the next business day.
You might think this terribly restricting but I haven't found it too terrible. They Ok'd Slashdot for crying out loud, and that right quickly. I can edit my home page, and use any kind of search engine, and they also block many advertisements, which is nice since I hate banner ads. The administrator for any account can set what attributes will prevent a page from being displayed. I think it would be an excellent solution for the proposed charity, financial issues aside (CharacterLink has good package deals for non-profit customers - something like 25 accounts for $150/mo).
"good ol Win 3.11" ??? Why in the whole stupid universe would you want to do a fool thing like that??? Nobody except nobody uses Windows 3.anything anymore! Like I said, you may as well port your stuff to TRS-80 Disk Basic 1.1 or store it on a paper tape for crying out loud. It's a non-issue! Nobody with a gram of grey matter is going to need to do such a thing. You people keep asking that dumb question. And it is a dumb question.
This is true. Portability is a non-issue for 99% of Windows developers; my Win32 program will run on any version of Windows 9x without any changes. In many cases it will also run on NT. Portability is a must in the *nix world where there really is fragmentation between operating systems, window toolkits, &c. Incidentally, I see a bunch of questions about porting a program from Win32 to Win16, which is just plain stupid; it almost never needs to be done. You might as well port it to MS-DOS. If you have a win32 program that absolutely needs to run under Windows 3.x, you install the Win32s library, which allows Win 3x to run most 32bit apps.
One of the reasons I have not started programming Linux yet is that I am loath to waste my precious time distributing two versions for just KDE and Gnome.
Doesn't work that way, at least not in this instance. The game ends with the first person to break into the box, so there's no opportunity for one-upmanship. The first person breaking in will probably put up a big ol' page with gaudy graphics splashed on it saying "I DID IT HOO HA HA" and it will be all over.
That much touted experiment, the Stanley Miller "Spark Chamber" experiment, which was conducted decades ago, used the starting materials, the wrong methods and got the wrong results.
Miller left out oxygen because he knew it would destroy the proteins he was trying to make. In fact, there have been oxidized rocks in the earth as deep as man has dug. There is no evidence that earth's early atmosphere had no oxygen, and of course life on earth requires it.
Miller used electrical sparks as a catalyst. Unfotunately, sparks do more tearing apart than putting together, so Miller had to draw the product out of the spark chamber in order to preserve them. This obviously would not have been possible during biogenesis without an informed intelligence.
The experiment produced an equal amount of long, short, left-handed and right-handed amino acids, whereas only short and lefthanded are used in living cells. The long and right-handed acids joining with the short and left-handed acids would prevent the coiling necessary for a useful protein.
Finally, the simplest life forms require many more than just one protein! The chances of these forty-plus proteins coming together to form a single solitary bacterium capable of reproducing (and which must now survive without oxygen, remember) are zilch for all practical purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
These words were spoken by Martin Luther King Jr in August of 1963. His dream has been largely ignored and misunderstood.
When a company hires a black man in preference to a more qualified white man because they must meet their diversity quota, they are being forced to judge men based on the color of their skin, and not the content of their character.
When a judge varies the harshness of a sentence according to the race of the person murdered, he becomes a minister of arbitrariness, not justice. He effectively places the worth of one race above the worth of another race.
What was that? I heard someone further up complain that such inequality exists already; that in the courts, murdered cops are already valued more than murdered cab drivers; that we are "looking for equality in a system where none exists." It therefore makes sense to this person that we legislate more of this nonsense in the name of fairness.
Sir, Martin Luther King Jr looked for equality in a system where none existed. I do too.
So-called "Hate crime" legislation would not be merely meaningless. It would be unjustice.
JD
To me, "universal free distribution" would seem like as loose a GPL as you can get. Basically, you are setting absolutely no limits on it's distribution.
Actually, it's so loose it can't even be likened to the GPL. It's in the public domain, which means anyone can do any kind of derivitave work from it and copyright the results if they care to.
This is not flamebait! I would not think twice before choosing Linux as a server, but until the UI design improves I do not think it is viable for desktop usage. Please read the whole post.
I am greatly encouraged by the progress I keep hearing about (especially Mozilla), and I think Linux is the coolest thing since the saltine cracker, but it has a ways to go. Linux for the home desktop is at the point now where Linux for the server was five years ago. My advice is, give it a couple of years to get financial software, CAD, a good browser, Notes client, CORBA counterpart to ActiveX (for real), and UI standards, and then give it a shot.
Can't wait!
I haven't actually tried the software, but if the package actually meets all the claims, it is definitely worth checking out. One thing I'm not sure of is whether it supports AutoCAD's LISP extensibility features. Our company has done a lot of customization for AutoCAD using LISP, and I don't think I could realistically recommend it to our folks if it meant we had to rewrite all our menus and LISP routines.
JD
I was referring not to Sun's 'open source' software, but to proprietary, closed source software solutions that are based on Sun's SCSL'ed code. By my original statement I meant that corporate IT will begin to see the dangers of such closed source solutions and pass them by in favor of open source products, which may be free or not (although free is better in my opinion).
Bill Joy makes his point that the SCSL protects 'innovation' by allowing you to make modifications/enhancements and distribute them closed source (as long as you pay the royalty fee and pass the compatibility test). I think allowing completely closed source enhancements is a backward step, however. If nothing else, your paying customers should be allowed to use the source code for their own support purposes, a la classic UNIX style.
The exchange of ideas in that article is rather muddy because of the misperception that GPL can and should cater to the classic corporation as well as the volunteer hacker.
The GPL suits me just fine because I do programming for fun (as well as at work), and I have no notions of profiting financially from my code. If someone builds on my product and sells it for $50 a pop, that is fine with me as long as they comply with the license.
However, there are companies out there dipping their toes in the water that most of us volunteers are already swimming in. Companies who (suprise!) do not believe in a business model like Red Hat's; they do not want someone to be able to come along and sell their $80 box under a different name for the cost of the CD. Using this new license they can enhance an SCSL'ed product and sell it w/o source and actually make a buck. This license is not aimed at individuals, it is for corporations and commercial use.
That does not mean that the SCSL approach is not fundamentally flawed; I believe it probably is. (even the name using foghorn words like 'community' puts me off) It still gives Sun the last word on enhancements and fixes, and it also looks like you still have to pay royalties for commercial use. If Linux's success thus far is any indication, true open source will gradually win out over any closed source solutiuon in the corporate IT world as it has already for individual hackers.
Also remember, just because a company is using SCSL does not mean that their output must be proprietary; they may release the source of their product (under SCSL of course) or they may not.
It is not a question of the Linux crowd 'rejecting' SCSL; it is a matter of both parties using the license best suited to them.
JAD
You make an excellent point. It is high time these people started getting more informed counsel.
A better way, if they must have something, might be to take into consideration the revenues of a site that runs an endorsement, especially advertising revenues. The true value of an endorsement is bound up with who is doing the endorsing and how big their audience is, not how much the equipment cost (what if they used the same rule for radio advertisements!?!). There is a direct relationship between the size of a site's audience and their [advertising] revenues. Thus, the value of the "donation" should be assesed by how much the site would charge a third party for an endorsement of similiar size/content.
If an endorsement is placed on Joe Hackestoop's Personal Home Page, it can and should be ignored by the government, regardless of what hardware he is running. However, if amazon.com or E*Trade placed endorsements for candidates on their sites, I should think those endorsements would be very valuable to their candidates and should be accounted for. The problem is not that the FEC wants to get a handle on this somehow, but the way they are doing it.
The flip side of this is that most commercial sites would never run endorsements on their pages for fear of alienating customers.
JAD
"Just think of how many credit card taking pages out there are in VBScript."
Very few. Most use java script if any, since Netscape doesn't do vbscript. Unless you mean ASP, which is all server-side anyway and very transient.
Just lurking in all the stories about linux vs NT security challenges, and it seems like most slashdotters are incredibly one-sided in their views, driven more by a sense of rebellion than anything else.
When somebody challenges people to break into their linux box, somebody eventually does, and all kinds of excuses are offered.
When somebody challenges people to break into their NT box, the linux sneetches with stars upon thars scoff, "Us? Condescend to help Microsoft by breaking into their pitiful OS? The very idea!"
If linux is so secure and Windows anything is not:
If linux advocates want any credibility, they will have to stop giving knee-jerk, "heads-I-win tails-you-lose" excuses and begin to demonstrate their claims.
Joel Dueck
I'm no computer newbie, but I am what you'd call a Linux newbie. I bought a Mandrake 6 GPL cd a week ago, and after running the installer 117 times on a computer with all supported hardware and oodles of disk space, I must say that it is the stupidest installer I've seen yet. All my hardware is detected, fine, but for crying out loud why does it deceive you into thinking you'll be running X Windows and then dump you at the command prompt? I have no problem using a command line, but figuring out how to fix things the installer should have done right in the first place is a pain and a crying shame.
The point of all this is...I can only hope now that other distros will get the hint on useability. If other users' experiences with even a supposedly user-friendly install program like Mandrake are anything like mine, then Linux is not ready for prime time any more than "Three's Company".
(?) [ech, venting frustration and all that jazz]
- J DUECK
On a related note, I fail to see how scientest writing "the world's largest book on snake poison antedotes" would be unable to copyright it unless the merely listed the various poisons with their antedotes in a two-column table. Any real book containing research, opinions and experiences by the author is copyrightable, whether or not it also contains data that is publicly available.
Joel Dueck
The issue is not the database format itself that is the issue, it is the data, regardless of what format it is stored in. You should read the article.
I mentioned closed-source only to point out that particular, clear advantage of Linux over OS/2. I would also imagine that OS/2's TCO is also higher than Linux' because of licensing costs, as well as the fact that at least as much user training is req'd.
The key word here is "was"
Bother. I am a Windows developer who has just seen the light, and I just forked over $12 for a mail-order CD set of Mandrake 6.0. I hope upgrading's not too big of a deal - but probably couldn't be harder than making room for it in the first place. I was pretty convinced of Mandrake's superiority when I first started looking around, though.
I may be missing something obvious here, but why for crying out loud can't people use PGP (or even the new GPG)? They are available free worldwide without any export restrictions (see PGPi.com and gnupg.org) and are many times stronger than standard 128-bit stuff. Yes, I know a commercial license is required for PGP, but the mere fact that there is no export hassle should make it a no-brainer.
That's the way it works in theory, but in fact the Internet will not transform politics, but rather become a mere extension of the political arena for both citizens and politicians.
On the citizen side, the Internet would be chiefly a tool for discussion and debate. This will not bring about a revolution in politics if existing examples of net-based discussion count for anything. People tend to use the Internet more to broadcast their own opinions and experience rather than for any serious exchange of ideas.
The fact is that most people who are old enough to vote and actually do so have already decided what their basic political philosophy is and their minds will not be changed by discussion or debate. Have you ever known a person to, in the midst of a storm of rhetoric, suddenly see what you're saying and agree with you? Very few (none that I know of) have switched parties (political or otherwise) as a result of open-ended discussion.
On the politician's side, the Internet becomes merely another media for advertising, like television and radio. Granted, the Internet does allow them to communicate more actual information than a thirty second commercial, but again, nobody's mind is going to be changed even by hard, undecorated facts they see on the site of a politician they dislike. Also, any information published on a politician's site is likely to be presented with such a partisan slant that everyone will be taking it with a grain of salt.
That leaves independent analysis and the media, which will not cause any more ripples in the pond through the Internet than they do already. There is nothing magic about pixels that makes a news report or a study appear any more objective and credible than it does on your local newspaper.
Remember, the underlying principle here is that people will interpret information in a way that fits a political model they have already accepted. This is true on the Internet as much as it is anywhere else.
I agree.
Think about it: why won't newspapers run ads for these movies? Why won't theatres show them? Because of public stigma. A newspaper would suffer huge backlash if it started running NC-17 ads. Theatres would likely be boycotted to a certain extent. This stigma against NC-17 ratings is not, and never was, the government's problem. It happened because many people in this country have some morality left. Most people not only don't want these kinds of products, but they also react against them, the same way Nike has been ostracized for its unfair labor practices, the same way a McDonald's would be shunned for selling Joe Camel toys. Is a movie theatre any less a family place than McDonald's? How about the Internet, then?
Many object to government trying to "legislate morality." Well, let's face it, laws are supposed to legislate morality! That's why we have laws! Things like don't steal, don't rape, don't kill; all of our laws legislate morality, the only question is whose.
There is nothing threatening about a rating system. Let's face it, all you're trying to protect if you're against it is your right to get pornography and gut-spattering violence off the Internet. A lot of guys are enslaved to their related addictions and get panicky when the rest of the world gets near their so-called constitutional rights.
Let ratings go on ahead. It won't hurt anyone except perverts and violence lovers.
I think this one is a dud; I don't know how it slipped past the "experts".
I am not a biological expert, but I am a programmer, and one things annoys me about evolution simulations on a computer. They don't Mean Anything. Scientists/programmers have preconcieved notions about how the process works, and when they write a program to simulate the process, they build their possibly wrong concepts into the program's framework. "What? Nothing's evolving? Must be a logic error - better change the program a little."
By the time they get the results they expected, their "experiment" is, to a certain extent, meaningless, and I will explain why.
The very reason for doing an experiment, I thought, is to test your hypothesis in a real-world environment, or one that accurately represents the real world. In a physical experiment, you are running on a code base that is real and infinitely complex: the universe. In a computer simulation, you must start from scratch. If they were able to accurately simulate everything down to the atomic level, they could perhaps approach gettning something like a meaningful conclusion from their "experiments."
As it is, the scientist/programmer makes a million assumptions in order to run, not an experiment on actual organic matter, but basically a high-level simulation of a list of rules. The list of rules is essentially his hypothesis about evolution. If his rules don't work as expected when run on the computer, he changes them until they do. When they do run, his simulation has not proved anything, only given him an idea of how evolution might work in a ridiculously oversimplified universe.
At home we use CharacterLink, which is an ISP that white-list filters content on the server, meaning initially all sites are verboten and only those which are checked out are allowed. 80% of the stuff I visit is already available, and when a site hasn't been reviewed, the server returns a page with a Submit button that allows you to add the site to the review queue. They usually get OK'd within six hours to the next business day.
You might think this terribly restricting but I haven't found it too terrible. They Ok'd Slashdot for crying out loud, and that right quickly. I can edit my home page, and use any kind of search engine, and they also block many advertisements, which is nice since I hate banner ads. The administrator for any account can set what attributes will prevent a page from being displayed. I think it would be an excellent solution for the proposed charity, financial issues aside (CharacterLink has good package deals for non-profit customers - something like 25 accounts for $150/mo).
"good ol Win 3.11" ??? Why in the whole stupid universe would you want to do a fool thing like that??? Nobody except nobody uses Windows 3.anything anymore! Like I said, you may as well port your stuff to TRS-80 Disk Basic 1.1 or store it on a paper tape for crying out loud. It's a non-issue! Nobody with a gram of grey matter is going to need to do such a thing. You people keep asking that dumb question. And it is a dumb question.
This is true. Portability is a non-issue for 99% of Windows developers; my Win32 program will run on any version of Windows 9x without any changes. In many cases it will also run on NT. Portability is a must in the *nix world where there really is fragmentation between operating systems, window toolkits, &c. Incidentally, I see a bunch of questions about porting a program from Win32 to Win16, which is just plain stupid; it almost never needs to be done. You might as well port it to MS-DOS. If you have a win32 program that absolutely needs to run under Windows 3.x, you install the Win32s library, which allows Win 3x to run most 32bit apps.
One of the reasons I have not started programming Linux yet is that I am loath to waste my precious time distributing two versions for just KDE and Gnome.
Doesn't work that way, at least not in this instance. The game ends with the first person to break into the box, so there's no opportunity for one-upmanship. The first person breaking in will probably put up a big ol' page with gaudy graphics splashed on it saying "I DID IT HOO HA HA" and it will be all over.
If it ever happens, that is.
That much touted experiment, the Stanley Miller "Spark Chamber" experiment, which was conducted decades ago, used the starting materials, the wrong methods and got the wrong results.
Miller left out oxygen because he knew it would destroy the proteins he was trying to make. In fact, there have been oxidized rocks in the earth as deep as man has dug. There is no evidence that earth's early atmosphere had no oxygen, and of course life on earth requires it.
Miller used electrical sparks as a catalyst. Unfotunately, sparks do more tearing apart than putting together, so Miller had to draw the product out of the spark chamber in order to preserve them. This obviously would not have been possible during biogenesis without an informed intelligence.
The experiment produced an equal amount of long, short, left-handed and right-handed amino acids, whereas only short and lefthanded are used in living cells. The long and right-handed acids joining with the short and left-handed acids would prevent the coiling necessary for a useful protein.
Finally, the simplest life forms require many more than just one protein! The chances of these forty-plus proteins coming together to form a single solitary bacterium capable of reproducing (and which must now survive without oxygen, remember) are zilch for all practical purposes.