This new breakthrough may saves some lives - The lives of young children in Latin America, Africa and Asia who are being kidnapped for their organs - and all in all, it is A Good Thing (TM).
If you don't know what I am talking about, every year, thousands (some says tens of thousands !) of young children are being kidnapped, and the only reason they are being kidnapped is because the children have organs that somebody else wants - like kidneys, hearts, liver, - and those organs ends up in the dying bodies of rich people.
If you ever wonder why your rich (and sick) uncle suddenly become so healthy, after a trip to Latin America (or Africa, or Asia), then you may don't have to wonder anymore.
I used trust the manufacturers' MBTF number for their HD, but with more and more HD failures before their time, I do not know anymore if bigger and bigger disk is the answer to go.
Why not make disks that last longer, rather than bigger disks that go belly-up before its time?
I knew something was up when I read, among other "clauses" in the "Jesux" (pronounced as "Hay Soos" distribution, is that thou shalt not use it on Sundays.
And I immediately filed a report to Rob, and our dear Robby had to gone through several days of searching in reaching the conclusion that it's all a hoax.
I mean, Mr. Dvorak put Linux into the "useless" category because, according to Dvorak, IRC servers don't run Linux. This is like saying rocketfuel is useless because it can't be used to power cars - like gasoline.
I used to admire Mr. Dvorak, but no more.
Back in the 80's he was one of those who dare to speak the truth. (The other was the "Cringely" character, before the author was fired, and replaced by a bunch of nincompoops. But that's another story)
Lately, I find Mr. Dvorak is behaving more and more like one of the "MicroSerf".
Totting partyline is fine, but totting party line disgusing as a "journalist" or "columnist" is a despicable act.
I mean, Intel wants to go for some expensive thingies alone, and if there is no support, Intel either drops it or end up holding the thing by itself.
Is this type of story even worth a mention on/. ?
Additionally, there _are_ alternatives, not only the via chipset, but also the SDRAM.
Ultimately the market will be the final judge for everthing. You can come up with all the ding-a-lings you want, if the market doesn't buy it, you will end up with a warehouse full of ding-a-lings.
What the authority has to do is to arrest someone, confiscate his computers, and then, in some government lab somewhere, announced something like "We found kiddie-porn materials inside."
Hey, all it takes is two diskettes filled with kiddie-porn jpeg pictures and the guy's reputation is ruined forever.
The article has one flaw, and that is, although it did mention the open-sourced databases like mySQL and PostgreSQL, it doesn't really compare the benefits of open-sourced databases vs those of the closed-sourced variety.
My only hope is that one day _someone-else_ would do a fair comparison.
In some countries, the real worth of certification is an "assurance" to the clients of the certified engineer, that the engineer who has been certified by the board is capable of finishing the task they hire him (or her) for.
However, in other places, the real worth of certification is a right to exert massive amount of payments from the clients.
You see, in the country that I was from, the "Professional Bodies" which has the exclusive right in giving out the "certificates" has the right to bar anyone who aren't certified by them to work in their chosen fields.
Which means, the "Professional Body" in question is using their monopolistic power to form a cartel of "Certified" people in exerting exhobitant fees from clients who need their services.
Their clients have no choice but to pay whatever price the "Certified" people ask for, because without the John Hancocks of those "Certified" people, you can't get your house or factory built, and you also need those "Certified" people to represent you in courts, to treat you, and so on....
But, **IF** the "Certified" people are worth the money they ask for, then everything should have been okay. It's just that, in the country that I was from, many of those "Certified" people are nothing but rubberstamps.
As long as you pay them money, those "Certified" people will stamp (or sign) everything you give them, no matter if the construction plan is okay or not.
In other words, the certification process has been turned into a legal highway robbery, _and_ a way for the unscrupulous to erect structures that are unsafe, making products that are unhealthy, and so on.
I thought for NeuroNet to be successful, it has to be a dynamic process - that is, to learn via trial and error, and to built the pattern-recognizing ability from the errors and success of previous tries.
Then, my question is, won't a hardware-based NeuroNet thingy like the one reported above kinda limiting?
That is, if everything has been hardcoded, then is there any room left for the dynamic process of "learning"?
Again, please correct me if I am wrong.
Thank you.
What Card impresses me the most ....
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 1
is a short article Card posted at the end of one of his books, on the difference between the two mode of Civilizations:
"Central civilization"
vs
"Peripheral civilization"
and that short article really opened up my eyes and the more I look around, the more it makes sense why some civilizations are so aggressively making troubles to their neighbors, while others are not.
> But this is not quite true, and that is > the great irony.
> When Sun Microsystems was founded, one of their > first employees (and their first CTO, I believe) > was Bill Joy, hired away from Berkeley where he > had been hacking on 4BSD for many years.
> One of Sun's important early strategic decisions > was to adopt BSD Unix for their operating system > rather than writing a new one from the ground > up.
> Obviously they did not apply open-source > principles to SunOS after making this decision, > but they owed part of their early start to the > relatively open-source nature of BSD.
> (I understand that this is not entirely > accurate, since pre-4.4 releases of BSD still > required an AT&T source license, so Sun still > had to license it from AT&T. But even in these > ancient days, BSD was moving strongly toward a > free software model.)
That is why I have said the Sun was and is NEVER a company that subscribes to the open-source philosophy.
If Bill Joy have been a open-source supporter, the history of Sun may have been re-written. I do not know if it is to the better or worse, but at the very least Sun wouldn't have been push into a niche market as it is right now.
One advantage for the open-source environment is one does not have to be confined into a tiny niche. For example, one can start an open-sourced project, and the result of the project can be ported to all the OS in the market, from tiny PC-DOS to mainframe/supercomputer.
One just doesn't need to confine one in a tiny hole anymore if one can look out in the wideopen open-sourced environment.
In fact, the word "OPEN" in the open-source is in many ways referred to the aspect of "WIDE-OPEN HORIZON".
Not everyday I get reply from Mr. Perens. I am simply awed.:)
But anyway, you are right, Corel's Wordperfect is _NOT_ an opensource project.
My sincere apologies to all for my misleading statement.
Regarding IBM and OpenSource, you have to understand that not only IBM is much larger, and can absorb the initial "loss" due to opensourcing, the IBM corporate structure is also different from that of Sun.
Whatever decisions IBM made, it does not have to got through the Chief Honcho's office, that is, as long as the decision does not effect the entire operation of the IBM corp.
Sun, on the other hand is different. It has been, and still is, run under sort of authoritarian model, that is, almost every decision Sun has made, from which new OEM partner Sun gonna sign up to make their Sparc line of chip, to what license a particular Sun software should be released under, often than not, the decision has to come from that Chief Honcho's office.
I hope you understand the difference between the two, Mr. Perens.
It may be that we are accustomed with the spirit of GPL that many of us are awaken with _shock_ that Sun is not releasing the StarOffice under GPL.
But we have to understand that Sun was and is never a part of the opensource community. Unlike RedHat, Suse, or Slackware that growed up along with (after the appearance of) Linux, Sun had been a commercialized enterprises _before_ anyone ever heard of Linux at all !
Unless something really drastic happened, I do not forsee Sun changes its stance in regarding the opensource matter.
Sun, like many of the older establishment, (such as MicroSoft), have great trouble believing in the benefits of opensource. True, Sun _does_ benefit from opensource projects such as Linux (and in a way, FreeBSD), - they simply sell more workstations because the demand created by the availability of opensource OS (and proggys) - but as long as Sun remains in the hand of the person who doesn't subscribe to the philosophy of opensource, there will be no chance for us to see StarOffice become a truly opensource program.
It's a shame, but then, c'est la vie !
On the other hand, there _are_ other programs that are opensourced, such as Abiword, Corel's Wordperfect, and the Saig-Officesuite project (I may have type the name wrong, but you get my point).
The StarOffice is not opensource, that is what we already know. If we insist on having a _truly_ opensourced officesuite, then my advice to the opensource community is to put our support behind the 3 projects above.
I understand that the 3 projects above do not have the scope as wide and as extensive as the StarOffice, but then at least they are a start.
If anyone is looking for a similar officesuite thingy that is not exactly opensource, then go look up the applixware thing.
There may be other opensource projects that have similar goal that I have missed. If so, please add on to this message and take this chance to annouce to the world and surf the wave on the Slashdot Effect (tm).
If DELL sells cars, then the DELL people will tell us that they are FORCED to attached an engine to each of the cars they sell that can only run on a specific brand of gasoline.
Get real, man.
Product Tying _IS_ illegal under the European Union rules, and what DELL is doing is ILLEGAL, no matter how they want to plea their case.
DELL can NOT say they are FORCED to put MicroSoft Windows in every PC they sell, because DELL can put in Linux, or Solaris or FreeBSD or DR DOS or whatever they want in it, and if DELL continues to put MS-Windows and ONLY MS-Windows _AND_ charge their customers for the MS-Windows they (the customers) did not asked for, then DELL has VOLUNTORY run against the anti PRODUCT TYING laws of the European Union.
The issue of "Product Tying" is an interesting case to test to resolve of the European Union.
If EU is anything as it has been advertized, then it has to do something about the Dell/Microsoft deal where PC buyers in Belgium are forced to pay the "MicroSoft Tax" whether they like it or not.
It is another case of "taxation without representation", and if EU is anything remotely approach a form of government, representing the people of Europe (which, if I am not mistaken, includes the people living in Belgium), then as a government _truly_ representing the European interest, the Dell/MicroSoft "TAX" should be abolished, and the culprits -- in this case, Dell and MicroSoft -- should be punished, and not just a light slap on the wrist.
Let us see how the EU will respond.
If EU does not respond, or fail to take appropriate action, then EU is nothing but a HOAX.
The whole world is watching anxiously to see how a _people_ organization will fare against a BORG organization.
Slashdot Mirror
This new breakthrough may saves some lives - The lives of young children in Latin America, Africa and Asia who are being kidnapped for their organs - and all in all, it is A Good Thing (TM).
If you don't know what I am talking about, every year, thousands (some says tens of thousands !) of young children are being kidnapped, and the only reason they are being kidnapped is because the children have organs that somebody else wants - like kidneys, hearts, liver, - and those organs ends up in the dying bodies of rich people.
If you ever wonder why your rich (and sick) uncle suddenly become so healthy, after a trip to Latin America (or Africa, or Asia), then you may don't have to wonder anymore.
Huge HD is nice.
Huge HD that gone is bad.
I used trust the manufacturers' MBTF number for their HD, but with more and more HD failures before their time, I do not know anymore if bigger and bigger disk is the answer to go.
Why not make disks that last longer, rather than bigger disks that go belly-up before its time?
I knew something was up when I read, among other "clauses" in the "Jesux" (pronounced as "Hay Soos" distribution, is that thou shalt not use it on Sundays.
And I immediately filed a report to Rob, and our dear Robby had to gone through several days of searching in reaching the conclusion that it's all a hoax.
Hahahahaha !! I've had some fun !
Ahhhh.... now the SUN finally shines in the classrooms.
Watch out for the SUNburns, though.
So his Torvaldness gets his honorably doctorate degree. What about Alan Cox, and all other contributors to the Linux / Open-source movement?
What about the people of FSF? Aren't their contribution important as well?
Hmmm....
is about the "unreliability" of Linux because, according to Mr. Dvorak, Linux can't run IRC servers !!
I will find you the url to John C. Dvorak's article if you want it.
The guy is a washout.
I mean, Mr. Dvorak put Linux into the "useless" category because, according to Dvorak, IRC servers don't run Linux. This is like saying rocketfuel is useless because it can't be used to power cars - like gasoline.
I used to admire Mr. Dvorak, but no more.
Back in the 80's he was one of those who dare to speak the truth. (The other was the "Cringely" character, before the author was fired, and replaced by a bunch of nincompoops. But that's another story)
Lately, I find Mr. Dvorak is behaving more and more like one of the "MicroSerf".
Totting partyline is fine, but totting party line disgusing as a "journalist" or "columnist" is a despicable act.
That is what John Dvorak has become.
Please help me, I am confused.
What kind of message are we trying to give it to the Joe o' Public out there?
That blackmailing banks are good?
That crackers (or in the NYT-speak, Hackers) are bad people who make a living by blackmailing others?
That banks are wimps waiting to be blackmailed?
That the future is bleak because our money is not safe no more in those wimpy banks?
What actually is the moral to this story, huh?!
I mean, Intel wants to go for some expensive thingies alone, and if there is no support, Intel either drops it or end up holding the thing by itself.
Is this type of story even worth a mention on
Additionally, there _are_ alternatives, not only the via chipset, but also the SDRAM.
Ultimately the market will be the final judge for everthing. You can come up with all the ding-a-lings you want, if the market doesn't buy it, you will end up with a warehouse full of ding-a-lings.
It is actually an easy task to set somebody up.
What the authority has to do is to arrest someone, confiscate his computers, and then, in some government lab somewhere, announced something like "We found kiddie-porn materials inside."
Hey, all it takes is two diskettes filled with kiddie-porn jpeg pictures and the guy's reputation is ruined forever.
Think about it, will you?
Look at how SGI has transform our cute little penguin into:
t ux.jpg
http://reality.sgi.com/performer/images/rocket_
The article has one flaw, and that is, although it did mention the open-sourced databases like mySQL and PostgreSQL, it doesn't really compare the benefits of open-sourced databases vs those of the closed-sourced variety.
My only hope is that one day _someone-else_ would do a fair comparison.
In some countries, the real worth of certification is an "assurance" to the clients of the certified engineer, that the engineer who has been certified by the board is capable of finishing the task they hire him (or her) for.
However, in other places, the real worth of certification is a right to exert massive amount of payments from the clients.
You see, in the country that I was from, the "Professional Bodies" which has the exclusive right in giving out the "certificates" has the right to bar anyone who aren't certified by them to work in their chosen fields.
Which means, the "Professional Body" in question is using their monopolistic power to form a cartel of "Certified" people in exerting exhobitant fees from clients who need their services.
Their clients have no choice but to pay whatever price the "Certified" people ask for, because without the John Hancocks of those "Certified" people, you can't get your house or factory built, and you also need those "Certified" people to represent you in courts, to treat you, and so on
But, **IF** the "Certified" people are worth the money they ask for, then everything should have been okay. It's just that, in the country that I was from, many of those "Certified" people are nothing but rubberstamps.
As long as you pay them money, those "Certified" people will stamp (or sign) everything you give them, no matter if the construction plan is okay or not.
In other words, the certification process has been turned into a legal highway robbery, _and_ a way for the unscrupulous to erect structures that are unsafe, making products that are unhealthy, and so on.
The name of the country I was from?
It starts with "M" and it has "Asia" in it.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
I thought for NeuroNet to be successful, it has to be a dynamic process - that is, to learn via trial and error, and to built the pattern-recognizing ability from the errors and success of previous tries.
Then, my question is, won't a hardware-based NeuroNet thingy like the one reported above kinda limiting?
That is, if everything has been hardcoded, then is there any room left for the dynamic process of "learning"?
Again, please correct me if I am wrong.
Thank you.
is a short article Card posted at the end of one of his books, on the difference between the two mode of Civilizations:
"Central civilization"
vs
"Peripheral civilization"
and that short article really opened up my eyes and the more I look around, the more it makes sense why some civilizations are so aggressively making troubles to their neighbors, while others are not.
Good work, Card !!
So, according to you, lawyers are such innocent bunch that they will follow their clients' order everytime.
Fine.
Next time I would like to see if my lawyer would follow my order and eat sh*t.
Hehehehehe
Has this world become too poor for them lawyers?
Why can't they put this silly game to a rest?
First in US, then Korea, and now in Germany.
Don't they understand that things like "Linux" belongs to EVERYBODY?
I mean, will they go and trademark the word "Earth", hoping that they would own the entire planet?
Geeeeesh !!
Yes, I have been carrying out some moderating tasks once in a while here for many months.
It is just that right now I can't find the "moderate" bar for me to moderate any of the messages.
I do not believe my "karma" is bad, since I have never done any "bad" posting. But anyway, that is besides the point.
The point at hand is if you want us to moderate, you do have to provide us the means to do our job.
> But this is not quite true, and that is
> the great irony.
> When Sun Microsystems was founded, one of their
> first employees (and their first CTO, I believe)
> was Bill Joy, hired away from Berkeley where he
> had been hacking on 4BSD for many years.
> One of Sun's important early strategic decisions
> was to adopt BSD Unix for their operating system
> rather than writing a new one from the ground
> up.
> Obviously they did not apply open-source
> principles to SunOS after making this decision,
> but they owed part of their early start to the
> relatively open-source nature of BSD.
> (I understand that this is not entirely
> accurate, since pre-4.4 releases of BSD still
> required an AT&T source license, so Sun still
> had to license it from AT&T. But even in these
> ancient days, BSD was moving strongly toward a
> free software model.)
That is why I have said the Sun was and is NEVER a company that subscribes to the open-source philosophy.
If Bill Joy have been a open-source supporter, the history of Sun may have been re-written. I do not know if it is to the better or worse, but at the very least Sun wouldn't have been push into a niche market as it is right now.
One advantage for the open-source environment is one does not have to be confined into a tiny niche. For example, one can start an open-sourced project, and the result of the project can be ported to all the OS in the market, from tiny PC-DOS to mainframe/supercomputer.
One just doesn't need to confine one in a tiny hole anymore if one can look out in the wideopen open-sourced environment.
In fact, the word "OPEN" in the open-source is in many ways referred to the aspect of "WIDE-OPEN HORIZON".
Not everyday I get reply from Mr. Perens. I am simply awed. :)
But anyway, you are right, Corel's Wordperfect is _NOT_ an opensource project.
My sincere apologies to all for my misleading statement.
Regarding IBM and OpenSource, you have to understand that not only IBM is much larger, and can absorb the initial "loss" due to opensourcing, the IBM corporate structure is also different from that of Sun.
Whatever decisions IBM made, it does not have to got through the Chief Honcho's office, that is, as long as the decision does not effect the entire operation of the IBM corp.
Sun, on the other hand is different. It has been, and still is, run under sort of authoritarian model, that is, almost every decision Sun has made, from which new OEM partner Sun gonna sign up to make their Sparc line of chip, to what license a particular Sun software should be released under, often than not, the decision has to come from that Chief Honcho's office.
I hope you understand the difference between the two, Mr. Perens.
Thank you again for the correction.
It may be that we are accustomed with the spirit of GPL that many of us are awaken with _shock_ that Sun is not releasing the StarOffice under GPL.
But we have to understand that Sun was and is never a part of the opensource community. Unlike RedHat, Suse, or Slackware that growed up along with (after the appearance of) Linux, Sun had been a commercialized enterprises _before_ anyone ever heard of Linux at all !
Unless something really drastic happened, I do not forsee Sun changes its stance in regarding the opensource matter.
Sun, like many of the older establishment, (such as MicroSoft), have great trouble believing in the benefits of opensource. True, Sun _does_ benefit from opensource projects such as Linux (and in a way, FreeBSD), - they simply sell more workstations because the demand created by the availability of opensource OS (and proggys) - but as long as Sun remains in the hand of the person who doesn't subscribe to the philosophy of opensource, there will be no chance for us to see StarOffice become a truly opensource program.
It's a shame, but then, c'est la vie !
On the other hand, there _are_ other programs that are opensourced, such as Abiword, Corel's Wordperfect, and the Saig-Officesuite project (I may have type the name wrong, but you get my point).
The StarOffice is not opensource, that is what we already know. If we insist on having a _truly_ opensourced officesuite, then my advice to the opensource community is to put our support behind the 3 projects above.
I understand that the 3 projects above do not have the scope as wide and as extensive as the StarOffice, but then at least they are a start.
If anyone is looking for a similar officesuite thingy that is not exactly opensource, then go look up the applixware thing.
There may be other opensource projects that have similar goal that I have missed. If so, please add on to this message and take this chance to annouce to the world and surf the wave on the Slashdot Effect (tm).
People vs. the evil empire --- and the people won !
T'is a Good Thing, [tm], indeed.
If DELL sells cars, then the DELL people will tell us that they are FORCED to attached an engine to each of the cars they sell that can only run on a specific brand of gasoline.
Get real, man.
Product Tying _IS_ illegal under the European Union rules, and what DELL is doing is ILLEGAL, no matter how they want to plea their case.
DELL can NOT say they are FORCED to put MicroSoft Windows in every PC they sell, because DELL can put in Linux, or Solaris or FreeBSD or DR DOS or whatever they want in it, and if DELL continues to put MS-Windows and ONLY MS-Windows _AND_ charge their customers for the MS-Windows they (the customers) did not asked for, then DELL has VOLUNTORY run against the anti PRODUCT TYING laws of the European Union.
Or is it yet another ploy to get us all excited for nothing?
I've read too many of the pie-in-the-sky things that I think I am becoming more and more cynical by the day.
The issue of "Product Tying" is an interesting case to test to resolve of the European Union.
If EU is anything as it has been advertized, then it has to do something about the Dell/Microsoft deal where PC buyers in Belgium are forced to pay the "MicroSoft Tax" whether they like it or not.
It is another case of "taxation without representation", and if EU is anything remotely approach a form of government, representing the people of Europe (which, if I am not mistaken, includes the people living in Belgium), then as a government _truly_ representing the European interest, the Dell/MicroSoft "TAX" should be abolished, and the culprits -- in this case, Dell and MicroSoft -- should be punished, and not just a light slap on the wrist.
Let us see how the EU will respond.
If EU does not respond, or fail to take appropriate action, then EU is nothing but a HOAX.
The whole world is watching anxiously to see how a _people_ organization will fare against a BORG organization.