*sigh* Yet another Ask Slashdot where "How do I do X?" gets greeted with a slew of non-answers refusing to even consider the question at hand. "You don't need to do that!" "I've never done it, but why would anyone need to?" "Don't. Do something else!"
Well, here are some projects that do do what you want, in one way or another.
photoseek.sourceforge.net
gpc.sourceforge.net
www.menalto.com/projects/gallery
photoarch.sourceforge.net
photo.sourceforge.net
liw.iki.fi/liw/lodju
www.seindal.dk/rene/software/sights
Photoseek, Lodju and GPC are the only ones that are not designed to be web-interface only. Several of the numerous "web gallery" packages have good indexing capabilities, but are primarily geared at presentation, not cataloging.
The non-Web-gallery programs are all relatively young-in-the-lifecycle projects. Although GPC seems to be the furthest along, my initial experience with Photoseek was better -- but it has been so long since a release that I'm not sure how healthy development is.
Don't listen to anybody who suggests that you do it all by hand with flat files. They've never tried.
I think he is interested in something more powerful than that. For any one picture, there are dozens of different metadata that could be of interest. Have you seen how many fields there are in the JPEG file information spec? Photoshop supports about twenty, and most of those can have multiple values. Here's the list:
Caption
Caption Writer
Headline
Special Instructions
Keywords
Category
Supplemental Categories
Urgency
Byline
Byline Title
Credit
Source
Name (Origin)
Date Created
City
Province
Country
Original Transmission Reference
Copyright
Copyright Notice
Image URL
Not to mention that Keywords and Category could have dozens of entries each. Consider a picture of the WTC cleanup. Category alone could give you WTC, NYC, Terrorism, Fire Dept, rescue, news, 2001, emergency, and Guiliani just at first glance. And that's an easy one. Stock photos are much worse. If you try organizing your images by hand-symlinking folders, you're rapidly going to end up with an exponentially-expanding mess that you then have to hand navigate every time you want to make a change. And that's assuming you do it all correct the first time through; forget about it when you throw in human error.
Besides, what you're really doing in that scenario is hand-creating a relational database. Why on earth would you want to go through that mess when there are industrial strength database packages out there that do it all for you?
Well, here's one factor that would be dangerous (and that I haven't heard anybody else mention):
If AOLTW owns RedHat, then AOLTW would own the copyright on all of RedHat's IP* (ie, their code). Remember, RedHat may license their code under the GPL, but the right to do that is theirs and theirs alone because they own the copyright to it.
So if some committee at AOLTW decides at some point in the future to stop licensing it under the GPL, they can. Think that won't happen? Maybe it won't... but can you guarantee that it won't ever happen, at any time in the future? No, you can't.
That's why the FSF always wants you to sign your copyright over to them -- they won't get bought out by anybody, ever.
Nate
* - of course, all above is null and void if RH bargains for a specific arrangement protecting their IP from this particular scenario, or if they do in fact sign their copyright over to the FSF or, you know, someone else....
Just for the non-article-reading record, the application towards "digital film" is only that they expect to make really really dense memory devices, so what this technology may replace is CF, not chemical/"analog" film, or even its digital equivalent, like CCD's.
Well, I was actually referring to the "setting out to prove it" part. In the attitudinal (is that a word?) sense. Several times they describe the progress of their experiment like this:
1. We think A probably implies B.
2. Let's devise an experiment to try and show this.
Admittedly, that sounds more vague than I thought it would.... The difference is that they try to devise the experiment in order to get the results they want to see, rather than devising the experiment to be neutral and then testing the hypothesis. Or, to engage in some wishful thinking, more than one hypothesis.
Besides, they use the language of statistics, but they clearly have no understanding of it (disclaimer: I am still bitter at having had six hours of statistics in college from a old Analysis professor who made us do proofs on everything). Example: they give a survey, asking respondants to check "always/sometimes/rarely/never" as their response. Then they do means and standard deviations to report their results. That's absolutely meaningless. First of all, the numbers you get are completely dependant on how you map those qualitative, non-numerical values to numbers, and secondly, nominal, categorical data like that has no correct mapping because it's nominal, and not numerical.
It doesn't matter how you encode it, saying you've taken the average of NBC, CBS, and FOX or the standard deviation of Red, Green, and Orange is meaningless. You can assign values and weights to them and then do your calculations on those, but it's totally arbitrary.
Nate
PS - also, before someone else mentions it, yes always/sometimes/rarely/never has order to it; that is called ordinal data. But it's not continuous, and order in a set does not imply oh, what's the word... interval? You can say that the person who checked sometimes ranks ahead of the person who checked rarely, but not by how much. Not even for a single response, much less for the data set as a whole.
Re:Clippy NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!
on
Do You Remember Bob?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Lord, no! I implore you! Stay AWAY from The Media Equation! This is one of the worst peices of drivel ever pawned off on an unsuspecting public. Please allow me to elaborate.
I had to read this book for a graduate Mass Comm class two years ago, and it is without a doubt the most awful excuse for experimental science that I have ever seen. Unfortunately for the authors, I had taken a class in research methods before I encountered their book (they should consider doing the same).
It's shoddy science, through and through. They ignore intervening variables, operate every experiment without controls, provide no accounting for intercoder reliability, the samples are always too small to be statistically significant (only one had more than 30 participants, many had less than ten), and comprised of forced participants (Reeves' and Nass's freshmen psych students at Stanford, to be precise. Even without a grade on the line, that's a bad sample). Usually, they rely on reported rather than observed behavior, and the only operating hypothesis ever examined is their goofy "equation" (you want me to spoil the beginning of the book for you? Here is The Media Equation: Media Equals Real Life. That's it. Word for word).
As if that wasn't enough, they make constant generalizations of their results (which with forced, nonrandom sampling is the first thing thrown out the window). They grandstand on every turn -- everything supports the Media Equation, and there is nothing it doesn't affect. You should always be suspicious when "scientists" do thirty experiments and always find their hypothesis supported exactly how they predicted. It's usually bunk, and in this case, it's a pantload. In one instance, they even admit to writing the hypothesis AFTER the experiment was performed. They make repeated references to other "research" in this area, but if you read through the bibliogrpahy, they are merely citing *themselves* from previous experiments. Many of these experiments, if you were interested, have still not been accepted for publication, many years after they were done. Most are not even available at the authors own Web sites. If it weren't for the fact that The Media Equation was published by Reeves & Nass's employer, I doubt whether they could've goten it published at all.
It's bad science, and it's only an afterthought: they plainly thought up their "equation" first, and then set out to prove it. That's the Scientific Method in reverse, people.
Let me give you one quick example in reference to the poster above: in the larger/smaller pictures experiment mentioned above, they show participants photographs of people's faces, some in close up and others standing 10 yards away. And the "test" is showing the subject another photo of the same people, and seeing which person the recognize most often. Guess what: it's the person who's face they saw in close-up. Surprised? You shouldn't be. No thinking adult would be; you see the face close up so you see more detail, and see it better. Plain and simple. But that's not the conclusion Reeves and Nass come up with; they decide instead that this turn of events means that you are having a psychological reaction to the face, and the biger face makes you happier because it seems more like a person. So if you think it's a person, you will remember it better.
That's the media equation, you see? The more person-like an electronic communication is, the better it works. The only time this has been tried under real-world circumstances, of course, is their grand experiment: Microsoft Bob. Funny how well that went over, huh.
Man, I hate that book.
Nate
PS - you might try the following link to Amazon, I submitted the review under "n8willis": here.
PPS - if anybody cares, I'll follow up what I say by emailing them the paper I had to write about this ridiculously bad book; it goes into more detail. Or perhaps I'll submit it as a/. book review. I meant to at the time, but it was just way too long....
Check it yourself if you don't believe my cut-n-paste. This generally agrees with my experience monitoring developer's sites -- there is far more activity on the GNOME front than on the KDE front. Who gives a Krap how Kool your drap-and-drop support is, if all of your appliKations are Krummy and derivative? And don't get me started on that naming Konvention.
Nate
PS - Oh yeah, one more example I thought of a moment ago:
Again, feel free to check it again on your own. As for me, I'll keep using GNOME because it offers a far superior computing experience. Even if it's not the default install option on Mandrake (my home distro -- so beware any KDE/GNOME counting based solely on who's running what distro).
Sometimes a "ghost call" is actually a telemarketing call. There's a company I've seen advertised (sorry, don't remember the name) who calls the client's list via computer, and then records a message on the answering machine if one picks up. If a person answers, it hangs up.
This is the source of a lot of credit card calls that act like some guy leaving you a message:
"Hi. This is Bill Johnson with Reliable Capital. Sorry I missed you. I just wanted to tell you that I've sent you the information packet I mentioned before. Give me a call back at 1-800..."
...but it always sounds like a recording anyway, so I don't know who's fooled.
What happens when you take your wristwatch off for 8 to 10 hours? Sure, generating electricity from body heat is fine when its a pacemaker... take that off and you're likely going to miss it before the eight hour mark.
I'll tell you one thing: he sure has Forth-colored glasses on....
I'm not bashing Forth. I think zeal can be a healthy thing. But, you know, zeal about a concept, not about one isolated tool/approach.
Nate
Yet another seige weapon fest
on
Fling-A-Keg
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· Score: 2
Anybody who likes this kind of stuff and is in West Texas might be interested in the Annual West Texas Punkin Chunkin Contest. I think this is the fifth or sixth year.
It was started by a HS physics teacher (aren't they all....) but lots of area teams, including colleges, compete.
It's in Abilene, and is usually a week or two after Halloween when all the pumpkins are on closeout. The contest "home page" above probably has details or at least the contact information will help.
Nate
PS - the guys I helped out occasionally as an undergrad have some pics of their machines here and here (If there are any others, ACU guys, I couldn't find them).
As far as I'm concerned, no anonymous coward has the right to expect his patch to make it into the mainstream kernel. Let's have some accountability, people!
...but that isn't quite what the term Catch-22 means. At least not as Joseph Heller used it in the book Catch-22, for which he made it up.
The situation here is a conundrum, a no-win situation, a bootstrapping problem, but that's not what Catch-22 was. In the book, Catch-22 means:
For every option open to you, the act of taking or exercising that option disqualifies you from being able to take or exercise it.
I know, that's pretty nitpicky, but the concept is so interesting that I like talking about it (even when no one's reading). Unfortunately, there's no simple way to explain it that makes it clearly distinct from the no-win situation. It's related, but not the same. Catch-22 is a paradox... that's what made Joseph Heller so cool; coming up with stuff like that.
So, just to plead for mercy from the -1 Offtopic mod, I tried to think of an equivalent Catch-22 for the situation the poster mentioned.... No luck so far. Somehow it'd have to involve like, "you can only make a Linux port of a game if the Windows version flops, but if the Windows version flops the game maker goes bankrupt and can't make a Linux port...." Something like that.
Seeing as the posting of this information-free lead seems to have brought down the site it is supposed to be pointing us to, would anyone (i.e., the submitter...) like to describe, just in brief, what Compaq's Test Drive program is?!?!!?!??
I remember when article leads used to tell you something....
Just for balance, here are Joe Barr's comments on Linux Today (some are even in response to Tirebiter's... though I don't know if that means anything):
http://linuxtoday.com/search.php3?tbquery=Joe+barr
I don't know anything about him, but a lot of these seem pretty inflammatory to me, too.
Developing new operating systems is hard work. It requires a great deal more computer science ability than I or the general slashdot community posses. They are a form of program, but they are a form you must go looking for. You must run tests, put in long hours, and do a lot of work to successful design a new operating system. They do not jump out and say "here I am" to the casual practioner.
Patenting operating systems protects the work and research of those who develop them. PhD. in computer science do not come cheap, and neither do grad assistants, sysadmins, numbers chruncers, and everything else required to keep a research institution operating. No patents, no more R&D. No more operating systems. No nifty new toys like the web, 3D graphics, or most of the other major developments in computer science. No more BSD or Linux because you could never recover your R&D investment. No more FSF.
/devil's advocate
...just what I think of every time I see someone saying how impossible something is.
Just to add one more to the record, what about Tom Brokaw's nightly news series "The Home of The Brave" -- it's a marketing ploy for his "The Greatest Generation" book and its sequels, of which there are now two (I believe). Just listen for how many times he uses the phrase "the greatest generation" or mentions the books during the pieces.
But not only is NBC News letting one of its employees use the nighly news program to push his own book(s), NBC has a deal with the book publisher that entitles them to a proportion of the profits from the book sales. I don't remember exactly what the numbers are, so I won't guess at them. But it doesn't matter; anything over zero is unethical....
We talked about this last summer in the Mass Media Ethics class I took. If anyone cares, I'll try to dig up a reference for them....
Err, but the problem is that the trend is the wrong way:
MacOS X is rapidly accumulating many ports of the open source/GNU/Linus userland world for non-GUI apps.
The Mac software vendors are porting to Carbon, not Qt or GTK. If they're looking at anything else, it's Cocoa.
As submitted earlier, Qt has been announced for OS X. Can GTK be far behind ?
This stuff is totally irrelevant... That's a different trend you're describing. It happens to be in the opposite direction of the trend that I first pointed out, but it's unrelated. Those QT and GTK developers aren't from the commercial Unix software vendors that I'm talking about.
What I'm really surprised at is the persistence of the (Slashdot-)widespread misconception that porting a GUI app to MacOS X from Windows or Mac OS Classic is somehow equivalent to porting it to Unix. No, no, no !
Well, to some degree it's different. But then again I didn't say it was the same thing. MacOS X is forcing Mac app vendors to do their first port to a new API in over a decade, and it just so happens that their new target OS is one step closer to Linux. I disagree with your statement that the only hard bits of a GUI app are the interface APIs. In fact, that's particularly untrue of multimedia apps, such as those in the Premiere/Flash space, that have to move a lot of data and execute a lot of low-level transforms. And as for the GUI API itself, what exactly do you think "interesting bits" of Maya were coded in? GTK? QT? OpenStep?
The difficulty of a particular port isn't even the issue. The point is that when Linux proves itself as a platform on a certain class of machine, app vendors one step down take notice, and that Linux proves itself as a platform by acquiring ports of established commercial apps. The more dominance in the server sector, the more pressure on workstation app vendors. The more dominance in the workstation sector, the more pressure on desktop app vendors.
In particular, companies like Macromedia and Adobe supply apps to the same customers that are currently in the market for the high-end graphics stuff being ported to Linux today. When they get deeper into OS X, they are placing themselves inline for such a downward-pressure trend. The more compatibility between MacOS X and Unix the easier the solution.
So, yes, actually, I will count on MacOS software going the Linux way.
Well I don't know. It does not seems that the market for a killer video app is similar in size to that of a word processor. It is more of a niche application. I type email, and docs everyday. I view video maybe several times a month, and and have had the desire to edit a movie maybe once or twice.
Well, maybe not. Video is more interesting to me than to some people. But really the crux of what I was trying to say is that it would be better to try for up-and-coming "markets" than for already saturated ones.
If I was writing that post again, I might say our definition of "killer app" isn't doing us a lot of good, for the simple reason that it's commoditized and everyone already has it.
Tomorrow's killer app is where the bullseye ought to be, if you ask me. So, it might very well be an IA...or video, or smellovision or whatever. The big coup would be to be the first player to the market, and not the last.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, here are some projects that do do what you want, in one way or another.
Photoseek, Lodju and GPC are the only ones that are not designed to be web-interface only. Several of the numerous "web gallery" packages have good indexing capabilities, but are primarily geared at presentation, not cataloging.
The non-Web-gallery programs are all relatively young-in-the-lifecycle projects. Although GPC seems to be the furthest along, my initial experience with Photoseek was better -- but it has been so long since a release that I'm not sure how healthy development is.
Don't listen to anybody who suggests that you do it all by hand with flat files. They've never tried.
Nate
Not to mention that Keywords and Category could have dozens of entries each. Consider a picture of the WTC cleanup. Category alone could give you WTC, NYC, Terrorism, Fire Dept, rescue, news, 2001, emergency, and Guiliani just at first glance. And that's an easy one. Stock photos are much worse. If you try organizing your images by hand-symlinking folders, you're rapidly going to end up with an exponentially-expanding mess that you then have to hand navigate every time you want to make a change. And that's assuming you do it all correct the first time through; forget about it when you throw in human error.
Besides, what you're really doing in that scenario is hand-creating a relational database. Why on earth would you want to go through that mess when there are industrial strength database packages out there that do it all for you?
Nate
If AOLTW owns RedHat, then AOLTW would own the copyright on all of RedHat's IP* (ie, their code). Remember, RedHat may license their code under the GPL, but the right to do that is theirs and theirs alone because they own the copyright to it.
So if some committee at AOLTW decides at some point in the future to stop licensing it under the GPL, they can. Think that won't happen? Maybe it won't... but can you guarantee that it won't ever happen, at any time in the future? No, you can't.
That's why the FSF always wants you to sign your copyright over to them -- they won't get bought out by anybody, ever.
Nate
* - of course, all above is null and void if RH bargains for a specific arrangement protecting their IP from this particular scenario, or if they do in fact sign their copyright over to the FSF or, you know, someone else....
Great Scott! I'm going to write to my Congressperson this very minute and lobby for an extension on patent lifetimes!
Nate
100% compression is easy.... I always found the real trick to be doing the 100% uncompression.
Nate
Just for the non-article-reading record, the application towards "digital film" is only that they expect to make really really dense memory devices, so what this technology may replace is CF, not chemical/"analog" film, or even its digital equivalent, like CCD's.
1. We think A probably implies B.
2. Let's devise an experiment to try and show this.
Admittedly, that sounds more vague than I thought it would.... The difference is that they try to devise the experiment in order to get the results they want to see, rather than devising the experiment to be neutral and then testing the hypothesis. Or, to engage in some wishful thinking, more than one hypothesis.
Besides, they use the language of statistics, but they clearly have no understanding of it (disclaimer: I am still bitter at having had six hours of statistics in college from a old Analysis professor who made us do proofs on everything). Example: they give a survey, asking respondants to check "always/sometimes/rarely/never" as their response. Then they do means and standard deviations to report their results. That's absolutely meaningless. First of all, the numbers you get are completely dependant on how you map those qualitative, non-numerical values to numbers, and secondly, nominal, categorical data like that has no correct mapping because it's nominal, and not numerical.
It doesn't matter how you encode it, saying you've taken the average of NBC, CBS, and FOX or the standard deviation of Red, Green, and Orange is meaningless. You can assign values and weights to them and then do your calculations on those, but it's totally arbitrary.
Nate
PS - also, before someone else mentions it, yes always/sometimes/rarely/never has order to it; that is called ordinal data. But it's not continuous, and order in a set does not imply oh, what's the word... interval? You can say that the person who checked sometimes ranks ahead of the person who checked rarely, but not by how much. Not even for a single response, much less for the data set as a whole.
I had to read this book for a graduate Mass Comm class two years ago, and it is without a doubt the most awful excuse for experimental science that I have ever seen. Unfortunately for the authors, I had taken a class in research methods before I encountered their book (they should consider doing the same).
It's shoddy science, through and through. They ignore intervening variables, operate every experiment without controls, provide no accounting for intercoder reliability, the samples are always too small to be statistically significant (only one had more than 30 participants, many had less than ten), and comprised of forced participants (Reeves' and Nass's freshmen psych students at Stanford, to be precise. Even without a grade on the line, that's a bad sample). Usually, they rely on reported rather than observed behavior, and the only operating hypothesis ever examined is their goofy "equation" (you want me to spoil the beginning of the book for you? Here is The Media Equation: Media Equals Real Life. That's it. Word for word).
As if that wasn't enough, they make constant generalizations of their results (which with forced, nonrandom sampling is the first thing thrown out the window). They grandstand on every turn -- everything supports the Media Equation, and there is nothing it doesn't affect. You should always be suspicious when "scientists" do thirty experiments and always find their hypothesis supported exactly how they predicted. It's usually bunk, and in this case, it's a pantload. In one instance, they even admit to writing the hypothesis AFTER the experiment was performed. They make repeated references to other "research" in this area, but if you read through the bibliogrpahy, they are merely citing *themselves* from previous experiments. Many of these experiments, if you were interested, have still not been accepted for publication, many years after they were done. Most are not even available at the authors own Web sites. If it weren't for the fact that The Media Equation was published by Reeves & Nass's employer, I doubt whether they could've goten it published at all.
It's bad science, and it's only an afterthought: they plainly thought up their "equation" first, and then set out to prove it. That's the Scientific Method in reverse, people.
Let me give you one quick example in reference to the poster above: in the larger/smaller pictures experiment mentioned above, they show participants photographs of people's faces, some in close up and others standing 10 yards away. And the "test" is showing the subject another photo of the same people, and seeing which person the recognize most often. Guess what: it's the person who's face they saw in close-up. Surprised? You shouldn't be. No thinking adult would be; you see the face close up so you see more detail, and see it better. Plain and simple. But that's not the conclusion Reeves and Nass come up with; they decide instead that this turn of events means that you are having a psychological reaction to the face, and the biger face makes you happier because it seems more like a person. So if you think it's a person, you will remember it better.
That's the media equation, you see? The more person-like an electronic communication is, the better it works. The only time this has been tried under real-world circumstances, of course, is their grand experiment: Microsoft Bob. Funny how well that went over, huh.
Man, I hate that book.
Nate
PS - you might try the following link to Amazon, I submitted the review under "n8willis": here.
PPS - if anybody cares, I'll follow up what I say by emailing them the paper I had to write about this ridiculously bad book; it goes into more detail. Or perhaps I'll submit it as a /. book review. I meant to at the time, but it was just way too long....
Freshmeat.net, Browse: Environment: X11 Applications:
Check it yourself if you don't believe my cut-n-paste. This generally agrees with my experience monitoring developer's sites -- there is far more activity on the GNOME front than on the KDE front. Who gives a Krap how Kool your drap-and-drop support is, if all of your appliKations are Krummy and derivative? And don't get me started on that naming Konvention.
Nate
PS - Oh yeah, one more example I thought of a moment ago:
Sourceforge.net: Software Map: Environment: X11 Applications:
Again, feel free to check it again on your own. As for me, I'll keep using GNOME because it offers a far superior computing experience. Even if it's not the default install option on Mandrake (my home distro -- so beware any KDE/GNOME counting based solely on who's running what distro).
Nate
This is the source of a lot of credit card calls that act like some guy leaving you a message:
"Hi. This is Bill Johnson with Reliable Capital. Sorry I missed you. I just wanted to tell you that I've sent you the information packet I mentioned before. Give me a call back at 1-800..."
...but it always sounds like a recording anyway, so I don't know who's fooled.
Nate
What happens when you take your wristwatch off for 8 to 10 hours? Sure, generating electricity from body heat is fine when its a pacemaker... take that off and you're likely going to miss it before the eight hour mark.
Nate
...hence they called it The Whopper, instead of The Third-Pounder (which is its uncooked weight).
Nate
I'm not bashing Forth. I think zeal can be a healthy thing. But, you know, zeal about a concept, not about one isolated tool/approach.
Nate
It was started by a HS physics teacher (aren't they all....) but lots of area teams, including colleges, compete.
It's in Abilene, and is usually a week or two after Halloween when all the pumpkins are on closeout. The contest "home page" above probably has details or at least the contact information will help.
Nate
PS - the guys I helped out occasionally as an undergrad have some pics of their machines here and here (If there are any others, ACU guys, I couldn't find them).
Nate
(I'm sorry; I had to do it....)
The situation here is a conundrum, a no-win situation, a bootstrapping problem, but that's not what Catch-22 was. In the book, Catch-22 means:
I know, that's pretty nitpicky, but the concept is so interesting that I like talking about it (even when no one's reading). Unfortunately, there's no simple way to explain it that makes it clearly distinct from the no-win situation. It's related, but not the same. Catch-22 is a paradox... that's what made Joseph Heller so cool; coming up with stuff like that.
So, just to plead for mercy from the -1 Offtopic mod, I tried to think of an equivalent Catch-22 for the situation the poster mentioned.... No luck so far. Somehow it'd have to involve like, "you can only make a Linux port of a game if the Windows version flops, but if the Windows version flops the game maker goes bankrupt and can't make a Linux port...." Something like that.
Ah, why bother? I need coffee....
N
I remember when article leads used to tell you something....
http://linuxtoday.com/search.php3?tbquery=Joe+bar
I don't know anything about him, but a lot of these seem pretty inflammatory to me, too.
Nate
If this works, I'll never have to work again!!!
Nate
Developing new operating systems is hard work. It requires a great deal more computer science ability than I or the general slashdot community posses. They are a form of program, but they are a form you must go looking for. You must run tests, put in long hours, and do a lot of work to successful design a new operating system. They do not jump out and say "here I am" to the casual practioner.
Patenting operating systems protects the work and research of those who develop them. PhD. in computer science do not come cheap, and neither do grad assistants, sysadmins, numbers chruncers, and everything else required to keep a research institution operating. No patents, no more R&D. No more operating systems. No nifty new toys like the web, 3D graphics, or most of the other major developments in computer science. No more BSD or Linux because you could never recover your R&D investment. No more FSF.
/devil's advocate
...just what I think of every time I see someone saying how impossible something is.
Nate
But not only is NBC News letting one of its employees use the nighly news program to push his own book(s), NBC has a deal with the book publisher that entitles them to a proportion of the profits from the book sales. I don't remember exactly what the numbers are, so I won't guess at them. But it doesn't matter; anything over zero is unethical....
We talked about this last summer in the Mass Media Ethics class I took. If anyone cares, I'll try to dig up a reference for them....
Nate
This stuff is totally irrelevant... That's a different trend you're describing. It happens to be in the opposite direction of the trend that I first pointed out, but it's unrelated. Those QT and GTK developers aren't from the commercial Unix software vendors that I'm talking about.
What I'm really surprised at is the persistence of the (Slashdot-)widespread misconception that porting a GUI app to MacOS X from Windows or Mac OS Classic is somehow equivalent to porting it to Unix. No, no, no !
Well, to some degree it's different. But then again I didn't say it was the same thing. MacOS X is forcing Mac app vendors to do their first port to a new API in over a decade, and it just so happens that their new target OS is one step closer to Linux. I disagree with your statement that the only hard bits of a GUI app are the interface APIs. In fact, that's particularly untrue of multimedia apps, such as those in the Premiere/Flash space, that have to move a lot of data and execute a lot of low-level transforms. And as for the GUI API itself, what exactly do you think "interesting bits" of Maya were coded in? GTK? QT? OpenStep?
The difficulty of a particular port isn't even the issue. The point is that when Linux proves itself as a platform on a certain class of machine, app vendors one step down take notice, and that Linux proves itself as a platform by acquiring ports of established commercial apps. The more dominance in the server sector, the more pressure on workstation app vendors. The more dominance in the workstation sector, the more pressure on desktop app vendors.
In particular, companies like Macromedia and Adobe supply apps to the same customers that are currently in the market for the high-end graphics stuff being ported to Linux today. When they get deeper into OS X, they are placing themselves inline for such a downward-pressure trend. The more compatibility between MacOS X and Unix the easier the solution.
So, yes, actually, I will count on MacOS software going the Linux way.
Nate
Well, maybe not. Video is more interesting to me than to some people. But really the crux of what I was trying to say is that it would be better to try for up-and-coming "markets" than for already saturated ones.
If I was writing that post again, I might say our definition of "killer app" isn't doing us a lot of good, for the simple reason that it's commoditized and everyone already has it.
Tomorrow's killer app is where the bullseye ought to be, if you ask me. So, it might very well be an IA ...or video, or smellovision or whatever. The big coup would be to be the first player to the market, and not the last.
Nate