Just in case it was unclear, my previous post was a request to mod its parent, not my own post. I jsut re-read it and realized that there was room for confusion there.
I spent my last mod point just before reading this post and immediately regretted it. This is an insightful post, NOT A TROLL. By posting here, I'm undoing one of my own mods, but I think this post is worth it (and someone else has since modded up the other post I modded in this article's discussion, so I know that it won't go back to being an unseen AC post).
Remember mods: Just because you disagree or a post is worded harshly doesn't mean it's a troll.
Sorry to come so late to the thread, I happened upon your post while metamoderating.
I'm interested to know what you mean by this:
We are letting people take advantage of us, the GNU/GPL are making us more vulerable to stolen code, how can we profit if people are stealing our work out from under out feet?
I don't see how GPL is making us more vulnerable to stolen code. I mean, isn't it just an option for how to license code you write? The only time you have to make a piece of code you write GPL is when you base it on another piece of GPL code and it's not like that's (basing it on another GPLed app) being forced upon you (unless perhaps it's by an employer or some similar entity).
This is not at all meant to be a flame, or even really an argument, I'm very interested in finding out what you meant by that comment.
The way I see it, the GPL works well because it protects the code that's already been paid for through taxes from becoming proprietary and therefore causing the taxpayers to have to pay for it again. It is true that a BSD style license will do that for the code in it's released state, and that's a good thing, but personally, I like the idea of the government working on and releasing software that must stay free.
Unless I understand the concept wrong, releasing software to the public domain offers no protection at all - whoever wants to can come along and copyright the work and then it's lost to all others unless they are willing to meet that owner's licensing requirements, whatever they may be.
In the past, memory and storage were expensive and limited, and processors were slow.
Today, Memory and storage are cheap, and processors are fast.
This has changed the focus. In the past, it was important to get as much done as you could with as little as possible. Today, we sacrifice a bit (perhaps too much) of that because we can afford to. The prime measure of efficiency today is code readablility and reusability. Why do you think OOP is so big these days? Do you think it's more efficient, in the traditional sense of making smaller, faster programs that use fewer resources? Not at all. There are optimizing compilers that do a good job of making OO code efficient, but it sure isn't inherent in the design of the languages. That's not the focus. The focus is on readable, reusable code.
CSIRAC was, of course, a vacuum-tube machine; most of its 2000 tubes were 6SN7, 6V6, EA50 and KT66. Eventually button-based tubes were used in the delay line store electronics, germanium diodes and, much later, George Semkiw re-designed the disk read electronics using germanium transistors.
And on top of that, ICs weren't invented until 1958.
I quoted the geek,com article: "ran at a blistering 300 kilohertz"
Then I said: "Apple ][ was only 1 MHz"
And, in reference to the above two: "less than doubling in processor speed"
Sorry, somehow when I was typing, I was thinking of the CSIRAC's quoted speed as 600 kHz rather than the 300 kHz I would have see if I'd only looked up about an inch and a half.
Still just over tripling processor speed in nearly 30 years seems a pretty amazing lack of progress -especially when you consider that you're comparing a an IC transistor based machine to one running on vacuum tubes.
The Geek.com article says: " A half-century old computer, called CSIRAC, is still operating in Australia. The computer, which was Australia's first, ran at a blistering 300 kilohertz, had 2 KB RAM, and 2.5 KB storage."
But the Inquirer article linked by the above Geek.com article says: "The machine was the fourth computer to be built anywhere in the world, ran at 0.001MHz, and had a massive 2000 bytes of memory and a behemothic 2500 bytes of storage."
Which, by my calcuations, would be 1000 hertz or 1 kilohertz. I tend to believe the Inquirer, since they're running the source article. And besides, the 1977 Apple ][ was only 1 MHz, Don't you think there was a bit more progress than less than doubling in processor speed from 1949 to 1977?
"As you might expect, the headline acts on the CD are OpenOffice.org, AbiWord and Beonex"
Actually, I'm a bit surprised by Beonex's presence. I would have expected Mozilla and/or Phoenix in its place. Can someone fill me in what (if anything) makes Beonex a better choice? I've tried it out briefly, but don't remmeber any significant improvements over Mozilla itself and it seems to get updated much less frequently.
And yes, I do realize that Mozilla isn't intended to be for end users, but it works well for me so I'm hoping for answers that will actually help me to understand the difference in practical terms rather than based on intent.
Well, If you'd read the first couple of paragraphs of the article, you would have seen this:
The idea was to make a compilation of mature open source software (OSS) for windows users as an easy introduction to OSS. The project was inspired by a question which is frequently asked in Linux forums: "Given that we now have this fast, secure, desktop-ready, free OS, why doesn't everyone switch?"
Well, the answer is complex, but includes elements like:
1. It is a major hurdle for an intermediate user to scrap their entire OS to try an unknown system, filled with strangely named applications like "grep."
2. Most people do not care which OS they use, but rather what their programs can do, and there is a perception that Linux apps are not as capable as those in Windows.
3. Microsoft's OS bundling has been extremely successful encourages people to regard their current OS as free (as in beer).
4. Software piracy, while apparently depriving proprietary software makers of profits, in fact simply serves to cement the commercial products as "the standard," by making home users familiar with these packages, and by locking everyone into proprietary file formats.
These cover the largest and most commonly cited reasons. The first two of these points are the most serious: the perception of Linux applications as difficult to use, hard to learn, and inadequate to their tasks encourages people to continue buying (or pirating) Microsoft products, not just Windows, but also Office.
And there's lots more good stuff that directly answers your question. If you ever get ten minutes or so to spare, I recommend giving the article a read.
"Have you ever noticed how everyone breaks down into a near-religious frenzy when the topic of the "best" science fiction universe comes up?"
OK, so let's make a whole/. story dedicarted to it!
I mean really, I really dislike getting into 'holy wars' and reading through the responses so far, I've already had to resist (hard) several times responding to posts to tell the poster what an idiot he is for ignoring one author or backing another.
Seems like this whole story should be modded down to -1 flamebait.
(of course, I'll probably be the one modded down for this comment, but oh well - I've sworn off of AC posting, so I guess I'll take the hit)
I had never noticed any difference at all (I've mostly stopped using IE since downloaing Mozilla), but I just ran a test search thinking it was kinda crazy that Google would give any sort of different results from different browsers.
The results for search terms chosen randomly, first two words that came to my mind "fire plane" (terms entered without quotes):
So, just to take the comparison a bit further I copied & pasted the URL from IE into Mozilla, where it retruned 2090 results again. Then I copied the URL from Mozilla (the one generated by searching Google with Mozilla, not the one I had just plugged into it from IE) and pasted it into IE which got 2090 images again.
That's all I've got, maybe there's enough info there for someone smarter than me to figure out wtf is causing the different results here, but I have no clue.
Re:silly quotes from article..
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 2
"Also, the article has the tone "P2P is here to stay"
That part I read the same as you.
""...and nobody will ever be willing to pay for a P2P file-sharing service", which I somewhat agree with.."
I didn't get that from the article. It seemed to me he was saying that the crappy P2P that the xxAA companies will try to use to supplant working P2P models will fail be cause nobody would ever be willing to pay for those.
I also don't agree with your feeling that people wouldn't pay at all for a decent P2P model of distribution. I know she's quoted a lot in the discussions of this stuff (but that's just because her writings are so well thought out), but Janis Ian's articles (second article here) talk a bit about possible ways of handling P2P distribution while still making a profit very intelligently.
"Divx's are also good because if I see a 'bootleg' home-camara recorded version of a movie that is still in theatres, I can get an idea of wether it is good or not simply by judging audience reation. For instance for the latest star wars movie, you could see alot of people getting pissed off and leaving the theatre because the movie was crap. If you didn't know this, you might have gone to see that terrible excuse for a movie."
I somehow doubt that the folks who run the movie industry would agree that this is good for the movie industry. In fact, they would even be correct in saying that pirating is losing them sales if they were to use this as an example. I highly doubt that they would ever use such an honest example, or that it would help to promote their cause, but that's a whole 'nother story.
"And compatible documents by OpenOffice, week after week, will open eyes. However, there is always the one picky manager (PHB) waiting to pounce. If I or another co-worker forget to save the thing in Word97 format just once, he will use it as a club to beat us 'wild ducks' into corporate submission. If I slip up, and he cannot read my status report, I will not be able to tell him the problem is his lack of a plugin. He is running the corporate standard. I'm the outsider trying to open the environment to allow for greater options."
While OO's ability to make compatible documents will help spread awareness about OO's quality, it leaves the Open Source world playing catch up with MS forever. Large corporations will not switch over to OO since they never know when it will become incompatible (even if it is through no fault of its own) or how long it will take to become compatible again.
If, however, a plugin like the one we're discussing were to exist, A large corporation could easily make the switch over to OO or StarOffice little by little. It would give them an open file format to standardize on that they could be confident would work with their existing investment in Office apps, allowing users who are not comfortable with switching over to continue to use their existing MSOffice installation.
Corporations have no desire to be locked in by MS file formats - the (smart) people at the top have seen plenty of evidence that MS is just looking to squeeze every penny out of them. Standardizing on an open file format gives them freedom to choose whether they need to make the next upgrade that MS insists they should pay $300 per seat for.
Think about it, with this plugin, your PITA PHB could end up on the wrong side of the corporate standard regarding OO vs MSOffice.
(Writing this on no sleep, apologies if it's not as coherent as I mean it to be)
Does anyone really think that this will change the alleged minds of doubters?
What if it shows them to be right?
Note: Although I'm beginning to see signs of conspiracy theorist (General paranoia, distrust of my own government, a sinking feeling that all my civil liberties are disappearing quickly, a belief that my government values the greed of corporations over the needs of its people, etc) in myself, I do not ascribe to the belief that the moon mission was faked.
Slashdot Mirror
"The only thing it was going for it is it runs windowsXP"
Don't you think that comes pretty close? (I do)
Just in case it was unclear, my previous post was a request to mod its parent, not my own post. I jsut re-read it and realized that there was room for confusion there.
I spent my last mod point just before reading this post and immediately regretted it. This is an insightful post, NOT A TROLL. By posting here, I'm undoing one of my own mods, but I think this post is worth it (and someone else has since modded up the other post I modded in this article's discussion, so I know that it won't go back to being an unseen AC post).
Remember mods: Just because you disagree or a post is worded harshly doesn't mean it's a troll.
Sorry to come so late to the thread, I happened upon your post while metamoderating.
I'm interested to know what you mean by this:
We are letting people take advantage of us, the GNU/GPL are making us more vulerable to stolen code, how can we profit if people are stealing our work out from under out feet?
I don't see how GPL is making us more vulnerable to stolen code. I mean, isn't it just an option for how to license code you write? The only time you have to make a piece of code you write GPL is when you base it on another piece of GPL code and it's not like that's (basing it on another GPLed app) being forced upon you (unless perhaps it's by an employer or some similar entity).
This is not at all meant to be a flame, or even really an argument, I'm very interested in finding out what you meant by that comment.
I'm confused. I thought SGI was dropping support on IRIX. Why are they releasing new Irix boxen?
"I feel that sooner or later, the majority of consumers will pirate software, rather than vice versa."
Rather than sofware pirating the majority of consumers? What is this, Soviet Russia?
The way I see it, the GPL works well because it protects the code that's already been paid for through taxes from becoming proprietary and therefore causing the taxpayers to have to pay for it again. It is true that a BSD style license will do that for the code in it's released state, and that's a good thing, but personally, I like the idea of the government working on and releasing software that must stay free.
Unless I understand the concept wrong, releasing software to the public domain offers no protection at all - whoever wants to can come along and copyright the work and then it's lost to all others unless they are willing to meet that owner's licensing requirements, whatever they may be.
I'm missing something here. The text you quoted doesn't appear to be from the quote you're responding to. What's it from.
(I haven't read the articles yet, sorry if that's where it's from)
The values have changed.
In the past, memory and storage were expensive and limited, and processors were slow.
Today, Memory and storage are cheap, and processors are fast.
This has changed the focus. In the past, it was important to get as much done as you could with as little as possible. Today, we sacrifice a bit (perhaps too much) of that because we can afford to. The prime measure of efficiency today is code readablility and reusability. Why do you think OOP is so big these days? Do you think it's more efficient, in the traditional sense of making smaller, faster programs that use fewer resources? Not at all. There are optimizing compilers that do a good job of making OO code efficient, but it sure isn't inherent in the design of the languages. That's not the focus. The focus is on readable, reusable code.
The CSIRAC was a vacuum tube based machine. From http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/csirac/design.html:
And on top of that, ICs weren't invented until 1958.
I quoted the geek,com article:
"ran at a blistering 300 kilohertz"
Then I said:
"Apple ][ was only 1 MHz"
And, in reference to the above two:
"less than doubling in processor speed"
Sorry, somehow when I was typing, I was thinking of the CSIRAC's quoted speed as 600 kHz rather than the 300 kHz I would have see if I'd only looked up about an inch and a half.
Still just over tripling processor speed in nearly 30 years seems a pretty amazing lack of progress -especially when you consider that you're comparing a an IC transistor based machine to one running on vacuum tubes.
The Geek.com article says:
" A half-century old computer, called CSIRAC, is still operating in Australia. The computer, which was Australia's first, ran at a blistering 300 kilohertz, had 2 KB RAM, and 2.5 KB storage."
But the Inquirer article linked by the above Geek.com article says:
"The machine was the fourth computer to be built anywhere in the world, ran at 0.001MHz, and had a massive 2000 bytes of memory and a behemothic 2500 bytes of storage."
Which, by my calcuations, would be 1000 hertz or 1 kilohertz. I tend to believe the Inquirer, since they're running the source article. And besides, the 1977 Apple ][ was only 1 MHz, Don't you think there was a bit more progress than less than doubling in processor speed from 1949 to 1977?
A Beowuld cluster of- oh never mind, where would you fit it?
"As you might expect, the headline acts on the CD are OpenOffice.org, AbiWord and Beonex"
Actually, I'm a bit surprised by Beonex's presence. I would have expected Mozilla and/or Phoenix in its place. Can someone fill me in what (if anything) makes Beonex a better choice? I've tried it out briefly, but don't remmeber any significant improvements over Mozilla itself and it seems to get updated much less frequently.
And yes, I do realize that Mozilla isn't intended to be for end users, but it works well for me so I'm hoping for answers that will actually help me to understand the difference in practical terms rather than based on intent.
And there's lots more good stuff that directly answers your question. If you ever get ten minutes or so to spare, I recommend giving the article a read.
"Have you ever noticed how everyone breaks down into a near-religious frenzy when the topic of the "best" science fiction universe comes up?"
/. story dedicarted to it!
OK, so let's make a whole
I mean really, I really dislike getting into 'holy wars' and reading through the responses so far, I've already had to resist (hard) several times responding to posts to tell the poster what an idiot he is for ignoring one author or backing another.
Seems like this whole story should be modded down to -1 flamebait.
(of course, I'll probably be the one modded down for this comment, but oh well - I've sworn off of AC posting, so I guess I'll take the hit)
Ahh, of course. I guess my prefs cookie for IE has run out in the time since I started using Mozilla as my default browser.
I had never noticed any difference at all (I've mostly stopped using IE since downloaing Mozilla), but I just ran a test search thinking it was kinda crazy that Google would give any sort of different results from different browsers.
T F-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search
i e=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&safe=off&q=fire+plane&btnG=Google +Search
The results for search terms chosen randomly, first two words that came to my mind "fire plane" (terms entered without quotes):
IE 5.5:
1,180 images found
URL: http://images.google.com/images?q=fire+plane&ie=U
Mozilla 1.2:
2090 images found
URL: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=lang_en&
So, just to take the comparison a bit further I copied & pasted the URL from IE into Mozilla, where it retruned 2090 results again. Then I copied the URL from Mozilla (the one generated by searching Google with Mozilla, not the one I had just plugged into it from IE) and pasted it into IE which got 2090 images again.
That's all I've got, maybe there's enough info there for someone smarter than me to figure out wtf is causing the different results here, but I have no clue.
"Also, the article has the tone "P2P is here to stay"
That part I read the same as you.
""...and nobody will ever be willing to pay for a P2P file-sharing service", which I somewhat agree with.."
I didn't get that from the article. It seemed to me he was saying that the crappy P2P that the xxAA companies will try to use to supplant working P2P models will fail be cause nobody would ever be willing to pay for those.
I also don't agree with your feeling that people wouldn't pay at all for a decent P2P model of distribution. I know she's quoted a lot in the discussions of this stuff (but that's just because her writings are so well thought out), but Janis Ian's articles (second article here) talk a bit about possible ways of handling P2P distribution while still making a profit very intelligently.
"Divx's are also good because if I see a 'bootleg' home-camara recorded version of a movie that is still in theatres, I can get an idea of wether it is good or not simply by judging audience reation. For instance for the latest star wars movie, you could see alot of people getting pissed off and leaving the theatre because the movie was crap. If you didn't know this, you might have gone to see that terrible excuse for a movie."
I somehow doubt that the folks who run the movie industry would agree that this is good for the movie industry. In fact, they would even be correct in saying that pirating is losing them sales if they were to use this as an example. I highly doubt that they would ever use such an honest example, or that it would help to promote their cause, but that's a whole 'nother story.
I may be missing something here, but it seems to me that this wouldn't be a problem as long as the plugin is also made for WordPerfect.
"only ignorant people think so even today."
You say that as if ignorant people were a rarity.
BTW, what's STW?
"And compatible documents by OpenOffice, week after week, will open eyes. However, there is always the one picky manager (PHB) waiting to pounce. If I or another co-worker forget to save the thing in Word97 format just once, he will use it as a club to beat us 'wild ducks' into corporate submission. If I slip up, and he cannot read my status report, I will not be able to tell him the problem is his lack of a plugin. He is running the corporate standard. I'm the outsider trying to open the environment to allow for greater options."
While OO's ability to make compatible documents will help spread awareness about OO's quality, it leaves the Open Source world playing catch up with MS forever. Large corporations will not switch over to OO since they never know when it will become incompatible (even if it is through no fault of its own) or how long it will take to become compatible again.
If, however, a plugin like the one we're discussing were to exist, A large corporation could easily make the switch over to OO or StarOffice little by little. It would give them an open file format to standardize on that they could be confident would work with their existing investment in Office apps, allowing users who are not comfortable with switching over to continue to use their existing MSOffice installation.
Corporations have no desire to be locked in by MS file formats - the (smart) people at the top have seen plenty of evidence that MS is just looking to squeeze every penny out of them. Standardizing on an open file format gives them freedom to choose whether they need to make the next upgrade that MS insists they should pay $300 per seat for.
Think about it, with this plugin, your PITA PHB could end up on the wrong side of the corporate standard regarding OO vs MSOffice.
(Writing this on no sleep, apologies if it's not as coherent as I mean it to be)
Parent post was modded up by one of the "doubters" with "alleged minds" the submitter mentioned?
Not that I wouldn't have modded it up myself, but I would have called it Funny.
Does anyone really think that this will change the alleged minds of doubters?
What if it shows them to be right?
Note: Although I'm beginning to see signs of conspiracy theorist (General paranoia, distrust of my own government, a sinking feeling that all my civil liberties are disappearing quickly, a belief that my government values the greed of corporations over the needs of its people, etc) in myself, I do not ascribe to the belief that the moon mission was faked.