Still, if we make that: "Any idea that can't be convincingly explained without using several different colours and animation has a serious flaw in it somewhere.", I think we'll be in perfect agreement. Especially since that sort of idea usually involves dancing hamsters or so.
If sudenly most of Debian packages are on the non-us branch, I guess people will start to reconsider sofware patents.
Unhappily, most of us who would be aware of the change are already against software patents. Debian is used mainly by folks like me, who value freedom, for people _and_ their ideas.
When MS and IBM start lobbying Congress to get rid of software patents (and business patents, too, please), then``people will start to reconsider sofware patents.''
I wonder if you misunderstood me. My comment wasn't intended as criticism of your friend or his choices for his web site, and I certainly don't want him to change his ways. I doubt that he and I have any interests in common, and if google misdirects me there some day, his Flash will tell me: ``Move along, there's nothing here for you.''
Every invention has at least two effects: the intended one and the other(s). For Flash, the intended effect is letting visually-oriented people do their thing. The unintended effect is shielding the rest of us from their thing, either by not installing Flash (my choice) or blocking it.
It's for you to say whether your life is incomplete without the minor celebrity pool player ad.
I've found that my life is substantially more complete without things which are best presented via Flash. Your friend is doing a great job by putting his ads in Flash, not least because I'll never see them. Tell him he needn't change on my account.
I'm a Linux/Libre software zealot who's 100% in favor of Flash. By not having it installed, I miss out on all the things on which I want to miss out.
First, I agree with your ``ask nicely'' message. As another post pointed out, Intel and especially AMD would benefit by having better free compilers (they are complementary goods to their CPUs), so maybe we should be asking them to buy and contribute this patent. Nicely, of course.
Second:
I recently advised a graphic designer/artist friend whose Flash app (advertising a minor celebrity pool player)...
Don't ever let him get rid of that Flash. I've found that when I see a webpage that invites me to download Flash, I can just close that tab: there's nothing there for me to see. That's saved me a great deal of time and bandwidth which I might have wasted if those sites had used animated gifs instead.
He's the world's richest guy - where is his motivation to change? Look at every statement out of his mouth! NOTHING has changed about the way he does business!
He was a rich, whiney little slime in 1976, and he hasn't changed a bit. It seems that being a whiney little slime is profitable.
>>"However the editorial board work is still essential"
> I'd say the solution is to get the universities to do that job, in a kind of peer-2-peer style.
You genius, you! That's exactly how the current greedy, money-grubbing, for-profit journals do it! We write the articles, we (that is, everyone who submits articles) get tapped to review them, then our institutions get tapped to pay big bucks (thousands of dollars) for our work.
The only thing that would be different under this new proposal is that there wouldn't be any bloated, plutocratic publishers leaching off of us.
>... you could send the paper to different faculties and get a prof of statistics to have a look at the statistical methods used,...
That would be different. A statistical review would result in some radical changes in some fields. It isn't going to happen, because too many careers and too many fields of study have been founded on unsound methods. I'll let you guess which I'm thinking of.
The guy who stays and wants to code is the one we want. It is perfectly normal, IMHO, that in a group of decent size only few actually can program. Our educational system should be designed in a way to identify those precious few and make sure they can go as high as they can.
That makes good sense, as far as it goes, but it ignores a vital question:
If you're a bright, capable kid who kind of likes programming, does it make sense for you to spend years of long hours studying programming and CS? Wouldn't it make more sense to use those same abilities in some field like financial engineering or accounting, where the long hours are likely to be rewarded with far higher pay, and a better career path? Or go in for a field like management, where you can coast through school and still make more money than the programmers you will be supervising?
I think that most bright, capable kids have figured this one out (with some help from breathless articles about unemployment and outsourcing), and if Johnny's smart enough to program, he's smart enough not to.
Dead men don't write, so a great starting point would be to make extensions of copyright terms apply only to the works of living authors. Here in the U.S., we've been applying our extensions to the living and the dead alike, despite an absolute lack of evidence that any dead author has been inspired to write any additional works.
Since we're talking about Australia, I think it would be a great thing if their new law said something like this:
$GOVERNING_BODY may promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. The time limits for such exclusive rights will be determined separately for each class of inventions or writings, and shall be chosen to maximise the extent of the public domain.
The first sentence should look familiar to Americans. The second sentence would prevent many of the abuses of copyright we're seeing today.
'Apocalypse' OS will be release immediately after Billy G. has been declared world dictator for life, forever and ever amen.
No, 'Apocalypse' will be the MS OS which leads up to that. The release immediately after Billy G. has been declared world dictator for life will be called `Leviathan', named after the ultimate evil.
debenture
Unsecured debt backed only by the integrity of the borrower, not by collateral, and documented by an agreement called an indenture. One example is an unsecured bond.
From TFA:
Dell invested his own money in the Raleigh Linux software developer, taking the largest single chunk of $600 million in debentures offered by the company in January 2004.
These seem to be a 0.5% convertable senior bond, so it's fairly safe and he gets paid to wait for the stock price to jump.
Knowing Sun, they are not going for a "it barely works" first release. These guys are quite serious about maintaining correct code. This is one of the things that OSS does *not* excel in particularly.
You're right: a perfect first release isn't the way most Libre projects proceed. They put together something that shows how good it could be, if only it were complete, and worked, then release it as version 0.0.1, and get some help.
Sun seems to be trying to release a completed masterpiece. No help wanted, thanks very much.
It's sort of like the difference between making a bazarre, and making a cathedral. Gee, that's a great metaphor! Maybe I should write an anthropology paper about the different development methods around that. I could title it: ``Sun's bizarre development model will build a cold, empty cathedral, but they could have had a sunny, open bazarre.'' Maybe just ``The Cathederal and the Bazarre'' for short. I bet I'd be famous!
In the Amazon review of your father's book, it says: ``... Jesus is one of the ways, all religions are paths to God... '',
while in the bible we see that Jesus said: No one comes to the Father except through Me.
Either Jesus was wrong, or your father's book is wrong (or both, I suppose). Certainly, they can't both be right.
It's obvious you have some experience in government or corporate purchasing.
I'll put in a purchase order for the $1,000,000 version with the $100,000 per year support contract. That's the version where girls with good hair provide on site support.
... it's doubtful that the OGP will outperform someone like NVidia or ATI who already build custom chips. But it might be able to give them a decent run for their money.
It doesn't really even have to give them ``a run for their money''. It just has to give decent, hi-res, 2D performance with no hassles using Libre drivers on Libre operating systems. The five percent or so of the video card market who use Linux and the BDSs may not sound like much, but it's a niche these guys could have all to themselves. If it doesn't cost any more than the equivalent from Nvidia, I'd buy it in preference to anything with closed drivers. That's really all they have to do: decent 2D, and don't cost more.
Gamers are willing to spend a lot on video cards, but the majority of us are quite happy without 3D anything, as long as we get a clear, high resloution image of emacs or openoffice on a big monitor. Let Nvidia and ATI have the gamer market; those guys are all on Windows, anyway.
Unless they spend their spare time working in a mall they aren't interacting with anywhere near the hundreds of other kids most public schoolers see on a daily basis.
I can only think of two places where you are likely to be age tracked, and spend all your time with large groups of people your own age: the military, and prison. The age tracking isn't deliberate in those institutions, but there are some other parallels.
Socialization is what happens in society. Adults spend most of their time either at a job, working individually or in small groups, then they go home to their families. School takes kids out of society, into an artificial environment which has more in common with a prison than the real world. School prevents socialization. Remember that the Columbine killers were ``socialized'' in one of the public, warehouse schools.
The Moores (see ``When Education Becomes Abuse: A Different Look at the Mental Health of Children'') did some research (see ``School Can Wait") in the 1970s which showed that putting children into a school environment before about age 12 caused no end of pathologies. They became peer-dependent, they became alienated from their parents, they learned to hate anyone who wasn't a member of their group, and on and on.
Most homeschooled children I've met are taught by parents who want to isolate them from what the parents see as harmful influences in public schools.
What sort of irresponsible parent wouldn't? The Moores' work shows that simply sending your kids to a ``good'' school can do them harm. The fact that there are metal detectors at the door and armed guards in the halls and a lot of violence in spite of all that shouldn't worry me, I suppose? Should I get my kids a bunch of snuff movies and kiddie porn so they don't grow up ``sheltered''? Have you done that for your kids?
That's not to say they're [homeschooling parents] all xenophobic extremist zealots, but the majority are.
I'm afraid that I've never met an extremist zealot who homeschooled, and I've met hundreds of homeschooling families over the years. Unless you simply mean ``parents who want to shelter their kids until they're mature enough to take care of themselves''. If that's what you mean, I'm proud to be a xenophobic extremist zealot.
I do know that Germany ``tracks'' students early. By about what would be middle school age here, the German kids' lives have been decided: either they are college material, or they're going into a trade. I think that most countries are closer to that system than to ours. Taiwan, for example, has high school entrance examinations, followed by college entrance exams. Both levels are highly competitive for the good schools.
I suspect that the U.S. practice of putting the disruptive and the incapable into the same class room with the capable and the brilliant is unique. Either way, what you're saying is that these other countries (e.g., Spain, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, France, et cetera) concentrate their resources on the students who are willing and able to benefit by them.
All of those countries have their share of economic and social problems, but many of them seem to have smaller and more tractable social problems than we do. Their economic problems don't seem to be caused by poor education to the extent ours are, either. No one seems to be suggesting that Germany's persistantly high unemployment rate, for example, could be solved by mainstreaming their retarded and their disruptive students, as we do, or by combining their trade schools with their gymnasiums, as we do.
So, yes, our high public school costs may have something to do with who we serve and how we serve them, but no, we don't seem to be any better off for the extra spending, neither economically nor socially. Furthermore, homeschoolers again are showing the way: learning disabled children who are homeschooled often wind up ahead of the U.S. median, and always at lower cost than the ineffective public child-warehouses. The problem isn't how much money we spend on the U.S. public schools, but how it's spent.
The problem isn't student's lack of interest, it's the lack of support from the government at the highest levels...
I'd argue that lack of preparation at the lowest levels has a lot to do with it, followed by lack of appreciation on the job.
The K-12 education system is a mess. Unfortunately, it isn't broken: it's working roughly as designed. It keeps the kids warehoused and off the labor market until age 18, which keeps unemployment rate down and the labor unions happy. It keeps the teachers' union strong. It provides free babysitting, which keeps the parents happy. It even provides a smattering of education to the children of the middle class, though that's only because of a few dedicated teachers who are doing their best to subvert the system.
It isn't a matter of money: every country which outscores us on standardized tests spends less money per student than we do. In 1998, the average per student expenditure for U.S. elementary and high schools was roughly the same as the per student expenditure at Harvard (NOT the tuition, but Harvard's expenditure).
The experience of recent immigrants suggests that cultural expectations are a big part of the problem: immigrants from the Caribbean usually do significantly better in school than American blacks in the same schools. Immigrants from China and Russia usually excel in the same schools in which American students avoid education. American schools foster an anti-intellectual culture which rewards ``students'' with popularity for almost anything but academic success.
Homeschoolers are educating their children to far higher standards than any public school, and at far less cost. While American public schools are spending over $7,000 per student, most homeshcoolers are spending less than $1,000 per student. That means they are spending roughly 1/10 the money, to get far better results. One big reason they are able to do this is is that they are able to socialize their children, in contrast to the public, warehouse schools, which anti-socialize them. Homeschooled children spend every day in society, seeing how adults value and reward work and learning. It's no wonder that they learn a very different lesson than the children in the warehouse schools.
Why are young Americans choosing any field but engineering and science? A big part of it is that the public schools don't prepare them adequately for anything, but especially not for the sciences. After teaching calculus to American engineering students at a competitive state university, I can say that even American engineering students are abysmally ill-prepared in math.
Then there's the problem of the reward on the job: why would any sensible person want to go into a field which requires long hours of hard study in school, followed by longer hours of harder work on the job, and rewards it with relatively low pay? Anyone who could make a good living as an engineer could make a much better living in something like financial engineering, accounting or actuary science, and the hours would be no worse.
Third, engineering is an ``up or out'' profession: after 5 to 10 years, most engineers are unemployable, since fresh graduates are available to do the same work (so their management thinks) for less money. Engineers who don't move into management eventually get laid off, and wind up flipping burgers. Why not coast through business school and go directly into management? You wind up in the same position, with less work and higher lifetime earnings.
If you become an engineer, you will work for managers who really believe that an engineer fresh out of school is better than an experienced engineer, because he's cheaper. Your management will sooner or later follow that to the logical conclusion that the engineer in China is ten times better than you, because he's ten times cheaper.
I got an engineering degree twenty years ago, but I never worked as an engineer, and today I'm an economist. What I've written abo
Sure the FSF can probably help, but I doubt they'd have the resources to defend the GPL on multiple fronts...
I suppose that if the expenses started to get out of hand, the FSF could take a few of the more egregious offenders to court, rather than settling. Or, they could simply start demanding a large cash settlement from the real bad guys. I'd say that their work could be self-funding, if they wanted to get mean.
And after less than 2000 years time we needed a Rosetta Stone and some big pictograms to re-discover how to read the ancient Egyptian pictograms. Now think that we had just found a shiny plastic disk. Even if we figured out how to read it, you're left with a string of numbers that say _nothing_ about the actual text.
Already covered, for thousands of years to come. The new, improved
Rosetta Stone. A really nifty project. I want one.
Slashdot Mirror
As a counter example, how about the four color theorem?
Still, if we make that: "Any idea that can't be convincingly explained without using several different colours and animation has a serious flaw in it somewhere.", I think we'll be in perfect agreement. Especially since that sort of idea usually involves dancing hamsters or so.
Unhappily, most of us who would be aware of the change are already against software patents. Debian is used mainly by folks like me, who value freedom, for people _and_ their ideas.
When MS and IBM start lobbying Congress to get rid of software patents (and business patents, too, please), then ``people will start to reconsider sofware patents.''
Every invention has at least two effects: the intended one and the other(s). For Flash, the intended effect is letting visually-oriented people do their thing. The unintended effect is shielding the rest of us from their thing, either by not installing Flash (my choice) or blocking it.
It's for you to say whether your life is incomplete without the minor celebrity pool player ad.
I've found that my life is substantially more complete without things which are best presented via Flash. Your friend is doing a great job by putting his ads in Flash, not least because I'll never see them. Tell him he needn't change on my account.
I'm a Linux/Libre software zealot who's 100% in favor of Flash. By not having it installed, I miss out on all the things on which I want to miss out.
``As of now.'' Something about your proposal is worrying me, but as of now I can't put my finger on it.
Yes, it's a good, sensible plan for today, but there's this terrible little flaw which keeps it from being a long term solution.
Second:
I recently advised a graphic designer/artist friend whose Flash app (advertising a minor celebrity pool player) ...
Don't ever let him get rid of that Flash. I've found that when I see a webpage that invites me to download Flash, I can just close that tab: there's nothing there for me to see. That's saved me a great deal of time and bandwidth which I might have wasted if those sites had used animated gifs instead.
He was a rich, whiney little slime in 1976, and he hasn't changed a bit. It seems that being a whiney little slime is profitable.
> I'd say the solution is to get the universities to do that job, in a kind of peer-2-peer style.
You genius, you! That's exactly how the current greedy, money-grubbing, for-profit journals do it! We write the articles, we (that is, everyone who submits articles) get tapped to review them, then our institutions get tapped to pay big bucks (thousands of dollars) for our work.
The only thing that would be different under this new proposal is that there wouldn't be any bloated, plutocratic publishers leaching off of us.
>... you could send the paper to different faculties and get a prof of statistics to have a look at the statistical methods used, ...
That would be different. A statistical review would result in some radical changes in some fields. It isn't going to happen, because too many careers and too many fields of study have been founded on unsound methods. I'll let you guess which I'm thinking of.
Why not? What does that ``c'' indicate?
That makes good sense, as far as it goes, but it ignores a vital question:
If you're a bright, capable kid who kind of likes programming, does it make sense for you to spend years of long hours studying programming and CS? Wouldn't it make more sense to use those same abilities in some field like financial engineering or accounting, where the long hours are likely to be rewarded with far higher pay, and a better career path? Or go in for a field like management, where you can coast through school and still make more money than the programmers you will be supervising?
I think that most bright, capable kids have figured this one out (with some help from breathless articles about unemployment and outsourcing), and if Johnny's smart enough to program, he's smart enough not to.
This is a useful refutation of the GP post, so a +1 insightful or informative would be good.
Since we're talking about Australia, I think it would be a great thing if their new law said something like this:
The first sentence should look familiar to Americans. The second sentence would prevent many of the abuses of copyright we're seeing today.No, 'Apocalypse' will be the MS OS which leads up to that. The release immediately after Billy G. has been declared world dictator for life will be called `Leviathan', named after the ultimate evil.
You're right: a perfect first release isn't the way most Libre projects proceed. They put together something that shows how good it could be, if only it were complete, and worked, then release it as version 0.0.1, and get some help.
Sun seems to be trying to release a completed masterpiece. No help wanted, thanks very much.
It's sort of like the difference between making a bazarre, and making a cathedral. Gee, that's a great metaphor! Maybe I should write an anthropology paper about the different development methods around that. I could title it: ``Sun's bizarre development model will build a cold, empty cathedral, but they could have had a sunny, open bazarre.'' Maybe just ``The Cathederal and the Bazarre'' for short. I bet I'd be famous!
while in the bible we see that Jesus said: No one comes to the Father except through Me.
Either Jesus was wrong, or your father's book is wrong (or both, I suppose). Certainly, they can't both be right.
You can suit yourself, but I'll believe Jesus.
You'll only encounter the Blue-light Saber of Death if your lightsaber is a Kmart special.
See who keeps sneaking their $&^%@ trash into your can.
At 2.5 meter resolution? You must have some FAT neighbors.
I'll put in a purchase order for the $1,000,000 version with the $100,000 per year support contract. That's the version where girls with good hair provide on site support.
It doesn't really even have to give them ``a run for their money''. It just has to give decent, hi-res, 2D performance with no hassles using Libre drivers on Libre operating systems. The five percent or so of the video card market who use Linux and the BDSs may not sound like much, but it's a niche these guys could have all to themselves. If it doesn't cost any more than the equivalent from Nvidia, I'd buy it in preference to anything with closed drivers. That's really all they have to do: decent 2D, and don't cost more.
Gamers are willing to spend a lot on video cards, but the majority of us are quite happy without 3D anything, as long as we get a clear, high resloution image of emacs or openoffice on a big monitor. Let Nvidia and ATI have the gamer market; those guys are all on Windows, anyway.
I can only think of two places where you are likely to be age tracked, and spend all your time with large groups of people your own age: the military, and prison. The age tracking isn't deliberate in those institutions, but there are some other parallels.
Socialization is what happens in society. Adults spend most of their time either at a job, working individually or in small groups, then they go home to their families. School takes kids out of society, into an artificial environment which has more in common with a prison than the real world. School prevents socialization. Remember that the Columbine killers were ``socialized'' in one of the public, warehouse schools.
The Moores (see ``When Education Becomes Abuse: A Different Look at the Mental Health of Children'') did some research (see ``School Can Wait") in the 1970s which showed that putting children into a school environment before about age 12 caused no end of pathologies. They became peer-dependent, they became alienated from their parents, they learned to hate anyone who wasn't a member of their group, and on and on.
Most homeschooled children I've met are taught by parents who want to isolate them from what the parents see as harmful influences in public schools.
What sort of irresponsible parent wouldn't? The Moores' work shows that simply sending your kids to a ``good'' school can do them harm. The fact that there are metal detectors at the door and armed guards in the halls and a lot of violence in spite of all that shouldn't worry me, I suppose? Should I get my kids a bunch of snuff movies and kiddie porn so they don't grow up ``sheltered''? Have you done that for your kids?
That's not to say they're [homeschooling parents] all xenophobic extremist zealots, but the majority are.
I'm afraid that I've never met an extremist zealot who homeschooled, and I've met hundreds of homeschooling families over the years. Unless you simply mean ``parents who want to shelter their kids until they're mature enough to take care of themselves''. If that's what you mean, I'm proud to be a xenophobic extremist zealot.
I think it was unforgivably bad moderation, by a lousy moderator, who probably won't have the grace to be ashamed of himself.
I do know that Germany ``tracks'' students early. By about what would be middle school age here, the German kids' lives have been decided: either they are college material, or they're going into a trade. I think that most countries are closer to that system than to ours. Taiwan, for example, has high school entrance examinations, followed by college entrance exams. Both levels are highly competitive for the good schools.
I suspect that the U.S. practice of putting the disruptive and the incapable into the same class room with the capable and the brilliant is unique. Either way, what you're saying is that these other countries (e.g., Spain, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, France, et cetera) concentrate their resources on the students who are willing and able to benefit by them.
All of those countries have their share of economic and social problems, but many of them seem to have smaller and more tractable social problems than we do. Their economic problems don't seem to be caused by poor education to the extent ours are, either. No one seems to be suggesting that Germany's persistantly high unemployment rate, for example, could be solved by mainstreaming their retarded and their disruptive students, as we do, or by combining their trade schools with their gymnasiums, as we do.
So, yes, our high public school costs may have something to do with who we serve and how we serve them, but no, we don't seem to be any better off for the extra spending, neither economically nor socially. Furthermore, homeschoolers again are showing the way: learning disabled children who are homeschooled often wind up ahead of the U.S. median, and always at lower cost than the ineffective public child-warehouses. The problem isn't how much money we spend on the U.S. public schools, but how it's spent.
I'd argue that lack of preparation at the lowest levels has a lot to do with it, followed by lack of appreciation on the job.
The K-12 education system is a mess. Unfortunately, it isn't broken: it's working roughly as designed. It keeps the kids warehoused and off the labor market until age 18, which keeps unemployment rate down and the labor unions happy. It keeps the teachers' union strong. It provides free babysitting, which keeps the parents happy. It even provides a smattering of education to the children of the middle class, though that's only because of a few dedicated teachers who are doing their best to subvert the system.
It isn't a matter of money: every country which outscores us on standardized tests spends less money per student than we do. In 1998, the average per student expenditure for U.S. elementary and high schools was roughly the same as the per student expenditure at Harvard (NOT the tuition, but Harvard's expenditure).
The experience of recent immigrants suggests that cultural expectations are a big part of the problem: immigrants from the Caribbean usually do significantly better in school than American blacks in the same schools. Immigrants from China and Russia usually excel in the same schools in which American students avoid education. American schools foster an anti-intellectual culture which rewards ``students'' with popularity for almost anything but academic success.
Homeschoolers are educating their children to far higher standards than any public school, and at far less cost. While American public schools are spending over $7,000 per student, most homeshcoolers are spending less than $1,000 per student. That means they are spending roughly 1/10 the money, to get far better results. One big reason they are able to do this is is that they are able to socialize their children, in contrast to the public, warehouse schools, which anti-socialize them. Homeschooled children spend every day in society, seeing how adults value and reward work and learning. It's no wonder that they learn a very different lesson than the children in the warehouse schools.
Why are young Americans choosing any field but engineering and science? A big part of it is that the public schools don't prepare them adequately for anything, but especially not for the sciences. After teaching calculus to American engineering students at a competitive state university, I can say that even American engineering students are abysmally ill-prepared in math.
Then there's the problem of the reward on the job: why would any sensible person want to go into a field which requires long hours of hard study in school, followed by longer hours of harder work on the job, and rewards it with relatively low pay? Anyone who could make a good living as an engineer could make a much better living in something like financial engineering, accounting or actuary science, and the hours would be no worse.
Third, engineering is an ``up or out'' profession: after 5 to 10 years, most engineers are unemployable, since fresh graduates are available to do the same work (so their management thinks) for less money. Engineers who don't move into management eventually get laid off, and wind up flipping burgers. Why not coast through business school and go directly into management? You wind up in the same position, with less work and higher lifetime earnings.
If you become an engineer, you will work for managers who really believe that an engineer fresh out of school is better than an experienced engineer, because he's cheaper. Your management will sooner or later follow that to the logical conclusion that the engineer in China is ten times better than you, because he's ten times cheaper.
I got an engineering degree twenty years ago, but I never worked as an engineer, and today I'm an economist. What I've written abo
I suppose that if the expenses started to get out of hand, the FSF could take a few of the more egregious offenders to court, rather than settling. Or, they could simply start demanding a large cash settlement from the real bad guys. I'd say that their work could be self-funding, if they wanted to get mean.
Already covered, for thousands of years to come. The new, improved Rosetta Stone. A really nifty project. I want one.