I hesistate to first throw hardware at the problem,
Why? If you're delivering a system, then it doesn't matter whether it's the hardware or the software doing the heavy lifting. $1,000 hardware with $100 software is just as expensive as $100 hardware with $1,000 software. If one solution has a desirable property (such as fewer bugs or faster delivery time), by all means take it.
but I do agree that optimizations generally should be left as the last thing to do in a project. Code should be written first to be readable and correct. Once those goals have been met, testing and profiling will find the few areas that are critical and may need some optimization.
Great goals, and this is something I would tell a student of computer science. The problem is that the industry is so bad at scheduling software projects that there's rarely ever any time scheduled for optimization. In practice, the only things that get optimized are the things that are Really Too Slow, and little or no effort goes to make things run Fast.
I'm not sure if that is true these days. I think IT management are looking much closer at what kind of bang per buck they are getting.
Particularly in a bad economy, IT departments are faced with increasing pressure to justify their own existence. It's hard to show how important you are until it's too late (you've been laid off and the network goes down), so it's important to roll out new projects and software installations even if nobody uses them. It gives you bullet points to present when the executives ask what you've been up to.
between a good VB app and a good C app [...], I'm guessing the C one would be better.
"Better" cannot be decided outside of a certain context. Does it have to run in Linux? If so, VB is probably never going to be "better". Does it have to be done really quickly and cheaply? If so, VB might be better.
Edsger Dijkstra is all too typical of the arrogant academics who gave rise to Shaw's comment "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach."
I disagree. Dijkstra is credited with numerous important fundamental algorithms, so he most certain "can". This isn't to say that he isn't arrogant, or that there aren't arrogant professors who "can't". This is to say there are those who are arrogant, and "can".
I have no problems at all with you criticizing various things he said or stood for. Just because he is smart enough to discover algorithms doesn't mean that he is beyond reproach. However, to say he "can't" I'm tempted to ask what you have done for computer science.
In the US a child genetically related to only one parent is extremely rare.
Based on data presented by a religious group, the divorce rate in the US is about 20% to 30%. Any children produced in these marriages will be related to only one parent in the event of a remarriage. On what basis do you conclude "extremely rare"?
In the face of proof you have simply reverted to a self-fulfilling sample. Think about it; those who think they cannot change have not and are in your sampling and those that think they can change have and are therefore not in your sampling.
I entirely agree that assuming homosexuals know correctly that they cannot change their sexual orientation is not a strong position. This is why I referred to it as a fallback in the absence of proof.
Now I ask you to think about it: if you can change, perhaps you weren't ever really a homosexual. In other words, you are logically just as unable to draw conclusion from those who changed than those who remained.
Answer #1 conflicts with #2, to wit "I simply don't feel that everybody deserves to be born equal in every way," yet you say, "From all appearances homosexuals [need] equal treatment."
No, it doesn't. Answer #1 says a person who was born without an arm cannot ask society to make good that arm. Answer #2 says a person cannot be treated differently than others by the state without just cause. Making everybody equal - nevermind it being impossible - is not society's job. Treating each person equally before the law, on the other hand, is common sense to lawful societies. Put another way, just because I don't think the government should pay someone $1M for losing a leg, I also don't think the government should deny that same person the right to marry because he lacks a leg.
Also answer #3 does not answer the question.
Then allow me to try again. I am reluctant to comment on what is natural. What do you call a woman, armed with modern knowledge, who times her sex acts to improve chances of conception? What do you call artificial insemination? One can take a definition that any conscious act to affect pregnancy is unnatural, which includes all of the above and of course asexual reproduction. One can also take a definition that anything that can happen in nature is natural. This is a philosophical or religious distinction that a government separated from the church has no business determining.
1) Through what intrusive, all knowing crystal ball will we determine who truly cannot have children and who can?
A heterosexual woman with her ovaries removed has less chance today of bearing children than a homosexual woman. Yet the former can marry, the latter cannot.
The fact remains that the same-sex union itself did not result in offspring and so society's interest in that union is considerably reduced.
As long as there are more unwanted children than there are willing and able adoptive parents, the state should in fact be interested in any union that will take good care of these children.
Furthermore, this line of reasoning suggests that if homosexual reproduction is as easy and safe as heterosexual reproduction, then there would be no opposition. Unfortunately science doesn't move fast enough to watch people eat their own words, but unless you agree with this point I must suspect you are merely hiding behind it.
My marriage is a commitment to my spouse, but even more relevant to the state it is a commitment to my children.
So you think heterosexual couples who do not wish to have children are "marginalizing" your commitment to your children, and should not be allowed to marry?
Look, if it's about children, then heterosexuals who do not want children cannot be exempt.
Same-sex partners want to marginalize the commitment to my children with a definition of marriage as simply an acknowledgement that my wife and I love each other.
This is as silly as saying other government employe
In neither case would the new husband or wife(?) be recognized as the child's family.
In what sense? Emotionally, they certainly can be. Legally, the child can be formally adopted. Genetically, clearly not, but is genetic relationship a pre-requisite for family?
If so, why is adoption legal?
So the child is really orthoganal to the point you were making as a childless woman or a woman with a child is treated the same. And a child is treated the same whether or not the woman chooses to shack up with a new male or female.
Correct. The child is inserted into the example to make a family. In the US, a heterosexual couple with a child genetically related to only one parent is not exactly rare.
I singled out "discovering" in quotes as that seems to imply that homosexuality is a condition out of her control precluding her from a heterosexual relationship. If I am wrong let me know, it will be important later.
This is a point of contention. There are people who think homosexuality is a choice that can be corrected. In the absence of proof, I defer to what the general homosexual population claims, which is that they do not choose their sexual orientation.
1) Do you feel that the handicapped should be compensated to help restore that which we deem naturally would be theirs?
No. They should be helped (charity) so that they are as self-sufficient as possible, but society owes them nothing for their misfortunes. (I'm talking about a moral debt, not a real debt such as a social insurance mechanism.) I simply don't feel that everybody deserves to be born equal in every way (mind, body parts, wealth, etc.)
2) Do you feel that homosexuality is a handicap?
No. From all appearances homosexuals do not need any special assistance, except equal treatment.
3) Do you feel that having children is a natural capacity of a homosexual union and/or a heterosexual union
I feel that whether or not a couple has children is none of the government's business. However, if it insists on granting extra rights to child-rearing couples, then heterosexuals without children should get exactly the same treatment as homosexuals.
I also feel that you haven't answered the question: what is the difference between two married homosexuals and two married heterosexuals who do not want or cannot have children?
A woman has a child with a man, who then leaves her with custody of the child. She later discovers that she is really homosexual, and moves in with her lover.
If she had moved in with a man, she can marry him. There are probably very few states that would not recognize this marriage, if any. On the other hand, very few states would recognize her gay marriage, even if the state cannot prove any material difference in the marital or family relationship.
Based on this example alone, it should be clear that the opponents to gay marriage don't actually have a problem with the constitution of the family or the depths of relationships, but with the fact that they are gay.
A heterosexual couple who cannot or will not have children can get married. A heterosexual couple who cannot have children can have a child with the help of a sperm or egg donor. None of these marriages and families are legally any different from the "normal" family.
So why must gay marriages be illegal? Why is the marriage of two infertile people legal? In fact, societies actively celebrate the marriage of very old people as fairytale endings. Why aren't their marriages illegal as well?
Its not what is neccisary for a family, but what is optimal for a family.
It's not completely clear to me what you mean by "it". I've been talking about genetic relationships of offspring with both parents. Assuming you're talking about the same thing, are you saying that a family where a child is genetically related only to a mother or father (i.e., remarried), or not at all (i.e., adopted), are "suboptimal" families? If so, why do most states allow them to occur (but not gay marriages)?
Ok, I didn't spell out my point well enough. I meant genetically linked families of both parents. They can't do that.
Sure, but why is that necessary for "family"? Two heterosexuals can adopt and have a family (both in the legal sense and in the moral sense in most societies). If you pay attention to the news, you might notice that homosexual couples are already getting marriage rights in various places. The moral debate you fear is already reality.
Great, so we are forced into another ice age, we lose parts of the population, we lose parts of cities... It's part of Earth's cycle. We sped it up, sure, we could have prevented it, possibly...
Sure, why retaliate if somebody flies an airplane into a building? Every single one of the victims would've died of something anyway. The terrorists just sped it up.
I don't think that the earth cares one way or the other.
Even if the earth did, there are probably plenty of planets just like earth. The universe won't care.
On the other hand, we live here. I don't believe we have "a responsibility to take care of the earth" or whatever, and the extinction of the human race isn't a big deal in the cosmic sense, but exactly why shouldn't we try to survive?
In the 80's, it was believed (by large record companies mainly) that home taping of radio broadcasts was killing music. This is the exact same thing as home taping [...]
No, it isn't. The really scary thing for the recording industry isn't just that you can make a high quality copy, but that you can redistribute high quality copies with great ease. How many tapes or CDs can you make for friends before it feels like a lousy job? Even if you're willing, how many friends can you possibly have? On the other hand, how many copies can you share via P2P?
First of all, speaking as a professional software developer, forking is bad. Forking inevitably involves extra work integrating changes from branch to branch, and can be justified only by some technical or business need. Forking also multiplies testing requirements.
I think we're talking about unnecessary forking as bad. For example, if vendor R backports features A, B, C, and D, while vendor S backports features A, C, D, and E, and vendor D backports features A, B, and E, writing software that'll work on "Linux" can already become complicated. In my example, you can only count on feature A being present, despite the collective effort of distros to backport 5 features 11 times!
The Linux software market, particularly on the desktop, is small enough as it is. If the market demand for backporting comes mainly from the desktop, then it might be better to establish a common "desktop branch" somewhere between the development and stable branches.
My fear is always that development/new stuff backported to a "stable" kernel is going to cause system unstability and weird stuff.
The problem is that Linux serves three major customers: developers, desktops, and servers. The developers are well-served by the odd-numbered development branch. The servers need a rock solid branch, but tend to have very little need to support new hardware, so they should be happy with the even-numbered branch. The desktops still need stability, but also have to work with new hardware. Since the kernel developers don't have a formal process for this demographic, it's up to the distro maintainers to backport changes from the cutting edge.
This is not a good thing, though. If each desktop Linux distro picks a slightly different subset of features to backport, desktop Linux can become even more fractured than the Gnome/KDE division. If they can manage to work together, it might be better to establish a new common branch between the two traditional ones.
Glade simplifies GUI development to a point that I have yet to see anyone improve on, in terms of simplicity (I've worked with Tk, regular Gtk, wxWindows, and web-based applications).
I've tried "plain" Tk, "plain" GTK, and HTML for GUIs. They were all bordering on painful and inflexible. But before I agree with your conclusion about Glade, have you tried the MacOS X Interface Builder?
If so, his belief in open source is less than his belief that he should make money selling closed source software, because he's not open sourcing his newest stuff. If open source was his first priority, then the Doom III engine would be on sourceforge where a thousand eyes can help him debug.
This takes nothing away from id Software. They should be lauded for open sourcing code that they feel they can. I'm sure this benefits students of 3-D graphics and game design. However, based on his actions, Carmack believes in the closed source model of software development and sales.
Now, intentional or not, open sourcing old engines has the following effects:
It's good karma. People will know that id is a cool company, and all other things being equal, you'd buy from a cool company.
It brings people in the door. Think of it as a loss leader that retail stores use to bring you in, hoping you'd buy something else as well. If you've worked with one id engine (and liked it), you have some confidence that the one you have to buy will also be pretty good.
It kills competition. Nobody can survive as an engine developer if your product is at the level of older id engines. IOW, id is forcing competitors to keep up, which is a hard thing because id moves pretty quickly.
I think it's cynical to try to guess which effects are intentional. However, I also think it's pretty naive to think it's all charity.
Guaranteed ownership of ideas. Local programmers are much less prone to simply taking their employer's ideas and reselling them to the next bidder. Foreign companies with vast distances between them and their hiring companies sometimes decide that because they wrote the software that they have the right to redistribute it.
You start out with "much less prone", and end with "sometimes". Do you actually have an fact-based estimate of how often this happens in either case, or are you just making this up as you go?
One thing that limits how fast jobs move overseas is communication.
This is true, but only to an extent. It is true enough to make a low-level manager reluctant to outsource all his underlings, but it will not be enough to make a high-level manager hesitate to outsource the entire department (including the reluctant low-level manager) and hire an Indian or Chinese manager who speaks excellent English.
Socialism and democracy and working together are actually good things and make life better to live.
They are also idealized systems. To take your previous assertion, how would you identify the scientists who are out for only personal fame (or fortune) before they have received it?
The point I was trying to make was far too subtle, and the actual words I chose were far too confrontational. Mainly I fear a social system, as you proposed, where a moral opinion (majority or minority) is supreme. I would like to be judged by the merits of my work, where my motives are my own business.
So yes Yellow Dog has a buisness case for people like us.
Whenever somebody ask a question like this, it seems that people are so eager to prove they exist. I'm not saying you don't exist. I'm asking how many there are of you! You cited four people. That's not a bleeding business case!
The point is, you don't know if it's a viable business. Nor do I. Which is why somebody asked the question.
As for your second question about why support 64-bit G5's now? Why not? Just because not many people have them yet and from your point of view even less would want Yellow Dog on them, why not support them now and be ready when more and more people start getting G5's and want to put Yellow Dog or another version of GNU/Linux on them, they will be ready.
That's quite a sentence there.:)
Seriously, a business should never ask "why not?" A business must always ask "why?" and "who will pay for it?" That's the nature of the beast. The late 90's dotcoms were exactly the businesses that asked "why not an on-line pet supplies store?" and "why not an on-line grocery store?"
Why not? Because investment wasted could've been used elsewhere. Even if the investment eventually is recouped, being "ahead of your time" is not a good thing in business.
GNU/Linux is constantly blasted for not supporting the latest hardware and what you are saying is that they shouldnt support the G5 because it is too new.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. Debian and other free distros should support the newest hardware as quickly as it can. A distro that relies on getting paid, on the other hand, should work on stuff that will get them paid. Debian has no business objective. I presume Yellow Dog does, since they want $55 for a box set.
Also, just because you view OSX as supirior does not mean everyone does.
I didn't say OS X was superior. I was discussing if YDL had a business case. As any Linux user must know, technical superiority has precious little to do with market success. But just for the sake of argument, YDL's home page is now advertising "Introducing... Dual Monitor Support". I wouldn't be surprised if that feature sells more boxes than 64-bit support within the next quarter.
I think we want the same thing....but I think flat taxes are the wrong way to get there.
By flat tax I did't really mean that literally everybody pays 17% or whatever. If society decides that the rich should pay more, then the tax rates are still easily designed. For example:
first $25,000: 10%
portion beyond $25,000: 15%
portion beyond $100,000: 20%
portion beyond $500,000: 30%
This way, if you make $100,001, then $25K of that would be taxed at 10%, $75K at 15%, and $1 at 20%. This avoids a huge difference in taxes between you and somebody who made $99,999. The good thing is that this is still nothing that would require a huge IRS, and takes literally minutes to compute.
I think programmers should share. We are, after all, computer scientists. What if every other scientist locked up all of their secrets
Scientists regularly lock up their secrets. The chemists who developed Coca-Cola are still keeping its formula a secret. The nuclear bomb and rocket scientists also keep their secrets. Even in the basic sciences where money and lives are rarely at stake, it's prudent to keep your discoveries secret until you are ready to publish, because unscrupulous scientists routinely steal important discoveries and fame.
It's just plain stupid to re-write some things when you have a perfectly good solution already written. Besides, if you write it over enough times, you'll remember how to write it... then you are ALWAYS carrying around code from job to job. You can't not take it.
Depends on the solution. The obvious example is a patented solution you wrote for a previous company, which you clearly cannot take along (without proper license). Beyond that, there are solutions worth significant money whose secrecy you were contractually obligated to protect, even if you invented it. An implementation of binary search that you copied from a book anyway is probably not covered.
Performances ! Run lmbench or do large HPC and compare. There is a real market for such type of applications, and so far, OS X is still way too far behind (lack of 64 bits address space is one thing, lack of large pages support is another, raw kernel perfs gets in the loop as well).
It's exactly because there's a demand for such things that ensures Apple will be concentrating on it. Apple knows that its hardware, while competent, doesn't blow the x86 out of the water. It is one of the few companies that is visibly optimizing its code.
- Choice. There are other reasons to choose an OS but "it's slick". Some of us (I know some people have difficulties getting this concept) do actually value the concept of Open Source and want to actively participate for personal and/or political reasons.
Yes, but how many people are willing to pay extra (OS X, like Windows, is "free") for principle?
The point is, I'm not belitting your choice one bit. I'm just agreeing with the parent question in the sense of wondering what Yellow Dog's business model is. When (not if, I think) Apple catches up with your first reason, will there be enough customers left for anybody else?
You can't begin to imagine how true this is. [...] I'm talking about tweaking the code
If Yellow Dog is counting on this sort of customer for a significant percentage of its income, they are doomed. No offense to you, but you have to be in the gross minority. The parent question "who wipes out OS X for Linux?" is really implicitly asking whether Yellow Dog has a real business case, not whether there are 20 people in the world who would do that.
The other part of the question is also valid. 64-bit support obviously will only run on a G5. This limits the audience further to people who have bought recent XServes or Power Macs. Obviously that will change over time, but is this already a good time to be investing in 64-bit?
Both good questions not answered by your anecdote, I think.
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Why? If you're delivering a system, then it doesn't matter whether it's the hardware or the software doing the heavy lifting. $1,000 hardware with $100 software is just as expensive as $100 hardware with $1,000 software. If one solution has a desirable property (such as fewer bugs or faster delivery time), by all means take it.
but I do agree that optimizations generally should be left as the last thing to do in a project. Code should be written first to be readable and correct. Once those goals have been met, testing and profiling will find the few areas that are critical and may need some optimization.
Great goals, and this is something I would tell a student of computer science. The problem is that the industry is so bad at scheduling software projects that there's rarely ever any time scheduled for optimization. In practice, the only things that get optimized are the things that are Really Too Slow, and little or no effort goes to make things run Fast.
Particularly in a bad economy, IT departments are faced with increasing pressure to justify their own existence. It's hard to show how important you are until it's too late (you've been laid off and the network goes down), so it's important to roll out new projects and software installations even if nobody uses them. It gives you bullet points to present when the executives ask what you've been up to.
Because we don't make enough money in prison to pay income taxes.
"Better" cannot be decided outside of a certain context. Does it have to run in Linux? If so, VB is probably never going to be "better". Does it have to be done really quickly and cheaply? If so, VB might be better.
I disagree. Dijkstra is credited with numerous important fundamental algorithms, so he most certain "can". This isn't to say that he isn't arrogant, or that there aren't arrogant professors who "can't". This is to say there are those who are arrogant, and "can".
I have no problems at all with you criticizing various things he said or stood for. Just because he is smart enough to discover algorithms doesn't mean that he is beyond reproach. However, to say he "can't" I'm tempted to ask what you have done for computer science.
Based on data presented by a religious group, the divorce rate in the US is about 20% to 30%. Any children produced in these marriages will be related to only one parent in the event of a remarriage. On what basis do you conclude "extremely rare"?
In the face of proof you have simply reverted to a self-fulfilling sample. Think about it; those who think they cannot change have not and are in your sampling and those that think they can change have and are therefore not in your sampling.
I entirely agree that assuming homosexuals know correctly that they cannot change their sexual orientation is not a strong position. This is why I referred to it as a fallback in the absence of proof.
Now I ask you to think about it: if you can change, perhaps you weren't ever really a homosexual. In other words, you are logically just as unable to draw conclusion from those who changed than those who remained.
Answer #1 conflicts with #2, to wit "I simply don't feel that everybody deserves to be born equal in every way," yet you say, "From all appearances homosexuals [need] equal treatment."
No, it doesn't. Answer #1 says a person who was born without an arm cannot ask society to make good that arm. Answer #2 says a person cannot be treated differently than others by the state without just cause. Making everybody equal - nevermind it being impossible - is not society's job. Treating each person equally before the law, on the other hand, is common sense to lawful societies. Put another way, just because I don't think the government should pay someone $1M for losing a leg, I also don't think the government should deny that same person the right to marry because he lacks a leg.
Also answer #3 does not answer the question.
Then allow me to try again. I am reluctant to comment on what is natural. What do you call a woman, armed with modern knowledge, who times her sex acts to improve chances of conception? What do you call artificial insemination? One can take a definition that any conscious act to affect pregnancy is unnatural, which includes all of the above and of course asexual reproduction. One can also take a definition that anything that can happen in nature is natural. This is a philosophical or religious distinction that a government separated from the church has no business determining.
1) Through what intrusive, all knowing crystal ball will we determine who truly cannot have children and who can?
A heterosexual woman with her ovaries removed has less chance today of bearing children than a homosexual woman. Yet the former can marry, the latter cannot.
The fact remains that the same-sex union itself did not result in offspring and so society's interest in that union is considerably reduced.
As long as there are more unwanted children than there are willing and able adoptive parents, the state should in fact be interested in any union that will take good care of these children.
Furthermore, this line of reasoning suggests that if homosexual reproduction is as easy and safe as heterosexual reproduction, then there would be no opposition. Unfortunately science doesn't move fast enough to watch people eat their own words, but unless you agree with this point I must suspect you are merely hiding behind it.
My marriage is a commitment to my spouse, but even more relevant to the state it is a commitment to my children.
So you think heterosexual couples who do not wish to have children are "marginalizing" your commitment to your children, and should not be allowed to marry?
Look, if it's about children, then heterosexuals who do not want children cannot be exempt.
Same-sex partners want to marginalize the commitment to my children with a definition of marriage as simply an acknowledgement that my wife and I love each other.
This is as silly as saying other government employe
In what sense? Emotionally, they certainly can be. Legally, the child can be formally adopted. Genetically, clearly not, but is genetic relationship a pre-requisite for family?
If so, why is adoption legal?
So the child is really orthoganal to the point you were making as a childless woman or a woman with a child is treated the same. And a child is treated the same whether or not the woman chooses to shack up with a new male or female.
Correct. The child is inserted into the example to make a family. In the US, a heterosexual couple with a child genetically related to only one parent is not exactly rare.
I singled out "discovering" in quotes as that seems to imply that homosexuality is a condition out of her control precluding her from a heterosexual relationship. If I am wrong let me know, it will be important later.
This is a point of contention. There are people who think homosexuality is a choice that can be corrected. In the absence of proof, I defer to what the general homosexual population claims, which is that they do not choose their sexual orientation.
1) Do you feel that the handicapped should be compensated to help restore that which we deem naturally would be theirs?
No. They should be helped (charity) so that they are as self-sufficient as possible, but society owes them nothing for their misfortunes. (I'm talking about a moral debt, not a real debt such as a social insurance mechanism.) I simply don't feel that everybody deserves to be born equal in every way (mind, body parts, wealth, etc.)
2) Do you feel that homosexuality is a handicap?
No. From all appearances homosexuals do not need any special assistance, except equal treatment.
3) Do you feel that having children is a natural capacity of a homosexual union and/or a heterosexual union
I feel that whether or not a couple has children is none of the government's business. However, if it insists on granting extra rights to child-rearing couples, then heterosexuals without children should get exactly the same treatment as homosexuals.
I also feel that you haven't answered the question: what is the difference between two married homosexuals and two married heterosexuals who do not want or cannot have children?
A woman has a child with a man, who then leaves her with custody of the child. She later discovers that she is really homosexual, and moves in with her lover.
If she had moved in with a man, she can marry him. There are probably very few states that would not recognize this marriage, if any. On the other hand, very few states would recognize her gay marriage, even if the state cannot prove any material difference in the marital or family relationship.
Based on this example alone, it should be clear that the opponents to gay marriage don't actually have a problem with the constitution of the family or the depths of relationships, but with the fact that they are gay.
A heterosexual couple who cannot or will not have children can get married. A heterosexual couple who cannot have children can have a child with the help of a sperm or egg donor. None of these marriages and families are legally any different from the "normal" family.
So why must gay marriages be illegal? Why is the marriage of two infertile people legal? In fact, societies actively celebrate the marriage of very old people as fairytale endings. Why aren't their marriages illegal as well?
It's not completely clear to me what you mean by "it". I've been talking about genetic relationships of offspring with both parents. Assuming you're talking about the same thing, are you saying that a family where a child is genetically related only to a mother or father (i.e., remarried), or not at all (i.e., adopted), are "suboptimal" families? If so, why do most states allow them to occur (but not gay marriages)?
Sure, but why is that necessary for "family"? Two heterosexuals can adopt and have a family (both in the legal sense and in the moral sense in most societies). If you pay attention to the news, you might notice that homosexual couples are already getting marriage rights in various places. The moral debate you fear is already reality.
Sure, why retaliate if somebody flies an airplane into a building? Every single one of the victims would've died of something anyway. The terrorists just sped it up.
I don't think that the earth cares one way or the other.
Even if the earth did, there are probably plenty of planets just like earth. The universe won't care.
On the other hand, we live here. I don't believe we have "a responsibility to take care of the earth" or whatever, and the extinction of the human race isn't a big deal in the cosmic sense, but exactly why shouldn't we try to survive?
No, it isn't. The really scary thing for the recording industry isn't just that you can make a high quality copy, but that you can redistribute high quality copies with great ease. How many tapes or CDs can you make for friends before it feels like a lousy job? Even if you're willing, how many friends can you possibly have? On the other hand, how many copies can you share via P2P?
The Internet is what they're terrified about.
First of all, speaking as a professional software developer, forking is bad. Forking inevitably involves extra work integrating changes from branch to branch, and can be justified only by some technical or business need. Forking also multiplies testing requirements.
I think we're talking about unnecessary forking as bad. For example, if vendor R backports features A, B, C, and D, while vendor S backports features A, C, D, and E, and vendor D backports features A, B, and E, writing software that'll work on "Linux" can already become complicated. In my example, you can only count on feature A being present, despite the collective effort of distros to backport 5 features 11 times!
The Linux software market, particularly on the desktop, is small enough as it is. If the market demand for backporting comes mainly from the desktop, then it might be better to establish a common "desktop branch" somewhere between the development and stable branches.
The problem is that Linux serves three major customers: developers, desktops, and servers. The developers are well-served by the odd-numbered development branch. The servers need a rock solid branch, but tend to have very little need to support new hardware, so they should be happy with the even-numbered branch. The desktops still need stability, but also have to work with new hardware. Since the kernel developers don't have a formal process for this demographic, it's up to the distro maintainers to backport changes from the cutting edge.
This is not a good thing, though. If each desktop Linux distro picks a slightly different subset of features to backport, desktop Linux can become even more fractured than the Gnome/KDE division. If they can manage to work together, it might be better to establish a new common branch between the two traditional ones.
I've tried "plain" Tk, "plain" GTK, and HTML for GUIs. They were all bordering on painful and inflexible. But before I agree with your conclusion about Glade, have you tried the MacOS X Interface Builder?
If so, his belief in open source is less than his belief that he should make money selling closed source software, because he's not open sourcing his newest stuff. If open source was his first priority, then the Doom III engine would be on sourceforge where a thousand eyes can help him debug.
This takes nothing away from id Software. They should be lauded for open sourcing code that they feel they can. I'm sure this benefits students of 3-D graphics and game design. However, based on his actions, Carmack believes in the closed source model of software development and sales.
Now, intentional or not, open sourcing old engines has the following effects:
- It's good karma. People will know that id is a cool company, and all other things being equal, you'd buy from a cool company.
- It brings people in the door. Think of it as a loss leader that retail stores use to bring you in, hoping you'd buy something else as well. If you've worked with one id engine (and liked it), you have some confidence that the one you have to buy will also be pretty good.
- It kills competition. Nobody can survive as an engine developer if your product is at the level of older id engines. IOW, id is forcing competitors to keep up, which is a hard thing because id moves pretty quickly.
I think it's cynical to try to guess which effects are intentional. However, I also think it's pretty naive to think it's all charity.You start out with "much less prone", and end with "sometimes". Do you actually have an fact-based estimate of how often this happens in either case, or are you just making this up as you go?
This is true, but only to an extent. It is true enough to make a low-level manager reluctant to outsource all his underlings, but it will not be enough to make a high-level manager hesitate to outsource the entire department (including the reluctant low-level manager) and hire an Indian or Chinese manager who speaks excellent English.
They are also idealized systems. To take your previous assertion, how would you identify the scientists who are out for only personal fame (or fortune) before they have received it?
The point I was trying to make was far too subtle, and the actual words I chose were far too confrontational. Mainly I fear a social system, as you proposed, where a moral opinion (majority or minority) is supreme. I would like to be judged by the merits of my work, where my motives are my own business.
Right. What have you done for the world, and why do you deserve the right to tell other people what they should be working for?
Whenever somebody ask a question like this, it seems that people are so eager to prove they exist. I'm not saying you don't exist. I'm asking how many there are of you! You cited four people. That's not a bleeding business case!
The point is, you don't know if it's a viable business. Nor do I. Which is why somebody asked the question.
As for your second question about why support 64-bit G5's now? Why not? Just because not many people have them yet and from your point of view even less would want Yellow Dog on them, why not support them now and be ready when more and more people start getting G5's and want to put Yellow Dog or another version of GNU/Linux on them, they will be ready.
That's quite a sentence there. :)
Seriously, a business should never ask "why not?" A business must always ask "why?" and "who will pay for it?" That's the nature of the beast. The late 90's dotcoms were exactly the businesses that asked "why not an on-line pet supplies store?" and "why not an on-line grocery store?"
Why not? Because investment wasted could've been used elsewhere. Even if the investment eventually is recouped, being "ahead of your time" is not a good thing in business.
GNU/Linux is constantly blasted for not supporting the latest hardware and what you are saying is that they shouldnt support the G5 because it is too new.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. Debian and other free distros should support the newest hardware as quickly as it can. A distro that relies on getting paid, on the other hand, should work on stuff that will get them paid. Debian has no business objective. I presume Yellow Dog does, since they want $55 for a box set.
Also, just because you view OSX as supirior does not mean everyone does.
I didn't say OS X was superior. I was discussing if YDL had a business case. As any Linux user must know, technical superiority has precious little to do with market success. But just for the sake of argument, YDL's home page is now advertising "Introducing... Dual Monitor Support". I wouldn't be surprised if that feature sells more boxes than 64-bit support within the next quarter.
By flat tax I did't really mean that literally everybody pays 17% or whatever. If society decides that the rich should pay more, then the tax rates are still easily designed. For example:
- first $25,000: 10%
- portion beyond $25,000: 15%
- portion beyond $100,000: 20%
- portion beyond $500,000: 30%
This way, if you make $100,001, then $25K of that would be taxed at 10%, $75K at 15%, and $1 at 20%. This avoids a huge difference in taxes between you and somebody who made $99,999. The good thing is that this is still nothing that would require a huge IRS, and takes literally minutes to compute.Scientists regularly lock up their secrets. The chemists who developed Coca-Cola are still keeping its formula a secret. The nuclear bomb and rocket scientists also keep their secrets. Even in the basic sciences where money and lives are rarely at stake, it's prudent to keep your discoveries secret until you are ready to publish, because unscrupulous scientists routinely steal important discoveries and fame.
It's just plain stupid to re-write some things when you have a perfectly good solution already written. Besides, if you write it over enough times, you'll remember how to write it... then you are ALWAYS carrying around code from job to job. You can't not take it.
Depends on the solution. The obvious example is a patented solution you wrote for a previous company, which you clearly cannot take along (without proper license). Beyond that, there are solutions worth significant money whose secrecy you were contractually obligated to protect, even if you invented it. An implementation of binary search that you copied from a book anyway is probably not covered.
It's exactly because there's a demand for such things that ensures Apple will be concentrating on it. Apple knows that its hardware, while competent, doesn't blow the x86 out of the water. It is one of the few companies that is visibly optimizing its code.
- Choice. There are other reasons to choose an OS but "it's slick". Some of us (I know some people have difficulties getting this concept) do actually value the concept of Open Source and want to actively participate for personal and/or political reasons.
Yes, but how many people are willing to pay extra (OS X, like Windows, is "free") for principle?
The point is, I'm not belitting your choice one bit. I'm just agreeing with the parent question in the sense of wondering what Yellow Dog's business model is. When (not if, I think) Apple catches up with your first reason, will there be enough customers left for anybody else?
If Yellow Dog is counting on this sort of customer for a significant percentage of its income, they are doomed. No offense to you, but you have to be in the gross minority. The parent question "who wipes out OS X for Linux?" is really implicitly asking whether Yellow Dog has a real business case, not whether there are 20 people in the world who would do that.
The other part of the question is also valid. 64-bit support obviously will only run on a G5. This limits the audience further to people who have bought recent XServes or Power Macs. Obviously that will change over time, but is this already a good time to be investing in 64-bit?
Both good questions not answered by your anecdote, I think.